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Collaborating, Creating And Implementing: A Cohesive Project-Based Learning Social Studies Unit With The Goal Of Deepening Third Grade Student Learning Experiences, Sarah Avery Kulchinsky

Master's Theses

The purpose of this research study was to integrate dance in a social studies project-based learning (PBL) unit. The incorporation of dance in this unit was not only a learning experience for the students, but for the dance teacher and classroom teacher alike. The teachers worked cooperatively to plan and create this unit of study and through their collaboration taught the subject using their individual teaching styles. The classroom teacher used traditional instructional methods, while the dance teacher taught the same subject matter through the use of movement and dance. Throughout the unit, the teachers consulted to ensure student learning …

Can Farmers Adapt To Higher Temperatures? Evidence From India, Vis Taraz

Economics: Faculty Publications

Projections suggest that the damages from climate change will be substantial for developing countries. Understanding the ability of households in these countries to adapt to climate change is critical in order to determine the magnitude of the potential damages. In this paper, I investigate the ability of farmers in India to adapt to higher temperatures. I use a methodology that exploits short-term weather fluctuations as well as spatial variation in long-run climate. Specifically, I estimate how damaging high temperatures are for districts that experience high temperatures more or less frequently. I find that the losses from high temperatures are lower …

Arrows In Biology: Lack Of Clarity And Consistency Points To Confusion For Learners, Leslie Kate Wright, Jordan J. Cardenas, Phyllis Liang, Dina L. Newman

Articles

In this article, we begin to unpack the phenomenon of representational competence by ex¬ploring how arrow symbols are used in introductory biology textbook figures. Out of 1214 figures in an introductory biology textbook, 632 (52%) of them contained arrows that were used to represent many different concepts or processes. Analysis of these figures revealed little correlation between arrow style and meaning. A more focused study of 86 figures containing 230 arrows from a second textbook showed the same pattern of inconsistency. Interviews with undergraduates confirmed that arrows in selected textbook figures were confusing and did not readily convey the information …

Hardware Obfuscation For Finite Field Algorithms, Ankur A. Sharma

All Theses

With the rise of computing devices, the security robustness of the devices has become of utmost importance. Companies invest huge sums of money, time and effort in security analysis and vulnerability testing of their software products. Bug bounty programs are held which incentivize security researchers for finding security holes in software. Once holes are found, software firms release security patches for their products. The semiconductor industry has flourished with accelerated innovation. Fabless manufacturing has reduced the time-to-market and lowered the cost of production of devices. Fabless paradigm has introduced trust issues among the hardware designers and manufacturers. Increasing dependence on …

The Effects Of Multilingualism Of Executive Function, Isabella Catalano

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

In today's world, monolingualism is in the minority (Alonso et al., 2017); however, there is still a lack of understanding about the potential effects of being bi- or multilingual, and whether there is an effect of bilingualism in executive function is debated, given multiple contradictory studies (Paap et al., 2015). This study aims to more closely examine whether the number of languages spoken is related to executive function. In this study, sixty-three participants (mean age = 19.9 years, males = 10) completed the Stroop and flanker tasks, measures of inhibitory control, as well as the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire, …

A Trail Plan For The Prairie Corridor, Michaela Daugherty

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

South of Lincoln, Nebraska a conservation project is underway to create a passage between Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center and Pioneers Park Nature Center. The passage way between the two parks will be restored to its natural state of tallgrass prairie. Eventually, a walking and bike path will be constructed through the corridor to join the parks. The passage has the potential to educate the surrounding community about their natural history and to connect them to their environment and their cultural heritage. Through this thesis and a systematic literature review, we examine different modes of outdoor education, interpretations, guided and …

The Canoe, The Wind, And The Mountain: Shunting The “Rashomon Effect” Of Mauna Kea: An Aloha Aina Response, Manulani Aluli Meyer

Pacific Studies

Manulani Aluli Meyerʻs response to Hereniko and Schorchʻs "THE CANOE, THE WIND, AND THE MOUNTAIN: SHUNTING THE RASHOMON EFFECT OF MAUNA KEA".

Editorial Introduction For The Topical Issue "The New Metaphysics: Analytic/Continental Crossovers", Paul Livingston, Jon Cogburn

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Cigarette Litter Leachates: A Statistical Study Of Elements In Freshwater And Saltwater, Cintly Guzman Hernandez

Honors Theses

Cigarette butts are the most common item found in coastal litter cleanups as approximately 4.5 trillion smoked cigarette butts are discarded into the environment every year. Cigarette butts can leach toxic heavy metals and nicotine along with other compounds from tobacco combustion. Past research in our lab has analyzed elements leached from cigarette butts into freshwater. The cigarette butts consisted of smoked and unsmoked butts that were soaked varying periods of time, and at different pH levels to identify the relationship of these variables to the amount of metal leached. The elements analyzed were Al, Ba, Cd, Cr, Cu, Fe, …

Bayesian Estimation Of Mixture Irt Models Using Nuts, Rahab Al Hakmani

Dissertations

The No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS) is a relatively new Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm that avoids the random walk behavior that common MCMC algorithms such as Gibbs sampling or Metropolis Hastings usually exhibit. Given the fact that NUTS can efficiently explore the entire space of the target distribution, the sampler converges to high-dimensional target distributions more quickly than other MCMC algorithms and is hence less computational expensive. The focus of this study is on applying NUTS to one of the complex IRT models, specifically the two-parameter mixture IRT (Mix2PL) model, and further to examine its performance in estimating model parameters …

Regional Sulfur Isotope Study Of The Vms Deposits In The Penokean Volcanic Belt, Nicholas M. Moleski

Masters Theses

The Penokean Volcanic Belt (PVB), located in northern Wisconsin and Upper Peninsula, Michigan hosts several volcanogenic massive sulfide deposits (VMS) including the well-known deposits of Flambeau and Crandon. The host rocks of the VMS deposits are Paleoproterozoic in age overlying Archean age basement rocks. This study provides δ³⁴S (VCDT) values for the following deposits within the PVB; (1) Eisenbrey, (2) Schoolhouse, (3) Bend, (4) Flambeau, (5) Reef, (6) Horseshoe, and (7) Back Forty, and explains the distribution of δ³⁴S values in the region.

The study reveals tight ranges of δ³⁴S values for each deposit …

A Structural And Stratigraphic Study Of The A-2 Carbonate In Southwest Michigan And Reservoir Characterization Of An A-2 Carbonate Gas Storage Field, Clayton Joupperi

Masters Theses

The Overisel and Salem gas storage fields of southwest Michigan annually store 34 Bcf of natural working gas in the upper dolomitized portion of the Silurian A-2 Carbonate. Porosity and permeability in these fields is thought to be enhanced by fracturing and dolomitization associated with the dissolution and collapse of underlying salt units. This study utilizes wire-line logs from 383 wells to explore the structural and stratigraphic controls on the deposition and diagenesis of the A-2 Carbonate in southwest Michigan. Core and thin sections from 4 wells serve as the primary data for investigating the depositional and diagenetic history of …

Productivity Framework, J Roberts

Professional Services

No abstract provided.

Influence Of Secondary Science And Mathematics (Sesemat), Programme In Teaching And Learning Mathematics In Lower Secondary Schools. A Case Study Of One School In Uganda., Gule Saidi

Master of Education

This study aimed at exploring the influence of SESEMAT training programme in teaching and learning mathematics in lower secondary school. The study was intended to find how SESEMAT graduates were applying the knowledge and skills learnt from the SESEMAT training programmes in teaching and learning mathematics. The study was conducted at one secondary school located in Yumbe district in Uganda. The study employed qualitative case study design using three objectives. The general objective was to investigate the Influence of SESEMAT training programme in teaching and learning mathematics. Data collection was done using interviews, observation methods and document analysis. The respondents …

Mechanistic Study Of The Inhibition Of Rho Gtpase-Mediated Metastasis, Hope Gloria Umutesi

Chemistry & Biochemistry Dissertations - Archive

The Ras superfamily of small GTPases are monomeric proteins that bind guanine nucleotides, and regulate many cellular signaling pathways. They function as molecular switches by shuttling between active GTP-bound and inactive GDP-bound states. The Ras superfamily consists of its subfamilies including Ras and Rho GTPases. Ras and Rho GTPases function to regulate cellular growth, transformation, transport, motility, traffic, and adhesion. Small GTPases reactions often require regulators, such as guanine nucleotide exchange factors (GEFs) and GTPase Activating Proteins (GAPs). GEFs mediate fast release of GDP and allow loading with GTP while GAPs accelerate the GTP hydrolysis to GDP. Redox agents also …

Designing Thermally Stable Ionic Liquid Stationary Phases For Gas Chromatography And Examining Their Structure-Property Relationships, Rahul A. Patil

Chemistry & Biochemistry Dissertations - Archive

Ionic liquids are popular in diverse scientific applications because of their unique physicochemical properties. The physicochemical properties of ionic liquids can be “tuned” by the modification of their structural moieties. Understanding of structure-property relationship is important if one wants to introduce a desired property in ionic liquid for a specific application. The initial part of this thesis will discuss the understanding of structure-property relationship of dicationic ionic liquids. Ionic liquids with high thermal stability are useful in many applications from simple solvents for high temperature reactions to high vacuum lubricants for space applications. This thesis presents the design, synthesis, and …

Development Of Highly Polar Structurally-Tuned Ionic Liquids With Unique Selectivity For Gas Chromatography, Mohsen Talebi

Chemistry & Biochemistry Dissertations - Archive

Ionic Liquids (ILs) are state-of-the-art fluids that have found broad application in separation science. Owing to their unique physicochemical properties such as low vapor pressure, high thermal stability, and high viscosity, they were successfully used as stationary phase in gas chromatography (GC). By properly engineering their molecular structure, ionic liquids with tailor-made properties can be designed. Therefore, a systematic structure-function relationship can be established to study the effect of structural modification on the properties of ionic liquids. Herein, I describe the design and synthesis of several dicationic ionic liquids. The synthesized ILs were characterized in terms their physicochemical properties. The …

The Impact Of Stereotype Threat On Object Location Memory, Samantha A. Boomgarden

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Gender differences have been identified in many tasks, and the male advantage in spatial skills has been well studied and is thought to be robust, especially on mental rotation and spatial perception tasks (e.g., Doyle & Voyer, 2016; Linn & Petersen, 2016; Pansu et al., 2016; Thompson & Voyer, 2014). However, women have been found to do better on tasks that require memorization of where objects are located in the environment (i.e., object location memory tasks; Voyer, Postma, Brake, & lmperato-McGinley, 2007). The purpose of this study was to examine how stereotype threat, elicited in women, would affect their performance …

Design And Analysis Of A Single Stage, Traveling Wave, Thermoacoustic Engine For Bi-Directional Turbine Generator Integration, Mitchell Mcgaughy

All Theses

The demand for clean, sustainable, and cost-effective energy continues to increase due to global population growth and corresponding use of consumer products. Thermoacoustic technology potentially offers a sustainable and reliable solution to help address the continuing demand for electric power. A thermoacoustic device, operating on the principle of standing or traveling acoustic waves, can be designed as a heat pump or a prime mover system. The provision of heat to a thermoacoustic prime mover results in the generation of an acoustic wave that can be converted into electrical power.

Thermoacoustic devices offer highly reliable and transportable power generation with low …

Comparison Of Electrical Impedance Tomography Reconstruction Algorithms With Eidors Reconstruction Software, Matthew Brinckerhoff

All Theses

Electrical impedance tomography ("EIT") has many significant applications, ranging from geophysical and medical imaging, to the military, to industrial fields. Due to the relevance of EIT in fields of critical importance to society, further development of EIT is vital. The instability of image reconstruction and the highly nonlinear behavior of the image reconstruction problem, make the problem particularly difficult, are referred to as ill-posed inverse problem. Specifically, development of a comprehensive set of techniques to solve the EIT problem is necessary, due to both its ill-posed, nonlinear nature, and its scope. In this thesis, several approaches to the inversion of …

Effects Of Performance Pressure On Response Inhibition Performance, Daniel N. Endres

All Theses

Previous research suggests that psychological pressure tends to exert detrimental effects on action-oriented cognitive tasks. However, the effect of psychological pressure on inhibitory cognitive processes has been relatively overlooked. Consequently, the goal of this study was to examine the effect of psychological pressure on response inhibition performance. Participants (N = 125) were assigned to either a time pressure condition or control condition, and then completed the Stop Signal Task, which tests response inhibition. Outcome variables of interest were stop accuracy, stop signal reaction time, and post error slowing. The results from the study indicated that time pressure significantly impaired stop …

An Investigative Study Of The Snapthrough, Snapback And The Stiffness Properties Of A Kirigami Unit Cell, Aditya Girish Lele

All Theses

Until recently, Carbon Fiber was considered to be a space-age material because of its applications. However, due to the advancements in the synthesis of these materials and manufacturing carbon fiber on a large scale, it has now become possible to use carbon fiber in day-to-day applications. Components which were traditionally being made out of steel or aluminum are now being redesigned and made using carbon fiber composites. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner fuselage is an excellent example where carbon fiber has been used as the major component. This is due to the fact that carbon fiber components are much lighter and …

An Experimental Investigation Of Combined Symmetric Asymmetric Composite Laminates, Guy Maximilian Kemmann

All Theses

It has been found that certain asymmetric composite laminates exhibit bistability, and are thus called bistable composite laminates. A bistable composite laminate is a composite laminate that exhibits multiple stable static equilibrium states. If the bistable composite is actuated it will snap to its secondary equilibrium state and then remain there without any further actuation. This unique behavior of bistable composites has made them the subject of much research in the areas of morphing structures as well as energy harvesting. Much of the research done on bistable laminates has been focused on the fundamental characterization of the bistable behavior and …

Using Contraflow On A Road Segment To Improve Emergency Response Vehicle Speed In A Connected Vehicle Environment, Nitin Srinath

All Theses

Emergency response vehicles (ERVs) need to reach their destinations as fast as possible. Road congestion and unpredictable movement of non-emergency vehicles (non-ERVs) makes it challenging for the ERV to move quickly. By using the autonomous/connected vehicle environment, instructions can be disseminated to the non-ERVs in the vicinity of the ERV to facilitate its passage within a link. In this thesis, an extension to a previously developed mathematical program is proposed to enable the ERV to use a contraflow lane when considerable speed gains can be potentially achieved. An experimental analysis is conducted to evaluate the sensitivity of the model’s output …

Thermal Mechanical Numerical Modeling Of Friction Element Welding, Ankit Varma

All Theses

With the objective of minimizing carbon footprint of vehicles, different organizations across the world are increasingly enforcing higher fuel efficiency targets for the automobile manufacturers. To improve the fuel economy while retaining or further improving the structural integrity, the automobile industry is vigorously shifting towards substituting conventional heavy materials like cast iron with new age materials such as aluminum alloys, steel alloys, etc. which are not only much lighter but also offer superior strength-to-weight ratio. Engineers use a mix of these new age materials with the aim of maximizing the benefits from each material. However, the utilization of such materials …

Developing Optimization System For Improving Highway Network Performance Under Seismic Hazards: A Case Study Of Charleston, Sc, Nixon Wonoto

All Theses

A significant number of bridges in the Central and Southeastern United States (CSUS) are known to have a design that is lacking or no seismic consideration. In an article by Wong et al., Charleston is considered an active seismic zone, and the economic loss from the Charleston region could reach over $14 billion if 1886 Charleston’s earthquake would happen again in the near future. Due to lack of present consideration in seismic design for bridges in CSUS, there has been emerging research that studies retrofit strategies for CSUS region such as in Charleston. However, most of the retrofit program, including …

Implementation And Applications Of Art-Directable Ocean Simulation Tools, Jingcong Zhang

All Theses

Ocean effects are important aspects of the filmmaking. They help to establish emotions and dynamism via the behaviors of the oceans, and provides the different atmosphere for storytelling by creating various ocean scenarios. Gilligan is a prototype environmental scene simulator, whose core technique of the ocean simulation has been widely used in feature film productions. This thesis develops ocean simulation tools working with Maya and Houdini with the techniques provided by Gilligan. The Gilligan-Maya workflow executes ocean simulation methods in Gilligan to simulate oceans. The Gilligan-Houdini workflow integrates Gilligan into Houdini, containing a Houdini wrapper of Gilligan, along with a …

Credit Assignment For Collective Multiagent Rl With Global Rewards, Duc Thien Nguyen, Akshat Kumar, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Scaling decision theoretic planning to large multiagent systems is challenging due to uncertainty and partial observability in the environment. We focus on a multiagent planning model subclass, relevant to urban settings, where agent interactions are dependent on their collective influence'' on each other, rather than their identities. Unlike previous work, we address a general setting where system reward is not decomposable among agents. We develop collective actor-critic RL approaches for this setting, and address the problem of multiagent credit assignment, and computing low variance policy gradient estimates that result in faster convergence to high quality solutions. We also develop difference …

Perflearner: Learning From Bug Reports To Understand And Generate Performance Test Frames, Xue Han, Tingting Yu, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software performance is important for ensuring the quality of software products. Performance bugs, defined as programming errors that cause significant performance degradation, can lead to slow systems and poor user experience. While there has been some research on automated performance testing such as test case generation, the main idea is to select workload values to increase the program execution times. These techniques often assume the initial test cases have the right combination of input parameters and focus on evolving values of certain input parameters. However, such an assumption may not hold for highly configurable real-word applications, in which the combinations …

Statistical Methods To Account For Gene-Level Covariates In Normalization Of High-Dimensional Read-Count Data, Lauren Holt Lenz

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The goal of genetic-based cancer research is often to identify which genes behave differently in cancerous and healthy tissue. This difference in behavior, referred to as differential expression, may lead researchers to more targeted preventative care and treatment. One way to measure the expression of genes is though a process called RNA-Seq, that takes physical tissue samples and maps gene products and fragments in the sample back to the gene that created it, resulting in a large read-count matrix with genes in the rows and a column for each sample. The read-counts for tumor and normal samples are then compared …