Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Advancement Of Computing On Large Datasets Via Parallel Computing And Cyberinfrastructure, Ahmet Artu Yildirim

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Large datasets require high processing power to compute, high-speed network connections to transmit, or high storage capacity to archive. With the advent of the internet, many in the science community and the public at large are faced with a need to manage, store, transmit and process large datasets in an efficient fashion to create value for all concerned. By example, large environmental researchers analyze large map data to extract hydrologic information from topography. However, processing these data and other tasks is hard – sometimes impossible – in minimal resource environments such as desktop systems.

This dissertation demonstrates novel approaches and …

Computational Prediction And Rational Design Of Novel Clusters, Nanoparticles, And Solid State Materials, Alexander S. Ivanov

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The prediction of structure at the atomic level is one of the most fundamental challenges in materials science. Indeed, the structure is arguably the most important piece of information about a material, as it determines pretty much all properties of a material. Knowing the structure, one can analyze a large number of properties of a material, even before it is synthesized – the crucial importance of structure prediction for computational molecular design. This dissertation describes the technique of reliable theoretical predictions and presents the results on the successfully predicted unusual clusters, nanoparticles and solid state materials. The major part of …

Synthesis Of Fluorogenic Probes For Studying Biomass Degradation And Synthesis Of New Antifungal Aminoglycosides, Qian Zhang

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

For the first project, a library of fifteen commercially purchased and synthetic fluorogenic probes were employed for the investigation of biomass degradation using extract of white-rot fungi. These discoveries prove that it is possible to employ fungi for selective degradation or release of hemicelluloses from biomass. This work is supported by Sun Grant Western Regional Center/DOT "Bioprospecting for Enzymes to Break Lignin-Hemicellulose Bond" ($300,000,09/01/2011-08/31/2013)

The second project is focused on synthesizing new aminoglycoside analogs and exploring the potential to revive traditional antibacterial kanamycin as new type of antifungal agents. Although aminoglycosides antibiotics are mainly used as antibacterial agents, this project …

Tropical Arithmetics And Dot Product Representations Of Graphs, Nicole Turner

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In tropical algebras we substitute min or max for the typical addition and then substitute addition for multiplication. A dot product representation of a graph assigns each vertex of the graph a vector such that two edges are adjacent if and only if the dot product of their vectors is greater than some chosen threshold. The resultS of creating dot product representations of graphs using tropical algebras are examined. In particular we examine the tropical dot product dimensions of graphs and establish connections to threshold graphs and the threshold dimension of a graph.

Fake And Spam Messages: Detecting Misinformation During Natural Disasters On Social Media, Meet Rajdev

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

During natural disasters or crises, users on social media tend to easily believe contents of postings related to the events, and retweet the postings, hoping that the postings will be reached by many other users. Unfortunately, there are malicious users who understand the tendency and post misinformation such as spam and fake messages with expecting wider propagation. To resolve the problem, in this paper we conduct a case study of the 2013 Moore Tornado and Hurricane Sandy. Concretely, we (i) understand behaviors of these malicious users; (ii) analyze properties of spam, fake and legitimate messages; (iii) propose flat and hierarchical …

A Study Of The Dayside High-Latitude Ionospheric Electrodynamics During Extended Solar Minimum, Janelle V. Jenniges

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This research investigated how electric fields, currents, and charged particles in Earth's high-latitude ionosphere respond to changing input from the sun. The ionosphere surrounds the entire Earth, makes radio communication possible, and can significantly degrade satellite communications and geo-positioning (navigation) capabilities. Many satellites fly within the ionosphere where a solar storm can cause increased satellite drag or destroy onboard electronics. Therefore, understanding and correctly predicting the behavior of this environment is important, and the results from this research will be used to improve current ionospheric models.

A relationship between the level of magnetic activity on Earth due to changes in …

A Chronostratigraphic Record Of Arroyo Entrenchment And Aggradation In Kanab Creek, Southern Utah, Kirk F. Townsend

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The purpose of this study is to explore the processes that lead to the formation of arroyos. Arroyos are entrenched stream channels with steep sides that form by incision into valley-fill sediment, and are common features throughout the southwest United States. Many of these systems formed during the late AD 1800s and early 1900s in one of the most significant historic geomorphic events in the region. At this time, former river floodplains were abandoned, creating terraces. This caused a decline in local water tables and associated changes in stream discharge, vegetative communities, and the ability to irrigate once fertile floodplains. …

Linking Form And Process In Braided Rivers Using Physical And Numerical Models, Alan Kasprak

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Braided rivers are characterized by their dynamic nature, and are often significantly reshaped during each flood capable of transporting sediment. Over time, they adjust in response to the frequency and magnitude of floods, along with the amount of sediment available for bar building. Factors such as climate change, dam construction, or land use alteration that change the amount of sediment or water available to braided rivers may subsequently affect channel form. One avenue toward understanding braided channel evolution is to develop simple relationships between channel form and sediment transport, and extrapolate those relationships over extended timescales. With funding from the …

Relative Toxicity Of Select Dehydropyrrolizidine Alkaloids And Evaluation Of A Heterozygous P53 Knockout Mouse Model For Dehydropyrrolizidine Alkaloid Induced Carcinogenesis, Ammon W. Brown

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Dehydropyrrolizidine alkaloids (DHPAs) are toxins produced by approximately 3% of the world’s flowering plants that can be present naturally or as contaminants in animal feed and the human food supply. Many of these compounds have been determined to cause cancer in animals and probably also cause cancer in humans. Due to the difficulty in obtaining sufficient amounts of pure DHPAs most toxicity research has been done via injection of a small amount into the abdomen of a rodent, although natural exposure is exclusively oral. For the same reason, cancer research is limited to a handful of the hundreds of known …

Digital Soil Mapping Using Landscape Stratification For Arid Rangelands In The Eastern Great Basin, Central Utah, Brook B. Fonnesbeck

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In some parts of the western US there is limited publicly available soil information that can be used to make land management decisions on both public and private land. A goal of the USDI Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Utah was to map an area in central Utah where such soil maps and value-added information was not available for management and restoration decisions following a wildfire. In 2007, the Milford Flat Fire had burned more than 363,000 acres, removing vegetation that was holding erosion-sensitive soils in place. Following inconsistent results from stabilization and restoration efforts, this study was funded …

Altitudinal Variability Of Quiet-Time Plasma Drifts In The Equatorial Ionosphere, Debrup Hui

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the modern world, we increasingly depend on space-based systems for our communication, positioning, and navigation systems. These systems depend on electromagnetic waves propagating through the ionosphere. The ionosphere is the medium in the upper atmosphere where, due to presence of the charged atomic and molecular particles and electrons collectively known as plasma, it influences the traveling electromagnetic waves following laws of electrodynamics. Improved models for predicting space weather conditions require improved knowledge of the drifts of these plasmas in the ionosphere. This study is focused on climatology of the altitudinal variations of these plasma drifts in the equatorial latitudes. …

Optical Characterization Of Carbon Nanotube Forests, Brian D. Wood

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Carbon nanotube forests are vertically grown tubular formations of graphene. Due to their inherent microstructure and geometry, they are ideal light absorbers over a broad spectrum, making this material an excellent absorber in applications such as radiometry, optical calibration, and stray light suppression. Samples were made with several growth conditions and substrates to provide forests of different morphologies. Optical data of these samples were gathered by taking spectroscopic reflectance and transmittance measurements in the mid-infrared spectral range. Results were correlated to the various forest morphologies. From this, the conditions necessary to maximize the absorption of the forests were found and …

Great Salt Lake Past And Present: Elevation And Salinity Changes To Utah's Great Salt Lake From Railroad Causeway Alterations, James S. White

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Utah's Great Salt Lake contributes and estimated $1.3 billion to the local and regional economy and is a vital food-source for migratory and resident birds. In 1959, the lake was fundamentally changed with construction of an earth-filled, semi-permeable railroad causeway which splits the lake into two "arms". The only flow interaction between these two arms is through the semi-permeable causeway material, and three openings in the causeway. In 2013, two of these causeway openings were closed, and a bridge was proposed to improve flow between arms. Four bridge designs were proposed. I modeled Great Salt Lake water and salt distribution …

Improving Reuse Of Distributed Transaction Software With Transaction-Aware Aspects, Anas Ahmad Alsobeh

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Implementing crosscutting concerns for transactions is difficult, even using Aspect-Oriented Programming Languages (AOPLs) such as AspectJ. Many of these challenges arise because the context of a transaction-related crosscutting concern consists of loosely-coupled abstractions like dynamically-generated identifiers, timestamps, and tentative value sets of distributed resources. Current AOPLs do not provide joinpoints and pointcuts for weaving advice into high-level abstractions or contexts, like transaction contexts. Other challenges stem from the essential complexity in the nature of the data, operations on the data, or the volume of data, and accidental complexity comes from the way that the problem is being solved, even using …

Classification Of Five-Dimensional Lie Algebras With One-Dimensional Subalgebras Acting As Subalgebras Of The Lorentz Algebra, Jordan Rozum

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Motivated by A. Z. Petrov's classification of four-dimensional Lorentzian metrics, we provide an algebraic classification of the isometry-isotropy pairs of four-dimensional pseudo-Riemannian metrics admitting local slices with five-dimensional isometries contained in the Lorentz algebra. A purely Lie algebraic approach is applied with emphasis on the use of Lie theoretic invariants to distinguish invariant algebra-subalgebra pairs. This method yields an algorithm for identifying isometry-isotropy pairs subject to the aforementioned constraints.

Modeling Seed Dispersal And Population Migration Given A Distribution Of Seed Handling Times And Variable Dispersal Motility: Case Study For Pinyon And Juniper In Utah, Ram C. Neupane

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The spread of fruiting tree species is strongly determined by the behavior and range of fruit-eating animals, particularly birds. Birds either consume and digest seeds or carry and cache them at some distance from the source tree. These carried and settled seeds provide some form of distribution which generates tree spread to the new location. Firstly, we modal seed dispersal by birds and introduce it in a dispersal model to estimate seed distribution. Using this distribution, we create a population model to estimate the speed at which juniper and pinyon forest boundaries move.

Secondly, we introduce a fact that bird …

Explicit Construction Of First Integrals For The Toda Flow On A Classical Simple Lie Algebra, Patrick Seegmiller

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Toda flow is a generalization of a dynamical system describing the interaction of particles in a one-dimensional crystal. The concepts and energy and conservation are prominent in the study of dynamical systems, and quantities which remain the same over the evolution of a system provide valuable insights into the system’s behavior. In the realm of mathematics these quantities are called first integrals, or integrals of motion. This paper provides a background for study of the Toda flow, a verification of its integrability, and programming code for finding these quantities which remain unchanged over the evolution of the system.

Factors Related To Successful Completion Of Developmental Mathematics Courses, Jason Bagley

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The goal of this research was to identify factors that contribute to students’ achievement in developmental math courses. This research collected information on several factors which have been suggested to have an effect on student achievement, particularly in developmental math courses at Utah State University, and analyzed their effects on student achievement. The literature review identified several factors that appeared related to student achievement, but many of these studies only analyzed a few factors. Very few studies have tried to analyze multiple variables together to try and identify which factors contribute most to student achievement and which observations can be …

Sequence Stratigraphy, Depositional Environments And Geochemistry Of The Middle Cambrian Bloomington Formation In Northern Utah, Christopher Ryan Jensen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Bloomington Formation (~425 m thick) is a latest Middle Cambrian (~506.5-505 Ma.), mixed warm water, carbonate and shale unit on the Cordilleran passive margin in northern Utah and southern Idaho. The Hodges Shale and Calls Fort Shale Members are shale dominated and the Middle Limestone Member is a thick carbonate. Fossil diversity and abundance is surprisingly low for a Middle Cambrian carbonate/shale formation. Present, however, are 10-50 cm thrombolite mud mounds, associated with Girvanella oncoliths. These mud mounds represent shallow water carbonates that experienced a small flooding event that gives the mud mounds time and proper conditions to build …

The Role Of Thermospheric Neutral Winds In The Mid-Latitude Ionospheric Evening Anomalies, Levan Lomidze

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Earth's ionosphere, which is the ionized part of the upper atmosphere, plays a very important role in ground- and satellite-based radio communication and navigation. During the last half century, a considerable experimental, theoretical, and modeling effort has been directed towards understanding the physical processes that affect the variation of the ionization in the ionosphere at various spatial and temporal scales. Even though tremendous progress has been made in many directions of ionospheric research, many questions remain to be answered.

One of the intriguing features in the ionosphere is an anomalous evening enhancement that occurs over certain mid-latitude locations, where …

Cultural Entropy: A Grounded Theory Study Of Early Childhood Experiences In Nature In The Arroyo Grande Creek Watershed, Nathaniel Miles Millard

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Through support from a Quinney Fellowship and the Institute of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism in the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University, the theory of cultural entropy emerged as an explanation for changing behavior across generations of people living in the Arroyo Grande Creek watershed. Through a trounded theory methodology data collection around early childhood experiences with nature leading towards positive civic engagement with the community, the theory of cultural entropy emerged along with a policy recommendation for reconnecting the community to the local watershed.

Lifelong residents participating in the research were found to have high levels …

Statistical Dependence In Imputed High-Dimensional Data For A Colorectal Cancer Study, Anvar Suyundikov

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The research objective of this dissertation was to provide novel statistical methods to fill potential gaps in the analyses of micro-ribonucleic acid (miRNA) data, and consequently to identify the miRNAs that contribute to cancer development. Mainly, this dissertation addressed the statistical issues raised by the statistical dependence of imputed (i.e., the missing data were replaced with substituted values) miRNA data in the colorectal cancer study. This dissertation presented a modified imputation method, the weighted KNN imputation accounting for dependence, that predicted the expression levels of missing normal samples with greater imputation accuracy than other imputation methods, and had moderate power …

Multi-Scale Modeling Of Microbial Defection In The Presence Of Antibiotics, Darshan Dilip Nahar

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Limited environmental resources push life into competition. In terms of microbes, we assume that the only goal is to grow and competition means to grow faster than the peers. Organisms tend to adapt to their environmental conditions and improve their efficiency in using the common resources to grow faster. While different organisms compete they engage into various social behaviors like cooperation to work together towards a common goal, e.g., production of public goods that benefits the entire population. Hence a part of the resources at hand is dedicated to participate in cooperative activities if the cost-to-benefit ratio is less than …

Pathway Pioneer: Heterogeneous Server Architecture For Scientific Visualization And Pathway Search In Metabolic Network Using Informed Search, Vipul Kantilal Oswal

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

PathwayPioneer is a website to visualize the biological models. The complex metabolic models are hard to perceive when read through text format. It is even more difficult to understand the flow of network and different subsystem or pathways. PathwayPioneer organizes different subsystems into simple graphical representation. We simplify the complex network based on subsystem and compartment. Users can do computation (flux balance analysis) through the user interface and perceive the changed model visually. Our system is one of its kind to handle large model files with quick response time.

Biologists are often interested in knowing different alternative pathways targeting a …

Multiversejava, Vishal Sharma

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Sequenced semantics, which was first proposed in the context of temporal databases, is the semantics for the evaluation of a program on values annotated with time metadata. The time metadata records when each value is “live” (is valid or has existence). Sequenced semantics stipulates that a computation on values annotated with temporal metadata must be equivalent to, in effect, running the computation at every time point with only the values alive at that time. Sequenced semantics is challenging to program because it is more than just a re-interpretation of the run-time behavior of a program; for instance, a sequenced “if-else” …

Minimizing Aggregate Movements For Interval Coverage, Aaron M. Andrews

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

We present an efficient algorithm for solving an interval coverage problem. Given n intervals of the same length on a line L and a line segment B on L, we want to move the intervals along L such that every point of B is covered by at least one interval and the sum of the moving distances of all intervals is minimized. As a fundamental computational geometry problem, it has applications in mobile sensor barrier coverage in wireless sensor networks. The previous work gave an O(n²) time algorithm for it. In this thesis, by discovering …

The Kimama Core: A 6.4 Ma Record Of Volcanism, Sedimentation, And Magma Petrogenesis On The Axial Volcanic High, Snake River Plain, Id, Katherine Elizabeth Potter

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Snake River Plain (SRP) is one of the best-preserved examples of continental hotspot volcanis, with a continuous record of volcanism that extends over 16 Ma to the present. Yellowstone-Snake River Plain records the migration of plume-tail volcanism from inception at the Bruneau-Jarbridge caldera complex at 12.6 Ma to its present locus, under the Yellowstone Plateau.

Records kept by the Snake River Plain volcanic actions include rhyolite lavas and ignimbritesm minor coeval basalts, and an overlying veneer of younger basalts. The central SRP has received comparatively little attention in the past. The Kimama core hole was drilled as part of …

Online Media Use And Adoption By Hurricane Sandy Affected Fire And Police Departments, Apoorva Chauhan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In this thesis work, I examine the use and adoption of online communication media by 840 fire and police departments that were affected by the 2012 Hurricane Sandy. I began by exploring how and why these fire and police departments used (or did not use) online media to communicate with the public during Hurricane Sandy. Results show that fire and police departments used online media during Hurricane Sandy to give timely and relevant information to the public about things such as evacuations, damages, weather, and cleanup and to engage in two-way communications with their constituents. In their messages, fire and …

Fault And Fluid Interactions In The Elsinore Fault-West Salton Detachment Fault Damage Zones, Agua Caliente County Park, California, Rebekah Erin Wood

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This study area provides a unique opportunity to study the intersection of the Elsinore and West Salton detachment faults in southern California, effusing warm springs, and alteration products in the midst of the fault intersection. Structural mapping and compiling previous maps supply an interpretation of the fault zone geometries within the Tierra Blanca Mountains. Geochemical analysis of the crystalline basement and altered protolith help determine the effects of faulting and fluid flow in the study area. In the Tierra Blanca Mountains, the Elsinore strike-slip fault system transitions from the double-stranded Julian segment and Earthquake Valley fault in the northwest, to …

Exploring Visitor Attitudes Toward The Proposed Greater Canyonlands National Monument: A Survey In Utah's Indian Creek Corridor, Chase C. Lamborn

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In August of 2012, the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) sent a letter to President Barack Obama asking him to designate the Greater Canyonlands National Monument (GCNM). The proposed 1.4 million acre national monument would surround the already present 337,570 acre Canyonlands National Park, and would include public lands/waterways from five Utah counties. The OIA’s goal for the GCNM is to preserve the landscape for quality outdoor recreation by decreasing the amount of off-highway vehicle use and to eliminate the possibility of oil/gas drilling and mining. Given the proposal highlights outdoor recreation use benefits as the main catalyst for justification of …