Digital Commons Network^™

España De La Guerra, By Brian Jeffery, Richard M. Long

Soundboard Scholar

A review of Brian Jeffery, España de la Guerra: The Spanish Political and Military Songs of the War in Spain, 1808 to 1814 (London: Tecla, 2017).

Soundboard Scholar No. 4: Editor's Letter, Thomas Heck

Soundboard Scholar

An introduction to the contents of this issue.

Alfabeto Falso (Vallerotondo, I Bassifondi), Ellwood Colahan

Soundboard Scholar

A review of Alfabeto falso, with Simone Vallerotondo (Baroque guitar) and I Bassifondi (Arcana A435, 2017), compact disc.

François Campion: Music For Baroque Guitar (Hofstötte), Ellwood Colahan

Soundboard Scholar

A review of François Campion: Music for Baroque Guitar, with Bernhard Hofstötter (Brilliant Classics 95275, 2017), compact disc.

How Instruction, Math Anxiety, And Math Achievement Affect Learning A Novel Math Task: Evidence For Better Instruction, Amy Jane Mcauley

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The primary goal of this paper is to test how math anxiety, achievement, and instruction affect learning a novel math task. Currently, most research measures achievement and math anxiety on previously learned tasks. A two-part study was proposed to measure the effects of math anxiety on learning modular arithmetic (MA), a novel math task that involves subtraction and division. Participants of varying degrees of anxiety and achievement were randomly assigned to either a specific or vague instruction condition. Participants were either taught how to solve the task or given minimal information about how to solve the task. Before moving on, …

The Use Of Chemical Element Fingerprints To Investigate The Transformation Of Lake Sediments To Land Soils In Drying Lakes: A Case Study At Lake Mead, Nevada, Ji Hye Park

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Drying lakes are a worldwide catastrophe. The goals of this dissertation research were (1) to investigate whether chemical fingerprints of lake sediments, and nearby land soils, could be established by the analysis of 44 chemical elements, moisture content, Eh, pH, and leachable anions and if so, (2) whether the fingerprints could help explain the process of physical and chemical changes in the lake sediments as they became soils when the lake's water level fell and the anoxic sediments were exposed to the air and weather.

Lake Mead was chosen to model drying lakes because its water level has fallen over …

Disastrous Voting, Moritz Peter Rissmann

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The central question of this study is ’Is there an observable general trend of electorates punishing incumbents for natural disasters across countries and elections?’ Many scholars have argued for the existence of such behavior, yet the empirical evidence rests mostly on single-country and even single-election studies. I look for a generalizable trend in two original data sets with country-election and country-constituency-election as the unit of analysis respectively. I test the punishment hypothesis by correlating the occurrence of natural disasters to the performance of incumbent parties in national lower house elections. Furthermore, I propose that the effect of natural disasters on …

A Qualitative Multiple Case Study Of The Transition Experiences Of Parents And Service Providers Of Individuals With Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities (Idd) In A Postsecondary Educational Program, Rebecca S. Rogers

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the transition experiences of parents of young adults with IDD who are currently enrolled in a postsecondary educational

program in the Southwest part of the United States. This qualitative multiple-case study used Schlossberg’s transition theory to frame the cases for this report. Schlossberg’s transition theory examines the way in which adults move through various transitions in their lives and what strategies they use to cope with the transitions. The theory identifies three different types of transitions: anticipated transitions, unanticipated transitions, and nonevent transitions. In addition, the theory identifies four coping …

Surface Resistivity For Concrete Quality Assurance, Stanley Tat

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The goal of this study was to determine the effectiveness of SRT for concrete quality assurance and to evaluate the relationship between SRT and the three chloride ion ingress methods currently used by various State DOTs. Additionally, the influence of binder type and content, concrete age, and water-to cementitious materials ratio on the experimental results were also examined.

In this study, Type V Portland and three SCMs; namely fly ash, slag, and silica fume were used. Fine and coarse, aggregates were supplied by a local quarry. To evaluate the transport properties of the studied concretes, RMT, RCPT, and ACT were …

Examining The Training Transfer Practice Of A Financial Institution: An Action Research Study, Maria Lourdes Lourdes Gutierrez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Many organizations rely on training to improve the skills and knowledge of its human resources. The underlying assumption is that employees will use what they learned when they return to the workplace. Although there is evidence that learning occurred it does not always result in transfer (Mosel, 1957). Transfer is an issue of concern for training practitioners. If despite the significant investment no return is realized, then the training is not effective and the investment is wasted. This action research study was conducted in a financial institution in the Southwestern United States. The purpose of this study was to (1) …

Supranational Identity Politics: Sovereignism In The Eu, Emilio Jacintho

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The implementation of identity politics policies conceived at a supranational level appears to motivate the coordination of populist movements, the radicalization of their discourses, and an increasing resentment towards minority groups. I investigate the reaction of populist sovereignist political movements, among recently admitted EU member states, to the implementation of European Union policies that involve the positive discrimination of minority groups and mandated refugee relocations. The implementation of such policies seems to have contributed to the resentment toward policy-favored minorities, the increase of anti-immigration values, the success of extremist political expressions, and the mistrust of political institutions and traditional parties. …

A Force Sensor That Converts Fluorescence Signal Into Force Measurement Utilizing Short Looped Dna, Golam Mustafa, Cho-Ying Chuang, William A. Roy, Mohamed M. Farhath, Nilisha Pokhrel, Yue Ma, Kazuo Nagawawa, Edwin Antony, Matthew J. Comstock, Soumitra Basu, Hamza Balci

Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

A force sensor concept is presented where fluorescence signal is converted into force information via single-molecule Förster resonance energy transfer (smFRET). The basic design of the sensor is a ~100 base pair (bp) long double stranded DNA (dsDNA) that is restricted to a looped conformation by a nucleic acid secondary structure (NAS) that bridges its ends. The looped dsDNA generates a tension across the NAS and unfolds it when the tension is high enough. The FRET efficiency between donor and acceptor (D&A) fluorophores placed across the NAS reports on its folding state. Three dsDNA constructs with different lengths were bridged …

Combining Footprinting Mass Spectrometry And Molecular Dynamics Simulation For Structural Studies In Membrane Proteins, Fengbo Zhou

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Membrane proteins are essential in many cellular processes and represent ~60% of all current drug targets. Due to technical limits, membrane proteins of various types were not studied extensively in the past and the biochemistry and functionality of them remain unclear. The structural biology methodologies require pure isolated protein samples for us to resolve their structure and study their biochemical functions. For such in vitro studies, however, membrane proteins often become unstable when isolated from their native lipid bilayer environment. To overcome the challenge, I employed a novel methodology of solubilizing membrane proteins in solution without detergent. I reconstituted ferroportin, …

Elevated Temperature Progressive Damage And Failure Of Duplex Stainless Steel, Darren P. Luke

Civil Engineering ETDs

Ductile failure of metals has been the focus of research efforts within academia and industry for many years since it is tremendously important for understanding the failure of structures under extreme loading conditions. However, limited research has been dedicated to elevated temperature ductile failure, which is critical for evaluating catastrophic events such as industrial, structural or shipping vessel fires. A detailed investigation was conducted on the structural response of Duplex Stainless Steel at elevated temperatures. The temperature dependence of elastic modulus, yield strength, ultimate strength, and ductility was measured up to 1000°C and a continuum damage plasticity model was developed. …

2018 Fall Commencement, Harding University

Commencement Programs

Program for the Harding University Commencement on December 15.

Commencement Speaker: Joel Anderson

Sequence Analysis Methods For The Design Of Cancer Vaccines That Target Tumor-Specific Mutant Antigens (Neoantigens), Jasreet Hundal

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The human adaptive immune system is programmed to distinguish between self and non-self proteins and if trained to recognize markers unique to a cancer, it may be possible to stimulate the selective destruction of cancer cells. Therapeutic cancer vaccines aim to boost the immune system by selectively increasing the population of T cells specifically targeted to the tumor-unique antigens, thereby initiating cancer cell death.. In the past, this approach has primarily focused on targeted selection of ‘shared’ tumor antigens, found across many patients. The advent of massively parallel sequencing and specialized analytical approaches has enabled more efficient characterization of tumor-specific …

The Essential Roles Of The Chromatin Factor Gon4l In Heart Development, Terin Elise Budine

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Heart development and the genetic pathways underlying it are highly conserved among vertebrates. During heart development, an embryo must induce mesoderm formation, pattern the mesoderm, specify cardiomyocytes, increase the population of cardiomyocytes through proliferation, and pattern the cardiac chambers. It is becoming increasingly clear that chromatin modifications help mediate the complex processes of heart development by providing spatiotemporal regulation of gene expression. My thesis work focuses on characterizing functions of the chromatin factor Gonad-4-like (Gon4l), encoded by the gene ugly duckling (udu), in zebrafish heart development. Previous works established a requirement for Gon4l in the formation of many mesoderm derivatives …

Genetic Basis Of Thermal Divergence In Saccharomyces Species, Xueying C. Li

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The genetic architecture of phenotypic divergence is a central question in evolutionary biology. Genetic architecture is impacted by whether evolution occurs through accumulation of many small-effect or a few large-effect changes, the relative contribution of coding and cis-regulatory changes, and the prevalence of epistatic effects. Our empirical understanding of the genetic basis of evolutionary change remains incomplete, largely because reproductive barriers limit genetic analysis to those phenotypes that distinguish closely related species. In this dissertation, I use hybrid genetic analysis to examine the basis of thermal divergence between two post-zygotically isolated species, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and S. uvarum. S. cerevisiae is …

A Recombinant Virus And Reporter Mouse System To Study Chronic Chikungunya Virus Pathogenesis, Alissa Roxanne Young

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is an arthritogenic alphavirus that during acute disease causes fever as well as severe joint and muscle pain. Chronic joint and muscle pain persists in a significant subset of patients, yet we still have a poor understanding of what drives this chronic disease. While replicating virus has not been detected in the joints of patients with chronic arthritis or in various animal models at chronic time points, persistent viral RNA can be detected for months after acute infection.To identify the cells that could be contributing to chronic CHIKV pathogenesis, we developed recombinant viruses that express Cre recombinase …

Mechanistic Characterization Of Resistome And Microbiome Dynamics Across Diverse Microbial Habitats, Andrew John Gasparrini

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Increasing antibiotic resistance in pathogens is a serious public health challenge, with over two million antibiotic resistant infections in the United States leading to at least 23,000 deaths and an estimated $55 billion in excess healthcare and societal costs. Antibiotic resistance has risen steadily in both pathogenic and benign bacteria since antibiotics’ introduction to agriculture and medicine 70 years ago. A dramatic reduction in the number of antibiotics approved for human use has accompanied this rise in antibiotic resistance, leading to the alarming prospect of a post-antibiotic era. Understanding the evolutionary origins, genetic contexts, and molecular mechanisms of antibiotic resistance …

The Role Of Apolipoprotein E In Regulating Tau Pathogenesis And Neurodegeneration In A Tauopathy Mouse Model, Yang Shi

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

APOE4 is the strongest genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD). APOE4 increases brain amyloid-β (Aβ) pathology relative to other APOE isoforms. However, whether APOE independently influences tau pathology, the other pathological hallmark of AD and other tauopathies, or tau-mediated neurodegeneration, is not clear. By generating P301S tau transgenic mice on either a human APOE knock in (KI) or APOE knockout (KO) background, we show that the presence of human APOE, regardless of APOE isoforms, leads to various degrees of brain atrophy in 9-month old P301S mice, whereas APOE ablation strongly protects against neurodegeneration. In particular, P301S/E4 mice develop …

Unsettling Geographies: Primitivist Utopias In Queer American Literature From Walt Whitman To Willa Cather, Benjamin Meiners

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

In “Unsettling Geographies: Primitivist Utopias in Queer American Literature from Walt Whitman to Willa Cather,” I argue that the colonial discourse of primitivism played a central role in the queer literary imaginaries of both canonical and non-canonical U.S. authors. Building on the work of historians of sexuality who trace the complex development of the twentieth-century homo-/hetero- binary, I show how literary works produced in this historical moment—roughly 1860 to 1925—explored and in some instances even advocated alternative queer modes of citizenship and erotic imagination and practice. Focusing on the works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Willa …

A Tail Of Two Pancancer Projects: Somatic Variant Identification And Driver Gene Discovery Using Tcga, Matthew Hawkins Bailey

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The implementation of next-generation genomic sequencing has exploded over the past dozen years. Large consortia, such as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA); the International Cancer Genetics Consortium (ICGC); and the Pediatric Cancer Genome Projects (PCGP), made great strides in democratizing big data for the scientific community. These data sets provide a rich resource to build tools for somatic variant discovery and exploratory analysis. Public repositories hold the answer to many novel biological and clinical revelations i.e., the discovery of complex indels, splice creating mutations, alternative super enhancer binding sites, machine learning models to predict mutation impact, and cancer subtype classification …

Neural Mechanisms Of Drosophila Circadian Rhythms, Xitong Liang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Animals show circadian rhythms in a variety of physiological functions and behaviors. In Drosophila melanogaster, behavioral rhythms are driven by circadian clock genes that are oscillating in ~150 circadian pacemaker neurons. To explain how circadian neurons encode time and regulate different behavioral rhythms, I performed 24-hour in vivo whole-brain calcium imaging using light-sheet microscopy. First, I found that different groups of circadian neurons show circadian rhythms in spontaneous neural activity with diverse phases. The neural activity phases of the M and E pacemaker groups, which are associated with the morning and evening locomotor activities respectively, occur ~4 hours before their …

Singing As A Therapeutic Technique To Improve Gait For People With Parkinson Disease, Elinor Harrison

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Abstract of the DissertationSinging as a Therapeutic Technique toImprove Gait for People with Parkinson DiseasebyElinor Clare HarrisonDoctor of Philosophy in Movement ScienceNeurosciencesWashington University in St. Louis, 2018Professor Gammon Earhart, ChairGait impairment is common in older adults and even more prevalent for people with Parkinson disease (PD). Gait dysfunction is often characterized by reductions in speed, step frequency, and step length. In addition, decreased ability to regulate step length and step frequency may contribute to increased gait variability, making walking less stable and increasing risk for falls. As gait deficits are often resistant to drug therapy, there is a need to …

The Relationship Between Challenge Courses And The, Christopher Luna

Health, Exercise, and Sports Sciences ETDs

There has been an increasing demand among education agencies to utilize challenge courses, also known as ropes courses, for personal growth opportunities among students of all ages. Teachers often tell students how they want students to work as a “team” and “get along” without providing the experiences for them to practice such behaviors. A low ropes experience allows students to practice cooperative skills. The focus of garnering participants for this study was to identify a specific target of first-generation college students from two separate classroom settings. The research focused on identifying the relationship between first-generation college students and low ropes …

Stability Of A Spinning Triangle Tethered Spacecraft System In A Circular Orbit, Matthew James Heitstuman

Mechanical Engineering ETDs

Equations of motion are derived for a spinning triangle tethered spacecraft system and are used to analyze the stability of such systems. Floquet theory is applied to the linearized, periodic coefficient, equations of motion to analyze spin stability as a function of triangle geometry and the average spin rate of the satellite relative to the angular velocity of the spacecraft orbiting around a central body. The results of the Floquet analysis show that spin stability is achievable for many combinations of spacecraft geometry and spin rate. Spacecraft engineers or operators for a triangle-shaped tethered spacecraft can use this information for …

Tangibility And Symbolism Along Historic Highway 66 In Albuquerque, Donatella Davanzo

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary exploration of Highway 66 heritage in order to understand what makes the historic American route distinctive in the contemporary capitalist scenario. Although deterioration of the road is evident, it continues to epitomize an historic American infrastructure as well as a fascinating conceptualization of the United States in the American imagination and in the international consciousness. Historical evidence indicates that the formation of Highway 66 largely depended on a conjuncture of political, cultural, and socio-economic factors under capitalism and institutional forces and ideological principles of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism. As an incarnation of these relationships …

Improve The Low Energy Sensitivity Of The Hawc Observatory, Zhixiang Ren

Optical Science and Engineering ETDs

The high altitude water cherenkov gamma-ray observatory (HAWC) has been fully operational since March of 2015 in Mexico at 4,100 meters above sea level on the hillside of the Sierra Negra Volcano. It consists of an array of 300 water cherenkov detectors, each equipped with four photo-multiplier tubes. HAWC operates 24-hours per day with a wide field-of-view (FOV, ∼ 2 sr) and a high duty cycle (∼ 95%). These make it a powerful survey and monitoring experiment for mapping the gamma ray sky at very high energies (VHE, 100 GeV to 100 TeV) and to study sources with varying intensities. …

Application Of Ict To Cataloguing And Classification For Effective Bibliographic Control In The National Library Of Nigeria: Issues And Challenges, Juliana Obiageri Akidi Phd, Cln, Chinyere A. Okezie Phd, Cln

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The study examines the application of information and communication technology (ICT) to cataloguing and classification for effective bibliographic control, with a focus on the National Library of Nigeria as the bibliographic control agency of the nation. The study was guided by six objectives. The research design adopted was survey research method. Population of study was 33 cataloguers, while the sampling technique was complete census of cataloguers in the National Library of Nigeria (NLN), as the population was manageable. The instrument for data collection was structured questionnaire, comprising forty-two item statements in six clusters. Method of data analysis involved the use …