Digital Commons Network^™

Nonlinear Frequency Tuning Of Pre-Curved Micro-Scale Beams, Mackenzie Rae Robatin

Theses and Dissertations

Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) have many common advantages in applications due to their small size and ability to integrate with electronics. For MEMS with vibrating elements, other advantages include their tunable resonant frequencies and the frequency range in which the systems operate. Also, the damping in these devices is often so light that it is nearly negligible, resulting in sharp resonance peaks with good frequency selectivity. Most such devices are designed to operate in their linear range. However, large amplitudes are often desired in order to reduce the relative effects of noise. In such cases, due to mechanical and electrostatic nonlinear …

Sediment Oxygen Demand And Stoichiometry Of Irl Nutrient Fluxes, Iulia Bibire

Theses and Dissertations

Eutrophication of coastal systems has become a prominent global issue with a variety of detrimental effects, one of these being the shift in the composition of phytoplankton communities often promoting harmful algal blooms (HABs) resulting at least partially from changes to the relative abundance of N:P:Si. This study investigated nutrient fluxes from muck, a fine-grained and organic-rich sediment, and from sand to determine the importance of these sediments with regards to regulating N:P ratios in the water column. Overall sediment oxygen demand (SOD) was used as an indicator of aerobic decomposition and was found to decrease from north to south …

Mouse Models To Study The Pathophysiology Of Combined Methylmalonic Acidemia And Homocystinuria, Cblc Type, Tiffany Chern, Annita Achilleos, Xuefei Tong, Chih-Wei Hsu, Leeyean Wong, Ross A Poché

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Combined methylmalonic acidemia and homocystinuria, cblC type, is the most common inherited disorder of cobalamin metabolism and is characterized by severe fetal developmental defects primarily impacting the central nervous system, hematopoietic system, and heart. CblC was previously shown to be due to mutations in the MMACHC gene, which encodes a protein thought to function in intracellular cobalamin trafficking and biosynthesis of adenosylcobalamin (AdoCbl) and methylcobalamin (MeCbl). These coenzymes are required for the production of succinyl-CoA and methionine, respectively. However, it is currently unclear whether additional roles for MMACHC exist outside of cobalamin metabolism. Furthermore, due to a lack of sufficient …

Electrical Identification Of Innate Immune Cells, Rasha Ayman Nasser

Theses

This thesis is concerned with the electrical characterization of the key players of the innate immune cells. Innate immunity is basically the nonspecific immune response that is triggered by any foreign body that attacks the human system. The key players of the innate immune system are mainly dendritic cells and macrophages. Accurately classifying these cell types helps us understand the mechanism of the immune system thereby enabling the development of models to improve new prospects for therapeutics and diagnostics. The characterization described in this thesis is based on extracting the capacitance for each biological cell using I-V curves. The main …

Exploring The Instructional Emergent Writing Strategies Of The Emirati Kindergarteners: A Mixed Method Study, Warda Suliman Al Azri

Theses

This mixed-method study aimed at exploring the nature and the types of instructional emergent writing strategies applied by UAE kindergarten teachers in their classrooms. The study also fathomed the teachers’ views toward the practicality of the instructional emergent writing strategies and the challenges they encountered when teaching emergent writing using these strategies. The study used an exploratory sequential mixed method design. In the first phase of the study, a qualitative mean was used by carrying out semi-structured interviews with a purposive-selected sampling of kindergarten English teachers (n=5). The second phase of the study featured a collection of quantitative data using …

An Investigation On The Effectiveness Of A Problem Structuring Method In A Group Decision-Making Process, Ying Thaviphoke

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

There is no shortage of methods to address messy problems. A messy problem is a system of problems with multiple stakeholders who may hold different views of what is feasible or desirable. Decision-makers in a messy problem are prone to committing an error – especially the Type III error. One of the ways to mitigate the chance of committing the error in a messy problem is to reach a group consensus. Problem Structuring Methods (PSM) are the collections of participatory modeling methods that aim to tackle a messy problem. Despite the positive reports, literature indicates some challenges and criticisms of …

Neutrosophic Sets And Systems, Vol. 38, 2020, Florentin Smarandache, Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Said Broumi

Neutrosophic Sets and Systems

No abstract provided.

Analyzing The Streamflow For Future Flooding And Risk Assessment Under Cmip6 Climate Projection, Indira Pokhrel

Theses

Hydrological extremes associated with climate change are becoming an increasing concern all over the world. Frequent flooding, one of the extremes, needs to be analyzed while considering climate change to mitigate flood risk. This study forecasted streamflow and evaluated the risk of flooding in the Neuse River, North Carolina considering future climatic scenarios, and comparing them with an existing Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood insurance study (FIS) report. The cumulative distribution function transformation (CDF-t) method was adopted for bias correction to reduce the uncertainty present in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) streamflow data. To calculate 100-year …

Application Of Compressive Sensing To Microwave Tomography, Rafael Gerardo Lopez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Microwave tomography(MT) allows the safe, non-intrusive examination of the internal structureof an object by irradiating it with microwave signals and measuring how they get attenuated and diffracted as they propagate through the object. Measurement of these signals is difficult and slow, it depends on the objectâ??s physical properties and the test setup used for this. MT is based on a scanning process that yields measurement data with unique characteristics that make it difficult to process using standard computational methods. As the number of measurements needed for an image with acceptable resolution increases, the complexity of processing all the data becomes …

Fundamental Studies Of Nanomaterial-Mediated Photothermal Effects And Novel Applications In Visual Quantitative Disease Diagnoses, Wan Zhou

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Infectious diseases and cancers frequently cause public health concerns and high burdens on health care globally. Early diagnosis of these diseases can provide an important guide on prevention, treatment, and prognosis in clinical practice. However, current laboratory diagnostic methods, such as nucleic acid- and protein-based detection methods, require sophisticated infrastructure, expensive and bulky instrumentation, well-trained personnel, and time-consuming processes, which significantly leads to high cost of detection assays and limit their wide accessibility, especially in low-resource settings. To address these issues, we have developed multiple simple, low-cost, and visual quantitative diagnostic methods based on nanomaterial-mediated photothermal effects for the detection …

Lyopreserved Amniotic Membrane Is Cellularly And Clinically Similar To Cryopreserved Construct For Treating Foot Ulcers, Kathryn E. Davis, Amanda L. Killeen, David Farrar, Katherine M. Raspovic, Zachary D. Berriman-Rozen, Matthew Malone, Lawrence A. Lavery

School of Podiatric Medicine Publications

We compared cellular viability between cryopreserved and lyopreserved amniotic membranes and clinical outcomes of the lyopreserved construct in a prospective cohort study of 40 patients with neuropathic foot ulcers. Patients received weekly application of lyopreserved membrane for 12 weeks with standard weekly debridement and offloading. We evaluated the proportion of foot ulcers that closed, time to closure, closure trajectories, and infection during therapy. We used chi-square tests for dichotomous variables and independent t-tests for continuous variables with an alpha of α = .10. Cellular viability was equivalent between cryo- and lyopreserved amniotic tissues. Clinically, 48% of subjects' wounds closed in …

Moving On Up? A Virtual School, Student Mobility, And Achievement, James D. Paul, Patrick Wolf

Curriculum and Instruction Faculty Publications and Presentations

Virtual charter schools provide full-time, tuition-free K-12 education through internet-based instruction. Although virtual schools offer a personalized learning experience, most research suggests these schools are negatively associated with achievement. Few studies account for differential rates of student mobility, which may produce biased estimates if mobility is jointly associated with virtual school enrollment and subsequent test scores. We evaluate the effects of a single, large, anonymous virtual charter school on student achievement using a hybrid of exact and nearest-neighbor propensity score matching. Relative to their matched peers, we estimate that virtual students produce marginally worse ELA scores and significantly worse math …

Technologies Of Language Meet Ideologies Of Law, Anya Bernstein

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Epidemiology Of Male Breast Cancer, Santhi Konduri, Maharaj Singh, George Bobustuc, Richard Rovin, Amin Kassam

School of Dentistry Faculty Research and Publications

Background

Due to its rarity, few studies have characterized the epidemiology of male breast cancer. The purpose of this study was to determine survival and risk factors for male breast cancer in a large U.S. population.

Methods

In this study, 19,795 male patients with breast cancer were identified from the National Cancer Database (2004–2014). Patient demographics, tumor characteristics and treatments were analyzed by using descriptive statistics. We used multivariate Cox regression and Kaplan Meier analysis.

Results

Over 10 years, the incidence of male breast cancer increased from 7.2% to 10.3%, while mortality decreased from 11% to 3.8%. Socioeconomic factors predicting …

Water, Fish, And Fire: Interdisciplinary Research On Ecosystem Services And Climate Adaptation, Liana Prudencio

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Ecosystem services, or benefits from the environment, are plentiful and vary from place to place. Human activities and climate change have impacted these services in every region of the world. This dissertation explores multiple ecosystem services, from water quality improvement to provisioning of fish and habitat, in multiple and international contexts. The first chapter synthesizes the literature on stormwater management and ecosystem services, finding that research at this intersection has provided many parcel-level studies and frameworks for implementing green infrastructure. The second chapter extends the stormwater management literature by quantifying the impacts of green infrastructure on water quantity and quality …

Embedded-Atom-Method Modeling Of Alkali-Metal/Transition-Metal Interfaces, Jake D. Christensen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Understanding the thermal properties of materials is essential to using those materials for technological advancement which can benefit civilization. For example, it has been proposed that essential components of tokamaks, devices which perform fusion, be made out of tungsten with a thin layer of lithium on the surface. To that end, this thesis seeks to calculate the thermal properties of a layer of alkali atoms, like lithium and sodium, on tungsten and molybdenum substrates. We use an Embedded Atom Method (EAM) model to perform our calculations. This type of model has been widely used to describe the interaction between atoms …

Delta Hedging Of Financial Options Using Reinforcement Learning And An Impossibility Hypothesis, Ronak Tali

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In this thesis we take a fresh perspective on delta hedging of financial options as undertaken by market makers. The current industry standard of delta hedging relies on the famous Black Scholes formulation that prescribes continuous time hedging in a way that allows the market maker to remain risk neutral at all times. But the Black Scholes formulation is a deterministic model that comes with several strict assumptions such as zero transaction costs, log normal distribution of the underlying stock prices, etc. In this paper we employ Reinforcement Learning to redesign the delta hedging problem in way that allows us …

Cost-Effective Planning Strategies For Battery Electric Bus Systems, Yi He

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In recent years, actions have been taken by countries around the world to create a more sustainable energy future. Electrifying transit buses is considered as a promising option to reduce emissions and increase sustainability of the transportation sector. However, there are still several barriers to the adoption of electric buses (e-buses). The barriers include, but are not limited to, the range limitations of e-buses, high up-front costs of e-buses, large capital expenses for charging infrastructure, and a lack of understanding regarding e-bus operation and management. This dissertation aims to overcome these barriers through the development of cost-effective planning strategies from …

The Development And Use Of A Secondary Electron Yield Database For Spacecraft Charge Modeling, Phillip Lundgreen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Charge modeling of electron-solid interactions requires a detailed and accurate compilation of experimental data on which to base its physics and against which to test its predictions. Historically researchers used methods involving individual research or information taken from existing, vague, databases that were often found wanting. To streamline the charge modeling process, a collection of data has been assembled and categorized based upon surface morphology and contamination from various published sources and existing databases. The quality and quantity of the compilation vary widely with very little information offered with regards to surface conditions of various materials (contamination, morphology, etc. ...). …

Triggerable, Targetable, And Trackable Flavonol-Based Carbon Monoxide-Releasing Molecules, Livia S. Lazarus

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Long known as a toxic gas, carbon monoxide (CO) has been recently redefined as a health beneficial molecule produced endogenously in humans. The biological activity of CO has been extensively examined in inflammatory conditions, vasoprotection, anti-apoptotic and anticancer studies, although the mechanisms of action are still not well defined. Because CO is a gaseous molecule, a straightforward administration would be inhalation. However, this delivery method is limited to use in hospital settings under professional supervision. For improved control over the amount and location of CO delivery, metal-free and light-triggered carbon monoxide-releasing molecules are of particular current interest. Our lab is …

Formal Verification Of The Adversarial Robustness Property Of Deep Neural Networks Through Dimension Reduction Heuristics, Refutation-Based Abstraction, And Partitioning, Joshua Smith

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Neural networks are tools that are often used to perform functions such as object recognition in images, speech-to-text, and general data classification. Because neural networks have been successful at approximating these functions that are difficult to explicitly write, they are seeing increased usage in fields such as autonomous driving, airplane collision avoidance systems, and other safety-critical applications. Due to the risks involved with safety-critical systems, it is important to provide guarantees about the networks performance under certain conditions. As an example, it is critically important that self driving cars with neural network based vision systems correctly identify pedestrians 100% of …

The Relationship Between Mindfulness, Academic Stress, And Attention, Tida Blackburn

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Some degree of anxiety in learning situations is expected and normal. However, excessive anxiety and stress negatively affect cognitive performance, especially working memory, concentration, and sustained attention. Studies have shown that higher success in academics is related to a better ability to maintain focus on the information presented including auditory and visual attention. College students who are better able to manage stress are more successful than those who cannot. One method of coping with stress and anxiety is the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the ability to be fully present in the moment, be aware of one’s mind, body, and …

Environmental Controls On Didymosphenia Geminata Bloom Formation, Lindsay Capito

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Climate change is causing rapid glacial recession and earlier snowmelt, which alter the physical and chemical properties of rivers. As a result, organisms at the base of the food web are responding in unforeseen ways. We use the nuisance algae D. geminata (Didymo) as a case study for how climate induced shifts in the timing of glacial and snowmelt runoff are affecting river ecosystems. We evaluated how shifts in the timing of nutrient concentrations and light availability affect nuisance blooms of Didymo in three complementary ways. These are, field studies across streams in various stages of glacial recession, weekly measurements …

Laboratory Scale Anaerobic Reactors For Bioenergy From Wastes: Materials, Mathematical Models, And Stoichiometry, Yehor Pererva

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Anaerobic processes are being explored for the production of bioenergy in the form of biomethane and biohydrogen in a "waste-to-value" approach that considers wastes as a resource. Laboratory scale Biomethane potential (BMP) tests and Up-Flow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket (UASB) reactors can be used to indicate the potential recovery of bioenergy from industry wastes. The goals of this research were to: (1) conduct a critical review of models for determining biomethane potential, (2) develop a theoretical relationship for stoichiometry for biomethane and biohydrogen from wastes, and (3) develop key design aspects for geometry and infrastructure, including gas-liquid-solid separation in laboratory UASB …

Applied Species Delimitation In Microbial Taxa And Plants, Austin C. Koontz

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Species are a fundamental concept in biology, and many subdisciplines in biology utilize species in aspects of theory and in the communication of results. Given the centrality of species in biological science, it can seem surprising that there is no universal definition amongst biologists of what, strictly speaking, a species is. In fact, there are, by some estimates, over 20 different "species concepts", and this lack of a consensus is termed "the species problem". This problem has theoretical underpinnings, but has become more relevant as advances in sequencing technologies over the past two decades have allowed researchers to probe the …

Perceptions Of Disabilities Among Native Americans Within The State Of Utah, Erica Ficklin

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Native Americans are diagnosed with disabilities at a significantly higher rate than the general American population. Due to cultural differences, other factors are likely impacting this difference in diagnosis rates. One possible factor is that Native Americans may have a different definition for ‘disability’ than the general American population. This study aimed to identify whether there is a difference in the definition for ‘disability’ and to learn about the current services available and what changes should be made to better serve Native Americans with disabilities. Native American participants were asked to share their experiences and thoughts about disabilities in sharing …

A Thermochronometric, Microtextural, And Numerical Modeling Approach To Deciphering The Rock Record Of Deformation Processes In The Wasatch And Denali Fault Zones, Robert G. Mcdermott

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Fault zones are the primary features that accommodate movement of Earth’s crust, resulting in the formation of mountain belts and damaging earthquakes. Rocks modified by faulting and brought to Earth’s surface by erosion are archives of the mechanical processes involved in earthquakes and(or) aseismic creep. Thermochronometry is a radioisotopic dating system primarily sensitive to temperature and offers a means to constrain dates and rates of thermal processes. Hematite is common in fault zones, amenable to (U-Th)/He (He) thermochronometry, and exhibits distinct microtextures diagnostic of fault zone mechanics. I apply hematite He thermochronometry and microtextural analyses with a suite of other …

A Deep Dive Into Natural Swimming Pool Filtration: Living Walls As Technical Wetland Filters, Anna Farb

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Vertical gardens such as living walls can filter air and water, in addition to cooling buildings, reducing noise, increasing urban biodiversity, providing food, and enhancing well-being. Natural swimming pools (NSPs) are an ecologically sound alternative to chemically treated pools, but they have not reached their potential in the U.S. We investigated whether a living wall could be integrated into an NSP system for water filtration purposes, given that the vertical filter would have to produce excellent water quality for human swimmers. This could be a novel landscape design, particularly in the cases of steep contours, urbanized sites with limited space, …

Analytic Guidance Strategies For Passively Safe Rendezvous And Proximity Operations, Simon Shuster

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

A safety ellipse is a type of relative motion trajectory that is commonly used for unmanned rendezvous and proximity operations. As the name suggests, safety ellipses are passively safe relative motion trajectories, which means that their natural motion inherently maintains a low collision risk. The focus of this dissertation is the derivation, analysis, and application of guidance strategies that reconfigure, establish, and exit a safety ellipse. The guidance strategies consist of a set of ∆v vectors and impulse times, all written in closed form. Through applications of optimal control theory and parameter optimization, it is shown that these maneuver …

Pre-Eruptive Evolution Of Izu-Bonin Boninite Melts: Mixing, Cooling, And Crystallization, Jesse L. Scholpp

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Subduction is the geologic process in which one tectonic plate moves beneath another as it sinks into the Earth’s mantle. Subduction initiation in the Izu-Bonin Marianas system is the result of a gravitational failure during which one tectonic plate (the Pacific plate) spontaneously sinks beneath another (the Philippne Sea plate). Fluids released by the sinking plate that caused the overlying mantle to melt by reducing its meltimg temperature, forming the Izu-Bonin Mariana island arc system.

The resulting melts initially have the chemical compositions that are rich in silica and magnesia, and highly depleted in other elements, refered to a boninite …