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2019

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The Effects Of Futures Markets On The Spot Price Volatility Of Storable Commodities, Cole Louis Goetz Jan 2019

The Effects Of Futures Markets On The Spot Price Volatility Of Storable Commodities, Cole Louis Goetz

Agribusiness and Applied Economics

This thesis examines the relationship between spot prices, futures prices, and ending stocks for storable commodities. We used Granger causality and DAGs to determine causal relationships and cointegration tests to determine long-run relationships. We use VAR/VECM and consider innovation accounting techniques to see how volatility in one market affects the price behavior and volatility in the other market. Results suggest that for agricultural commodities, innovations in futures price permanently increase the level of spot prices while accounting for much of spot price variance over time. For national oil, shocks to futures price decrease the level of spot price in the …

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Telomere Length And Senescence In A Long-Lived Fish (Ictiobus Cyprinellus), Derek Sauer Jan 2019

Telomere Length And Senescence In A Long-Lived Fish (Ictiobus Cyprinellus), Derek Sauer

Biological Sciences

The pattern of shorter telomere lengths in older individuals has been observed across many vertebrates, but has not been well-documented in bony fishes. Bony fish (i.e., Class Osteichthyes) represent the most speciose and oldest group of vertebrates, and understanding their telomere dynamics can fill gaps in our understanding of the process and evolution of aging in vertebrates. In this study we quantified telomere length, immune function, and stress in bigmouth buffalo (Ictiobus cyrpinellus), a long-lived bony fish in the family Catostomidae, to characterize variation in telomeres and condition. We found that length of telomeres extracted from red blood cells was …

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The Mortality Response To Absolute And Relative Temperature Extremes, Scott C. Sheridan, Cameron C. Lee, Michael J. Allen Jan 2019

The Mortality Response To Absolute And Relative Temperature Extremes, Scott C. Sheridan, Cameron C. Lee, Michael J. Allen

Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications

While the impact of absolute extreme temperatures on human health has been amply studied, far less attention has been given to relative temperature extremes, that is, events that are highly unusual for the time of year but not necessarily extreme relative to a location's overall climate. In this research, we use a recently defined extreme temperature event metric to define absolute extreme heat events (EHE) and extreme cold events (ECE) using absolute thresholds, and relative extreme heat events (REHE) and relative extreme cold events (RECE) using relative thresholds. All-cause mortality outcomes using a distributed lag nonlinear model are evaluated for …

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To Promote Innovation, Congress Should Abolish The Supreme Court Created Exceptions To 35 U.S. Code Sec. 101, Shahrokh Falati Jan 2019

To Promote Innovation, Congress Should Abolish The Supreme Court Created Exceptions To 35 U.S. Code Sec. 101, Shahrokh Falati

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

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Insulation In Windows Using Resin & Aerogel Mixture, Priyanka Mallikarjun Pujar Jan 2019

Insulation In Windows Using Resin & Aerogel Mixture, Priyanka Mallikarjun Pujar

Construction Management and Engineering

Insulation materials are essential in building construction; this study proposed to use one such material called silica aerogel, which is known for its excellent thermal properties, and a UV acrylate resin that has been formulated to mix with the aerogel. In this experiment, existing methods of aerogel insulation are discussed and a novel method is investigated. U- value and R- values were obtained by LHICD (i.e., Laser Heating Infrared Camera Detecting method), and K - values were calculated using an equation for 0%, 22.5% and 45% volume of aerogel. The study suggests that using aerogel and resin coating on windows …

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Incorporating Sliding Window-Based Aggregation For Evaluating Topographic Variables In Geographic Information Systems, Rahul Gomes Jan 2019

Incorporating Sliding Window-Based Aggregation For Evaluating Topographic Variables In Geographic Information Systems, Rahul Gomes

Computer Science

The resolution of spatial data has increased over the past decade making them more accurate in depicting landform features. From using a 60m resolution Landsat imagery to resolution close to a meter provided by data from Unmanned Aerial Systems, the number of pixels per area has increased drastically. Topographic features derived from high resolution remote sensing is relevant to measuring agricultural yield. However, conventional algorithms in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) used for processing digital elevation models (DEM) have severe limitations. Typically, 3-by-3 window sizes are used for evaluating the slope, aspect and curvature. Since this window size is very small …

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A Petri Net Based Simulation For Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Puneet Mehta Jan 2019

A Petri Net Based Simulation For Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Puneet Mehta

Computer Science

Nowadays more and more Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being mass produced and are being used for a lot of activities like exploring never before explored areas of the world, recreational work, rescue missions etc. In today’s world violence and attacks have increased and to have personnel in such extreme places will always result in loss of life. To help reduce the loss of lives in situations like this we can use these Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to sweep the affected areas and also attack identified targets. The objective of my study is to create a simulation where multiple UAVs can …

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Image Processing For White Line Detection In A Grassy Field, Rodi Murad Jan 2019

Image Processing For White Line Detection In A Grassy Field, Rodi Murad

Computer Science

Image processing for object detection and decision making based on the observed remains a challenge today. As participants in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition in 2018 and 2019, we were tasked to build an autonomous vehicle capable of maneuvering through a grassy course delineated with white lines and laid out with obstacles. To remain within the white line boundaries, we used OpenCV and Python for image processing and white line detection. To accomplish the task, we used image processing techniques such as image filtering, blurring, and edge detection. Although this algorithm was produced for the specific application of detection edges …

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Using Machine Learning And Graph Mining Approaches To Improve Software Requirements Quality: An Empirical Investigation, Maninder Singh Jan 2019

Using Machine Learning And Graph Mining Approaches To Improve Software Requirements Quality: An Empirical Investigation, Maninder Singh

Computer Science

Software development is prone to software faults due to the involvement of multiple stakeholders especially during the fuzzy phases (requirements and design). Software inspections are commonly used in industry to detect and fix problems in requirements and design artifacts, thereby mitigating the fault propagation to later phases where the same faults are harder to find and fix. The output of an inspection process is list of faults that are present in software requirements specification document (SRS). The artifact author must manually read through the reviews and differentiate between true-faults and false-positives before fixing the faults. The first goal of this …

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A Smartphone-Based Pointing Technique In Cross-Device Interaction, Juechen Yang Jan 2019

A Smartphone-Based Pointing Technique In Cross-Device Interaction, Juechen Yang

Computer Science

In this paper, the author develops a novel cross-device cursor position estimation system for transferring a mobile device’s four-direction 2D movement to a cursor’s four-direction movement on a large display device; this is achieved through the use of sound-source localization and machine-learning algorithms. This system is implemented in two steps. First, the system starts the cursor’s position initialization by taking advantage of the theory of soundsource localization. Second, the system transfers the mobile device’s movement to the cursor’s movement by means of a machine-learning model. This newly developed system improves usability of cross-device applications by offering intuitive 2D move gesture …

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Investigation Of Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm, Madhumitha Kakarlapudi Jan 2019

Investigation Of Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm, Madhumitha Kakarlapudi

Computer Science

The Strength Pareto Evaluation Algorithm (SPEA) (Zitzler and Thiele 1999) is one of the prominent technique for approximating the pareto-optimal set for the Multiple Objective Optimization (MOO) algorithm. The Strength Pareto Evaluation Algorithm 2 (SPEA2) is an improved version of SPEA that was introduced in the year 2001. SPEA2 in contrast to SPEA incorporates a fine-grained fitness assignment strategy, an improved archive truncation technique, and a density assessment procedure. In this paper, we studied the influence of the optimization ability of SPEA2 on different benchmark functions by evaluating different performance metrics. The benchmark functions used in the paper include 10 …

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Enumeration Of Dense Modules In Networks, Yashwanth Goud Durgapathi Jan 2019

Enumeration Of Dense Modules In Networks, Yashwanth Goud Durgapathi

Computer Science

To analyze large networks in various research fields including biology, sociology, and web mining, detection of dense modules (a.k.a. clusters) is a crucial step. Though numerous methods have been proposed to this aim, they often lack mathematical rigor. Namely, there is no guarantee that all dense modules are detected. Here, a novel method for enumerating all dense modules is presented as well as a python program implementing this algorithm. Module detection plays a significant role in variety of modern systems to understand their functionality in depth for example in Biology. In Biology many data bases for the protein-protein interactions are …

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User-Behavior Trust Modeling In Cloud Security, Maryam Alruwaythi Jan 2019

User-Behavior Trust Modeling In Cloud Security, Maryam Alruwaythi

Computer Science

With the cloud computing increasing in popularity by providing a massive number of services such as recourses and data center, the number of attacks is increasing. Security is a basic concern in cloud computing, and threats can occur both internally and externally. Users can access the cloud infrastructure for software, operating systems, and network infrastructure provided by the cloud service providers (CSPs). Evaluating users’ behavior in the cloud-computing infrastructure is becoming more important for both cloud users (CSs) and the CSPs that must ensure safety for users accessing the cloud. Because user authentication alone is not enough to ensure the …

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Predictive Performance Evaluation Of Different Neural Networks Using Stock Prices, Deepika Nyavanandi Jan 2019

Predictive Performance Evaluation Of Different Neural Networks Using Stock Prices, Deepika Nyavanandi

Computer Science

Forecasting stock market prices has been a challenging task due to its volatile nature and nonlinearity. Recently, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have become popular in solving a variety of scientific and financial problems including stock market price forecasting. ANNs have the ability to capture the underlying nonlinearity and complex relationship between the dependent and independent variables. This paper aims to compare the performance of various neural networks including Feed Forward Neural Networks (FNN), Vanilla Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks by forecasting stock market prices of three different companies. Empirical results show that the LSTM …

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Scalable Particle Swarm Optimization And Differential Evolution Approaches Applied To Classification, Jamil Al-Sawwa Jan 2019

Scalable Particle Swarm Optimization And Differential Evolution Approaches Applied To Classification, Jamil Al-Sawwa

Computer Science

Applying the nature-inspired methods in the data mining area has been gaining more attention by researchers. Classification is one of the data mining tasks which aims to analyze historical data by discovering hidden relationships between the input and the output that would help to predict an accurate outcome for an unseen input. The classification algorithms based on nature-inspired methods have been successfully used in numerous applications such as medicine and agriculture. However, the amount of data that has been collected or generated in these areas has been increasing exponentially. Thus, extracting useful information from large data requires computational time and …

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Ma 220 Supplement: Applied Calculus For Business & Life Sciences, Heather P. Lippert, Jan S. Collins Jan 2019

Ma 220 Supplement: Applied Calculus For Business & Life Sciences, Heather P. Lippert, Jan S. Collins

OER Main

The MA220 Supplement workbook is designed to support the concepts learned in MA220. There are business and life science applications for students majoring in business and/or life science. The MA220 supplement supports, but does not replace the textbook required for the MA220 course.

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Application Of Memory-Based Collaborative Filtering To Predict Fantasy Points Of Nfl Quarterbacks, Dienul Haq Ambeg Paramarta Jan 2019

Application Of Memory-Based Collaborative Filtering To Predict Fantasy Points Of Nfl Quarterbacks, Dienul Haq Ambeg Paramarta

Computer Science

Subjective expert projections have been traditionally used to predict points in fantasy football, while machine prediction applications are limited. Memory-based collaborative filtering has been widely used in recommender system domain to predict ratings and recommend items. In this study, user-based and item-based collaborative filtering were explored and implemented to predict the weekly statistics and fantasy points of NFL quarterbacks. The predictions from three seasons were compared against expert projections. On both weekly statistics and total fantasy points, the implementations could not make significantly better predictions than experts.However, the prediction from the implementation improved the accuracy of other regression models when …

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Automated Detection Of Acute Leukemia Using K-Means Clustering Algorithm, Minakshi Arya Jan 2019

Automated Detection Of Acute Leukemia Using K-Means Clustering Algorithm, Minakshi Arya

Computer Science

Detection of ALL can be done through the analysis of white blood cells (WBCs) called leukocytes. Usually, the analysis of blood cells is performed manually by skilled operators, have numerous drawbacks, such as slow analysis, a non-standard accuracy and skill of the operator. Hence many automated systems are using in order to analyze and classify the blood cells. This paper focuses on an automatic system based on image processing algorithms for the classification of blood cells for detection of Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL). Experiments were ran using 20 models with PCA and seven models namely Medium KNN, Coarse KNN, Cosine …

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Multi Feature Cbir Model For Trademark Image Distinctiveness, Pratima Soni Jan 2019

Multi Feature Cbir Model For Trademark Image Distinctiveness, Pratima Soni

Computer Science

A Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system can help in detecting trademark infringement. This paper describes an improvement and extension of previous work for the existing Universal Model for a CBIR system, which only uses texture along with color to produce a reliable and capable system. To enhance the security and efficiency of the CBIR based Universal Model, the extension is a Multi Feature CBIR Model that can utilize many parameters including color, texture, and shape with the facility of choosing a suitable and flexible set of features. The supported selection techniques give priority to individual features and help increase the …

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Breast Cancer Diagnosis Using Different Machine Learning Techniques, Souradip Roy Jan 2019

Breast Cancer Diagnosis Using Different Machine Learning Techniques, Souradip Roy

Computer Science

Cancer is one of the dangerous diseases which causes many deaths each year and breast cancer being one of them which is quite common among women. In today’s time 12 percent of the women can develop breast cancer over her course of lifetime. There are two kinds of tumors that can be found in women, they are benign and malignant. The former is considered non-cancerous while the latter is deadly. In this work we applied different machine learning models and did a comparative study to see which one performs better in predicting unseen data to be benign or malignant. The …

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Geostatistical Interpolation And Analyses Of Washington State Aadt Data From 2009 – 2016, Kunle Meshach Owaniyi Jan 2019

Geostatistical Interpolation And Analyses Of Washington State Aadt Data From 2009 – 2016, Kunle Meshach Owaniyi

Construction Management and Engineering

Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) data in the transportation industry today is an important tool used in various fields such as highway planning, pavement design, traffic safety, transport operations, and policy-making/analyses. Systematic literature review was used to identify the current methods of estimating AADT and ranked. Ordinary linear kriging occurred most. Also, factors that influence the accuracy of AADT estimation methods as identified include geographical location and road type amongst others. In addition, further analysis was carried out to determine the most apposite kriging algorithm for AADT data. Three linear (universal, ordinary, and simple), three nonlinear (disjunctive, probability, and indicator) …

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Improving Sustainability In Protective Coating Systems, Alison Marie Rohly Jan 2019

Improving Sustainability In Protective Coating Systems, Alison Marie Rohly

Coatings and Polymeric Materials

Sustainability has been a driving factor in the recent development of protective coating systems, from reducing volatile organic compounds (VOC’s), integrating biomass for the replacement of petrochemicals, to reducing the number of synthetic or processing steps within a coating system. Incorporating changes to established technologies requires research initiatives focused on matching or exceeding performance properties while maintaining or lowering costs. As a result, sustainable changes to protective coating systems have been under heavy investigation as market demands shift from petrochemicals to renewable materials. This research focuses on the development of unique thermoset coating systems and sustainable improvements. The first study …

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Soysomes And Other Functional Biomaterials From Sucrose Soyate Derivatives, Ruvimbo Pearl Wright Jan 2019

Soysomes And Other Functional Biomaterials From Sucrose Soyate Derivatives, Ruvimbo Pearl Wright

Coatings and Polymeric Materials

Biomaterials serve as interventional tools in medicine to treat, improve or replace diseased tissues, organs or function of the body. Although several polymeric biomaterials already exist, they often present challenges, at material level, such as non-biodegradability, degradation into acidic by-products or tissue incompatibility, or at functional level such as failure to sustain prolonged release of therapeutic payload for a desired period. Research has been focused on investigating new polymeric candidates to address these problems of current systems. The use of renewable resources to generate smart polymers for biomedical and pharmaceutical purposes presents a new and exciting avenue for biomaterials. As …

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Functional Colloids From Amphiphilic Polymer Assemblies And Peptides/Polypeptides, Oksana Zholobko Jan 2019

Functional Colloids From Amphiphilic Polymer Assemblies And Peptides/Polypeptides, Oksana Zholobko

Coatings and Polymeric Materials

The use of responsive polymers, where even minor changes in one of the macromolecular characteristics triggered by the external stimuli can cause drastic changes in the material function or performance, is widely studying area of research. Formation of the thermodynamically stable polymer-peptide colloids, such as mixed micellar assemblies or polymer-enzyme conjugates, loading capacity of the colloids, and cargo activity all depend on the macromolecular interactions within the peptide/polypeptide-polymer system. The goal of this work is to investigate interactions between range of new polymers and various cargo molecules and determine whether those interactions affect the physicochemical properties of the resulted colloids. …

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Epoxidized Sucrose Soyate And Derivatives As Bioderived Crosslinkers In Various Thermosets, Samantha Danielle Silbert Jan 2019

Epoxidized Sucrose Soyate And Derivatives As Bioderived Crosslinkers In Various Thermosets, Samantha Danielle Silbert

Coatings and Polymeric Materials

Throughout the world, alternatives to petrochemically-derived materials are being sought. Aside from petrochemical feedstocks with precarious futures, materials that are derived from renewable resources such as crops are attractive. Epoxidized sucrose soyate is a material made from soybean oil and sucrose. Its rigid sucrose core, flexible aliphatic chains, and many modifiable epoxy sites make it an attractive candidate to replace petrochemically derived materials in a multitude of thermosets. This dissertation encompasses studies of ESS and its derivatives for the development of thermosets in a variety of processes. Namely, ESS-derived polycarbamates for use in ambient-curing polyurethane coatings produced via carbamate-dialdehyde crosslinking, …

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Features Of Highly Hydrophobic Plant Oil-Based Vinyl Monomers In Cationic And Free Radical Polymerization, Kyle Kingsley Jan 2019

Features Of Highly Hydrophobic Plant Oil-Based Vinyl Monomers In Cationic And Free Radical Polymerization, Kyle Kingsley

Coatings and Polymeric Materials

The demand for polymeric materials, which have traditionally been produced from petroleum-based resources over the last century, continues to grow each year. However, the supply of fossil fuels is limited. This, along with price volatility, harmful effects on the environment, and stricter regulations, have led to a surge in the exploration of suitable replacements, namely renewable resources such as plant and vegetable oils. In this work, newly synthesized highly hydrophobic plant oil-based vinyl monomers were polymerized using different mechanisms and processes to obtain polymer coatings and crosslinked films. First, novel vinyl ether monomers derived from soybean oil were copolymerized with …

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Intellectual And Experiential Knowing: An Exploratory Factor Analysis To Uncover The Underlying Structure Of Knowing, Francis Oakgrove Jan 2019

Intellectual And Experiential Knowing: An Exploratory Factor Analysis To Uncover The Underlying Structure Of Knowing, Francis Oakgrove

Education

Knowledge and the acquisition thereof have long been debated throughout human history. Several authors have suggested that knowing and knowledge differ among people. However, there is consistency among these studies that suggests a dualism within Western philosophy where a person exists of a mind and a body—two distinct and separate entities—with the mind as the central point of knowing. The theoretical framework for this study suggests that the dualism representation is limiting. Further, it posits that the body is also a central point for knowing. Hence, the Ways of Knowing Scale (WoKS) was developed in an attempt to measure the …

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Consequential Validity And Social Studies Education: An Examination Of Standards, Assessment Policies, And Teacher Preparation, Michael Scott Learn Jan 2019

Consequential Validity And Social Studies Education: An Examination Of Standards, Assessment Policies, And Teacher Preparation, Michael Scott Learn

Education

Educational quality is a way to influence the future of the American economy (Hanushek, 1986). Large-scale assessments are designed to determine quality in education by measuring student achievement. A connection exists between the standards, teachers, and assessments that form a system of accountability within education. State and national accountability policies place value in certain educational fields, thereby preferring some while excluding others. As a result, accountability systems influence the field of social studies in several unanticipated ways. Consequential validity suggests that assessments should include value implications and relevance (Messick, 1989). While assessment research examines the disciplines of mathematics, science, and …

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Student-Centered Active Learning Environment For Undergraduate Programs (Scale-Up): Effective Tool For Biology?, Melissa Rae Stotz Jan 2019

Student-Centered Active Learning Environment For Undergraduate Programs (Scale-Up): Effective Tool For Biology?, Melissa Rae Stotz

Education

The Student-Centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs (SCALE-UP) method incorporates active learning pedagogies into space designed to facilitate effective active learning. Methods predominately used to demonstrate the effectiveness of active learning in STEM fields do not generally account for differences in student characteristics; furthermore, there is a lack of data sources that measure student-centered educational practices. This study examined the impact of SCALE-UP on student achievement in introductory biology, as evidenced by course grades. A regression framework was used to account for student characteristics. Course syllabi, classroom observation data, and an instructor interview were examined to gain deeper understanding …

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