Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Geological And Geochemical Analysis Of Phosphorus Bearing Minerals And Natural Glasses On Earth And In Meteorites: Implications Of The Origin Of Life, Tian Feng

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Phosphorus is a key element in biogenic molecules and the mineral schreibersite is a major reactive phosphorus source for organic compounds on the prebiotic Earth. In this dissertation, a suite of reactions of phosphorus species, which originate from schreibersite minerals on chondrite meteorites and on the early Earth, have been studied to determine the intermediate geochemical pathways between phosphides and common minerals on meteorites and on the early earth.

I first investigated a unique blue fulgurite that was studied to clarify if this blue color was caused by rich phosphorus content, as has been reported for impact glasses that also …

Design, Synthesis And Testing Of Bioactive Peptidomimetics, Sami Abdulkadir

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Proteins are complex macromolecules that are responsible for almost all biochemical processes and play vital roles in signaling pathways, metabolic pathways, and all other cellular functions. Proteins accomplish this by interacting with other proteins and macromolecules like DNA and RNA, for instance, as transcription factors. As such, we can find protein interactions behind every cellular action or inaction, and it is easy to see how protein interactions are crucial in understanding disease processes. Advance in proteomics has particularly provided a wealth of insights into molecular mechanisms of disease processes of cancers and other rare diseases, which has helped identify key …

Designing A Health Coach-Augmented Mhealth System For The Secondary Prevention Of Coronary Heart Disease, Avijit Sengupta

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents research that employs design science research (DSR) methodology to develop and evaluate a high-fidelity prototype of a home-based cardiac rehabilitation (HBCR) system to support self-management of chronic cardiovascular diseases like coronary heart disease (CHD) and to offer secondary prevention against other chronic diseases with similar risk factors. While the population of coronary heart disease (CHD) patients requiring cardiac rehabilitation (CR) continues to expand, lack of access and other barriers to center based cardiac rehabilitation (CBCR) presents a huge challenge. A mobile phone and wearable device based technological system can offer an HBCR program for CHD. By following …

Data-Driven Studies On Social Networks: Privacy And Simulation, Yasanka Sameera Horawalavithana

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social media datasets are fundamental to understanding a variety of phenomena, such as epidemics, adoption of behavior, crowd management, and political uprisings. At the same time, many such datasets capturing computer-mediated social interactions are recorded nowadays by individual researchers or by organizations. However, while the need for real social graphs and the supply of such datasets are well established, the flow of data from data owners to researchers is significantly hampered by privacy risks: even when humans’ identities are removed, or data is anonymized to some extent, studies have proven repeatedly that re-identifying anonymized user identities (i.e., de-anonymization) is doable …

Designing Targeted Mobile Advertising Campaigns, Kimia Keshanian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the proliferation of smart, handheld devices, there has been a multifold increase in the ability of firms to target and engage with customers through mobile advertising. Therefore, not surprisingly, mobile advertising campaigns have become an integral aspect of firms’ brand building activities, such as improving the awareness and overall visibility of firms' brands. In addition, retailers are increasingly using mobile advertising for targeted promotional activities that increase in-store visits and eventual sales conversions. However, in recent years, mobile or in general online advertising campaigns have been facing one major challenge and one major threat that can negatively impact the …

Recognizing Patterns From Vital Signs Using Spectrograms, Sidharth Srivatsav Sribhashyam

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Spectrograms extract frequency components from a signal. Spectrograms have beenin use for a long time mainly to analyze frequency components in audio signals. Typically, these audio signals have a very high sampling rate, various frequency components and high frequency variability with time. Vital signs on other hand have very low sampling rate with no frequency variability. This work explores if spectrograms can be used to analyze and recognize patterns from vital signs signals.

As mentioned above, spectrograms deal with frequencies. More the variability of frequency, better the patterns emerge when spectrograms are applied on the signals. As vital signs lack …

Improving Environmental Protection: One Imagined Touch At A Time, Luke Ingalls Liska

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Can imagined touch of flora and fauna (i.e., the plants and animals of the natural world) make you more willing to support environmental protection efforts? Across seven studies, I demonstrate that by asking consumers to imagine touching fauna, marketers can encourage consumers to become more engaged in environmental protection efforts. This effect occurs because imagined touch generates haptic imagery, which enhances a consumer’s emotional attachment to fauna. I demonstrate that emotional attachment to fauna induced via imagined touch enhances individual’s willingness to share Facebook posts, improves their willingness to support increased fines for environment-related offenses, and increases the number of …

Ware And Tear In Ancient Tampa Bay: Ceramic Elemental Analyses From Pinellas County Sites, Mckenna Loren Douglass

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research tested a null hypothesis on whether ceramics from a variety of archaeological sites around the Pinellas County peninsula were sourced locally for their materials. The sites in this study include Weeden Island (8PI1-5-6-A/B/C/D), Bayshore Homes (8PI41), Yat Kitischee (8PI1753), and Maximo Point (8PI19). Since there were multiple sites that I assessed in the Tampa Bay, Florida area, I focused on one cultural period, Safety Harbor (AD 900-1500), and the ceramics created during it at the various locations. My research questions included: Were materials locally sourced for ceramic production at each of these sites? If not, what is the …

A Constitutive-Based Deep Learning Model For The Identification Of Active Contraction Parameters Of The Left Ventricular Myocardium, Igor Augusto Paschoalotte Nobrega

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Modern breakthroughs in biomedical engineering, computer science, and data mining have created new opportunities for detecting important mechanical properties of soft tissues that can be employed to identify possible signs of diseases or physiological difficulties. However, the scarcity of different mechanical properties obtained through noninvasive testing emphasizes the importance of incorporating authentic biological data into computer models capable of replicating the behavior of soft tissues.

The field of continuum theory of large deformation hyperactivity permits the formulation of highly descriptive mathematical research and computational models capable of perfectly describing the minute mechanical characteristics of soft materials. By including features about …

Montage Music Videos: Racial Utopianism Vs. Abstract Cowboys And The Question Of Cultural Montage, Alan E. Blanchard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Along with the explosion of consumer goods in America over the past century came the human impulse to alter these objects to produce new meanings the manufacturers never intended: commercial products become amateur artists’ raw material. We see this with custom cars and the curious blending of clothes. Inevitably, digital commercial products, like music videos, would undergo a similar treatment as seen in DJ Cummerbund’s “mashup” videos “Old Staind Road” and “Blurry in the USA” where he is painting with audio tracks and sculpting with video clips to create new digital art with new meanings uncoupled from industry’s original intent …

Green Business And The Culture Of Capitalism: Constructing Narratives Of Environmentalism, Julia S. Jester

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are widespread colloquial arguments claiming that any actions taken to combat climate change will be bad for business and the economy, scaring people into continuing their support for the status quo for fear of their financial security. Alternatively, those attempting to combat ecological destruction have subsequently made transitions to sustainable development of products and shifting consumer behavior within this system. There is one core argument that both sides have, albeit in different ways – capitalism and environmentalism are seemingly incompatible; one cannot be successful without the eradication of the other. While it may appear there are only strict binary …

Field And Remote Sensing Analysis Of The 2015 Pyroclastic Density Currents At Colima (Mexico) And Calbuco (Chile) Volcanoes: Implications For Hazard Assessment And Crisis Management, Elodie Macorps

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although one of the most spectacular phenomena of active volcanoes, Pyroclastic density currents, or PDCs, are considered the most dangerous volcanic hazards. PDCs are avalanches of hot volcanic gases, ash, and larger volcanic fragments that travel at incredible speed down the flank of a volcano. High dynamic pressures, high temperatures, and high velocities are the primary dangers associated with PDCs and lead to near-complete destruction and death.

I use a multi-disciplinary approach to study the deposits left behind by PDCs, in order to understand their dynamics, their interactions with the receiving landscape, and their final distribution, starting on the ground …

Bayesian Multivariate Joint Modeling For Skewed-Longitudinal And Time-To-Event Data, Lan Xu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In epidemiologic and clinical studies, a relatively large number of biomarkers are repeatedly measured in patients over time, often associated with data on epidemiologic and clinical interest events. So, much attention is focused on developing the specific patterns of the longitudinal measurements, and the associations between those patterns and the time to a certain event, such as heart attack, diagnose of disease, time to transplantation, or death. In the last two decades, the research into joint modeling of longitudinal and time-to-event data has received a tremendous amount of attention.

Numerous researchers have proposed joint modeling approaches for a single longitudinal …

Adaptive Network Slicing In Fog Ran For Iot With Heterogeneous Latency And Computing Requirements: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach, Almuthanna Nassar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In view of the recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the emerging new breed of smart city applications and intelligent vehicular systems driven by artificial intelligence, fog radio access network (F-RAN) has been recently introduced for the next generation wireless communications. The capability of F-RAN has emerged to overcome the latency limitations of cloud-RAN (C-RAN) and assure the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of the ultra-reliable-low-latency-communication (URLLC) for IoT applications. To this end, fog nodes (FNs) are equipped with computing, signal processing and storage capabilities to extend the inherent operations and services of the cloud to the edge. However, …

Optimization And Machine Learning Methods For Solving Combinatorial Problems In Urban Transportation, Aigerim Bogyrbayeva

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates three applications of emerging technologies for urban trans- portation. In the first chapter, we design a new market for fractional ownership of au- tonomous vehicles (AVs), in which an AV is co-leased by a group of individuals. We present a practical iterative auction based on the combinatorial clock auction to match the interested customers together and determine their payments. In designing such an auction, we con- sider continuous-time items (time slots) which are defined by bidders, and naturally exploit driverless mobility of AVs to form co-leasing groups. To relieve the computational burdens of both bidders and the …

The Early Medieval Transition: Diet Reconstruction, Mobility, And Culture Contact In The Ravenna Countryside, Northern Italy, Anastasia Temkina

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research project evaluates the effects of increased mobility and culture contact on dietary practices, and on dietary variation among people buried at two northern Italian sites, Chiunsano di Ficarolo and Chiesazza di Ficarolo, located near the ancient Roman capital of Ravenna and dating 4th to 7th century CE. The Early Medieval period was a time of change, political instability, migration and invasion of the “barbarian” tribes, and diet was not unaffected. In particular, it is hypothesized that a new staple crop, millet, was introduced and that meat consumption had increased. The goal of this research is to use stable …

Archaeology And Seasonality Of Stock Island (8mo2), A Glades-Tradition Village On Key West, Ryan M. Harke

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Later Glades-period cultures (ca. 500–1760 CE) of south Florida and the Florida Keys are understudied and thus poorly understood, especially those that pre-date the arrival of Spaniards to the New World. Recent archaeological models of their sociopolitical organization suggest that by the Glades I-II transition (750/800 CE), south Florida peoples were organized into what appear to be regional population centers (e.g., Pineland and Mound Key, Granada, Turner River) and smaller hinterland towns in the Everglades (e.g., Cane Patch, Bear Lake) and the Florida Keys (e.g., Stock Island, Clupper Site). Smaller towns are hypothesized to be sedentary, heterarchically-organized, simple chiefdoms from …

Affectivetda: Using Topological Data Analysis To Improve Analysis And Explainability In Affective Computing, Hamza Elhamdadi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We present an approach utilizing Topological Data Analysis to study the structure of face poses used in affective computing, i.e., the process of recognizing human emotion. The approach uses conditional comparison of different emotions, both respective and irrespective of time, with multiple topological distance metrics, dimension reduction techniques, and face subsections (e.g., eyes, nose, mouth, etc.). The results confirm that our topology-based approach captures known patterns, distinctions between emotions, and distinctions between individuals, which is an important step towards more robust and explainable emotion recognition by machines.

Factors Controlling Circulation At The Terminus Of A Shallow Seagrass-Dominated Estuary, Fort Desoto Bay, West-Central Florida, Charles Gray Vickery

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Fort DeSoto Bay is a shallow seagrass-dominated estuary located landward of Mullet Key that is home to the most extensive seagrass beds in all of Tampa Bay. During a period of development in the 1950s and early 1960s, the bay underwent extensive physical modifications, including the construction of earthen causeways and dredged channels, which altered the bathymetry of the seafloor and changed natural circulation patterns. The stagnation of water in the southern bay and increased estuarine residence time led to elevated summer temperatures, reduced dissolved oxygen levels, and die-offs of seagrasses. Two 40-foot circulation bridges were installed on each causeway …

Turkic Interlingua: A Case Study Of Machine Translation In Low-Resource Languages, Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Machine Translation (MT) has the potential to bridge the gap between the developed world and the marginalized communities by making information more accessible in real-time. While there are over 7000 spoken languages in the world, only about a hundred have access to high-quality MT systems and even fewer enjoy the benefits of more advanced language technologies. Unfortunately, resource scarcity and the lack of digital infrastructure are only some of the many challenges associated with globalizing NLP. Many large-scale multilingual studies and datasets often get little to no feedback from native speakers or linguistic experts of the languages involved, leading to …

Data-Driven Analytical Modeling Of Multiple Myeloma Cancer, U.S. Crop Production And Monitoring Process, Lohuwa Mamudu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Globally, cancer disease is a major health issue causing a lot of deaths. The duration of time an individual diagnosed with a particular type of cancer survives has become a major area of research concern. The Kaplan Meier and Cox Proportional Hazard (Cox-PH) model have been a traditionally used method for survival analysis of cancer data. These techniques of cancer survival analysis are developed from nonparametric and semi-parametric approaches, respectively, which are not as robust as a parametric approach. In this dissertation, we proposed a new method of cancer survival analysis based on a parametric approach using multiple myeloma cancer …

Past Ice-Ocean Interactions On The Sabrina Coast Shelf, East Antarctica: Deglacial To Recent Paleoenvironmental Insights From Marine Sediments, Kara J. Vadman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) contains ~53 meters of sea level equivalent (SLE) ice, and observations suggest it is sensitive to ongoing and past climate change. The EAIS has traditionally been considered insensitive to climate perturbations because it is largely grounded above sea level. However, aerogeophysical surveys, oceanographic observations, and models indicate that large areas of the EAIS are grounded below sea level and contain 19.2 m SLE. Marine-based parts of the EAIS are thought to be located on inland-sloping beds that drain through marine terminating outlet glaciers, indicating large areas of the EAIS may be more sensitive to …

Sensible/Latent Hybrid Thermal Energy Storage For The Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Brayton Cycle, Kelly Osterman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mitigating the effects of climate change will require rapid deployment of a carbon-free electricity system that includes all available forms of zero-carbon energy. Both renewables and nuclear show great promise, but both come with drawbacks. Power production from wind and solar is limited to times when their respective resources are available, while nuclear is limited in its ability to adjust its output according to the ever-varying demand for electricity. Additionally, the systems must be affordable. One way to reduce the cost of thermal power plants (concentrated solar power and nuclear) is to use new power cycles, such as the supercritical …

Parallel Computation Of Feynman Path Integrals And Many-Body Polarization With Application To Metal-Organic Materials, Brant H. Tudor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Space Research Group is a computational outfit, and so the work presented herein will reflect that. Much of our simulation code is developed in-house and so what follows is a small exploration of that development—although the physics underpinning our software development is never ignored for long. Following the programming centric work, the code and the physics are put to the test. The final chapter describes a scientific endeavor in which a new, robust force field has been validated. Indeed, the new potential has taken a first step in proving itself by making accurate predictions in what have historically found …

Combination Of Time Series Analysis And Sentiment Analysis For Stock Market Forecasting, Hsiao-Chuan Chou

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this research is to build a model to predict trend of financial asset price using sentiment from news headlines and financial indicators of the asset. Objective of the model is to conclude good results but also to minimize the difference between predicted values and actual values. Unlike previous approaches where the sentiments are usually calculated into score, we focus on combination of word embedding of news and financial indicators due to nonavailability of sentiment lexicon.

One idea is that the sentiment of news headline should have impact on financial asset val- ues. In other words, it would …

Pregnancy And Fertility Amongst Women With The Mthfr C677t Polymorphism: An Anthropological Review, Caroline A. Maclean

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Effects of the MTHFR C677T allele on reproduction include multiple complications. The frequency of births with neural tube defects, Down Syndrome, or recurrent pregnancy loss of CC, CT, and TT mothers was measured using data collected from existing literature. Total participants n=2605 (n=1111 cases, n=1494 controls). Results show that folic acid supplementation did not prevent the incidence of NTD pregnancy in CT women. Furthermore, CT women are more fecund overall, producing more pregnancies than CC and TT women. While CT case women did have higher incidences of RPL, NTD pregnancy and DS pregnancy, this is due to the overall greater …

Identifying Skeletal Puberty Stages In A Modern Sample From The United States, Jordan T. Wright

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Investigating the onset and progression of puberty can provide insight and evidence for social changes regarding the transition to adulthood. There are also many social factors that can lead to variation in the timing of the onset and progression of puberty. Methods created by Mary Lewis and Fiona Shapland for assessing changes in skeletal development associated with pubertal timing were applied to computerized tomography scans (n=400) from the New Mexico Decedent Image Database and recorded in an attempt to identify adolescent growth trends in a modern skeletal sample from the United States. This is a novel study using the methods …

Long-Time Asymptotics For Mkdv Type Reduced Equations Of The Akns Hierarchy In Weighted L2 Sobolev Spaces, Fudong Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The long-time asymptotics of nonlinear integrable partial differential equations is one of the important research areas in the field of integrable systems. The main tool to analyze the long-time behaviors is the so-called nonlinear steepest descent method, or Deift-Zhou's method, which was born in 1993. To apply Deift-Zhou's method, one first uses the inverse scattering transform to formulate the nonlinear PDEs in terms of an oscillatory 2 by 2 matrix Riemann-Hilbert problem (RHP). After about 15 years of development, a generalized version of Deift-Zhou's method, the ∂—steepest method, came out. The ∂—steepest descent method is a useful method for analyzing …

Listening To Women: Using A Mixed-Methods Approach To Understanding Women’S Desires And Experience During Childbirth, Nicole Loraine Falk Smith

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is based on evolutionary medicine and applied anthropological research where the narratives and biology of modern women are used to inform evolutionary theory, specifically obligate midwifery, and modern birth practices. Improvements to the US maternity care systems are needed as rates of maternal mortality and morbidity are continually higher than rates in other technologically advanced nations. Additionally, women birthing under the technocratic model of care, as is predominant in the US, report trauma and post-traumatic stress disorders due to their birthing experience, and more women are experiencing postpartum depression. Thus, I seek to use an evolutionary medicine perspective …

Investigating The Hydrology Of The Western Greenland Ice Sheet: Spatiotemporal Variability And Implications On Ice-Dynamics, Jessica Z. Mejia

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1990's the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) has been losing mass at an accelerating rate in response to climatic warming and is currently the largest terrestrial contributor to sea-level rise. While ice sheet models agree the GrIS will continue losing mass throughout the century, there are significant uncertainties associated with future sea-level rise contributions. Predicting the GrIS's response to future climate warming scenarios is limited by gaps in our understanding of the links between ice sheet hydrology and dynamics. Meltwater produced on the ice surface flows within supraglacial streams that deliver it to crevasses or moulins—vertical conduits extending from …