Digital Commons Network^™

High-Pressure Kinetic Interactions Between Co And H2 During Syngas Catalytic Combustion On Pdo, Ran Sui, John Mantzaras, Rolf Bombach, Meysam Khatoonabadi

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The catalytic combustion of H2/CO/O2/N2 mixtures over PdO was investigated at pressures 3 to 10 bar, H2:CO volumetric ratios 1:5 to 3:1, and global equivalence ratios ψ = 0.13 and 0.23. The catalyst surface temperatures were controlled to 540-690 K, a range especially important for hybrid hetero-/homogeneous combustion approaches with large gas turbines at idle or part-load operation and for microreactors with recuperative small-scale turbines. In situ Raman measurements determined the major gas-phase species concentrations over the catalyst boundary layers in a channel-flow reactor, thermocouples monitored the surface temperatures, and surface characterization identified the catalyst oxidation state (PdO) and surface …

Spatial Transformation Of A Layer-To-Layer Control Model For Selective Laser Melting, Xin Wang, Robert G. Landers, Douglas A. Bristow

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Selective Laser Melting (SLM) is an Additive Manufacturing (AM) technique with challenges in its complexity of process parameters and lack of control schemes. Traditionally, people tried time-domain or frequency-domain control methods, but the complexity of the process goes beyond these methods. In this paper, a novel spatial transformation of SLM models is proposed, which transforms the time-domain process into a spatial domain model and, thus, allows for state-space layer-to-layer control methods. In a space domain, this also provides the convenience of modelling laser path changes. Finally, a layer-to-layer Iterative Learning Control (ILC) method is designed and demonstrates the methodology of …

A Guide To Trauma Informed Pediatric Primary Care, Felicity Bernard, Corina Chao, Holly Tutko

All Materials

No abstract provided.

Analyzing Bipoc Representation In Young Adult Fiction, Bianca Carbone

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

This thesis uses an identity studies approach to look at the representation of BIPOC characters within three young adult speculative fiction: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Black Witch by Laurie Forest, and Cinder by Marissa Meyer. By incorporating identity studies to explore and analyze examples of misrepresentation and unconscious bias throughout stories centered on oppressive world building, racial hierarchies, this thesis draws upon the works of various scholars including: Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Orlando Patterson, Toni Morrison, and Edward Said. A lack of diverse authors and Eurocentrically-framed ideologies cemented into the publishing industry has led to instances of …

Psychoanalysis And Dreams In Toni Morrison’S Beloved: Exploring Continuities And Ruptures Of Trauma Cycles, Rebecca M. Peter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

“Psychoanalysis and Dreams in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Exploring Continuities and Ruptures of Trauma Cycles,” explores the function of dreams as they relate to trauma and memory. This thesis argues that a character’s engagement with their dreams leads to a healing discontinuity of traumatic cycles, while dreams left untouched likely result in historical and transgenerational cycles and the continuation of personal trauma and its symptoms. This thesis compares the dreams of the characters Beloved and Denver. In part because Morrison notes her influence from both African and Western traditions, this paper argues that a sufficient understanding of dreams in her work …

Sentiment Analysis Of Tweets From The 2020 Presidential Election, Joseph M. Williams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

We collected approximately 60 million tweets over a 6-month period during the 2020 presidential election, starting from the conventions through the inauguration. Each tweet referenced either the Republican incumbent Donald Trump or the Democrat challenger Joe Biden. The tweets were analyzed for sentiment and the frequency of the moral foundations using the standard LIWC2015 dictionary and the Moral Foundations Dictionary 2.0. We found that the tweets had an overall negative sentiment for both candidates, with tweets referencing Trump being more negative than tweets about Biden. Additional analyses showed that the Authority (Virtue) and Loyalty (Virtue) were the most frequently used …

Swimming Control Of An Underwater Vessel With Elongated Ribbon Fin Propulsion, Mohammad Irfan Uddin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

Navigation of unmanned underwater vehicles in coastal zones, tight spaces and close to structures such as ports, ship hulls and pipelines remains a difficult challenge. Currently Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) use a variety of techniques for motion control, including single thrusters with diving planes or hydrofoils, robotic wrists, or a moving mass. However, these techniques provide limited maneuverability. The objective of this work was to understand the mechanics of elongated fin propulsion for swimming and motion control of underwater vehicles. This bio-inspired propulsion is used by several fishes that swim by undulating a thin and elongated median fin that allow …

The Effects Of Implicit Bias In Simulated Police-Community Interactions: A Pilot Study, Scott Evan Gardner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

High-profile police use-of-force events, like the deaths of Trevon Martin, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, and George Floyd, have increased scrutiny towards law enforcement, and many believe that racial disparities in the justice system are caused by biased decision-making. The subsequent protests and civil unrest have furthered the divide between the police and members of the public, which has damaged police legitimacy and led to depolicing and militarization. This study pilot tests the impact of implicit bias on decision-making for a student sample with a decision-making simulator and an experimental design with random assignment. Simulated police-public contacts, substantively, were found to …

Caa Bylaws, Caa

Executive Actions

No abstract provided.

Implementation Of A Nonverbal Scrub Cap Identification System To Improve Communication And Perception Of Patient Safety Among Unfamiliar, De-Identified Staff Members In The Operating Room., Keri Ann Roskowinski

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Background: Operating room (OR), professionals deliver patient care with brief introductions, and roles were not always identified, and although team members wear identification (ID) badges, they were usually covered by sterile gowns and other routine personal protective equipment (PPE). Purpose: The aim of this Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) project was to determine if a simple intervention to apply the individual’s name and role to a scrub cap could improve identification, OR team communication, and consequently, patient safety. The participants in this project consisted of nurses, physicians, anesthesia providers, scrub technicians, students, medical sales representatives, and those that identified as …

On Paradoxical Examples Of Real Functions, Cheng-Han Pan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation is a summary of the author's research work, supervised by Professor Krzysztof Ciesielski, based on three published articles in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications and one published article in the Banach Journal of Mathematical Analysis. Our work focuses on the study of paradoxical real functions regarding differentiability and generalized continuity within the foundations of real analysis. The reasons why they are paradoxical are directly connected to their definitions, which will be provided and explained in the later texts. Note that all functions discussed in the dissertation are single-variable and real valued, that is, well-defined from a …

New Touch Park, Abdirahman Mohamud

Landscape Architecture Theses

My study is to answer the question how can landscapes themselves be interactive, could they be learning & teaching experiences? Can you learn actively from design? Could a landscape teach you a story of a people or a lesson? Are their existing sites that do these things already that we can learn from them? Could it be replicated? What are their structures and programing that make them successful? My study is also promoting and proposing an environment for learning objectives for young developing children in low income housing, with project elements such as natural playground setting, pushing a narrative of …

Voting Technology, Democracy, And Propaganda: Ontological Considerations For The 2020 Presidential Election, Erik Gustafson

Communication

The 2020 United States Presidential election was considered one of the most tumultuous political contests in the 21st century. During an international pandemic, travel restrictions and social distancing requirements created uncertainty about whether to vote in person or via absentee-mail-in ballot. The present study sought to investigate how voters experience different technologies in the 2020 United States Presidential election. Selected concepts in media ecology supplemented Fox and Alldred’s (2013) framework for new materialist inquiry to explore the technical material characteristics of voting technology and the discursive elements of voter fraud propaganda. By tracing the history of voting technologies and voter …

Sentiment Analysis Of Covid-19 Vaccination Impact On Twitter Tweets Using Nlp Supervised Learning And Rnn Classification Comparison, Tanvir Ahmed

Computer Science

Twitter provides a platform for exchanging information and opinions on global concerns like the COVID-19 epidemic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we used a collection of around 16,180 tweets to derive inferences regarding public views toward the vaccine impact once immunizations became widely available to the community. We use natural language processing and sentiment analysis techniques to uncover information regarding the public's perception of the COVID-19 vaccine. Our findings demonstrate that people are more pleased about taking COVID-19 shots than they are about some of the vaccines' side effects. We also look at people's reactions to COVID-19 safety measures after they …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Music Recommendations Using Cosine Similarities Of Various Combined Feature Sets Consisting Of Metadata And User Generated Tags, Shubhit Kumar

Computer Science

This paper aims to compare and evaluate the methods for recommending songs using metadata, user generated tags, metadata and tags, and metadata and top five tags. Recommendations are calculated using cosine similarities with relevant exceptions (artist filtering, tag filtering, year to decade conversion) investigated.

Political Activism Through Music For Piano: A Performer’S Guide To Interpreting The Ideology In Frederic Rzewski’S (1938-2021) North American Ballads (1979) And Cornelius Cardew’S (1936-1981) Thälmann Variations (1974), Michael Jorge Langer

Music

Political music is an emerging and relevant phenomenon. These works can pose challenges to performers in terms of understanding and interpreting their nuanced historical and political ideology. This dissertation is about the philosophical intersection of politics and works for solo piano. The primary works I examine are Thälmann Variations (1974) by English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) and North American Ballads (1979) by American composer Frederic Rzewski (1938-2021). I investigate the political ideology of each composer and connect it to their works. I explore the theoretical and philosophical implications of these works and offer my interpretive and programmatic recommendations to the …

From Paintings To Opera: Discovering The Reimagination Of William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress In Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Hong Liang Ng

Music

The Rake’s Progress (1951) is a well-known satirical opera in three acts with an epilogue by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), with a libretto written by Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) and Chester Kallman (1921-1975). This opera is based on William Hogarth’s (1697-1764) series of eight paintings, A Rake’s Progress (1734), which inspired Stravinsky during his visit to the Art Institute of Chicago on May 2, 1947. Even though many scholars have conducted discussions on the opera itself, there is little scholarship on the influence of Hogarth’s paintings on Stravinsky’s opera. This dissertation considers how Stravinsky, Auden, and Kallman translated Hogarth’s series of …

Anthrozoology Center: Healing Through Animal-Assisted Therapy, Elaine Smith

Architecture Theses

Anthrozoology is defined as the interdisciplinary study of the interaction between humans and other animals. This thesis involves animal-human relationships and the ways that animals can improve the mental, physical, and the spiritual health of people. I will be specifically researching the positive effects of the connections equines and canines have on humans and implementing designs that respond to that. Equine-assisted therapy has been a method for helping individuals with disabilities and trauma for centuries. To respond to the need for this type of therapy, I will design a facility that gives space for the occupants to bond and interact …

Walker Reimagined, Mckenna Reller

Architecture Theses

Tourism has the unique opportunity to support and create a thriving community in locations across the world that would otherwise be small and sleepy. But what are the impacts of tourism on the local communities of those towns; there are the obvious financial benefits to tourism but how does the fluctuation of tourist throughout the year impact the social and cultural health of the local community. When focusing on catering to a transient community, what becomes of a town’s identity? A town has much more to its story then the expensive boutiques and tourist destinations; there is the story and …

Edgar Allan Poe Rare Books Library At Yale University: The Rematerialization Of Language, Luke Devries

Architecture Theses

Michel de Certeau states, “The current industrial mass production of visual imagery tends to alienate vision from emotional involvement and identification and turns imagery into a mesmerizing flow without focus or participation” (Pallasmaa). Based upon a critique of the expedient exchange of information in our modern culture, this thesis examines how creative language and the act of reading itself might open an interpretive dimension for new pathways that are more and more lost in our current cultural milieu. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s story La Ligeia, which follows a grieving lover through the death and reemergence of his first true …

Wellness In Educational Facilities, Carol Carpenter

Architecture Theses

Universally children are sent to attend school to gain basic knowledge in most communities. In the United States the standard is about 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 13 years. These educational institutions that are in place have a strong impact on the growth and development of young individuals. Many schools are historical or show strong elements that speak to the time they were built. These elements include architectural style, classroom size, amounts, and types, and systems within the building. As communities grow from the framework in which the school was originally constructed, there lies the opportunity …

Rangeland Forage Growth Prediction, Logistics, Energy, And Economics Analysis And Tool Development Using Open-Source Software, Subhashree Navaneetha Srinivasagan

Agribusiness and Biosystems Engineering

Forage availability was crucial for livestock production across the United States. Rangelands occupied vast areas 31 % of land and were the primary source of forage for livestock. However, extreme climatic conditions such as drought affect rangeland forage production and pose a serious threat to the rangeland enterprise. This increases the need to monitor forage in vast rangelands and adapt to other measures such as cultivating or buying forage to balance demand and supply. Despite this need, resources (studies and tools) on rangeland forage monitoring and existing forage production, handling, and economics were scattered and scarce. Therefore, a comprehensive systematic …

Are Infrared Thermography, Automated Feeding Systems, And Heart Rate Variability Measures Capable Of Characterizing Group-Housed Sow Social Hierarchies?, Dominique Sommer

Animal Sciences

Group gestation housing is becoming standard practice in commercial swine production. Although group housing promotes behavioral variability within the breeding herd, it can cause several management challenges for producers due to the establishment of the social hierarchy. Poor performance and welfare in group housed breeding stock can be attributed to the repercussions of aggression performed between dyads. The ability to quickly identify sows in the social hierarchy could be beneficial to producers for enforcing preventative actions. Precision livestock farming tools have proven to aid animal caretakers in monitoring animal health and welfare in livestock industries.The objective of this thesis was …

Play And The Public Realm, Gabriella Toquam

Architecture Theses

Play is what makes us human. Play provides new perspectives which are required. Play promotes relationship, of those close to us and those in public, both needed relationships. We are more connected than ever in the modern day, yet we feel distant from our fellow man, especially when we meet him on the street. Symptoms of isolation include an unbalanced personal life and an empty social life. The comfort one feels at home, even with other people, is rarely or never experienced in public. The modern city can function as a creative space, but rediscovering the power of the public …

Found In Translation: Language And The Built Reality, Kiara Groth

Architecture Theses

Language acts as the primary way humans understand themselves and the world, and through the learning of languages, we are able to mediate and enrich this exchange. As humans reach for understanding of the world they inhabit, how can language be used to influence the design and experience of architecture, and can it be used to bring together communities with cultural and linguistic differences? How do these parallel yet contrasting stories impact worldviews, imaginations, and behaviors? Minnesota has over 300 languages woven into its history. The people who speak these languages use them to give life to their own art, …

2022 Silicon Valley Pain Index, Scott Myers-Lipton, William Armaline

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Robustness Of Image-Based Malware Analysis, Katrina Tran, Fabio Di Troia, Mark Stamp

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

In previous work, “gist descriptor” features extracted from images have been used in malware classification problems and have shown promising results. In this research, we determine whether gist descriptors are robust with respect to malware obfuscation techniques, as compared to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) trained directly on malware images. Using the Python Image Library (PIL), we create images from malware executables and from malware that we obfuscate. We conduct experiments to compare classifying these images with a CNN as opposed to extracting the gist descriptor features from these images to use in classification. For the gist descriptors, we consider a …

Writing Fires: Writing Instruction, Student Learning Perceptions, And The Importance Of Connection In The Age Of Covid-19, Isaac Sullivan

English

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought with it devastating and potentially long-lasting impacts to the world. From economic upheavals, political ramifications, and educational disruptions, COVID-19 has changed the face of many aspects of life, perhaps forever. The issue in this study is to ask how COVID-19 may have impacted the literacy development of undergraduate students through the use of emergency remote instruction. To begin investigating the issue, roughly 200 undergraduate students in writing-focused classes (first-year composition and upper-division writing courses) were surveyed to understand how they learned the rhetorical conventions and genre expectations of their discipline. Out of the 200 responses, …

The Contribution Of Positive Affect And Loneliness On Readiness And Self-Efficacy To Quit Smoking Among Spanish-Speaking Mexican American Smokers, Tatiana Londoño, John R. Moore, Zully C. Guerra, Nazanin M. Heydarian, Yessenia Castro

School of Social Work Faculty Publications

Background: The existing research on affective and interpersonal determinants of smoking cessation largely under-represents minority smokers, such as Latinos.

Objective: The current study examined associations between affective and interpersonal factors with intermediary smoking cessation variables among Mexican-American smokers (N = 290; 60% male).

Methods: Measures of positive and negative affect, social support, and loneliness were each examined for associations with measures of motivational readiness to quit smoking, and smoking abstinence self-efficacy. Significant predictors were entered into models simultaneously to examine their unique associations. Covariates included gender, age, and educational attainment.

Results: Negative affect (b = .68, SE b = …

“Usefulness Without Use," Or, The Power Of The Virtual: Lu Xun On The Vital Efficacy Of Literature, Wenjin Cui

Faculty Publications

This article explores Lu Xun’s distinct view of the vital efficacy of literature, as

captured in his well-known conception of literature’s “usefulness without use.”

Starting with the highly idealistic vision of his youthful years, which posits an

unmediated flow of power from the free play of poetry to the direct action of politics,

I follow Lu Xun on the strenuous and crisis-ridden path he took in coming to terms

with the uselessness of literature vis-à-vis the power of politics, until he finally

reaffirmed the vital power of literature by pitching the self-transcending virtual

impetus of literature against the conservative actual …