Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Sir Model When S(T) Is A Multi-Exponential Function., Teshome Mogessie Balkew

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The SIR can be expressed either as a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations or as a nonlinear Volterra integral equation. In general, neither of these can be solved in closed form. In this thesis, it is shown that if we assume S(t) is a finite multi-exponential, i.e. function of the form S(t) = a+ ∑ⁿ_k=1 r_ke^-σ_kt or a logistic function which is an infinite-multi-exponential, i.e. function of the form S(t) = c + a/b+e^wt, then …

Conjugate Additions And Transposition Of The Allylic Alcohols Of Enol Ethers Of 1, 2-Cyclohexanedione., Barnabas Otoo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A variety of protected enolic forms of 1, 2-cyclohexanedione was prepared as substrates for conjugate addition studies using organocopper reagents. The sequence involved the enol ether preparation via the enolate, alkylation with an organometalic reagent, and oxidative rearrangement with pyridinium chlorochromate followed by the conjugate addition reactions. Protection of 1, 2-cyclohexanedione was achieved by reacting with chloro tert-butyldimethyl silane and subjected to alkylation. Steric problems were encountered and so an alternative protective group the methoxymethyl acetal was prepared and studied. Alkylation of these derivatives was successful; however, the oxidation was problematic and although evidence for rearrangement was observed in one …

Extraction And Determination Of A Selected Polyphenol From Selected Red And Black Grapes By High Performance Liquid Chromatography., Summer Nicole Niles

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Polyphenols are a group of compounds found naturally in plants and they provide much of the flavor, color, and taste to fruits, vegetables, seeds, and other parts of the plants They also act as antioxidants which provide numerous health benefits by protecting cells against damage caused by free radicals. Their antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and anti-allergenic properties have also contributed to the prevention of degenerative diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases and cancers by slowing the rate of oxidative stress on cells. This study was aimed at the identification and quantitation of a specific polyphenol, quercetin, found in grapes commonly purchased at grocery …

An Investigation Of How Surface Coal Mining Affects Water Quality., Sara Moore

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Surface coal mining has become the ideal method for extracting coal from the Appalachia Mountains. However, surface coal mining generates large amounts of waste which may decrease the water quality in central Appalachia. This research is an attempt to determine whether surface coal mining negatively impacts water quality. This research consists of a literature review in addition to an analysis of data obtained through the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. This data was analyzed at three separate locations along the Clinch River, VA to determine trends and cycles in pH, temperature, total hardness, and chloride, sulfate and metal concentrations. After …

P300-Based Bci Performance Prediction Through Examination Of Paradigm Manipulations And Principal Components Analysis., Nicholas Edward Schwartz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Severe neuromuscular disorders can produce locked-in syndrome (LIS), a loss of nearly all voluntary muscle control. A brain-computer interface (BCI) using the P300 event-related potential provides communication that does not depend on neuromuscular activity and can be useful for those with LIS. Currently, there is no way of determining the effectiveness of P300-based BCIs without testing a person's performance multiple times. Additionally, P300 responses in BCI tasks may not resemble the typical P300 response. I sought to clarify the relationship between the P300 response and BCI task parameters and examine the possibility of a predictive relationship between traditional oddball tasks …

The Correlation Of The Concentration Of Selected Metals Determined In Water And Fish Samples From A Public Pond., Paula Kay Edwards

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The concentrations of heavy metals (Cd, Cu, Fe, Ni, Pb, Zn) were measured in water, and fish samples caught from the pond at Fishery Park in Unicoi County, TN. The water samples were collected once a week for 8 weeks. The amounts of metals in the muscle tissues, gill, and liver of the two fish species were measured. This was to determine if any correlation exists between the metal contents in water and those in the fish samples. The concentration ranges for the heavy metals found in the water samples are as follows: Zn 0.04-0.13; Cu, 0.00-0.00; Pb, 0.00-0.59; Cd, …

A Comparative Study Between The Standards Of Learning And In-Class Grades., Randetta Lynn Fuller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We examined the Standards of Learning mathematics scores and in-class grades for a rural Virginia county public school system. We looked at third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh grades as well as Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry classes. The purpose of this was to determine whether or not there is a strong correlation between the Standards of Learning and the students' in-class grades. Had a strong enough correlation between the Standards of Learning and in-class grades been found we would have used only the in-class grades to predict the Standard of Learning test scores. However, we found that the …

A Study Of Improving The Parallel Performance Of Vasp., Matthew Brandon Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis involves a case study in the use of parallelism to improve the performance of an application for computational research on molecules. The application, VASP, was migrated from a machine with 4 nodes and 16 single-threaded processors to a machine with 60 nodes and 120 dual-threaded processors. When initially migrated, VASP's performance deteriorated after about 17 processing elements (PEs), due to network contention. Subsequent modifications that restrict communication amongst VASP processes, together with additional support for threading, allowed VASP to scale up to 112 PEs, the maximum number that was tested. Other performance-enhancing optimizations that were attempted included replacing …

Cyanoscorpionates And Transition Metal Complexes., Donald Martin Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The new dihydrobis(4-cyano-3-tert-butylpyrazolylborate) ligand has been synthesized. Isolated crystals of the thallium complex were collected and structurally characterized by X-ray diffraction. Transition metal complexes of the ligand are currently under investigation.

Non-Classical Symmetry Solutions To The Fitzhugh Nagumo Equation., Arash Mehraban

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Reaction-Diffusion systems, some parameters can influence the behavior of other parameters in that system. Thus reaction diffusion equations are often used to model the behavior of biological phenomena. The Fitzhugh Nagumo partial differential equation is a reaction diffusion equation that arises both in population genetics and in modeling the transmission of action potentials in the nervous system. In this paper we are interested in finding solutions to this equation. Using Lie groups in particular, we would like to find symmetries of the Fitzhugh Nagumo equation that reduce this non-linear PDE to an Ordinary Differential Equation. In order to accomplish …

The Analysis Of Palaeobotanical Remains From Native American Sites In The Tennessee Region Of The Upper Cumberland Plateau., Chase W. Beck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sediment samples were collected from 3 rock shelter sites and one natural pond on the Upper Cumberland Plateau. Samples were processed to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate pollen and charcoal abundance as well as other palaeobotanicals. The analysis was to determine when prehistoric Native Americans began controlled burns to enhance resources acquisition. Samples were also analyzed for the presence of pollen to determine vegetation changes that may accompany the use of controlled burns and to determine the onset of horticulture. The Upper Cumberland Plateau is often considered a marginal area used only seasonally by Native Americans; however, management practices may have …

Spousal Concordance In Academic Achievements And Intelligence And Family-Based Association Studies Identified Novel Loci Associated With Intelligence., Yue Pan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Assortative Mating, the tendency for mate selection to occur on the basis of similar traits, plays an essential role in understanding the genetic variation on academic achievements and intelligence (IQ). It is an important mechanism explaining spousal concordance. We used principal component analysis (PCA) for spousal correlation. There is a significant positive correlation between spouses by the new variable PC1 (correlation coefficient=0.515, p<0.0001). We further research the genetic factor that affects IQ by using the same data. We performed a low density genome-wide association (GWA) analysis with a family-based association test to identify genetic variants that associated with intelligence as measured by WAIS full-score IQ (FSIQ). NTM at 11q25 (rs411280, p=0.000764) and NR3C2 at 4q31.23 (rs3846329, p=0.000675) were 2 novel genes that haven't been associated with IQ from other studies. This study may serve as a resource for replication in other populations and a foundation for future investigations.

Early Stopping Of A Neural Network Via The Receiver Operating Curve., Daoping Yu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents the area under the ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristics) curve, or abbreviated AUC, as an alternate measure for evaluating the predictive performance of ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks) classifiers. Conventionally, neural networks are trained to have total error converge to zero which may give rise to over-fitting problems. To ensure that they do not over fit the training data and then fail to generalize well in new data, it appears effective to stop training as early as possible once getting AUC sufficiently large via integrating ROC/AUC analysis into the training process. In order to reduce learning costs involving the …

Assessing Commercial Organic And Conventionally Grown Vegetables By Monitoring Selected Heavy Metals Found In Them., Charles Kafui Dotse

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Commercially available organic and conventionally grown vegetables were studied by quantitative determination of selected metals in them and to determine if any differences found are statistically significant. These findings can help the consumers to determine if the vegetable products are within the recommended maximum limits as proposed by the joint FAO/WHO Expert committee on organic foods designation. Eight edible vegetables were purchased from local stores in both the organic and conventionally grown categories. Samples were digested with concentrated nitric acid and the metals monitored were zinc, copper, lead, iron, cadmium, and nickel using flame atomic absorption. The concentration range for …

Generating Compact Wasp Nest Structures Via Minimal Complexity Algorithms., Fadel Ewusi Kofi Adoe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many models have been developed to explain the process of self organization-the emergence of seemingly purposeful behaviors from groups of entities with limited individual intelligence. However, the underlying behavior that facilitates the emergence of this global pattern is not generally well understood. Our study focuses on different low complexity building algorithms and characterizes how nests are built using these algorithms. Three rules postulated to be functions of wasps' building behavior were developed. First is the random rule, in which there is no constraint per the choice of site to be initiated. The second is the 2-cell rule where only sites …

Total Domination Dot Critical And Dot Stable Graphs., Stephanie Anne Marie Mcmahon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Two vertices are said to be identifed if they are combined to form one vertex whose neighborhood is the union of their neighborhoods. A graph is total domination dot-critical if identifying any pair of adjacent vertices decreases the total domination number. On the other hand, a graph is total domination dot-stable if identifying any pair of adjacent vertices leaves the total domination number unchanged. Identifying any pair of vertices cannot increase the total domination number. Further we show it can decrease the total domination number by at most two. Among other results, we characterize total domination dot-critical trees with total …

A Predictive Model For Secondary Rna Structure Using Graph Theory And A Neural Network., Denise Renee Koessler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this work we use a graph-theoretic representation of secondary RNA structure found in the database RAG: RNA-As-Graphs. We model the bonding of two RNA secondary structures to form a larger structure with a graph operation called merge. The resulting data from each tree merge operation is summarized and represented by a vector. We use these vectors as input values for a neural network and train the network to recognize a tree as RNA-like or not based on the merge data vector.

The network correctly assigned a high probability of RNA-likeness to trees identified as RNA-like in the RAG database, …

A Re-Evaluation Of The Pleistocene Hellbender, Cryptobranchus Guildayi, And An Overview Of Cryptobranchus Remains From Appalachian Caves., Keila Elaine Bredehoeft

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cryptobranchus guildayi is described as an extinct species of large salamander that is closely related to the hellbender, Cryptobranchus alleganiensis. The validity of this extinct taxon has been questioned, so an expanded osteological sample of modern hellbenders was used for comparative purposes with the C. guildayi fossil material. Based on this analysis, all supposed distinguishing morphological characteristics used to define C. guildayi can be observed in specimens of C. alleganiensis, or are based on misidentifications. Therefore, Cryptobranchus guildayi is considered to be conspecific with C. alleganiensis and taxonomically should be considered a junior synonym of the latter. The …

Using Ant Colonization Optimization To Control Difficulty In Video Game Ai., Joshua Courtney

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is an algorithm which simulates ant foraging behavior. When ants search for food they leave pheromone trails to tell other ants which paths to take to find food. ACO has been adapted to many different problems in computer science: mainly variations on shortest path algorithms for graphs and networks.

ACO can be adapted to work as a form of communication between separate agents in a video game AI. By controlling the effectiveness of this communication, the difficulty of the game should be able to be controlled. Experimentation has shown that ACO works effectively as a form …