Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Boron In The Pariette Wetlands, Uinta Basin, Ut, Palak Vasudeva

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Boron is a naturally occurring mineral in shale and coal beds formed in marine environments, as found in the Uinta Basin. Mining activity and the application of excess irrigation water on agricultural lands in the Pariette watershed lead to mobilization of B via surface run off. Water quality monitoring records from 2006- 2009 reported violations of Utah B standard for irrigation water 43-100% of the time, for water flowing through the Pariette Wetlands. This study aims to determine B distribution in abiotic (water, sediments) and biotic samples (macroinvertebrates, aquatic vegetation, fish, bird eggs), and to establish correlations between B concentrations …

Effect Of Plant Derived Tannins On Nitrogen And Carbon Cycling In Pasture Soils, Kathryn A. Slebodnik

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Pasture-finished beef has become increasingly popular, but nitrogen losses from these pastures are of concern. Legumes containing condensed tannins such as birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) and sainfoin (Onobrychis viciifolia) may serve as environmentally and economically viable alternative forages in pasture finishing systems while reducing soil nitrogen loss. The goal of this project was to understand how tannin type and concentration affects soil nitrogen cycling both in the lab and the field. This thesis: 1) compared the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of soil samples obtained from grazed grass and tannin and non-tannin containing legume pastures, 2) …

Some Examples Of The Liouville Integrability Of The Banded Toda Flows, Zachary Youmans

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Toda lattice is a famous integrable system studied by Toda in the 1960s. One can study the Toda lattice using a matrix representation of the system. Previous results have shown that this matrix of dimension n with 1 band and n‚àí1 bands is Liouville integrable. In this paper, we lay the foundation for proving the general case of the Toda lattice, where we consider the matrix representation with dimension n and a partially filled lower triangular part. We call this the banded Toda flow. The main theorem is that the banded Toda flow up to dimension 10 is …

Soil Health Assessment On Arid Rangeland Soils Impacted By Oil And Gas Exploration, Development, And Extraction, Justin Allred

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Oil and gas well pad reclamation in arid environments such as in the Uinta Basin of Utah, presents unique challenges, including remote locations, limited water, and elevated soil salinity and sodicity. Successfully reclaimed Plugged and Abandoned (P&A) well pads should resemble the surrounding rangeland once fully reclaimed. Revegetation of native species is the primary indicator of successful reclamation, but the lack of water makes it challenging to re-seed native plants, while trying to prevent the encroachment of invasive plant species such as Bromus tectorum (cheatgrass), Salsola tragus (Russian thistle), and Halogeton glomeratus (halogeton). Could successful reclamation be reflective of good …

Visual Saliency Estimation And Its Applications, Fei Xu

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The human visual system can automatically emphasize some parts of the image and ignore the other parts when seeing an image or a scene. Visual Saliency Estimation (VSE) aims to imitate this functionality of the human visual system to estimate the degree of human attention attracted by different image regions and locate the salient object. The study of VSE will help us explore the way human visual systems extract objects from an image. It has wide applications, such as robot navigation, video surveillance, object tracking, self-driving, etc.

The current VSE approaches on natural images models generic visual stimuli based on …

A Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo Approach To Uncertainty Quantification, Matthew Isaac

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is a framework used frequently in engineering analyses to understand how uncertainty in system inputs lead to uncertainty in the system output. An instability is observed in a UQ method proposed by Roy and Oberkampf and a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach to UQ is offered as an alternative. The Bayesian approach allows analysts to incorporate information from various available sources including observed measurements and expert opinion and to update the analysis and results as more information becomes available. An illustrative engineering example is provided as a platform to demonstrate the Bayesian UQ approach and to …

Analyzing The Von Neumann Entropy Of Contact Networks, Thomas J. Brower

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

When modeling the spread of disease, ecologists use ecological or contact networks to model how species interact with their environment and one another. The structure of these networks can vary widely depending on the study, where the nodes of a network can be defined as individuals, groups, or locations among other things. With this wide range of definition and with the difficulty of collecting samples, it is difficult to capture every factor of every population. Thus ecologists are limited to creating smaller networks that both fit their budget as well as what is reasonable within the population of interest. With …

Storm-Time Equatorial Thermospheric Dynamics And Electrodynamics, Luis A. Navarro Dominguez

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

We present the first complete study of the dynamics of the equatorial upper atmosphere (180-350 km) during periods of strong magnetic activity driven by the Sun, which are generally referred as geomagnetic storms. These storms have the potential to considerably affect satellite-based communications and navigation systems among other severe technological challenges. We used large databases of two of the most important parameters at these altitudes, which are the velocities of the neutral and ionized gas (plasma) referred to as neutral winds and plasma drifts. These measurements were acquired in the Peruvian equatorial region by the Jicamarca radar and by a …

Nitrogen Fertilizer Needs Of First-Year Small Grains Following Alfalfa, Collin Pound

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Wheat, barley, triticale, and oats, are small grains commonly grown as hay and grain following alfalfa in Utah and the Intermountain West, especially during drought years as they require less irrigation than corn. Several studies in many parts of the world have shown that first-year corn following alfalfa rarely needs nitrogen (N) fertilizer, yet relatively few have evaluated the N needs of small grains, especially small grains grown for hay. Objectives of this research were to determine whether N fertilizer is needed to economically optimize the yield and quality of first-year small grains following alfalfa, develop N guidelines, and whether …

An Analysis Of Syntax Exercises On The Performance Of Cs1 Students, Shelsey B. Sullivan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Students in introductory programming classes (CS1) generally have a difficult time learning the rules of programming. Although the general concepts of programming are relatively easy to learn, it can be difficult to learn what exactly can be typed in what order, which is known as syntax. To attempt to help students overcome this barrier, a study was conducted that introduced exercises into a CS1 class which taught the programming syntax in simple steps. The results of this study were obtained by analyzing the keys the students pressed, the errors of their code, their midterm exam scores, and their responses to …

Development And Identification Of Metrics To Predict The Impact Of Dimension Reduction Techniques On Classical Machine Learning Algorithms For Still Highway Images, Wasim Akram Khan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

We are witnessing an influx of data - images, texts, video, etc. Their high dimensionality and large volume make it challenging to apply machine learning to obtain actionable insight. This thesis explores several aspects pertaining to dimensional reduction: dimension reduction methods, metrics to measure distortion, image preprocessing, etc. Faster training and inference time on reduced data and smaller models which can be deployed on commodity hardware are a critical advantage of dimension reduction. For this study, classical machine learning methods were explored owing to their solid mathematical foundation and interpretability.

The dataset used is a time series of images from …

Materials Design For High-Performance Organic Redox Flow Batteries And Electrocatalytic Carbon Dioxide And Nitrogen Reduction, Bo Hu

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Nowadays, the utilization of renewable energy resources such as solar and wind energy has been realized to be a sustainable and environmentally benign strategy to alleviate the world’s severe dependency on traditional fossil fuels, and thus enables the environmental recovery and sustainable development of the economy. The massive commercialization of solar and wind energy raises the demands for advanced energy storage technologies, among which the redox flow battery has been recognized as a promising solution due to it is low cost, safe, environmentally benign, and easy to be scaled up. All vanadium redox flow battery stands for the most important …

Nanotextural And Nanochemical Constraints On The Role Of Heat In The Development Of Crystalline-Hosted, Silica-Rich Fault Mirrors In The Wasatch Fault Damage Zone, Utah, Usa, Leah M. Houser

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Earthquakes occur on faults, or rock that has experienced displacement at depth. Experimental work on a range of rock types reveals that >90% of earthquake energy on fault surfaces is given off as heat. Heat weakens rock and promotes earthquake rupture propagation. Thin (<0.5mm), high-gloss, "polished", light-reflective exposed fault surfaces are called fault mirrors (FMs). Fault mirrors may record rapid thermal, textural, and chemical changes that occur during an earthquake event.

The Wasatch Mountains are a N-S trending mountain range in Northern Utah that are the backdrop for Salt Lake City, Provo, Ogden, and Brigham City. This mountain range is currently built by the active Wasatch fault, and includes the exposed Wasatch fault damage zone. Many segments of the Wasatch fault are overdue for a potentially catastrophic …

Predicting The Impact Of Weather On Rural Travel Times Using Now-Cast Weather Forecast Data, Manish Meshram

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the states which record extreme weather conditions and high snow in winters, the travel time to drive between cities can get highly affected due to these bad weather conditions. The present solutions to tackle this problem are largely flow or time related and do not take weather conditions into account while making the predictions about travel time. Also these solutions can mostly be used for real time travel and not the future travel. In addition to that, the studies that have been done in this space are mostly for urban travel times but most parts of the interstate highways …

The Marshmallow Lab: A Project-Based Approach To Understanding Functional Responses, Melissa Pulley

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This paper presents a three-part lesson plan to improve student’s understanding of Holling’s type II functional response model. This model describes the interaction between a predator and how much it is able to consume given a constant number of prey. According to the model, while increased availability of prey allows predators to consume portionately more prey for low values, after some number of prey, predators will only be able to capture a limited number of prey even as the prey continues to increase. This phenomenon is known as saturation. Holling first develop this important ecological theory through his “disc experiment” …

Using Imagery To Improve Program Quality In Computer Programming, Joseph S. Ditton

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

A common practice in sports is to review film footage of a game. This is done in the hope that individuals on the team or the a team as a whole might learning something about technique, form, process, or strategy that they either did well on or need to improve on. We believe that the benefits of doing this could extend to computer science, and more specifically, the process of writing a computer program. This has never been done in the past, as such this research is exploratory in nature. A new tool called Phanon can record someone writing a …

Semisimple Subalgebras Of Semisimple Lie Algebras, Mychelle Parker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Let g be a Lie algebra. The subalgebra classification problem is to create a list of all subalgebras of g up to equivalence. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a software toolkit within the Differential Geometry package of Maple for classifying subalgebras of In particular the thesis will focus on classifying those subalgebras which are isomorphic to the Lie algebra sl(2) and those subalgebras of which have a basis aligned with the root space decomposition (regular subalgebras).

Teaching Distributed Application Design Using Drones, Cameron Frandsen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis provides a new platform that instructors can use to create a learning environment for students to learn how to design and implement distributed applications. One possible way to use the platform uses milestones to test the student’s understanding of different concepts. Milestones contain pretests that students can use to test their code. Each milestone focuses on a different concept, including interprocess communication, reliability, and security. A monitor process can be created by the students to provide away for the instructor to see how well the students are learning the concepts by using a monitor process. The platform gives …

Applications Of Machine Learning In High-Frequency Trade Direction Classification, Jared E. Hansen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The correct assignment of trades as buyer-initiated or seller-initiated is paramount in many quantitative finance studies. Simple decision rule methods have been used for signing trades since many data sets available to researchers do not include the sign of each trade executed. By utilizing these decision rule methods, as well as engineering new variables from available data, we have demonstrated that machine learning models outperform prior methods for accurately signing trades as buys and sells, achieving state-of-the-art results. The best model developed was 4.5 percentage points more accurate than older methods when predicting onto unseen data. Since finance and economics …

'Lmshapemaker': Utilizing The 'Rmapshaper' R Package To Modify Shapefiles For Use In Linked Micromap Plots, Braden D. Probst

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In order to effectively create map-based visualizations, some map modifications need to be conducted to ensure the map is readable and interpretable. There are several issues that need to be addressed to achieve this. The boundaries of a country may be overly complex which is particularly true with coastal areas of countries. Regions may be small and not seen in the final plot, as is the case with many capital cities in the world’s countries such as Washington D.C. and the Federal District of Mexico City. In other countries, regions may geographically lie far away from the rest of the …

Model-Based Properties Of Earth's Protective Shield: Relating Ut-Based Dependencies Of The Open/Closed Boundary, Cutoff Latitude, And L-Shell Parameter With Polar Cap Absorption Events, David A. Smith

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

High frequency radio continues to be an important communications medium. For example, commercial airlines use high frequency radios as their primary communications mode during transpolar crossings. It has been estimated that over 7000 transpolar flights occur each year. Unfortunately, during geomagnetic storms high frequency communications can become unreliable, especially near Earth's Polar Regions.

Space weather forecasters are burdened with the responsibility of predicting how radio signals might be affected during geomagnetic storms and passing that important information on to commercial airlines, allowing them to adjust flight plans accordingly. Such adjustments can be costly, but are necessary to ensure safety of …

Retention Of Women In Computer Science: Why Women Persist In Their Computer Science Majors, Katarina Pantic

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Retention of women through graduation in Computer Science (CS) majors is one of the biggest challenges for CS education. Most research in this area focuses on factors influencing attrition rather than why and how women remain committed. The goal of this research study is to understand retention from the perspective of women who persisted in their CS major. Using the theoretical lens of legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice, I designed and conducted a study that involved focus groups, interviews, journey maps, and experience sampling methods. I found that retention of women in this study was influenced by four …

Evolution Of The Book Cliffs Dryland Escarpment In Central Utah - Establishing Rates And Testing Models Of Escarpment Retreat, Nicholas R. Mccarroll

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Since the earliest explorations of the Colorado Plateau, geologists have suspected that cliffs are retreating back laterally. Clarence Dutton envisioned “the beds thus dissolving edge wise until after the lapse of millions of centuries their terminal cliffs stand a hundred miles or more back from their original position” when he wrote about the landscape in 1882. While many geologic studies have determined how fast rivers cut down through the Plateau, only a few studies have calculated how quickly cliffs retreat laterally, and geologists have been arguing since the 1940’s what exactly drives cliffs to retreat in the first place. We …

Developing, Adopting, And Executing 100% Net-Renewable Electricity Resolutions At The Local Level, Emily E. Skill

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the absence of national leadership on climate policy, municipalities are adopting resolutions to reduce their carbon footprint and transition to clean energy. However, what leads to successful adoption of these resolutions and how to effectively implement climate goals at the community level needs further exploration. To investigate these questions, this thesis examines the resolutions adopted in Salt Lake City, Park City, and Moab, Utah to transition to 100% renewable electricity by 2032. Data was collected through documents, such as city reports and newspapers, and interviews with government officials, city staff, and community members involved with the resolution process. A …

Temporal Json, Aayush Goyal

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a format for representing data. In this thesis we show how to capture the history of changes to a JSON document. Capturing the history is important in many applications, where not only the current version of a document is required, but all the previous versions. Conceptually the history can be thought of as a sequence of non-temporal JSON documents, one for each instant of time. Each document in the sequence is called a snapshot. Since changes to a document are few and infrequent, the sequence of snapshots largely duplicates a document across many time instants, …

Evaluation Of Stream Bank Restoration To Improve Water Quality In A Semi-Arid Stream, Johnathan Neenan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Human watershed activities such as converting land cover to agriculture and livestock grazing have negatively impacted stream water quality worldwide. One such case is Utah’s Upper Sevier River where a loss of woody bank vegetation (reduced shading) and accelerated bank erosion (increased fine sediment inputs) has led to increased stream temperature and water turbidity. As a result, the state of Utah sought to improve water quality conditions using streambank restoration. While commonly recommended and performed, the effectiveness of this sort of restoration has rarely been quantified. Here, I evaluated a restored reach of the Upper Sevier River near Hatch, UT …

A Model Explaining Medusahead Invasion And Novel Targeted Grazing Approaches Of Control, Casey N. Spackman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Medusahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae (L.) Nevski) is currently one of the biggest threats to rangelands and livestock operations in the Western US. High silica concentrations in medusahead contribute to its invasiveness. I developed a model to explain how silica is involved in the invasion process, and attempted to manipulate silica to increase use of the grass by livestock. Experiments were conducted to determine: 1) whether rotational grazing on established forages of improved nutritional quality would provide supplemental nutrients to increase cattle use of medusahead; 2) evaluate intake of and preference for medusahead treated with a glyphosate herbicide at different rates …

Cost-Effective Synthesis, Bioactivity And Cellular Uptake Study Of Aminoglycosides With Antimicrobial And Connexin Hemichannel Inhibitory Activity, Yagya P. Subedi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Amphiphilic kanamycin is one of the promising class of compounds for the treatment of fungal infections in plants and animal. Factor that lead to the restricting of compounds for commercialization includes, the higher cost of production and poor stability of the compound. However, the new lead, identified from the synthesis and biological testing, can be synthesized on a large scale with a cost comparable to commercial antifungals. The newly reported lead is stable at the acidic and basic conditions. Additionally, this compound has an excellent activity towards Candida auris, a multidrug-resistant superbug.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death …

Wildfire In The West: An Initial Analysis Of Wildfire Impacts On Hydrology And Riverbed Grain Size In Relation To Salmonid Habitat, Natalie J. Gillard

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Historically wildfires have been beneficial to forests, however, human developments have encroached on forests when wildfire was artificially suppressed by federal and state agencies. The area burned by wildfire each year has increased twenty-fold in the past three decades. Large, high severity fires pose increased threats to human and aquatic communities within and downstream of the burned area due to post-wildfire effects on flooding and sedimentation. We need to understand the impacts of wildfires to be able to mitigate their damages and to recognize their potential benefits. This research addresses the questions: 1) Do wildfires impact rural and urban economies …

Plug-And-Play Web Services, Arihant Jain

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The goal of this research is to make it easier to design and create web services for relational databases. A web service is a software service for providing data over computer networks. Web services provide data endpoints for many web applications. We adopt a plug-and-play approach for web service creation whereby a designer constructs a “plug,” which is a simple specification of the output produced by the service. If the plug can be “played” on the database then the web service is generated. Our plug-and-play approach has three advantages. First, a plug is portable. You can take the plug …