Digital Commons Network^™

Makerspaces And The Iowa Core: Connections In A High School Library, Tracie Marshall

Graduate Research Papers

Studies within the last five years have examined the subject of makerspaces, but few have explored the specific details of how standards and learning are achieved through use of a makerspace. The purpose of this qualitative study is to deepen understanding of five Iowa Core Standards while participants use a makerspace. Additionally, the study aims to determine the degree to which state learning standards are addressed through the activities students engage in during their use of a makerspace in a school library. A sample population of five participants, three students and two teachers were included in the study. One session …

Content Analysis Of Two Libraries Resources For Supporting Primary Economics Instruction, Lindsey J. Hilts

Graduate Research Papers

The teaching of some primary teachers is being compromised in schools with a lack of rich science and social studies library collections that have been intentionally developed by a professional teacher librarian in collaboration with teachers. The purpose of this study was to analyze and compare school library resources for the same economics unit taught in two different elementary schools’ primary classrooms, including the quality of resources available and their usefulness in teaching social studies economics standards. School B had a higher quantity of resources meeting the standards as well as more texts determined to be of high quality. The …

Utilizing Local Project Experts To Provide Professional Development For Early Childhood Educators : A Professional Development Project, Dawn Janette Johnson

Graduate Research Papers

This project consists of a series of professional development sessions designed to support early childhood educators in implementing Project Approach in their classrooms. The project utilizes local project experts of the Southeast Iowa Project Group. In addition, the project addresses the need of early childhood educators in rural southeast Iowa to have opportunities to attend professional development locally.

Research indicates that professional development is enhanced when educators are given opportunities to learn in authentic contexts, engage in problem-solving, practice new skills, and participate in extending learning experiences. Additionally, professional development greatly affects educators' abilities to provide children with high quality …

A Unit Design : Learning To Code With Finches, William V. Gruman

Graduate Research Papers

The purpose of this project was to develop a coding unit for students in grades 5-8 as an introductory programming course using the programming language SNAP! with a Finch robotics platform. The robotics platform provides a means of student engagement that allows them to complete computer programming challenges that drive interest and motivation. A series of five major learning activities were created as part of a middle school technology exploratory course. The beta testers included the four course instructors and around 30 of middle school student volunteers.

The designed unit was implemented once as a pilot, and was being implemented …

A New Vision For A 6-12 Library Science Curriculum, Jacqueline Leigh Seidl

Graduate Research Papers

The current perception of the teacher librarian's role in our Central Iowa school district is quite different than the role suggested in the professional research. Students leaving high school do not have the inquiry and evaluation skills expected at the postsecondary level (Donham, 2014). Students spend their free time using technology, but not for academic or voluntary reading (Igbokwe & Obidike, 2012). It is evident that the Common Core's focus on information inquiry and literacy, technology use, and pleasure reading are all facets of the teacher librarian's desired curriculum, but creating a curriculum where the three complement each other rather …

Bacterial Regulon Modeling And Prediction Based On Systematic Cis Regulatory Motif Analyses, Bingqiang Liu, Chuan Zhou, Guojun Li, Hanyuan Zhang, Erliang Zeng, Qi Liu, Qin Ma

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Regulons are the basic units of the response system in a bacterial cell, and each consists of a set of transcriptionally co-regulated operons. Regulon elucidation is the basis for studying the bacterial global transcriptional regulation network. In this study, we designed a novel co-regulation score between a pair of operons based on accurate operon identification and cis regulatory motif analyses, which can capture their co-regulation relationship much better than other scores. Taking full advantage of this discovery, we developed a new computational framework and built a novel graph model for regulon prediction. This model integrates the motif comparison and clustering …

A Knowledge Analytic Comparison Of Cued Primitives When Students Are Explaining Predicted And Enacted Motions, Victor R. Lee

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

The Knowledge in Pieces theoretical perspective posits p-prims as an important knowledge element in intuitive reasoning. Because p-prims are a class of knowledge elements developed and abstracted from everyday physical experiences, it seems plausible that immediate physical experiences, both in terms of sensations and actual observations of motion, would cue knowledge in different ways than when those experiences are just discussed as hypotheticals. This paper presents two cases to show that immediate embodied experiences with everyday objects does change which p-prims are cued and how they are deployed by students to explain situations involving motion. These cases come from a …

The Scholar Magician In English Renaissance Drama, Ashley M. Minnis-Lemley

Scripps Senior Theses

In this paper, I will explore the rise and fall of the scholar magician or sorcerer, both as a popular dramatic subject and as an arc for individual characters, and the ways in which these figures tied into contemporary fears about the intersection of religion and developing scientific knowledge.

Age, Growth And Natural Mortality Of Blackfin Snapper Lutjanus Buccanella From The Southeastern United States And U. S. Caribbean, Michael L. Burton, Jennifer C. Potts, Daniel R. Carr

Gulf and Caribbean Research

We determined ages of Blackfin Snapper (Lutjanus buccanella Cuvier 1828; n = 622) collected from the southeastern United States coast and U.S. Caribbean from 1979–2015 using sectioned sagittal otoliths. Opaque zones were determined to be annular, forming March – July (peaking in April–June). Blackfin Snapper ranged from 1–27 years and from 180–609 mm total length (TL). Body size relationships for Blackfin Snapper were: TL = 1.09 FL + 0.81 (n = 203, r2 = 0.99); FL = 0.91 TL + 3.38 (n = 203, r2 = 0.99); TL = 1.23 SL + 14.27 (n = 83, r2 = 0.97); FL …

Drained And Undrained Analyses Of Cylindrical Cavity Contractions By Bounding Surface Plasticity, S. L. Chen, Y. N. Abousleiman

Faculty Publications

This paper develops a rigorous semi-analytical approach for drained-undrained cylindrical cavity contraction problems in bounding surface elastoplastic geomaterials. For undrained situations, the effective radial, tangential, and vertical component stresses can be solved directly from the constitutive governing differential equations as an initial value problem, the excess pore pressure subsequently being determined from the radial equilibrium equation. In contrast, for the drained case the Eulerian radial equilibrium equation must be first transformed into an equivalent one in a Lagrangian description via the introduction of an auxiliary variable, then solved together with the elastoplastic constitutive relation for the three stress components as …

Finding, Understanding And Learning: Making Information Discovery Tasks Useful For Children And Teachers, Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, Nevena Dragovic, Maria Soledad Pera

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present our ongoing efforts on the development of a search environment tailored to 6-15 year-olds that can foster learning though retrieval of materials that not only satisfy the information needs of users but also match their reading abilities. YouUnderstood.me is an enhanced environment based on a popular search engine specifically designed to help students deal with search for learning tasks, and allow teachers to track their progress. An initial assessment conducted on YouUnderstood.me and well-known (children-oriented) search engines based on queries generated by K-9 students, showcases the need for this type of environment.

“One Size Doesn’T Fit All": Helping Users Find Events From Multiple Perspectives, Sean Maclachlan, Stacey Donohue, Nevena Dragovic, Maria Soledad Pera

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this demo, we showcase a novel mobile application that offers various ways to present recommendations to users. While the majority of the existing applications in the tourism domain either focus on event recommendation or event browsing, our mobile application acknowledges the fact that users have diffrent interests at different times and for different occasions. Consequently, while suggested events are filtered and ranked by proximity and date ranges to ensure they suit users' needs, each user is allowed to choose how to access these suggestions in one of four ways: search, categorized browsing, following, and traditional recommendations.

Anything Fun Going On?: A Simple Wizard To Avoid The Cold-Start Problem For Event Recommenders, Stacey Donohue, Nevena Dragovic, Maria Soledad Pera

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this demo, we showcase a set up wizard designed to bypass the cold start problem that often affects recommendation systems in the event domain. We have developed a mobile application for tourists, RelEVENT, which allows them to quickly and non-intrusively set up preferences and/or interests related to events. This will directly affect the degree to which they can receive personalized recommendations on-the-fly and become aware of events happening around town that might be appealing to them.

Identifying And Scheduling Loop Chains Using Directives, Ian J. Bertolacci, Michelle Mills Strout, Stephen Guzik, Jordan Riley, Catherine Olschanowsky

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Exposing opportunities for parallelization while explicitly managing data locality is the primary challenge to porting and optimizing existing computational science simulation codes to improve performance and accuracy. OpenMP provides many mechanisms for expressing parallelism, but it primarily remains the programmer’s responsibility to group computations to improve data locality. The loopchain abstraction, where data access patterns are included with the specification of parallel loops, provides compilers with sufficient information to automate the parallelism versus data locality tradeoff. In this paper, we present a loop chain pragma and an extension to the omp for to enable the specification of loop chains and …

Sustained Flow Index: Stochastic Measure Of Freeway Performance, Siavash Shojaat, Justin Geistefeldt, Scott A. Parr, Chester G. Wilmot, Brian Wolshon

Faculty Publications

Research into the operation of traffic flow at high volumes reveals that the capacity of freeways is not a fixed number but is rather a random variable. Since traditional operational performance measures for the analysis of traffic flow on freeways typically disregard the randomness of capacity, new approaches to make use of the concept of randomness for freeway operation analysis are required. To address that need, this paper introduces a new indicator of freeway performance based solely on a stochastic approach to capacity computation. With this new indicator, the maximum reliable volume that can be carried by a freeway over …

Further Results On Edge - Odd Graceful Graphs, Mohammed Seoud, Maher Salim

Turkish Journal of Mathematics

wheel $W_n$, for $n\equiv 1,\ 2$ and $3\ mod\ 4$; $C_n\bigodot\bar{K}_{2m-1}$; even helms; $P_n\bigodot\bar{K}_{2m}$ and $K_{2,s}$. Also we present two theorems of non edge - odd graceful graphs and an idea to label complete graphs.

Restall's Proof-Theoretic Pluralism And Relevance Logic, Teresa Kouri

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Restall (Erkenntnis 79(2):279–291, 2014) proposes a new, proof-theoretic, logical pluralism. This is in contrast to the model-theoretic pluralism he and Beall proposed in Beall and Restall (Aust J Philos 78(4):475–493, 2000) and in Beall and Restall (Logical pluralism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006). What I will show is that Restall has not described the conditions on being admissible to the proof-theoretic logical pluralism in such a way that relevance logic is one of the admissible logics. Though relevance logic is not hard to add formally, one critical component of Restall’s pluralism is that the relevance logic that gets added must …

Acoustic Entropy Of The Materials In The Course Of Degradation, Ali Kahirdeh, M. M. Khonsari

Faculty Publications

We report experimental observations on the evolution of acoustic entropy in the course of cyclic loading as degradation occurs due to fatigue. The measured entropy is a result of the materials' microstructural changes that occur as degradation due to cyclic mechanical loading. Experimental results demonstrate that maximum acoustic entropy emanating from materials during the course of degradation remains similar. Experiments are shown for two different types of materials: Aluminum 6061 (a metallic alloy) and glass/epoxy (a composite laminate). The evolution of the acoustic entropy demonstrates a persistent trend over the course of degradation.

Blood, Donors And Dollars: Rethinking Financial Sustainability Of Safe Blood Services In Tanzania, Kahabi Isangula, Sharon Brownie, Abela Mahimbo, Solomon Kibona, Abdu Juma, Deus Mogela

School of Nursing & Midwifery, East Africa

Introduction: Collection, processing and distribution of safe blood in Tanzania occurs within a free-for-service context, that is, a collection from non-remunerated blood donors and distributing freely to the needy people through health facilities. The safe blood services in the country appear to be crippled with many challenges and cannot meet the demand for blood and its products. As such, a need for rethinking collection methods, financial models and possible mechanisms for donor remuneration is evident.

Methods: In this paper, we venture on multi-stakeholder meetings and ongoing discussions regarding the internal mechanisms of safe blood transfusion financing. The intent is to …

Marine Infectious Disease Dynamics And Outbreak Thresholds: Contact Transmission, Pandemic Infection, And The Potential Role Of Filter Feeders, Gorka Bidegain, Eric N. Powell, John M. Klinck, Tal Ben-Horin, Eileen E. Hofmann

CCPO Publications

Disease-causing organisms can have significant impacts on marine species and communities. However, the dynamics that underlie the emergence of disease outbreaks in marine ecosystems still lack the equivalent level of description, conceptual understanding, and modeling context routinely present in the terrestrial systems. Here, we propose a theoretical basis for modeling the transmission of marine infectious diseases (MIDs) developed from simple models of the spread of infectious disease. The models represent the dynamics of a variety of host-pathogen systems including those unique to marine systems where transmission of disease is by contact with waterborne pathogens both directly and through filter-feeding processes. …

An Interactive Tool For The Computational Exploration Of Integrodifference Population Models, Kennedy Agwamba

HMC Senior Theses

Mathematical modeling of population dynamics can provide novel insight to the growth and dispersal patterns for a variety of species populations, and has become vital to the preservation of biodiversity on a global-scale. These growth and dispersal stages can be modeled using integrodifference equations that are discrete in time and continuous in space. Previous studies have identified metrics that can determine whether a given species will persist or go extinct under certain model parameters. However, a need for computational tools to compute these metrics has limited the scope and analysis within many of these studies. We aim to create computational …

Realizing The 2-Associahedron, Patrick N. Tierney

HMC Senior Theses

The associahedron has appeared in numerous contexts throughout the field of mathematics. By representing the associahedron as a poset of tubings, Michael Carr and Satyan L. Devadoss were able to create a gener- alized version of the associahedron in the graph-associahedron. We seek to create an alternative generalization of the associahedron by considering a particle-collision model. By extending this model to what we dub the 2- associahedron, we seek to further understand the space of generalizations of the associahedron.

Interval Graphs, Joyce C. Yang

HMC Senior Theses

We examine the problem of counting interval graphs. We answer the question posed by Hanlon, of whether the formal power series generating function of the number of interval graphs on n vertices has a positive radius of convergence. We have found that it is zero. We have obtained a lower bound and an upper bound on the number of interval graphs on n vertices. We also study the application of interval graphs to the dynamic storage allocation problem. Dynamic storage allocation has been shown to be NP-complete by Stockmeyer. Coloring interval graphs on-line has applications to dynamic storage allocation. The …

Hopper Bands: Locust Aggregation, Ryan C. Jones

HMC Senior Theses

Locust swarms cause famine and hunger in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa as they travel across croplands and eat vegetation. Current models start with biological properties of locusts and analyze the macroscopic behavior of the system. These models exhibit the desired migratory behavior, but do so with too many parameters. To account for this, a new model, the Alignment and Intermittent Motion (AIM) model, is derived with minimal assumptions. AIM is constructed with regards to locust biology, allowing it to elicit biologically correct locust behavior: the most noteworthy being the fingering of hopper bands. A Particle-in-Cell method is used to optimize …

Differences In Rhodococcus Equi Infections Based On Immune Status And Antibiotic Susceptibility Of Clinical Isolates In A Case Series Of 12 Patients And Cases In The Literature, Praveen Gundelly, Yasuhiro Suzuki, Julie A. Ribes, Alice C. Thornton

Internal Medicine Faculty Publications

Rhodococcus equi is an unusual zoonotic pathogen that can cause life-threatening diseases in susceptible hosts. Twelve patients with R. equi infection in Kentucky were compared to 137 cases reported in the literature. Although lungs were the primary sites of infection in immunocompromised patients, extrapulmonary involvement only was more common in immunocompetent patients (P > 0.0001). Mortality in R. equi-infected HIV patients was lower in the HAART era (8%) than in pre-HAART era (56%) (P > 0.0001), suggesting that HAART improves prognosis in these patients. Most (85–100%) of clinical isolates were susceptible to vancomycin, clarithromycin, rifampin, aminoglycosides, ciprofloxacin, and imipenem. …

The Role Of Renal Replacement Therapy In The Management Of Pharmacologic Poisonings, Aibek E. Mirrakhimov, Aram Barbaryan, Adam Gray, Taha Ayach

Internal Medicine Faculty Publications

Pharmacologic toxicities are common and range from mild to life-threatening. The aim of this study is to review and update the data on the role of renal replacement therapy (RRT) in the management of various pharmacologic poisonings. We aim to provide a focused review on the role of RRT in the management of pharmacological toxicities. Relevant publications were searched in MEDLINE with the following search terms alone or in combination: pharmacologic toxicity, hemodialysis, hemofiltration, renal replacement therapy, toxicology, poisonings, critical illness, and intensive care. The studies showed that a pharmacologic substance should meet several prerequisites to be deemed dialyzable. These …

Prediction Of Metal Remobilization From Sediments Under Various Physical/ Chemical Conditions “Design Of Experiments Cd, Co And Pb”, Eid A. Alkhatib, Trey Chabot, Danielle Grunzke

Chemistry & Physics Faculty Publications

The metal partition coefficient Kd (L/kg) is the ratio of sorbed metal concentration on the solid phase m (mg/kg) to the dissolved metal concentration at equilibrium. The behavior of metals in surface water is complex and their partition coefficients can be impacted by many factors. Organic matter (OM) content in sediments, pH and salinity, are factors that may influence speciation and partitioning of metals. In this study, the partitioning coefficient of three metals (Cd, Co and Pb) under different levels of salinity, pH, and OM content were examined. A series of factorial experiments were evaluated in which three levels of …

Emerson On Plato: Literary Philosophy, Dialectic, And The Temporality Of Thought, Jesse I. Bailey

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

For Emerson, Plato is the quintessential philosopher. I will argue that, to the extent that Emerson wanted his essays to have philosophical depth, he considered his work to be an extension of the work found in Plato’s dialogues.

Temporal Trends And Spatial Variabilities Of Pcb Concentrations In Lake Trout From Lake Superior From 1995 To 2013, Hongyi Lin

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

It has been frequently reported that concentrations of PCBs in the Great Lakes fish have declined dramatically since their ban on production and use in 1979 in the United States, although some studies suggested that recent rates of decline are leveling off. In order to examine the temporal trends and spatial variabilities of PCB concentrations in lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) from Lake Superior during the past two decades, statistical analyses were performed on fish sample data collected by two national agencies (U.S. EPA, Environment and Climate Change Canada) and three state agencies (Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, Minnesota …

Predictive Control Of Power Grid-Connected Energy Systems Based On Energy And Exergy Metrics, Meysam Razmara

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Building and transportation sectors account for 41% and 27% of total energy consumption in the US, respectively. Designing smart controllers for Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems and Internal Combustion Engines (ICEs) can play a key role in reducing energy consumption. Exergy or availability is based on the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics and is a more precise metric to evaluate energy systems including HVAC and ICE systems. This dissertation centers on development of exergy models and design of model-based controllers based on exergy and energy metrics for grid-connected energy systems including HVAC and ICEs.

In this PhD dissertation, …