Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Applications Of Organic Probes For Imaging And Analysis Of Different Cancer Cell Models, Hong Guan

Theses and Dissertations

Novel techniques for better studying cancer cell behavior and progression are extremely important. Our lab is interested in synthesizing specifically designed organic reagents and applying them in the studies of cancers. In this dissertation, we used organic probes to investigate cancer cells in the following topics: determination of amino acid concentration in different types of cancers, tumor toxicity of organic probes towards HER2 positive breast cancer cells, glycoproteins identification in breast cancer cells and development of enzyme activity assay for colon cancer cells.

The first chapter was focused on the determination of cysteine/homocysteine concentrations using turn-on sensors in cancer cells. …

Detrital Zircon Analysis Of The Taza-Guercif Basin And The Adjacent Rif And Middle Atlas Mountains Of Morocco And X-Ray Fluorescence Chemofacies Analysis Of The Maness Shale Of East Texas, Jonathan Richard Pratt

Theses and Dissertations

The research in this compilation encompasses three studies leveraging quantitative chemical analyses to interpret the sedimentary record to reconstruct geologic history. The first study surveys the detrital zircon U-Pb and zircon fission-track geochronology of the sedimentary Cretaceous Ketama and Tisiren units of the Rif Mountains, and the Bou Rached sandstones of the Middle Atlas Mountains. All analyzed samples contain a population of Mesoproterozoic crystallization ages formerly unknown to northwest Africa. Possible sources for these ages include the Avalonian terranes now present on the northeastern seaboard of North America, and/or zircons derived from the Amazonian craton and preserved in the Pan-African …

Keeping Pace With Criminals: Designing Patrol Allocation Against Adaptive Opportunistic Criminals, Chao Zhang, Arunesh Sinha, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Police patrols are used ubiquitously to deter crimes in urban areas. A distinctive feature of urban crimes is that criminals react opportunistically to patrol officers' assignments. Compared to strategic attackers (such as terrorists) with a well-laid out plan, opportunistic criminals are less strategic in planning attacks and more flexible in executing them. In this paper, our goal is to recommend optimal police patrolling strategy against such opportunistic criminals. We first build a game-theoretic model that captures the interaction between officers and opportunistic criminals. However, while different models of adversary behavior have been proposed, their exact form remains uncertain. Rather than …

Heuristic Collective Learning For Efficient And Robust Emergence Of Social Norms, Jianye Hao, Jun Sun, Dongping Huang, Yi Cai, Chao Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In multiagent systems, social norms is a useful technique in regulating agents’ behaviors to achieve coordination or cooperation among agents. One important research question is to investigate how a desirable social norm can be evolved in a bottom-up manner through local interactions. In this paper, we propose two novel learning strategies under the collective learning framework: collective learning EV-l and collective learning EV-g, to efficiently facilitate the emergence of social norms. Experimental results show that both learning strategies can support the emergence of desirable social norms more efficiently in a much broader range of multiagent interaction scenarios than previous work, …

Self-Assembly Dynamics For The Transition Of A Globular Aggregate To A Fibril Network Of Lysozyme Proteins Via A Coarse-Grained Monte Carlo Simulation, R. B. Pandey, B. L. Farmer, Bernard S. Gerstman

Department of Physics

The self-organizing dynamics of lysozymes (an amyloid protein with 148 residues) with different numbers of protein chains, Nc = 1,5,10, and 15 (concentration 0.004 – 0.063) is studied by a coarse-grained Monte Carlo simulation with knowledge-based residue-residue interactions. The dynamics of an isolated lysozyme (Nc = 1) is ultra-slow (quasi-static) at low temperatures and becomes diffusive asymptotically on raising the temperature. In contrast, the presence of interacting proteins leads to concentration induced protein diffusion at low temperatures and concentration-tempering sub-diffusion at high temperatures. Variation of the radius of gyration of the protein with temperature shows a systematic transition from a …

The Fierce Green Fire: Vol 5 Issue 23, Wofford College Environmental Studies Program

The Fierce Green Fire

No abstract provided.

Expectations For Methodology And Translation Of Animal Research: A Survey Of Health Care Workers, Ari Joffe, Meredith Bara, Natalie Anton, Nathan Nobis

Experimentation Collection

Background: Health care workers (HCW) often perform, promote, and advocate use of public funds for animal research (AR); therefore, an awareness of the empirical costs and benefits of animal research is an important issue for HCW. We aim to determine what health-care-workers consider should be acceptable standards of AR methodology and translation rate to humans.

Methods: After development and validation, an e-mail survey was sent to all pediatricians and pediatric intensive care unit nurses and respiratory-therapists (RTs) affiliated with a Canadian University. We presented questions about demographics, methodology of AR, and expectations from AR. Responses of pediatricians and nurses/RTs were …

Using Capture-Mark-Recapture Techniques To Estimate Detection Probabilities & Fidelity Of Expression For The Critically Endangered James Spinymussel (Pleurobema Collina)., Alaina C. Esposito

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The critically endangered James Spinymussel (Pleurobema collina) is a species of freshwater mussel endemic to Virginia’s James and Dan River basins. In the last 20 years, P. collina has experienced a substantial decline in numbers and currently occupies approximately 10% of its original habitat; however, little information is known about this species to assist in conservation. A 230-meter reach of transitional habitat in Swift Run was selected for repeat observations to estimate detection probabilities using a Capture-Mark-Recapture framework. In June 2014, visual scouting began to locate and tag P. collina (including other mussels in the community) with PIT …

Periodicity In Some Light Curves Of The Solar Analogue V352 Canis Majoris, Perttu Kajatkari, Lauri Jetsu, Elizabeth M. Cole, Thomas Hackman, Gregory W. Henry, Sirkka-Liisa Joutsiniemi, Jyri J. Lehtinen, V. Mäkelä, Sebastian Porceddu, Kyösti Ryynänen, V. Solea

Information Systems and Engineering Management Research Publications

Aims. We applied the Continuous Period Search (CPS) method to 14 yr of V-band photometry of the active G6.5 solar analog V352 CMa. Our aim was to show that CPS can successfully model the presence or absence of periodicity in low-amplitude light curves.

Methods. CPS computes values for the mean brightness, photometric period, amplitude and minimum of selected datasets. We also applied the Power Spectrum Method (PSM) to these datasets and compared the performance of this frequently applied method to that of CPS.

Results. We found an apparent 11.7 ± 0.5 yr cycle in the mean brightness. The mean of …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2015, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

Factors Affecting Munitions Mobility Underwater, C. Friedrichs

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Magnetoresistance Characteristics In Individual Fe3O4 Single Crystal Nanowire, K. M. Reddy, Nitin P. Padture, Alex Punnoose, Charles Hanna

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We report on the magnetoresistance (MR) and electron transport measurements observed on asingle crystal magnetite nanowire prepared using a hydrothermal synthesis method. High-resolution electron microscopy revealed the single crystal magnetite nanowires with 80–120 nm thickness and up to 8 μm in length. Magnetic measurements showed the typical Verwey transition around 120 K with a 100 Oe room temperature coercivity and 45 emu/g saturationmagnetization, which are comparable to bulk magnetite. Electrical resistance measurements in 5-300 K temperature range were performed by scanning gate voltage and varying appliedmagnetic field. Electrical resistivity of the nanowire was found to be around 5 × …

Novel Magnetic And Optical Properties Of Sn1−XZnXO2 Nanoparticles, Nevil A. Franco, Kongara M. Reddy, Josh Eixenberger, Dmitri A. Tenne, Charles B. Hanna, Alex Punnoose

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this work, we report on the effects of doping SnO₂ nanoparticles with Zn²⁺ ions. A series of ∼2–3 nm sized Sn_1−x Zn_xO₂ crystallite samples with 0 ≤ x ≤ 0.18 were synthesized using a forced hydrolysis method. Increasing dopant concentration caused systematic changes in the crystallite size, oxidation state of Sn, visible emission, and band gap of SnO₂ nanoparticles. X-ray Diffraction studies confirmed the SnO₂ phase purity and the absence of any impurity phases. Magnetic measurements at room temperature showed a weak ferromagnetic behavior characterized by an open hysteresis loop. Their …

Heterojunction Metal-Oxide-Metal Au-Fe3O4-Au Single Nanowire Device For Spintronics, K. M. Reddy, Nitin P. Padture, Alex Punnoose, Charles Hanna

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this report, we present the synthesis of heterojunction magnetite nanowires in alumina template and describe magnetic and electrical properties from a single nanowire device for spintronics applications. Heterojunction Au-Fe-Au nanowire arrays were electrodeposited in porous aluminum oxide templates, and an extensive and controlled heat treatment process converted Fe segment to nanocrystalline cubic magnetite phase with well-defined Au-Fe₃O₄ interfaces as confirmed by the transmission electron microscopy. Magnetic measurements revealed Verwey transition shoulder around 120 K and a room temperature coercive field of 90 Oe. Current–voltage (I-V) characteristics of a single Au-Fe₃O₄-Au nanowire have …

The Effects Of A Planned Missingness Design On Examinee Motivation And Psychometric Quality, Matthew S. Swain

Dissertations, 2014-2019

Assessment practitioners in higher education face increasing demands to collect assessment and accountability data to make important inferences about student learning and institutional quality. The validity of these high-stakes decisions is jeopardized, particularly in low-stakes testing contexts, when examinees do not expend sufficient motivation to perform well on the test. This study introduced planned missingness as a potential solution. In planned missingness designs, data on all items are collected but each examinee only completes a subset of items, thus increasing data collection efficiency, reducing examinee burden, and potentially increasing data quality. The current scientific reasoning test served as the Long …

Examining The Performance Of The Metropolis-Hastings Robbins-Monro Algorithm In The Estimation Of Multilevel Multidimensional Irt Models, Bozhidar M. Bashkov

Dissertations, 2014-2019

The purpose of this study was to review the challenges that exist in the estimation of complex (multidimensional) models applied to complex (multilevel) data and to examine the performance of the recently developed Metropolis-Hastings Robbins-Monro (MH-RM) algorithm (Cai, 2010a, 2010b), designed to overcome these challenges and implemented in both commercial and open-source software programs. Unlike other methods, which either rely on high-dimensional numerical integration or approximation of the entire multidimensional response surface, MH-RM makes use of Fisher’s Identity to employ stochastic imputation (i.e., data augmentation) via the Metropolis-Hastings sampler and then apply the stochastic approximation method of Robbins and Monro …

Tempo-Containing Romp Polymers As A Component For Treatment Of Traumatic Brain Injuries, Cameron H. Feriante

Honors College Theses

During a traumatic brain injury (TBI) sustained in combination with hemorrhagic shock the brain undergoes anoxic conditions resulting from swelling and blood loss. Traditional intravenous solutions are used to replace blood volume, but are unable to replace the blood’s oxygen carrying capacity. A proposed treatment based on isotonic solutions containing hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HBOC’s) which were intended to provide readily available oxygen was developed. However, cell-free hemoglobin was shown to have excessive oxidative potential. Polynitroxylated Pegylated Hemoglobin (PNPH) was developed to address this shortcoming. During PNPH synthesis a combination of polyethylene glycol (PEG) and (2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidin-1-yl)oxidanyl (TEMPO), is bound to the …

Impacts Of Consumer Horticulture On Stormwater And Nutrient Management: Investigating Public Perception, Knowledge, And Practices In The Shenandoah River Watershed, Christopher P. Parker

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The South Fork Shenandoah River is a tributary to the Chesapeake Bay that is a significant contributor to nitrogen and phosphorus that enter the Bay and leads to increased eutrophication. These nutrients also cause problems in the South Fork Shenandoah River. The United States Environmental Protection agency has implemented strict regulation to reduce nutrients entering the Bay by developing the Chesapeake Bay TMDL. While the TMDL has strict regulation on wastewater treatment, agriculture, and industry, there are still sources of nutrients entering the Bay through unregulated sources. Urban/suburban runoff is one of these sources, particularly runoff from home owner’s lawns. …

Analysis Of Real-World Passwords For Social Media Sites, Mark J. Quinn

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Textual passwords have dominated all other entity authentication mechanisms since they were introduced in the early 1960’s. Despite an inherent weakness against social engineering, keylogging, shoulder surfing, dictionary, and brute-force attacks, password authentication continues to grow as the Internet expands. Existing research on password authentication proves that dictionary attacks are successful because users make poor choices when creating passwords. To make passwords easier to remember, users select character strings that are shorter in length and contain memorable content, like personal identity information, common words found in a dictionary, backward spellings of common words, recognizable sequences, and easily guessed mnemonic phrases. …

Water Quality, Chemistry, And Hydrology Of Salt Creek In Northeastern Illinois, Luke Lampo

Celebration of Learning

Salt Creek flows through the metropolitan area of Chicago and into the Des Plaines River. Its urban environment provides multiple sources of contamination, including storm runoff, combined sewer overflow, and wastewater treatment plant discharge. The purpose of this study is to determine how water chemistry changes downstream, whether the presence and levels of metals meet IPCB (Illinois Pollution Control Board) and EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) water quality standards, and how water chemistry changes during periods of storm flow and base flow. The study area consists of 10 sites along a 37 km stretch of Salt Creek. Water samples were taken …

Geochemical Analysis Of Surface Materials Surrounding The Bautsch-Gray Mine Superfund Site Near Galena, Illinois, Ryan Plath

Celebration of Learning

The Bautsch-Gray zinc and lead mine, near Galena, Ill., was in operation from the early 1900s until closing in 1975. The mine’s tailings pile has documented elevated lead and zinc concentrations in the surface materials surrounding the site. Numerous floods have caused contaminated sediment to migrate off the mine tailings pile, across Blackjack Road and into an outwash basin, and towards Smallpox Creek. Since this site was designated an EPA priority list superfund site in 2010, there have been numerous remediation efforts.

This study attempts to develop a better understanding of the contamination within the soils of the outwash basin …

Data Management In Cloud Environments: Nosql And Newsql Data Stores, Katarina Grolinger, Wilson A. Higashino, Abhinav Tiwari, Miriam Am Capretz

Wilson A Higashino

: Advances in Web technology and the proliferation of mobile devices and sensors connected to the Internet have resulted in immense processing and storage requirements. Cloud computing has emerged as a paradigm that promises to meet these requirements. This work focuses on the storage aspect of cloud computing, specifically on data management in cloud environments. Traditional relational databases were designed in a different hardware and software era and are facing challenges in meeting the performance and scale requirements of Big Data. NoSQL and NewSQL data stores present themselves as alternatives that can handle huge volume of data. Because of the …

Query Analyzer And Manager For Complex Event Processing As A Service, Wilson Higashino, Cedric Eichler, Miriam A M Capretz, Thierry Monteil, M. Beatriz F. Toledo, Patricia Stolf

Wilson A Higashino

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a set of tools and techniques that can be used to obtain insights from high-volume, high-velocity continuous streams of events. CEP-based systems have been adopted in many situations that require prompt establishment of system diagnostics and execution of reaction plans, such as in monitoring of complex systems. This article describes the Query Analyzer and Manager (QAM) module, a first effort toward the development of a CEP as a Service (CEPaaS) system. This module is responsible for analyzing user-defined CEP queries and for managing their execution in distributed cloud-based environments. Using a language-agnostic internal query representation, …

Evaluation Of Particle Swarm Optimization Applied To Grid Scheduling, Wilson Higashino, Miriam Capretz, M. Beatriz Toledo

Wilson A Higashino

The problem of scheduling independent users’ jobs to resources in Grid Computing systems is of paramount importance. This problem is known to be NP-hard, and many techniques have been proposed to solve it, such as heuristics, genetic algorithms (GA), and, more recently, particle swarm optimization (PSO). This article aims to use PSO to solve grid scheduling problems, and compare it with other techniques. It is shown that many often-overlooked implementation details can have a huge impact on the performance of the method. In addition, experiments also show that the PSO has a tendency to stagnate around local minima in high-dimensional …

Network And Energy-Aware Resource Selection Model For Opportunistic Grids, Izaias Faria, Mario Dantas, Miriam A M Capretz, Wilson Higashino

Wilson A Higashino

Due to increasing hardware capacity, computing grids have been handling and processing more data. This has led to higher amount of energy being consumed by grids; hence the necessity for strategies to reduce their energy consumption. Scheduling is a process carried out to define in which node tasks will be executed in the grid. This process can significantly impact the global system performance, including energy consumption. This paper focuses on a scheduling model for opportunistic grids that considers network traffic, distance between input files and execution node as well as the execution node status. The model was tested in a …

Service Evolution Patterns, Shuying Wang, Wilson Higashino, Michael Hayes, Miriam A M Capretz

Wilson A Higashino

Service evolution is the process of maintaining and evolving existing Web services to cater for new requirements and technological changes. In this paper, a service evolution model is proposed to analyze service dependencies, identify changes on services and estimate impact on consumers that will use new versions of these services. Based on the proposed service evolution model, four service evolution patterns are described: compatibility, transition, split-map, and merge-map. These proposed patterns provide reusable templates to encourage well-defined service evolution while minimizing issues that arise otherwise. They can be applied in the service evolution scenario where a single service is used …

On The Sum Of The Reciprocals Of Squares, Hussam Ibrahim

Celebration of Learning

The Fourier Series has always been a great tool by turning the most complicated functions into a simple approximation by several sine and cosine terms. However, given the fact that its called an approximation arouses the question of how accurate is this approximation, especially with functions that have a corner at x values. In this project, we will show how the series that is the sum of the reciprocals of squares arises in the study of Fourier series. We will discuss the convergence and the rate of convergence of this series. This result arose during exploration on mathematical software Sage. …

Rank Conditioned Rank Selection Filters For Signal Restoration, Russell C. Hardie, Kenneth E. Barner

Russell C. Hardie

A class of nonlinear filters called rank conditioned rank selection (RCRS) filters is developed and analyzed in this paper. The RCRS filters are developed within the general framework of rank selection(RS) filters, which are filters constrained to output an order statistic from the observation set. Many previously proposed rank order based filters can be formulated as RS filters. The only difference between such filters is in the information used in deciding which order statistic to output. The information used by RCRS filters is the ranks of selected input samples, hence the name rank conditioned rank selection filters. The number of …

Partition-Based Weighted Sum Filters For Image Restoration, Kenneth Barner, Ahmad Sarhan, Russell Hardie

Russell C. Hardie

We develop the concept of partitioning the observation space to build a general class of filters referred to as partition-based weighted sum (PWS) filters. In the general framework, each observation vector is mapped to one of M partitions comprising the observation space, and each partition has an associatedfiltering function. We focus on partitioning the observation space utilizing vector quantization and restrict the filtering function within each partition to be linear. In this formulation, a weighted sum of the observation samples forms the estimate, where the weights are allowed to be unique within eachpartition. The partitions are selected and weights tuned …

Asymmetric Lipid Membranes: Towards More Realistic Model Systems, Drew Marquardt, Barbara Geier, Georg Pabst

Chemistry and Biochemistry Publications

Despite the ubiquity of transbilayer asymmetry in natural cell membranes, the vast majority of existing research has utilized chemically well-defined symmetric liposomes, where the inner and outer bilayer leaflets have the same composition. Here, we review various aspects of asymmetry in nature and in model systems in anticipation for the next phase of model membrane studies.