Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Computer-Based Approach For Identifying Student Conceptual Change, Junchao Yan

Open Access Theses

Misconceptions are commonly encountered in many areas of science and engineering where a to-be-learned concept conflicts with prior knowledge. Conceptual change is an approach for identifying and repairing the misconceptions. One of the ways to promote student conceptual change is providing students with ontological schema training. However, assessment of conceptual change relies on qualitative analysis of student responses. With the exponential growth of qualitative data in the form of graphical representations or written responses, the process of data analysis relying on human experts has become time-consuming and costly. This study took the advantages of natural language processing and machine learning …

A Sandbox Development For Demonstrating Bom Transmission In A Plm And Erp Integrated System, Zhen Zeng

Open Access Theses

Integrating Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in a company is important. Currently, many companies have difficulties on integrating PLM and ERP systems. This study developed a prototype (sandbox) of PLM and ERP integrated system for demonstrating BOM transmission in a PLM and ERP integrated system, describing key aspects of system integration and BOM transmission. This sandbox will facilitate users' knowledge on how to process transactions in a PLM and ERP integrated system. The BOM accuracy was examined by comparing BOM data in PLM system to BOM data in ERP system after implementing engineering changes. This study …

Effect Of Multivalent Ions On The Swelling And Mechanical Behavior Of Superabsorbent Polymers (Saps) For Mitigation Of Mortar Autogenous Shrinkage, Qian Zhu

Open Access Theses

The chemical and physical structure-property relationships of model superabsorbent polymer (SAP) hydrogels were characterized with respect to swelling behavior and mechanical properties in different ionic solutions (Na+ , Ca2+ , and Al3+ ). The model hydrogels were composed of poly(sodium acrylate-acrylamide) (PANa-PAM) copolymer with varying concentrations of PANa (0, 17, 33, 67, and 83 wt.%) and covalent crosslinking densities of 1, 1.5, and 2 wt.%. By synthesizing the hydrogels in-house, systems with independently tunable amounts of covalent crosslinking and anionic functional groups were created, allowing for the relative effects of covalent and ionic crosslinking on the properties of the hydrogels …

Reactivity Studies Of Tridhydropyridine Radical Cautions By Using Fourier-Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry And Advancement Of Mass Spectrometric Analysis Of Asphaltenes And Degradation Products, Mohammad Sabir Aqueel

Open Access Dissertations

Aromatic organic molecules which have unpaired electrons play an important role in a variety of applications in the fields of organic synthesis, organic magnets, and biological activity of organic compounds. Several studies have been published on σ- type carbon-centered mono- and biradicals. Reactive intermediates with three formally unpaired electrons are known as triradicals. They can be defined as species with three electrons distributed in three degenerate or nearly degenerate orbitals, based on Salem's definition of biradicals from the electronic structure point of view. Very little is known about the reactivity of carbon-centered σ,σ,σ- triradicals due to the complexity of studying …

Usability Testing Of The M.A.E.G.U.S. Serious Game, James He

Open Access Theses

Interpreting raw data in serious games and simulations can be a time consuming and uninteresting task without visualizations. This study proposes one possible solution for an interface that incorporates data visualizations for Whittinghill and Nataraja's (2013) MAEGUS simulation, a serious game used to increase the retention of wind energy and solar energy concepts in students, while still being fun. After the interface was designed and developed, a think aloud usability test was conducted to answer the following research questions: how do students use a series of information visualizations to operate a multi-variate game-based simulation and what are some the usability …

Economic And Policy Analysis For Solar Pv Systems In Indiana, Jinho Jung

Open Access Theses

In recent years, the energy market in the US and globally is expanding the production of renewable energy. With other energy sources, solar energy for electricity is also expanding in the US. Indiana is one of the states expanding solar energy with solar PV systems. However, the economics of solar PV systems in Indiana have not been analyzed and electricity customers in Indiana are not informed enough about the economics of solar PV systems. Therefore, we conduct benefit cost analysis with several uncertain input variables to determine the economics of adopting solar PV systems in Indiana based on policy instruments …

Resisting The Canon: Maori And The New Zealand Short Story Canon 1953-1984, Rachel Lacasse-Ford

Open Access Theses

This thesis offers informed readings of a wide selection of short stories by both Pakeha (ethnically European New Zealand) and Maori (indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand) writers in an effort to place these stories, and anthologies in which they are canonized, within a cultural and historical context. It provides a concise literary genealogy of the Maori within the New Zealand short story, and it explores the ways Maori short story writers pushed back against racist portrayals of Maori and efforts to silence or contain the Maori voice.

Study Of The Sustainbility Issues Of Food Production Using Vertical Farm Methods In An Urban Environment Within The State Of Indiana, Victor Mendez Perez

Open Access Theses

There are several problems around the globe related to water scarcity, energy shortages, deforestation and loss of fertile land, and food security. Climate change is making environmental and social issues arise. Issues such as, changes in the agricultural landscape, increasing population (9 billion is the expected population for 2040), rising food borne illnesses, scarcity of drinking water, and more crop failure due to plant pathogens and insect pests, among other factors make this study specially significant. Vertical farming could be a potencial solution to some of these problems.

Due to these problems the present thesis analyzed vertical farming as a …

M.A.E.G.U.S: Measuring Alternate Energy Generation Via Unity Simulation, Kavin Muhilan Nataraja

Open Access Theses

This paper presents the MAEGUS serious game and a study to determine its efficacy as a pedagogical tool. The MAEGUS serious game teaches sustainable energy concepts through gameplay simulating wind turbines and solar arrays. Players take the role of an energy manager for a city and use realistic data and information visualizations to learn the physical factors of wind and solar energy generation. The MAEGUS serious game study compares game assisted learning to a more traditional teaching method such as reading material in a crossover study, the results of which can inform future serious game development for educational purposes.

Improving Indoor Air Quality Through Botanical Air Filtration In Energy Efficient Residences, Daniel William Newkirk

Open Access Theses

According to the U.S. EPA, the average American spends 90% of their time indoors where pollutants are two to five times more prevalent than outside. The consequences of these pollutants are estimated to cost the U.S. 125 billion dollars in lost health and productivity. Background literature suggests botanical air filtration may be able to solve this problem by leveraging the natural ability of plants to purify indoor air. By improving indoor air quality, energy consumption can also be reduced by bringing in less outside air to dilute contaminants within the space. A botanical air filter, called the Biowall, was designed …

Evaluation And Economic Value Of Winter Weather Forecasts, Derrick William Snyder

Open Access Theses

State and local highway agencies spend millions of dollars each year to deploy winter operation teams to plow snow and de-ice roadways. Accurate and timely weather forecast information is critical for effective decision making. Students from Purdue University partnered with the Indiana Department of Transportation to create an experimental winter weather forecast service for the 2012-2013 winter season in Indiana to assist in achieving these goals. One forecast product, an hourly timeline of winter weather hazards produced daily, was evaluated for quality and economic value.

Verification of the forecasts was performed with data from the Rapid Refresh numerical weather model. …

Protein Affinity Extraction Of Prostate Specific Antigen (Psa) Using Submicron Spheres, Yao Wang

Open Access Theses

PSA has been used as a biomarker for prostate cancer for a long time. To characterize different glycoforms of PSA using techniques like UHPLC and cIEF, concentration and purification of PSA from complex samples becomes necessary. Our group has developed submicron silica spheres based affinity beads to extract PSA through immunoprecipitation. This study focuses on measuring the bead performance when antibody type/amount was varied and PSA concentration was lowered for clinical use. To better satisfy the requirement of large-scale extraction, several attempts were made to increase the bead capacity. The results will be presented and future directions of the project …

Effectiveness Of Air Sealing Measures And Other Energy Retrofit Measures In Lafayette Energy Improvement Program, Jia Ye

Open Access Theses

From September 2011 to March 2013, the City of Lafayette, IN implemented Lafayette Improvement Program. The goal of this project was to "increase energy efficiency of existing homes through retrofitting, thereby lowering the costs of home ownership within the Vinton and Glen Acres Neighborhood Target Area (The City of Lafayette, 2011)." Energy audit companies carried out before blower door test and after blower door test to identify air tightness of subjects. This paper finds out there was an improvement in air tightness in the population of 85 houses and the degree of improvement was between 16.85% and 17.85%.

Change point …

Pharmaceuticals And Personal Care Products: Emerging Contaminants In Aquatic Ecosystems, Jenny E. Zenobio

Open Access Theses

In recent years, the presence of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) in aquatic systems has led to research on their fate and effects. PPCPs have been found in mixture in wastewater effluents, surface, ground, and drinking water at low concentrations from areas of intense urbanization. Although adverse effects to human health from the current environmental concentrations are unlikely, the impacts to ecological receptors are not clear. We performed field and laboratory studies to quantify and evaluate effects of PPCPs on fish. First, a field study was conducted at the Baca National Wildlife Refuge, Colorado (2010-2012) because a portion of …

Woodification Of Polygonal Meshes, Gustavo Alejandro Guayaquiul Sosa

Open Access Theses

An evolving polygonal mesh based on stem's tree growth coupled with a physical simulation of bark's cracking is presented. This process is denominated woodification. Whereas previous approaches use a fixed resolution voxel grid, woodification is built on the deformable simplicial complex representation, which robustly simulates growth with adaptive subdivision. The approach allows any meshed object to be grown and textured. Features, such as interaction with obstacles, attributes interpolation, and sketching tools, are added to provide control during the woodifible process.

Security Of Graph Data: Hashing Schemes And Definitions, Muhammad U. Arshad, Ashish Kundu, Elisa Bertino, Krishna Madhavan, Arif Ghafoor

Cyber Center Publications

Use of graph-structured data models is on the rise - in graph databases, in representing biological and healthcare data as well as geographical data. In order to secure graph-structured data, and develop cryptographically secure schemes for graph databases, it is essential to formally define and develop suitable collision resistant one-way hashing schemes and show them they are efficient. The widely used Merkle hash technique is not suitable as it is, because graphs may be directed acyclic ones or cyclic ones. In this paper, we are addressing this problem. Our contributions are: (1) define the practical and formal security model of …

Randomized And Efficient Authentication In Mobile Environments, Wei Jiang, Dan Lin, Feng Li, Elisa Bertino

Cyber Center Publications

In a mobile environment, a number of users act as a network nodes and communicate with one another to acquire location based information and services. This emerging paradigm has opened up new business opportunities and enables numerous applications such as road safety enhancement, service recommendations and mobile entertainment. A fundamental issue that impacts the success of these applications is the security and privacy concerns raised regarding the mobile users. In that, a malicious user or service provider can track the locations of a user traveled so that other malicious act can be carried out more effectively against the user. Therefore, …

Identification Of Genomic Factors Using Family-Based Association Studies, Libo Wang

Open Access Dissertations

Genome-wide association studies become increasingly popular and important for detecting genetic associations of complex traits. However, it is well known that spurious associations could arise from statistical analysis without proper consideration of genetic relatedness of samples. Many methods have been proposed to guard against these spurious associations. Here we focus on multi-locus association studies of quantitative traits and the case-control status, and propose algorithms that take into consideration of genetic related samples to address possible confounding issues. As supervised dimension reduction methods, these algorithms performs well to conduct association studies with a large number of biomarkers but a relative small …

Identidroid: Android Can Finally Wear Its Anonymous Suit, Bilal Shebaro, Oyindamola Oluwatimi, Daniele Midi, Elisa Bertino

Cyber Center Publications

Because privacy today is a major concern for mobile applications, network anonymizers are widely available on smartphones, such as Android. However despite the use of such anonymizers, in many cases applications are still able to identify the user and the device by different means than the IP address. The reason is that very often applications require device services and information that go beyond the capabilities of anonymous networks in protecting users’ identity and privacy. In this paper, we propose two solutions that address this problem. The first solution is based on an approach that shadows user and application data, device …

Data Preparation For Validation Study Of Hazus Canada Flood Model, Heather Mcgrath, Emmanual Stefanakis, M Mccarthy, Miroslav Nastev

International Institute for Infrastructure Resilience and Reconstruction (I3R2) Conference

As our climate changes, the occurrence of extreme weather events and heavier rainfall becomes more common. This change in weather patterns and precipitation results in a greater number of recorded flood events and a larger magnitude of flood events. Canadian municipalities are therefore facing a pressing demand to perform hazard assessments to identify communities at risk and measure potential economic and societal losses due to flood events. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) developed a standardized tool, Hazus-MH, for loss estimation from natural disasters for use in the US. Recently, Hazus has been adapted for use in Canada. This paper introduces …

Dj-1 And Atp13a2: Two Proteins Involved In Parkinson’S Disease, Josephat M Asiago

Open Access Dissertations

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder after Alzheimer's disease, affecting approximately 0.3% of the total U.S. population, and its prevalence increases with age. Two neuropathological hallmarks of PD are the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta, a region in the midbrain involved in initiating and sustaining movement, and the presence of cytosolic inclusions called Lewy bodies (LBs) in various brain regions. LBs are enriched with fibrillar forms of the presynaptic protein &agr;-synuclein (aSyn). Two autosomal recessive genes implicated in familial PD are PARK9, encoding the P-type ATPase ATP13A2, a lysosomal ATPase; and …

Lecture-Free Calculus For Science And Engineering, Benjamin Wiles

IMPACT Symposium

Plane Analytic Geometry and Calculus I (MA 16100) is a historically difficult, required course for engineering and science majors. The traditional configuration consists of 250 students meeting in a large lecture 3 times per week and twice per week in smaller recitations of size 40. Additionally, those who repeat the course often continue to encounter difficulty. A scalable re-design has been implemented to attempt to address the needs of students that are not being met in the traditional configuration by diverting resources from lecture to problem sessions and from traditional Q&A recitations to student-driven presentation/collaboration-based recitations. The students work in …

Statistics 301 Bilingual (English/Spanish), Laura Cayon

IMPACT Symposium

This poster outlining the redesign of STAT 301 (Elementary Statistical Methods) was presented at the IMPACT Symposium 2014.

Qualitative, Tiered, Iclicker Recitation Introductions, David Blasing, Andrew Hirsch, Rebecca Lindell

IMPACT Symposium

Interactively engaging students can significantly help them understand key concepts [Hake 1998]. Additionally, students are most likely to recall the first five minutes of a presentation [Burns 1985]. Capitalizing on both of these, we altered the beginning of PHYS 272 (ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC INTERACTIONS) recitation to include a series of qualitative, “tiered,” iClicker questions that interactively engage students and socratically teach fundamental principals in electricity and magnetism.

The series begin with a question that most students comfortably and correctly answer. Successive questions increase in difficultly and the series stops with most students struggling to identify the correct answer. Along the …

Peering Into The Discourse Of Industrial Design Training Through A Sustainability Lens, Norman M. Su, Haodan Tan, Eli Blevis

Design Thinking Research Symposium

Now well established in HCI, the lens of sustainability may be applied to educational practices in industrial design and interaction design. By sustainability, we mean to include notions of mitigation of the environmental effects of climate change. In this paper, we present an analysis of student projects in a junior and senior industrial design class dataset. Drawing from discourse analysis, we examine how the industrial design classroom serves as a space to socially construct the philosophies and goals inherent in “good” design. We then examine how the lens of sustainability is implicated into the industrial design “way” as espoused by …

Study Of User Search Activities With Two Discovery Tools At An Academic Library, Xi Niu, Tao Zhang, Hsin-Liang Chen

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

The goal of this study was to investigate and compare user search activities of two discovery tools at an academic library. The implementation of a new discovery tool (Primo by Ex Libris) to replace an existing system (VuFind) provided a unique opportunity to collect transaction logs of both systems and examine user search behavior in an empirical test. Results from a transaction log analysis and a user study of this study have contributed to the understanding of users’ search behavior and their preferences and perceptions of the two systems. We find both commonalities and differences between VuFind and Primo for …

Tablet And Face-To-Face Hybrid Professional Development: Providing Earth Systems Science Educators Authentic Research Opportunities Through The Globe Program At Purdue University, Kristin Wegner, Benjamin D. Branch, Steven Smith

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

No abstract provided.

Global Change Factors On Ecosystem Invasibility, Raj Lal, Jeffrey Dukes, Michael J. Schuster, Nick G. Smith

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Current climate and human-induced changes are projected to alter many regimes of ecosystem functioning. It is projected that invasive species, nonnative species that can be of great detriment to an ecosystem, will benefit under these conditions. The Prairie Invasion and Climate Experiment (PRICLE) studies the effects of two global change factors – N addition and altered precipitation – on invasive species success and the traits that are selected for in a mixed-grass prairie ecosystem. PRICLE is a two by two factorial design over three replications in a restored mixed-grass prairie ecosystem. The major findings from the community traits examination of …

Web-Based Visual Analytics For Social Media Data, Jun Xiang Tee, David S. Ebert

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Social media data provides valuable information about different events, trends and happenings around the world. Visual data analysis tasks for social media data have large computational and storage space requirements. Due to these restrictions, subdivision of data analysis tools into several layers such as Data, Business Logic or Algorithms, and Presentation Layer is often necessary to make them accessible for variety of clients. On server side, social media data analysis algorithms can be implemented and published in the form of web services. Visual Interface can then be implemented in the form of thin clients that call these web services for …

Next Generation Crystal Viewing Tool, Zach Schaffter, Gerhard Klimeck

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The science and engineering community is limited when it comes to crystal viewing software tools. Each tool lacks in a different area such as customization of structures or visual output. Crystal Viewer 2.0 was created to have all of these features in one program. This one tool simulates virtually any crystal structure with any possible material. The vtkvis widget offers users advanced visual options not seen in any other crystal viewing software. In addition, the powerful engine behind Crystal Viewer 2.0, nanoelectronic modeling 5 or (NEMO5), performs intensive atomic calculations depending on user input. A graphical user interface, or GUI, …