Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Recource Limited Testing Center Scheduling For A Web-Based Testing Application, Adam J. Graham

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Testing centers are a useful tool to help instructors deliver computer-based tests, but computers resources are expensive and therefore limited. This paper describes a method by which testing center(s) may use iNetTest, a web-based computer aided testing system, to house and administer exams. The algorithm discussed in this paper makes it possible for instructors to schedule tests for a given time frame while ensuring that enough computer resources will be available to all of the students. The algorithm prevents the testing center from getting overwhelmed with students while attempting to maximize the usage of the valuable computer resources.

Simulating Loan Repayment By The Sinking Fund Method (Sinking Fund Governed By A Sequence Of Interest Rates), Placede Judicaelle Gangnang Fosso

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The sinking fund method is a way to repay a loan where the borrower pays the amount of interest accrued by the principal at the end of each time period and puts a certain amount in a sinking fund in order to repay the principal at the end of the loan. Usually, we assume that the interest rate on the sinking fund is the same during the entire time of the loan. In the study, we will depart from the usual assumptions and will look at different scenarios, including when changes of the interest rate on the sinking fund follows …

The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Disaster: A Graphical Assessment Of Its Impact On Wildlife, Anvar Suyundikov

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010. Considered the largest accidental marine oil spill in history, oil flowed for three months and approximately five million barrels of oil spilled through by mid-July 2010. In this report, we analyze fish and bird data to assess the impact of the oil spill on the Gulf wildlife. Our findings based on the available fish data for 2005, 2006, and 2010 are not very helpful to make a judgement on the negative impact of the oil spill on fish species. On the other hand, the bird …

Validation Study: A Case Study Of Calculus 1 (Math 1210), Abibat Adebisi Lasisi

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This report discusses the process of assessing the validity of a test. We provide an analysis of the validation study of a test administered to the first semester calculus students at Utah State University in the Fall 2011 semester. The results of our analysis suggest that the test has some measurement relevance. This implies that the subject contents of the test correlate with the syllabus of the course. Thus, the measurement has some learning level relevance. Our analysis also revealed that the measurement has a high reliability coefficient which signifies some internal consistency of the mea- surement. The relevancy and …

Information Flow In The Spatiotemporal Dynamics Of Cellular Automata, Akshay Thakre

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Decision making in natural systems, such as the body's immune response to a potential pathogen or a bacterial colony's initiation of fruiting due to food scarcity, is distributed over many cells that posses only local information, and not determined globally. Understanding how accurate decisions can be made in such systems where no individual decisions maker has complete information has important implications in distributed software and can provide insights into the biological evolution of complexity. In this work, the process of distributed decision making is modeled using the majority problem in cellular automata, and information theoretic measures of Kolmogorov complexity are …

Ignoring The Spatial Context In Intro Statistics Classes - And Some Simple Graphical Remedies, Nathan Voge

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Statistical data often have a spatial (geographic) context, be it countries of the world, states in the US, counties within a state, cities across the globe, or locations where measurements have been taken. However, most introductory statistics books do not even suggest that such data often are not independent from location, but rather are eected by some spatial association. Remedies are simple: Display data via various map views and brie y discuss which additional information can be extracted from such a graphical representation. In this report, we will visit a variety of popular introductory statistics textbooks and show how some …

The Mechanisms Of Hydride Exchange, Organic Combination And Displacement Reactions, Weifang Hao

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The primary aim of this dissertation was to seek the answer to the question: “Is the single transition-state model appropriate for the fundamental reactions in organic chemistry?” The goal was accomplished by performing enormous kinetic data collection and detailed mechanistic analysis on several typical fundamental organic chemical reactions. Three new methodologies for differentiating between a simple one-step and complex multi-step mechanism were developed and extensively confirmed during the application in the kinetic studies of all of the reaction discussed in this dissertation. The three methods consist of (1) half-life dependence of kapp, (2) sequential linear pseudo-first-order correlation, and (3) revised …

Integrating Remote Sensing And Ecosystem Models For Terrestrial Vegetation Analysis: Phenology, Biomass, And Stand Age, Gong Zhang

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Terrestrial vegetation plays an important role in global carbon cycling and climate change by assimilating carbon into biomass during the growing season and releasing it due to natural or anthropogenic disturbances. Remote sensing and ecosystem models can help us extend our studies of vegetation phenology, aboveground biomass, and disturbances from field sites to regional or global scales. Nonetheless, remote sensing-derived variables may differ in fundamental and important ways from ground measurements. With the growth of remote sensing as a key tool in geoscience research, comparisons to ground data and intercomparisons among satellite products are needed. Here I conduct three separate …

Water Infrastructure Challenges In Urbanizing Environments: A Case Study Of The 2009 Logan Canal Landslide, Kathryn Davis Henderson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In July, 2009 in Logan, Utah, a wet, steep hillside failed, leveling a home below and destroying an irrigation canal that ran along the hill. Three people were killed. The event and the resulting policy changes present an opportunity to uncover how frames, or social constructions, play into the policy development cycle. This case also uncovers the nuances involved when old infrastructure takes on new social meanings. Planners and policymakers that pay attention to frames and social dimensions may be able to minimize conflict.

The landslide received immediate media attention and spurred state legislation on canal safety. The event had …

Planning, Acting, And Learning In Incomplete Domains, Christopher H. Weber

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The engineering of complete planning domain descriptions is often very costly because of human error or lack of domain knowledge. Learning complete domain descriptions is also very challenging because many features are irrelevant to achieving the goals and data may be scarce. Given incomplete knowledge of their actions, agents can ignore the incompleteness, plan around it, ask questions of a domain expert, or learn through trial and error.

Our agent Goalie learns about the preconditions and effects of its incompletely-specified actions by monitoring the environment state. In conjunction with the plan failure explanations generated by its planner DeFault, Goalie diagnoses …

Peer-To-Peer Simulation Of Massive Virtual Environments, James Dean Mathias

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Massively multiplayer games make up a large and growing segment of the computer game industry. One of the best known examples of these games is World of Warcraft, developed and published by Activision Blizzard. World of Warcraft boasts a subscriber base of over eleven million active subscribers, earning an estimated $1 billion dollars in 2010.

Some of the core issues for companies that publish these games are the cost of the computers, Internet bandwidth usage, and supporting technical staff. These costs easily reach hundreds of thousands of dollars each month, and in the case of World of Warcraft, millions of …

Java Api-Aware Code Generation Engine: A Prototype, Chandra Sekhar Vijyapurpu

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Software reuse enhances a programmer's productivity and reduces programming errors. Improving software reuse through libraries and frameworks is a vast problem area. This thesis offers an approach to solve two sub-problems within the problem area - to identify the right library components, and to offer code snippets that use the components correctly. The Java API-Aware Code Generation Engine, or JAGE for short, is a prototype system that demonstrates the feasibility of generating semantically valid code snippets consisting of method calls to classes in the J2SDK library.

Developers often search for sample code snippets that describe how to use the …

1. Improving The Yield Of Biodiesel From Microalgae And Other Lipids. 2. Studies Of The Wax Ester Biosynthetic Pathway And Potential Biotechnological Application, Bradley D. Wahlen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The production of biofuels and oleochemicals from renewable sources offers an opportunity to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. The work contained in this dissertation has focused on developing and improving methods for the production of biodiesel from non-traditional feedstocks and understanding biosynthetic pathways that result in the production of oleochemicals and fuels.

Pure vegetable oil can account for 70-80% of the total cost of biodiesel production. Many low-cost oils contain high amounts of free fatty acids, which are unsuitable for base-catalyzed transesterification. Herein an approach is described that efficiently accomplishes the simultaneous esterification and transesterification of both free fatty …

The Kinetics And Mechanisms Of Some Fundamental Organic Reactions Of Nitro Compounds, Zhao Li

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In chemistry, kinetics is the study of the rates of chemical reactions. A reaction mechanism describes in detail exactly what takes place at each stage of an overall chemical reaction from reactants to products. The work outlined in this dissertation was carried out in order to find out the true mechanisms of some fundamental organic reactions of nitro compounds by means of a series of novel kinetic techniques and analysis methods.

The target reactions include (1) the proton transfer reactions of nitroalkanes and (2) the aromatic nucleophilic reactions of trinitroarenes, both of which are undeniably among the most elementary and …

Planning In Incomplete Domains, Jared William Robertson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Automated planning in computer science consists of finding a sequence of actions leading from an initial state to a goal state. People who have expert knowledge of the specific problem domain work with experts in automated planning to define the domain states and actions. This knowledge engineering required to create complete and correct domain descriptions for planning problems is often very costly and difficult. Our goal with incomplete planning is to allow people to program domains without the need for planning experts.

Throughout the process of instruction of intelligent systems, teachers can often leave out whole procedures and aspects of …

Geothermal Alteration Of Basaltic Core From The Snake River Plain, Idaho, Christopher Joseph Sant

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Snake River Plain is located in the southern part of the state of Idaho. The eastern plain, which this study focuses on, is a trail of volcanics from the Yellowstone
hotspot. Three exploratory geothermal wells were drilled on the Snake River Plain. This project studies basaltic core from the first well at Kimama, north of Burley, Idaho. The objectives of this project are to establish zones of geothermal alteration and analyze the potential for geothermal power production near the center of the Snake River Plain. Thirty samples from 1,912 m of core were sampled and analyzed. Mineral data, temperature …

A Pre-Paving Baseline Inventory Of Vehicle-Related Mortality On Mule Deer Along, Seep Ridge Road, Book Cliffs, Utah, D. Alex Hansen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Part I:

The Seep Ridge road is the major route used to access the Book Cliffs from Uintah County. For many years the County has expressed interest in paving the road in order to improve access to this remote portion of the County. In 2011 Uintah County received Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approval for the project and began construction on the road. There have been many concerns expressed concerning the Seep Ridge Road paving project, including impacts to mule deer. The Utah Division of Wildlife, sportsmen and conservation groups are concerned that upgrading the road may lead to a …

A Study Of The Spawning Ecology And Early Life History Survival Of Bonneville Cutthroat Trout, Phaedra E. Budy, Sarah Wood, Brett B. Roper

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

We completed a large-scale field experiment in four tributaries of the Logan River, Utah, where the largest metapopulation of imperiled Bonneville cutthroat trout Oncorhynchus clarkii utah persists. We documented the spatial and temporal distributions of spawners, quantified substrate use versus substrate availability, and evaluated differences in hatch and emergence fry success between and among sites in relation to habitat characteristics. We observed considerable variability in the timing, magnitude, and duration of spawning among study areas (streams), in part as a function of a variable, multipeaked hydrograph. Nevertheless, across study areas, >70% of redds were constructed on the final descending limb …

Cochrane Resources Proposes To Drill One New Natural Gas Well, The Horse Point Federal Well 12-13, United States Department Of The Interior, Bureau Of Land Management

Environmental Assessments (UT)

This Environmental Assessment (EA) has been prepared to analyze Cochrane Resources proposal to drill one new natural gas well. The access road and pipeline would be within the Horse Point Lease boundary and would not need a right-of-way.

The Effects Of Surface Roughness On Diffuse Optical Reflection And Photoyields On Spacecraft Materials, Amberly Evans Jensen

Senior Theses and Projects

The goal of this project was to measure the change in the absorbance of spacecraft materials due to changes in the surface of the material. The absorbance was obtained by measuring reflectance and transmittance. We found that modifying the surface of a material did affect the material’s specular reflectance. However, the change may not have been entirely due to an increase in absorbance, but may also imply an increase in the diffuse reflection. To understand the affect on absorbance, diffuse reflectance and transmission will need to be measured. This will lead to a prediction of how surface modification affects the …

Evaluation Of The Temperature Dependence Of Endurance Models Of Electrostatic Breakdown, Charlie Sim, Jr Dennison

Senior Theses and Projects

The goal of this research was to investigate temperature and time dependent models for the electrostatic breakdown of polymeric spacecraft insulators. Temperature dependent breakdown was found by inducing an electrostatic breakdown in the prototypical polymer Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE) at various temperatures. Time dependent breakdown was found by applying a static voltage to LDPE and measuring the time to electrostatic breakdown. No significant temperature dependence of the electrostatic breakdown of LDPE was observed in a temperature range of 150 K to 300 K. The time dependent results show that the time to electrostatic breakdown is modeled by a negative logarithmic …

A Collection And Analysis Of Local Middle Grade Math Projects For The Common Core, Lynnette Checketts

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The State of Utah has changed the mathematics core curriculum several times over the past decade. The latest change was the adoption of the Common Core State Standards introducing both grade level content standards and standards of mathematical practice that emphasize how students are to study and reason with mathematics at all grade levels. According to state officials, these standards require more mathematical reasoning, problem solving, and deeper understanding than previous core curriculum documents. One way to address this change is for teachers to educate using projects during their instruction as unit starters, daily lessons, and for evaluation purposes. Yet …

Composite Feature-Based Face Detection Using Skin Color Modeling And Svm Classification, Swathi Rajashekar

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This report proposes a face detection algorithm based on skin color modeling and support vector machine (SVM) classification. Said classification is based on various face features used to detect specific faces in an input color image. A YCbCr color space is used to filter the skin color pixels from the input color image. Template matching is used on the result with various window sizes of the template created from an ORL face database. The candidates obtained above, are then classified by SVM classifiers using the histogram of oriented gradients, eigen features, edge ratio, and edge statistics features.

A Novel And Effective Short Track Speed Skating Tracking System, Yuxuan Wang

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Short track speed skating lends itself to intense competitions with a strong visual impact. Thus, the sport has become increasingly popular. In fact, in 1992, short track speed skating became an official Winter Olympic sport with four events, and four more events were added in 2002. Because of the sport’s growing popularity, there is a high demand from both coaches and TV broadcasters for a means of automatically gathering competition data such as trajectories, velocities, and 2D reconstruction animation. We call this vision-based sports video analysis.

In competitive short track speed skating, multiple skaters skate together on an ice track …

Rationalizing Structure, Stability, And Chemical Bonding Of Pure And Doped Clusters Isolated And Solvated Multiply Charged Anions, And Solid State Materials, Alina P. Sergeeva

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Chemistry is the study of materials and the changes that materials undergo. One can tune the properties of the known materials and design the novel materials with desired properties knowing what is responsible for the chemical reactivity, structure, and stability of those materials. The unified chemical bonding theory could address all these questions, but we do not have one available yet. The most accepted general theory of chemical bonding was proposed by Lewis in 1916, though Lewis’s theory fails to explain the bonding in materials with delocalized electron density such as sub-nano and nanoclusters, as well as aromatic organic and …

Homogenization Of Large-Scale Movement Models In Ecology With Application To The Spread Of Chronic Wasting Disease In Mule Deer, Martha J. Garlick

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) that affects deer, elk, and moose. TSEs are prion diseases which include mad cow disease and scrapie in sheep and goats. The disease agent is a misshapen protein called a prion, which causes lesions in the brain, and to date, there is no cure. CWD is a slow-developing, fatal disease, which is rare in the free-ranging mule deer population of Utah. Infected deer shed prions into the environment through saliva, feces, and decaying carcasses. These prions remain infective in soils for many years and healthy deer may contract CWD by …

The Influence Of Geology And Other Environmental Factors On Stream Water Chemistry And Benthic Invertebrate Assemblages, John R. Olson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Determining if a stream has been degraded by human activities requires knowing what that stream’s natural water quality and freshwater species composition would likely be without any alteration. However stream natural conditions vary greatly from stream to stream, making predicting natural conditions difficult. To determine natural stream conditions, I developed models to predict natural stream water chemistry at individual streams across the western USA. Specifically, the models predict a stream’s electrical conductivity (a measure of the amount of solids dissolved in water), acid neutralization capacity, and concentrations of calcium, magnesium, sulfate, total phosphorus, and total nitrogen. These models predict chemistry …

The Survival And Growth Of Adult Bonneville Cutthroat Trout (Oncorhynchus Clarkii Utah) In Response To Different Movement Patterns In A Tributary Of The Logan River, Utah, Jared W. Randall

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the past many inland trout species were believed to be sedentary, only occupying small stream segments (20 meters) during their life span. Recently it has been found that cutthroat trout do move and many populations do contain both mobile and non-mobile strategies. Most organisms move to attain greater growth rates, but movement also leads to higher detection by predators. Both mobile and non-mobile strategies have been observed in Spawn creek, a tributary of the Logan River in Northern Utah. My research evaluated the movement patterns, survival, and growth of adult Bonneville cutthroat trout Oncorhynchus clarkii Utah. My objectives …

Rock Properties And Structure Within The San Andreas Fault Observatory At Depth (Safod) Borehold, Northwest Of Parkfield, California: In Situ Observations Of Rock Deformation Processes And Fluid-Rock Interactions Of The San Andreas Fault Zone At ~ 3 Km Depth, Kelly Keighley Bradbury

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) is a scientific drilling experiment situated along the central creeping segment of the San Andreas Fault, near Parkfield, California, and north of a segment of the fault that has experienced large historical earthquakes. Drilling into active fault zones allows scientist’s to examine in situ rock samples and to record real-time data.

The main goal of this study is to characterize the geologic setting and rock properties of the San Andreas fault at ~ 3 km depth in the SAFOD borehole. In this region, the fault deforms nearly continuously through aseismic creep and …

Structural And Functional Characterization Of The Essential Rna Helicase Mtr4, Ryan N. Jackson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

To insure the integrity of nuclear RNA, the eukaryotic cell employs surveillance systems that identify and degrade RNAs that are detrimental or unneeded. The failure of RNA surveillance systems can lead to neurodegenerative disease states and cancer. The essential RNA helicase Mtr4 is required for the degradation and processing of several nuclear RNAs. To further the understanding of RNA surveillance and processing in eukaryotes, Ryan Jackson of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Utah State University has determined the molecular structure of Mtr4 and has used this structure to interrogate Mtr4 function biochemically. The structure revealed that Mtr4 contains …