Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Multifunctional Heterocyclic Scaffolds For Hybrid Lewis Acid/Lewis Base Catalysis Of Carbon–Carbon Bond Formation, Dennis Wiedenhoeft, Adam R. Benoit, Yibiao Wu, Jacob D. Porter, Elisia Meyle, Teresa H.W. Yeung, Raechel Huff, Sergey V. Lindeman, Chris Dockendorff

Chemistry Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

How The Magnitude Of Prey Genetic Variation Alters Predator-Prey Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics, Michael H. Cortez

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications

Evolution can alter the stability and dynamics of ecological communities; for example, prey evolution can drive cyclic dynamics in predator-prey systems that are not possible in the absence of evolution. However, it is unclear how the magnitude of additive genetic variation in the evolving species mediates those effects. In this study, I explore how the magnitude of prey additive genetic variation determines what effects prey evolution has on the dynamics and stability of predator-prey systems. I use linear stability analysis to decompose the stability of a general eco-evolutionary predator-prey model into components representing the stabilities of the ecological and evolutionary …

Bacteria And Archaea Diversity Within The Hot Springs Of Lake Magadi And Little Magadi In Kenya, Anne Kelly Kambura, Romano Kachiuru Mwirichia, Remmy Wekesa Kasili, Edward Nderitu Karanja, Huxley Mae Makonde, Hamadi Iddi Boga

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Background: Lake Magadi and little Magadi are hypersaline, alkaline lakes situated in the southern part of Kenyan Rift Valley. Solutes are supplied mainly by a series of alkaline hot springs with temperatures as high as 86 °C. Previous culture-dependent and culture-independent studies have revealed diverse groups of microorganisms thriving under these conditions. Previous culture independent studies were based on the analysis of 16S rDNA but were done on less saline lakes. For the first time, this study combined illumina sequencing and analysis of amplicons of both total community rDNA and 16S rRNA cDNA to determine the diversity and community structure …

Layered Xerogel Films Incorporating Monolayer Protected Cluster Networks On Platinum Black Modified Electrodes For Enhanced Sensitivity In 1st Generation Uric Acid Biosensing, Mulugeta B. Wayu, Michael J. Pannell, Michael C. Leopold

Chemistry Faculty Publications

Amperometric uric acid (UA) biosensing schemes incorporating networks of alkanethiolate‐protected gold nanoparticles, monolayer protected clusters (MPCs), and platinum black (Pt‐B) electrode modification through the layer‐by‐layer construction of xerogels are investigated. MPC doping and Pt‐B augmentation are implemented within hydroxymethyltriethoxysilane xerogel bilayers at platinum electrodes. The first xerogel adlayer is doped with an MPC network and houses uricase for the enzymatic reaction required for first‐generation schemes. Polyluminol–aniline and polyurethane are used as selective/stabilizing interfacial layers. The sensing performance with and without Pt‐B and/or MPC doping is assessed by amperometry with standardized UA injections. The use of each individual material results in …

Low-Cost Hab Platform To Measure Particulate Matter In The Troposphere, Mark J. Potosnak, Bernhard Beck-Winchatz, Paul Ritter

2017 Academic High Altitude Conference

High-altitude balloons (HABs) are an engaging platform for formal and informal STEM education. However, the logistics of launching, chasing and recovering a payload on a 1200 g or 1500 g balloon can be daunting for many novice school groups and citizen scientists, and the cost can be prohibitive. In addition, there are many interesting scientific applications that do not require reaching the stratosphere. In this poster presentation we discuss a novel approach based on small (30 g) balloons that are cheap and easy to handle, and low-cost tracking devices (SPOT and 900 MHz spread spectrum) that do not require a …

Review Of Sustainable Energy -- Without The Hot Air By David Mackay (2009), Kira Hamman

Numeracy

David MacKay. Sustainable Energy: Without the hot air. (Cambridge, England: UIT Cambridge Ltd., 2009). 384 pp. ISBN 978-0954452933 (also available as a free e-book).

Physicist David MacKay transforms what has historically been a debate fraught with skepticism and hysteria into an informed conversation. He does this by providing clear, accurate quantitative information on energy production and consumption in a form that allows comparison and invites thoughtful analysis. By recalibrating power into kilowatt-hours per day per person, he makes the numbers meaningful on an individual level. He then meticulously estimates the productive capacity of various renewable energy sources, explores alternative …

On A Desert Island With Unit Sticks, Continued Fractions And Lagrange, Victor J. Ricchezza, H. L. Vacher

Numeracy

GLY 4866, Computational Geology, provides an opportunity, welcomed by our faculty, to teach quantitative literacy to geology majors at USF. The course continues to evolve although the second author has been teaching it for some 20 years. This paper describes our experiences with a new lab activity that we are developing on the core issue of measurement and units. The activity is inspired by a passage in the 2008 publication of lectures that Joseph Louis Lagrange delivered at the Ecole Normale in 1795. The activity envisions that young scientists are faced with the need to determine the dimensions of a …

U.S. Drought Monitor, July 5, 2016, David Miskus

United States Agricultural Commodities in Drought Archive

Drought map of U.S. for July 5, 2016 (7/5/16) plus: U.S. crop areas experiencing drought (map), Approximate percentage of crop located in drought, by state (bar graph), Percent of crop area located in drought, past 52 weeks (line graph) for: Corn, Soybeans, Hay, Cattle, Winter wheat.

Dango (Doings And Goings On) - Vol. 22 | Issue 7, Matthew Kimball, Haley Stien, Aric Tate, Vicente Rojas, Zhaojia Xi, Caleb Hicks, Paul Carstens, Joshua Daniel Martinez, Mike Daugherity, Reuben Byrd, Donald Isenhower

DANGO: Doings and Goings On: Summer Research Newsletter, Department of Engineering and Physics

Summer Research Newsletter for ACU's Engineering and Physics Department

Stratigraphy And Sedimentology Of The Cretaceous Mowry Shale In The Northern Bighorn Basin Of Wyoming: Implications For Unconventional Resource Exploration And Development, Jordan M. Bremer

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The Mowry Shale (Albian-Cenomanian) is an extensive mudrock dominated unit historically believed to represent a single, long-term deep water sequence within the Western Cordilleran Foreland Basin of North America. While the Mowry Shale has received study for almost a century, detailed stratigraphic context is still lacking. Such an understanding will be required as the formation is increasingly explored as an unconventional resource play.

This study examines the stratigraphy of the interval between the Muddy sandstone and the Frontier Formation, focusing on the Mowry Shale both at outcrop and in the subsurface of the Bighorn Basin of northwestern Wyoming. Detailed measured …

Assessment Of A Mycorrhizal Fungi Application To Treat Stormwater In An Urban Bioswale, Alaina Diane Melville

Dissertations and Theses

This study assessed the effect of an application of mycorrhizal fungi to stormwater filter media on urban bioswale soil and stormwater in an infiltration-based bioswale aged 20 years with established vegetation. The study tested the use of commercially available general purpose biotic soil blend PermaMatrix^® BSP Foundation as a treatment to enhance Earthlite^™ stormwater filter media amelioration of zinc, copper, and phosphorus in an ecologically engineered structure designed to collect and infiltrate urban stormwater runoff before it entered the nearby Willamette River.

These results show that the application of PermaMatrix^® BSP Foundation biotic soil amendment to Earthlite …

Genomics-Informed Isolation And Characterization Of A Symbiotic Nanoarchaeota System From A Terrestrial Geothermal Environment, Louie Wurch, Richard J. Giannone, Bernard S. Belisle, Carolyn Swift, Sagar Utturkar, Robert L. Hettich, Anna-Louise Reysenbach, Mircea Podar

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Biological features can be inferred, based on genomic data, for many microbial lineages that remain uncultured. However, cultivation is important for characterizing an organism’s physiology and testing its genome-encoded potential. Here we use single-cell genomics to infer cultivation conditions for the isolation of an ectosymbiotic Nanoarchaeota (‘Nanopusillus acidilobi’) and its host (Acidilobus, a crenarchaeote) from a terrestrial geothermal environment. The cells of ‘Nanopusillus’ are among the smallest known cellular organisms (100–300 nm). They appear to have a complete genetic information processing machinery, but lack almost all primary biosynthetic functions as well as respiration and …

Search For Direct Pair Production Of Scalar Top Quarks In The Single- And Dilepton Channels In Proton-Proton Collisions At √S= 8 Tev, M M. Baarmand, Vallary Bhopatkar, Stefano Colafranceschi, Marcus Hohlmann, H Kalakhety, D Noonan, Tuhin S. Roy, Francisco X. Yumiceva, Cms Collaboration

Aerospace, Physics, and Space Science Faculty Publications

Results are reported from a search for the top squark t ˜ 1, the lighter of the two supersymmetric partners of the top quark. The data sample corresponds to 19.7 fb−1 of proton-proton collisions at s=8 TeV collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. The search targets t˜1→bχ˜1± and t˜1→t(∗)χ˜10 decay modes, where χ˜1± and χ˜10 are the lightest chargino and neutralino, respectively. The reconstructed final state consists of jets, b jets, missing transverse energy, and either one or two leptons. Leading backgrounds are determined from data. No significant excess in data is observed above the expectation from standard …

Galaxy Zoo: Comparing The Demographics Of Spiral Arm Number And A New Method For Correcting Redshift Bias, Ross E. Hart, Steven P. Bamford, Kyle W. Willett, Karen L. Masters, Carolin Cardamone, Chris J. Lintott, Robert J. Mackay, Robert C. Nichol, Christopher K. Rosslowe, Brooke D. Simmons, Rebecca J. Smethurst

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

The majority of galaxies in the local Universe exhibit spiral structure with a variety of forms. Many galaxies possess two prominent spiral arms, some have more, while others display a many-armed flocculent appearance. Spiral arms are associated with enhanced gas content and star formation in the discs of low-redshift galaxies, so are important in the understanding of star formation in the local universe. As both the visual appearance of spiral structure, and the mechanisms responsible for it vary from galaxy to galaxy, a reliable method for defining spiral samples with different visual morphologies is required. In this paper, we develop …

On Understanding Preference For Agile Methods Among Software Developers, David Brian Bishop, Amit V. Deokar, Surendra Sarnikar

Research & Publications

Agile methods are gaining widespread use in industry. Although management is keen on adopting agile, not all developers exhibit preference for agile methods. The literature is sparse in regard to why developers may show preference for agile. Understanding the factors informing the preference for agile can lead to more effective formation of teams, better training approaches, and optimizing software development efforts by focusing on key desirable components of agile. This study, using a grounded theory methodology, finds a variety of categories of factors that influence software developer preference for agile methods including self-efficacy, affective response, interpersonal response, external contingencies, and …

Synthesis, Characterization, And Pre-Ceramic Properties Of Π-Conjugated Polymers Based On Ni(Ii) Complexes Of Goedken’S Macrocycle, Joseph A. Paquette, Joe Gilroy

Chemistry Publications

Nickel(II) complexes of Goedken’s macrocycle bearing alkyne substituents were copolymerized with 2,7-dibromo-9,9-dihexylfluorene, 2,5-dibromo-3-hexylthiophene, and 1,4-dibromo-2,5-bis(hexyloxy)benzene via microwave-induced Sonogashira cross-coupling reactions to produce copolymers 6F, 6T, and 6B. The spectroscopic and electrochemical properties of the copolymers were examined and compared to model compounds. Specifically, each polymer exhibited a nickel-based absorption centered at ca. 589 nm and two π → π* transitions between 272 and 387 nm. While the copolymers did not exhibit extended π conjugation, the nature of the organic spacer did affect the high energy transitions. Furthermore, each copolymer underwent two ligand-based one-electron oxidations at potentials …

Star Formation In Quasar Hosts And The Origin Of Radio Emission In Radio-Quiet Quasars, Nadia L. Zakamska, Kelly Lampayan, Andreea Petric, Daniel Dicken, Jenny E. Greene, Timothy M. Heckman, Ryan C. Hickox

Dartmouth Scholarship

Radio emission from radio-quiet quasars may be due to star formation in the quasar host galaxy, to a jet launched by the supermassive black hole, or to relativistic particles accelerated in a wide-angle radiatively-driven outflow. In this paper we examine whether radio emission from radio-quiet quasars is a byproduct of star formation in their hosts. To this end we use infrared spectroscopy and photometry from Spitzer and Herschel to estimate or place upper limits on star formation rates in hosts of ~300 obscured and unobscured quasars at z<1. We find that low-ionization forbidden emission lines such as [NeII] and [NeIII] are likely dominated by quasar ionization and do not provide reliable star formation diagnostics in quasar hosts, while PAH emission features may be suppressed due to the destruction of PAH molecules by the quasar radiation field. While the bolometric luminosities of our sources are dominated by the quasars, the 160 micron fluxes are likely dominated by star formation, but they too should be used with caution. We estimate median star formation rates to be 6-29 Msun/year, with obscured quasars at the high end of this range. This star formation rate is insufficient to explain the observed radio emission from quasars by an order of magnitude, with log(L_radio, observed/L_radio, SF)=0.6-1.3 depending on quasar type and star formation estimator. Although radio-quiet quasars in our sample lie close to the 8-1000 micron infrared / radio correlation characteristic of the star-forming galaxies, both their infrared emission and their radio emission are dominated by the quasar activity, not by the host galaxy.

Why Be So Critical? Nineteenth Century Mathematics And The Origins Of Analysis, Janet Heine Barnett

Analysis

No abstract provided.

Henri Lebesgue And The Development Of The Integral Concept, Janet Heine Barnett

Analysis

No abstract provided.

The Failure Of The Euclidean Parallel Postulate And Distance In Hyperbolic Geometry, Jerry Lodder

Geometry

No abstract provided.

College Of Science And Mathematics Newsletter, Summer 2016, College Of Science And Mathematics, Wright State University

College of Science and Mathematics Newsletters

This 5 page newsletter discusses various happenings within the College of Science and Mathematics. It begins with a letter from the dean, and continues on with news, events, alumni news, and other community news.

Impartial Avoidance And Achievement Games For Generating Symmetric And Alternating Groups, Bret J. Benesh, Dana C. Ernst, Nándor Sieben

Mathematics Faculty Publications

Anderson and Harary introduced two impartial games on finite groups. Both games are played by two players who alternately select previously unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who builds a generating set from the jointly-selected elements wins the first game. The first player who cannot select an element without building a generating set loses the second game. We determine the nim-numbers, and therefore the outcomes, of these games for symmetric and alternating groups.

Why Cannot We Have A Strongly Consistent Family Of Skew Normal (And Higher Order) Distributions, Thongchai Dumrongpokaphan, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, the only information that we have about the probability distribution is its first few moments. Since many statistical techniques requires us to select a single distribution, it is therefore desirable to select, out of all possible distributions with these moments, a single "most representative" one. When we know the first two moments, a natural idea is to select a normal distribution. This selection is strongly consistent in the sense that if a random variable is a sum of several independent ones, then selecting normal distribution for all of the terms in the sum leads to a …

Automated Microscopy Platform For High-Throughput Analysis Of Cellular Characteristics, Hussam Ibrahim

Physics: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Existing microscopy platforms allow analysis post-hoc, but not in real time. This is an issue in the world of Bioengineering because you are limited to performing further analysis on specimen. The aim of my research was to design a sophisticated system whereby information can be exchanged between the software which acquires images and software that analyzes the images immediately after acquisition. In this system, images would be acquired by the microscope and analyzed by customized scripts (MATLAB, Mathworks) in real time. Specifically, MATLAB would wait for new images to be saved on the hard drive, import these images, and perform …

Automated Detection Of Deep-Sea Animals, Dallas J. Hollis, Duane Edgington, Danelle Cline

STAR Program Research Presentations

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute routinely deploys remotely operated underwater vehicles equipped with high definition cameras for use in scientific studies. Utilizing a video collection of over 22,000 hours and the Video Annotation and Reference System, we have set out to automate the detection and classification of deep-sea animals. This paper serves to explore the pitfalls of automation and suggest possible solutions to automated detection in diverse ecosystems with varying field conditions. Detection was tested using a saliency-based neuromorphic selective attention algorithm. The animals that were not detected were then used to tune saliency parameters. Once objects are detected, …

Surface Roughness Effects On Light Propagation In Optical Light Pipes, Youngjin Park

Graduate Theses - Physics and Optical Engineering

Solid- and hollow-core light pipes are commonly employed to shape the intensity profile of high power lasers for applications in various technology industries such as the automobile, medical, and communications. There are several loss mechanisms present in solid-core glass and polymer light pipes, including absorption, bulk scattering in the material, surface scattering at the material-air interface, and Fresnel Loss at the material-air interface. Fresnel reflection and surface scattering losses typically dominate over other loss mechanisms in solid-core light pipes made of high quality optical materials. In order to analyze the losses in the light pipe, an approximate model is developed …

Richard Dedekind And The Creation Of An Ideal: Early Developments In Ring Theory, Janet Heine Barnett

Abstract Algebra

No abstract provided.

Why Ragin's Fuzzy Techniques Lead To Successful Social Science Applications: An Explanation, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To find the relation between two concepts, social scientists traditionally look for correlations between the numerical quantities describing these concepts. Sometimes this help, but sometimes, while we are clear that there is a relation, statistical analysis does not show any correlation. Charles Ragin has shown that often, in such situations, we can find statistically significant correlation between the degrees to which experts estimate the corresponding concepts to be applicable to given situations. In this paper, we provide a simple explanation for this empirical success.

Interpolation Sometimes Enhances And Sometimes Impedes Spatial Correlation: Simple Pedagogical Examples, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

A natural way to check whether there is a dependence between two quantities is to estimate their correlation. For spatial quantities, such an estimation is complicated by the fact that, in general, we measure the values of the two quantities of interest in somewhat different locations. In this case, one possibility is to correlate each value of the first quantity with the value of the second quantity measured at a nearby point. An alternative idea is to first apply an appropriate interpolation to each of the quantities, and then look for the correlation between the resulting spatial maps. Empirical results …

How To Explain Ubiquity Of Constant Elasticity Of Substitution (Ces) Production And Utility Functions Without Explicitly Postulating Ces, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Thongchai Dumrongpokaphan

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many situations, the dependence of the production or utility on the corresponding factors is described by the CES (Constant Elasticity of Substitution) functions. These functions are usually explained by postulating two requirements: an economically reasonable postulate of homogeneity (that the formulas should not change if we change a measuring unit) and a less convincing CSE requirement. In this paper, we show that the CES requirement can be replaced by a more convincing requirement -- that the combined effect of all the factors should not depend on the order in which we combine these factors.