Digital Commons Network^™

Reading The Reader: Analyzing Depictions Of Male Readers In Serial Victorian Fiction, Ashton Foley-Schramm

Open Access Dissertations

During the nineteenth century, mass literacy was taking hold in Britain, spurred on by the widespread availability of printed materials, crossing class and gender borders as never before. Most literary scholars concerned with reading in nineteenth-century England investigate the female reader within fiction, analyzing the various cultural, especially social and gender-specific, aspects of how, where, why, and what women read. This project addresses the gap in our knowledge created by this focus on the female reader in Victorian fiction: the position and function of the male reader. It argues that concerns over too much reading, or not reading the “right” …

Structured, Individualized, Video-Based Coaching To Improve Technical Skill Acquisition, Kenneth A. Lynch Jr.

Open Access Dissertations

In the current era of a reduced hourly workweek and competency-based curriculum, it is becoming increasingly clear that the cognitive apprenticeship model of training, which dominated the surgical discipline for well over a century, may no longer be the single best strategy to train the surgeons of today. There needs to be a multifaceted approach to surgical residency training, especially with regards to improving technical skill acquisition. Video-based-coaching is quickly being adapted for use in many training programs due to its low cost and broad range of applications including self-assessment, operative evaluations, and bench model training. The challenge for most …

On The Havel-Hakimi Residue Of Degree Sequences And Its Relation To The Independence Number, Benjamin Lantz

Open Access Dissertations

The Havel-Hakimi residue (or residue) of a graph is the number of zeros left after iteratively applying the Havel-Hakimi algorithm to a degree sequence. Favaron, Mahéo, and Saclé showed that the residue is a lower bound on the independence number. Determining how good of a bound this is remains an open question, including in what cases the bound is realized.

This dissertation looks to help answer when the bound is realized by examining the Maxine heuristic, which reduces a graph G, to an independent set of size M(G). It has been shown that given a graph …

Impact Of Brand Recognition In Psychological Test Selection: Identification And Corrective Procedure, Aaron M. Baker

Open Access Dissertations

The accuracy of psychological assessment may be determined largely by the quality of the test(s) selected; however, in clinical practice, tests may be selected impressionistically, and without sufficient consideration of test validity. Appreciating that not only psychometric standing, but also pragmatic considerations may be of import in test selection may help explain why surveys of test usage have not necessarily shown robust associations between frequency of test use and psychometric quality. The primary goal of this dissertation was to examine whether brand recognition (BR; presence/absence of the name of a well-known test) may sometimes diminish attention to psychometric qualities, and …

Methodology For Underwater Deployment From A Host Vehicle, Brian Caferro, Casie Castell, Trevor Ide, Mark Keenan

Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design Projects

Team 10, the Sea Raccoon, is responsible for developing a methodology for the release of several deployables from an underwater host vehicle. The sponsor for this project is the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, NUWC. The project demanded a methodology for launching a deployable from an underwater host vehicle. The deployables are approximated generally as cylinders due to the secret nature of the actual payload.

Beginning with an extensive analysis of the problem and its definition, the design process for the first prototype took place over the four months of the 2019 Fall Semester at the University of Rhode Island. In …

Maximize Efficiency And Minimize Wastewater, Robert Tampellini, John Robert Gimler, Robert Hall, Cody Kwasniewski

Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design Projects

The boiler blowdown project, sponsored by Amgen, is a multi-phase project that will include analyses of thermodynamics, systems usage, and the piping system. At the end of this project, the current blowdown system Amgen has will be transformed from an intermittent system to a continuous system. This project will also include the integration of a heat recovery system. This was determined based off of a previous design that was utilized at Amgen’s facilities before transferring to the current intermittent blowdown system. The purpose of the heat recovery system will be to extract the majority of the heat from the blowdown …

Faraday Generator From Periodic Wave Motion, Max Boden, Oliver Capalbo, Danna Kimmelman, Valentina Rossell

Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design Projects

Team 12 was selected by Anthony Baro of E2SOL located in Fall River, Massachusetts to help them develop a product with given customer specifications. Recent market research has shown that the design of a buoy equipped with sensors would appeal to a larger consumer base if it were able to perform reliably during prolonged overcast conditions. Today, most buoys today are powered by solar panels. This sparked an effort to utilize a concept well documented in physics; the Faraday type generator, powered by the kinetic energy and potential energy of a passing wave. The team researched the topic, collected a …

Student Collaborations In Introductory Statistics Courses; A Network Study, Isabel S. Nowinowski

Open Access Master's Theses

Generation Z, also known as iGen, (individuals born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s), characterized as tech-savvy, independent, and visual, is beginning to graduate college and enter the workforce. While significant research effort has focused on understanding the learning preferences of the preceding Millennial generation (individuals born between the early 1980s and mid-1990s), less is known about the way technology has influenced the educational expectations and learning preferences of Generation Z. A deeper and broader understanding of the way this generation learns would allow universities to modify and enhance course structures and teaching methodologies to suit this incoming generation of …

The Impacts Of Hearing Loss On Social-Emotional Health, Lili Lan Lebrun Visgilio

Open Access Master's Theses

According to the World Health Organization, over 900 million people are expected to have disabling hearing loss by 2050. Most studies about hearing loss published thus far have focused on the impacts hearing loss has on adults above the age of 60. However, this study examines the relationship between hearing loss and social-emotional health in adults between the ages of 21 and 50. Literature describing the impact of hearing loss on the social-emotional health of young and middle aged adults is sparse. This study uses data from the 2011 wave of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) obtained via the …

Friction Compensation Using Linear Control Methods, Florian Meiners

Open Access Master's Theses

Friction is one of the most frequently appearing sources of problems in mechanical systems. While several controller designs exist that successfully mitigate or compensate the friction effects in an application, they usually rely on a thoroughly identified model. The focus of this work is on verifying the suitability of a linear dual-loop controller for friction compensation in an arbitrary system. It does not require detailed estimation of a friction model for the design. The controller is complemented by a Luenberger observer, to improve the quality of state feedback.

Based on different model reduction approaches, the control architecture is effectively applied …

Fundamental Understanding And Applications Of Nanoemulsions For Ultrasensitive Electrochemical Analysis, Shashika Gunathilaka Sabaragamuwe Jayasundarakorale

Open Access Master's Theses

We demonstrate a new electroanalytical approach for the ultrasensitive electrochemical analysis using nanoemulsions (NEs) uniquely combined with single entity electrochemistry (SEE). First, we investigate the relationship between the structure and relevant electrochemical activity of NEs. We employ SEE to elucidate the interfacial structure of NEs and their corresponding electrochemical activities, which cannot be unequivocally defined by general microscopic techniques. Throughout this work on nanostructural effect of NEs, we could optimize the most suitable composition of NEs, showing facile electron transfer kinetics across the NE interface as well as a high monodispersity. Particularly, the application of SEE for optimized NEs allowed …

Enhanced Visual Bridge Inspection Practices For An Improved Bridge Management System, Carl Constantin Falter

Open Access Master's Theses

The bridge infrastructure in the United States, and particularly in Rhode Island, has deteriorated over the last decades. The state of Rhode Island is placed last in the United States’ bridge condition ranking. To counteract the steady deterioration, it is necessary to have an overview of the current bridge conditions by implementing a Bridge Management System. Bridge inspections are the first entity in an effective Bridge Management System since they assess the bridge condition on site.

This thesis investigates two technologies that are promising to enhance and digitize the bridge inspection processes. Augmented Reality (AR) and Building Information Modeling (BIM) …

Analysis Of The Traffic Flows Caused By The Kingston Campus Of The University Of Rhode Island, Morten Flesser

Open Access Master's Theses

Like many universities, the University of Rhode Island is facing challenges dealing with traffic volume, due to its growth over the last twenty years and the lack of transportation infrastructure to provide the capacity it needs as it exists currently. For the University of Rhode Island, Single-Occupant Vehicles (SOVs) comprise approximately 90% of those traveling to the university, and very few use alternative means of transportation such as public transit or bicycles, which exacerbate the trend of congested roadways adjacent to the campus during peak hours of an academic semester. This thesis addresses these consequences and the traffic burden with …

A Blockchain-Based Auditable And Secure Voting System, Madhukara Kekulandara

Open Access Master's Theses

Improving electronic voting systems to provide election security and integrity while controlling cost has been an area of active research for decades. As a result, many technological improvements are incorporated into the voting systems used today. The introduction of technology, however, has not been without issues and has raised new concerns. One is the possibility of inaccurate election outcomes due to technical failures of the equipment. Another is the problem of election security and the possibility of malicious alteration of election results. Yet another concern is the capability to conduct post-election audits to validate and provide confidence in election results. …

Taxonomic Profiling Of Metagenomic Reads Using Deep Learning, Cecile Cres

Open Access Master's Theses

The field of metagenomics studies microbes from environmental samples in a process generating millions of short DNA sequences called reads. The final outcome is to discover the diversity as well as the function of complex microbial communities using computational tools. The general idea adopted by most taxonomic classifiers, which aim to assign taxonomic groups to individual reads, is to compare the target DNA sequences to a reference database and identify the taxon of the best match. This method has many disadvantages including the necessity for large computing resources in order to process large sequence databases. The current project aims to …

L1-Norm Regularized L1-Norm Best-Fit Line Problem, Xiao Ling, Paul Brooks

Graduate Research Posters

Background

Conventional Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a widely used technique to reduce data dimension. PCA finds linear combinations of the original features capturing maximal variance of data via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). However, SVD is sensitive to outliers, and often leads to high dimensional results. To address the issues, we propose a new method to estimate best-fit one-dimensional subspace, called l1-norm Regularized l1-norm.

Methods

In this article, we describe a method to fit a lower-dimensional subspace by approximate a non-linear, non-convex, non-smooth optimization problem called l1 regularized l1-norm Best- Fit Line problem; minimize a combination of the l1 error …

Temporal Behavior Of The Individual Soft Microparticles: Understanding The Detection By Particle Impact Electrochemistry, Junaid Ahmed, Julio C. Alvarez

Graduate Research Posters

Emerging progress of the Particle Impact Electrochemistry (PIE) technique has opened a novel field of detection and characterization of many analyte particles. 1 PIE comprises detection of changes in current when collisions of individual micro or nanoparticles are linked with an electrochemical event at the surface of an ultramicroelectrode (UME). 2 Being a rapid, low cost, and analyzing of one analyte at a time, PIE is widely used to characterize the shape, size distribution, and catalytic activity of nanoparticles. 2-5 To explore the scope of PIE for the detection of soft microparticles (absence of crystalline structure), ferrocene (Fc) trapped toluene-in-water …

Nanoparticles As Alternative Ceramic Glaze Colorants, Nathan Dinh

Honors Theses

Metallic nanoparticles, including gold and silver, have been used in wide-ranging applications due to their versatile characteristics. These include catalysis, biosensing, imaging, cancer treatments, and art. Due to the phenomenon called surface plasmon resonance, metallic particles change optical properties when sized in the nanoscale based on their composition, shape, diameters, or aspect ratios. In study, these robust nanoparticle systems are applied as an alternative to traditional bulk metal colorants in ceramic glazes.

In this study, the research goals are two-fold: to understand firing mechanism on the gold nanoparticle size and to develop these processes for wider use by regular artisans. …

Almost Difference Sets In 2-Groups, Xin Yutong

Honors Theses

Difference sets have been studied for decades due to their applications in digital communication, cryptography, algebra, and number theory. More recently, mathematicians have expanded their focus to the field of almost difference sets. Almost difference sets have similar functionalities with difference sets, yet with more potential of finding new constructions. In this paper I will introduce the definitions, properties, and applications of difference sets and almost difference sets, and discuss our effort and results in the exploration of almost difference sets in cyclic and non-cyclic groups.

Assessing The Feasibility Of Machine Learning To Predict Chronic Pain In Adolescence, Max A. Kramer

Honors Papers

"Chronic pain affects between 15 to 40% of adolescents worldwide. The impact and prevalence of chronic pain can be felt every day in terms of missed school days, strained familial relationships, and financial stress. While rehabilitation programs specifically designed for chronic pain management exist, they cannot always adapt to the idiosyncratic nature of chronic pain. Machine learning presents a framework to use diary data from individuals in pain and make predictions about the trajectories of their pain and related functioning. This study's goal is to assess the feasibility of using machine learning to predict pain and functioning by constructing, training, …

Pretraining Deep Learning Models For Natural Language Understanding, Han Shao

Honors Papers

Since the first bidirectional deep learn- ing model for natural language understanding, BERT, emerged in 2018, researchers have started to study and use pretrained bidirectional autoencoding or autoregressive models to solve language problems. In this project, I conducted research to fully understand BERT and XLNet and applied their pretrained models to two language tasks: reading comprehension (RACE) and part-of-speech tagging (The Penn Treebank). After experimenting with those released models, I implemented my own version of ELECTRA, a pretrained text encoder as a discriminator instead of a generator to improve compute-efficiency, with BERT as its underlying architecture. To reduce the number …

Meaning In Apocalypse, Alexander Johan Metz

Honors Papers

Modernity has always contained the threat of destruction. Mostly, the threat has been shapeless. It has manifested itself in the collective psyche as a vague fear of a far-off wasteland: an unknown apocalypse. The more tense moments of history have sometimes lent the fear real shape. For many years, it seemed as if atomic destruction was just over the horizon. Indeed, the early years of atomic testing wrought significant ecological damage. In the post-Cold War era, the fear of atomic destruction, at least by full nuclear exchange between the superpowers, has receded, but the apocalyptic threat has not. Climate change, …

Curving Towards Bézout: An Examination Of Plane Curves And Their Intersection, Camron Alexander Robey Cohen

Honors Papers

One area of interest in studying plane curves is intersection. Namely, given two plane curves, we are interested in understanding how they intersect. In this paper, we will build the machinery necessary to describe this intersection. Our discussion will include developing algebraic tools, describing how two curves intersect at a given point, and accounting for points at infinity by way of projective space. With all these tools, we will prove Bézout’s theorem, a robust description of the intersection between two curves relating the degrees of the defining polynomials to the number of points in the intersection.

Asking Questions Is Easy, Asking Great Questions Is Hard: Constructing Effective Stack Overflow Questions, Jane W. Hsieh

Honors Papers

This paper explores and seeks to improve the ways in which Stack Overflow question posts can elicit answers. Using statistical data analysis approaches and reviews of existing literature, we pin- point three key factors that are found in many previously success- ful/answerable questions. We then present a prototypical sidebar for the ask page that leverages these factors to dynamically (1) evaluate the quality of questions in construction (2) display answer previews of relevant questions and (3) scaffold the identified factors to subsequent askers during their question development processes.

Machine Learning? In My Election? It's More Likely Than You Think: Voting Rules Via Neural Networks, Daniel Firebanks-Quevedo

Honors Papers

Impossibility theorems in social choice have represented a barrier in the creation of universal, non-dictatorial, and non-manipulable voting rules, highlighting a key trade-off between social welfare and strategy-proofness. However, a social planner may be concerned with only a particular preference distribution and wonder whether it is possible to better optimize this trade-off. To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end, machine learning-based framework that creates voting rules according to a social planner's constraints, for any type of preference distribution. After experimenting with rank-based social choice rules, we find that automatically-designed rules are less susceptible to manipulation than most existing rules, …

A Future For Paris? Federalism, The Law Of Nations, And U.S. Courts, Jamison E. Colburn

Faculty Scholarship

The 'We Are Still In' movement raised novel and urgent questions about the status of executive agreements, treaties, and customary international law in U.S. courts. As sub-national governments increasingly face difficult trade-offs between climate change mitigation and adaptation, American courts will confront challenges thereto likely grounded in various types of "dormant" preemption of state and local initiatives. This symposium essay argues that our courts must first situate sub-national actions on climate mitigation within a complex and evolving context of mitigation as a globally-scaled collective good that can only be provided if contributions thereto accumulate over time. They must also avoid …

The Burden On Society From Eleventh-Hour "Citizen Petitions" Filed To Slow Generic Drugs, Feldman Robin

Maryland Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Encoding Music: Perforated Paper, Copyright Law, And The Legibility Of Code, 1880–1908, Gerardo Con Díaz

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Utilizing Institutional Data For Curriculum Enhancement To Improve Student Success In Undergraduate Computing Programs, Prateek Basavaraj

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Student success is one of the widely discussed topics in post-secondary institutions and is measured in terms of the graduation and retention rates of programs. The goal of an educational institution is to achieve maximum student success and, hence, high graduation and retention rates. There are multiple studies on factors affecting student success. One of the factors that contributes to student success is the "program curriculum." Unfortunately, the traditional program curricula at many higher education institutions were developed with a belief or assumption that all students possess equal expertise, skills, and follow a similar learning path. The traditional curricular development …

A Comparison Of Open And Closed Chain Knee Extension Exercises On Patterns Of Quadriceps Hypertrophy, Domenic Angelino

Open Access Master's Theses

Resistance training causes hypertrophy, however, the magnitude of muscle growth varies along the length of the muscle (i.e. proximo-distally). For running based athletes and those dependent on movement about the hip, preferential proximal hypertrophy of the quadriceps femoris (the primary knee extensor) shifts the center of mass (CoM) of the thigh closer to the hip which provides a direct biomechanical advantage by decreasing the moment of inertia of the high about the hip (I). This in turn can increase movement velocity and economy and has been observed in studies using mathematical modeling and when comparing elite national level …