Digital Commons Network^™

Investigations Of External Resources And The Impact Of Imaging On Patient Flow In The Emergency Department, Marisa Shehan

All Theses

The problems associated with Emergency Department (ED) crowding are numerous, varied, and complex. Though overcrowded Emergency Departments are frequently attributed to overcrowded hospitals, crowding is also impacted by bottlenecks in patient flow. While discrete-event simulation (DES) is commonly used to model ED flow, external resources are typically excluded from these models due to their complexity and the limited amount of known information for these processes. Instead, external resources such as consults, labs, and imaging are modeled using estimation and/or educated guesswork. In this study, the impact of imaging on patient flow was assessed through data analysis of specific imaging factors, …

A Study On Effect Of Manufacturing Parameters On Morphology Of A356 Aluminum Foam, Nikhil Nanabhau Mahajan

All Theses

Metal foams have shown an excellent promise for usage as multifunctional material concerning research & development in the last 20 years. They provide remarkable mechanical as well as physical properties being lightweight. Open-cell metal foams have already been used in sound and noise absorption. Open-cell metal foams are outstanding for use in heat exchangers, filters, and many more applications, while closed-cell foams show excellent characteristics in impact energy absorptions. Closed-cell metal foams have higher energy absorption than their solid parent metal as they convert most of the impact energy into deformation energy. Metal foams have been used as prominent safeguard …

In The Grip Of Grippe: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic Viewed Through A Cross-Section Of American Society, Carole C. Thomas

All Theses

In 1918, a virulent strain of influenza swept the world, infecting as many as 500 million people and killing at least 50 million, 675,000 of whom were in the United States. Despite the many advances that had been made in science and medicine, even the best medical professionals were helpless against the disease. Lawmakers, too, were limited in what they could do to respond to the emergency, especially as the demands of the First World War remained a priority. Through an examination of the response to the flu in a cross-section of American society– national, state, and local – this …

Identification Of Critical Points For Bacterial Contamination In The Microbrewery Environment, Alex Ryan Thompson

All Theses

There are 8,884 craft breweries producing over 23 million barrels of beer in the United States as of 2020. These 23 million barrels of craft beer account for 12.3% of the United States beer consumption in 2020. The American craft beer industry is substantial and needs to protect its product from bacterial contamination.

Overall, beer is a microbially stable product. Beers pH, ethanol levels, CO₂ concentrations, the presence of hop-derived antimicrobial compounds, and low levels of O₂ make beer a highly unfavorable environment for most bacterial species. Furthermore, the brewing process, which involves heat treatments and chemical sanitizers …

A Cross-Cultural Trek Of Nomadism Through Metaphoric Criticism, Gabrielle Wilkosz

All Theses

How has the worldwide phenomenon of nomadism—present day, recent past, and ancient past—been characterized through metaphor by writers, orators, and auteurs? Using metaphoric criticism, I show how the rhetoric of twenty-first-century "van-lifers" builds on a long global history of displacement that ranges from Central Asia to Malaysia to the Grand Canyon. This project’s three case studies span two decades each, comprising the Kitan people of Central Asia (1207-1227); Bukat people of Borneo in Malaysia (1930-1950), and contemporary "van-lifers" of the US (2001-21). This MA thesis parses a newfound connection between the language of nomadism and Burkean “truth”; the language of …

Improving Intelligent Transportation Safety And Reliability Through Lowering Costs, Integrating Machine Learning, And Studying Model Sensitivity, Cavender Holt

All Theses

As intelligent transportation becomes increasingly prevalent in the domain of transportation, it is essential to understand the safety, reliability, and performance of these systems. We investigate two primary areas in the problem domain. The first area concerns increasing the feasibility and reducing the cost of deploying pedestrian detection systems to intersections in order to increase safety. By allowing pedestrian detection to be placed in intersections, the data can be better utilized to create systems to prevent accidents from occurring. By employing a dynamic compression scheme for pedestrian detection, we show the reduction of network bandwidth improved by 2.12× over the …

The Nuclear Role Of Rpt1 In Long-Term Synaptic Plasticity, Lindsey Duke

Biology Theses

The hippocampus is the region of the brain responsible for the formation and storage of memory for places, events, and things. In order for memories to be stored for long periods of time, the connections between nerve cells called synapses must get stronger. The ability of the synapses to change in strength is termed synaptic plasticity which can last a few minutes (short-term) or for days and years or even a lifetime (long-term). Previous research pointed to the requirement of new gene transcription and protein synthesis for long-term synaptic plasticity. Research over the past several years indicates that protein degradation …

Neo's Cleaning Service, Yuka Saito, Mcfloyd Nguyen

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

As the modern working society of any global economy experiences exponential growth in work-centric culture, the integrity of communal and family values degrades as a result. Factors such as lack of leisure and human interaction directly correlate to the declining number of marriages, hence exposing an aging population with no reinforcement. Collectively, as a result, the number of elderly people who live alone continues to expand, and in places such as modern-day Japan, the phenomenon of "lonely death" or kodokushi - 孤独死, an occurrence of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long time, has been a remarkable issue. …

Nursing Students’ Cultural Awareness And High-Fidelity Simulation Skills, Shorok Hamed M Alahmedi

Nursing Dissertations - Archive

Cultural awareness is learning to be self-aware of other cultures and even an individual’s own culture. Nursing students learn about influences of values and beliefs, and the impacts of culture as they consider how to care for patients of other cultures. However, as students are learning cultural awareness for patient care they may struggle with some of their own cultural values and beliefs that may affect them in ways that they are not aware. This descriptive correlational study involved two research questions that examined undergraduate nursing students’ (n = 51) cultural awareness, and the association between undergraduate nursing students’ cultural …

Earnings Management In Response To Fair Treatment: The Roles Of Organizational Identity And Moral Identity, Kimberly M. Bates

Management Dissertations - Archive

Fraud continues to be an issue that organizations face globally, losing an estimated 5% of annual revenue for a total of $4.5 trillion globally. However, fraudulent behavior is difficult to study due to the unacceptable nature of it. I provide researchers with an adapted measure of earnings management that mitigates the socially undesirable act of earnings management which can suppress findings in self-reported studies. Additionally, based on the target similarity model, my dissertation considers accountants’ perception of fair treatment by the organization on willingness to engage in earnings management benefiting the organization. I survey 123 financial and managerial accountants to …

Intersections Between Social Work And Public Administration: A Case Study Of Urban Water Poverty, Katherine M. Lindsey

Social Work Theses - Archive

Despite infrastructure advances, water testing, and environmental policies, there are still areas in the United States that lack clean water. Some communities are negatively impacted by policies, location, socioeconomic status, water obtainment methods, and racial, ethnic, or cultural differences. Social workers desiring to intervene may not know where to begin. To identify potential interventions, this case study examines how the community of Green Tree Estates gained access to clean water through advocacy efforts and community organizing. This community, located within a large city in Texas, is a previously annexed, small mobile home community consisting of a Hispanic, Spanish speaking population …

Challenges Experienced By Rural Informal Caregivers Of Older Adults: A Scoping Review, Jon Shuffler

Social Work Theses - Archive

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to document the state of the literature regarding the challenges experienced by rural informal caregivers of older adults in the United States. Methods: A scoping review of peer-reviewed academic articles published through December 1, 2021, was conducted, utilizing the scoping review framework of Arksey and O’Malley (2005). The initial search resulted in 1,255 articles for review, of which 12 studies were included for the final review. Results: Thematic content analysis was utilized to identify emerging themes of challenges experienced by rural informal caregivers of older adults. The identified themes of challenges include a …

I Kissed Shaming Goodbye: Mental Health Implications Of Christian Purity Culture, Danielle Miriam Stillman

Social Work Theses - Archive

This study investigates the impact of Christian “purity culture,” a particular variety of shame and guilt-based approach to sexual development, on the millennial generation. An emerging body of personal reminiscences and essays have been written about the experience of growing up as part of this culture and the damage that has resulted from the teachings impressed upon those born from 1981-1996 during their adolescence. The research introduces social work theory and recommendations for working with the population’s mental health treatment into the body of literature. Data was collected through qualitative methods of research in personal interviews conducted with the researcher …

Autonomous Aerial Vehicles Distributed Control And Interactive Games, Yusuf Kartal

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

As the number of quadrotors and other Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) increases in industrial and urban areas, the development of reliable engineering methods to control their behavior as they interact with each other becomes of central interest in control research. With the increase in demand for UAVs to work together, several real-life challenges need to be addressed that include the implementation, test, and validation of the control algorithms in flight test experiments. On the one hand, the interests of UAVs may be in harmony to perform certain tasks such as transportation, surveillance and reconnaissance. On the other hand, the interests …

The Latina Experience: Ethnic Markers & Identity Building At An Hispanic Serving Institution, Tatiana Marie Rivera

Sociology & Anthropology Theses - Archive

This study addresses the identity reconstruction process and ethnic marker development of 2nd generation Latina undergraduates attending a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). A qualitative study consisting of 12 individual interviews and a focus group consisting of two new respondents and two old ones (N=14) were conducted virtually to understand how identity was reconstructed, and which ethnic markers this new generation uses to identify other Latinx. To understand the identity reconstruction process and ethnic marker identification, borderlands theory with a focus on the mestiza consciousness was employed. Results show that not all Latinas reconstruct their identity once they start attending an …

Not All Discounts Are Created Equal: Power Distance Belief And Locus-Of-Discount In A Product Bundle, Hsin-Yi Liao

Business Administration Dissertations - Archive

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the relationship between power distance belief (PDB) – the tendency to accept and endorse power disparity – and preference for a discount on the focal (vs. tie-in) product in a product bundle. The findings show that high PDB consumers prefer a discount on the focal (vs. tie-in) product in a bundle, whereas low PDB consumers’ preference is not affected by the locus-of-discount. This difference is driven by the greater tendency to differentiate among high (vs. low) PDB consumers. Furthermore, contextual factor that affect consumers’ differentiation tendency, namely consumers’ prioritization tendency, set boundary condition for the impact …

Synthesis And Function Of Ion-Selective Single-Molecule Fluorescent Imaging Molecules And Materials, Alena A. Denisenko

Chemistry & Biochemistry Dissertations - Archive

Neutrinos are fermion subatomic particles that interact only by weak subatomic forces—making them almost impossible to detect. However, they can be produced in specific radioactive decay reactions, such as beta decay. We hypothesize the detection of double beta decay through the tagging of the Ba2+ daughter ion from 136Xe (136Xe —136Ba2+ + 2ν + 2β). The proposal is to develop single-molecule fluorescence imaging (SFMI) technology to investigate gaseous chemical constituents in high-pressure gases (ca. 30-150 psi) at gas-solid interfaces. To achieve proper SMFI, heterogenous self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) containing fluorophores that operate under dry conditions and are turned on when a …

Asset Management Of Wastewater Interceptors Adjacent To Bodies Of Water, Mohammad Bani Fawwaz

Civil Engineering Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation presents the viability of managing a pipeline network adjacent to bodies of water to maximize asset life by evaluating the significant factors that affect the condition levels of pipeline assets. Pipeline asset management derives from pipelines’ physical conditions, condition rating, and serviceability through testing, monitoring, and analyzing rupture history. The remaining asset life and structural condition of the pipeline network running near and under bodies of water are often hard to predict. In case of pipeline failure, exuberant damages will occur to the surrounding environment, adding up to disruption in service and repairing costs. This research develops Multinomial …

Photonic Crystal Surface Emitting Lasers, Akhil Raj Kumar Kalapala

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

ABSTRACT: Since the initial proposal in 1999 by Noda et al., photonic crystal surface emitting lasers (PCSELs) have proven to achieve large area, coherent lasing with a narrow, single mode beam. Owing to their unique orthogonal electrical/optical cavity scheme, PCSELs have emerged as one of the most promising platforms for high power diode lasers. The evanescent coupling of the optical mode in the active region with the photonic crystal layer enables large area two dimensional in-plane lasing mode in the photonic crystal cavity due to bandedge effect. Bragg’s multi-order diffraction provides the necessary feedback for the lasing and enhances surface …

Evaluation And Modeling Of Power System Components, Zachary Ryan Bailey

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Future power system architectures will rely on a combination of rotating machines, power electronic devices, and energy storage. While it is possible to procure each component separately and conduct studies incorporating these devices into a system, increases in computing power and advanced computer modeling software have expanded the opportunity for research to be conducted on power system architectures without the need for actual hardware. This provides flexibility by allowing the user to design models of individual components that can then be integrated together or effortlessly interchanged depending on the function or testbed design that is being studied. The UTA IDEAL …

Robust Noise-Based Attacks Against Audio Event Detection Systems, Rodrigo Augusto Silva Dos Santos

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The massive advances on the field of deep neural networks in the 2000 and 2010 decades led to an overwhelming adoption of these algorithms on all sorts of domains and applications. Under this widespread adoption scenario, it is natural that these neural networks have also been employed on safety-related use cases, bringing substantial improvements to the performance of existing as well as novel systems. Examples of these safety-inclined applications include scene recognition, object detection and tracking, speech recognition, audio event detection and classification, just to cite a few ones. Unfortunately, these neural network algorithms have been shown to be vulnerable …

Designing Large-Scale Key-Value Systems On High-Speed Storage Devices, Xingsheng Zhao

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

With the evolution of new technologies, such as edge computing, full self-driving, virtual reality, and multi-media streaming, the volume of data is growing at an accelerated speed. The global data volume could achieve 175~zettabytes by 2025. With this huge amount of data, the focus of data management has been shifted from traditional SQL databases to NoSQL databases, which provide higher performance and better scalability. Key-value (KV) stores are a common type of NoSQL database and are becoming a major storage infrastructure in various application domains. With the development of high-speed storage devices, such as NVMe SSD, Open-channel SSD, and non-volatile …

Efficient Algorithms And Human-In-The-Loop Approaches For Attribute Design And Selection, Md Abdus Salam

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Feature engineering and feature selection are two important aspects of data science pipeline. Due to the advancement of data collection techniques in recent years, huge amount of data is becoming available in different industries. Consequently, the importance of data science is increasing for business analytic purpose. Different tools and techniques are being developed to assist data scientists to complete their tasks efficiently. One of the main human involvements in the data science task is for feature engineering and selection. These pre-processing steps will prepare the data in the format desired to be fed into various machine learning algorithms to accomplish …

Working For Peanuts: Labor, Geography, And Class Composition In The American Circus Industry, 1872-1938, William James Hansard

History Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation focuses on class composition in the traveling circus in the Gilded Age (1870s-1900s), the Progressive Era (1890s-1910s), and the New Era (1920s-1930s). American circuses became industrial operations beginning in the 1870s under the leadership of P.T. Barnum and his business partners, and within a few years, they had become the most important form of entertainment in the United States. By the turn of the twentieth century, the major industrial circuses employed around 1,200 people each and traveled the country in what amounted to a mobile factory town. However, up to this point, collective action by circus workers was …

Mechanistic Basis For The Role Of Resistance And Tolerance Determinants In Antibiotic Treatment Failure, Misha Iqbal Kazi

Biology Dissertations - Archive

Failure of antibiotics in treatment of nosocomial Gram-negative bacterial infections has created a substantial burden for global public health. The β-lactam class of antibiotics includes last resort carbapenems, which are used to combat multidrug resistant Gram-negative bacterial infections. Production of β-lactamase enzymes that degrade these antibiotics is the primary mechanism β-lactam resistance in Gram-negative bacteria. While FDA-approved serine-β-lactamase inhibitors are co-formulated with β-lactam antibiotics to prevent their inactivation during treatment, no metallo-β-lactamase inhibitors have been approved for clinical use. The first study employs an innovative antimicrobial discovery platform to identify peptide inhibitors against the New Delhi metallo-β-lactamase-1 (NDM-1), which is …

Pif Transposable Elements Domestication And Genetic Novelty In Insects, Fatema Ruma

Biology Dissertations - Archive

Transposable elements or TEs, are selfish genetic elements that represent a major component of a eukaryotic genome. They are genetic units that can move and amplify within a host genome. Mobilization of these TEs can be harmful to the host genome as they can transpose to new locations and can be a source of disruptions to the genetic information, DNA breakage and ectopic recombination. It has been shown, however, that TE proteins can be domesticated/co-opted and supply functions for major adaptations. There are two broad classes of TEs: Class I or retro-transposable elements and Class II or DNA elements. It …

Optimizing The Performance Of Analytical Chemistry Instrumentation, Srividya Sekar

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Surrogate Optimization and Global Optimization approaches to optimize underlying functions have been studied and used extensively in the field of Operations Research. However, there are very few instances where these approaches have been applied and tested in applications with uncertainty. Additionally, extensive focus and effort have been put into developing highly complex metamodels rather than globally optimizing these metamodels. In this study, we propose a Mixed Integer Quadratically Constrained Program (MIQCP) based approach that globally optimizes a Quintic Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (QMARS) metamodel. The QMARS-MIQCP based optimization is applied to a global optimization framework called QMARS-MIQCP-OPT to optimize several …

Uncertain Times In An Already Uncertain Context: Foster Parenting Stress & Resilience During Covid-19, Erin M. Findley

Social Work Dissertations - Archive

This three-article, mixed-methods dissertation looked at the nature of U.S. foster parent stress and resilience both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first article employed a Qualitative Interpretive Meta-Synthesis (QIMS) approach to answer the question, “What do foster parents tell us about their greatest points of stress in the foster care system?” Foster parent voices (n=572) from twenty-one existing qualitative articles were analyzed until themes emerged. The second article aimed to fill a gap in the literature with a deeper understanding of foster parents’ lived experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with n=20 foster parents across …

A Necessary And Sufficient Condition For The Asymptotic Normality Of The Quantile Estimator In The Deconvolution Problem, Jeremy R. Valdez

Mathematics Dissertations - Archive

In this study, we examine the estimation of a quantile function when we have n observations coming from the convolution model contaminated by additive measurement errors. Under certain assumptions, a kernel type deconvolution quantile estimator of the unknown quantile function is proposed. Moreover, we discuss the necessary and sufficient condition on the bandwidth in order to investigate the limiting distribution of the deconvolution kernel quantile estimator when the error terms follow either an ordinary smooth or super smooth distribution. A bootstrap approach is used to select the optimal bandwidth to construct approximate distribution free confidence bands for the quantile function …

Twisting Systems And Some Quantum P³S With Point Scheme A Rank-2 Quadric, Hung Viet Tran

Mathematics Dissertations - Archive

In 1996, J. J. Zhang introduced the concept of twisting a graded algebra by a twisting system, which generalizes the concept of twisting a graded algebra by an automorphism (the latter concept having been introduced in an article by M. Artin, J. Tate and M. Van den Bergh in 1991). Twisting using a twisting system is an equivalence relation and certain important algebraic properties of the original algebra are carried over to the twisted algebra. We call a twisting system nontrivial if it is not given by an automorphism. However, there are very few known examples of nontrivial twisting systems …