Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Integrated Human Health And Ecological Risk Assessment For The South River, Virginia: A Bayesian Approach, Meagan J. Harris

WWU Graduate School Collection

Regional scale risk assessments can be used to determine the likelihood of effects from multiple stressors on ecological or human endpoints at multiple scales. The Relative Risk Model framework can incorporate ecosystem services as endpoints in this multiple stressor- multiple endpoint approach. Through this research, I aimed to demonstrate an approach to integrating ERA and HHRA that could be applied to assess risk to human health and ecosystem services using the South River, VA as a case study. I applied the Relative Risk Model with Bayesian networks (BN-RRM) to an integrated assessment of four ecosystem services of the South River, …

Effects Of Heavy Metals On Benthic Macroinvertebrates In The Cordillera Blanca, Peru, George L (George Livingston) Burgess

WWU Graduate School Collection

Glacial retreat as a result of global climate change is causing ongoing alterations in the hydrogeochemistry of streams in the glacial foreland of the Cordillera Blanca mountain range in Ancash, Peru. Changes in water chemistry include increased concentrations of toxic metals and decreased pH, which have the potential to affect the structure of benthic macroinvertebrate communities in impacted streams. This study measured physical-chemical water quality parameters, metal concentrations, and macroinvertebrate abundances at 29 sample reaches throughout seven valleys located in Huascaran National Park. The relationships of invertebrate abundances and metrics of community structure to water quality parameters, including metal concentrations, …

Structural Requirements For Ribosome-Dependent Gtpase Activity And Binding, Markus A. Carlson

WWU Graduate School Collection

The two billion years of evolution since the divergence of prokaryotes and eukaryotes has left earth with very few molecules conserved across these two domains of life. One such molecule, the ribosome, is an enormous ribonucleoprotein responsible for translation, the process of converting the information contained within an organism’s genetic code into functional proteins. Translation is facilitated by a number of other proteins, termed translation factors, required to catalyze the synthesis of these proteins. A large number of antibiotics prescribed today target either the ribosome or translation factors, and with increasing antibiotic resistance being found in infectious bacteria there is …

Reservoir Analysis Of The Birdbear Formation (Devonian) In Northwestern North Dakota, Mitchell V. Sigler

Theses and Dissertations

The Birdbear Formation of northwestern North Dakota is a carbonate-evaporite unit deposited on a rimmed carbonate platform during the Late Devonian. The upper and lower contacts are conformable and the formation has been previously divided into two informal upper and lower members. Analyses of core intervals, thin sections, total organic carbon, and wire line logs have allowed for the identification of three informal units that are divided based on lithologic changes, depositional settings, and reservoir characteristics of the formation. Each unit is identified and mapped across the study area using core to log correlations. The units are recognized and named …

Effects Of Hypoxia And Sulfide Intrusion On Eelgrass (Zostera Marina), Melissa Ciesielski

WWU Graduate School Collection

Eelgrass, Zostera marina, provides critical habitat for many marine species in the Pacific Northwest. Although most eelgrass beds in the Salish Sea are stable, a few areas are experiencing decline. One region experiencing eelgrass decline is Hood Canal, a region that also has frequent hypoxic events. Hypoxia has the potential to be a stressor to eelgrass as it can lead to tissue anoxia at night. These tissues then must undergo anaerobic metabolism, which is less energetically efficient and can produce toxic byproducts. Hypoxia may also work in synergy with other stressors, such as sediment pore-water sulfide. Hypoxia can facilitate …

Poly(Vinylpyridine) Nanostructures For Nanoparticle Synthesis And Energy-Related Catalysis, Audrey Taylor

WWU Graduate School Collection

Synthetic methodologies that allow for intentionally designed structures Pt_xM_100-x with a specified size, composition, and inter-particle spacing are key to advancing the field of energy-related catalysis. The synthesis of these catalytic nanostructures can be carried out using well-defined polymer frameworks that selectively retain catalyst precursors. Poly(vinylpyridine), (PVP) a polymer bearing pyridine residues is capable of metal-coordination or electrostatic association with metal anions in acidic media. In this work, we explore the synthesis of cross-linked PVP colloids and block copolymer templates capable of loading with catalyst precursors (ie: PtCl₆^2-, AuCl₄^-, IrCl_{6 …}

High-Mg Andesites From The Northern Cascade Arc: Using Mineral Chemistry To Distinguish Between Hypotheses For Petrogenesis, May Sas

WWU Graduate School Collection

A fundamental question in the Earth Sciences is whether, in certain situations, subducting lithospheric plates can get hot enough to generate melt that consequently contributes to magmatic output in volcanic arcs. Because the subducting plate beneath the Cascade arc is relatively young, and therefore understood to be hotter than older subducting slabs, slab melt generation is considered possible. Recent work has shown that slab melt is involved in magma petrogenesis in the southern Cascade arc (Walowski et al., 2015). To better understand the role of slab melt in north Cascades magmas, this study focused on petrogenesis of high-Mg lavas from …

High-Sr Volcanic Domes From The Lassen Volcanic Region, Southernmost Cascade Arc, Northern California: Implications For Andesite And Dacite Magma Generation, Christina M. Stout

WWU Graduate School Collection

The Onion Butte (OB) and Barkley Mountain (BM) groups are two lineaments of volcanic domes and lava flows located with the Lassen segment of the southernmost Cascades, northern California. The OB group (_~2.5 Ma) consists of 13 domes that are dominantly dacitic, but span the range from andesite to dacite. The BM group (_~1.5 Ma) comprises 21 domes that range from basaltic andesite to andesite, but are mostly andesitic.

The lavas of both groups are petrographically similar, but differ geochemically. The lavas are fine-grained, sparsely phyric containing needle-like hornblende phenocrysts, but lack the large plagioclase phenocrysts …

Profiling Sortase Substrate Specificity Using Peptide Libraries, Keyvan Dastkhosh Nikghalb

WWU Graduate School Collection

The use of enzymes for protein modification chemistry has gained traction in recent years due to the remarkable site-selectivity that enzymes afford. Among enzymes reported for this purpose, sortase A from Staphylococcus aureus (SrtAStaph) has garnered significant attention because of its selectivity, and its ability to install a wide range of non-natural modifications. In addition to SrtAStaph, it is now appreciated that sortase homologs exist in many bacterial strains, each with the potential to serve as a new catalyst for protein engineering. However, the majority of these enzymes has not been studied biochemically, and in order to utilize these enzymes …

Structural Studies Of Blood Coagulation Factor Viii In Protein Complexes, Michelle E. Wuerth

WWU Graduate School Collection

A deficiency in blood coagulation factor VIII (fVIII) is responsible for the inherited bleeding disorder hemophilia A, which affects approximately 1 in 5000 males. The development of inhibitory antibodies is a significant issue faced by hemophilia A patients receiving therapeutic infusions of fVIII. The C-terminal C2 domain of fVIII has been shown to be highly immunogenic and the site of binding for numerous antibodies of both the classical and non-classical classifications. A detailed understanding of the structural components involved in C2-antibody binding interactions is vital for the development of improved therapeutics for hemophilia patients. Here we present the structure of …

Ocean Acidification Affects Larval Swimming In Ostrea Lurida But Not Crassostrea Gigas, Shannon Buckham

WWU Graduate School Collection

The effects of ocean acidification (OA), which results from increased CO₂ emissions, are of particular concern for calcifying marine organisms. In marine invertebrates, the larval stages are generally considered the most vulnerable to the effects of OA and many recent studies show negative impacts of OA on early developmental stages of calcifying marine invertebrates. I studied the impact of OA on larval swimming performance and behavior in the Pacific oyster, Crassostrea gigas, and the Olympia oyster, Ostrea lurida. Swimming studies can be used to understand how short-term performance and behavior changes may affect the long-term success of …

The Effect Of American Kestrels On Deterrence Of Bird Damage To Pacific Northwest Sweet Cherries, Deanna K. Leigh

WWU Graduate School Collection

Bird damage to fruit crops causes major economic loss to growers. The Pacific Northwest leads sweet cherry production in North America, but few studies highlight the impacts of bird damage to cherries in this region. Growers currently employ a diverse range of bird-deterrent strategies, but there is little information regarding efficacy. A low-impact management practice common to the region is the use of kestrel nest boxes in orchards. The American kestrel (Falco sparverius), is a small falcon that may mitigate damage because it is territorial and preys on birds. My research objectives were to quantify bird damage and …

Paleomagnetic Determination Of Vertical-Axis Block Rotation And Magnetostratigraphy In The Mecca Hills And Coachella Valley, California, Cassidy W. (Cassidy Wade) Dimitroff

WWU Graduate School Collection

Our ongoing work on the paleomagnetism and magnetostratigraphy in the Coachella Valley has provided an improved understanding of the timing and spatial variations of sediment accumulation and deformation during evolution of plate-boundary fault zones. Here, we report updated results from the Palm Spring Formation of the Mecca Hills, and new paleomagnetic data from Pleistocene conglomeratic sandstone in Desert Hot Springs and the Plio-Pleistocene San Timoteo Formation from Live Oak Canyon.

From the Mecca Hills, new data were obtained-112 samples from 29 sites. The majority of the paleomagnetic results yielded well-defined components of magnetization, which allowed us to identify seven well …

Incorporating Experiential Education Into Entry-Level College Biology Curriculum, David W. Droppers

WWU Graduate School Collection

Through a literature review and application from personal experiences, this paper acts as a best methods guide for incorporating experiential education in higher education biology/life sciences curricula. The advantages of experiential education are explored, as well as how to best employ them to maximize gains. As experiential education is on the decline, this paper outlines what may be lost from a student’s education experience. This paper explores in particular entry-level college biological/life sciences curricula, as well as the pedagogy of entry-level college students. Throughout the paper, I reflect on how I have applied these methods through field trips as part …

Non-Planar On-Shell Diagrams, Sebastían Franco, Daniele Galloni, Brenda Penante, Congkao Wen

Publications and Research

We initiate a systematic study of non-planar on-shell diagrams in N = 4 SYM and develop powerful technology for doing so. We introduce canonical variables generalizing face variables, which make the d log form of the on-shell form explicit. We make significant progress towards a general classification of arbitrary on-shell diagrams by means of two classes of combinatorial objects: generalized matching and matroid polytopes. We propose a boundary measurement that connects general on-shell diagrams to the Grassmannian. Our proposal exhibits two important and non-trivial properties: positivity in the planar case and it matches the combinatorial description of the diagrams in …

Critical Controlled Branching Processes And Their Relatives, George Yanev

School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

This survey aims at collecting and presenting results for one-type, discrete time branching processes with random control functions. In particular, the subclass of critical migration processes with different regimes of immigration and emigration is reviewed in detail. Critical controlled branching processes with continuous state space are also discussed.

Sparse Coding Based Dense Feature Representation Model For Hyperspectral Image Classification, Ender Oguslu, Guoqing Zhou, Zezhong Zheng, Khan Iftekharuddin, Jiang Li

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

We present a sparse coding based dense feature representation model (a preliminary version of the paper was presented at the SPIE Remote Sensing Conference, Dresden, Germany, 2013) for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. The proposed method learns a new representation for each pixel in HSI through the following four steps: sub-band construction, dictionary learning, encoding, and feature selection. The new representation usually has a very high dimensionality requiring a large amount of computational resources. We applied the l₁/l_q regularized multiclass logistic regression technique to reduce the size of the new representation. We integrated the method with a linear …

Evaluation Of Static Vs. Dynamic Visualizations For Engineering Technology Students And Implications On Spatial Visualization Ability: A Quasi-Experimental Study, Petros Katsioloudis, Daniel Dickerson, Vukica Jovanovic, Mildred Jones

STEMPS Faculty Publications

The benefit of using static versus dynamic visualizations is a controversial one. Few studies have explored the effectiveness of static visualizations to those of dynamic visualizations, and the current state of the literature remains somewhat unclear. During the last decade there has been a lengthy debate about the opportunities for using animation in learning and instruction. More specifically it has been shown that dynamic visualizations often provide no advantages over static visualizations. If they had shown advantages, it was due to the fact that more information was available in the animated than in the static version. Given this result, the …

Spark Discharge Coupled Laser Multicharged Ion Source, Md. Haider A. Shaim, Hani E. Elsayed-Ali

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

A spark discharge is coupled to a laser multicharged ion source to enhance ion generation. The laser plasma triggers a spark discharge with electrodes located in front of the ablated target. For an aluminum target, the spark discharge results in significant enhancement in the generation of multicharged ions along with higher charge states than observed with the laser source alone. When a Nd:YAG laser pulse (wavelength 1064 nm, pulse width 7.4 ns, pulse energy 72 mJ, laser spot area on target 0.0024 cm²) is used, the total multicharged ions detected by a Faraday cup is 1.0 nC with …

Resilient And Trustworthy Dynamic Data-Driven Application Systems (Dddas) Services For Crisis Management Environments, Youakim Badr, Salim Hariti, Youssif Al-Nashif, Erik Blasch

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Future crisis management systems needresilient and trustworthy infrastructures to quickly develop reliable applications and processes, andensure end-to-end security, trust, and privacy. Due to the multiplicity and diversity of involved actors, volumes of data, and heterogeneity of shared information;crisis management systems tend to be highly vulnerable and subjectto unforeseen incidents. As a result, the dependability of crisis management systems can be at risk. This paper presents a cloud-based resilient and trustworthy infrastructure (known as rDaaS) to quickly develop secure crisis management systems. The rDaaS integrates the Dynamic Data-Driven Application Systems (DDDAS) paradigm into a service-oriented architecture over cloud technology and provides …

The Multimodal Brain Tumor Image Segmentation Benchmark (Brats), Bjoern H. Menze, Andras Jakab, Stefan Bauer, Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer, Khan M. Iftekharuddin, Syed M.S. Reza

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper we report the set-up and results of the Multimodal Brain Tumor Image Segmentation Benchmark (BRATS) organized in conjunction with the MICCAI 2012 and 2013 conferences. Twenty state-of-the-art tumor segmentation algorithms were applied to a set of 65 multi-contrast MR scans of low-and high-grade glioma patients-manually annotated by up to four raters-and to 65 comparable scans generated using tumor image simulation software. Quantitative evaluations revealed considerable disagreement between the human raters in segmenting various tumor sub-regions (Dice scores in the range 74%-85%), illustrating the difficulty of this task. We found that different algorithms worked best for different sub-regions …

A Robust Deep Model For Improved Classification Of Ad/Mci Patients, Feng Li, Loc Tran, Kim-Han Thung, Shuiwang Ji, Dinggang Shen, Jiang Li

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Accurate classification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its prodromal stage, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), plays a critical role in possibly preventing progression of memory impairment and improving quality of life for AD patients. Among many research tasks, it is of a particular interest to identify noninvasive imaging biomarkers for AD diagnosis. In this paper, we present a robust deep learning system to identify different progression stages of AD patients based on MRI and PET scans. We utilized the dropout technique to improve classical deep learning by preventing its weight coadaptation, which is a typical cause of overfitting in deep learning. …

Plasma Processes And Cancer - Special Topical Cluster Of The 2nd Iwpct Meeting, Masaru Hori, Mounir Laroussi, Kai Masur, Yuzuru Ikehara

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Although the emerging multidisciplinary field of plasma medicine has been around for nearly two decades important advances have already taken place that could one day revolutionize healthcare and the way various challenging diseases can be treated.1-3Amongst these advances the effects of low temperature plasma (LTP) on cancer cells in vitro and in vivo stand out.4-13Current cancer treatment modalities, such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy, have serious side effects and tend to lose their benefits to the patients after a while. Therefore, novel and improved therapies that can be used alone …

Ridazz, Wrenches, And Wonks: A Revolution On Two Wheels Rolls Into Los Angeles, Donald Parker Strauss

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

How can we make cities more livable? Los Angeles, in particular, is a notably challenging place to live. For many, it is hard to see Los Angeles—city or county—as anything other than a huge, sprawling, and some would say placeless place. Los Angeles is known by many as the place that tore up more than 1,000 miles of streetcar lines to make way for millions of cars and hundreds of miles of freeways. Because of this, Los Angeles is also known for its poor air quality and jammed freeways. Those who live in Los Angeles know that it can be …

Ecs: Educational Communication System, Nasmah Alnaimi

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

"The characteristics of school organizations and their reactions to change are critical to success in educational reform and necessary to the health of an organization and the well-being of its members. Organizational change, in order to be effective and sustainable, can use technology but it must also accommodate the need to simplify complexity in schools. Organizing student attendance, current grade status and school bus information, such as between the school and bus stops, on field trips or traveling to other activities outside of school, including sporting events, will ensure that parents know their kids are safe and physically accounted for …

Modeling And Rendering Of Fluid Flows Using The Lennard-Jones Potential, Nicholas J. Lefave

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Indirect Association Rule Mining For Crime Data Analysis, Riley Englin

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

"Crime data analysis is difficult to undertake. There are continuous efforts to analyze crime and determine ways to combat crime but that task is a complex one. Additionally, the nature of a domestic violence crime is hard to detect and even more difficult to predict. Recently police have taken steps to better classify domestic violence cases. The problem is that there is nominal research into this category of crime, possibly due to its sensitive nature or lack of data available for analysis, and therefore there is little known about these crimes and how they relate to others. The objectives of …

Investigation Of Electrostatic Assembly Of Gold Nanoparticles Mediated By Giant Polyoxomolybdate Clusters, Jonathan Gooch

Dissertations - ALL

Nanoscience has shifted its focus from studying properties of individual nanoparticles toward using these nanoparticles as building blocks to assemble larger systems. One approach to this end is to exploit electrostatic self-assembly through the interaction of oppositely charged nanoparticles to form larger superstructures and even crystalline superlattices. Metal nanoparticles, such as gold, have been used to design such structures, but understanding the mechanics of the self-assembly can be elusive due to their random size and charge distributions. However, a certain class of polyoxomolybdates can provide insights into how electrostatic self-assembly occurs with their precise size dimensions and charges.

In the …

Wiener-Chaos Approach To Optimal Prediction, Daniel Alpay, Alon Kipnis

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

In this work we combine Wiener chaos expansion approach to study the dynamics of a stochastic system with the classical problem of the prediction of a Gaussian process based on part of its sample path. This is done by considering special bases for the Gaussian space G generated by the process, which allows us to obtain an orthogonal basis for the Fock space of G such that each basis element is either measurable or independent with respect to the given samples. This allows us to easily derive the chaos expansion of a random variable conditioned on part of the sample …

Techno-Art Of Selariu Supermathematics Functions, 2nd Volume, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

An ALBUM, according to the dictionary, is defined as "notebook for storing photos, postcards, stamps, lyrics, quotes etc.", which, in other words, means gatherings of "pieces" of the same "species". Or, in the new Techno-Art of Selariu SuperMathematics Functions ALBUM (the second book of Selariu SuperMathematics Functions), one contemplates a unique COMPOSITION, INTER-, INTRA- and TRANS-DISCIPLINARY. (Capitalizing here is not a futility, but a harmony with the TRUTH.) One caveat I am indebted to do, as a consequent "reader" – over time, I received the ALBUM, chapter by chapter, pace by pace, which gave me the time to analyze / …