Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Relativistic R-Matrix Theory, Janina Grineviciute

Dissertations

We have developed a relativistic coupled{channel reaction theory in which binary break-up channels satisfy a relative Dirac equation. This theory is developed by extending the R-matrix formalism of Lane and Thomas to the relativistic case and implementing the Dirac oscillator basis. The motivation for this project is testing po- tentials for the dense matter calculations and generating relativistic wave functions for the nal states in the knockout reactions. As an example of the formalism we have calculated observables for the proton scattering on light-to-medium weight nuclei in the relativistic impulse approximation using the relativistic Love-Franey amplitudes of Horowitz. The R-matrix …

Summative Confidence, Paul Cristian Gugiu

Dissertations

Often the singular goal of an evaluation is to render a summative conclusion of merit, worth or feasibility that is based on multiple streams of multidimensional data. Exacerbating this difficulty, conducting evaluations in real-world settings often necessitates implementation of less than ideal study designs. This reality gets further complicated by the standard method for estimating the precision of results via the confidence interval (CI). Traditional CIs offer a limited approach for understanding the precision of a summative conclusion. This dissertation develops and presents a unified approach for the construction of a CI for a summative conclusion (SC).

This study derived …

Modular And Graceful Edge Colorings Of Graphs, Ryan Jones

Dissertations

Abstract attached as separate file.

Hamiltonicity And Connectivity In Distance-Colored Graphs, Kyle C. Kolasinski

Dissertations

Abstract attached as separate file.

Commissioning Of The Helical Orbit Spectrometer: A New Device For Measuring Nuclear Reactions In Inverse Kinematics, Jonathan C. Lighthall

Dissertations

The Helical Orbit Spectrometer (HELIOS) at Argonne National Laboratory is the first implementation of a radical new concept for measuring nuclear reactions. Direct nuclear transfer reactions are powerful tools for studying the properties of the atomic nucleus. A traditional example is the neutron-transfer reaction (d ,p), wherein an accelerated beam of deuterons d bombards a heavy target. The incoming deuteron transfers a neutron to the target nucleus and the outgoing proton p is detected to study the properties of the residual heavy nucleus. A new frontier of nuclear reaction studies involving short-lived exotic nuclei—which are unsuitable for use …

Characterizing Potential Sustainable Energy Feedstocks, Jesse George Thompson

Dissertations

Trap grease offers a promising and less expensive alternative to food grade vegetable oils for biodiesel production, but its commercial marketability could be affected by its intense and offensive odor. Identification, quantitation and eventual elimination of the odorant compounds are vital challenges that need to be addressed before commercialization can be achieved. A rapid method using HS-SPME and GC/MS was developed in this study to identify and quantify the major volatile odorant compounds present in trap grease. The main odorant compounds were identified as short chain free fatty acids (SC-FFA) from C₄ - C₁₀.

Sensory evaluations by …

Glucosamine-Induced Insulin Resistance In Primary Rat Hepatocytes And The Role Of Selenium As An Insulin Mimetic, Sandhya N. Adiyodi Veetil

Dissertations

Type 2 diabetes is mediated by insulin resistance, the inability of insulin to elicit a normal biological response in insulin responsive tissues. Several cellular models have been utilized to determine the mechanism of induction of insulin resistance but questions remain unanswered. One model, implicates the products of the Hexosamine Biosynthetic Pathway (HBP) in the induction of insulin resistance under hyperglycemia. The major end product of HBP, UDP-GlcNAc, is the substrate for O-GlcNAc transferase, an enzyme that catalyzes the O-GlcNAcylation of numerous proteins. This modification may play a role in induction of insulin resistance and thus needs to be evaluated in …

Spectroscopic Study Of New Sensors For Organophosphates, Metals, And Cyanide Based On Rhodamine And Cholic Acid Derivatives, Arambe Gedara Aruna Weerasinghe

Dissertations

Despite the increasing interest in developing sensors for nerve gas agents, efficient detection remains challenging. Among the various sensors developed so far, fluorescence sensors play an important role due to their simplicity. We developed six new rhodamine-based compounds that can be used as fluorescent turn-on sensors. Compound 1 and 3 gave high fluorescent enhancement with diethyl chlorophosphate (DCP) compared to the other compounds. Very high selectivity and sensitivity were observed as these compounds did not show significant fluorescent enhancement with dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), HC1 and transition metal ions. The potential sensor can be used in solution as well as on …

Robust Nonparametric Methods For Regression To The Mean Model, Therawat Wisadrattanapong

Dissertations

Regression to the mean is a statistical phenomenon that often confounds treatment effects in experiments. Consider an experiment involving a treatment, in which a response is measured (baseline) on a subject then a treatment is applied and a second measurement is taken. Then under many bivariate models for the pair of responses (including the bivariate normal), the predicted response of the second measurement will regress to the mean. In experiments where the second response is only taken for a select sample, say above a cutoff value, then this regression to the mean effect may mistakenly be thought of as a …

An Analog Experiment Comparing Goal-Free Evaluation And Goal Achievement Evaluation Utility, Brandon W. Youker

Dissertations

Goal-free evaluation (GFE) is the process of determining the merit of an evaluand independent of the stated or implied goals and objectives, whereas goal achievement evaluation (GAE), as the most rudimentary form of goal-based evaluation, determines merit according to the evaluand’s level of accomplishment with regard to its goals. This study examines the utility of GAE and GFE from the perspective of the evaluation’s intended users. In the study, two evaluation teams, goal achievement and goal-free, independently and simultaneously evaluate the same human service program. Each team produced a final evaluation report, which was read by the evaluation’s users, who …

Leach-Sm: A Protocol For Extending Wireless Sensor Network Lifetime By Management Of Spare Nodes, Bilal Abu Bakr

Dissertations

Operational lifetime of a wireless sensor network (WSN) depends on its energy resources. Significant improvement of WSN lifetime can be achieved by adding spare sensor nodes to WSN. Spares are ready to be switched on when any primary (a node that is not a spare) exhausts its energy. A spare replacing a primary becomes a primary itself.

The LEACH-SM protocol (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy with Spare Management) proposed by us is a modification of the prominent LEACH protocol. LEACH extends WSN lifetime via rotation of cluster heads but allows for inefficiencies due to redundant sensing target coverage. There are two …

Robust Adaptive Scheme For Linear Mixed Models, Gabriel Asare Okyere

Dissertations

If the underlying distribution of a statistical model is known then a procedure which maximizes power and efficiency can be selected. For example, if the distribution of errors is known to be normal in a linear model then inference based on least squares maximizes power and efficiency. More generally, if this distribution is known then a ranked based inference based on the appropriate rank score function has maximum efficiency. In practice, though, this distribution is not known. Adaptive schemes are procedures which hopefully select appropriate methods to optimize the analysis.

Hogg (1974) presented an adaptive rank-based scheme for testing in …

Performance Of Bfsa Based Anti-Collision Protocols For Rfid Networks Supporting Identical Tags, Kirti Chemburkar

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a powerful emerging technology widely used for asset tracking, supply chain management, animal identification, military applications, payment systems, and access control. Over the years, RFID has emerged as a popular technology in various industries because of its ability to track moving objects. As RFID is becoming less expensive and more robust, many companies and vendors are developing tags to track objects. Multiple vendors manufacture RFID tags worldwide. Therefore, it is quite possible that they manufacture tags with the same identification code (ID) as vendor ID code data sets may not be synchronized or may be …

Structural Characterization Of Water-Soluble Atmospheric Organic Matter By Ultrahigh-Resolution Mass Spectrometry, Jeffrey P. Leclair

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Isolated water-soluble analytes extracted from fog water collected during a radiation fog event near Fresno, CA were analyzed using collision induced dissociation and ultrahigh-resolution mass spectrometry. Tandem mass analysis was performed on scan ranges between 100-400 u to characterize the structures of nitrogen and/or sulfur containing species. CHNO, CHOS, and CHNOS compounds were targeted specifically because of the high number of oxygen atoms contained in their molecular formulas. The presence of 22 neutral losses corresponding to fragment ions was evaluated for each of the 1308 precursors. Priority neutral losses represent specific polar functional groups (H2O, CO2, CH3OH, HNO3, SO3, etc., …

Synthesis Of Chiral Ferrosalen Ligands And Their Applications In Asymmetric Catalysis, Xiang Zhang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

A new series of chiral ferrosalen ligands was designed and synthesized. The special feature of the ferrosalen ligands is that the chirality originated from the planar chiral ferrocenyl structure. For most known salen ligands, chirality comes from central and axial chiral centers. The key building block for the construction of these ferrosalen ligands was synthesized stereoselectively by a chiral auxiliary approach. This approach does not consume any chiral material, and does not require chiral HPLC resolution. Using this method, nine ligands were prepared using ferrocene as the starting material. In addition, the steric hindrance was modulated by changing the cyclopentadienyl …

Quantum Transport In A Single Molecular Junction, Partha Pratim Pal

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

The craze for faster and smaller electronic devices has never gone down and this has always kept researchers on their toes. Following Moore’s law, which states that the number of transistors in a single chip will double in every 18 months, today “30 million transistors can fit into the head of a 1.5 mm diameter pin”. But this miniaturization cannot continue indefinitely due to the ‘quantum leakage’ limit in the thickness of the insulating layer between the gate electrode and the current carrying channel. To bypass this limitation, scientists came up with the idea of using vastly available organic molecules …

Planar Magneto-Photonic And Gradient-Photonic Structures : Crystals And Metamaterials., Zhuoyuan Wu

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

In the field of photonics, two new types of material structures, photonic crystals and metamaterials, are presently of great interest. Both are studied in the present work, which focus on planar magnetic materials in the former and planar gradient metamaterials in the latter. These planar periodic structures are easy to handle and integrate into optical systems. The applications are promising field for future optical telecommunication systems and give rise to new optical, microwave and radio technologies.

The photonic crystal part emphasizes the utilization of magnetic material based photonic crystals due to its remarkable magneto-optical characteristics. Bandgaps tuning by magnetic field …

Applications Of Finite Geometries To Designs And Codes, David C. Clark

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

This dissertation concerns the intersection of three areas of discrete mathematics: finite geometries, design theory, and coding theory. The central theme is the power of finite geometry designs, which are constructed from the points and t-dimensional subspaces of a projective or affine geometry. We use these designs to construct and analyze combinatorial objects which inherit their best properties from these geometric structures.

A central question in the study of finite geometry designs is Hamada’s conjecture, which proposes that finite geometry designs are the unique designs with minimum p-rank among all designs with the same parameters. In this dissertation, we will …

Using Water Balance Models To Approximate The Effects Of Climate Change On Spring Catchment Discharge : Mt. Hanang, Tanzania , Randall E. Fish

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

This project addresses the potential impacts of changing climate on dry-season water storage and discharge from a small, mountain catchment in Tanzania. Villagers and water managers around the catchment have experienced worsening water scarcity and attribute it to increasing population and demand, but very little has been done to understand the physical characteristics and hydrological behavior of the spring catchment. The physical nature of the aquifer was characterized and water balance models were calibrated to discharge observations so as to be able to explore relative changes in aquifer storage resulting from climate changes.

To characterize the shallow aquifer supplying water …

"The Need Obliged Us" : Culture As Capacity During The Hurricane Stan Emergency Response. A Case Study From Tectitan, Huehuetenango, Guatemala , Jesse Silverman

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

A major deficiency in disaster management plans is the assumption that pre-disaster civil-society does not have the capacity to respond effectively during crises. Following from this assumption a dominant emergency management strategy is to replace weak civil-society organizations with specialized disaster organizations that are often either military or Para-military and seek to centralize decision-making. Many criticisms have been made of this approach, but few specifically addresses disasters in the developing world. Disasters in the developing world present unique problems not seen in the developed world because they often occur in the context of compromised governments, and marginalized populations. In this …

Cyclic Automorphic Graph Decompositions , Michael Li Misson

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Chapter 1 introduces the tools and mechanics necessary for this report. Basic definitions and topics of graph theory which pertain to the report and discussion of automorphic decompositions will be covered in brief detail. An automorphic decomposition D of a graph H by a graph G is a G-decomposition of H such that the intersection of graph (D) @H. H is called the automorhpic host, and G is the automorphic divisor. We seek to find classes of graphs that are automorphic divisors, specifically ones generated cyclically.

Chapter 2 discusses the previous work done mainly by Beeler. …

Characterizing A Single Photon Detector, Paul N. Rojas

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

I will present my work about constructing and characterizing a single photon detector. Using the 1550nm laser and second harmonic light generation, I am able to count single photons on a Multi‐Pixel Photon Counter (MPPC) silicon APD. My results show that upwards of 22% quantum efficiency is achievable with the MPPC. Future work will include coincidence detection of correlated photon‐pair.

Four-Window Technique For Measuring Optical-Phase-Space-Time-Frequency Tomography, Rachel A. Blaser

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

A new approach, the four-window technique, was developed to measure optical phase-space-time-frequency tomography (OPSTFT). The four-window technique is based on balanced heterodyne detection with two local oscillator (LO) fields. This technique can provide independent control of position, momentum, time and frequency resolution. The OPSTFT is a Wigner distribution function of two independent Fourier transform pairs, phase-space and time-frequency. The OPSTFT can be applied for early disease detection.

Privacy-Preserving Assessment Of Location Data Trustworthiness, Chenyun Dai, Fang-Yu Rao, Gabriel Ghinita, Elisa Bertino

Cyber Center Publications

Assessing the trustworthiness of location data corresponding to individuals is essential in several applications, such as forensic science and epidemic control. To obtain accurate and trustworthy location data, analysts must often gather and correlate information from several independent sources, e.g., physical observation, witness testimony, surveillance footage, etc. However, such information may be fraudulent, its accuracy may be low, and its vol-
ume may be insufficient to ensure highly trustworthy data. On the other hand, recent advancements in mobile computing and positioning systems, e.g., GPS-enabled cell phones, highway sensors, etc., bring new and effective technological means to track the location of …

Balloon Borne Mars Research Platforms, Sean Michael Hancock

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Aerial platforms can fill a measurement gap between orbiters and rovers, providing planetary scale high resolution in situ measurements, access to scientifically interesting terrain that is either inaccessible or hazardous to rovers, and serve as a planet-wide delivery platforms to deploy surface probes and rovers to areas inaccessible given existing entry, descent, and landing systems. A permanent robotic outpost on the Martian surface can utilize locally-derived hydrogen as a lifting gas for balloon systems deployed from Mars. That approach can simplify the inflation and launch of aerial vehicles while allowing for a long duration deployment campaign that is not constrained …

Solving The Teacher Assignment Problem By Two Metaheuristics, Aldy Gunawan, Kien Ming Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The timetabling problem arising from a university in Indonesia is addressed in this paper.It involves the assignment of teachers to the courses and course sections. We formulate theproblem as a mathematical programming model. Two different algorithms, mainly basedon simulated annealing (SA) and tabu search (TS) algorithms, are proposed for solving theproblem. The proposed algorithms consist of two phases. The first phase involves allocatingthe teachers to the courses and determining the number of courses to be assigned to eachteacher. The second phase involves assigning the teachers to the course sections in order tobalance the teachers’ load. The performance of the proposed …

Efficient Strong Designated Verifier Signature Schemes Without Random Oracle Or With Non-Delegatability, Qiong Huang, Guomin Yang, Duncan S. Wong, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Designated verifier signature (DVS) allows a signer to convince a designated verifier that a signature is generated by the signer without letting the verifier transfer the conviction to others, while the public can still tell that the signature must be generated by one of them. Strong DVS (SDVS) strengthens the latter part by restricting the public from telling whether the signature is generated by one of them or by someone else. In this paper, we propose two new SDVS schemes. Compared with existing SDVS schemes, the first new scheme has almost the same signature size and meanwhile, is proven secure …

Identity-Based Strong Designated Verifier Signature Revisited, Qiong Huang, Guomin Yang, Duncan S. Wong, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Designated verifier signature (DVS) allows the signer to persuade a verifier the validity of a statement but prevent the verifier from transferring the conviction. Strong designated verifier signature (SDVS) is a variant of DVS, which only allows the verifier to privately check the validity of the signer’s signature. In this work we observe that the unforgeability model considered in the existing identity-based SDVS schemes is not strong enough to capture practical attacks, and propose to consider another model which is shown to be strictly stronger than the old one. We then propose a new efficient construction of identity-based SDVS scheme, …

Near-Duplicate Keyframe Retrieval By Semi-Supervised Learning And Nonrigid Image Matching, Jianke Zhu, Steven C. H. Hoi, Michael R. Lyu, Shuicheng Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Near-duplicate keyframe (NDK) retrieval techniques are critical to many real-world multimedia applications. Over the last few years, we have witnessed a surge of attention on studying near-duplicate image/keyframe retrieval in multimedia community. To facilitate an effective approach to NDK retrieval on large-scale data, we suggest an effective Multi-Level Ranking (MLR) scheme that effectively retrieves NDKs in a coarse-to-fine manner. One key stage of the MLR ranking scheme is how to learn an effective ranking function with extremely small training examples in a near-duplicate detection task. To attack this challenge, we employ a semi-supervised learning method, semi-supervised support vector machines, which …

A Qualitative Approach To Spiral Of Silence Research: Self-Censorship Narratives Regarding Environmental And Social Conflict, Christopher John Ryan

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The purpose of this research is to seek narratives of self-censorship from in-depth interviews of 19 participants acquired through a purposive (criterion) sampling protocol. The primary research question driving this study is “What types of sanctions contribute to people choosing to self-censor their strongly held beliefs, values, and opinions.” Previous research conducted on the topic of self-censorship (generally under the rubric of the spiral of silence theory) has been predominantly quantitative and consideration of sanctions influencing self-censorship have been limited to fear of social isolation. I suggest that ostensibly important sanction variables have not been utilized within these existing frameworks. …