Digital Commons Network^™

Groundwater Recharge Response To Reduced Irrigation Pumping In Western Nebraska, Justin Philip Gibson

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Given current and continued investment in irrigation scheduling technologies, a need exists to better estimate the longevity and magnitude of water savings at watershed level to avoid the paradox of irrigation efficiency. This paradox occurs within a watershed as not all irrigation inefficiencies lead to the system losing water. For example, irrigation pumping rates in excess of crop water demand may lead to enhanced groundwater recharge or surface runoff that migrates to a stream. Thus, increases in efficiency may not lead to similar magnitudes of water savings. I hypothesize that water savings longevities are short given previous work demonstrating rapid …

Mass Spectrometry And Nuclear Magnetic Resonance In The Chemometric Analysis Of Cellular Metabolism, Eli Riekeberg

Department of Chemistry: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The development and awareness of Machine Learning and “big data” has led to a growing interest in applying these methods to bioanalytical research. Methods such as Mass Spectrometry (MS), and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) can now obtain tens of thousands to millions of data points from a single sample, due to fundamental instrumental advances and ever-increasing resolution. Simple pairwise comparisons on datasets of this magnitude can obfuscate more complex underlying trends, and does a disservice to the richness of information contained within. This necessitates the need for multivariate approaches that can more fully take advantage of the complexity of these …

Perceptions Of School District Curriculum Administrators Regarding K-12 Engineering Education, Derrick A. Nero

Student Work

The state of Nebraska recently adopted and implemented a set of Science standards that aligns with the Next Generation Science Standards which include engineering practices such as engineering design and the use of technology. Curriculum administrators throughout the state are responsible for the implementation of these standards including training for engineering teaching and learning. This exploratory study investigated curriculum administrators’ (n = 43) perceptions of Engineering Education in four areas: Importance of Engineering Education, District Familiarity with Engineering Education, Characteristics of Engineering, and Barriers to Integrating Engineering Education. This exploratory study used one instrument to collect data: a modified Design, …

Postseismic Restoration Of The Ecological Environment In The Wenchuan Region Using Satellite Data, Zhibin Huang, Min Xu, Wei Chen, Xiaojuan Lin, Chunxiang Cao, Ramesh Singh

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Using Landsat remote-sensing data combined with geological information extracted from ALOS and Sentinel-1A radar data, the ecological environment was evaluated in the years 2007, 2008, 2013, and 2017 through gray correlation analysis on the basis of the construction of the pressure-state-response model. The main objective of this research was to assess the ecological environment changes in Wenchuan County before and after the earthquake, and to provide reference for future social development and policy implementation. The grading map of the ecological environment was obtained for every year, and the ecological restoration status of Wenchuan County after the earthquake was evaluated. The …

Shale Investment Dashboard In Ohio Q3 And Q4 2017, Andrew R. Thomas, Mark Henning, Kirby Date, Tahir E. Sondo

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

This report presents findings from an investigation into shale-related investment in Ohio. The investment estimates are cumulative from July through December of 2017. Prior investments have previously been reported and are available from Cleveland State University. Subsequent reports will estimate additional investment since the date of this report.

Pva/Chitosan/Silver Nanoparticles Electrospun Nanocomposites: Molecular Relaxations Investigated By Modern Broadband Dielectric Spectroscopy, Mohammad K. Hassan, Ahmed Abukmail, Alaa J. Hassiba, Kenneth A. Mauritz, Ahmed A. Elzatahry

Faculty Publications

In this study, we used broadband dielectric spectroscopy to analyze polymer nanofibers of poly(vinyl alcohol)/chitosan/silver nanoparticles. We also studied the effect of incorporating silver nanoparticles in the polymeric mat, on the chain motion dynamics and their interactions with chitosan nanofibers, and we calculated the activation energies of the sub-T_g relaxation processes. Results revealed the existence of two sub-T_g relaxations, the first gets activated at very low temperature (−90 °C) and accounts for motions of the side groups within the repeating unit such as –NH₂, –OH, and –CH₂OH in chitosan and poly(vinyl alcohol). The second …

Information-Driven Inverse Approach To Disordered Solids: Applications To Amorphous Silicon, Dil K. Limbu, Raymond Atta-Fynn, David A. Drabold, Stephen R. Elliott, Parthapratim Biswas

Faculty Publications

© Physical Review Materials

Publisher's Version

Investigation On The Rons And Bactericidal Effects Induced By He + O2 Cold Plasma Jets: In Open Air And In An Airtight Chamber, Han Xu, Dingxin Liu, Weitao Wang, Zhijie Liu, Li Guo, Mingzhe Rong, Michael G. Kong

Bioelectrics Publications

He + O₂ plasma jets in open air and in an airtight chamber are comparatively studied, with respect to their production of gaseous/aqueous reactive species and their antibacterial effects. Under the same discharge power, the plasma jet in open air has higher densities of gaseous reactive species and a higher concentration of aqueous H₂O₂ but lower concentrations of aqueous OH and O₂^-. In addition, the increase in the O₂ ratio in He in both plasma jets causes a linear decrease in the population of gaseous reactive species, except for O(3p⁵P) …

3d Printing For Microfluidics, Hua Gong

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on developing 3D printing as a fabrication method for microfluidic devices. Specifically, I concentrate on the 3D printing approach known as Digital Light Processing stereolithography (DLP-SLA) in which serially projected images are used to sequentially photopolymerize layers to build a microfluidic device. The motivation for this work is to explore a much faster alternative to cleanroom-based microfabrication that additionally offers the opportunity to densely integrate microfluidic elements in compact 3D layouts for dramatic device volume reduction. In the course of my research, an optical approach was used to guide custom resin formulation to help create the interconnected …

Clean Indices Of Common Rings, Benjamin L. Schoonmaker

Theses and Dissertations

Lee and Zhou introduced the clean index of rings in 2004. Motivated by this work, Basnet and Bhattacharyya introduced both the weak clean index of rings and the nil clean index of rings and Cimpean and Danchev introduced the weakly nil clean index of rings. In this work, we calculate each of these indices for the rings ℤ/nℤ and matrix rings with entries in ℤ/nℤ. A generalized index is also introduced.

Netlight: Cloud Baked Indirect Illumination, Nathan Andrew Zabriskie

Theses and Dissertations

Indirect lighting drastically increases the realism of rendered scenes but it has traditionally been very expensive to calculate. This has long precluded its use in real-time rendering applications such as video games which have mere milliseconds to respond to user input and produce a final image. As hardware power continues to increase, however, some recently developed algorithms have started to bring real-time indirect lighting closer to reality. Of specific interest to this paper, cloud-based rendering systems add indirect lighting to real-time scenes by splitting the rendering pipeline between a server and one or more connected clients. However, thus far they …

Vision-Based Emergency Landing Of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Parker Chase Lusk

Theses and Dissertations

Emergency landing is a critical safety mechanism for aerial vehicles. Commercial aircraft have triply-redundant systems that greatly increase the probability that the pilot will be able to land the aircraft at a designated airfield in the event of an emergency. In general aviation, the chances of always reaching a designated airfield are lower, but the successful pilot might use landmarks and other visual information to safely land in unprepared locations. For small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS), triply- or even doubly-redundant systems are unlikely due to size, weight, and power constraints. Additionally, there is a growing demand for beyond visual line …

Child-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Technologies, And Big Data, Jerry Alan Fails

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The children's technology landscape is changing quickly. The ubiquity of interactive technologies means children can access them just about anytime, anywhere. At the same time, these technologies constantly collect data from and about children, bringing them into the age of big data, voluntarily or not. These developments have the potential to significantly change children's relationship to technology and the long-term impact of technology use. To discuss these changes, the child-computer-interaction community held a special interest group (SIG) meeting during the CHI 2018 conference.

The Stringent Takings Test For Impact Fees In Illinois: Its Origins And Implications For Home Rule Units And Legislation, Lisa Harms Hartzler

Northern Illinois University Law Review

Many Illinois municipalities impose exactions, or impact fees, on new housing developments. Appropriate impact fees offset the anticipated financial burdens on government created by a resulting increase in population, such as a need to build wider roads or add schools. The validity of these fees, however, is subject to a unique and especially stringent standard under the Illinois Constitution's Takings Clause. Unlike the U.S. Supreme Court's interpretation of the federal constitution and most other state court interpretations of their respective constitutions, an impact fee in Illinois must be "uniquely and specifically attributable" to the burdens it creates for a local …

Reading Robot Light-Up Bookmarks, Professional Field Services

Hands-on STEM Activities

Materials: Robot Bookmark Template, LED light, 3V Lithium Battery, 3 strips of copper tape (approx. 3 in. or 8 cm.)

An Investigation Into The Imposed Cognitive Load Of Static & Dynamic Type Systems On Programmers, Ian Vaughn Koeppe

Student Work

Static and dynamic type systems have long been a point of contention in the programming language wars. Yet, for many years, arguments on either side were drawn from personal experience and not empirical evidence. A challenge for researchers is that the usability of language constructs is difficult to quantify, especially since usability can be interpreted in many ways. By one definition, language usability can be measured in terms of the level of cognitive load imposed on a developer. This can be done through questionnaires, but ultimately user responses are subject to bias. In recent years, eye-tracking has been shown to …

State Energy Research Center, University Of North Dakota. Energy And Environmental Research Center

EERC Brochures and Fact Sheets

Fact sheet about the Energy & Environmental Research Center being designated North Dakota’s State Energy Research Center (SERC). Includes information on how environmentally responsible precommercial research helps North Dakota economically. [This item is an outdated or superseded version and retained for historical purposes only. It may no longer reflect current information, policies, or practices.]

Improving Reusability Of Software Libraries Through Usage Pattern Mining, Mohamed Aymen Saied, Ali Ouni, Houari A. Sahraoui, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Katsuro Inoue, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern software systems are increasingly dependent on third-party libraries. It is widely recognized that using mature and well-tested third-party libraries can improve developers’ productivity, reduce time-to-market, and produce more reliable software. Today’s open-source repositories provide a wide range of libraries that can be freely downloaded and used. However, as software libraries are documented separately but intended to be used together, developers are unlikely to fully take advantage of these reuse opportunities. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically identify third-party library usage patterns, i.e., collections of libraries that are commonly used together by developers. Our approach employs …

Comparing Elm With Svm In The Field Of Sentiment Classification Of Social Media Text Data, Zhihuan Chen, Zhaoxia Wang, Zhiping Lin, Ting Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Machine learning has been used in various fields with thousands of applications. Extreme learning machine (ELM), which is the most recently developed machine learning algorithm, has become increasingly popular for its good generalization ability. However, it has been relatively less applied to the domain of social media. Support Vector Machine (SVM), another popular learning-based algorithm, has been applied for sentiment classification of social media text data and has obtained good results. This paper investigates and compares the capabilities of these two learning-based methods in the field of sentiment classification of social media. The results indicate that SVM can obtain good …

Comparison Of Modeled And Measured Pesticide Concentrations In Air, Trenell Davis Boggans

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chlorpyrifos (CPF) is a popular organophosphorus insecticide that is heavily used in the agriculture industry as a means of pest control. Chlorpyrifos is known for its toxic effect to inhibit the enzyme acetylcholinesterase (ACHE) in humans and is widely used in areas of California where the site of application is close to occupied areas, such that exposures to residents and bystanders can occur due to secondary drift. Secondary drift refers to the volatilization of a pesticide from the surface to which it was applied (e.g. soil or plant foliage) and subsequent off-site movement in ambient air. Secondary drift is different …

Optimizing Peptide Fractionation To Maximize Content In Cancer Proteomics, Victoria Izumi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the studies included in this thesis is to develop an effective an efficient method to study the proteome using separation and detection of peptides, when only a limited amount of sample, 10 micrograms of total protein or less, is available. The analysis will be applied to multiple myeloma cancer cells using ultra high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry for expression proteomics to illustrate utility. To detect low abundance peptides in a complex proteome, we use different strategies, including basic pH reversed-phase liquid chromatography (bRPLC), mass-to-charge fractionation in the mass spectrometer, and various liquid chromatography gradients to increase peptide separation …

Validation Of The Thermal Work Limit (Twl) Against Known Heat Stress Exposures, Danielle L. Kapanowski

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Workers are exposed to stressful thermal work environments in multiple industries every day. Methods for assessing heat stress often struggle to balance productivity without compromising the health of the workers. The Thermal Work Limit (TWL) is a method that has been adopted in areas outside of the United States as a viable method for heat assessment that combines health with productivity. TWL recommends a maximum metabolic rate for a given set of environmental conditions, clothing ensemble and acclimatization state. The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the validity of the TWL against a set of heat stress data known …

Using Problems Of Practice To Leverage Clinical Learning, Maika Yeigh

Curriculum and Instruction Faculty Publications and Presentations

Teacher preparation is a complex endeavor. Preparation programs are designed to transform regular humans into adept teachers through carefully constructed coursework and clinical experiences. University programs and the K-12 school systems both play important roles in the process; however, tensions have persisted between university coursework and clinical field work—a divide between "theoretical" and "clinical". The 2010 NCATE Blue Ribbon Panel Report issued a call to action, and asked teacher preparation programs to reconceptualize approaches to pre-service teacher learning by placing clinical experiences at the heart of the work in an effort to bridge traditional theoretical and clinical divides. This article …

Mountaintop Neutrino Detection: A Nu(Tau) Concept, Caroline E. Paciaroni

Physics

High-energy neutrinos traveling from the distant universe produce detectable signals at radio frequencies after interacting with the earth or its atmosphere. This is the principle behind a new experiment, the BEamforming Elevated Array for COsmogenic Neutrinos, or BEACON. BEACON will be a high altitude array of antennas that is sensitive to up-going tau neutrinos ($\nu_{\tau}$). These elementary particles serve as sources of information about the extraordinarily high energy events in the universe that create them, and also the laws of particle physics that govern their behavior. This report details the construction of a transient detector used to characterize site locations …

Doing History In The Undergraduate Classroom: Project-Based Learning And Student Benefits, Dominic G. Morais

School of Business Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Developing Serious Games In Engineering Education: Innovation At The Nexus Of Food, Energy, And Water Systems, Nathan Rice

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

At a time when food, energy, and water (FEW) are of the utmost concern to the security and health of the world, an initiative has begun to understand the interactions between these systems. The goal of Innovation at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems (INFEWS) is to bring together research fields that typically work in their own silos to solve complex problems increasing the resiliency and sustainability of the FEW system. Stemming from this initiative was a project to produce an educational immersive simulation game to teach youth about how their food is produced, systems thinking, and sustainable …

Triangular Cubic Hesitant Fuzzy Einstein Hybrid Weighted Averaging Operator And Its Application To Decision Making, Florentin Smarandache, Aliya Fahmi, Fazli Amin, Madad Khan, Nasruddin Hassan

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this paper, triangular cubic hesitant fuzzy Einstein weighted averaging (TCHFEWA) operator, triangular cubic hesitant fuzzy Einstein ordered weighted averaging (TCHFEOWA) operator and triangular cubic hesitant fuzzy Einstein hybrid weighted averaging (TCHFEHWA) operator are proposed. An approach to multiple attribute group decision making with linguistic information is developed based on the TCHFEWA and the TCHFEHWA operators. Furthermore, we establish various properties of these operators and derive the relationship between the proposed operators and the existing aggregation operators. Finally, a numerical example is provided to demonstrate the application of the established approach

Gis To Address Questions In Forest Ecology And Management, Nicolas Picard

Purdue GIS Day

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are powerful tools to deal with spatialized issues. As such, they have become routine tools in forestry to delimit forest resources, support the design of forest inventories, map forest resources, and analyze, model and support decision making to sustainably manage forests. Two examples will be provided to show how forest management can benefit from progress in GIS technology. The first one deals with the optimization of forest roads to harvest trees in tropical rainforests. It required the development of heuristics to solve the multiple target access problem in a reasonable time. The second one deals with …

A Correlational Study Of Academic Locus Of Control, Study Preparation, And The Praxis Ii, Elizabeth Polzin

Dissertations

For school counseling candidates, the culmination of the pathway to state certification and/or licensure lies in a passing score on a standardized test. Within the state of Missouri, this test is the Praxis II. Within the state of Missouri, an achievement gap on the pass rates of the Praxis II existed between Caucasian and African American students. Participants in this study, both male and female, attended a Midwestern, private university and spanned a wide range of ages, all older than 20 years. The participant population included African American and Caucasian students. This dissertation sought to explore potential contributors to the …

My Laptop Takes Forever, Now What!, Eric Adams

Purdue GIS Day

ITAP Research Computing's Data Workbench offers researchers access to an interactive computing environment for non-batch big data analysis and simulation. Researchers who outgrow their local computing resources can benefit from the extra computing power that Data Workbench offers without jumping directly into the High-Performance Computing clusters.

In this presentation, we will discuss the details of Data Workbench, file storage options including the Data Depot and how to transfer large files reliably with the Globus research data management service.