Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Candida Albicans Hyphal Mannan Is Structurally Distinct From Yeast Mannan, Francis Kwofie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

C. albicans is a polymorphic fungal pathogen which has the ability to shift from yeast to hyphae. C. albicans cell wall is composed of glucan, chitin, mannoprotein and mannan. It is not possible, using standard extraction methods, to isolate mannan from C. albicans hyphae. To isolate hyphal mannan, we developed a simplified alkali extraction method. Using this method it was determined that hyphal mannan has a much lower molecular weight, a smaller polymer distribution and altered conformation structure when compared to yeast mannan. The hyphal mannan was found to contain little to no acid-labile portion with only α-Man-PO₄ groups …

Nonparametric Regression In Natural Exponential Families: A Simulation Study, Yijun Chen

All Theses

Nonparametric regression has been particularly well developed. Base on the asymptotic equivalence theory, there are some procedures that can turn more complicated nonparametric estimation problems into a standard nonparametric regression, especially in natural exponential families. This procedure is described in detail with a wavelet thresholding estimator for Gaussian nonparametric regression and simulation study shed light on the behavior of this method under different sample sizes and parameterizations of exponential distribution. The resulting estimators have a high degree of adaptivity in [2].

Mcicsl Newsletter - August 2015, Shannon R. Trimboli Education Coordinator

MCICSL Newsletter

This issue includes the following:

Bat Night was a success for education and research

MCICSL participated in national network strategic planning

as well as Summer research opportunities

Maintaining Consistency Between A Design Model And Its Implementation, Hector M. Chavez

Dissertations

Software design models are increasingly being used as part of the software development process as analysis and design artifacts and to automatically generate code that developers can further modify or extend, greatly expediting the software development process. This, however, has introduced the challenge of maintaining consistency between the design models and their implementation as they evolve during the development process. Traditional software testing and verification techniques have been well studied in the past, and they are an integral part of many software development projects, however, they are not well suited for consistency checking between a design model and its implementation. …

The Strict Higher Grothendieck Integral, Scott W. Dyer

Department of Mathematics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis generalizes A. Grothendieck’s construction, denoted by an integral, of a fibered category from a contravariant pseudofunctor, to a construction for n- and even ∞-categories. Only strict higher categories are considered, the more difficult theory of weak higher categories being neglected. Using his axioms for a fibered category, Grothendieck produces a contravariant pseudofunctor from which the original fibered category can be reconstituted by integration. In applications, the integral is often most efficient, constructing the fibered category with its structure laid bare. The situation generalizes the external and internal definitions of the semidirect product in group theory: fibration is …

Methods To Obtain Pedestrian Distance Walked Via Inertial Measurement Units, Brian Williams

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

A mobile App designed to help stroke patients with their rehabilitation is in development. This App, designed to work with one or two inertial measurement units (IMUs), requires gait analysis as one of its components. The most difficult part of performing this analysis is determining how far the patient has walked. Two competing methods were identified to gather this data. The first method uses angles and trigonometry to determine the length of each step. The second uses calculus to integrate the accelerometer readings from the IMU. In this thesis, both methods are investigated to see which one appears more promising …

Combination Treatment With Conjugated Linoleic Acid And Nitrite Protects Against Myocaridal Infarction., Natia Qipshidze Kelm

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to the CDC, the most common type of heart disease is coronary artery disease, which frequently leads to myocardial infarction (MI). Therapeutic approaches to lessen the resulting cardiovascular injury associated with MI are limited. Recently, the management paradigm for cardiac injury has entered the molecular era and microRNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to act as negative regulators of gene expression by inhibiting mRNA translation and/or stimulating mRNA degradation. A single miRNA can modulate physiological or disease phenotypes by regulating whole functional systems. Importantly, miRNAs can regulate cardiac function, thereby modulating heart muscle contraction, heart growth and morphogenesis. MicroRNA-499 (miRNA-499) …

Optical And Sensing Properties Of Various Shaped Gold Nanoplates And Highly Controlled Asymmetric Gold Nanoplate/Nanosphere Coupled Assemblies., Aiqin Fang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the development of a strategy to correlate the dark-field light scattering spectra of individual nanostructures with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) images of the same nanostructures, we were able to investigate several interesting optical properties of Au nanoplates (NPs) and asymmetrically-coupled Au nanospheres (NSs) attached to Au NPs with a high level of control. The light scattering spectra of the NP/NS coupled structures depend strongly on the location of NS attachment on the NP. Attachment of multiple NSs at the edge/vertex sites leads to a unique synergistic effect. In contrast to the uniform distribution of …

Mechanistic Study Of Heme Protein-Mediated Nitric Oxide Dioxygenation Using Photolytically Produced Nitric Oxide, Karl Joseph Koebke

Theses and Dissertations

The previously reported NO precursor [Mn(PaPy2Q)(NO)]ClO4 (1), where (PaPy2QH) is N,N-bis(2-pyridylmethyl)-amine-N-ethyl-2-quinoline-2-carboxamide, was synthesized and proven capable of producing as much as 180 µM NO when irradiated by a single 3 mJ 500nm laser pulse, in a 0.15 cm path cell, without the need for additional sacrificial reductants or oxidants. Species 1 was first used to study the reaction of nitric oxide with oxy-myoglobin (oxyMb) to form ferric myoglobin (metMb) and nitrate. This reaction had long been assumed to proceed via the same iron-bound peroxynitrite intermediate (metMb(OONO)) as the metMb-catalyzed isomerization of peroxynitrite to nitrate. Recent research showed that the metMb-catalyzed …

Scaling Laws For High-Order-Harmonic Generation With Midinfrared Laser Pulses, M. V. Frolov, N. L. Manakov, Wei-Hao Xiong, Liang-You Peng, J. Burgdörfer, Anthony F. Starace

Anthony F. Starace Publications

We derive an analytic expression for thewavelength scaling of the high-order-harmonic generation (HHG) yield induced by midinfrared driving laser fields. It is based on a quasiclassical description of the returning electron wave packet, which is shown to be largely independent of atomic properties. The accuracy of this analytic expression is confirmed by comparison with results of numerical solutions of the time-dependent Schr¨odinger equation for wavelengths in the range of 1.4 μm ≤ λ ≤ 4 μm. We verify the wavelength scaling of the HHG yield found numerically for midinfrared laser fields in a recent paper by Le et al. [

Favorable Target Positions For Intense Laser Acceleration Of Electrons In Hydrogen-Like, Highly-Charged Ions, Liang-Wen Pi, S. X. Hu, Anthony F. Starace

Anthony F. Starace Publications

Classical relativistic Monte Carlo simulations of petawatt laser acceleration of electrons bound initially in hydrogen-like, highly-charged ions show that both the angles and energies of the laser-accelerated electrons depend on the initial ion positions with respect to the laser focus. Electrons bound in ions located after the laser focus generally acquire higher (≈GeV) energies and are ejected at smaller angles with respect to the laser beam. Our simulations assume a tightly-focused linearly-polarized laser pulse with intensity approaching 10²²W/cm². Up to fifth order corrections to the paraxial approximation of the laser field in the focal region are …

Asymmetric Synthesis Of All-Carbon Α-Aryl Quaternary Carbonyl Compounds By Palladium-Catalyzed Asymmetric Allylic Alkylation (Pd-Aaa) And Their Application To The Synthesis Of Biologically Important 3,3′-Disubstituted Oxindole And Α-Disubstituted Quaternary Β-Lactone Frameworks, Md. Sharif Al Asad

Theses and Dissertations

The development of catalytic, enantioselective methods for the construction of all-carbon quaternary stereocenters is an outstanding achievement in the recent history of organic chemistry. The palladium-catalyzed asymmetric allylic alkylation (Pd-AAA) reaction has played a key role in creating such stereocenters and has allowed researchers to synthesize a vast number of biologically potent natural products. However, synthetic methodologies to access compounds containing α-aryl groups to the quaternary carbon stereocenters are still rare. The increasing appearance of these all-carbon α-aryl quaternary stereocenters in a growing number of biologically active natural products and pharmaceutical agents creates a pressing need for the ability to …

Extended Book Review: Really Big Numbers, By Richard Evan Schwartz; The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life Of Paul Erdös, By Deborah Heiligman; The Short Seller, By Elissa Brent Weissman, Gizem Karaali

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

The genre of math lit for children is not huge, but it is growing. My kid loves the early reader books by my friend and colleague Julie Glass (A Dollar for Penny (1998), The Fly On the Ceiling (2000)). I found Izolda Fotiyeva’s Math with Mom (2003) too late for my daughter but will definitely read it with my son. For a neat twist on the traditional alphabet book, I recommend The Technical Alphabet (2014) by the engineer sisters Lavanya and Melissa Jawaharlal. More recently a colleague introduced me to Laura Overdeck’s Bedtime Math series; these will soon join …

Strain Promoted Click Chemistry Of 2- Or 8-Azidopurine And 5-Azidopyrimidine Nucleosides And 8-Azidoadenosine Triphosphate With Cyclooctynes. Application To Living Cell Fluorescent Imaging, Jessica Zayas, Marie Annoual, Jayanta K. Das, Quentin Felty, Walter Gonzalez, Jaroslava Miksovska, Nima Sharifai, Akira Chiba, Stanislaw F. Wnuk

Environmental Health Sciences

Strain-promoted click chemistry of nucleosides and nucleotides with an azido group directly attached to the purine and pyrimidine rings with various cyclooctynes in aqueous solution at ambient temperature resulted in efficient formation (3 min to 3 h) of fluorescent, light-up, triazole products. The 2- and 8-azidoadenine nucleosides reacted with fused cyclopropyl cyclooctyne, dibenzylcyclooctyne, or monofluorocyclooctyne to produce click products functionalized with hydroxyl, amino, N-hydroxysuccinimide, or biotin moieties. The 5-azidouridine and 5-azido-2'-deoxyuridine were similarly converted to the analogous triazole products in quantitative yields in less than 5 min. The 8-azido-ATP quantitatively afforded the triazole product with fused cyclopropyl cyclooctyne in aqueous …

Tin Nanoparticles Encapsulated In Hollow Tio2 Spheres As High Performance Anode Materials For Li-Ion Batteries, Xiang Pan

Theses and Dissertations

Tin, an anode material with a high capacity for lithium-ion batteries, has poor cyclic performance because of the high volume expansion upon lithiation. Based on a literature review of the applications of lithium-ion batteries and current research progress of the tin-based anode materials for lithium-ion batteries, we developed a method to synthesize hollow TiO2 spheres with tin nanoparticles anchored on the inner surface of the TiO2 shell. Such a unique tin/TiO2 composite alleviates the volume change of tin–based anode materials in charge-discharge processes. SnCl2·2H2O (Tin (II) chloride dihydrate) and titanium (IV) isopropoxide (TIPT) were used as the Sn source and …

Integrated Li-Ion Ultracapacitor With Lead Acid Battery For Vehicular Start-Stop, Emad Manla

Theses and Dissertations

Advancements in automobile manufacturing aim at improving the driving experience at every level possible. One improvement aspect is increasing gas efficiency via hybridization, which can be achieved by introducing a feature called start-stop. This feature automatically switches the internal combustion engine off when it idles and switches it back on when it is time to resume driving. This application has been proven to reduce the amount of gas consumption and emission of greenhouse effect gases in the atmosphere. However, the repeated cranking of the engine puts a large amount of stress on the lead acid battery required to perform the …

Tunneling Experiments With Dirac Electrons In Graphene Heterojunctions, Shivani Rajput

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents results of scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy experiments performed on graphene, a two-dimensional membrane of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice, where charge carriers behave like massless fermions described by the Dirac equation. Our findings demonstrate that interface engineering is a viable route to control and further enhance the electronic properties of graphene.

In the first experiment, by transferring chemical vapor deposited (CVD) graphene onto substrates of opposite polarization - H-terminated Si-face and C-faces of hexagonal silicon carbide (SiC), we show that the type of charge carrier in graphene can be controlled by substrate polarization. Furthermore, we find …

Lang’S Universal Molecule Algorithm, John C. Bowers, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Robert Lang’s Universal Molecule algorithm, a landmark in modern computational origami, is the main component of his widely used Tree Maker program for origami design. It computes a crease pattern of a convex polygonal region, starting with a compatible metric tree. Although it has been informally described in several publications, neither the full power nor the inherent limitations of the method are well understood. In this paper we introduce a rigorous mathematical formalism to relate the input metric tree, the output crease pattern and the folded uniaxial origami base produced by the Universal Molecule algorithm. We characterize the family of …

Inkball Models For Character Localization And Out-Of-Vocabulary Word Spotting, Nicholas Howe

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Inkball models have previously been used for keyword spotting under the whole word query-by-image paradigm. This paper applies inkball methods to string-based queries for the first time, using synthetic models composed from individual characters. A hybrid system using both query-by-string for unknown words and query-by-example for known words outperforms either approach by itself on the George Washington and Parzival test sets. In addition, inkball character models offer an explanatory tool for understanding handwritten markings. In combination with a transcript they can help to to attribute each ink pixel of a word image to specific letters, resulting in highquality character segmentations.

Establishing A Chronology Of Late Quaternary Glacial Advances In The Cordillera De Talamanca, Costa Rica, Rebecca Susan Potter

Masters Theses

Little research has focused on glacial events in the tropics. Providing an absolute glacial chronology in Costa Rica will build a foundation for future glacial chronologies and paleoclimate reconstructions in the highlands of Central America. Evidence of past glaciation, including moraines and glacial lakes, is preserved within formerly glaciated valleys in the Cordillera de Talamanca. Orvis and Horn (2000) constrained deglaciation ages of the most recent glacial event in the Cordillera de Talamanca based on radiocarbon dates of glacial lake sediments. Radiocarbon ages indicated complete deglaciation after 12.4 ka cal BP but before 9.7 ka cal BP (Orvis and Horn, …

Comparison Of Activation Enthalpies For Aminoglycoside Modification Reactions, Brittany Sterling Soto

Masters Theses

At highly elevated temperatures, many biological reactions can proceed spontaneously from the ground state to the transition state. However, due to the long half-life of these reactions, catalysts are required to catalyze these reactions at modern day temperatures by lowering the activation energy. Wolfenden et al. has previously shown that catalysts enhance the rate of the reaction by reducing the enthalpy of activation. Therefore, the activation energies have been determined for three aminoglycoside modifying enzymes, APH(3’)-IIIa, AAC(3)-IIIb, and AAC(3)-VIa, to determine whether these three enzymes distinguish between the two classes of aminoglycoside antibiotics by reducing the enthalpy of activation during …

Real-Time Spectroscopic Analysis Of Microalgal Adaptation To Changing Environmental Conditions, Robert Ked Byrd

Masters Theses

Increases in anthropogenic pollution are causing many environmental problems; understanding their impact on the environment has become an important issue. Industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels have caused increased levels of carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere, which is contributing to global warming and ocean acidification. Agricultural runoff has caused levels of inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus to rise, where they have been noted to cause harmful algal blooms. Marine ecosystems have been particularly affected as both of these forms of pollution accumulate in bodies of water. Microalgae are important organisms in these ecosystems because they sequester these pollutants and …

Utilizing Inventory Data And Public Opinion To Develop An Urban Tree Management Plan For Oak Ridge, Tn, Thomas E. Jennings

Masters Theses

Proper management by a trained urban forester is essential for the health of urban trees, due to the adverse growing conditions they face. Unfortunately, many cities do not have the luxury of employing an urban forester for various reasons, which is the case for the City of Oak Ridge, TN. This study utilized inventory data of the street trees, park trees, and trees surrounding the municipal complexes in Oak Ridge, as well as evaluated park visitor satisfaction in three of the city parks through the use of a survey to aid in the development of an urban tree management plan. …

On The Existence And Uniqueness Of Static, Spherically Symmetric Stellar Models In General Relativity, Josh Michael Lipsmeyer

Masters Theses

The "Fluid Ball Conjecture" states that a static stellar model is spherically symmetric. This conjecture has been the motivation of much work since first mentioned by Kunzle and Savage in 1980. There have been many partial results( ul-Alam, Lindblom, Beig and Simon,etc) which rely heavily on arguments using the positive mass theorem and the equivalence of conformal flatness and spherical symmetry. The purpose of this paper is to outline the general problem, analyze and compare the key differences in several of the partial results, and give existence and uniqueness proofs for a particular class of equations of state which represents …

American Black Duck Wintering Dynamics And Dabbling Duck Response To Herbicide Application In Western Tennessee Wetlands, Joshua Matthew Osborn

Masters Theses

American black duck (Anas rubripes) populations declined throughout North America in the late 20^th century. Although the breeding population has since stabilized, research investigating habitat use by black ducks in the Mississippi Flyway is scarce. Impacts of wetland management practices in response to invasive species must also be tested to measure responses to habitat quality by black ducks and other waterfowl. During winters 2011-2013 (December-February), I estimated food biomass, diurnal habitat use, and activities of black ducks in 6 cover types at the Duck River Unit of Tennessee National Wildlife Refuge and Cross Creeks National Wildlife Refuge …

Correlating Morphology To Performance In Conjugated Polymer Nanocomposite Thin Films, Siddharth Pradhan

Masters Theses

The morphology and performance of thin films that consist of conjugated polymers and nanoparticles are investigated in this thesis. In the first system, the morphology of the nanocomposite that consists of low band gap alternating copolymers with a methano-fullerene are determined by neutron scattering and correlated to their photovoltaic performance as polymer solar cells. These results show that the conjugated alternating copolymers have high miscibility relative to other conjugated polymers. The analysis of the scattering data shows that the morphology of the conjugated polymer-fullerene bulk heterojunction can be described as the formation of aggregates on two length scales. Important parameters …

A Scaffolded, Metamorphic Ctf For Reverse Engineering, Wu-Chang Feng

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Hands-on Capture-the-Flag (CTF) challenges tap into and cultivate the intrinsic motivation within people to solve puzzles, much in the same way Sudoku and crossword puzzles do. While the format has been successful in security competitions, there have been a limited number of attempts to integrate them into a classroom environment. This paper describes MetaCTF, a metamorphic set of CTF challenges for teaching reverse code engineering. MetaCTF is 1) scaffolded in a way that allows students to make incremental progress, 2) integrated with the course material so that students can immediately apply knowledge gained in class, 3) polymorphic and metamorphic so …

Reinforced Imitative Graph Learning For Mobile User Profiling, Dongjie Wang, Pengyang Wang, Yanjie Fu, Kunpeng Liu, Hui Xiong, Charles Hughes

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Mobile user profiling refers to the efforts of extracting users’ characteristics from mobile activities. In order to capture the dynamic varying of user characteristics for generating effective user profiling, we propose an imitation-based mobile user profiling framework. Considering the objective of teaching an autonomous agent to imitate user mobility based on the user’s profile, the user profile is the most accurate when the agent can perfectly mimic the user behavior patterns. The profiling framework is formulated into a reinforcement learning task, where an agent is a next-visit planner, an action is a POI that a user will visit next, and …

A Study On The Geographical Distribution Of Brazil’S Prestigious Software Developers, Fernando Figueira Filho, Marcelo Gattermann Perin, Christoph Treude, Sabrina Marczak, Leandro De Almeida Melo, Igor Marques Da Silva, Lucas Bibiano Dos Santos

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Brazil is an emerging economy with many IT initiatives from public and private sectors. To evaluate the progress of such initiatives, we study the geographical distribution of software developers in Brazil, in particular which of the Brazilian states succeed the most in attracting and nurturing them. We compare the prestige of developers with socio-economic data and find that (i) prestigious developers tend to be located in the most economically developed regions of Brazil, (ii) they are likely to follow others in the same state they are located in, (iii) they are likely to follow other prestigious developers, and (iv) they …

Fast Object Retrieval Using Direct Spatial Matching, Zhiyuan Zhong, Jianke Zhu, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The conventional bag-of-visual-words (BoW) model is popular for the large-scale object retrieval system but suffers from the critical drawback of ignoring spatial information. RANSAC-based methods attempt to remedy this drawback, but often require traversing all the feature matches for each hypothesis, leading to the heavy computational cost which limits the number of gallery images to be verified for each online query. We propose an efficient direct spatial matching (DSM) approach to directly estimate the scale variation using region sizes, in which all feature matches voted for estimating geometric transformation. DSM is much faster than RANSAC-based methods and exhaustive enumeration approaches. …