Digital Commons Network^™

Assessing The Climate Change Vulnerability Of Ecosystem Types Of The Southwestern U.S., Francis J. Triepke, Esteban H. Muldavin, Maximillian M. Wahlberg, Timothy K. Lowrey, Donald A. Falk, Megan M. Friggens, Karen E. Bagne

Biology ETDs

Climate change is challenging scientists and decision-makers to understand the complexities of climate change and to predict the related effects at scales relevant to environmental policy and the management of ecosystem services. Extraordinary change in climate, and the ensuing impacts to ecosystem services, are widely anticipated for the southwestern United States. Predicting the vulnerability of Southwest ecosystems and their components has been a priority of natural resource organizations over the past decade. Supplementing vulnerability assessments in the region with geospatial inputs of high thematic and spatial detail has become vital for supporting local analyses, planning, and decisions. In this context …

Passive Radio Frequency Identification (Rfid) And Museum Collections, Owen Kinser

Master's Projects and Capstones

Keeping a collection organized and accounted for is a never-ending struggle for museums of every type. New to museums and the collections management field, Radio Frequency Identification is a growing technology that museums can implement to keep track of the location, status, condition, and movement of their objects. Objects are labeled with RFID “tags” which enable them to communicate custom information to a reader and ultimately a database. This implementation would save time, money, and stress among collections staff members. Using the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas, as my subject museum, I propose implementing a pilot …

An Intercomparison Of Dissolved Iron Speciation At The Bermuda Atlantic Time-Series Study (Bats) Site: Results From Geotraces Crossover Station A, Kristen N. Buck, Loes J. A. Gerringa, Micha J. A. Rijkenberg

Marine Science Faculty Publications

The organic complexation of dissolved iron (Fe) was determined in depth profile samples collected from GEOTRACES Crossover Station A, the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS) site, as part of the Dutch and U.S. GEOTRACES North Atlantic programs in June 2010 and November 2011, respectively. The two groups employed distinct competitive ligand exchange-adsorptive cathodic stripping voltammetry (CLE-AdCSV) methods, and resulting ligand concentrations and conditional stability constants from each profile were compared. Excellent agreement was found between the total ligand concentrations determined in June 2010 and the strongest, L₁-type, ligand concentrations determined in November 2011. Yet a primary distinction between …

Focusing Light Inside Scattering Media With Optical Phase Conjugation, Yan Liu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In scattering media such as biological tissue, the heterogeneous refractive index distribution causes light to scatter, which makes the media look opaque and prevents us from focusing light beyond ~1 mm deep inside the media to achieve optical imaging and manipulation. Hence, the ability to focus light deep inside scattering media is highly desired, and it could revolutionize biophotonics by enabling deep-tissue non-invasive high-resolution optical microscopy, optical tweezing, optogenetics, micro-surgery, and phototherapy.

To break the optical diffusion limit and focus light deep inside scattering media, optical phase conjugation based wavefront shaping techniques, such as time-reversed ultrasonically encoded (TRUE) optical focusing, …

Characterizing Nonmodel Microorganisms And Reconstructing Catabolic Pathways For Bio-Productions, Whitney Hollinshead

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In the 1970s, spikes in oil prices sparked early interests into first-generation biofuels (i.e., the production of ethanol from corn). Four decades later, biofuel manufacturing has under-performed as developed industrial strains suffer from poor performance and high costs of feedstocks. While the advancement in molecular biology has greatly benefited pathway engineering, synthetic biology hosts still cannot overcome the obstacles for profitable microbial bio-production. One approach may be to study non-model organisms and employ their metabolic features towards an improved bio-production pipeline. Here, this thesis aims to develop 13C-metabolism analysis tools to characterize novel organisms and re-program cell metabolism using novel …

Guided Medical Data Segmentation Using Structure-Aligned Planar Contours, Michelle Vaughan Holloway

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Segmentation of 3D/4D biological images is a critical step for a wide range of applications such as treatment planning, quantitative analysis, virtual simulations, and rendering visualizations. Automatic segmentation methods are becoming more reliable, but many experts still rely on manual intervention which makes segmentation a time and resource intensive bottleneck. Marking boundary contours in 3D images can be difficult when images are often noisy or the delineation of biological tissue is unclear. Non-parallel contours can be more accurate and reduce the amount of marking necessary, but require extra effort to ensure boundary consistency and maintain spatial orientation. This dissertation focuses …

Genetic Circuits For Transcriptional Regulation In Synechocystis Sp. Pcc 6803, Cheryl M. Immethun

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Microbial biosynthesis has produced a variety of complex compounds using processes that are more environmentally-friendly than many conventional methods. The most common hosts are heterotrophs, which require the addition of an organic carbon source; while cyanobacteria possess many traits that make them a more sustainable biotechnology platform. As phototrophs, cyanobacteria can employ sunlight and carbon dioxide to create many value-added compounds. A wealth of tools has been developed to engineer the commonly used heterotrophs for higher yields and titers; yet, few synthetic biology tools have been designed for cyanobacteria. Furthermore, many of the tools created for heterotrophs do not function …

Novel Contrasts In Photoacoustic Tomography, Ruiying Zhang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) combines rich optical contrast and high ultrasonic resolution in optically scattering tissue at depths. Taking advantage of its 100% sensitivity to optical absorption, PAT has been widely applied to structural, functional and molecular imaging, with both endogenous and exogenous contrasts, at superior depths than pure optical methods. This dissertation explores novel absorption contrast mechanisms of PAT based on optical/thermal patterns, endogenous cellular chromophores, nanoparticles, small-molecule dyes and genetically-encoded proteins. With these novel contrasts, the proof-of-concept applications of PAT have been extended to include homogenous flow measurements, targeted angiogenesis imaging and therapy, label-free white blood cell imaging, 3D-whole-organ …

Applications Of Aerosol Technologies In The Silicon Industry, Miguel Vazquez Pufleau

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In this dissertation, the focus was on two unit operations that have the potential to significantly lower the cost and energy required for refining silicon. First, the removal of carbon from silicon kerf (sawing dust from wafering) was examined to enable its recycling. Second, silane pyrolysis was studied to better understand the dynamics of the initial stages of silicon aerosol formation and growth.

Fluorescence Imaging Of Cortical Calcium Dynamics: A Tool For Visualizing Mouse Brain Functions, Connections, And Networks, Patrick William Wright

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Hemodynamic-based markers of cortical activity (e.g. functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and optical intrinsic signal imaging) are an indirect and relatively slow report of neural activity driven by electrical and metabolic activity through neurovascular coupling, which presents significant limiting factors in deducing underlying brain network dynamics. As application of resting state functional connectivity (FC) measures is extended further into topics such as brain development, aging, and disease, the importance of understanding the fundamental basis for FC will grow.

In this dissertation, we extend functional analysis from hemodynamic- to calcium-based imaging. Transgenic mice expressing a fluorescent calcium indicator (GCaMP6) driven by …

Reforming School Discipline, Derek W. Black

Northwestern University Law Review

Public schools suspend millions of students each year, but less than ten percent of suspensions are for serious misbehavior. School leaders argue that these suspensions ensure an orderly educational environment for those students who remain. Social science demonstrates the opposite. The practice of regularly suspending students negatively affects misbehaving students as well as innocent bystanders. All things being equal, schools that manage student behavior through means other than suspension produce the highest achieving students. In this respect, the quality of education a school provides is closely connected to its discipline policies.

Reformers have largely overlooked the connection between discipline and …

Explicit Bases Of Motives Over Number Fields With Application To Feynman Integrals, Yu Yang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Chapter 1 contains background material on higher Chow groups, KLM formula and Feynman integrals. In Chapter 2, we construct explicit bases for these extension classes mapping to zeta values. In Chapter 4, we study the Feynman integral of the three spoke wheel graph, reinterpret it as an image of regulator using higher Abel-Jacobi maps and theoretically prove that it is a rational multiple of zeta three. In Chapter 5, a reflexive graph polytope based on the graph polynomial is constructed. In Chapter 6, to generalize the results beyond wheel with three spokes, a criterion is given on the vanishing of …

Development Of A One-Equation Eddy Viscosity Turbulence Model For Application To Complex Turbulent Flows, Timothy Wray

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is routinely used in performance prediction and design of aircraft, turbomachinery, automobiles, and in many other industrial applications. Despite its wide range of use, deficiencies in its prediction accuracy still exist. One critical weakness is the accurate simulation of complex turbulent flows using the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations in conjunction with a turbulence model. The goal of this research has been to develop an eddy viscosity type turbulence model to increase the accuracy of flow simulations for mildly separated flows, flows with rotation and curvature effects, and flows with surface roughness. It is accomplished by developing a …

A Transactional Model And Platform For Designing And Implementing Reactive Systems, Justin Ross Wilson

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

A reactive program is one that has "ongoing interactions with its environment." Reactive programs include those for embedded systems, operating systems, network clients and servers, databases, and smart phone apps. Reactive programs are already a core part of our computational and physical infrastructure and will continue to proliferate within our society as new form factors, e.g. wireless sensors, and inexpensive (wireless) networking are applied to new problems.

Asynchronous concurrency is a fundamental characteristic of reactive systems that makes them difficult to develop. Threads are commonly used for implementing reactive systems, but they may magnify problems associated with asynchronous concurrency, as …

Ongoing And Visually-Evoked Cortical Activity Measured Across Multiple Spatial Scales, Nathaniel Caleb Wright

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The visual cortex is a densely-interconnected network of neurons, which receives sensory input from the early visual pathway, and represents information about the visual world in the resulting spatiotemporal activity patterns. These patterns are mediated by cortical interactions that span multiple spatial scales (i.e., neuron-neuron, neuron-population, and population-population). Such interactions are a fundamental property of cortical function, and capture the contribution of the cortex to sensory coding. Yet these interactions are only beginning to be understood, in part because of the challenge of recording ongoing and visually-evoked activity across multiple spatial scales in individual studies. In this thesis, we present …

Epigenomics Of Cell Fate In Development And Disease, Rebecca Faith Lowdon

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Epigenetic features at regulatory elements provide instructive cues for transcriptional regulation during development. However, the particular epigenetic alterations necessary for proper cell fate acquisition and differentiation are not well understood. This dissertation explores the epigenetic dynamics of regulatory elements during development and uses epigenome annotations to document inappropriate transcriptional regulation in disease. First, I summarize my contributions to developing a new algorithm for detecting differential DNA methylation, M&M. I report the application of the M&M algorithm to identify distinct classes of DNA methylation dynamics in surface ectoderm (SE) progenitor cells and SE-derived lineages: epigenome alterations, and differential DNA methylation in …

The Death Penalty And The Fifth Amendment, Joseph Blocher

Northwestern University Law Review

Can the Supreme Court find unconstitutional something that the text of the Constitution “contemplates”? If the Bill of Rights mentions a punishment, does that make it a “permissible legislative choice” immune to independent constitutional challenges?

Recent developments have given new hope to those seeking constitutional abolition of the death penalty. But some supporters of the death penalty continue to argue, as they have since Furman v. Georgia, that the death penalty must be constitutional because the Fifth Amendment explicitly contemplates it. The appeal of this argument is obvious, but its strength is largely superficial, and is also mostly irrelevant to …

Novel Regulation Of The Nonsense-Mediated Rna Decay Pathway, Andrew Keith Nickless

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The nonsense mediated RNA decay (NMD) pathway maintains the integrity of cellular RNAs and controls gene expression. NMD is essential for vertebrate development and defects in NMD are associated with a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders and cancers. NMD activity is tightly regulated and is altered in response to environmental and developmental signals. To better study this dynamic pathway and to identify clinically relevant regulators of its activity, we developed a dual-color bioluminescent NMD reporter that rapidly and accurately quantifies NMD activity in mammalian cells. Using this reporter, we performed a chemical screen for small-molecule modulators of NMD activity and identified …

Genetic Mechanisms For The Maintenance Of Behavioral Mating Barriers In Drosophila, Kathleen M. Mortland

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

One of the most successful and diverse systems involved in the maintenance of behavioral barriers between closely related animal species is pheromonal communication. In the fruit fly, contact chemosensation input is especially important during sexual decision-making as it allows for the sensing of sex and species-specific non-volatile cuticular hydrocarbons (CHCs), which function as insect pheromones. However, how pheromonal systems support the maintenance of mating barriers is puzzling since any change in either pheromone ligands or their cognate receptors would carry a fitness cost, which should be eliminated by stabilizing selection. To resolve this evolutionary conundrum I hypothesized that pleiotropic genes …

The Second Quantized Approach To The Study Of Model Hamiltonians In Quantum Hall Regime, Li Chen

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The study of model Hamiltonians, whose exact ground states are well known quantum Hall states, have been investigated solely in the literature from the point of view of first quantized approach in the last few decades. However, a second quantized approach to such Hamiltonians has not been taken in the same measure. In this dissertation, we study Haldane pseudopotential, which is the parent Hamiltonian of 1/M Laughlin state, and Trugman-Kivelson pseudopotential, which is the parent Hamiltonian of 2/5 unprojected Jain state. We find that the study of these Hamiltonians in their second quantized forms not only reproduces all properties of …

New Techniques And Optimizations Of Short Echo-Time 1h Mri With Applications In Murine Lung, Jinbang Guo

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Although x-ray computed tomography (CT) is a gold standard for pulmonary imaging, it has high ionizing radiation, which puts patients at greater risk of cancer, particularly in a longitudinal study with cumulative doses. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) doesn't involve exposure to ionizing radiation and is especially useful for visualizing soft tissues and organs such as ligaments, cartilage, brain, and heart. Many efforts have been made to apply MRI to study lung function and structure of both humans and animals. However, lung is a unique organ and is very different from other solid organs like the heart and brain due to …

Development And Characterization Of Genetic Sensors And Regulators For The Construction Of Environmentally-Responsive Genetic Circuits, Allison Hoynes-O'Connor

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Genetic circuits enable engineers to program complex logical behaviors into living organisms. Organisms can be programmed to optimize the production of fuels and chemicals, diagnose and treat diseases, or remediate environmental pollutants. A well-characterized toolbox of genetic sensors and regulators is needed to construct these circuits. Genetic sensors that respond to environmentally-relevant signals allow circuits to evaluate the cell's conditions, and versatile and designable regulators translate information about the cell's environment into the desired response. In this work, we demonstrate the de novo design of RNA thermosensors in Escherichia coli, and integrate these sensors into complex genetic circuits. Next, we …

On Control Systems Of The Brain: A Study Of Their Connections, Activations, And Interactions, Haoxin Sun

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Implementation of daily functions in humans crucially relies on both the bottom-up moment-to- moment processing of relevant input and output information as well as the top-down controls that instantiate and regulate goal-directed strategies. The current dissertation focuses on different systems of brain regions related to task control. We are interested in investigating, in detail, some of the basic activity patterns that different control systems carry during simple tasks, and how differences in activity patterns may shed new insight onto the distinctions among the systems' functional roles. In addition, carefully coordinated interactions between brain regions specialized for control-related activity and regions …

Courtly Love And Its Counterparts In The Medieval Mediterranean, Robin William Girard

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

At least since Stendhal's De l'Amour, scholars have argued that the theories of courtly love expressed in the Old French literature of the High Middle Ages were inspired by or drew upon elements of Islamicate culture. In this dissertation, I explore the theories of love represented in works of literature, lover's manuals and medical treatises composed in and around the late twelfth–century court of Marie de Champagne, which I read in conjunction with contemporaneous works from the Islamicate world, ranging from Al‑Andalus to Persia, in order to show how these works reflect the common cultural orientation of the medieval Mediterranean. …

Neural Dynamics Tracking Subjective Cognitive Effort, John Andrew Westbrook

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

What patterns of brain activity reflect engagement with highly demanding cognitive tasks? How do these patterns relate to subjective, phenomenal effort? Answering these questions is critical to understanding what causes some people to experience cognitive tasks as more effortful than others. Subjective experience, in turn, is vital, with trait tendencies to exert effort having been linked to career and academic success. High subjective effort, as in schizophrenia and depression, can thus be extremely problematic. And yet, poor operational definitions have constrained research into basic questions about what neural dynamics track subjective effort. Here, a powerful, new behavioral economic operationalization is …

Plate Waste Trends Of 5​Th​-8​Th​ Grade Students At A Residential Environmental Learning Center, Colleen K. Foehrenbacher

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

This descriptive research determined, using aggregated nonselective plate waste measurements, the characteristics of plate waste generated by 5th-8th grade students visiting Eagle Bluff Environmental Learning Center in Lanesboro, Minnesota over the course of 5 years. The results indicated a positive relationship between plate waste and group size; that groups from rural schools wasted less plate waste than schools from urban or suburban locations; and that groups from private schools wasted less than groups from public school groups. Completely eliminating plate waste is unrealistic, but reducing plate waste lowers user costs, makes program operations more efficient, and enhances a program’s success …

An Evaluation Of The Safety Of The Cycling In Dublin City For Dit Students, Niamh O' Reilly

Articles

Cycling as a mode of transport offers many benefits including a cheap, cost effective, healthy, fast, mainly congestion free and environmentally friendly means of getting to and from places of employment and education. Given the central location of Technological University Dublin campus buildings this would seem an ideal option for its third level students, but on the contrary, a DIT online travel survey conducted in March 2014 found that only 7% of students chose cycling as their primary mode of transport. Concerns about cyclist safety were a major factor cited by students who chose alternative modes of transport. Based on …

The Development Of A Higher Education Biblical Foundation Course Design Model, Cynthia Gettys, Ph.D., Elaine Plemons, M.A.

The Journal of Biblical Foundations of Faith and Learning

Every course at a Seventh-day Adventist (Adventist) institution of higher education should be qualitatively different from the same or similar course at a secular institution. They should also be different from a similar course taught at another Christian university. There are fundamental differences in Adventist beliefs that should influence the way Adventists view life and through which the disciplines are approached to form a unique and distinctive Adventist biblical worldview. Professors come to academia as experts in their discipline; however, because they are not generally educated in teaching theory, they often bring little understanding of course development, let alone course …

Tough On Black Asses: Segregation Ideology In The Early American Jazz Industry, Laurel Bettis

Historical Perspectives: Santa Clara University Undergraduate Journal of History, Series II

No abstract provided.

Protecting The Dead Or Protecting The Living? Above Ground Interment In Georgian (1714-1830) And Victorian Britain (1837-1901), Maxine Devincenzi

Historical Perspectives: Santa Clara University Undergraduate Journal of History, Series II

No abstract provided.