Digital Commons Network^™

Complexity, Resources And Text Borrowing In State Legislatures, Eric Hansen, Joshua M. Jansa

Political Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Do states copy or reinvent language from complex policies as they diffuse, and does this depend on legislative resources? We argue that states will more frequently reinvent more complex policies, but that states with high-resource legislatures will reinvent more than their low-resource counterparts for more complex policies. We test the theory using the bill texts from 18 policies that diffused across the 50 states from 1983-2014, measuring reinvention and complexity using text analysis tools. In line with expectations, we find that complex policies are reinvented more than simple policies and that high-resource legislatures reinvent bills more than low-resource legislatures on …

A Proposed Study To Explore The Relationships Of Methionine Restriction, The Mitochondrial Upr, And Animal Lifespan Determination, Joanne Mai

2021 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

The determination of chronological age is complex and can be influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. Mitochondria, essential organelles that generate the vast amount of cellular energy, are closely associated with the aging process. While many studies have been performed, we still lack a complete understanding of how animal lifespan is determined. In the following research proposal, a strategy is outlined to uncover the mechanism of the mitochondrial unfolded protein response (UPRmt) and extended lifespan resulting from restriction of the amino acid methionine. The model organism Caenorhabditis elegans and a forward genetic screening strategy will be used to identify …

A Scoping Review Of Motor Assessments For Children, Crystal Tavarez

2021 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Motor skill assessments are used to evaluate a child’s development and reveal potential deficits of the individual. The purpose of this study was to research and analyze a number of motor assessments for children that have been created over the past 30 years. This information will then be used, in the future, to create a new motor assessment that would be able to be utilized in therapeutic settings. To accumulate the articles to review, the website Rayyan was used. A total number of 14,524 articles were gathered and the screening consisted of assessing abstracts to determine whether an article was …

Designing, Developing, And Deploying Fast And Secure System Architecture With Autonomous Data Importation Feature For Statefarm’S Sponsored Lifefit App, Sushant Gupta

2021 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Our sponsor, State Farm Insurance, is interested in creating a system that will maintain a record of profile for its customers’ daily health habits to get a better view of their overall health. The system should use Machine Learning on the user’s recorded health data, along with other health related information, to determine how healthy the individual is and to provide better health and/or life insurance rates to that individual. Concerning the sponsor requirements, we created the system called Lifefit Application. It is a mobile (Android and IOS) and web-based application which, with the support of AWS cloud computing and …

The Impact Of Developmental Coordination Disorder, Irissa Le

2021 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Development Coordination Disorder (DCD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects the performance of common, everyday tasks in children due to a delay in the development of motor skills. Oftentimes, parents of these children express concern about the limited number of resources available. To further understand what kind of support children with DCD may need, questionnaire responses of parents with DCD children in the US were documented. A survey was prepared through a survey software program called QuestionPro for the parents participating in Impact for DCD – USA. In total, there were 217 surveys completed. It was found that most children …

Development Of Methodology And Software To Ensure The Quality Performance Of The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment High Voltage Field Cage, Archit Jaiswal

2021 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is the U.S. flagship experiment being designed to study the characteristics of neutrinos which make up a quarter of the fundamental particle map. These subatomic particles help physicists understand the fundamental constituents of matter in the universe. In DUNE, neutrino interactions will be captured inside the active volume of the time projection chamber (TPC) using liquid argon (LAr) as the medium. The DUNE detector will be built using various parts assembled according to the proposed design which enables accomplishing the precision measurements for the underlying physics goals. The detector is constructed by assembling various …

A Practical Moral Theory The Failed State Of Normative Ethics, Gage Martinez

2021 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Normative ethics can be described as the investigation into how one ought to act, morally speaking. The state of contemporary normative ethics is, essentially, a split between consequentialist (the idea that things are morally right or wrong based on their consequence) and non-consequentialist thought. Yet in practice, no one seems to be able to live by these moral theories, and I argue that it would be bizarre to do so as well. I examine reasons to believe that neither theory provides a complete account of real moral life, and how they fail at being prescriptive in practice. I provide a …

Electroluminescent Signals And Cosmogenicbackgrounds In High Pressure Xenon Gas Timeprojection Detectors, Leslie Rogers

Physics Dissertations - Archive

The NEXT collaboration is developing a sequence of high pressure xenon gas time projection chambers with the aim of creating a ton-scale, very low background neutrinoless double beta decay search. Finding evidence of neutrinoless double beta decay would give insight into the origins of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe, the smallness of neutrino mass, and the symmetry structure of the Standard Model. My research involves addressing critical challenges on the path to realization of high pressure xenon gas detectors for ton-scale, very low background neutrinoless double beta decay searches. While most aspects of this technology are easily scalable, some …

The Effectiveness Of A Web-Based Motor Intervention Program On Motor And Psychosocial Abilities Of Children With Dcd: A Preliminary Study, Karyssa Nelson

2021 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Group intervention programs are known to improve motor and psychosocial skills in children with motor difficulties, however, many programs were suspended due to COVID-19. Therefore, we investigated the effectiveness of a web-based asynchronous intervention on the motor and psychosocial abilities of children with DCD. The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, Developmental Coordination Disorder Questionnaire, and Motor Ability Questionnaire were completed before and after eight sessions. No significant differences were seen on the DCDQ, but effect sizes were found for the MAQ in jumping (d= .28), grasping (2= .27), lacing (d= .70) and overall ability (d= .30). For the SDQ, small effect …

The Sublethal Effects Of Ammonia On Daphnia, Michelle Le

2021 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Water pollution is a worldwide concern due to its devastating effects on the environment. Not only does this pose a significant threat to the environment, but these effects can also matriculate to humans causing disease and even death. As clean water is vital to our society, it is essential to monitor the effects of pollution and assess water quality. Using Daphnia spp. as bioindicators, the effects of various sublethal doses of ammonia, a common waterborne pollutant, on the phototactic behavior of Daphnia was investigated. Daphnids were first reared in common garden conditions and exposed to following concentrations of ammonia: 0 …

Evaluation Of Geotechnical Parameters Of Soil Using Electrical Resistivity Imaging, Md Asif Akhtar

Civil Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Electric resistivity imaging (ERI) is an effective non-destructive and rapid measuring way of obtaining continuous soil subsurface resistivity profiles. An ERI technique can be used to identify moisture variations and soil heterogeneities in an area. Thus, ERI is becoming a popular tool in geotechnical (FHWA, 2015)engineering; however, it only provides qualitative information at the current time. Using qualitative images, it is challenging to extract quantitative geotechnical information, such as the type of soil, moisture content, degree of saturation, and atterberg limit, of the subsurface. Several studies have described the electrical resistance of soil as a function of pore fluid conductivity …

The Visualization Of Wireless Network Data In Augmented Reality, Tiffany Frias

2021 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

The visualization of wireless networks has been a research topic so computer scientists can understand what cannot be seen with the naked eye and advance in specialized fields such as data visualization, cyber security, and computer networking. Flying a drone with a microcontroller around a building, signal strength and location data points of wireless networks can be collected and uploaded into a cloud database like AWS (Amazon Web Services), or Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. On the Unity platform used for game development, developers can create a program that pulls such data from the cloud in real-time. Using this data, they …

Texas Poker Vr, Allison Gardiner

2021 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Texas Poker VR is a virtual reality (VR) poker game that provides players with the ability to play privately among friends. The Texas Game Developers team is working to develop a VR poker game that has a focus on the private room and socialization aspects of the game. The application is for the Oculus Quest 2, using the Unity game engine. We will be using a subscription server that will allow players to create a private room with other players they invite, visualize the poker screen, socialize with each other, and keep track of the fake money, all on a …

Development Of New Techniques To Dissect The Genetic Basis Of Population-Level Variation Of Recombination Rates In The Daphnia Model System, Swatantra Neupane

Biology Dissertations - Archive

We know very little about the determining genetic factors that control the recombination events within a genome. Moreover, the cause of recombination rate variation in population-level remains poorly understood, especially in non-mammalian species. The scarcity of population-level recombination rate data makes pinpointing genetic loci responsible for recombination rate variation even more challenging. Due to a lack of population-level recombination data, this hypothesis remains untested mainly in natural systems, like Daphnia. In response to the limitation of genetic tools used to dissect the genetic determinant of a trait in Daphnia, we put an effort to address these shortcomings in the Daphnia …

Design For Older Adults – Functional Limitations And Human Factors Engineering, Megumi Sato Hice

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Background: Throughout the aging process, people experience changes in functional ability and such changes can happen in physical and mental functions. As a result, older adults develop limitations in their capabilities to perform daily activities. Although many studies have done to identify functional limitations for elderly, many older adults still face negative consequences in daily living conditions due to their functional declines. One of the possible causes may be a lack of feedback or participations of elderly users in the design process. Other reason could be a lack of consideration to identify the needs for a specific task associated with …

Study On Forming Dna-Mediated Nanoparticle Conjugates: Toward Detection Of Covid-19, Chinmay Nitin Afzulpurkar

Material Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

The objective of this thesis is to establish a rapid, robust, and reproducible procedure to controllably assemble DNA-functionalized Au nanoparticles (AuNPs) into satellite-shaped nanostructures using sequence-specific DNA hybridization. A target DNA strand with COVID-19 sequence (t-DNA) is used as a bridge to connect a capture DNA functionalized on a 50nm gold nanoparticle (C-AuNP) and a probe DNA functionalized on a 30nm nanoparticle (P-AuNP), creating C-AuNP/t-DNA/P-AuNP conjugates. The C-DNA is complementary to a portion of t-DNA, and P-DNA is complementary to the other portion of t-DNA. The parameters that affect the conjugate formation, including hybridization buffer strength, hybridization temperature, and DNA …

Liutex Analysis By Pod And Dmd In Turbulent Flow After/ In Micro Vortex Generator, Xuan My Trieu

Mathematics Dissertations - Archive

Although vortex has been studied more than one hundred year, we still have not had universally accepted definition. A few well-known vortex identification methods are introduced ��,∆, ��2,������ criteria to identify coherent vortex structures the last three decades. A new Omega vortex identification method, which is defined as a ratio of the vorticity tensor norm squared over the sum of the vorticity tensor norm squared and deformation norm squared, was proposed in 2016. Two year later, the new vortex vector named Liutex (previously called Rotex) was proposed by Liu et al. with direction of local rotation axis (an eigenvector of …

I Want You To Panic: Leveraging The Rhetoric Of Fear And Rage For The Future Of Food, Iselin Gambert

Journal of Food Law & Policy

"Humanity Is About to Kill 1 Million Species in a Globe-Spanning Murder-Suicide. Only 11 Years Left to Prevent Irreversible Damage from Climate Change." Doomsday headlines like these are terrifying. But are they enough to make us act? The causes of the current climate crisis are many, but the science is clear that the meat and dairy industry shoulders much of the blame. Given the role the animal agriculture industry plays in perpetuating the climate crisis, combined with the harms the industry imposes on the animals and workers within it, politicians and governments—given their degree of power and influence—should ostensibly be …

The Right To Food Comes To America, Wendy Heipt

Journal of Food Law & Policy

The people of Maine recently exercised an opportunity no citizen of this country has ever had before: the ability to vote on whether to enshrine a right to food in their state constitution. This Essay provides an overview of Maine’s experience with food rights in order to explain how the state came to occupy this unique position.

English-To-Ipa Transcription, Riley Roberts

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The purpose of this project was to create a tool that could automate English-to-IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription. Research was done to determine what would be required to perform such a transcription. After researching and experimenting with existing tools, it was determined that developing the signal processing and Artificial Intelligence model portion of the application would be too intensive to successfully complete within the timeframe of this project.

The choice was made to develop an iOS application, with the Python library Allosaurus used to do the speech processing and as the Artificial Intelligence model. This model was then deployed in …

The Volatility Implications Of The Chinese Cryptocurrency Ban, Keaton Manwaring

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

In this paper, I examine the effect of the May 18^th, 2021 Chinese ban of cryptocurrency transactions on the overall volatility of the cryptocurrency market. To do this, I analyze, in both univariate and multivariate settings, range-based volatility in various event windows surrounding the event. I find clear economic and statistical change in volatility in the five days after the ban. In the ten-day period after the ban, there is a moderate economic change in volatility. In the forty-day period after the ban, there is little economic change in volatility. I conclude that the Chinese ban had a …

Examining General Education Teacher Perceptions Of Individualized Education Program Accommodations, Riley Johnson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This study examines general education teacher perceptions of IEP accommodations and their suggestions for relevant training to support diverse learner needs. Accommodations have been defined as adaptations or changes to educational environments and practices designed to help students overcome challenges presented by their disabilities. An electronic survey was sent to general education teachers across the four high schools in Cache County School District. The survey included a variety of questions regarding teachers’ perceptions of accommodations and their involvement in the IEP process. The results showed a variety of explanations and expand the knowledge base of various perceptions of this important …

Impact Of Pank1 Deletion On Mitochondrial Acetylation And Cardiac Function During Pressure Overload., Timothy N. Audam

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent studies have associated elevated protein acetylation levels with heart failure in humans. Although mechanisms promoting elevated acetylation levels are not fully known, excess acetyl-CoA may drive enzyme-independent acetylation of cardiac proteins. Accumulation of acetyl-CoA depends on the availability of sufficient CoA, whose production is regulated by pantothenate kinases in the CoA biosynthetic pathway. We show that cardiac proteins are hyperacetylated during heart failure in humans and tested in mice whether limiting CoA abundance would improve ventricular remodeling during pressure overload-induced hypertrophy. We limited cardiac CoA levels by deleting the rate-limiting enzyme in CoA biosynthesis, Pank1 (one of three PANK-encoding …

The Role Of Sphingolipids In Aki And The Progression To Ckd: Potential Therapuetic Targets., Nicholas A. Hoffman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) is most simply defined as a rapid decline in kidney function over a period of hours to days. There is currently a lack of effective treatment options for patients with AKI, highlighting the need to identify new therapeutic targets. Sphingolipids play a number of roles in different models of AKI, suggesting they could be promising future targets for treating kidney injury. Specifically, sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) and its receptors (S1PRs) have been implicated in numerous inflammatory disorders and models of AKI. The purpose of this review is to better characterize the role of S1P receptors in models of …

Ultrafast Magnetic Entropy Dynamics With Time-Resolved Pump-Probe Magneto-Optical Technique., Sahar Goharshenasanesfahani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It has been observed that ultrathin films, multilayers, or magnetic nanostructures indicate novel magnetic phenomena that differ profoundly from the respective bulk properties. Besides, because of the broad applications of these magnetic materials in the industry, they are an exciting research area. Hence, investigating the low-dimensional magnetic systems is one of the most active fields in experimental condensed matter physics. Magnetization dynamics can occur over a wide range of time scales (from seconds to femtoseconds). Some of these processes even occur on time scales as short as a few picoseconds (10^-12s) or femtoseconds (10^-15s). Measurement of …

An Analysis Of Taste Neuron Morphological Variability: Influences Of Neuron Type And Plasticity., Lisa Christina Ohman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Taste neurons are functionally and molecularly diverse, but their morphological diversity was, until recently, completely unexplored. Taste neurons were considered relay cells, communicating information from taste-transducing cells to the brain without variation in morphology. Instead, individual taste neurons are tremendously morphologically variable. To determine how differences in branching relate to the number and types of taste-transducing cells providing neuronal input, I combined sparse cell genetic labeling with a whole-mount immunohistochemistry and analysis workflow. I found that the maximum number of taste-transducing cells capable of providing convergent input onto individual gustatory neurons varied with a range of 1-22 taste-transducing cells. Consistently, …

An Exploration Of Afrocentric Features At A Black Homeschool Collective., Tytianna Nikia Maria Wells

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the development and benefits of familial relationships as the primary feature of Afrocentricity at Black Scholars Academy (BSA), a Pre-Kindergarten (Pre-K) through 12th-grade Black homeschool collective in the United States. This qualitative study draws upon Afrocentricity as a theoretical framework to analyze and interpret data collected from classroom observations, individual interviews with current and former teachers and students, and textual artifacts between July and November 2019. Familial relationships—an African time orientation, a personalized learning plan, OurStory, and Rising Meeting—are present in BSA. Familial relationships helped students develop cultural pride, agency, self-determination, independence, liberation through education, and a …

Manifestations Of Students’ Voices: Examining Shifts, Academic Demands, And Identity Work In How Students Make Themselves Understood., Lauren Elizabeth Fletcher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Voice is a concept that is both highly sought after and elusive in education. While schools aim to foster students’ voices, many academic structures inadvertently conceal their voices and in turn their identities. Definitions of voice have been assumed, vague, or looked at as a writing trait, with little consideration of voices’ dynamic and mediated structures. Drawing on scholarship grounded in sociocultural theories and dialogism (e.g., Bakhtin, 1986; Engeström; 1987, Leont’ev, 1981; Rosenblatt, 1978; Vygotsky, 1978), I contribute a new, tangible definition of voice, in which voice is a dynamic happening, continually negotiated and constructed. This dissertation explores students’ voices, …

Collaborative Human-Machine Interfaces For Mobile Manipulators., Shamsudeen Olawale Abubakar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The use of mobile manipulators in service industries as both agents in physical Human Robot Interaction (pHRI) and for social interactions has been on the increase in recent times due to necessities like compensating for workforce shortages and enabling safer and more efficient operations amongst other reasons. Collaborative robots, or co-bots, are robots that are developed for use with human interaction through direct contact or close proximity in a shared space with the human users. The work presented in this dissertation focuses on the design, implementation and analysis of components for the next-generation collaborative human machine interfaces (CHMI) needed for …

Black Codes Re-Envisioned: The Dred Scott Majority Opinion As An Antiblack Performative Speech Act., Tiffany Dillard-Knox

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a discursive analysis of the decision in the Dred Scott v Sandford, 1857 case written by Chief Justice Roger Taney. It begins with an overview of the literature on performative speech acts, focusing on the aspects of performatives that relate to Louis Miron and Jonathan Xavier Inda’s thesis that race is a performative speech act. Breaking from their use of race as the analytic, this analysis is situated within a black/nonblack paradigm. This provides a framework that focuses on the unique ways in which the discourse of the text enacts, accumulates and renders blackness fungible. The …