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About The Mcnair Scholars Program, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Electrochemical And Photoelectrochemical Properties Of Oxide And Chalcogenide Semiconductors, Farinaz Firouzan

Chemistry & Biochemistry Dissertations - Archive

Photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting via inorganic semiconductors has shown interest in technical applications such as harvesting sunlight as sustainable fuels. Chalcogen-based (S, Se, Te) semiconductors are important in numerous technology applications especially related to photovoltaic solar conversion, fuel cells, hydrogen generation etc. On the other hand, oxide semiconductors are great candidates due to their unique properties namely electrolyte stability, a wide range of bandgaps and easy access. In this vein, we investigated the quaternary metal chalcogenide, Ca(La1−xCex)2S4 (0 ≤ x ≤ 1) photoelectrochemical behavior in an aqueous redox electrolyte. These solid solution series were synthesized in Prof. Macaluso’s laboratory by …

Emergency Alerts And The Application Of Location Sharing, Martha Taffa

2020 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

With the advancement in technology, a lot of work has been done for the welfare and betterment of people globally. Nevertheless, there are not as many systems implemented to inform deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) people when an emergency alert is going off, or when a similar situation is taking place. This project is about the implementation of a mobile app that gives different pop-up alerts when detecting emergency sounds. The paper mainly focuses on the implementation of the audio classifier and the feature that lets a user share their location with family and friends. The Google Maps application …

Mr-Compatibility Of An Isometric/ Dynamic Plantarflexion Ergometer, Ramtin Behbahan

2020 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Plantarflexion Ergometry (PE), in conjunction with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), has shown to be a useful technique in the research and study of Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) in patients' extremities. A number of studies have conducted PE experiments with favorable results. However, the devices reviewed lack the MRI compatibility option. They are often not designed to measure angular displacement, which accounts as the displacement variable within the calculated torque and work function. In this research, a fully MRI compatible PE was constructed using commercially available parts. To reduce interference and imaging noise during MRI PE, RF (Radio Frequency), magnetic shielding …

Principles, Design, Fabrication, And Characterization Of Subwavelength Periodic Resonant Metasurfaces, Hafez Hemmati

Material Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Since the emergence of diffraction gratings containing periodic unit cells, innumerable advances in theoretical studies and practical applications have emerged. Recently, these classic structures have been categorized as subsets of “meta-surfaces” or “meta-materials” in which periodically aligned wavelength-scale features manipulate all key properties of the electromagnetic waves in a desired manner for a wide variety of applications. This includes manipulating of amplitude, phase, spectral distribution, polarization state, and local mode structure of light in the various available spectral expressions. Among the significant characteristic properties of metasurfaces is the coupling of incident light to laterally propagating leaky Bloch modes in the …

Exploring The Relationship Between Student Online Discussion-Board Activity And Student Grades, Frank Robert Talbott

Dissertations

As students, instructors, and higher-education administrators delve further into cyberspace, scholarly literature and practice require further insights into the dynamics of online learning. This study examined the relationship between online student discussionboard activity and student grades and, consequently, addressed a dearth in the literature about this relationship. Student Involvement Theory provided the theoretical foundation of this research. This study’s sample consisted of 200 online undergraduate students in online business-analytics courses. Regression-analyses findings supported the relationship between student postings of certain mathematical-symbol references (e.g., for equalities, inequalities, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) and student grades. Therefore, administrators, faculty, and course designers …

On The Generation, Structure, And Semantics Of Grammar Patterns In Source Code Identifiers, Christian D. Newman,, Reem S. Alsuhaibani, Michael J. Decker, Anthony Peruma, Dishant Kaushik, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Emily Hill

Articles

Identifier names are the atoms of program comprehension. Weak identifier names decrease developer productivity and degrade the performance of automated approaches that leverage identifier names in source code analysis; threatening many of the advantages which stand to be gained from advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Therefore, it is vital to support developers in naming and renaming identifiers. In this paper, we extend our prior work, which studies the primary method through which names evolve: rename refactorings. In our prior work, we contextualize rename changes by examining commit messages and other refactorings. In this extension, we further consider data …

The Utilization Of Metal-Ligand Cooperativity For Electrocatalytic Reduction And Catalytic Hydration., Steven Cronin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Small molecules are building blocks for developing larger materials. These small molecules could be extremely small, such as hydrogen, or larger such as a nitrile, but their impact on the global economy is massive. This dissertation describes a catalyst for three reactions involving small molecules; 1) the hydrogen evolution reaction, 2) the carbon dioxide reduction reaction, 3) nitrile hydration. The catalyst Zn(DMTH) (DMTH = diacetyl-2-(4-methyl-3-thiosemicarbazonate)-3-(2-pyridinehydrazonato)) use “metal-ligand cooperativity” between the Lewis acid Zn(II) metal ion and an uncoordinated Lewis base nitrogen in the ligand framework to activate substrates. The complex has been analyzed via NMR, UV/Vis, single crystal X-ray crystallography, …

Malaria, Microbes, And Mice: The Role Of The Gut Microbiota On The Immune Response To Plasmodium Infection And The Treatment Potential Of Microbiota Modulation., Morgan L. Waide

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Plasmodium infection leads to over 200 million cases of malaria and 400,000 deaths worldwide each year. These deaths are largely in children under the age of five and pregnant women [1]. Caused by transmission of Plasmodium parasites by the female Anopheles mosquito, malaria poses a risk for over 40 percent of the world’s population [1]. Despite worldwide efforts to eradicate malaria leading to a decrease in malaria-associated mortalities in the early 2000s [2], growing resistance to the available antimalarials and the lack of an effective, long-lasting vaccine has caused this decrease to plateau in recent years [1, 3-6]. Furthermore, malaria …

Buried Soil Carbon Vulnerability To Decomposition With Landscape Disturbance, Abby Mcmurtry

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Buried layers of ancient soil organic carbon (SOC) can store significant amounts carbon (C). Persistence of this C is favored by burial, which disconnects the soil from atmospheric conditions and limits plant derived C inputs, thus reducing microbial activity. However, erosion exposes buried paleosols to modern surface conditions and results in influx of root-derived C through the processes of root exudation and root turnover. These C inputs stimulate microbial activity and leave paleosol C vulnerable to decomposition. Understanding turnover of ancient soil C is critical for predicting the response of this large C reservoir to environmental change and feedbacks to …

Smart Solar Charge Controller, Aria Pegah, Miclaine Emtman

Electrical Engineering

The technology of photovoltaics has been quickly evolving as we move toward a future with more clean energy. Energy conversion efficiency is key to making these systems the viable option amongst other sources of power. This project proposes a way to increase the power yield from a solar system by implementing smarter algorithms in the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) component of the system. MPPT is critical because environmental conditions may vary significantly for any given system due to irradiance and shading. The proposed method for MPPT utilizes a controller that uses swarm intelligence to do the power tracking.. This …

Overcoming The Myth Of The Contemporary “Starving Artist”: An Exploration Into The Fusion And Viability Of A 21st-Century Career In Art And Design, Miranda M. Myles Jackson

Masters Theses

This research explores the myth of the “starving artist” surrounding the pursuit of a career in the arts. Artists are often dubbed as starving due to the pre-conceived notion that careers in art do not provide longevity or financial stability. Due to this stigma, budding creatives are often dissuaded at home, school, or both from pursuing a career doing what they love. Arts programs are often cut and or remain underfunded, mainly due to this biased perception. Research indicates that careers in the arts have expanded exponentially due to its merge with various fields. According to both the STEM vs. …

1,9,10-Substituted Phenothiazine Derivatives With Strained Radical Cations And Use Thereof, Susan A. Odom, Chad Risko, Matthew D. Casselman, Corrine F. Elliott, Nuwan Harsha Attanayake, Subrahmanyam Modekrutti

Chemistry Faculty Patents

Compounds for use in a rechargeable battery are provided, including a compound according to the formula: (see patent for the formula)

wherein R₁ and R₉ are independently selected from the group consisting of H, alkyl, aryl, perfluoroaryl, perfluoroalkyl, alkylaryl, alkoxyaryl, alkylcarboxyl, aryl carbonyl, haloalkyl, perfluoroalkyl, glycols, haloaryl, a negative electrolyte, and a polymer, so long as when R₁ is H, R₉ is not H; and R₁₀ is selected from the group consisting of methyl, alkyl, aryl, alkylaryl, alkoxyaryl, alkylcarboxyl, aryl carbonyl, haloalkyl, perfluoroalkyl, perfluoroaryl, glycols, haloaryl, an oligomer, and a polymer.

On The Plastic-Free Path: Plastic-Free Living, Hannah Natzke

Honors Projects

What is living plastic-free like? This project explores the trials and triumphs of living a plastic-free life. Although this project is only mandates that the participant lives plastic-free for a month, it still investigates the challenges faced by longer plastic-free living.

Determination Of Spiramycin And Oxytetracycline In Binary Mixtures By Novel Spectrophotometric Methods With And Without Regression Equation, Afaf Abou El Khaira, Hanaa Saleh, Magda El Henawee, Neven Ahmed, Emad Hussien

Bulletin of Faculty of Pharmacy Cairo University

Spiramycin (SPI) and oxytetracycline (OTC) are widely used antibacterial drugs. Thus, a great attention has been focusing on the development of a simple and selective analytical procedure for fast analysis of these compounds in a binary pharmaceutical mixture. Herein, we report four simple and reproducible spectrophotometric methods for determination of SPI and OTC in a binary mixture and in veterinary pharmaceutical formulations. A ratio difference (RD) based on the difference in the amplitude of the ratio spectra and dual wavelength methods were proposed for sensitive and selective determination of SPI in presence of OTC. Furthermore, Constant Value and Concentration Value …

Vision-Based Analytics For Improved Ai-Driven Iot Applications, Amit Sharma

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) sensor systems, primarily driven by cheaper embedded hardware platforms and wide availability of light-weight software platforms, has opened up doors for large-scale data collection opportunities. The availability of massive amount of data has in-turn given way to rapidly growing machine learning models e.g. You Only Look Once (YOLO), Single-Shot-Detectors (SSD) and so on. There has been a growing trend of applying machine learning techniques, e.g., object detection, image classification, face detection etc., on data collected from camera sensors and therefore enabling plethora of vision-sensing applications namely self-driving cars, automatic crowd monitoring, traffic-flow analysis, occupancy …

Notes From The Director, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Comparing Approximate Total Current Of The Dayside Magnetopause To Solar Wind Pressure, Michelle X. Bui

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Performing Quality Control And Characterization For Pixel-Based Lartpcs, Curtis Kizer-Pugh

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Scholarships, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Gamification On The Mathematics Achievement Of Elementary Students, Tamisha Kimble

Doctor of Education in Teacher Leadership Dissertations

This study explores the use of gamification in elementary math. Living in a Global society requires students to use technology in classes daily. Students are using technology to complete a task that is aligned to state standards. These tasks are geared to help students master grade-level skills. So often, teachers are finding that students are completing the task just to comply. Teachers are seeking problems that will help with student engagement and prepare students for mastery of grade-level skills. Teachers are looking for a problem that serves the purpose of both. Teachers are looking for programs that engage students as …

2020-December-01-Enjoy Retirement, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

Congratulations to the following members of the East Tennessee State University family who retired in December.  Thank you for your service!

Fred J. Alsop III – Professor, Biological Sciences, 48 years

Gary D. Burkette – Professor, Accountancy, 28 years

Mary Elizabeth Cradic – Office Manager, Office of the President, 27 years

Bruce Dalton – Professor, Social Work, 17 years

Joseph G. Disque – Professor, Counseling and Human Services, 26 years

Edward J. Dwyer – Professor, Curriculum and Instruction, 44 years

Brian G. Evanshen – Research Specialist, Environmental Health, 30 years

Richard J. Felts – Boiler Mechanic, Power House Operations, 22 …

2020-December-01-Governors School Applications, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

JOHNSON CITY – The Governor’s School for the Scientific Exploration of Tennessee Heritage, offered by the East Tennessee State University Center of Excellence for Appalachian Studies and Services, is now accepting applications for summer 2021. The School will run from May 30-June 25.

Students live on the ETSU campus and earn three hours of college credit. Rising juniors and seniors in Tennessee high schools or home schools are eligible to apply, but applications must be submitted through the school counselor. Interested students should see their school counselor. The deadline for applications is January 15, 2021. More information is available at …

Coordination And Privacy Preservation In Multi-Agent Systems, Huan Gao

All Dissertations

This dissertation considers two key problems in multi-agent systems: coordination (including both synchronization and desynchronization) and privacy preservation.

For coordination in multi-agent systems, we focus on synchronization/desynchronization of distributed pulse-coupled oscillator (PCO) networks and their applications in collective motion coordination. Pulse-coupled oscillators were originally proposed to model synchronization in biological systems such as flashing fireflies and firing neurons. In recent years, with proven scalability, simplicity, accuracy, and robustness, the PCO based synchronization strategy has become a powerful clock synchronization primitive for wireless sensor networks. Driven by these increased applications in biological networks and wireless sensor networks, synchronization of pulse-coupled oscillators …

Changes In R 3.6–4.0, Tomas Kalibera, Sebastian Meyer, Kurt Hornik

The R Journal

We give a selection of the most important changes in R 4.0.0 and in the R 3.6 release series. Some statistics on source code commits and bug tracking activities are also provided.

Analyzing Basket Trials Under Multisource Exchangeability Assumptions, Michael J. Kane, Nan Chen, Alexander M. Kaizer, Xun Jiang, H Amy Xia, Brian P. Hobbs

The R Journal

Basket designs are prospective clinical trials that are devised with the hypothesis that the presence of selected molecular features determine a patient’s subsequent response to a particular “targeted” treatment strategy. Basket trials are designed to enroll multiple clinical subpopulations to which it is assumed that the therapy in question offers beneficial efficacy in the presence of the targeted molecular profile. The treatment, however, may not offer acceptable efficacy to all subpopulations enrolled. Moreover, for rare disease settings, such as oncology wherein these trials have become popular, marginal measures of statistical evidence are difficult to interpret for sparsely enrolled subpopulations. Consequently, …

Motbfs: An R Package For Learning Hybrid Bayesian Networks Using Mixtures Of Truncated Basis Functions, Inmaculada Pérez-Bernabé, Ana D. Maldonado, Antonio Salmerón, Thomas D. Nielsen

The R Journal

This paper introduces MoTBFs, an R package for manipulating mixtures of truncated basis functions. This class of functions allows the representation of joint probability distributions involving discrete and continuous variables simultaneously, and includes mixtures of truncated exponentials and mixtures of polynomials as special cases. The package implements functions for learning the parameters of univariate, multivariate, and conditional distributions, and provides support for parameter learning in Bayesian networks with both discrete and continuous variables. Probabilistic inference using forward sampling is also implemented. Part of the functionality of the MoTBFs package relies on the bnlearn package, which includes functions for learning the …

A Graphical Eda Tool With Ggplot2: Brinton, Pere Millán-Martínez, Ramon Oller

The R Journal

We present brinton package, which we developed for graphical exploratory data analysis in R. Based on ggplot2, gridExtra and rmarkdown, brinton package introduces wideplot() graphics for exploring the structure of a dataset through a grid of variables and graphic types. It also introduces longplot() graphics, which present the entire catalog of available graphics for representing a particular variable using a grid of graphic types and variations on these types. Finally, it introduces the plotup() function, which complements the previous two functions in that it presents a particular graphic for a specific variable of a dataset. This set of functions is …

Nts: An R Package For Nonlinear Time Series Analysis, Xialu Liu, Rong Chen, Ruey Tsay

The R Journal

Linear time series models are commonly used in analyzing dependent data and in forecasting. On the other hand, real phenomena often exhibit nonlinear behavior and the observed data show nonlinear dynamics. This paper introduces the R package NTS that offers various computational tools and nonlinear models for analyzing nonlinear dependent data. The package fills the gaps of several outstanding R packages for nonlinear time series analysis. Specifically, the NTS package covers the implementation of threshold autoregressive (TAR) models, autoregressive conditional mean models with exogenous variables (ACMx), functional autoregressive models, and state-space models. Users can also evaluate and compare the performance …

Aquadtree: An R Package For Quadtree Anonymization Of Point Data, Raymond Lagonigro, Ramon Oller, Joan Carles Martori

The R Journal

The demand for precise data for analytical purposes grows rapidly among the research community and decision makers as more geographic information is being collected. Laws protecting data privacy are being enforced to prevent data disclosure. Statistical institutes and agencies need methods to preserve confidentiality while maintaining accuracy when disclosing geographic data. In this paper we present the AQuadtree package, a software intended to produce and deal with official spatial data making data privacy and accuracy compatible. The lack of specific methods in R to anonymize spatial data motivated the development of this package, providing an automatic aggregation tool to anonymize …