Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Climate Change And Gender In Africa: A Review Of Impact And Gender-Responsive Solutions, Alex Awiti

Institute for Human Development, East Africa

Climate change affects livelihoods and wellbeing. Women and men may experience the impacts of climate change differently. But climate change and its associated impacts affect women negatively. A review was done on peer-reviewed literature related to the impact of climate change on gender in Africa. While there is an abundance of credible scientific evidence on the impacts of climate change, there is a dearth of reliable disaggregated data and evidence on the impact of climate change on women. The review shows that climate change affects women more negatively compared to men in five impact areas: (i) agricultural production; (ii) food …

Images Of Embedded Jovian Planet Formation At A Wide Separation Around Ab Aurigae, Thayne Currie, Kellen Lawson, Glenn Schneider, Wladimir Lyra, John Wisniewski, Carol Grady, Olivier Guyon, Motohide Tamura, Takayuki Kotani, Hajime Kawahara, Timothy Brandt, Taichi Uyama, Takayuki Muto, Ruobing Dong, Tomoyuki Kudo, Jun Hashimoto, Misato Fukagawa, Kevin Wagner, Julien Lozi, Jeffrey Chilcote, Taylor Tobin, Tyler Groff, Kimberly Ward-Duong, William Januszewski, Barnaby Norris, Peter Tuthill, Nienke Van Der Marel, Michael Sitko, Vincent Deo, Sebastien Vievard, Nemanja Jovanovic, Frantz Martinache

Astronomy: Faculty Publications

Direct images of protoplanets embedded in disks around infant stars provide the key to understanding the formation of gas giant planets such as Jupiter. Using the Subaru Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, we find evidence for a Jovian protoplanet around AB Aurigae orbiting at a wide projected separation (~93 au), probably responsible for multiple planet-induced features in the disk. Its emission is reproducible as reprocessed radiation from an embedded protoplanet. We also identify two structures located at 430–580 au that are candidate sites of planet formation. These data reveal planet formation in the embedded phase and a protoplanet discovery …

Water And Soil Gas Sampling Near Richardton, North Dakota, University Of North Dakota. Energy And Environmental Research Center

EERC Brochures and Fact Sheets

Fact sheet on a 2019 Energy & Environmental Research Center project to collect water and soil gas samples near Richardton, North Dakota, as part of the Red Trail Energy carbon capture and storage (CCS) research effort. [This item is an outdated or superseded version and retained for historical purposes only. It may no longer reflect current information, policies, or practices.]

Highly Swellable Hydrogels Prepared From Extensively Oxidized Lignin, Jihyeon Hwang, Daniella V. Martinez, Estevan J. Martinez, Gift Metavarayuth, Dustin Goodlett, Qi Wang, Mitra Ganewatta, Michael S. Kent, Chuanbing Tang

Faculty Publications

Biopolymers such as lignin are gaining renewed appeal due to the need for sustainable materials. Herein, we used chelator-mediated Fenton (CMF) chemistry to oxidize Kraft lignin to develop sustainable super absorbent materials. The CMF chemistry adds oxygen, opens aromatic rings and increases COOH content, producing hydrophilic lignin without depolymerization. UV absorption, molecular weight, elemental analysis, and titration were used to study the chemical compositions of CMF-processed lignin. Then the chemically modified hydrophilic lignin was used to produce lignin-based hydrogels utilizing an aqueous polymerization and cross-linking reaction that enabled tunable properties. The resulting lignin hydrogels absorbed water up to 96% and …

Analysis Of Covid-19 And Vaccine Administration In Mississippi, Megan Sickinger

Honors Theses

In this work, we develop a simple mathematical model to observe the spread of COVID-19 and vaccine administration in Mississippi. Based on the well-known Kermack-McKendrick Susceptible-Infected-Removed epidemiological model, the ASIRD−V model has eight ordinary differential equations that split infected populations and recovered populations into vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. After determining that the system is reliable for real-world applications, we investigate and determine the stability and equilibrium points of this system. The system is found to be disease-free when R0 < 1 and endemic when R0 > 1. We use MATLAB to numerically solve the system and optimize the model’s parameters over four short periods, two with the …

Fine-Tuning A 𝑘-Nearest Neighbors Machine Learning Model For The Detection Of Insurance Fraud, Alliyah Stout

Honors Theses

Billions of dollars are lost within insurance companies due to fraud. Large money losses force insurance companies to increase premium costs and/or restrict policies. This negatively affects a company’s loyal customers. Although this is a prevalent problem, companies are not urgently working toward bettering their machine learning algorithms. Underskilled workers paired with inefficient computer algorithms make it difficult to accurately and reliably detect fraud.

The goal of this study is to understand the idea of -Nearest Neighbors ( -NN) and to use this classification technique to accurately detect fraudulent auto insurance claims. Using -NN requires choosing a value and a …

Draft Final Blacktail Creek Remediation And Contaminated Groundwater Hydraulic Control Site Piezometer Installation And Monitoring Well Repair Plan, Pioneer Technical Services, Inc.

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Valuing Angling On Reservoirs Using Benefit Transfer, Richard T. Melstrom, Mark A. Kaemingk, Nicholas W. Cole, John C. Whitehead, Christopher J. Chizinski, Kevin L. Pope

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

Economic assessments are rarely applied to inland recreational fisheries for management purposes, especially when compared to fish, habitat, and creel assessments, yet economic assessments can provide critical information for management decisions. We provide a brief overview of economic value, key terminology, and existing economic techniques to address these issues. Benefit transfer, a technique used to measure economic value when an original analysis is not practicable, is conducted by drawing on existing estimates of economic value in similar contexts. We describe an application of benefit transfer to measure the economic value of several recreational fisheries in Nebraska, USA. We examine two …

Decomposing Generation Networks With Structure Prediction For Recipe Generation, Hao Wang, Guosheng Lin, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recipe generation from food images and ingredients is a challenging task, which requires the interpretation of the information from another modality. Different from the image captioning task, where the captions usually have one sentence, cooking instructions contain multiple sentences and have obvious structures. To help the model capture the recipe structure and avoid missing some cooking details, we propose a novel framework: Decomposing Generation Networks (DGN) with structure prediction, to get more structured and complete recipe generation outputs. Specifically, we split each cooking instruction into several phases, and assign different sub-generators to each phase. Our approach includes two novel ideas: …

A Survey On Visual Analysis Of Massive Open Online Courses (Mooc) Data [大型开放式在线课程(Mooc)数据可视分析综述], Zhiguang Zhou, Saqing Wang, Yuhua Liu, Yong Wang, Yigang Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Massive open online courses(MOOC)are free online courses that provide educational resources to users.In this paper,related works are summarized from the following perspectives:data types of MOOC,MOOC data visualization,and visual analysis applications of MOOC data.First,MOOC data is categorized into four types,including text data,video data,topological data,spatio-temporal data,and their concepts and applications are introduced.Then,the common visualization methods of different data types are discussed.Furthermore,the major applications of visual analytics approaches in MOOC data analysis are summarized,including online course learning,online tests and exams,online forum interaction and so on.Finally,the challenges and future work on visual analytics of MOOC data are discussed and concluded.

Bpsou Draft Final Residential Metals Abatement Program (Rmap) Qapp (Non-Residential Parcels) (5/12/22), Nikia Greene, Butte Silver Bow, Atlantic Richfield Company

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Methods For Focal Plane Array Resolution Estimation Using Random Laser Speckle In Non-Paraxial Geometries, Phillip J. Plummer

Theses and Dissertations

The infrared (IR) imaging community has a need for direct IR detector evaluation due to the continued demand for small pixel pitch detectors, the emergence of strained-layer-super-lattice devices, and the associated lateral carrier diffusion issues. Conventional laser speckle-based modulation transfer function (MTF) estimation is dependent on Fresnel propagation and a wide-sense-stationary input random process, limiting the use of this approach for lambda (wavelength)-scale IR devices. This dissertation develops two alternative methodologies for speckle-based resolution evaluation of IR focal plane arrays (FPAs). Both techniques are formulated using Rayleigh-Sommerfield electric field propagation, making them valid in the non-paraxial geometries dictated for resolution …

Full Pattern Analysis And Comparison Of The Center Fed And Offset Fed Cassegrain Antennas With Large Focal Length To Diameter Ratios For High Power Microwave Transmission, Derek W. Mantzke

Theses and Dissertations

High power microwaves (HPM) have been a topic of research since the Cold War era. This paper will present a comparison between two Cassegrain-type antennas: the axially, or center fed, and the offset fed. Specifically, the 10 GHz operating frequency will be investigated with large focal length to diameter () ratios. Beam patterns which encompass the entire radiation pattern will be included for data validation and optimization. The simulations will follow a design of experiments factorial model to ensure all possible combinations of prescribed parameters are included, including an analysis of variance (ANOVA) study to find parameter influence on the …

Scheduling For Space Tracking And Heterogeneous Sensor Environments, Gabriel H. Greve

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation draws on the fields of heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithm development, resource allocation problems, and scheduling to address key Air Force problems. The world runs on many schedules. People depend upon them and expect these schedules to be accurate. A process is needed where schedules can be dynamically adjusted to allow tasks to be completed efficiently. For example, the Space Surveillance Network relies on a schedule to track objects in space. The schedule must use sensor resources to track as many high-priority satellites as possible to obtain orbit paths and to warn of collision paths. Any collisions that occurred …

Innovative Heuristics To Improve The Latent Dirichlet Allocation Methodology For Textual Analysis And A New Modernized Topic Modeling Approach, Jamie T. Zimmerman

Theses and Dissertations

Natural Language Processing is a complex method of data mining the vast trove of documents created and made available every day. Topic modeling seeks to identify the topics within textual corpora with limited human input into the process to speed analysis. Current topic modeling techniques used in Natural Language Processing have limitations in the pre-processing steps. This dissertation studies topic modeling techniques, those limitations in the pre-processing, and introduces new algorithms to gain improvements from existing topic modeling techniques while being competitive with computational complexity. This research introduces four contributions to the field of Natural Language Processing and topic modeling. …

Evaluating A Statistical-Based Assessment Tool For Stratifying Risk Among U.S. Air Force Organizations, Tiffany A. Low

Theses and Dissertations

The Air Force Inspection System is a proponent of utilizing a risk-based sampling strategy (RBSS) for conducting inspections from major command levels down to the unit level. The strategy identifies areas deemed most important or risky by commanders and prioritizes them accordingly for an independent assessment by the Inspector General. While Air Force regulation specifies the need to use a RBSS for inspection, the implementation process is delegated to individual commands and, subsequently, wings. The 23rd Wing, the sponsor for this research, directed us to analyze a RBSS tool highlighted as an example from which to adopt for those units …

Machine Learning Applied To A Modern-Pleistocene Petrographic Data Set: The Global Prediction Of Sand Modal Composition (Gloprsm) Model, J. Isaac Johnson, Glenn R. Sharman, Eugene Szymanski, Xiao Huang

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Petrography has long been used as a tool to decipher the sedimentary provenance of sand and sandstone based on relative proportions of detrital grain types. However, there is not yet a predictive framework that constrains the relationship between sand grain composition and the factors that influence it, including bedrock lithology, elevation, slope, basin area, precipitation, and temperature. We used a globally extensive modal point-count data set of 3,522 Pleistocene to modern sand samples to train an inline series of random forest meta-estimators to predict relative abundances of quartz (Q), feldspar (F), and lithic (L) grain types and eight subcompositions. The …

Developing A Data Acquisition System For Use In Cold Neutral Atom Traps, Jonathan E. Fuzaro Alencar

Physics

The rising interest in quantum computing has led to new quantum systems being developed and researched. Among these are trapped neutral atoms which have several desirable features and may be configured and operated on using lasers in an optical lattice. This work describes the development of a new data acquisition system for use in tuning lasers near the precise hyperfine transition frequencies of Rb 87 atoms, a crucial step in the functionality of a neutral atom trap. This improves on previous implementations that were deprecated and limited in laser frequency sweep range. Integration into the experiment was accomplished using an …

Developing A Miniature Smart Boat For Marine Research, Michael Isaac Eirinberg

Computer Engineering

This project examines the development of a smart boat which could serve as a possible marine research apparatus. The smart boat consists of a miniature vessel containing a low-cost microcontroller to live stream a camera feed, GPS telemetry, and compass data through its own WiFi access point. The smart boat also has the potential for autonomous navigation. My project captivated the interest of several members of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo’s (Cal Poly SLO) Marine Science Department faculty, who proposed a variety of fascinating and valuable smart boat applications.

Maximum Trapping Focal Length In Photophoretic Trap For 3d Imaging Systems, Jason M. Childers

Electrical Engineering

This product is a photophoretic trapping system which allows varying focal lengths to test which focal lengths are possible for trapping toner particles. This system establishes that there exists a maximum trapping distance limitation and is the first time the effect of focal length is studied in a photophoretic trapping system. Increasing photophoretic trapping focal length is necessary for improving this technology as a 3D display. The 3D imaging technology is realized by dragging a microscopic (micrometer-scale) particles with a laser beam to trace an image. This technology can display fully colored and high-resolution 3D images visible from almost any …

Mixture Of Functional Graphical Models, Qihai Liu

Dissertations

With the development of data collection technologies that use powerful monitoring devices and computational tools, many scientific fields are now obtaining more detailed and more complicatedly structured data, e.g., functional data. This leads to increasing challenges of extracting information from the large complex data. Making use of these data to gain insight into complex phenomena requires characterizing the relationships among a large number of functional variables. Functional data analysis (FDA) is a rapidly developing area of statistics for data which can be naturally viewed as a smooth curve or function. It is a method that changes the frame of data …

Mid To Late Neogene (5.9-3.7 Ma) Epeirogenic Uplift And Associated Ultramafic Volcanism, Canterbury Basin, New Zealand, Katherine Anne Dvorak

Dissertations

Cored marine sediments from Canterbury Basin Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 317 shelf sites U1351, U1353, and upper slope Site U1352 have been resampled with emphasis on benthic foraminifera from the Late Eocene to Late Pliocene. These new data coupled with paleo water-depth and age data from the nearby Clipper-1 petroleum exploration well, are used to develop a 1-dimensional basin subsidence model for the Canterbury Basin. Our model indicates there was widespread epeirogenic uplift of 890  350m, in the mid-Neogene (5.9-3.7 million years ago), which took place during concomitant ultramafic volcanism. Close association of uplift and volcanism could …

A Tale Of Two Regulatory Regimes: Creation And Analysis Of A Bilingual Privacy Policy Corpus, Siddhant Arora, Henry Hosseini, Christine Utz, Vinayshekhar Bannihatti Kumar, Jasmine Mangat, Peter Story, Rex Chen, Martin Degeling, Tom Norton, Thomas Hupperich

Computer Science

Over the past decade, researchers have started to explore the use of NLP to develop tools aimed at helping the public, vendors, and regulators analyze disclosures made in privacy policies. With the introduction of new privacy regulations, the language of privacy policies is also evolving, and disclosures made by the same organization are not always the same in different languages, especially when used to communicate with users who fall under different jurisdictions. This work explores the use of language technologies to capture and analyze these differences at scale. We introduce an annotation scheme designed to capture the nuances of two …

Understanding Rapid Intercalation Materials One Parameter At A Time, Wessel Van Den Bergh, Morgan Stefik

Faculty Publications

Demand for fast, energy-dense storage drives the research into nanoscale intercalation materials. Nanomaterials accelerate kinetics and can modify reaction path thermodynamics, intercalant solubility, and reversibility. The discovery of intercalation pseudocapacitance has opened questions about their fundamental operating principles. For example, are their capacitor-like current responses caused by storing energy in special near-surface regions or rather is this response due to normal intercalation limited by a slower faradaic surface-reaction? This review highlights emerging methods combining tailored nanomaterials with the process of elimination to disambiguate cause-and-effect at the nanoscale. This method is applied to multiple intercalation pseudocapacitive materials showing that the timescales …

Data-Driven Analysis Of Drug And Substance Abuse Rates Across The Varying Regions In The United States Of America, Reem Saleh

University Honors Theses

Drugs and substance abuse is one of the leading causes of death for adolescents in the United States. The consequences of using these drugs are profound and can cause both damage to one's physical and psychological health. The rates of drug abuse in the United States continue to increase over the years. This paper analyzes the trends in rates of drug abuse in the four regions in the United States. It looks at the rates in cocaine, cigarettes, marijuana, and tobacco. A preliminary analysis was done to look at the trend in rates followed by an ARIMA time series model …

General Rogue Wave Solutions To The Sasa-Satsuma Equation, Chengfa Wu, Guangxiong Zhang, Changyan Shi, Bao-Feng Feng

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

General rogue wave solutions to the Sasa-Satsuma equation are constructed by the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (KP) hierarchy reduction method. These solutions are presented in three different forms. The first form is expressed in terms of recursively defined differential operators while the second form shares a similar solution structure except that the differential operators are no longer recursively defined. Instead of using differential operators, the third form is expressed by Schur polynomials.

Asssembly And Deployment Of The Uaeu 256-Element Radio Array For Space Science, Ibrahim J.M. Alghoul

Theses

The scope of this project, a 256-element Radio Interferometer Array was assembled and deployed as part of the “UAEU Radio Astronomy Pathway Project”, which is jointly supported by the College of Science and the National Space Science & Technology Centre (NSSTC) at the UAE University. This antenna array was deployed at the NSSTC site, and it will serve as the central part of the ground-based radio observations facility to be utilized for multi-disciplinary space science research at the UAEU. The facility is capable of making low-frequency radio observations of astronomical sources and events, measurements for spacecraft tracking, atmospheric studies, planetary …

Properties Of Certain Connected Graphs Related To Their Edge Metric Dimension, Sanabel Mahmoud Y. Bisharat

Theses

Metric dimension, resolving sets and edge metric dimension are very important invariants for the resolvability of graphs that have been studied and investigated intensively in the literature over the last decades. Their immense utilization in network topology, master mind games, robot navigation and representation of chemical compounds make their study very attractive. This thesis is concerned with the graph-theoretic properties of certain families of connected graphs related to their edge metric dimension. The main objective of this thesis is to study the comparison of metric dimension ver-sus edge metric dimension of certain families of graphs. The study investigates the relationship …

Observation And Control Of Photoemission And Electric Field Enhancement Of Plasmonic Antennas Through Photoemission Electron Microscopy, Christopher M. Scheffler

Dissertations and Theses

Photoemission electron microscopy (PEEM) is an imaging method which uses electrons excited through the photoelectric effect to characterize a sample surface with nanometer-level resolution. In PEEM, a high intensity laser excites electrons from the surface of the material and electron optics are used to form an image from the intensity and spatial distribution of the photoemission from the sample. The goal of this research was to study and maximize light confinement, which was accomplished using plasmonic nanostructures. Surface plasmons represent oscillations in the electron density of a material and can occur along the transition interface between a metal and a …

Leveraging Context Patterns For Medical Entity Classification, Garrett Johnston

Computer Science Senior Theses

The ability of patients to understand health-related text is important for optimal health outcomes. A system that can automatically annotate medical entities could help patients better understand health-related text. Such a system would also accelerate manual data annotation for this low-resource domain as well as assist in down- stream medical NLP tasks such as finding textual similarity, identifying conflicting medical advice, and aspect-based sentiment analysis. In this work, we investigate a state-of-the-art entity set expansion model, BootstrapNet, for the task of medical entity classification on a new dataset of medical advice text. We also propose EP SBERT, a simple model …