Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Synthesis And Biological Evaluation Of Azide- Tagged Biomimetic Probes For Global Labeling Of The Saccharomyces Cerevisiae Glycerolipidome, Matthew R. Johnson

Masters Theses

Lipid metabolism is an extremely complex, interconnected process that, when dysregulated, is strongly linked to cellular disease states including cancer. Study of these metabolic processes is complicated by the characteristic intricacy of these systems; nonetheless, it is achievable through metabolic labeling. Visualization of biosynthesis is an advantage offered by metabolic labeling through the incorporation of fluorescent tags. In this technique, synthetic probes bearing a clickable tag such as azide are fed into live cells where they are directly incorporated using the native enzymatic and cellular processes to metabolically label lipid products. These labeled lipid products are capable of being studied …

Electron Microprobe In Situ Monazite Dating Of The Slide Lake Shear Zone, Jeremy Leierzapf

Masters Theses

The Colorado mineral belt (CMB) shear zone system records Proterozoic deformation episodes documenting the progressive tectonic accretion of Laurentia. Regional fold formation (D₁ & D₂) is coeval with the ca. 1700 – 1600 Ma Yavapai and Mazatzal orogenies, while Mesoproterozoic sub-vertical shear zones (D₃ & D₄) are a response to 1450 – 1300 Ma intracontinental deformation. The Slide Lake shear zone (SLSZ) is a sub-horizontal shear zone located in the Northern Sawatch Range, central Colorado. Aside from its orientation, the SLSZ records similar deformational structures to other shear zones in the CMB, but there …

Investigating The Ecology And Behavior Of The Indiana Bat And Tri-Colored Bat During Fall Swarming And Spring Staging, Mallory E. Tate

Masters Theses

White-nose syndrome has devastated bat populations across North America since 2005. Due to declines in Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis) and tri-colored bat (Perimyotis subflavus) populations across the eastern United States, management prescriptions need to consider all seasons of these species annual cycles. However, data is severely lacking on the two seasons surrounding winter hibernation. These include fall swarming, a time period when bats are mating and preparing for hibernation, and spring staging, when bats are emerging from hibernation and preparing for spring migration. Both periods are critical for successful reproduction and survival following white-nose syndrome infection. …

Dataset And Evaluation Of Self-Supervised Learning For Panoramic Depth Estimation, Ryan Nett

Master's Theses

Depth detection is a very common computer vision problem. It shows up primarily in robotics, automation, or 3D visualization domains, as it is essential for converting images to point clouds. One of the poster child applications is self driving cars. Currently, the best methods for depth detection are either very expensive, like LIDAR, or require precise calibration, like stereo cameras. These costs have given rise to attempts to detect depth from a monocular camera (a single camera). While this is possible, it is harder than LIDAR or stereo methods since depth can't be measured from monocular images, it has to …

Phantom Ocean, Real Impact: Natural Surf Sound Experiments Alter Foraging Activity And Habitat Use Across Taxa, Ryan N. Wardle

Master's Theses

A growing body of research focuses on how background sounds shape and alter critical elements of animals’ lives, such as foraging behavior, habitat use, and ecological interactions (Bradbury & Vehrencamp, 2011; Barber et al., 2010; Kight & Swaddle, 2011; Shannon et al., 2016). Much of this research has centered on the effects of anthropogenic noise (Dominoni et al., 2020; Francis & Barber, 2013; Ortega, 2012; Swaddle et al., 2015), but recent studies have also revealed that natural sound sources can influence animal behavior (Davidson et al., 2017; Le et al., 2019). Natural sounds, such as crashing surf, can create conditions …

Investigation On The Use Of Small Aperture Telescopes For Leo Satellite Orbit Determination, Luis R. Curiel Iii

Master's Theses

The following thesis regards the use of small aperture telescopes for space domain awareness efforts. The rapidly populating space domain was motivation for the development of a new operation scheme to conduct space domain awareness feasibility studies using small telescopes. Two 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescopes at the California Polytechnic State University and the Air Force Research Lab in Kirtland AFB, NM, in conjunction with a dedicated CCD camera and a commercial DSLR camera, were utilized to conduct optical observations on satellites in Earth orbit.

Satellites were imaged during August 2019, and from January 2020 to March 2020, resulting in the collection …

Attentional Parsing Networks, Marcus Karr

Master's Theses

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have dominated the computer vision field since the early 2010s, when deep learning largely replaced previous approaches like hand-crafted feature engineering and hierarchical image parsing. Meanwhile transformer architectures have attained preeminence in natural language processing, and have even begun to supplant CNNs as the state of the art for some computer vision tasks.

This study proposes a novel transformer-based architecture, the attentional parsing network, that reconciles the deep learning and hierarchical image parsing approaches to computer vision. We recast unsupervised image representation as a sequence-to-sequence translation problem where image patches are mapped to successive layers …

Measurement Of Pion-Pion Final State Interactions In Η → Π +Π −Γ With Clas At Jefferson Lab, Torri C. Jeske

Physics Theses & Dissertations

Decays of pseudoscalar mesons proceed from the chiral anomaly, which arises from spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking. In the limit of massless quarks (chiral limit), the η → π +π −γ the decay width is determined solely by the box anomaly term in the Wess Zumino Witten Lagrangian. Since the physical quarks are not massless, the decay region of the η meson is far from the chiral limit and thus proper inclusion of the momentum dependence is essential to reproduce the measured decay width. Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to describe these interactions. We report a new measurement of the …

Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering At Hall A, Jefferson Lab, Mohamed Nuhman Hashir Rashad

Physics Theses & Dissertations

The Standard Model of particle physics defines quarks and leptons as the basic building blocks of all matter. The interaction between them are mediated by force carrying gauge bosons. Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD), the theory that explains the strong interaction is still not complete enough to derive the physical observables of a Quark-Gluon system from the fundamental degrees of freedom of it’s constituents. Experimentally observable single particle densities provide important insights into our understanding of the quark-gluon system and hence help fill in the gaps of QCD. Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs) provide simultaneous information of both spacial and longitudinal momentum distributions …

Onboard Autonomous Controllability Assessment For Fixed Wing Suavs, Brian Edward Duvall

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Traditionally fixed-wing small Unmanned Arial Vehicles (sUAV) are flown while in direct line of sight with commands from a remote operator. However, this is changing with the increased popularity and ready availability of low-cost flight controllers. Flight controllers provide fixed-wing sUAVs with functions that either minimize or eliminate the need for a remote operator. Since the remote operator is no longer controlling the sUAV, it is impossible to determine if the fixed-wing sUAV has proper control authority. In this work, a controllability detection system was designed, built, and flight-tested using COTS hardware. The method features in-situ measurement and analysis of …

Conical Orbital Mechanics: A Rework Of Classic Orbit Transfer Mechanics, Cian Anthony Branco

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Simple orbital maneuvers obeying Kepler’s Laws, when taken with respect to Newton’s framework, require considerable time and effort to interpret and understand. Instead of a purely mathematical approach relying on the governing relations, a graphical geometric conceptual representation provides a useful alternative to the physical realities of orbits. Conic sections utilized within the full scope of a modified cone (frustum) were employed to demonstrate and develop a geometric approach to elliptical orbit transformations. The geometric model in-question utilizes the rotation of a plane intersecting the orbital frustum at some angle β (and the change in this angle) in a novel …

Real-Time Action Classification Using Intermediate Skeletal Pose Estimation, Kleanthis Zisis Tegos

Theses and Dissertations

The topic of Human Action Classification has attracted significant interest these past years, which can be attributed to the advancements in deep learning methodologies. Its applications range from robotics to surveillance and automated video categorization, as well as in the healthcare industry. The literature, however, has primarily focused on offline action classification, without significant attention being given to the constraints of an online real-time classifier. Using an intermediate skeletal representation of humans, while convoluted, provides a scalable means of tackling the action classification problem. This project discusses the existing literature, and adapts two of the state-of-the-art approaches for real-time analysis. …

A Fast And Exact Motif Enumeration Algorithm For Dynamic Networks, Abbas Al-Thaedan

Theses and Dissertations

From social to biological networks, prior research in complex networks have demonstrated the importance of the frequency and distribution of different types of motifs to important network functions and properties. A network motif (or graphlet) is defined as a small connected sub-pattern which is over-represented in a network. Network motifs have been widely applied in a wide range of applications, namely biological, social, and technical networks. The counting of the network motif involves expensive enumeration of graph sub-patterns along with the detection of graph isomorphism. In general, network motif detection algorithms are computationally expensive and often designed to operate over …

Biometric Face Skintone Data Augmentation Using A Generative Adversarial Network, Rosalin Dash

Theses and Dissertations

Researchers seek methods to increase the accuracy and efficiency in identifying an individual using facial biometric systems. Factors like skin color, which may affect the accuracy of facial recognition, need to be investigated further. To analyze the impact of race with respect to skin color of face on biometric systems, we focused on generating a dataset with uniformly distributed images of different skin tones while preserving identities. Deep learning neural network architectures like the generative adversarial network (GAN) focus on modifying only certain features of the face like the color of the skin. In our experimental approach, we implemented a …

Sediment Oxygen Demand And Stoichiometry Of Irl Nutrient Fluxes, Iulia Bibire

Theses and Dissertations

Eutrophication of coastal systems has become a prominent global issue with a variety of detrimental effects, one of these being the shift in the composition of phytoplankton communities often promoting harmful algal blooms (HABs) resulting at least partially from changes to the relative abundance of N:P:Si. This study investigated nutrient fluxes from muck, a fine-grained and organic-rich sediment, and from sand to determine the importance of these sediments with regards to regulating N:P ratios in the water column. Overall sediment oxygen demand (SOD) was used as an indicator of aerobic decomposition and was found to decrease from north to south …

Envrment: Investigating Experience In A Virtual User-Composed Environment, Matthew Key

Master's Theses

Virtual Reality is a technology that has long held society's interest, but has only recently began to reach a critical mass of everyday consumers. The idea of modern VR can be traced back decades, but because of the limitations of the technology (both hardware and software), we are only now exploring its potential. At present, VR can be used for tele-surgery, PTSD therapy, social training, professional meetings, conferences, and much more. It is no longer just an expensive gimmick to go on a momentary field trip; it is a tool, and as with the automobile, personal computer, and smartphone, it …

Rapid Implicit Diagonalization Of Variable-Coefficient Differential Operators Using The Uncertainty Principle, Carley Walker

Master's Theses

We propose to create a new numerical method for a class of time-dependent PDEs (second-order, one space dimension, Dirichlet boundary conditions) that can be used to obtain more accurate and reliable solutions than traditional methods. Previously, it was shown that conventional time-stepping methods could be avoided for time-dependent mathematical models featuring a finite number of homogeneous materials, thus assuming general piecewise constant coefficients. This proposed method will avoid the modeling shortcuts that are traditionally taken, and it will generalize the piecewise constant case of energy diffusion and wave propagation to work for an infinite number of smaller pieces, or a …

Sediment Provenance Of Tsunami Deposits: Implications For Assessing The Relative Intensity Of Paleotsunamis From The Sendai Coastline Of Japan, Tiffany Otai

Master's Theses

The 2011 Tohoku tsunami impacted the northeastern coast of Japan and caused unexpected damages due to the underestimation of this type of hazard. Of particular importance is the fact that geologic evidence for a predecessor event, the Jogan tsunami (CE 869), could have forecasted the severity of the 2011 Tohoku event. While the timing of tsunamis is important for effective hazard mitigation, outside of the 2011 Tohoku event, the intensity of past tsunamis remains unclear. To understand paleotsunami intensity, it is important to document characteristics of modern analogues like the 2011 event. This study utilizes surface distributions of foraminifera from …

Incorporating Shear Resistance Into Debris Flow Triggering Model Statistics, Noah J. Lyman

Master's Theses

Several regions of the Western United States utilize statistical binary classification models to predict and manage debris flow initiation probability after wildfires. As the occurrence of wildfires and large intensity rainfall events increase, so has the frequency in which development occurs in the steep and mountainous terrain where these events arise. This resulting intersection brings with it an increasing need to derive improved results from existing models, or develop new models, to reduce the economic and human impacts that debris flows may bring. Any development or change to these models could also theoretically increase the ease of collection, processing, and …

Hierarchical Aggregation Of Multidimensional Data For Efficient Data Mining, Safaa Khalil Alwajidi

Dissertations

Big data analysis is essential for many smart applications in areas such as connected healthcare, intelligent transportation, human activity recognition, environment, and climate change monitoring. Traditional data mining algorithms do not scale well to big data due to the enormous number of data points and the velocity of their generation. Mining and learning from big data need time and memory efficiency techniques, albeit the cost of possible loss in accuracy. This research focuses on the mining of big data using aggregated data as input. We developed a data structure that is to be used to aggregate data at multiple resolutions. …

On Simes’S Second Conjecture: An Extended Single-Step Simes Test Procedure For Multiple Testing, Matthew G. Hudson

Dissertations

One of the major concerns with multiple tests of significance is controlling the family wise error rate. Various methods have been developed to ensure that the false positive rate be maintained at some prespecified level. One of the most well know being the Bonferroni procedure. Simes presented an improved Bonferroni procedure for testing the global hypothesis that is more powerful and less conservative, especially with positively correlated tests. While Simes’s procedure is more powerful, it does not allow for making inferences on the individual hypotheses. However, the Simes procedure has since become the foundation of many p-value based multiple testing …

On The Local Theory Of Profinite Groups, Mohammad Shatnawi

Dissertations

Let G be a finite group, and H be a subgroup of G. The transfer homomorphism emerges from the natural action of G on the cosets of H. The transfer was first introduced by Schur in 1902 [22] as a construction in group theory, which produce a homomorphism from a finite group G into H/H^' an abelian group where H is a subgroup of G and H' is the derived group of H. One important first application is Burnside’s normal p-complement theorem [5] in 1911, although he did not use the transfer homomorphism explicitly to prove it. …

Mcst : An App For Patron Awareness Of Covid-19 Safety Measures Instituted By Small Businesses, Jorge Torres

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Small businesses across America are having restrictions placed upon them due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Those fortunate enough to remain open now face the challenge of trying to generate enough revenue to stay afloat. Small businesses, with their lack of funds, have resorted to listing their safety precautions on their front door to inform patrons. However, viewing these rules would require patrons to leave their homes. Additionally, there is no consistent set of rules being enforced by the government which is dangerous as some patrons may feel that stricter procedures be in place. These inconsistencies and lack of information can …

A Colonized Cop: Indigenous Exclusion And Youth Climate Justice Activism At The United Nations Climate Change Negotiations, Corrie Grosse, Brigid Mark

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

Youth activists around the world are demanding urgent climate action from elected leaders. The annual United Nations climate change negotiations, known as COPs, are key sites of global organizing and hope for a comprehensive approach to climate policy. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews at COP25 in 2019, this research examines youth climate activists’ priorities, frustrations and hopes for creating just climate policy. Youth are disillusioned with the COP process and highlight a variety of ways through which the COP perpetuates colonial power structures that marginalize Indigenous peoples and others fighting for justice. This is intersectional exclusion - the …

The Effects Of Security Framing, Time Pressure, And Brand Familiarity On Risky Mobile Application Downloads, Cody Parker

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

The current study examined the effects of security system framing, time pressure, and brand familiarity on mobile application download behaviors, with an emphasis on risk taking. According to the Prospect Theory, people tend to engage in irrational decision making, and make qualitatively different decisions when information is framed in terms of gains and losses (i.e., the framing effect). Past research has used this framing effect to guide the design of a risk display for mobile applications (apps), with the purpose of communicating the potential risks and minimizing insecure app selections. Time pressure has been shown to influence the framing effect …

Existence And Stability Of The Doubly Nonlinear Anisotropic Parabolic Equation, Huashui Zhan, Zhaosheng Feng

School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper, we are concerned with a doubly nonlinear anisotropic parabolic equation, in which the diffusion coefficient and the variable exponent depend on the time variable t. Under certain conditions, the existence of weak solution is proved by applying the parabolically regularized method. Based on a partial boundary value condition, the stability of weak solution is also investigated.

Constraining Respired Carbon Storage In The Eastern Tropical Pacific Over The Last 25 Thousand Years Using Benthic Foraminiferal Boron/Calcium Ratios, Brian James Close

OES Theses and Dissertations

The storage of inorganic carbon in the deep Pacific Ocean is thought to play an important role in regulating both glacial-interglacial and millennial-scale atmospheric CO₂ concentrations (Broecker and Barker 2007; Sigman et al., 2010). A recent study by Loveley et al. (2017) showed that sedimentary authigenic uranium (aU) concentrations, a proxy for suboxic bottom-water conditions, increased significantly in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific (EEP) during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, 18 kyr – 23 kyr). If this is correct, the low-oxygen, CO_2-rich waters would also have a lower pH and a lower carbonate ion concentration ([CO₃^{2- …}

Synthesis, Characterization, Spectroscopic, And Mesomorphic Studies Of New Schiff Base Ligands And Titanium, Cobalt, Nickel And Copper Metal Centers, Raj K. Gurung

Chemistry & Biochemistry Theses & Dissertations

Transition metal complexes with Schiff base ligands offer a wide application in the field of development of catalysis and material. The straightforward synthesis allowed the structural modification and helped to optimize in various application of such complexes. Titanium-containing complexes have been reported to be important for their catalytic and material applications through the coordination of a tetradentate Schiff base ligand, viz. N, N’-ethylene bis(salicylideneiminate) dianion (salen). Studies reporting the characterization of achiral titanium(IV) salen complexes are scarce due to their intricate nature. Such complexes would be comparatively less expensive and easier to prepare synthetically and thus could represent an …

Parallelization Of The Advancing Front Local Reconnection Mesh Generation Software Using A Pseudo-Constrained Parallel Data Refinement Method, Kevin Mark Garner Jr.

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Preliminary results of a long-term project entailing the parallelization of an industrial strength sequential mesh generator, called Advancing Front Local Reconnection (AFLR), are presented. AFLR has been under development for the last 25 years at the NSF/ERC center at Mississippi State University. The parallel procedure that is presented is called Pseudo-constrained (PsC) Parallel Data Refinement (PDR) and consists of the following steps: (i) use an octree data-decomposition scheme to divide the original geometry into subdomains (octree leaves), (ii) refine each subdomain with the proper adjustments of its neighbors using the given refinement code, and (iii) combine all subdomain data into …

Global Conservation Status Of Croaker And Drum (Family: Sciaenidae) And Role Of The Maw Trade, Claire E. Gorman

Biological Sciences Theses & Dissertations

Understanding threats and drivers of extinction risk is critical to conserving marine biodiversity. Although marine bony fishes are some of the most diverse and abundant vertebrates in the world, overexploitation is the major threat to these taxa. Species in the family Sciaenidae are important marine resources in many parts of the world, supporting small- and large-scale fisheries for consumption and the international maw (dried swimbladder) trade. Sciaenids exhibit a diverse array of life history characteristics, such as high fecundity, large body size, formation of spawning aggregations, and longevity. Some characteristics increase their susceptibility to anthropogenic stressors. Despite being ecologically and …