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Articles 1351 - 1380 of 4195

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Intramoleculer Hydrogen Bonding In Epoxide, Thiirane, Aziridine And Phosphirane Containing Cyclopentanols, Ben Edward Smith Jan 2019

Intramoleculer Hydrogen Bonding In Epoxide, Thiirane, Aziridine And Phosphirane Containing Cyclopentanols, Ben Edward Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A recent computational analysis of the stabilizing intramolecular OH· · · O contact in 1,2-dialkyl-2,3-epoxycyclopentanol diastereomers has been extended to thiiriane, aziridine and phosphirane analogues. Density functional theory (DFT), second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory (MP2) and CCSD(T) coupled-cluster computations with simple methyl and ethyl substituents indicate that electronic energies of the cis isomers are lowered by roughly 3 to 4 kcal mol−1 when the OH group of these cyclopentanol systems forms an intramolecular contact with the O, S, N or P atom on the adjacent carbon. The results also suggest that S and P can participate in these stabilizing intramolecular interactions …


Theranostics Based On Linear Dendritic Block Copolymers, Jon Williams Jan 2019

Theranostics Based On Linear Dendritic Block Copolymers, Jon Williams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When combining imaging and therapeutic motifs, known as theranostics, amphiphilic diblock copolymers have a strong precedent of success. These polymers can self-assemble into a variety of morphologies that are known to concentrate in areas of inflammation such as tumors. However, prediction of size and morphology from polymer structure still remains an open challenge. Another system with promise of therapeutic efficacy are tree-like struc- tures known as dendrimers, such as poly(amidoamine) (PAMAM) and bis-(hydroxymethyl) propionic acid (bMPA), which can uptake drugs and dyes into their branches. It is desireable to combine these two motifs, using linear-dendritic block copolymers (LDBCs). These represent …


Cramer Type Moderate Deviations For Random Fields And Mutual Information Estimation For Mixed-Pair Random Variables, Aleksandr Beknazaryan Jan 2019

Cramer Type Moderate Deviations For Random Fields And Mutual Information Estimation For Mixed-Pair Random Variables, Aleksandr Beknazaryan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation we first study Cramer type moderate deviation for partial sums of random fields by applying the conjugate method. In 1938 Cramer published his results on large deviations of sums of i.i.d. random variables after which a lot of research has been done on establishing Cramer type moderate and large deviation theorems for different types of random variables and for various statistics. In particular results have been obtained for independent non-identically distributed random variables for the sum of independent random to estimate the mutual information between two random variables. The estimates enjoy a central limit theorem under some …


A Computational Approach To Predicting And Understanding New Psychoactive Substances (Nps) For Developing A Database For State And Federal Crime Laboratories, Caroline Amelia Spencer Jan 2019

A Computational Approach To Predicting And Understanding New Psychoactive Substances (Nps) For Developing A Database For State And Federal Crime Laboratories, Caroline Amelia Spencer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The object of this dissertation was to use a computational approach to predict and understand new psychoactive substances (NPS) to develop a database for state and federal crime. The primary scope of the dissertation was to better understand the interactions that take place between new psychoactive substances and their corresponding receptors. Through analysis of the interactions between the amino acids within the receptors and the NPS an understanding into the pharmacology and toxicology of these drugs can be gained. NPS such as synthetic cannabinoids fentanyl and its analogs and kratom have become more problematic for both state and federal crime …


Geographic Variations Of Sound Channel Axis In The Global Ocean, Mukunda Kumar Acharya Jan 2019

Geographic Variations Of Sound Channel Axis In The Global Ocean, Mukunda Kumar Acharya

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sound signals are used for imaging and communication in the ocean. Underwater sound speed has a minimum at a certain depth that forms a sound channel for long-range underwater sound propagation. The geographic variation of sound channel is crucial in uses of underwater sound in various environments including ocean acoustic tomography and monitoring of global warming. In this work, sound speed and depth of the channel axis in the global ocean are characterized for their variation with the latitude, longitude, and depth.


Essays On Mixture Models, Trevor R. Camper Jan 2019

Essays On Mixture Models, Trevor R. Camper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When considering statistical scenarios where one can sample from populations that are not of interest for the purposes of a study, bivariate mixture models can be used to study the effect that this missampling can have on parameter estimation. In this thesis, we will examine the behavior that bivariate mixture models have on two statistical constructs: Cronbach's alpha \cite{C51}, and Spearman's rho \cite{S04}. Chapter 1 will introduce notions of mixture models and the definition of bias under mixture models which will serve as the central concept of this thesis. Chapter 2 will investigate a particular psychometric issue known as insufficient …


Quantized Circulation In Racetrack Atomtronic Circuits At Non-Zero Temperature, Benjamin R. Eller Jan 2019

Quantized Circulation In Racetrack Atomtronic Circuits At Non-Zero Temperature, Benjamin R. Eller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We extend previous theoretical investigations of the creation of quantized circulation states by stirring Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) confined in ``racetrack" potentials. The previous study, {\em Producing Smooth Flow in Atom Circuits by Stirring}, used the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE), which is valid at $T=0$ K. Here we use a non-zero temperature model based on the Zaremba, Nikuni, Griffin (ZNG) theory to simulate stirring racetrack BECs. The two main goals of this thesis are 1) to understand the effects of temperature on the production of circulation and 2) to understand the mechanism by which the circulation is excited. We find that it …


Variable Selection In Accelerated Failure Time (Aft) Frailty Models: An Application Of Penalized Quasi-Likelihood, Sarbesh R. Pandeya Jan 2019

Variable Selection In Accelerated Failure Time (Aft) Frailty Models: An Application Of Penalized Quasi-Likelihood, Sarbesh R. Pandeya

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Variable selection is one of the standard ways of selecting models in large scale datasets. It has applications in many fields of research study, especially in large multi-center clinical trials. One of the prominent methods in variable selection is the penalized likelihood, which is both consistent and efficient. However, the penalized selection is significantly challenging under the influence of random (frailty) covariates. It is even more complicated when there is involvement of censoring as it may not have a closed-form solution for the marginal log-likelihood. Therefore, we applied the penalized quasi-likelihood (PQL) approach that approximates the solution for such a …


Characterization Of Hydrogen Bonding, Halogen Bonding And Argyrophilic Interactions Using Computational Modeling, Sarah Nicole Arradondo Jan 2019

Characterization Of Hydrogen Bonding, Halogen Bonding And Argyrophilic Interactions Using Computational Modeling, Sarah Nicole Arradondo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Non-covalent interactions govern multiple important chemical processes throughout nature from those within the human body to the complex environment of the atmosphere. Quantum mechanical electronic structure modeling of these relatively weak interactions can provide molecular level insight that can further our understanding of specific macroscopic properties. In the present work different non-covalent interactions are computationally evaluated within four systems. A small prototypical hydrogen bonded system and the various structural motifs that promoted proton transfer within concentrated acid and water clusters are characterized with sophisticated wavefunction based methods and large robust basis sets in order to accurately predict the structures energies …


The Medicine Hat Block And The Assembly Of Laurentia: New Interpretations From Single-Grain Zircon Analyses, Blake Oswell Ladouceur Jan 2019

The Medicine Hat Block And The Assembly Of Laurentia: New Interpretations From Single-Grain Zircon Analyses, Blake Oswell Ladouceur

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Medicine Hat Block (MHB) is one of the core cratonic elements that amalgamated in the Paleoproterozoic to form Laurentia. However the role of the MHB in the formation of Laurentia is poorly constrained due to virtually all of the MHB being concealed by Proterozoic and younger supracrustal sequences limiting availability of data. The primary sources of samples from the MHB are 1) xenoliths of variable metamorphic grade including gneisses amphibolites and meta-plutonic rocks collected from Eocene volcanic rock; and 2) similar lithologies recovered from boreholes that penetrate to the MHB basement. Previous work on samples from the MHB yielded …


Improving Random Forests By Feature Dependence Analysis, Silu Zhang Jan 2019

Improving Random Forests By Feature Dependence Analysis, Silu Zhang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Random forests (RFs) have been widely used for supervised learning tasks because of their high prediction accuracy good model interpretability and fast training process. However they are not able to learn from local structures as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) do when there exists high dependency among features. They also cannot utilize features that are jointly dependent on the label but marginally independent of it. In this dissertation we present two approaches to address these two problems respectively by dependence analysis. First a local feature sampling (LFS) approach is proposed to learn and use the locality information of features to group …


The Development Of Novel Rhenium- And Copper-Based Molecular Catalysts For Applications In Energy Conversion Chemistry, Joseph Michael Lee Jan 2019

The Development Of Novel Rhenium- And Copper-Based Molecular Catalysts For Applications In Energy Conversion Chemistry, Joseph Michael Lee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the Industrial Revolution, the consumption of fossil fuels has increased dramatically worldwide. The combustion of fossil fuels leads to the generation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but also a C1 feedstock that could be utilized for the generation of renewable fuels and commodity chemicals. However, CO2 is chemically inert and typically demands strong chemical reductants or very negative potentials before it undergoes conversion into reduced carbon products. The desire to carry out CO2 conversion in the presence of water presents a significant challenge, as protons may be reduced to hydrogen gas rather than facilitating …


Detrital Zircon Provenance And Correlation Of Two Newly Discovered Ripley Formation Bentonites: Pontotoc County, Mississippi, Elizabeth Jayne Vitale Jan 2019

Detrital Zircon Provenance And Correlation Of Two Newly Discovered Ripley Formation Bentonites: Pontotoc County, Mississippi, Elizabeth Jayne Vitale

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Two newly discovered bentonite deposits in northern and southern Pontotoc County, Mississippi occur in the Upper Cretaceous outcrop in a banded pattern on the northeastern margin of the Mississippi Embayment (MSE). The entire Ripley Formation (Fm) consists of ~73 m of fossiliferous clay, sand, and calcareous sand beds. The bentonites are located stratigraphically within the Chiwapa Sandstone Member (CSM) at the top of the Ripley Fm and stratigraphically lie above previously mined bentonites in central Pontotoc County. Since the northern and southern bentonites differ stratigraphically from the previously mined bentonites, it is possible that there are other unknown bentonite deposits …


Electro- And Photocatalytic Carbon Dioxide Reduction And Thermal Isomerization Of Highly Strained Tricyclocompounds, Weiwei Yang Jan 2019

Electro- And Photocatalytic Carbon Dioxide Reduction And Thermal Isomerization Of Highly Strained Tricyclocompounds, Weiwei Yang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Anthracene-bridged dinuclear rhenium complexes are reported for electrocatalytic and photocatalytic carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction to carbon monoxide (CO). Related by hindered rotation of each rhenium active site to either side of the anthracene bridge cis and trans conformers have been isolated and characterized. Electrochemical studies reveal distinct mechanisms whereby the cis conformer operates via cooperative bimetallic CO2 activation and conversion and the trans conformer reduces CO2 through well-established single-site and bimolecular pathways analogous to Re(bpy)(CO)3Cl. Higher turnover frequencies are observed for the cis conformer (35.3 s−1) relative to the trans conformer (22.9 s−1) with both outperforming Re(bpy)(CO)3Cl (11.1 s−1). Photocatalytic …


Processing Of Advanced Infrared Materials, Daniel Mcgill Jan 2019

Processing Of Advanced Infrared Materials, Daniel Mcgill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Infrared transparent glassy and crystalline materials often have unique and complex processing requirements but are an important class of materials for such applications as optical windows, lenses, waveplates, polarizers and beam splitters. This thesis investigates two specific materials, one amorphous and one crystalline, that are candidates for use in the short and midwave-infrared and mid and longwave infrared, respectively. It is demonstrated that an innovative uniaxial sintering process, which uses a sacrificial pressure-transmitting medium, can be used to fully densify a 70TeO2-20WO3-10La2O3 (TWL) glass powder. The characteristics of the sintered TWL glass is compared to that of a parent glass …


Nanoscale Functional Imaging By Tailoring Light-Matter Interaction To Explore Organic And Biological Systems, Negar Otrooshi Jan 2019

Nanoscale Functional Imaging By Tailoring Light-Matter Interaction To Explore Organic And Biological Systems, Negar Otrooshi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Probing molecular systems with light has been critical to deepen our understanding of life sciences. However, conventional analytical methods fail to resolve small quantities of molecules or the heterogeneity in molecules assembled into complex systems. This bottleneck is mostly attributed to light diffraction limit. In recent years, the successful implementation of new approaches to achieve sub-wavelength chemical speciation with an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) has paved the way to a deeper understanding of the effect of local composition and structure on the functional properties of a larger scale system. The combination of infrared light, to excite the vibrational modes of …


Approximate In-Memory Computing On Rerams, Salman Anwar Khokhar Jan 2019

Approximate In-Memory Computing On Rerams, Salman Anwar Khokhar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Computing systems have seen tremendous growth over the past few decades in their capabilities, efficiency, and deployment use cases. This growth has been driven by progress in lithography techniques, improvement in synthesis tools, architectures and power management. However, there is a growing disparity between computing power and the demands on modern computing systems. The standard Von-Neuman architecture has separate data storage and data processing locations. Therefore, it suffers from a memory-processor communication bottleneck, which is commonly referred to as the 'memory wall'. The relatively slower progress in memory technology compared with processing units has continued to exacerbate the memory wall …


Optimization Algorithms For Deep Learning Based Medical Image Segmentations, Aliasghar Mortazi Jan 2019

Optimization Algorithms For Deep Learning Based Medical Image Segmentations, Aliasghar Mortazi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Medical image segmentation is one of the fundamental processes to understand and assess the functionality of different organs and tissues as well as quantifying diseases and helping treatment planning. With ever increasing number of medical scans, the automated, accurate, and efficient medical image segmentation is as unmet need for improving healthcare. Recently, deep learning has emerged as one the most powerful methods for almost all image analysis tasks such as segmentation, detection, and classification and so in medical imaging. In this regard, this dissertation introduces new algorithms to perform medical image segmentation for different (a) imaging modalities, (b) number of …


Training Neural Networks Through The Integration Of Evolution And Gradient Descent, Gregory Morse Jan 2019

Training Neural Networks Through The Integration Of Evolution And Gradient Descent, Gregory Morse

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Neural networks have achieved widespread adoption due to both their applicability to a wide range of problems and their success relative to other machine learning algorithms. The training of neural networks is achieved through any of several paradigms, most prominently gradient-based approaches (including deep learning), but also through up-and-coming approaches like neuroevolution. However, while both of these neural network training paradigms have seen major improvements over the past decade, little work has been invested in developing algorithms that incorporate the advances from both deep learning and neuroevolution. This dissertation introduces two new algorithms that are steps towards the integration of …


Adsorption Capacity Assessment Of Advance Green Environmental Media To Remove Nutrients From Stormwater-Runoff, Hanan Elhakiem Jan 2019

Adsorption Capacity Assessment Of Advance Green Environmental Media To Remove Nutrients From Stormwater-Runoff, Hanan Elhakiem

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Best Management Practices (BMPs) in stormwater treatment are a suite of treatment alternatives to deal with pollutant removal problems from stormwater runoff. Biosorption-activated media (BAM) are green sorption media consists of recycled materials have shown excellent nutrient removal as an effective BMP by enhancing physicochemical and microbiological processes. In this study, Iron-Filling Green Environmental Media (denoted as IFGEM-3) and Advanced Green Environmental Media 1 and 2 (denoted as AGEM-1 and AGEM-2) were produced and tested for their adsorption capacities as well as removal and recovery potential for phosphate, nitrate, and ammonia against natural soil (baseline) collected from a stormwater retention …


Semi-Analytical Solutions Of Non-Linear Differential Equations Arising In Science And Engineering, Mangalagama Dewasurendra Jan 2019

Semi-Analytical Solutions Of Non-Linear Differential Equations Arising In Science And Engineering, Mangalagama Dewasurendra

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Systems of coupled non-linear differential equations arise in science and engineering are inherently nonlinear and difficult to find exact solutions. However, in the late nineties, Liao introduced Optimal Homotopy Analysis Method (OHAM), and it allows us to construct accurate approximations to the systems of coupled nonlinear differential equations. The drawback of OHAM is, we must first choose the proper auxiliary linear operator and then solve the linear higher-order deformation equation by spending lots of CPU time. However, in the latest innovation of Liao's "Method of Directly Defining inverse Mapping (MDDiM)" which he introduced to solve a single nonlinear ordinary differential …


Seascape Genetics And Rehabilitation Efficiency In The Florida Manatee, Madison Hall Jan 2019

Seascape Genetics And Rehabilitation Efficiency In The Florida Manatee, Madison Hall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Florida manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris) was recently downlisted federally from "endangered" to "threatened" despite acknowledgments of remaining threats to long term population persistence. Challenges to future manatee conservation include, but are not limited to, increases in frequency of harmful algal blooms, intensifying anthropogenic disturbance, and loss of warm-water habitat. The goals of this dissertation were 1) to assess threats to the manatee via a comprehensive, long-term (1973-2016), retrospective analysis of the manatee rescue and rehabilitation partnership (MRRP) and 2) to use seascape genetics analysis to examine whether abiotic, biotic, or anthropogenic seascape variables could significantly describe genetic distance patterns …


Action Recognition, Temporal Localization And Detection In Trimmed And Untrimmed Video, Rui Hou Jan 2019

Action Recognition, Temporal Localization And Detection In Trimmed And Untrimmed Video, Rui Hou

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Automatic understanding of videos is one of the most active areas of computer vision research. It has applications in video surveillance, human computer interaction, video sports analysis, virtual and augmented reality, video retrieval etc. In this dissertation, we address four important tasks in video understanding, namely action recognition, temporal action localization, spatial-temporal action detection and video object/action segmentation. This dissertation makes contributions to above tasks by proposing. First, for video action recognition, we propose a category level feature learning method. Our proposed method automatically identifies such pairs of categories using a criterion of mutual pairwise proximity in the (kernelized) feature …


Hadwiger Numbers And Gallai-Ramsey Numbers Of Special Graphs, Christian Bosse Jan 2019

Hadwiger Numbers And Gallai-Ramsey Numbers Of Special Graphs, Christian Bosse

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores two separate topics on graphs. We first study a far-reaching generalization of the Four Color Theorem. Given a graph G, we use chi(G) to denote the chromatic number; alpha(G) the independence number; and h(G) the Hadwiger number, which is the largest integer t such that the complete graph K_t can be obtained from a subgraph of G by contracting edges. Hadwiger's conjecture from 1943 states that for every graph G, h(G) is greater than or equal to chi(G). This is perhaps the most famous conjecture in Graph Theory and remains open even for graphs G with alpha(G) …


Multi-Touch Detection And Semantic Response On Non-Parametric Rear-Projection Surfaces, Jason Hochreiter Jan 2019

Multi-Touch Detection And Semantic Response On Non-Parametric Rear-Projection Surfaces, Jason Hochreiter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The ability of human beings to physically touch our surroundings has had a profound impact on our daily lives. Young children learn to explore their world by touch; likewise, many simulation and training applications benefit from natural touch interactivity. As a result, modern interfaces supporting touch input are ubiquitous. Typically, such interfaces are implemented on integrated touch-display surfaces with simple geometry that can be mathematically parameterized, such as planar surfaces and spheres; for more complicated non-parametric surfaces, such parameterizations are not available. In this dissertation, we introduce a method for generalizable optical multi-touch detection and semantic response on uninstrumented non-parametric …


Towards More Reliable Neural Network Learning Models, Navid Kardan Jan 2019

Towards More Reliable Neural Network Learning Models, Navid Kardan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ideally, when a neural network makes a wrong decision or encounters an out-of-distribution example, its predictive confidence should be as low as possible. Three primary contributions in this dissertation address this challenge. The first two contributions are new approaches to mitigate overconfident predictions in modern neural networks. In the first (1), called competitive overcomplete output layer neural networks, several classifiers, as part of the same output layer, are trained simultaneously and later their consensus produces more reliable predictions. The second approach (2) reformulates the original classification problem into several new versions by combining classes together and training a classifier on …


Interpreting Vegetation And Soil Anomalies In The Guarumen Area Of Northwestern Venezuela Using Remote Sensing Applications, Tyler Edward Ricketts Jan 2019

Interpreting Vegetation And Soil Anomalies In The Guarumen Area Of Northwestern Venezuela Using Remote Sensing Applications, Tyler Edward Ricketts

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Guarumen area of Venezuela is a tectonically active region that is approximately 1,640 mi2 across the northern portions of the Barinas Basin and the foothills of the Mérida Andes. It is structurally influenced by the Caribbean plate to the north, the Nazca plate to the west, and the Maracaibo block against the Guyana Shield of the South American Plate. These result in an oblique boundary that gives rise to the fold-and-thrust belt of the Mérida Andes to the west, and the Caribbean Mountain system to the north, in concordance to the right-lateral shearing that is evidenced by the Boconó …


Building An Automated Q-A System Using Online Forums As Knowledge Bases, Kyle Moore Jan 2019

Building An Automated Q-A System Using Online Forums As Knowledge Bases, Kyle Moore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Question-Answer systems traditionally use expensive and difficult to produce structured knowledge bases. Recent systems have used unstructured natural language sources as their datasets, but most of those sources have been overly broad or difficult to extend. Online forums are a largely untapped source of information that can provide both depth and breadth when limited to a specific domain, as well as being adaptive to the introduction of new information. In this paper, I conjecture that online forums can be similarly and effectively used as an unstructured knowledge base for Question-Answer systems. I use a relatively simple summarization-based approach to analyze …


A Study Of Several Applications Of Parallel Computing In The Sciences Using Petsc, Nicholas Stegmeier Jan 2019

A Study Of Several Applications Of Parallel Computing In The Sciences Using Petsc, Nicholas Stegmeier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The importance of computing in the natural sciences continues to grow as scientists strive to analyze complex phenomena. The dynamics of turbulence, astrophysics simulations, and climate change are just a few examples where computing is critical. These problems are computationally intractable on all computing platforms except supercomputers, necessitating the continued development of efficient algorithms and methodologies in parallel computing. This thesis investigates the use of parallel computing and mathematical modeling in the natural sciences through several applications, namely computational fluid dynamics for impinging jets in mechanical engineering, simulation of biofilms in an aqueous environment in mathematical biology, and the solution …


Using Social Network Analysis To Examine The Connections Within A Noyce Community’S Facebook Group, Amanda Jensen Jan 2019

Using Social Network Analysis To Examine The Connections Within A Noyce Community’S Facebook Group, Amanda Jensen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One of the successes of the Rural Enhancement of Mathematics And Science Teachers (REMAST) Scholarship Program at South Dakota State University is the community we have built. This community has been built through a summer conference and a closed Facebook group. As we near the end of our Phase II Noyce funding, we are using social network analysis to examine the connections within the REMAST Facebook group. What we learn in this research project will be useful to other Noyce projects as it is a model for developing a strong professional learning community. In order to determine information about the …