Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Cadet Training Program Versus The Student Certification Program: A Study Of It- Support Training Programs At Western Kentucky University, Michael Courtney Moore

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Technology is a critical component of modern-day success. Advancements in technology have improved communication between individuals and companies. Technological advancements have allowed students to earn college degrees online. People who habitually use technology expect a high level of performance and support. As new technologies are implemented, such as complex web services or new operating systems, the dependence for information technology (IT) support grows in demand. Even learning curves can be cumbersome without proper assistance from IT professionals. Companies and institutions must accommodate user needs by implementing fast, efficient, and friendly support. In order to offer optimal customer support, representatives must …

Station Exposure And Resulting Bias In Temperature Observations: A Comparison Of He Kentucky Mesonet And Asos Data, James Kyle Thompson

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Station siting, exposure, instrumentation, and time of observations influence longterm climatic records. This thesis compared and analyzed temperature data from four Kentucky Mesonet stations located in Fayette (LXGN), Franklin (LSML), Clark (WNCH), and Bullitt (CRMT) counties to two nearby Automated Surface Observation Systems (ASOS) stations in Kentucky. The ASOS stations are located at Louisville International Airport (Standiford Field - KSDF) and at Lexington Airport (Blue Grass Field - KLEX). The null hypothesis states that there is no significant difference in temperature measurements between the two types of stations. To quantify the differences in temperature measurements, geoprofiles and the following statistical …

Trophic Dynamic Interactions In A Temperate Karst River, Elizabeth Malloy

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Surface streams in karst landscapes are often characterized by high nutrient levels due to incomplete filtration through series of innumerable, below-ground conduits. Seasonal growth of the filamentous alga, Cladophora, is typically associated with nutrient-rich waters. This research compared macroinvertebrate food web structure between riverine reaches with contrasting underlying karst topography, nutrient levels, and Cladophora cover during summer 2012 and autumn 2013. Recent work in these reaches found a high correlation between Cladophora cover and nutrient content, particularly nitrate. Four questions were addressed during this study: 1. Do longitudinal trends in algal and consumer δ13C values relate to decreased DIC availability …

Implementing Lensless Cameras In Autonomous Robotic Systems, Aleksandar Tomović

Culminating Projects in Computer Science and Information Technology

The open-source Robot Operating System (ROS) is a mixed and scalable P2P network-based robotics framework. We examine lensless compressive imaging using a hardware apparatus assembly having an imaging sensor, but no lens. Cameras with lenses have been the standard, but several factors constrain their application. Lensless cameras may reduce the cost, size, and weight of image processing as we move away from use of expensive lenses in robot designs. Lensless cameras can be used also in applications such medicine, where apparatus size is very important.

To support our objective we show how ROS applications are developed and most importantly how …

Creating A Song Lyric Corpus Generator And Identifying Verb-Particle Constructions In Informal Language, Mary Thrall

Culminating Projects in Computer Science and Information Technology

Song lyric corpora - collections of text for use in linguistic analysis-have proven to be publicly unavailable despite many previous studies on the subject. We designed and created two programs which generate a song lyric corpus. These programs can be shared or distributed, and they avoid potential copyright issues while also allowing future researchers to generate corpora of popular song lyrics which contain songs as current as the previous week. We used these programs to create a corpus of approximately 800 modem US popular songs, the Song Lyric Corpus.

Verb-particle constructions, a type of multiword expression, often cause difficulties for …

Determination Of The X(3872) Meson Quantum Numbers, Bin Gui

Dissertations - ALL

The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) is one of the several experiments located at the ring of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. The LHCb detector is a single arm forward spectrometer and is designed to perform high precision measurements of Charge Parity (CP) violation parameters and rare decays of the beauty and charm hadrons. The detector was successfully operated at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV in 2010 and 2011 and at 8 TeV in 2012. Over 3 fb-1 of data has been collected by the LHCb. The LHCb experiment is also well suited for studies on hadron …

Laboratory Studies Of Gas-Grain Processes On Cosmic Dust Analogues, Jiao He

Dissertations - ALL

The formation of molecules in the interstellar medium (ISM) takes place both in the gas phase and on surfaces of cosmic dust grains. Gas phase reactions alone are found to be insufficient to account for the observed abundance of molecules such as molecular hydrogen, water, carbon dioxide, methanol as well as many other complex molecules; grain surfaces must be involved as catalysts to explain their formation. In this thesis we study the physical and chemical processes on surfaces of cosmic dust grain analogues in simulated ISM environments. Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe and is present …

A Smart Web Crawler For A Concept Based Semantic Search Engine, Vinay Kancherla

Master's Projects

The internet is a vast collection of billions of web pages containing terabytes of information arranged in thousands of servers using HTML. The size of this collection itself is a formidable obstacle in retrieving information necessary and relevant. This made search engines an important part of our lives. Search engines strive to retrieve information as relevant as possible to the user. One of the building blocks of search engines is the Web Crawler. A web crawler is a bot that goes around the internet collecting and storing it in a database for further analysis and arrangement of the data.

The …

A Study Of Graphical Permutations, Jessica Thune

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A permutation π on a set of positive integers {a_1,a_2,...,a_n} is said to be graphical if there exists a graph containing exactly a_i vertices of degree (a_i) for each i. It has been shown that for positive integers with a_1

Connections Of Zero Curvature And Applications To Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations, Paul Bracken

School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

A general formulation of zero curvature connections in a principle bundle is presented and some applications are discussed. It is proved that a related connection based on a prolongation in an associated bundle remains zero curvature as well. It is also shown that the connection coefficients can be defined so that the partial differential equation to be studied appears as the curvature term in the structure equations. It is discussed how Lax pairs and Bäcklund tranformations can be formulated for such equations that occur as zero curvature terms.

Ecosystem Services In The Wet Tropics: A Literature Review And Economic Valuation, Alyson Cheney

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The present study can be broken down into two sections. First, it created a literature review on the current body of knowledge regarding ecosystem services in the Australian Wet Tropics World Heritage Area. The second portion of the study was an economic valuation determining how much residents that live in the Wet Tropics value the benefits provided to them through ecosystem services. The literature review found that there were large gaps in the present body of knowledge. Biophysical studies made up the vast majority of the literature and very few ecosystem service economic valuations have been carried out for the …

Economic Equity In The Annapurna Conservation Area: Effects Of Government And Community-Based Organizations, Hanna Seltz

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This research addresses the impact of community-based and government organizations on rural livelihoods in protected areas (PAs) by investigating whether benefits of such organizations involved in conservation and community development reach more marginalized members of communities in the Annapurna Conservation Area (ACA) of Nepal. I conduct a case study focusing on two villages within ACA, Kagbeni and Phalyek, examining how local groups interact with each other and with the government in trying to promote equity through the ACA Project primarily through indepth, unstructured interviews. Locally-created and locally-based groups in these communities appear to be successful in managing local resources and …

Is The Smartphone Smart In Kathmandu?, Seth Bird

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This is the extensive study of the smartphone in the developing country of Nepal, specifically the Kathmandu valley. Throughout my research I conducted various interviews with businesses, Tibetan refugees, and Nepali millennials (18yrs-33yrs) with the goal of identifying how the smartphone is used and understood. I chose the Kathmandu valley as my main area of research because the usage of smartphones in rural Nepal is extremely limited, and the valley represents the economic hub where progressive thinking flourishes. As a main objective I sought to understand how, if at all, the smartphone is used differently between Nepal and America. All …

Modeling And Analysis Of Pedestrian Flows, Romesh Khaddar

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

According to the Traveler Opinion and Perception Survey of 2005, about 107.4 million Americans regularly use walking as a mode of transport during their commute, which amounts for 51% of the total American population. In 2009, 4092 pedestrian fatalities were reported nationwide, out of 59,000 pedestrian crashes. This amounts for 12% of the fatalities in the total traffic accidents recorded, and shows an over-representation of pedestrians incidents. Thus, it is imperative to understand the causes behind such statistics, and conduct a comprehensive research on pedestrian walking behavior and their interaction with surroundings.

A lot of researches on pedestrian flows have …

Design And Implementation Of An Instruction Set Architecture And An Instruction Execution Unit For The Rez9 Coprocessor System, Daniel Spencer Anderson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

While the use of RNS has provided groundbreaking theory and progress in this field, the applications still lack viable testing platforms to test and verify the theory. This Thesis outlines the processing of developing an instruction set architecture (ISA) and an instruction execution unit (IEU) to help make the first residue based general processor a viable testing platform to address the mentioned problems.

Consider a 32-bit ripple adder. The delay on this device will be 32N where N is the delay for each adder to complete its operation. The delay of this process is due to the need to propagate …

Technetium Sulfide: Fundamental Chemistry For Waste Storage Form's Application, Maryline Ghislaine Ferrier

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Technetium is the lightest radioelement. The isotope ⁹⁹Tc has around a 6% yield from ²³⁵U with a half-life of 2.13 x 10⁵ years. The high mobility of TcO₄^-, the common chemical form of technetium in the environment makes ⁹⁹Tc an isotope of concern in nuclear waste management. Despite its important role in radiopharmaceuticals and in the nuclear fuel cycle, the fundamental chemistry of technetium is not as well developed as that of the neighboring transition metals; one of the most striking examples being its sulfide chemistry.

Only two technetium binary sulfide compounds had …

Cataclysmic Variables In The Superblink Proper Motion Survey, Julie N. Skinner, John R. Thorstensen, Sébastien Lépine

Dartmouth Scholarship

We have discovered a new high proper motion cataclysmic variable (CV) in the SUPERBLINK proper motion survey, which is sensitive to stars with proper motions greater than 40 mas yr⁻¹. This CV was selected for follow-up observations as part of a larger search for CVs selected based on proper motions and their near-UV−V and V−K_s colors. We present spectroscopic observations from the 2.4 m Hiltner Telescope at MDM Observatory. The new CVʼs orbital period is near 96 minutes, its spectrum shows the double-peaked Balmer emission lines characteristic of quiescent dwarf novae, and its V magnitude is …

Selective Indicators For Optical Determination Of Disease Biomarkers, Lovemore Hakuna

Dissertations and Theses

The most abundant biological thiols, homocysteine (Hcy), cysteine (Cys) and glutathione (GSH) have been the subject of intense research due to their association with a wide range of diseases. They play a key role in maintaining the redox status of biological systems. Selective detection methods for these thiols are challenging due to their similar structures and properties. Current commercially available detection methods use separations, fragile and expensive enzymatic or immunogenic materials and complex instrumentation. This has led to a global effort towards developing simple and inexpensive optical probes and indicators selective for specific biological thiols.

Highly selective chemical probes and …

Storm Water Damage Risk Assessment Along The South Carolina Heritage Trail, Charles Pellett

All Theses

This study was conducted to better predict and assess damage to high-value small-spatial scale landscapes from storm water. Storm water damage in the form of rill formation across the South Carolina Botanic Gardens (SCBG) Natural Heritage Garden Trail has been modelled as a function of contributing area using D8 and D-infinity flow direction algorithms on a preprocessed LiDAR-derived elevation raster. D8 and D-infinity algorithms were also applied over a set of stochastic Monte Carlo simulations (n=1,000) representing elevation error. The contributing area was calculated using each of the four methods for each 5'x5' cell along the trail. The output was …

Peanut Butter Jelly: An Animated Short Film, Alexander Beaty

All Theses

Peanut Butter Jelly is an animated short film based on the concept of two species of Jellyfish clashing over a jar of peanut butter. The production spanned a year and involved the artistic effort of 12 Digital Production Arts graduate students as well as a support team of 10 students from various programs within the University.

Gradient-Based Compressive Sensing For Noise Image And Video Reconstruction, Huihuang Zhao, Yaonan Wang, Xiaojiang Peng, Zhijun Qiao

School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this study, a fast gradient-based compressive sensing (FGB-CS) for noise image and video is proposed. Given a noise image or video, the authors first make it sparse by orthogonal transformation, and then reconstruct it by solving a convex optimisation problem with a novel gradient-based method. The main contribution is twofold. Firstly, they deal with the noise signal reconstruction as a convex minimisation problem, and propose a new compressive sensing based on gradient-based method for noise image and video. Secondly, to improve the computational efficiency of gradient-based compressive sensing, they formulate the convex optimisation of noise signal reconstruction under Lipschitz …

James City County And City Of Williamsburg, Virginia Shoreline Inventory Report Methods And Guidelines, Marcia Berman, Karinna Nunez, Sharon Killeen, Tamia Rudnicky, Julie Bradshaw, Karen Duhring, Kory Angstadt, Alexandra Procopi, David Weiss, Carl Hershner

Reports

The data inventory developed for the Shoreline Inventory is based on a three tiered shoreline assessment approach. This assessment characterizes conditions that can be observed from a small boat navigating along the shoreline or by using observations made remotely at the desktop using high resolution imagery. The three tiered shoreline assessment approach divides the shorezone into three regions:

1) the immediate riparian zone, evaluated for land use; 2) the bank, evaluated for height, stability, cover and natural protection; and 3) the shoreline, describing the presence of shoreline structures for shore protection and recreational purposes.

The 2014 Inventory for James City …

Platform Pricing With Endogenous Network Effects, Mei Lin, Ruhai Wu, Wen Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper examines a monopoly platform’s two-sided pricing strategy through modeling the trades between the participating sellers and buyers. In this approach, the network effects emerge endogenously through the equilibrium trading strategies of the two sides. We show that platform pricing depends crucially on the characteristics associated with market liquidity, including both sides’ entry costs, the buyers’ preferences, and the distribution of the sellers’ quality. The platform may subsidize sellers if the market is sufficiently liquid, whereas buyer subsidy can be optimal given an illiquid market. We also illustrate the impact of the sellers’ quality heterogeneity on the platform’s optimal …

Cardioguard: A Brassiere-Based Reliable Ecg Monitoring Sensor System For Supporting Daily Smartphone Healthcare Applications, Sungjun Kwon, Jeehoon Kim, Seungwoo Kang, Youngki Lee, Hyunjae Baek, Kwangsuk Park

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose CardioGuard, a brassiere-based reliable electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring sensor system, for supporting daily smartphone healthcare applications. It is designed to satisfy two key requirements for user-unobtrusive daily ECG monitoring: reliability of ECG sensing and usability of the sensor. The system is validated through extensive evaluations. The evaluation results showed that the CardioGuard sensor reliably measure the ECG during 12 representative daily activities including diverse movement levels; 89.53% of QRS peaks were detected on average. The questionnaire-based user study with 15 participants showed that the CardioGuard sensor was comfortable and unobtrusive. Additionally, the signal-to-noise ratio test and the washing durability …

Android Or Ios For Better Privacy Protection?, Jin Han, Qiang Yan, Debin Gao, Jianying Zhou, Huijie Robert Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid growth of the mobile market, security of mobile platforms is receiving increasing attention from both research community as well as the public. In this paper, we make the first attempt to establish a baseline for security comparison between the two most popular mobile platforms. We investigate applications that run on both Android and iOS and examine the difference in the usage of their security sensitive APIs (SS-APIs). Our analysis over 2,600 applications shows that iOS applications consistently access more SS-APIs than their counterparts on Android. The additional privileges gained on iOS are often associated with accessing private …

Using Consumer Informedness As An Information Strategy, Ting Li, Robert John Kauffman, Eric Van Heck, Peter Vervest, Benedict Dellaert

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Consumer informedness describes the degree to which consumers are aware of the specific attributes of products or services offered in the marketplace. Understanding how this level of informedness can amplify consumer behaviour provides firms with the opportunity to develop information-based strategies that can encourage their target segment make purchases.

Split-Step Approach To Electromagnetic Propagation Through Atmospheric Turbulence Using The Modified Von Karman Spectrum And Planar Apertures, Monish Ranjan Chatterjee, Fathi H.A. Mohamed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The impact of atmospheric phase turbulence on Gaussian beam propagation along propagation paths of varying lengths is examined using multiple random phase screens. The work is motivated by research involving generation and encryption of acousto-optic chaos, and the interest in examining propagation of such chaotic waves through atmospheric turbulence. A phase screen technique is used to simulate perturbations to the refractive index of the medium through the propagation path. A power spectral density based on the modified von Karman spectrum model for turbulence is used to describe the random phase behavior of the medium.

In recent work, results for the …

Developing And Testing A Greenness-Duration Method For Mapping Irrigated Areas: A Case Study In The Snake River Plain, Blaine C. Dawson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Climate change has raised concerns about the interplay between agricultural productivity, water demand, and water availability in semi-arid to arid regions of the world. As these regions cover nearly 41% of the Earth’s surface and are home to more than 38% of the total global population of 6.5 billion, it is important to understand the implications of changes to water use and water availability on the civilizations and industries that rely upon already scarce water resources. Currently, irrigated agriculture is the dominant water user in these regions and is estimated to consume approximately 80% of the world’s diverted freshwater resources. …

Development And Application Of Tools For Avalanche Forecasting, Avalanche Detection, And Snowpack Characterization, Scott Christopher Havens

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Avalanche formation is a complex interaction between the snowpack, weather, and terrain. However, detailed observations typically can only be made at a single point and must be extrapolated over the slope or regional scale. This study aims to provide avalanche forecasters with tools to evaluate the snowpack, avalanche hazard, and avalanche occurrence when manual observations are not feasible.

Avalanches that occur within the new storm snow are a prevalent problem for the avalanche forecasters with the Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) along Highway 21. We have implemented a real time SNOw Slope Stability (SNOSS) model that provides an index to the …

Spring Thaw Ionic Pulses Boost Nutrient Availability And Microbial Growth In Entombed Antarctic Dry Valley Cryoconite Holes, Jon Telling, Alexandre M. Anesio, Martyn Tranter, Andrew G. Fountain, Thomas H. Nylen, Jon Hawkings, Virendra B. Singh, Preeti Kaur, Michaela Musilova, Jemma L. Wadham

Geology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The seasonal melting of ice entombed cryoconite holes on McMurdo Dry Valley glaciers provides oases for life in the harsh environmental conditions of the polar desert where surface air temperatures only occasionally exceed 0°C during the Austral summer. Here we follow temporal changes in cryoconite hole biogeochemistry on Canada Glacier from fully frozen conditions through the initial stages of spring thaw toward fully melted holes. The cryoconite holes had a mean isolation age from the glacial drainage system of 3.4 years, with an increasing mass of aqueous nutrients (dissolved organic carbon, total nitrogen, total phosphorus) with longer isolation age. During …