Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Are Rural And Small Community Aerated Wastewater Stabilization Ponds A Neglected Source Of Microplastic Pollution?, Zhiqiang Gao, James V. Cizdziel, Kendall Wontor, Haitao Lu

Faculty and Student Publications

Wastewater treatment systems collect and treat sewage that includes microplastics (MPs). However, we are not aware of any studies on the occurrence and distribution of MPs in wastewater stabilization ponds (WSPs), which serve small communities worldwide. Here, we characterized MPs (~45 µm–5 mm) in an aerated WSP serving ~500 houses and an adjacent lake. Putative MPs were most abundant in duckweed (Lemna minor) and sludge (75 ± 22 and 12.8 ± 3.1 particles/g, respectively: ±1 standard deviation (SD), n = 6, dry weight). In the water, average concentrations (particles/L ± 1 SD, n = 6) were highest in the pond …

2021 Celebration Of Scholarship, Creativity, And Engagement, Todd Bruns, Beth Heldebrandt

Programs

At this annual celebration, we, as a shared community, are pleased that the important work of faculty continues and evolves as faculty have broadened and redefined the boundaries of scholarship, creativity, and innovation throughout the COVID, late-COVID, and soon-to-be post-COVID eras. While we are pleased to return to more familiar campus-based traditions, functions, and activities, the experiences of 2020-2021 have contributed to the development of new forms and strategies for scholarship and creativity that reflect the core principles of faculty life and ensure that student learning remains central to the mission of Eastern Illinois University.

For that reason, our faculty, …

Soliton Based All-Optical Data Processing In Waveguides, Amaria Javed

Dissertations

The growing demand for higher data processing speed and capacity motivates the replacement of the current electronic data processing by optical data processing in analogy with the successful replacement of electronic data communication by optical data communication. In a quest to achieve comprehensive optical data processing we aim at using solitons in waveguide arrays to perform all-optical data processing operations. Solitons are special nonlinear waves appreciated for their ability to conserve their shape and velocity before and after scattering. They are observed naturally in diverse fields of science, namely, nonlinear physics, mathematics, hydrodynamics, biophysics, and quantum field theory, etc. with …

Active Community Opinion Network Mining And Maximization Through Social Networks Posts, Mayank Semwal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Existing OM systems like CONE take a partial historical rating of users on multiple products and perform opinion estimation to maximizes overall positive opinions using OM. However, CONE does not consider actual user opinions from social posts where users provide opinions through comments, likes and sharing about a product. OBIN mines users' low-frequency features from comments to create a community preference influence network utilizing user response on posts and relationships between them. However, OBIN only performs feature-level opinion mining and does not consider a joint approach that combines sentence-level and feature-level to remove subjective reviews and includes slang words and …

Physiological State Determinants Of Maternal Cortisol Signaling And Its Impact On Offspring Quality And Fitness, Sydney Currier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Assessing the intergenerational effects of maternal stress is important for predicting how offspring will respond to changing environments. The overall aim of my thesis was to quantify the effects of maternal state on maternally derived egg cortisol and determine whether this variation in egg cortisol impacts Chinook salmon offspring performance and fitness in a sex-specific way. I quantified within-female changes in maternal energetics and reproductive metrics that I linked to egg quality and ultimately embryo survival. I found egg cortisol increases with increasing maternal plasma cortisol, and increases further as plasma cortisol levels rise with each day that eggs are …

Building A More Sustainable And Accessible Internet: Lightweight Web Design With Html And Css, Chelsea Thompto

Assignment Prompts

While the internet has great potential to bring people together, if the internet was a country, it would be the 7th largest energy consumer on the planet. This is set to increase in years to come moving the internet even higher on this list to become the 4th largest energy consumer if it were to be a country. So, as artists and digital citizens it is imperative that we understand how to create and display the content we produce online in ways that are sustainable and accessible.
This assignment, while slated for Art 109, may be slotted into an earlier …

Elemental Relations: Fire & Culture, Daniel Lanza Rivers

Assignment Prompts

This assignment functions as the capstone task for my course AMS 159: Nature and World Cultures, and it asks students to use textual analysis, external research, and creative teamwork to produce installation material for the SJSU Thompson Art Gallery’s upcoming event series “Protecting Home: Sustainable Fire Management and the California Environment.” Throughout the third unit of my course, students are reading Stephen J. Pyne’s book Fire: a brief history. This assignment tracks with our reading of that text, and asks student teams to select a topic, facilitate classroom discussions of a chapter related to their topic, and then use research …

The Hera Orebody: A Complex Distal (Au–Zn–Pb–Ag–Cu) Skarn In The Cobar Basin Of Central New South Wales, Australia, Corey Wall

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Hera Au–Pb–Zn–Ag deposit in the southeastern Cobar Basin of central New South Wales preserves calc-silicate veins and remnant sandstone/carbonate-hosted skarn within a reduced anchizonal Siluro-Devonian turbidite sequence. The skarn orebody distribution is controlled by a long-lived, basin margin fault system, that has intersected a sedimentary horizon dominated by siliciclastic turbidite, with lesser gritstone and thick sandstone intervals, and rare carbonate-bearing stratigraphy. Foliation (S1) envelopes the orebody and is crosscut by a series of late-stage east–west and north–south trending faults. Skarn at Hera displays mineralogical zonation along strike, from southern spessartine–grossular–biotite–actinolite-rich associations, to central diopside-rich–zoisite–actinolite/tremolite–grossular-bearing associations, through to the northern …

Synchronous Emplacement Of The Anorthosite Xenolith-Bearing Beaver River Diabase And One Of The Largest Lava Flows On Earth, Yiming Zhang, Nicholas L. Swanson-Hysell, Mark D. Schmitz, James D. Miller, Margaret S. Avery

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

New geochronologic and paleomagnetic data from the North American Midcontinent Rift (MCR) reveal the synchronous emplacement of the Beaver River diabase, the anorthosite xenoliths within it, and the Greenstone Flow—one of the largest lava flows on Earth. A U-Pb zircon date of 1091.83 ± 0.21 Ma (2σ) from one of the anorthosite xenoliths is consistent with the anorthosite cumulate forming as part of the MCR and provides a maximum age constraint for the Beaver River diabase. Paired with the minimum age constraint of a cross-cutting Silver Bay intrusion (1091.61 ± 0.14 Ma; 2σ), these data tightly …

Discrete Hypergeometric Legendre Polynomials, Tom Cuchta

Mathematics Faculty Research

A discrete analog of the Legendre polynomials defined by discrete hypergeometric series is investigated. The resulting polynomials have qualitatively similar properties to classical Legendre polynomials. We derive their difference equations, recurrence relations, and generating function.

Deep Learning Applications In Medical Bioinformatics, Ziad Omar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

After a patient’s breast cancer diagnosis, identifying breast cancer lymph node metastases is one of the most important and critical factor that is directly related to the patient’s survival. The traditional way to examine the existence of cancer cells in the breast lymph nodes is through a lymph node procedure, biopsy. The procedure process is time-consuming for the patient and the provider, costly, and lacks accuracy as not every lymph node is examined. The intent of this study is to develop an artificial neural network (ANNs) that would map genetic biomarkers to breast lymph node classes using ANNs. The neural …

Improved Glove Word Embedding Using Linear Weighting Scheme For Word Similarity Tasks, Qinglan Lu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One of the trends in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the use of word embedding. Its aim is to build a low dimensional vector representation of words from text corpora. Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVe) and Sikp-Gram with Negative Sampling (SGNS) are two representative word embedding methods. Existing papers have different conclusions on the performance of these two methods. This thesis focuses on GloVe and studies its commonalities and differences with SGNS.

Word co-occurrence is the cornerstone of all word embedding algorithms. One difference between GloVe and SGNS is the definition of co-occurrence. The weight of co-occurring words tapers …

Gamification Platform For Social Engineering Training And Awareness, Rui Xu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Almost every type of cybersecurity incident leverages one or more social engineering attacks. Nowadays social engineering attack is considered one of the most significant threats to individuals and organizations. It is an attacking technique that manipulates and deceives users to access or gain privileged information. Cybersecurity training is an effective defense method to enhance people's awareness of social engineering attacks, especially training through game playing or educational games. However, fewer tools can customize social engineering simulations based on user's characteristics and needs. Some social engineering training tools are lack motivation, engagement, and interaction.

Gamification is the use of game elements …

Reaction Wheels Fault Isolation Onboard 3-Axis Controlled Satellite Using Enhanced Random Forest With Multidomain Features, Mofiyinoluwa Oluwatobi Folami

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing number of satellite launches throughout the years, it is only natural that an interest in the safety and monitoring of these systems would increase as well. However, as a system becomes more complex it becomes difficult to generate a high-fidelity model that accurately describes all the system components. With such constraints using data-driven approaches becomes a more feasible option. One of the most commonly used actuators in spacecraft is known as the reaction wheel. If these reaction wheels are not maintained or monitored, it could result in mission failure and unwarranted costs. That is why fault detection …

Mining Twitter Sequences Of Product Opinions With Multi-Word Aspect Terms, Vinay Kiran Manjunath

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social media platforms have opened doors to users' opinions and perceptions. The text remains the most popular means of contact on social media, despite different means of communication (audio/video and images). Twitter is one such microblogging platform that allows people to express their thoughts within 280 characters per message. The freedom of expression has made it difficult to understand the polarity (Positive, Negative, or Neutral) of the tweets/posts. Given a corpus of microblog texts (e.g., "the new iPhone battery life is good, but camera quality is bad"), mining aspects (e.g., battery life, camera quality) and opinions (e.g., good, bad) of …

Giplot: An R Package For Visualizing The Summary Statistics Of A Quantitative Variable, Siddhanta Phuyal, Mamunur Rashid, Jyotirmoy Sarkar

Student Research

A GI plot is a graphical tool that pictorially represents the five-number summary, the mean, the standard deviation, the sample size, and flags potential outliers that are c standard deviations away from the mean together with their frequencies. The GI plot was developed by Sarkar and Rashid (2021) as a companion to the boxplot. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the GIplot package and introduce the main functionality of the package using several examples.

A Unified Framework Of Deep Learning-Based Facial Expression Recognition System For Diversified Applications, Sanoar Hossain, Saiyed Umer, Vijayan K. Asari, Ranjeet Kumar Rout

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This work proposes a facial expression recognition system for a diversified field of appli- cations. The purpose of the proposed system is to predict the type of expressions in a human face region. The implementation of the proposed method is fragmented into three components. In the first component, from the given input image, a tree-structured part model has been applied that predicts some landmark points on the input image to detect facial regions. The detected face region was normalized to its fixed size and then down-sampled to its varying sizes such that the advantages, due to the effect of multi-resolution …

Toi-431/Hip 26013: A Super-Earth And A Sub-Neptune Transiting A Bright, Early K Dwarf, With A Third Rv Planet, A. Osborn, D. J. Armstrong, B. Cale, R. Brahm, R. A. Wittenmyer, F. Dai, I. J. M. Crossfield, E. M. Bryant, V. Adibekyan, R. Cloutier, K. A. Collins, E. Delgado Mena, M. Fridlund, C. Hellier, S. B. Howell, G. W. King, J. Lillo-Box, J. Otegi, S. Sousa, K. G. Stassun, E. C. Matthews, C. Ziegler, G. Ricker, R. Vanderspek, D. W. Latham, S. Seager, J. N. Winn, J. M. Jenkins, J. S. Acton, B. C. Addison, D. R. Anderson, S. Ballard, D. Barrado, S. C. C. Barros, N. Batalha, D. Bayliss, T. Barclay, B. Benneke, J. Berberian Jr., F. Bouchy, B. P. Bowler, C. Briceño, C. J. Burke, M. R. Burleigh, S. L. Casewell, D. Ciardi, K. I. Collins, B. F. Cooke, O. D. S. Demangeon, R. F. Díaz, C. Dorn, D. Dragomir, C. Dressing, X. Dumusque, N. Espinoza, P. Figueira, B. Fulton, E. Furlan, E. Gaidos, C. Geneser, S. Gill, M. R. Road, E. J. Gonzales, V. Gorjian, M. N. Günther, R. Helled, B. A. Henderson, T. Henning, A. Hogan, S. Hojjatpanah, J. Horner, A. W. Howard, S. Hoyer, D. Huber, H. Isaacson, J. S. Jenkins, Eric L.N. Jensen, A. Jordán, A. R. Kane, R. C. Kidwell Jr., J. Kielkopf, N. Law, M. Lendl, M. Lund, R. A. Matson, A. W. Mann, J. Mccormac, M. W. Mengel, F. Y. Morales, L. D. Nielsen, J. Okumura, H. P. Osborn, E. A. Petigura, P. Plavchan, D. Pollacco, E. V. Quintana, L. Raynard, P. Robertson, M. E. Rose, A. Roy, M. Reefe, A. Santerne, N. C. Santos, P. Sarkis, J. Schlieder, R. P. Schwarz, N. J. Scott, A. Shporer, A. M. S. Smith, C. Stibbard, C. Stockdale, P. A. Strøm, J. D. Twicken, T.-G. Tan, A. Tanner, J. Teske, R. H. Tilbrook, C. G. Tinney, S. Udry, J. N. Villaseñor, J. I. Vines, S. X. Wang, L. M. Weiss, R. G. West, P. J. Wheatley, D. J. Wright, H. Zhang, F. Zohrabi

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Works

We present the bright (V_mag = 9.12), multiplanet system TOI-431, characterized with photometry and radial velocities (RVs). We estimate the stellar rotation period to be 30.5 ± 0.7 d using archival photometry and RVs. Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) objects of Interest (TOI)-431 b is a super-Earth with a period of 0.49 d, a radius of 1.28 ± 0.04 R_⊕, a mass of 3.07 ± 0.35 M_⊕, and a density of 8.0 ± 1.0 g cm⁻³; TOI-431 d is a sub-Neptune with a period of 12.46 d, a radius of 3.29 ± 0.09 …

2021 Assessment Of The Status Of The West Coast Demersal Scalefish Resource, David V. Fairclough, Sybrand Alex Hesp, Ainslie Denham, Emily A. Fisher, Rachel Marks, Karina L. Ryan, Elaine Lek, Rhys Allen, Brett M. Crisafulli

Fisheries research reports

A recovery program for the West Coast Demersal Scalefish Resource was introduced between late 2007 and early 2010, based on the maintenance of retained catches of demersal species (overall suite and each indicator species) by both the commercial and recreational sectors below 50% of the catches reported in 2005/06 (original catch recovery benchmarks).

Catch reductions were aimed at reducing exploitation levels (F, long-term fishing mortality of the key indicator species’ stocks) to below the threshold reference point (F = M, the natural mortality rate), which would then allow stocks to recover to above the …

The Coastal Monitor: Vol. 7 No. 3, John Tanacredi Ph.D.

The Coastal Monitor

Where has all the pollution gone? No hazardous toxic algal blooms? Incredible summer estuarine water quality! No fish kills. Banner years in recreational fisheries for Stripers and Blues and incredible numbers of Humpback whales! No going to restaurants, so greater at home use of water and septic systems! Since March 2020, drier years than most, thus reducing runoff with fertilizers and organic pesticides, resulting in reduced water contamination. So maybe, just maybe, this COVID- 19 period which has altered our collective lives forever, has also resulted in a grand experiment on what has been hiding in plain sight? That is, …

Bellingham's Housing Ecosystem, Malene Garcia

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

The goal of my project was to understand what puts people at risk of becoming unhoused and what solutions are the most effective in combating and preventing houselessness.

To figure this out, I used Bellingham as a case study. I did research on homelessness in general, and then used that to guide my research specific to Bellingham. I focused on the causes of houselessness, the demographics of those experiencing houselessness, and the challenges that they face. Then, I researched solutions. To supplement this research, and get different perspectives specific to Bellingham, I interviewed people working in three different organizations: The …

What's In That Scat: An Analysis Of Canada Lynx Diet And Distribution In The North Cascades Ecosystem, Antonia Parrish

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This research provides critical information on the diet and distribution of the elusive North Cascades lynx population. Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) are considered threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act and are the focus of protection efforts by the state of Washington as a result of climate change, heightened competition, and human interference. I analyzed the diet and distribution of both lynx and coyote (Canis latrans) in the North Cascades to determine whether there was an overlap of prey and habitat that could constrain lynx restoration. During the summer of 2020, the hiking trails in the North Cascades National Park …

Bivalve Monitoring At Weaverling Spit, Nathalie Wagler

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

A service learning project with the Samish Indian Nation to provide materials for increased volunteer training protocol for their bivalve monitoring research. This project is an extrapolation on my College of the Environment capstone project, where I analyzed data collected by Anacortes High School students on the quantity, species, and size of bivalves on Weaverling Spit, land owned by the Samish Indian Nation in Anacortes, WA. Students annually visit Weaverling Spit and follow a protocol to collect this data on bivalves, which hold cultural, economical, and ecological significance to the Samish Indian Nation. While the students are trained on bivalve …

Trade Bait: Season 3, Ben Bagley

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

A 5-episode podcast series dissecting the use of statistics in the NFL and NFL Media

Assessment Of Heavy Metals In Sharks From The Arabian Gulf Waters, The United Arab Emirates, Noor Alali

Theses

Metals occur naturally in the environment however anthropogenic activities have contributed to their increase in the marine ecosystem. As elements have the ability to bioaccumulate, biomagnify and transfer between biological compartments throughout the food web, they pose a great threat to living biota. The characteristics of the Arabian Gulf make it a harsh environment for marine species especially when multiple stressors are acting together. Rhizoprionodon acutus (milk shark) and Carcharhinus sorrah (spot-tail shark) are essential compartments of the Arabian Gulf ecosystem. As they are found up in the food chain and considered a predator species they are under the threat …

The Red Palm Weevil In The Uae: Morphological Diversity And Rnai-Mediated Gene Silencing Of Two Cuticle-Related Genes, Safa Hashem Mohammed Musaed

Theses

Red Palm Weevil (RPW), Rhynchophorus ferrugineus (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), threatens palm trees worldwide. A better understanding of this insect can help with designing an adequate management strategy. This study aimed to a better understand the morphological diversity of RPW and examined RNAi-mediated gene silencing of two cuticle-related genes, vestigial (vg) gene, and Laccase (Lac2) gene by injecting the last larval stage with double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). For the morphological diversity study, adults of RPW were collected and classified by their prothoracic spots. Additional morphological characters were measured such as Pronotum Length (PL), Pronotum Width (PW), Elytra Length (EL), Elytra Width (EW), and …

A Network-Based Approach For Computational Drug Repurposing On Cancer Data, Ann Reba, Thomas Alexander

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we are interested in finding the best drugs that can be repurposed for the disease and able to find the adverse effects such drugs that are FDA-Approved. Developing an effective drug can be a time-consuming and expensive crucible method. Network-based machine learning methods are used for predicting a given drug for A that can be used for B. It aims at finding new indications for already existing drugs and therefore increases the available therapeutic choices at a fraction of the cost of new drug development. The perturbation gene expression data corresponding to the MCF7 cell line was …

Using Desmos Activitybuilder For Dynamic Proof Building, Eryn M. Maher, Ha Nguyen

College of Science and Mathematics Faculty Presentations

We will demonstrate a Desmos Activity used to support proof building for middle grades Geometry concepts. Desmos ActivityBuilder is a user-friendly interactive tool designed for teaching mathematics that integrates scientific calculators, graphing abilities, virtual manipulatives, media, and more. Participants will create a task in Desmos ActivityBuilder to use in their classroom, copying and editing a dynamic proof-building task.

Introduction To Discrete Mathematics: An Oer For Ma-471, Mathieu Sassolas

Open Educational Resources

The first objective of this book is to define and discuss the meaning of truth in mathematics. We explore logics, both propositional and first-order , and the construction of proofs, both formally and human-targeted. Using the proof tools, this book then explores some very fundamental definitions of mathematics through set theory. This theory is then put in practice in several applications. The particular (but quite widespread) case of equivalence and order relations is studied with detail. Then we introduces sequences and proofs by induction, followed by number theory. Finally, a small introduction to combinatorics is …

Why Daubechies Wavelets Are So Successful, Solymar Ayala Cortez, Laxman Bokati, Aaron Velasco, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many applications, including analysis of seismic signals, Daubechies wavelets perform much better than other families of wavelets. In this paper, we provide a possible theoretical explanation for the empirical success of Daubechies wavelets. Specifically, we show that these wavelets are optimal with respect to any optimality criterion that satisfies the natural properties of scale- and shift-invariance.