Digital Commons Network^™

Linear Modeling Of Election Results For U.S. House Of Representatives Candidates And State Executive Offices For Iowa, Minnesota, And North Dakota, Christopher Mcewen

Statistics

Better understanding the relationship between the results for the U.S. House of Representatives and for state executive offices could potentially be useful in predicting outcomes if a significant relationship is present and if one has more information about either the election for the U.S. House of Representatives candidate or the state executive office candidate. To better understand this relationship, election results were analyzed using regression models for three upper Midwest states - Iowa, Minnesota, and North Dakota - to compare the outcomes of the state executive office elections and the U.S. House of Representative elections. Additionally, median income was included …

Survival Analysis Of Treatment Effect For Brain Cancer Based On The Surveillance, Epidemiology, And End Results Database, Madison Jane Mathiason

Statistics

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. The Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) data from the National Cancer Institute is a population based cancer registry, which geographically covers 34.6% of the US population. The SEER database was used to model surivial time for 21,524 patients with primary malignant brain tumors. The Kaplan-Meier surivial curves and the logrank test were used to compare the effect of treatment in each grade. The Cox Proportional Hazard Model was used to show the simultaneous effect of treatment, sex, and age on the risk of death for patients …

Three Essays On Urban Public Transit Systems In The U.S., Narendra Dhananjaya Kumara Malalgoda

Transportation Logistics and Finance

Public transportation is a critical component of urban communities and plays an important role in facilitating mobility which is integral to economic development and the quality of life of urban residents. In recent years, urban transportation has evolved rapidly with the emergence of transportation network companies (TNCs) and e-commerce that drastically transformed urban living. The availability of TNCs has given consumers more transportation options. However, the implications of TNCs on public transit ridership are unknown. In addition, the rising online shopping trend has drastically reduced the businesses of brick-and-mortar retailers, but does the shift in consumer shopping behavior reduce the …

Rubric Rating With Mfrm Versus Randomly Distributed Comparative Judgment: A Comparison Of Two Approaches To Second-Language Writing Assessment, Maureen E. Sims, Troy L. Cox, Grant T. Eckstein, K. James Hartshorn, Matthew P. Wilcox, Judson M. Hart

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study is to explore the reliability of a potentially more practical approach to direct writing assessment in the context of ESL writing. Traditional rubric rating (RR) is a common yet resource-intensive evaluation practice when performed reliably. This study compared the traditional rubric model of ESL writing assessment and many-facet Rasch modeling (MFRM) to comparative judgment (CJ), the new approach, which shows promising results in terms of reliability. We employed two groups of raters—novice and experienced—and used essays that had been previously double-rated, analyzed with MFRM, and selected with fit statistics. We compared the results of the …

Rethinking Leisure Time Use Metrics: Greater Diversity In Shared Sibling Leisure Is Associated With Higher Relationship Quality During Emerging Adulthood, Eric K. Layland, Camilla Hodge, Mikala Glaza, Jerrica O. Peets

Faculty Publications

Leisure diversity—the total number of unique leisure categories shared within a sibling dyad—may vary according to sibling characteristics (e.g., sibling gender, age difference) and predict sibling relationship quality. Using triangulated lists, brief narratives, and focus groups, we constructed a taxonomy of shared sibling leisure in emerging adulthood and then calculated individual leisure diversity scores. The sample (N ¼ 185) included college-attending emerging adults with an average age of 20.1 years (35.7% female). Taxonomic analysis suggested 19 categories of shared sibling leisure. Analyses of variance indicated differences by dyadic gender composition in endorsement rates of select leisure categories and average levels …

Overselling Winners And Losers: How Mutual Fund Managers' Trading Behavior Affects Asset Prices, Li An, Bronson Argyle

Faculty Publications

We link a seemingly biased trading behavior to equilibrium asset prices. U.S. equity mutual fund managers tend to sell both their big winners and big losers. This selling pressure pushes down current prices and leads to higher future returns; aggregating across funds, we find that securities for which investors have large unrealized gains and losses outperform in the subsequent month. Funds with larger turnover, shorter holding period, and higher expense ratios, are significantly more likely to manifest this trading pattern, and unrealized profits from such funds have stronger return predictability. This cross-sectional return predictability is difficult to reconcile with alternative …

Successful Moderation In Online Patient Communities: Inductive Case Study, Tanner Skousen, Hani Safadi, Colleen Young, Elena Karahanna, Sami Safadi, Fouad Chebib

Faculty Publications

Background: Online patient communities are becoming more prevalent as a resource to help patients take control of their health. However, online patient communities experience challenges that require active moderation.

Objective: This study aimed to identify the challenges of sustaining a thriving online patient community and the moderation practices employed to address the challenges and manage the online patient community successfully.

Methods: An inductive case study of Mayo Clinic Connect was analyzed using the grounded theory methodology. Insights for the analysis were obtained from semistructured interviews with community managers and community members. Secondary data sources, such as community management documents, observational …

Climate Refuge: Thermal Comfort In Urban Micro Climates, Nathaniel Horvath

Landscape Architecture Theses

This study addresses two major issues by responding to the significant decline in retail buildings including enclosed shopping malls and improving density, livability and human comfort in communities welcoming climate refugees. Future designs will become more responsive when involving suburban and urban infill landscape to enhance user experiences through thermal comfort. Studies show that Earth’s temperatures are on the rise causing large populations to be displaced by rising sea levels and contributing to extreme weather patterns in the colder hemispheres. Specifically, in the Midwest United States, this means colder temperatures, more snow, and longer months of winter (Cohen 2018). Analyzing …

Words Matter: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Msba / Masa Model School Discipline Policy, Tamara Uselman

Education

This dissertation in practice was a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Model School Policy 506, Student Discipline (MSBA, 2019), as it relates to the school-to-prison pipeline across the nation as well as in Minnesota. Model Policy 506, co-authored by the Minnesota School Board Association and the Minnesota Association of School Administrators, is offered to school districts that subscribe to MSBA’s policy services. The homogeneity in school discipline policy across Minnesota provided an opportunity for this study. The purpose of this CDA was two-fold: to assess the discourses instantiated in Model School Policy 506, and to determine, through the figured world …

Effectiveness Of Human Error Abstraction Assist Tool At Improving The Quality Of Software Requirements, Navneet Deosi

Computer Science

The successful completion of any given software project is dependent on error-free Software Requirement Specification (SRS) documents. SRS documents are prone to human errors and faults because their creation involves a large amount of human interaction. This paper reports an experiment study conducted to gauge the accuracy with which the users identify the root causes of software faults in external and self-developed SRS documents. This study primarily focuses on the effective use of the Human Error Abstraction Assist (HEAA) as a tool to help users abstract human errors. HEAA was chosen because it takes all real-life mishaps into consideration and …

Adaptive Mesh Refinment Applications For Adviction-Diffusion Problems Using Amrex, Venkata Kanumuru

Computer Science

In this paper we implemented an adaptive mesh refinement in high performance computing environment to study a wide range of problems in engineering. They are nonlinear Fisher-Kolmogorov equation, heat equation, advection equation and poisons equation using traditional message passing interface (MPI). We used adaptive mesh refinement library called AMReX for computation. AMReX is a numerical library containing the functionality to write massively parallel, block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) applications. Our study includes examples to solve poisons equation in traditional MPI approach and compared the performance between the two methods.

Image Classification Using Transfer Learning And Convolution Neural Networks, Mohan Burugupalli

Computer Science

In the recent years, deep learning has shown to have a formidable impact on image classification and has bolstered the advances in machine learning research. The scope of image recognition is going to bring big changes in the Information Technology domain. This paper aims to classify medical images by leveraging the advantages of Transfer Learning over Conventional methods. Three types of approaches are used namely, pre-trained CNN as a Feature Extractor, Feature Extractor with Image Augmentation, and Fine-tuning with Image Augmentation. The best pre-trained network architectures such as VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50, Inception, Xception and DenseNet are used for classification with …

Vanlife: Creating Community On The Road, John Digiorno

Architecture Theses

Van life is an ever-growing movement across North America and the rest of the world. Driven by high costs of living, mundane desk jobs, poor quality of life, and the urge to be free, thousands of people are packing up their houses and apartments and moving into self-converted full-size cargo vans. Van-lifers tend to gravitate towards each other, creating community on the road. What is the potential of community-based infrastructure for van-lifers? How can a prototypical rest area for van-lifers be placed in almost any location in the world? The research will begin with a compilation of case studies that …

Supporting Undergraduate Underrepresented Minority Students For Success In Stem, Nadia Kennedy, Urmi Ghosh-Dastidar, Sandie Han, Diana Samaroo, Armando Solis

Publications and Research

This presentation reports on a model for engaging, retaining, and supporting undergraduate STEM students, and in particular women and underrepresented minorities (URM), which aims at: recruitment of students in the STEM disciplines and in particular URM students; increased persistence of students; increased graduation rates, and shortened time to graduation. The model has been tested and found to be successful at an urban northeastern university in the USA that has been designated as a Hispanic-serving institution. In this presentation, we describe this model, built from support strategies that include mandatory academic advisement; increased exposure to early research experiences; expanded one-on-one faculty …

From Open Access To Open Science: The Path From Scientific Reality To Open Scientific Communication, Christian Heise, Joshua M. Pearce

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

Although opening up of research is considered an appropriate and trend-setting model for future scientific communication, it can still be difficult to put open science into practice. How open and transparent can a scientific work be? This article investigates the potential to make all information and the whole work process of a qualification project such as a doctoral thesis comprehensively and freely accessible on the internet with an open free license both in the final form and completely traceable in development. The answer to the initial question, the self-experiment and the associated demand for openness, posed several challenges for a …

Enhancing Final Image Contrast In Off-Axis Digital Holography Using Residual Fringes, Manuel Bedrossian, Kent Wallace, Eugene Serabyn, Chris Lindensmith, Jay Nadeau

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We show that background fringe-pattern subtraction is a useful technique for removing static noise from off-axis holographic reconstructions and can enhance image contrast in volumetric reconstructions by an order of magnitude in the case for instruments with relatively stable fringes. We demonstrate the fundamental principle of this technique and introduce some practical considerations that must be made when implementing this scheme, such as quantifying fringe stability. This work also shows an experimental verification of the background fringe subtraction scheme using various biological samples.

Membraneless H2o2 Fuel Cells Driven By Metallophthalocyanine Electrocatalysts, Bao Nguyen, Neal Kuperman, Gary Goncher, Raj Solanski

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

One-compartment hydrogen peroxide fuel cells with Co, Cu, and Fe phthalocyanine (PC) and iron nitride (FexN) as cathodes and Ni anode have been investigated as sustainable energy sources. The cells were operated under acidic conditions and at room temperature. The potentials for onset of the catalytic currents in these cells were determined via cyclic voltammograms. The reduction current onset potentials of FePC, CoPC, CuPC and FexN were 0.56 V, 0.42 V, 0.51 V and 0.57 V, respectively. Potentialcurrent linear sweep voltammetry was utilized to determine the open circuit potentials (OCP) and the power densities the fuel cells. The OCPs for …

Openfoam Simulations Of Late Stage Container Draining In Microgravity, Joshua Thomas Mccraney, Mark M. Weislogel, Paul Steen

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the reduced acceleration environment aboard orbiting spacecraft, capillary forces are often exploited to access and control the location and stability of fuels, propellants, coolants, and biological liquids in containers (tanks) for life support. To access the ‘far reaches’ of such tanks, the passive capillary pumping mechanism of interior corner networks can be employed to achieve high levels of draining. With knowledge of maximal corner drain rates, gas ingestion can be avoided and accurate drain transients predicted. In this paper, we benchmark a numerical method for the symmetric draining of capillary liquids in simple interior corners. The free surface is …

Crowdsourcing Image Extraction And Annotation: Software Development And Case Study, Ana Jofre, Vincent Berardi, Kathleen P.J. Brennan, Aisha Cornejo, Carl Bennett, John Harlan

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

We describe the development of web-based software that facilitates large-scale, crowdsourced image extraction and annotation within image-heavy corpora that are of interest to the digital humanities. An application of this software is then detailed and evaluated through a case study where it was deployed within Amazon Mechanical Turk to extract and annotate faces from the archives of Time magazine. Annotation labels included categories such as age, gender, and race that were subsequently used to train machine learning models. The systemization of our crowdsourced data collection and worker quality verification procedures are detailed within this case study. We outline a data …

Validation Of Predictive Empirical Weed Emergence Models Of Abutilon Theophrasti Medik Based On Intercontinental Data, Valle Egea-Cobrero, Kevin Bradley, Isabel M. Calha, Adam S. Davis, Jose Dorado, Frank Forcella, John L. Lindquist, Christy L. Sprague, Jose L. Gonzalez-Andujar

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

Good weed management relies on the proper timing of weed control practices in relation to weed emergence dynamics. Therefore, the development of models that predict the timing of emergence may help provide growers with tools to make better weed management decisions. The aim of this study was to validate and compare two previously published predictive empirical thermal time models of the emergence of Abutilon theophrasti growing in maize with data sets from the USA and Europe, and test the hypothesis that a robust and general weed emergence model can be developed for this species. Previously developed Weibull and Logistic models …

การประมาณปริมาตรของมันสำปะหลังโดยใช้กล้อง Rgb-D, ชนิกานต์ บัญชาจารุรัตน์

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

มันสำปะหลังเป็นพืชที่ปลูกง่ายและปลูกเป็นจำนวนมากในประเทศไทย เครื่องมือที่เกี่ยวข้องในการตรวจวัดคุณภาพมันสำปะหลังหลังการเก็บเกี่ยวจนไปถึงก่อนแปรรูปที่ใช้ในปัจจุบันเป็นเครื่องมือที่ใช้หลักการวัดทางกลพื้นฐานและใช้ความรู้สึกของผู้ประเมินร่วมด้วย ทำให้มีโอกาสที่จะได้ผลประเมินที่ไม่เป็นความจริง วิทยานิพนธ์นี้เสนอแนวทางการตรวจวัดคุณภาพมันสำปะหลังในห่วงโซ่อุปทานโดยใช้กล้อง Kinect ซึ่งเป็นกล้อง RGB-D ถ่ายรูปภาพของหัวมันสำปะหลังเพื่อหาปริมาตรของมันสำปะหลัง การศึกษาทำโดยถ่ายภาพมันสำปะหลังพันธุ์เกษตรศาสตร์ 50 จำนวน 90 ตัวอย่างแล้วนำมาวิเคราะห์หาปริมาตรด้วยโปรแกรม MATLAB และใช้วิธีการประมาณปริมาตรมันสำปะหลัง 2 วิธีได้แก่ การประมาณปริมาตรโดยใช้ Depth image และการประมาณปริมาตรโดยใช้ Point Cloud image ทั้งสองวิธีการนี้มีพื้นฐานมาจากการหาปริมาตรของรูปทรงเรขาคณิต ผลการหาปริมาตรของมันสำปะหลังจากการประมาณด้วยวิธีการ depth image และวิธีการ point cloud image เมื่อนำมาพล็อตกับปริมาตรของมันสำปะหลังที่ได้จากวิธีการแทนที่น้ำให้ค่าความคลาดเคลื่อน RMSE เท่ากับ 66.94 มิลลิลิตรและ 41.4 มิลลิลิตร หรือคิดเป็นร้อยละ 21.12 และ 13.06 ตามลำดับเมื่อเทียบกับค่าเฉลี่ยของปริมาตรของหัวมันสำปะหลังจากวิธีการแทนที่น้ำ และค่า R-squared ที่ได้จากการประมาณทั้งสองวิธีมีค่า 0.9561 และ 0.9626 ดังนั้นจึงสรุปได้ว่าการประมาณปริมาตรหัวมันสำปะหลังด้วยวิธีการใช้รูป point cloud จะดีกว่าจากค่า R-squared ที่มากกว่าและค่า RMSE ที่น้อยกว่า ปริมาตรของมันสำปะหลังที่ประมาณด้วยรูปถ่ายนี้สามารถนำไปประยุกต์หาเปอร์เซ็นต์แป้งมันสำปะหลังได้

Speaking The Truth: Supporting Authentic Advocacy With Professional Identity Formation, Laura A. Webb

Law Faculty Publications

When law students are asked to articulate legal rules in a persuasive communication such as a brief, they may experience internal tension. Their version of the rule, as framed to benefit a particular client’s position, may be different from the way they would articulate the rule if they were not taking on an advocate’s role. The conflict between those two versions of a legal rule leads some students to wonder if advocacy itself is deceptive, if an advocate’s role requires one to sacrifice ethics for success, and if ancient Greek philosophers were correct when they derided persuasive communication as “trickery …

The Hidden Value Of Abandoned Applications To The Patent System, Christopher A. Cotropia, David L. Schwartz

Law Faculty Publications

Some inventors abandon their patent applications without ever receiving a patent. Although patent scholars view such abandoned patent applications as essentially worthless, we question that conventional wisdom. Conducting an empirical analysis of a recently released patent application dataset in light of a 1999 change that requires publication of most abandoned applications, we find that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) often uses abandoned applications as “prior art” when examining future patent applications. Abandoned applications thus generate an “administrative disclosure” that prevents the issuance of broader patent rights to later applicants. By narrowing the scope of new patents, abandoned …

Filling The California Federal District Court Vacancies, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

"President Donald Trump frequently argues that confirming federal appellate judges constitutes his quintessential success. The President and the Republican Senate majority have dramatically eclipsed appeals court records by appointing fifty-one conservative, young, and capable appellate court nominees, which leaves merely one vacancy across the country. Nonetheless, these approvals have imposed costs, especially among the plentiful district courts that address seventy-four openings in 677 judicial positions.

The most striking example is the four California districts, which realize seventeen pressing vacancies among sixty posts. The Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AO), the federal judiciary’s administrative arm, designates all of them …

Patent-Eligible Subject Matter... Still Wielding The Wrong Weapon - 12 Years Later, Kristen Jakobsen Osenga

Law Faculty Publications

I am delighted to have participated in the Second Annual Intellectual Property Redux Conference and to publish this essay. I rarely look back at my older articles, but in Fall 2018 I was asked to give a keynote address at a conference held by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), where the organizers asked me to speak about 35 U.S.C. § 101 and patent-eligible subject matter. In preparing my remarks, I had the opportunity to refer back to one of my earliest scholarly pieces—a 2007 article entitled Ants, Elephant Guns, and Statutory Subject Matter, published in the Arizona State Law Journal.1 …

Filling The Federal District Court Vacancies, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

"President Donald Trump’s major success has been confirming judges for the thirteen federal appellate courts. The President shattered records by appointing a dozen circuit jurists in his administration’s first year, eighteen judges over the course of 2018, and twenty additional judges throughout his third year. Indeed, by June 2019, the appeals courts experienced four vacancies in 179 judgeships and today, only one position remains empty. This achievement is critical, as these tribunals are the courts of last resort for nearly every appeal, and appellate court opinions articulate greater policy than district court rulings and cover multiple states.

However, that accomplishment …

Supporting Novice Mathematics Teacher Educators Teaching Elementary Mathematics Content Courses For The First Time, Siobahn Suppa, Joseph Dinapoli, Eva Thanheiser, Jennifer M. Tobias, Sheunghyun Yeo

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

In order to be effectively prepared by a teacher education program, prospective elementary teachers (PTs) need to experience high quality mathematics instruction in their mathematics content courses. The instructors of these courses typically consist of individuals (mathematicians and mathematics educators) with ranging experiences, from tenured faculty members to first-year assistant professors or graduate students. This paper explores how to support novice mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) who are teaching elementary content coursework for PTs for the first time. We detail and describe how to implement three systems for supporting novice MTEs: working with a mentor, being provided with educative curriculum materials, …

A Primer On Laplacian Dynamics In Directed Graphs, J. J. P. Veerman, R. Lyons

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We analyze the asymptotic behavior of general first order Laplacian processes on digraphs. The most important ones of these are diffusion and consensus with both continuous and discrete time. We treat diffusion and consensus as dual processes. This is the first complete exposition of this material in a single work.

Naked Price And Pharmaceutical Trade Secret Overreach, Robin C. Feldman, Charles Graves

Faculty Scholarship

Trade secret has drifted from a quiet backwater doctrine to a pervasive force in intellectual property. As always, the risk of distortion is great when a legal arena is developing and expanding rapidly. Nowhere do the theoretical tensions of trade secret law appear in such stark relief as in the modern pharmaceutical debates, where the heart of the theoretical question involves whether pricing is a proper subject for trade secrecy claims.

We aim to bring trade secret into greater harmony with broad concepts that reach across all intellectual property regimes. As with other areas of intellectual property law, trade secret …

Moral Character: Making Sense Of The Experiences Of Bar Applicants With Criminal Records, Hadar Aviram

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.