Digital Commons Network^™

Are Gaming And Gambling Disorders Related? Examining The Roles Of Money, Relative Deprivation, And Upward Mobility, Anthony J. King

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Few studies have examined the financial motives and risks involved in modern video games, as well as the psychosocial factors contributing to this type of gaming involvement. Previous research on gambling has shown financial motives alone to be a major risk factor for the development of gambling disorder, with higher levels of personal relative deprivation (PRD) identified as a main contributor to this relationship. Therefore, the present study investigated whether this association applied to US adult video gamers, and if it would predict their problematic gaming behaviors. We hypothesized PRD and gaming disorder severity would have a positive association, with …

The Use Of Post-Course Feedback On Mastery Learning In A Professional Development Context, Thomas M. Kramer

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study investigated the effect of feedback to measure post-mastery learning in a professional development course designed for child welfare worker. In addition, the study explored the subjects’ perceptions of benefits gained by taking an online professional development course for child welfare worker. Specifically, the effect of email summaries sent out after the completion of the course on the participant’s retention of material covered in the course was assessed. The summary emails were designed to enhance the benefits of reviewing the study material after the completion of the course with a particular focus on the quantity and frequency of reminders …

Bone Morphogenetic Protein Signaling Requirement In Centripetal Migration In Drosophila Melanogaster Oogenesis, Sheila Mosallaei

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Cells interact with each other via signals to coordinate migration for proper tissue development and maintenance, immunity and tissue repair. Signals regulate migration via changes to cytoskeletal components or transcriptional regulation. Here, I used Drosophila melanogaster to investigate whether and how a transcriptional signal, Bone Morphogenetic Protein signaling, drives a cell migration, centripetal migration. The migrating cells, centripetal follicle cells, consist of two subsets of cells, “leading” and “following” centripetal follicle cells, that although adjacent to each other, migrate differently. The differences in modes of migration correlate to differential gene expression in the centripetal follicle cells. The leading centripetal follicle …

Relationship Between Standardization Critical Success Factors (Csfs) And Project Performance, Binit Kumar Shrestha

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Facility standardization strategy is defined as the development and use of consistent designs to align project stakeholders, objectives, and scope to capture and optimize schedule, cost, and value. The implementation and proper execution of this strategy can lead to considerable benefits, such as design once and reuse multiple times, along with learning curve benefits in fabrication, operations, and construction, as well as accelerated responds to schedule needs. Although standardization strategy is not a new idea; capital projects have failed to achieve high levels of facility standardization. The primary reason for this is the industry’s struggle to execute standardized projects successfully. …

Forecasting Pedestrian Trajectory Using Deep Learning, Arsal Syed

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this dissertation we develop different methods for forecasting pedestrian trajectories. Complete understanding of pedestrian motion is essential for autonomous agents and social robots to make realistic and safe decisions. Current trajectory prediction methods rely on incorporating historic motion, scene features and social interaction to model pedestrian behaviors. Our focus is to accurately understand scene semantics to better forecast trajectories. In order to do so, we leverage semantic segmentation to encode static scene features such as walkable paths, entry/exits, static obstacles etc. We further evaluate the effectiveness of using semantic maps on different datasets and compare its performance with already …

The Development Of Prerequisite Skills And Concepts From Task-Based Interviews In Calculus Students With Low-Levels Of Prerequisite Skills, Nicholas Wong

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This task-based interview study examined the development of prerequisite skills and concepts and calculus skill and concepts of students who entered a first-semester calculus course with a low level of prerequisite skills. The participants in this study completed three task-based interviews with two tasks in each interview. The research question addressed by this study was, To what extent do task-based interviews reveal students’ prerequisite skills and conceptual understanding for applications of the derivative and how do these skills and understanding develop for students who have been classified as having low levels of prerequisite skills upon entering a calculus course? The …

A Manufacturing-To-Response Pathway For Formed Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer Composite Structures, Madhura Limaye

All Theses

Over the past decade, there has been an increased adoption of thermoplastic and thermoset based continuous carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites for structural applications in several industries. Among the different manufacturing methods, thermoforming process for thermoplastic based continuous CFRP’s offer a major advantage in reducing cycle times for large scale productions. Similarly, out-of-autoclave curing process for thermoset based continuous CFRP’s using heated tooling enables production of large composite structures. However, these manufacturing processes can have a significant impact on the structural performance of parts by inducing undesirable effects. These effects include inhomogeneous fiber orientations, thickness variations, and residual stresses …

Delivering Highly-Characterized Low-Dose X-Ray Radiation To Biological Samples, Jaclyn D'Avanzo

All Theses

Since the advent and swift adoption of x-ray imaging in 1986, the understanding of radiation among the general populace has markedly increased as has the average annual radiation exposure. The biological effects of high doses and high dose-rates, particularly related to x-ray radiation, became a concern of the scientific and medical communities within the same year due to the unregulated use of such imaging. The dangers of these high doses sparked extensive studies, health recommendations, and regulations. However, after it became common practice to use the lowest dose necessary to facilitate medical treatment, the research on the biological effects of …

Affordance Judgment For Collision Or Bypass Of Objects By Rotating Panels, Balagopal Raveendranath

All Theses

We interact with rotating panels like doors in our day-to-day life. Doors afford the action of entry and exit from an enclosed space. Since a rotating door can pose a risk of collision to a person standing within the swept volume of the door, the ability to judge a safe distance from the door is imperative. The current study investigated the optical information available to judge whether a rotating panel would collide with or bypass a stationary object nearby. On a desktop computer, participants saw the top-down view of a door-like panel, which rotated about one of three different axes …

Development Of Guidelines For Support Structure Design And Placement In Metal Additive Manufacturing, Lucas M. Morand

All Theses

Support structures used in metal additive manufacturing (AM) have traditionally been used to overcome process limitations. A new approach explored in this study used novel design and placement of support structures to reduce part deformation. First, a case study was conducted with a simple production part at a major OEM. Changing the support structures used in the print reduced the average deformation by up to 21% and the maximum deformation by up to 24%. Once this opportunity for customized support structure design was established, interviews with AM engineers were used to identify the most common challenge features that would benefit …

Cloud-Based Low-Cost Wireless Distributed Indoor Temperature And Humidity Monitoring System, Ningxuan Wen

All Theses

In the U.S., buildings are usually responsible for about 40% of total energy consumption, indicating a great potential for energy saving. It is reported that in EU countries, about 60% to 70% of the consumed energy in buildings are for space heating, and the rest of the energy are mostly accounted by hot water and electrical appliance. On the other hand, the indoor climate comfort is strongly related to the life quality and productivity of the occupants. There is no doubt that any improvement in building control and optimization will lead to a significant energy savings while still maintain the …

Promoting A Safe Hospital Environment Through Autonomy, Christopher Lee Sousa

All Theses

The use of ultraviolet-C (UVC) radiation for disinfecting high contact surfaces in areas with a high risk of transferring infection causing bacteria and viruses such as hospitals is a growing practice that has proved to be more effective than currently used disinfection methods. Current practices of hospital room disinfection via UVC radiation include running a stationary UVC source for a large amount of time in a space to allow all surfaces to receive the radiation dosage required to eliminate the targeted surface-dwelling pathogens. This method relies on either passively reflecting rays around a room to achieve adequate disinfection of hidden …

Bovine Intervertebral Disc Organ Culture For Assessing Regenerative Therapeutics For Herniation Repair, Mario Josef Krussig

All Theses

Annually over 3 million people suffer from intervertebral disc (IVD) herniation (IVDH)¹ and approximately 500,000 discectomies are performed in the United States alone. Within one-year post-operation, up to 15% of patients must undergo a second discectomy or spinal reconstruction due to re-herniation². One potential method to overcome limitations associated with discectomies is to develop tissue engineered constructs to augment the surgical procedure. Previously two novel scaffolds have been created by our lab: an annulus fibrosus repair patch (AFRP) and acellular bovine nucleus pulposus (ABNP); however, these constructs require extensive testing before implementation in humans. Therefore, the purpose …

A Cross-Sectional Assessment Of Cem Curriculum Offerings At The Pre-College Level In The Carolinas, Cayla Lenore Anderson

All Theses

Career and Technical Education (CATE or CTE) is essential at the pre-college level since students primarily make career decisions during this time. CTE curriculum is implemented in various schools, including Title 1, to develop knowledge for students regarding technical careers. The construction, engineering, and management (CEM) curriculum is a type of CTE curriculum designed to educate pre-college level students about careers in the construction industry. Knowledge opportunities about the construction industry can contribute to a workforce shortage. Research suggests a shortage of future workforce in the construction industry within the next decade or by 2040. Assessing the CEM curriculum at …

Constitutive Expression Of The Inositol Polyphosphate 5- Phosphatase Gene Alters Plant Development And Enhances Abiotic Stress Tolerance In Creeping Bentgrass, Chen Chang

All Theses

Inositol-1,4,5-triphosphate (IP3), a second messenger molecule and a very important component of phosphoinositide (PI) signaling, participates in plant growth and response to various abiotic stresses. Strict control of the IP3 balance is critical for normal plant development. Type I Inositol polyphosphate 5-phosphatase (InsP 5-ptase) functions to hydrolyze soluble inositol phosphates, such as IP3. It has previously been reported that transgenic Arabidopsis, a dicotyledonous plant species overexpressing InsP 5-ptase exhibit a sharply declined IP3 level, but enhanced tolerance to various environmental adversities, indicating an important role the InsP 5-ptase plays in regulating phosphoinositide (PI) signaling to mediate plant stress responses. To …

Tarn: Towards A Traffic Analysis Resistant Network, Christian Geddings Barrineau

All Theses

The Internet today is made up of large networks known as autonomous systems (AS). These networks are given ownership over static blocks of IP prefixes, which they announce using the border gateway protocol (BGP). These static mappings of IP prefixes to ASes are well known and publicly available. This makes it easy for individuals, corporations, and governments to target specific entities for traffic analysis. This thesis describes traffic analysis in terms three scopes of trust, discussing the risks and requirements at each level. It then looks at traffic captured at Clemson University, showing how much information is actually made available …

Thermal Modeling Of Fused Deposition Modeling Process Using Discrete Elements, Chelsea Charles Menezes

All Theses

Over the years various models have been proposed to predict the material behavior during fused deposition modeling (FDM) process. FDM produced components show anisotropic material properties as compared to the virgin materials produced via injection molding. The thermal phenomena subjected to the filament during the FDM process leads to temperature gradient between filaments within a layer and across layers. This affects the adhesion and bond formation between the filaments and leads to directional differences in bonding strengths throughout the component. In this study, discrete elements have been used to study the thermal cooling behavior of FDM deposited filaments. This approach …

Image Segmentation Applied To Electrical Impedance Tomography, Scott Randall Scruggs

All Theses

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) has many significant applications and has gained popularity due to its ease of use and its non-invasiveness. While it has notable applications, EIT is severely ill-posed. Since EIT is ill-posed, various techniques have been considered to solve the inverse problem. While the inverse problem has been well-studied, a common question is to ask how we can improve in solving the inverse problem of the electrical impedance tomography?

In this thesis, we consider using image segmentation alongside with iteratively-regularized Gauss-Newton Method (IRGN) to solve the inverse problem of EIT in various geometries. A comparison between the reconstruction …

Detecting Eating Episodes From Daily Patterns Of Wrist Motion Using Recurrent Neural Networks, Adam Patyk

All Theses

This thesis considers the problem of detecting when a person is eating during everyday life by examining daily patterns of wrist motion with recurrent neural networks. Our novelty is analyzing an entire day of data to classify and segment meals with a model we call the “daily pattern classifier”. Previous research has only analyzed short windows on the order of seconds or minutes long that miss larger day-to-day patterns. The goal of this work is to utilize daily contextual indicators to improve eating episode detection and reduce false detections that occur throughout the day.

The wrist motion data used in …

A Tightly Integrated Generic Instruction Risc-V Accelerator (Tigra) For The Rocket Core, Theresa Thao Le

All Theses

Custom accelerators are largely beneficial for compute intensive applications such as data encryption or floating point arithmetic. These accelerators allow for a very specific task to be offloaded to its own unit so that the rest of the pipeline is not overwhelmed by these complicated instructions. To further achieve speed, a custom accelerator can be offloaded to an FPGA while still being on the same die as the CPU. Intel had announced this new technology back in 2014 and recently at the end of 2020, AMD released a patent application describing a similar approach.

In this thesis, we present a …

Root System Architecture That Improves Biomass Production And Yield Of Soybean, Enoch Noh

All Theses

Soybean [Glycine max (L.)] is the most important oilseed and one of the most important and affordable protein sources worldwide. Enhancing the acquisition of belowground resources has been identified as an opportunity for improving soybean productivity worldwide. Root architecture is gaining interest as a selection criterion in breeding programs for enhancing soil resource acquisition and developing climate-resilient varieties. The objective of this research was to investigate whether root system characteristics are related with aboveground growth and yield of 11 selected soybean genotypes under rainfed conditions. Our goal was to identify beneficial root traits and genotypes that can be included in …

The Effect Of Carbon Black Electrocatalyst Type And Ink Composition On The Production Of H2O2 With Gas Diffusion Electrodes, Alexander Gex

All Theses

Hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) is a powerful oxidizing agent that produces no known disinfection by products (DBPs), making it an ideal candidate for water treatment if produced efficiently. This study compared the efficiency of H₂O₂ electrosynthesis between different conductive carbon electrocatalysts, binding agents, and current densities, with phosphate buffered saline (PBS) as the electrolyte in a gas diffusion electrode (GDE). The results showed that for any given binding agent, the electrocatalyst that produced the most H₂O₂ changed based upon the current density applied to the cathodes. A current density dependent impact …

Evaluation Of Long-Term Boron Leaching Rates In Industrial Grade And Laboratory Created Coal Ash, Allison Mclane

All Theses

Understanding boron speciation is critical in determining how leaking coal ash basins could potentially affect nearby agricultural or drinking water sources due to its non-reactive and highly mobile nature. While boron is not typically considered a health risk driver at many coal ash basin sites, it is required for detection monitoring and generally indicates the leading edge of a plume when present downstream. Boron leaching rates from coal fly ash has been studied in many scenarios, but there is a lack of knowledge in the literature about bottom ash as a source of boron in basin pore waters. Additionally, most …

Data-Driven System Identification And Optimal Control Framework For Grand-Prix Style Autonomous Racing, Rongyao Wang

All Theses

For the past 30 years, autonomous driving has witnessed a tremendous improvements thanks to the surge of computing power. Not only did we witness the autonomous vehicle navigate itself safely in the urban area, stories about more diverse autonomous driving applications, such as off-road rally-style navigation, are also commonly mentioned. Just until recently, the exponential increase in GPU and high-performance computing technology has motivated the research on autonomous driving under extreme situations such as autonomous racing or drifting.[25] The motivation for this thesis is to offer a brief overview about the main challenge of autonomous driving control and planning in …

The Second-Person Narrative Mode Used As A Proposed Engagement Form In Virtual Reality Storytelling, Rodney Florencio Da Costa

All Theses

Methods of storytelling in cinema, theater, and literature have well-established conventions that have been built throughout narrative history and the development of these more traditional formats. In virtual reality, though, many of the techniques that have formed part of this cinematic language or visual narrative are not easily applied. In general, when the virtual reality narrative term is used, it is associated with filmed or rendered 360º videos that use head-mounted displays for presentation and most often uses first and third-person narratives, which may compromise a director's intent for story flow.

This thesis aims to put a new light on …

Shining Light On Retroreflectivity: Perceived Brightness Of Surfaces With Varying Reflective Properties, Savana King

All Theses

Typical road users appear not to understand retroreflectivity despite nightly exposure to retroreflective materials such as road signs. While retroreflective surfaces have been engineered to reflect light back in the direction of its source, retroreflectors appear to be diffuse reflectors in most viewing conditions. This may lead road users to underestimate its value in nighttime roadway applications and contribute to vulnerable road users’ under-use of retroreflective markings to enhance their own conspicuity at night. In this context, a critical benefit of retroreflective materials is a robustness to changes in entrance angle, the angle at which the light strikes the material.This …

Evaluation Of Two-Phase Anaerobic Digestion For Increased Sludge Handling Capacity And Energy Production At The F. Wayne Hill Water Resources Center, Julia Ann Funk

All Theses

Two-phase anaerobic digestion (AD) of municipal wastewater separates the hydrolytic-acidogenic phase from the methanogenic phase, resulting in optimization of the respective microbial communities, increased stability, shorter residence times, and increased methane production rates compared to conventional single-phase treatment. Anaerobic co-digestion of fats, oils, and grease (FOG) with municipal wastewater also offers the potential for increased methane production rates; however, FOG can lead to system upsets and overall digester failure if not managed properly. Anaerobic co-digestion in a two-phase system could offer the potential of alleviating many of these upsets, including more efficient conversion of long chain fatty acids (LCFAs) and …

Applications Of Set-Theoretic Topology In The Construction And Analysis Of Engineering Design Spaces, Joshua Bronson Ortiz

All Theses

The idea of design spaces in engineering has appeared in many forms and served a variety of purposes in practice, research, and literature. Yet very few of the definitions put forth have a concrete mathematical structure that can be practically applied by the designer in real-time. This research seeks to address this gap by taking advantage of tools and techniques in point-set topology, a field that has been used successfully in a number of different areas. The primary objective of this undertaking is to formalize definitions for design spaces as topological structures that will encapsulate many of the relevant characteristics …

Framing Ludens: Pawn Swapping And Game Mode Alteration In An Unreal Engine Game Level, Jeffrey Paul Martell

All Theses

Knight of Drones is a hybrid twin-stick top-down shooter and side-scrolling platformer that aims to bring vintage gameplay to a contemporary game engine. A single swatch of the top-down game mode and a pair of levels from the side-scrolling game mode will be presented beginning with the player characters and player pawn assets and then extending to the level design and game design assets.

The game deals with the fallout effects of climate change and serves as a cautionary tale against pollution and weaponized AI. This message will appear primarily in the game's atmosphere, literally in the background in some …

Design And Studies Of Cvd Graphene-Based Membranes On Modified Support For Water Treatment Applications, Mansour Saberi

All Theses

Although almost 70% of the world is covered by water, less than 3% is fresh. The remainder—most of the Earth’s water is saline. To meet humanity’s increasing and unavoidable need for water, we must convert saline water into freshwater through desalination. Many desalination technologies are available, and membrane-based technologies, such as reverse osmosis (RO), are widely used. Though RO is especially common, desalination through RO faces several challenges. For example, high operation cost due to high pressure during the process or its degradable polymeric active layer in contact with chlorine-containing compounds. In terms of general functionality and energy consumption, water …