Digital Commons Network^™

The Transition Of The College Quarterback To The Nfl: Why The Hardest Position In Sports Is Getting Easier, Derik Abbott

Theses

The NFL is changing. Score boards are being lit up by young quarterbacks like never seen before. Rookie quarterbacks are playing like 10 year veterans. Offenses are playing at light speed paces. But why? This Thesis paper looks to uncover why college quarterbacks are playing at MVP caliber levels at such a young age. With research in multiple fields such as analytics, neuroscience, youth football developmental leagues and artificial intelligence,, this paper seeks to determine the relationship between what strategies front offices and coaching staffs are using and the high success rate of young quarterbacks in the National Football League. …

Creating A Virtual World For Mathematics, Young Rae Kim, Mi Sun Park

Curriculum and Instruction Faculty Publications (Archived)

A virtual world was created using the popular sandbox game Minecraft to support the development of preservice teachers’ knowledge for teaching mathematics. Preservice teachers explored the virtual world for a geometry activity involving area and volume problems. They then discussed how this integration of technology could support students’ effective learning of mathematics in a meaningful way. The findings of the study demonstrated that to a certain extent the Minecraft activity supported the transfer of knowledge from preservice teachers’ mathematics content knowledge to their mathematics pedagogical and instructional practice knowledge. Preservice teachers appreciated the usefulness and effectiveness of the Minecraft activity …

Does “See Something, Say Something” Work?, Brian Michael Jenkins, Bruce R. Butterworth

Mineta Transportation Institute

Do “See Something, Say Something” programs work? The evidence strongly suggests that in the specific case of public surface transportation, the answer is “yes.” Transport staff and passengers play an important role in the prevention of terrorist attacks. By discovering and reporting suspicious objects, they have prevented more than 10 percent of all terrorist attacks on public surface transportation. Detection rates are even better in the economically advanced countries where more than 14 percent of the attempts are detected—and have been improving. This MTI Security Perspective analyzes detections since 1970 and suggests that “See Something, Say Something” campaigns are worthwhile.

Mitigating Loss Of Control In General Aviation: A Human-Systems Integrated Flight Test Method For Mapping Pilot Cognition And Aircraft Dynamics, Tiziano Bernard

Theses and Dissertations

General aviation (GA) loss of control accidents, in the United States, have continued to occur despite efforts by government and non-government research agencies. The lack of data during loss of control events (due to the absence of data recorders in small aircraft) does not allow for an accurate reconstruction of the accidents, causing accident investigators to focus on generic causes like pilot error. Flight test research has shown that there are various systems induced causal factors that can potentially set up an aircraft to depart controlled flight and do not aid pilot efforts. An example of these causal factors is …

In Search Of America: One Barbershop At A Time, Keith M. Buswell

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Barbershops are a mainstay of the American tradition and have served as an anchor to main streets across the country. They have a colorful history and play an important role as community gathering places for men and boys. Before our society became more mobile, a boy may have grown up in the same barbershop, in the same barber chair, getting his hair cut by the same barber, from his years as a toddler, a teenager, and into his young adulthood. Many old school barbers have cut the hair of multiple generations, grandfathers, fathers, and sons, while standing in the same …

Supporting English Language Learners Through Collaboration, Compassion, And Engagement, Lora Ann Stead

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This portfolio illustrates the student’s academic work completed while in the Master of Second Language Teaching program at Utah State University. The project is centered around the student’s philosophy on teaching English language learners (ELLs) as drawn from personal experience and second language acquisition research. The author seeks to provide awareness into best practices for teaching ELLs.

The portfolio is divided into three sections: 1) teaching perspectives, 2) research perspectives, and 3) annotated bibliographies. Within these sections, the author explores themes related to ELL teaching that highlight the importance of collaboration, compassion, and engagement. These topics include politely closing a …

Rfviz: An Interactive Visualization Package For Random Forests In R, Christopher Beckett

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Random forests are very popular tools for predictive analysis and data science. They work for both classification (where there is a categorical response variable) and regression (where the response is continuous). Random forests provide proximities, and both local and global measures of variable importance. However, these quantities require special tools to be effectively used to interpret the forest. Rfviz is a sophisticated interactive visualization package and toolkit in R, specially designed for interpreting the results of a random forest in a user-friendly way. Rfviz uses a recently developed R package (loon) from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) to create …

Identifying And Assessing Conflicts Between Future Development And Current Migratory Bird Habitat Around Farmington Bay, Utah, Aubin A. Douglas

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Every year, the Great Salt Lake (GSL) and its associated wetlands provide critical habitat for over 250 migratory bird species from both the Pacific and Central Flyways. The GSL borders the Wasatch Front, which is the fastest growing and most populous region in Utah. To support the ever-increasing working population, the government of Utah aspires to increase the robust economic growth of the region through economic incentives and development of infrastructure. As this area continues to develop, greater pressure will be placed on the surrounding natural resources, including the GSL, its wetlands, and the open space and agricultural land that …

Dayananda Saraswati And The Colonial Machines: Vedic Reformation, European Science, And Modernity In Colonial India, David Tauber

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The relationship between European science and religion has varied considerably through time and among different traditions. This monograph attempts to catalogue one such variant by exploring the context entrance of European science into the Indian subcontinent, at the beginning of the British colonial period, by focusing on how a single religion leader drew upon European notions of science in building his reformed Vedic theology. Dayananda Saraswati (1824-83) spent much of his life traveling northern India as an itinerate ascetic and ultimately founded an intellectual lineage that was instrumental in the Indian Independence movement. Despite having no formal British education included …

Two Cases Of Intellectual Continuity Between Mental Philosophy And Psychology: William James And Charles Grandison Finney, Zachary Zschaechner

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The history of American psychology was once dominated by a narrative that emphasized the unprecedented nature of psychology at the expense of its relation to mental philosophy. Contrary to this narrative, this discussion offers two cases of intellectual continuity between 19th century Protestant mental philosophy and the new psychology as it emerged in the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century.

The Advanced Mesospheric Temperature Mapper: Remote Sensing Of The Nighttime Oh Layer During The Deepwave Campaign, Pattilyn Mclaughlin

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The Advanced Mesospheric Temperature Mapper [AMTM] is a remote sensing instrument developed at Utah State University to map temperature structures in the hydroxyl airglow emission at ~87 km. These maps can then be used to quantify wave field characteristics and to observe general climatology trends. Two recent campaigns that it has been involved with are the DEEPWAVE campaign in Lauder, New Zealand and the Super Soaker campaign in Fairbanks, Alaska.

The Deep Propagating Gravity Wave Experiment, “DEEPWAVE” was an international measurement and modeling program intended to characterize the generation and propagation of a broad range of atmospheric gravity waves with …

Inter-Laminar Fracture Of 3d-Printed Plastics - Development Of Methods, Christopher Stolinski

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Due to the increased use of 3D printed acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic parts, a way to quantify the failure energy (energy needed to initiate cracking) is needed. Impact tests at high rates of loading are performed to determine failure energy. Throughout testing, specimens are monitored with high speed cameras to perform camera-based deformation measurements. Data acquisition and processing methods to calculate failure energy using crack opening displacement, and loading rates are developed to enable further use by Dr. Ryan Berke’s lab at Utah State University.

The Live Load Response Of The Open Web Steel Joist Black Slough Bridge, Piero Caputo

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The bridge being studied spans the Black Slough River in the Nucor/Vulcraft facilities near Brigham City, Utah. The bridge is composed of seven heavyweight open web steel joists supporting a concrete deck-slab element and sitting in two concrete cantilever walls serving as bearings. A full-scale live-load test was performed using forklift vehicles at four locations on the deck. During the test, axial strains, deflections, and rotations where measured.

In their provisions, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) included a simplified number of equations and solutions used to calculate GDFs for standardized decks supported by beam systems. …

Mergers Of The Utah Cooperative Association In Post-War Utah, 1940-1970, Emily Gurr Thompson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Agricultural historians have long grappled with the causes leading to the dissolution of the farming community and their disassociation with their lands. Cooperatives were key to maintaining this relationship. The cooperative economic model sustained farmers to shape, negotiate and create a place for themselves in the 20^th century agrarian landscape. Long time agricultural leaders like W.B. Robins worked to bolster cooperative ideologies and prevent integration into large scale American agribusiness between 1940 and 1970.

This plan B paper examines a series of failed mergers that Robins had intended to thwart the decline of the Utah Cooperative Association (UCA). W.B. …

Towards Enhanced Security For Automotive Operating Systems, Maksym Hryhorenko

Theses and Dissertations

Modern automotive infotainment systems are represented by highly complex components with broad functionality and network capabilities. As a result, they are becoming more exposed to the outer world, thus turning into potentially lucrative targets for remote cyber attacks. In the worst case scenario, an attacker could gain complete control over critical vehicle’s systems, for instance, steering, braking, engine, etc. This thesis proposes security hardening features based on ARM’s TrustZone technology for infotainment systems that ensures confidentiality and integrity of critical applications. In addition, we present a technique that allows to mitigate the impact of certain attacks on the car’s internal …

Automatic Anuran Species Recognition Via Vocalization, Katrina Smart

Theses and Dissertations

Species recognition of Anuran vocalization is an important problem in ecology, which is costly and time consuming. Recently, biologists have turned to machine learning techniques to automate the process. An automated process can be made even more helpful if available to use on a smart phone, which can be used in the field by scientists and citizen scientists alike. The problem of automatic frog call recognition is challenging because features need to be chosen that can properly separate different species’ very similar sounding vocalizations. This thesis offers the following contributions: 1. Three novel feature extraction methods, which do not require …

Mindful: A Novel Virtual System Migration Decision-Making Framework For Automated Cyber-Resiliency, Nicholas James Lowing

Theses and Dissertations

Virtual system migration has revolutionized modern computing. As an advantageous byproduct of virtualization, virtual system migration has allowed for cheaper, more robust cloud management. The selection of a destination host during migration is a key component of migration management. However, there is currently no state-of-the-art, standardized framework for making this decision. Previous work related to automated load balancing is plentiful, but when load balancing is not the primary focus of the cloud management strategy there is a lack of research. We focus on this case, where virtual systems are no longer moved based on some predefined optimization pattern, but rather …

An Approach To Improve Single Photon Detectors For Highly Sensitive Applications, Ahmed Chyad Kadhim

Theses and Dissertations

The problem of detecting a single photon is receiving considerable attention with the development of new single photon detectors in biophotonics, stressed free-space optical communication, low probability of intercept (LPI) optical communication, quantum communication, and remote sensing. The theoretical modeling of the waveforms of the single photon detector output produced in particular systems will expedite the search for and analysis of detected signals. Since SNSPDs require cooling to very low temperature, 4K, and PMTs work on the visible wavelength, current photon detection focus on research developing SPADs and using InGaAs/InP materials. However, SPADs can work over the infrared range of …

Development Of Portable Embedded Face Recognition Prototype, Prasad S. Garapati

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we focus on developing a prototype for collecting multispectral images for face recognition. With such application, the quality of the image is an important factor that affects the accuracy of the recognition. However, the sensory data either provided in RGB channel or in NIR channel. The images acquired in RGB and NIR were never aligned in previous developments during my literature study. Thus, I propose an embedded system prototype capable of acquiring NIR and RGB images providing multispectral information which is computation efficient for real time face recognition applications.

Mitigating Memory Randomization Weaknesses Via Moving Target Defense, Sultan M. Aldossary

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we address the problem of weakness of address space layout randomization. The address space randomization technique was proposed to make determining the address of a shared library more difficult since each instance of the program is loaded into a random base address. However, when address space randomization layout (ASLR) is implemented on a 32-bit system, an attacker can use a brute force attack to guess the address of the shared library.The main goal of the research described in this dissertation is to study the use of a dispatching algorithm and multiple back-end servers as a moving target …

Wind-Driven Setup, Roughness, And Drag Over A Depth- And Fetch-Limited Coastal Estuary, Jeffrey Allen Colvin

Theses and Dissertations

The understanding of the momentum exchange across the air-sea interface is critical to accurately model and forecast wind speed, wave properties, setup, and circulation. This is particularly true for a restricted estuary, such as the Indian River Lagoon (IRL), where wind is the driving force behind water movement due to the limited number of direct ocean connections. Current atmospheric and hydrodynamic models use formulations of the drag coefficient and/or roughness length based on open ocean studies in which wave properties are not considered. This dissertation develops two parameterizations – one for wind setup and one for the drag coefficient – …

Clustmixtype: User-Friendly Clustering Of Mixed-Type Data In R, Gero Szepannek

The R Journal

Clustering algorithms are designed to identify groups in data where the traditional emphasis has been on numeric data. In consequence, many existing algorithms are devoted to this kind of data even though a combination of numeric and categorical data is more common in most business applications. Recently, new algorithms for clustering mixed-type data have been proposed based on Huang’s k-prototypes algorithm. This paper describes the R package clustMixType which provides an implementation of k-prototypes in R.

Revengc: An R Package To Reverse Engineer Summarized Data, Samantha Duchscherer, Robert Stewart, Marie Urban

The R Journal

Decoupled (e.g. separate averages) and censored (e.g. > 100 species) variables are continually reported by many well-established organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and World Bank. The challenge therefore is to infer what the original data could have been given summarized information. We present an R package that reverse engineers censored and/or decoupled data with two main functions. The cnbinom.pars() function estimates the average and dispersion parameter of a censored univariate frequency table. The rec() function reverse engineers summarized data into an uncensored bivariate table of probabilities.

Stplanr: A Package For Transport Planning, Robin Lovelace, Richard Ellison

The R Journal

Tools for transport planning should be flexible, scalable, and transparent. The stplanr package demonstrates and provides a home for such tools, with an emphasis on spatial transport data and non-motorized modes. The stplanr package facilitates common transport planning tasks including: downloading and cleaning transport datasets; creating geographic “desire lines” from origin-destination (OD) data; route assignment, locally and interfaces to routing services such as CycleStreets.net; calculation of route segment attributes such as bearing and aggregate flow; and ‘travel watershed’ analysis. This paper demonstrates this functionality using reproducible examples on real transport datasets. More broadly, the experience of developing and using R …

A Comparative Analysis Of Regional Productivity Trends, Michael P. Foley

Construction Management

Throughout recent decades, the construction industry has suffered considerably from its inability to accurately target and measure key aspects of worker output that hinder productivity most. Much research has been conducted to analyze the factors contributing to labor productivity output at the work face, however, this dissertation is primarily focused on discovering key components of the building process that seem to hinder productivity from the perspective of the general contracting team. This paper’s literature review looks to address historical data relating to productivity difficulties specific to the construction industry, laborers’ productivity dilemma at the work face, and the resulting impact …

A Study Of Career Path Interest Amongst Cm Students At Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Travis James Tollstrup

Construction Management

With the labor shortage being experienced in the modern construction industry, it is important that office and field management personnel stay balanced to support the gap in skilled labor. However, for the students of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, there is a trend that students are more interested in pursuing a career path in Office management, specifically that of a Project Manager. This paper determined the lack of interest in field management career path choice, specifically that of a Superintendent, by surveying the Junior and Senior students to gauge their career interests. It is concluded that there is indeed a …

Improving Ductility Of Slender Reinforced Concrete, Luke M. Ostrom

Construction Management

The Sylmar earthquake of 1971 caused significant damage to slender, non-ductile reinforced concrete (RC) shear wall buildings in California. A later survey by the Concrete Coalition in 2011, under the guidance of members of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), indicated that there are over 3000 vulnerable concrete buildings in California [8]. This led to City of Los Angeles (LA) Ordinance 193893 enacted in 2015, which requires mandatory upgrades to these concrete buildings by 2035. Current practice to meet the requirements of this ordinance, with respect to RC wall buildings, involves adding new shear walls to the building plan or …

Case Study: The Implementation Of Tool Box Talks At A Steel Subcontracting Shop, Joseph M. Freschet

Construction Management

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of implementing tool box talks at a small iron working shop. A case study of workers at Ironstone Metal Works, Inc. based out of San Carlos were given a series of tool box talks then evaluated on the effectiveness of the implementation of regular safety meetings. The impact focused on this paper will be the effectiveness of the implementation of regular safety training and how it relates to a safer work environment, reduced cost of workplace injuries, and workers knowledge of safe practices. An analysis of worker interviews and survey …

A Comparative Analysis Of Regional Productivity Trends, Michael P. Foley

Construction Management

Throughout recent decades, the construction industry has suffered considerably from its inability to accurately target and measure key aspects of worker output that hinder productivity most. Much research has been conducted to analyze the factors contributing to labor productivity output at the work face, however, this dissertation is primarily focused on discovering key components of the building process that seem to hinder productivity from the perspective of the general contracting team. This paper’s literature review looks to address historical data relating to productivity difficulties specific to the construction industry, laborers’ productivity dilemma at the work face, and the resulting impact …

Case Study: Environmental Requirements And Its Impacts Upon The Conservation Center For Wildlife Care, Chase Flemmer

Construction Management

As the population of California continues to grow, urban spaces are rapidly being developed into areas considered to be environmentally sensitive. In order to prevent extensive damage to our state’s delicate ecosystems, environmental regulations are often enforced by local organizations during the course of impactful operations such as construction projects. These regulations will often vary from one site to another, depending on a given site’s location and proximity to the environmentally sensitive areas. No two jobs will posses the exact same specifications for dealing with this aspect of construction, and as such some will require more intense regulations than others. …