Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Black-Tailed Prairie Dog (Cynomys Ludovicianus) State-And-Transition Model For Loamy Ecological Sites In Mlra 62 In Custer State Park, South Dakota, Mark R. Hendrix

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus) are native burrowing rodents that occupy large areas in the shortgrass and mixed-grass prairies of the Northern Great Plains. They are an important component of these prairie systems due to their impacts on plant communities. Currently State-and-Transition models (STMs) for grassland Ecological Site Descriptions (ESDs) address grazing by livestock as a major factor affecting states and phases within states. Impacts from other grazers, such as prairie dogs, are either not addressed directly, or are included only in a transition to a generalized early seral state. There are, however, dramatic differences in plant communities …

A Comprehensive Analysis Of Aromatic-Proton Mediated Hydrogen Bonds, Mona S. Alshamrani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Hydrogen bonds play critical role in folding, structure and recognition of biological macromolecules (e.g., proteins, RNA, DNA). In addition to classical hydrogen bonds (e.g., ─OH---O=, ─OH---O─, ─NH---O─ etc.), structural analysis of protein and nucleic acids, almost a decade ago, showed that hydrogen bonds (e.g., CH---O) with hydrogen atoms on aliphatic carbon atoms (hereafter, aliphatic-protons) also play very important role in the structure and function of biomolecules. Even though, protons of aromatic ring systems (hereafter, aromatic-protons) are more polar than the aliphatic-protons, systematic analysis of hydrogen bonds of aromatic-protons have not been carried out. Therefore, I carried out a systematic analysis …

Quantifying The Short-Term Impacts Of Cover Crops And Grazing On Soil Health Under An Integrated Crop-Livestock System In South Dakota, Vishal Seth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cover crops and grazing under Integrated Crop-Livestock System (ICLS) can impact the rhizosphere nutrient cycling and may have potential to increase the long-term sustainability and economic profitability of agricultural production system. In South Dakota, crop production practices and livestock husbandry are both common which provide the opportunity for ICLS to be successful in this region. However, little is known about the impacts of the cover crops and grazing under ICLS on soil properties in this region. The present study was conducted at South Dakota State University Research Farm (44°20'34.8"N, 96°48'14.8"W), Brookings, SD, to quantify the impacts of cover crops and …

Development Of A High Performance Liquid Chromatography Method For The Analysis Of Next-Generation Cyanide Antidote, 3-Mercaptopyruvate, In Plasma, Elaf Alzhrani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although the current FDA approved cyanide antidotes (i.e., sodium nitrite, sodium thiosulfate, and hydoxocoboalamine) are effective for treating cyanide poisoning, each individual antidote has major limitations, including large effective dosage, delayed onset of action, or dependence on enzymes generally confined to specific organs. To overcome these current limitations, next-generation cyanide antidotes are being investigated, including 3-mercaptopyruvate (3-MP). Analytical methods capable of detecting 3-MP from plasma are essential for the development of 3-MP as a nextgeneration cyanide antidote. Although 3-MP has been analyzed by LC-MS-MS, this instrument is not widely available. Therefore, a high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method with fluorescence …

Molecular Level Encapsulation Of Chromophores Using Pillar[5]Arenes For Enhanced Photostability, Manik Gudimani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Organic π-conjugated materials have been researched extensively for a number of applications including organic photovoltaics, electrooptic (EO) modulation, solid-state lasing, organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), biological imaging and sensing, chemical sensing and ligands for photocatalysts. These organic optoelectronic materials have one major issue that affects its performance and lifetime—photostability. For some applications, hermetical packaging, which is expensive, is required to prevent degradation by light and oxygen. Photooxidation occurs when a material is exposed to light and causes structural and chemical changes leading to photodegradation of the material. The two primary degradation mechanisms responsible for photooxidation involve superoxide radical anion and …

The Impact Of Data Sovereignty On American Indian Self-Determination: A Framework Proof Of Concept Using Data Science, Joseph Carver Robertson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Data Sovereignty Initiative is a collection of ideas that was designed to create SMART solutions for tribal communities. This concept was to develop a horizontal governance framework to create a strategic act of sovereignty using data science. The core concept of this idea was to present data sovereignty as a way for tribal communities to take ownership of data in order to affect policy and strategic decisions that are data driven in nature. The case studies in this manuscript were developed around statistical theories of spatial statistics, exploratory data analysis, and machine learning. And although these case studies are …

Biomass Burning In The Conterminous United States: A Comparison And Fusion Of Active Fire Observations From Polar-Orbiting And Geostationary Satellites For Emissions Estimation, Fangjun Li

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Biomass burning is an important source of atmospheric greenhouse gases and aerosol emissions that significantly influence climate and air quality. Estimation of biomassburning emissions (BBE) has been limited to the conventional method in which parameters (i.e., burned area and fuel load) can be challenging to quantify accurately. Recent studies have demonstrated that the rate of biomass combustion is a linear function of fire radiative power (FRP), the instantaneous radiative energy released from actively burning fires, which provides a novel pathway to estimate BBE. To obtain accurate and timely BBE estimates for near real-time applications (i.e., air quality forecast), the satellite …

Variable Selection Techniques For Clustering On The Unit Hypersphere, Damon Bayer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mixtures of von Mises-Fisher distributions have been shown to be an effective model for clustering data on a unit hypersphere, but variable selection for these models remains an important and challenging problem. In this paper, we derive two variants of the expectation-maximization framework, which are each used to identify a specific type of irrelevant variables for these models. The first type are noise variables, which are not useful for separating any pairs of clusters. The second type are redundant variables, which may be useful for separating pairs of clusters, but do not enable any additional separation beyond the separability provided …

Quantifying Potential Long-Term Changes In Erosion, Discharge, And Total Suspended Solids Resulting From Agricultural Land Use Change In South Dakota, Hector Manuel Menendez Iii

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

South Dakota is a mosaic of grasslands, wetlands, and cropland. A continuing shift from grassland to cropland has occurred over the past decade and is expected for the next 50 years. Rate of future conversion may vary greatly in response to regulatory, economic, and social factors. Concern has risen over environmental consequences associated with land conversion, which include but are not limited to changes in rill and sheet erosion rates from cultivated soils, stream and river discharge, and water quality. Quantifying future changes for these three externalities is important to understand the possible long-term consequences of complex grassland conversion decisions …

Lignin Depolymerization: Mechanistic Analysis, Optimization And Application, Eric Michael Nagel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lignin is the most abundant aromatic biopolymer and is a potential source for phenolic chemical feedstocks. Lignin is composed of phenolic units connected by more than eight different linkages, the most common being β-O-4 which constitutes 50-60%. The hydrothermal decomposition of a guaiacol based β-O-4 lignin dimer was studied under neutral and basic conditions to elucidate the mechanism of β-O-4 bond cleavage and the formation of downstream products. Phenol-carbonyl condensation and vinyl-ether formation were shown to be the primary causes for low monomer yields under the tested conditions. Three Ni catalyst systems, Ni/C + H₂, Ni/C-Zn, and Ni/Zn, …

Comparison Of Historical Precipitation For Aberdeen, Ipswich, And Eureka, South Dakota, Uday Singh Kshatriya

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The availability of water resources varies from time to time with the climate conditions. Keeping track of climate conditions would eventually benefit for the future predictions. The objective of this research was to compare and contrast the climate especially for Aberdeen, Ipswich and Eureka, South Dakota utilizing the historical monthly precipitation records and to develop the techniques that are reliable to estimate the missing data. For these necessary statistical analyses were performed using the monthly precipitation data from High Plains Regional Climate Center (HPRCC) for the annual and 8-Year periods for Aberdeen, Ipswich and Eureka, South Dakota. 63 water years …

A Development Of Travel Time Equation For Overland Flow As Affected By Vegetation, Naga Vara Prasad Ganti

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In overland flow water research, travel time is a significant parameter used in estimating peak discharge in channels or rivers. Overland flow is assumed to be in turbulent condition to estimate travel time using Manning’s Velocity Equation (MVE). When the flow is in a laminar condition, Grismer’s Laminar Mean Velocity Equation (GLMVE) is applied but fails to consider the roughness parameter. A review of the literature shows numerous equations for overland travel time, but there is no known equation that determines the mean velocity of overland flow under laminar condition with a roughness coefficient or other coefficient related to the …

Towards High-Performance Big Data Processing Systems, Hong Zhang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The amount of generated and stored data has been growing rapidly, It is estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated every day, and 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years. How to solve these big data issues has become a hot topic in both industry and academia. Due to the complex of big data platform, we stratify it into four layers: storage layer, resource management layer, computing layer, and methodology layer. This dissertation proposes brand-new approaches to address the performance of big data platforms like Hadoop and Spark on …

The Ecology Of Land Managers In Riparian Restoration, Lisa Buie Clark

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While previous studies in restoration ecology have focused on the efficacy of direct management actions, the driving forces on management decisions (e.g., managers' characteristics or attitudes, environmental conditions) and the indirect impacts on restoration outcomes from management decisions (such as whether to collaborate) are quantified here for the first time. As a case study, I used data from 244 sites across the riparian Southwest US where the invasive shrubby tree Tamarix sp. was removed using various different methods. I surveyed and interviewed the 45 land managers who were responsible for the removal projects to determine their characteristics, attitudes, and …

Rnn-Based Generation Of Polyphonic Music And Jazz Improvisation, Andrew Hannum

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents techniques developed for algorithmic composition of both polyphonic music, and of simulated jazz improvisation, using multiple novel data sources and the character-based recurrent neural network architecture char-rnn. In addition, techniques and tooling are presented aimed at using the results of the algorithmic composition to create exercises for musical pedagogy.

Dynamically Tunable Plasmonic Structural Color, Daniel Franklin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Functional surfaces which can control light across the electromagnetic spectrum are highly desirable. With the aid of advanced modeling and fabrication techniques, researchers have demonstrated surfaces with near arbitrary tailoring of reflected/transmitted amplitude, phase and polarization - the applications for which are diverse as light itself. These systems often comprise of structured metals and dielectrics that, when combined, manifest resonances dependent on structural dimensions. This attribute provides a convenient and direct path to arbitrarily engineer the surface's optical characteristics across many electromagnetic regimes. But while many of these plasmonic systems struggle to compete with the efficiency of pre-existing technologies, the …

Analysis Of Driver Behavior Modeling In Connected Vehicle Safety Systems Through High Fidelity Simulation, Ahura Jami

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A critical aspect of connected vehicle safety analysis is understanding the impact of human behavior on the overall performance of the safety system. Given the variation in human driving behavior and the expectancy for high levels of performance, it is crucial for these systems to be flexible to various driving characteristics. However, design, testing, and evaluation of these active safety systems remain a challenging task, exacerbated by the lack of behavioral data and practical test platforms. Additionally, the need for the operation of these systems in critical and dangerous situations makes the burden of their evaluation very costly and time-consuming. …

In Situ Treatment Systems For Remediation Of Polychlorinated Biphenyl-Contaminated Building Materials, Adibah Almutairi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) are a family of synthetic organohalides comprising 209 congeners which were used historically as additives in paint and caulking materials over a span of many years. Even though the production of PCBs in the USA has been banned since the late 1970s, their former prevalence and widespread use means many structures are still coated with PCB-laden paints. In addition, the presence of PCBs in elastic sealants has resulted in transport of PCBs into concrete structures and has caused soil contamination around buildings. PCB-contaminated building materials have become a significant concern for the environment and building occupants due …

Light Scattering Property Of Gold Nanoparticles With Applications To Biomolecule Detection And Analysis, Tianyu Zheng

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) have unique optical and chemical properties. Dynamic light scattering (DLS) is an analytical tool used routinely for nanoparticle size measurement. The combined use of AuNPs and DLS has led to a novel analytical assay technology called D2Dx (from diameter to diagnostics). Herein, my dissertation highlights the extended use of D2Dx for biomolecule detection and analysis. Under this general theme, Chapter 1 provides some background information of AuNPs, DLS, the principle of D2Dx technique and its potential applications. Chapter 2 summarizes a study on the effect of AuNP concentrations and laser power on the hydrodynamic size measurement of …

Personalized Digital Body: Enhancing Body Ownership And Spatial Presence In Virtual Reality, Sungchul Jung

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

person's sense of acceptance of a virtual body as his or her own is generally called virtual body ownership (VBOI). Having such a mental model of one's own body transferred to a virtual human surrogate is known to play a critical role in one's sense of presence in a virtual environment. Our focus in this dissertation is on top-down processing based on visual perception in both the visuomotor and the visuotactile domains, using visually personalized body cues. The visual cues we study here range from ones that we refer to as direct and others that we classify as indirect. Direct …

Sampling And Subspace Methods For Learning Sparse Group Structures In Computer Vision, Maryam Jaberi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The unprecedented growth of data in volume and dimension has led to an increased number of computationally-demanding and data-driven decision-making methods in many disciplines, such as computer vision, genomics, finance, etc. Research on big data aims to understand and describe trends in massive volumes of high-dimensional data. High volume and dimension are the determining factors in both computational and time complexity of algorithms. The challenge grows when the data are formed of the union of group-structures of different dimensions embedded in a high-dimensional ambient space. To address the problem of high volume, we propose a sampling method referred to as …

Producing Smooth Flow In Atom Circuits By Stirring, Olatunde Oladehin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We studied how smooth flow can be produced by stirring an ultracold atom circuit consisting of a gaseous Bose--Einstein condensate (BEC) confined in a ``racetrack'' potential. The racetrack potential was made up of two straight parallel channels of length L connected on both ends by semicircular channels of the same width and (energy) depth as the straightaways. We used the Gross--Pitaevskii equation to simulate the behavior of the BEC in this potential when stirred by a rectangular paddle at various speeds and barrier heights. We found that smooth flow could be produced and conducted a systematic study of the flow …

Optimal Supply Delivery Under Military Specific Constraints, Talena Fletcher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through-out military history, the need to safely and effectively allocate resources to various military operations was a task of extreme importance. Satisfying the needs of multiple consumers by optimally pairing with appropriate suppliers falls into the category of vehicle routing problems (VRP), which has been intensively studied over the years. In general, finding the optimal solution to VRP is known to be NP-hard. The proposed solutions rely on mathematical programming and the size of the problems that can be optimally solved is typically limited. In military settings, balancing the needs of multiple consumers with the current operational environment has always …

Old English Character Recognition Using Neural Networks, Sattajit Sutradhar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Character recognition has been capturing the interest of researchers since the beginning of the twentieth century. While the Optical Character Recognition for printed material is very robust and widespread nowadays, the recognition of handwritten materials lags behind. In our digital era more and more historical, handwritten documents are digitized and made available to the general public. However, these digital copies of handwritten materials lack the automatic content recognition feature of their printed materials counterparts. We are proposing a practical, accurate, and computationally efficient method for Old English character recognition from manuscript images. Our method relies on a modern machine learning …

Cellulose Modification For Use As Reinforcement In Bio-Based Composites, Ashley L. Rudolph

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The goal of the research contained in this thesis is to provide an alternative method of developing polymers than the current petroleum-based polymeric products. Vegetable oil-based polymers are a popular alternative due to their low-cost and low toxicity. The carbon-carbon double bonds in the oil are ideal reactive sites for a free radical polymerization. Cellulose is a naturally occurring polymer. Modifying cellulose prior to making composites with tung oil allows a hydrophilic material to mix better with a hydrophobic resin. Vegetable oil-based polymers usually require the reinforcement of fibers to enhance the thermo-mechanical properties that would replace petroleum-based polymers. In …

A Journey To The Adic World, Fayadh Kadhem

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first idea of this research was to study a topic that is related to both Algebra and Topology and explore a tool that connects them together. That was the entrance for me to the “adic world”. What was needed were some important concepts from Algebra and Topology, and so they are treated in the first two chapters.

The reader is assumed to be familiar with Abstract Algebra and Topology, especially with Ring theory and basics of Point-set Topology.

The thesis consists of a motivation and four chapters, the third and the fourth being the main ones. In the third …

Multiclass Classification Using Support Vector Machines, Duleep Prasanna W. Rathgamage Don

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we discuss different SVM methods for multiclass classification and introduce the Divide and Conquer Support Vector Machine (DCSVM) algorithm which relies on data sparsity in high dimensional space and performs a smart partitioning of the whole training data set into disjoint subsets that are easily separable. A single prediction performed between two partitions eliminates one or more classes in a single partition, leaving only a reduced number of candidate classes for subsequent steps. The algorithm continues recursively, reducing the number of classes at each step until a final binary decision is made between the last two classes …

Developing An Affect-Aware Rear-Projected Robotic Agent, Ali Mollahosseini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social (or Sociable) robots are designed to interact with people in a natural and interpersonal manner. They are becoming an integrated part of our daily lives and have achieved positive outcomes in several applications such as education, health care, quality of life, entertainment, etc. Despite significant progress towards the development of realistic social robotic agents, a number of problems remain to be solved. First, current social robots either lack enough ability to have deep social interaction with human, or they are very expensive to build and maintain. Second, current social robots have yet to reach the full emotional and social …

Weathering Climate Change: Provisions For Climate Change Resiliency In Transboundary River Treaties, Emily Joan Zmak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Climate change will be most apparent in alterations to the hydrologic system - shifts in movement, variations in extremes - thereby defining many resource disputes in the coming decades. Water is a boundaryless resource; as its hydrologic patterns shift within and without borders, so too will preexisting agreements on its use and allocation. The question for transboundary water agreements is: how can agreements both satisfy parties' needs and account for future uncertainties of climate-induced changes to their basins' hydrologic systems?

From examining literature and water agreements, this thesis develops a list of provisions identified as foundational to resiliency in transboundary …

Improving The Detection Limit Of Tau Aggregates For Use With Biological Samples, Emily Rickman Hager

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The protein Tau is found in neurofibrillary tangles in Alzheimer's disease and over 20 other neurodegenerative diseases. An assay has been developed to detect minute amounts of fibrils from human brain tissue. This assay subjects brain tissue extract and recombinant Tau to several rounds of sonication and incubation. Incubation allows recombinant Tau to add itself to the ends of the existing fibrils in brain tissue extract. Sonication breaks the existing fibrils in the brain tissue extract offering more ends for Tau to add onto. Cycles of sonication and incubation have been shown to allow for amplification of Tau fibrils from …