Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Comparative Assessment Of Soil Characteristics Between Forests And Urban Lawns, Remigio Casanova, Stephanie Huerta, Lukia Kalugin, Garrison Layne, Valerie Pacheco

Undergraduate Research Conference

Objectives

• Examine the differences in soil characteristics between a recreational lawn and a forest

• Make comparisons between a forest and lawn sampling area from a visual standpoint to observe a difference in what vegetation the soil supports.

• Collect data through on on-site and in in-laboratory methods.

• Interpret the results by examining the collected data and looking for patterns.

Creating Communities Of Practice To Promote Sustainability: A Framework For Organizational Change, Ryan J. Wallace, Haydee M. Cuevas, Sang-A Lee

Sustainability Conference

Everything necessary for human survival depends on our ability to establish stewardship practices that preserve critical resources and foster conditions to ensure long-term protection of Earth’s natural environment for future generations. Sustainability practices rely upon individuals to adhere to conscientious principles to establish a reasonable balance between environmental, social, and economic influences. This presentation seeks to establish a candid dialogue about how to identify opportunities for sustainability, how to implement policies that reinforce sustainability practices, and encourage the formulation of a community of practice to reinforce accountability and continuous improvement of sustainability efforts.

Identifying sustainability practices requires a keen understanding …

Casein Kinases Are Required For The Stability Of The Glucose Sensing Receptor Rgt2 In Yeast, Danny Bloor

Liberty University Research Week

Undergraduate

Basic

Historical Investigation Of New London Alum Springs Through Elemental Analysis, Chloe Vernon, Asia Eskaros

Liberty University Research Week

Undergraduate

Textual or Investigative

What Lives On Offshore Artificial Reefs In South Carolina? An Analysis Of Epifaunal Reef Communities And How They Vary With Reef Age, Sydney Madden

Undergraduate Research Competition

Artificial reef structures have been deployed across the coast of South Carolina in an effort to increase fish habitat and provide other ecosystem services. There are approximately 45 artificial reef systems established by the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR) over several decades. The hard structure—frequently composed of concrete, old boats, or other structures—forms unique high relief hard-bottom habitat in the otherwise largely low relief coastal shelf. Currently, there is little published on the species composition of the epifaunal communities in this region, how much biomass they support, and how they develop over time. We studied two established artificial …

Isolation And Analysis Of Extracellular Vesicles From Lactic Acid Bacteria, L. Brooke Busby, Isabel Myers, Klea Hoxha

Undergraduate Research Competition

Extracellular Vesicles, also referred to as EVs, are spherical lipid membrane-bound vesicles produced by both Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria. These vesicles are secreted into the extracellular space and play important functions in cellular and host communication, elimination of competitors, virulence, detoxification of environmental stress, and nutrition sensing. They are often packed with proteins, enzymes, lipids, and nucleic acids like DNA or RNA molecules among other biological entities. Streptococcus thermophilus is a lactic acid bacterium (LAB), inhabiting the human digestive tract, that has been shown to produce EVs. The bacterial flora has a great impact on the host immune …

Tourism And Sustainability In The City Of Georgetown, Ya Zheng

Undergraduate Research Competition

I am working on improving and increasing tourism in the city of Georgetown. These plans that I will implement will relate to SDG goals. Works will include creating social media posts to attract tourists, promoting jobs to spread job opportunities, encouraging sustainable tourism through creative content, and much more.

Identifying Conditions For Indole Additions To Aldehydes To Be Applied To The Synthesis Of Phidianidine Analogues, Lindsay Newton, Anna Tingler

Undergraduate Research Competition

Phidianidines are natural products originally isolated from Phidiana Militaru, a shell-less mollusk. The compounds are comprised of an indole, a 1,2,4 oxadiazole ring, and an aminoalkylguanadine group on the C-3' position of the ring. They have been found to neutralize reactive oxygen species and are agonists of the µ-opioid receptor. Other groups have synthesized analogues of the phidianidines that have substituted the aminoalkylguanadine group for a biaryl ring system, which has been shown to have neuroprotective properties. The current synthetic routes make substitution of the indole and changing the oxadiazole difficult, so our goal is to create a synthesis that …

Environmental Bacteriophage Detection On Coastal Carolina University Campus, Hailey Oldfield, Madison Gentilo

Undergraduate Research Competition

The purpose of this study is to utilize bacteriophage as an environmental indicator of the presence of harmful bacteria in waterways on Coastal Carolina's campus and to identify bacteriophage that could be used to control bacterial blooms. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. These viruses are found ubiquitously in the environment and are the most abundant organism on Earth. Eleven sites are designated for weekly sample collection. Water samples are filtered and amplified using strains of E. coli B and E. coli K12 to allow potential viruses in the sample to proliferate to detectable levels. Plaque assays are used as …

Land Cover Classification And Change During Mine Reclamation In Northeast Florida Using Multispectral Imagery, Daniel Burow, Robert Brown, Alexis Caldwell, Patrick Hunter, Jett-Ramy Kaddour, Alexander Kingma, Justin Kozicki, Blake Neal, Abigail Neff, Rylan Randolph, Devon Tanner, Isaiah Vahos

Sustainability Conference

Titanium is commonly used in the aerospace industry because it is lightweight and durable in extreme temperatures. The Green Cove Springs Mine, near Green Cove Springs, Florida, was used for mining and processing titanium and other minerals from 1972 until 2009. Since then, the mine area is being reclaimed, or rehabilitated and restored to its natural state, as required by Florida Department of Environmental Protection regulations. In this study, we use high-resolution multispectral satellite and aerial imagery obtained from 2016 to 2022 to examine land cover (LC) changes at the Green Cove Springs Mine during this reclamation period. We use …

Multi-Device Data Analysis For Fault Localization In Electrical Distribution Grids, Jacob D L Hunte

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The work presented in this dissertation represents work which addresses some of the main challenges of fault localization methods in electrical distribution grids. The methods developed largely assume access to sophisticated data sources that may not be available and that any data sets recorded by devices are synchronized. These issues have created a barrier to the adoption of many solutions by industry. The goal of the research presented in this dissertation is to address these challenges through the development of three elements. These elements are a synchronization protocol, a fault localization technique, and a sensor placement algorithm.

The synchronization protocol …

A Web User Interface Image Processing Tool For Classifying The Extent Of Dementia Across Alzheimer’S, Sathvik Prasad Palyam, Robin Ghosh

ATU Research Symposium

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia. This project used four image specifications to classify the dementia stages in each patient applying the CNN algorithm. Employing the CNN-based in silico model, the authors successfully classified and predicted the different AD stages and got around 97.19% accuracy. Later, a web interface tool was developed to educate doctors or researchers to check the patients' dementia level based on the MRI brain images and suggest symptoms that strengthen the predicted level of AI. A user uploads the brain scan, which is sent to the backend server, where the image is …

Fake Profile Detection On Social Media Using Generative Adversarial Networks (Gans), Edidiong Akpan

ATU Research Symposium

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is an artificial intelligence framework used to make computers inventive. This has been applied in several areas of security such as intrusion detection systems. With the wave of globalization and increased social media presence, security has become a thing of concern. For instance, social media security breaches and faking has become one of the many things people are subjected to ranging from impersonation, cyberbullying, stalking, fraud, fleecing of personal assets, and issuing online threats behind fake profiles, these fake profiles are created either by hacking an existing account or by copying the lifestyle and events shared …

Internet Of Things Device Capabilities, Architectures, Protocols, And Smart Applications In Healthcare Domain: A Review, Md. Milon Islam, Sheikh Noorduddin, Fakhreddine (Fakhri) Karray, Ghulam Muhammad

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

Nowadays, the Internet has spread to practically every country around the world and is having unprecedented effects on people's lives. The Internet of Things (IoT) is getting more popular and has a high level of interest in both practitioners and academicians in the age of wireless communication due to its diverse applications. The IoT is a technology that enables everyday things to become savvier, everyday computation towards becoming intellectual, and everyday communication to become a little more insightful. In this paper, the most common and popular IoT device capabilities, architectures, and protocols are demonstrated in brief to provide a clear …

Fast Fashion: A Price The Planet Has To Pay, Abby Gager

Environmental Law Journal blog

With fashion trends rapidly changing, the fashion industry is placed under pressure to produce new styles quickly and for a cheap price. Although consumers enjoy having the latest trends at their fingertips with the convenience of online shopping, the rise of fast fashion will have a long-lasting detrimental impact on the environment. Fashion is considered “fast” for a variety of reasons; the constant change in trends is fast, the rate of production is fast, the consumer’s decision and methods of buying are fast, delivery is fast, and articles of clothing are worn fast before they are tossed and to never …

Exploration Of The Effects Of Bond Length On The Potential Energy Curves For Diatomic Compounds, Ramsey Cotton, Ashley Summers

Research and Creativity Symposium

Bond dissociation energy (BDE) is the unique energy required to break a bond in a molecule into its respective atoms or molecular fragments. In this study, the theories behind harmonic and anharmonic oscillators, which address BDE of diatomic molecules, were employed to relate the length of a bond to its corresponding potential energy. A computational chemistry program was utilized to investigate the potential energies of diatomic hydrogen (H2), bromine (Br2), and hydrogen bromide (HBr). The diatomic molecules were found to obey Hooke’s law for harmonic oscillation at low energies, but as the energy increased with stretching the bond, deviations were …

How Electrons Impact Binding Energy, Nicholas Hacker, Sierra Hunter

Research and Creativity Symposium

An atom is made up of a positively charged nucleus, consisting of non-charged neutrons and a number of positively charged protons, and of negatively charged electrons, the number of which is equivalent to the protons. The attractive force between the positive and negative charges fluctuates with the quantity of subatomic particles; binding energy is the energy required to overcome this attractive force to remove an electron from its orbital. In diatomic molecules, the binding energy is between the two atoms themselves rather than just between the nucleus and electrons for a singular atom. The relationship between binding energies of the …

Transition State Theory: Thermodynamics And Kinetics Of Ammonia Production Via Dft Functional, Madeleine Stanisha, Emma Freakley

Research and Creativity Symposium

The thermodynamics and kinetics of a proposed mechanism for ammonia production from nitrogen and hydrogen gas were analyzed by utilizing transition state theory (TST) and density functional theory (DFT). The enthalpy and entropy for the overall reaction were computed via DFT functionals, PBE0 and B3LYP, and were compared to literature values for the thermodynamics of ammonia production. PBE0 produced an enthalpy and entropy for the overall reaction of -81.32 kJ/mol and -197.75 kJ/mol K with percent errors of -11.5 % and -0.18 %, respectively. In comparison, B3LYP produced an enthalpy and entropy for the overall reaction of -1923.02 kJ/mol and …

Assessing The Correlation Between The Electron-Nucleus Binding And Electron-Electron Repulsion, Isabella Groover, Joey Henry

Research and Creativity Symposium

Multi-electron systems add a level of complexity to the Schrödinger equation by introducing an electron-electron repulsion term into the potential energy. The electron-electron repulsion term is difficult to assess utilizing the Schrödinger equation due to extensive computation required. In this study, the binding energy between the 1s electron(s) and the nucleus of the atoms in the first two rows of the periodic table were determined using an ab initio computational method, 6-31G*, that incorporated the electron-electron repulsion instead of assuming that electrons act independently of one another. As the number of electrons increased, pushing the 1s electrons closer to the …

Using Potential Energy Surfaces Of Diatomic Molecules To Determine The Bond Dissociation Energy Via Computational Chemistry, Skye Curry, Nathaniel Holbrook

Research and Creativity Symposium

The bond length along which two atoms vibrate can be altered in order to construct a potential energy surface used to determine the bond dissociation energy of a diatomic molecule. Carbon monoxide was initially used as the diatomic molecule of choice in this ChemCompute lab experiment. The bond length of carbon monoxide was altered in the range of .086 to .177 nm, and the electronic energy produced was recorded. A potential energy curve was constructed at these bond lengths until the molecule dissociated; a relative potential energy curve was then constructed. The equilibrium bond length, 0.113 nm, and the well …

Fluoride Doping In Crystalline And Amorphous Indium Oxide Semiconductors, Aritra Sil, Michael J. Deck, Elise A. Goldfine, Chi Zhang, Sawankumar V. Patel, Steven Flynn, Haoyu Liu, Po Hsiu Chien, Kenneth R. Poeppelmeier, Vinayak P. Dravid, Michael J. Bedzyk, Julia E. Medvedeva, Yan Yan Hu, Antonio Facchetti

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this contribution, the structural and electronic effects of fluoride doping in both crystalline and amorphous indium oxides are investigated by both experimental and theoretical techniques. Pristine crystalline and amorphous fluoride-doped indium oxide (F:In-O) phases were prepared by solution-based combustion synthesis and sol-gel techniques, respectively. The chemical composition, environment, and solid-state microstructure of these materials were extensively studied with a wide array of state-of-the-art techniques such as UV-vis, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, grazing incidence X-ray diffraction, 19F and 115In solid-state NMR, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM), and extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) as well as by density functional theory (DFT) …

How Students Use The Services Available From Lindenwood Universities Library, Jennifer Sailor

2022 Student Academic Showcase

Student Assessment Scholars took on the Library Services stakeholder proposal. Their goal was to find how students use the service available from Lindenwood Universities Library. Through evidence, it was found that students have a positive sentiment towards the Lindenwood’s Library Services. That the Students want longer hours, better marketing, and find one of the best services being the building itself. Lindenwood Universities Library Services are similar to the other schools in the athletic conference. Lindenwood University houses a Maker Lab, Career Services, and technology rentals like the other universities, but Lindenwood students were not aware of them. Overall, students were …

Survival Analysis, Darrell Charles

2022 Student Academic Showcase

Survival analysis is a branch of statistics used by engineers to estimate the reliability of some mechanical system before it ultimately fails. In particular, survival analysis is used to estimate the lifespan of consumer goods. Previous efforts have studied the estimated lifespan of civilian vehicles based on a set of common attributes. In this preliminary report, we focus on the American market over 1990-2020. For our study, the variables of interest are the manufacturer, body type, number of owners, mileage, and age of the vehicle.

Surface Urban Heat Island In South Korea’S New Towns With Different Urban Planning, Kyungil Lee, Yoonji Kim, Hyun Chan Sung, Seung Hee Kim, Seong Woo Jeon

Institute for ECHO Articles and Research

A new town is strategically built within a short period compared to naturally developed cities. It is considered an appropriate study area for analyzing the urban climate problems such as surface urban heat islands (SUHIs) that is differently generated according to urban planning and development. In this study, we suggest comprehensive method for determining and comparing changes in surface UHI distribution during 1989–2048 in two new towns with different urban planning. First, a substantial increase in built-up areas was observed from 1989 (< 5%) to 2018 (> 40%) in both new towns. However, SUHI phenomenon-increasing patterns were different of about 12.25% depending on urban …

Method Development For Analysis Of Dietary Supplements Using Flame Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy, Elijah Hongsermeier-Baxter

2022 Student Academic Showcase

Dietary supplements are typically ingested by customers who already have a well-balanced diet and an awareness of a personal, specific deficiency or fitness goal serving as their reason for doing so. Accordingly, the accuracy of the composition of a supplement on its label is paramount in determining if said tablets are worthwhile for customer use. A method was developed to determine the accuracy of the nutrition facts labels on two different brands of iron and zinc supplements. Samples were prepared via dissolution in nitric acid followed by filtration, dilution and analysis via flame atomic absorption spectroscopy. A standard curve method …

Can We Use Antipredator Behavior Theory To Predict Wildlife Responses To High-Speed Vehicles?, Ryan B. Lunn, Bradley Blackwell, Travis L. Devault, Esteban Fernández-Juricic

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Animals seem to rely on antipredator behavior to avoid vehicle collisions. There is an extensive body of antipredator behavior theory that have been used to predict the distance/time animals should escape from predators. These models have also been used to guide empirical research on escape behavior from vehicles. However, little is known as to whether antipredator behavior models are appropriate to apply to an approaching high-speed vehicle scenario. We addressed this gap by (a) providing an overview of the main hypotheses and predictions of different antipredator behavior models via a literature review, (b) exploring whether these models can generate quantitative …

Mucot: Multilingual Contrastive Training For Question-Answering In Low-Resource Languages, Gokul Karthik Kumar, Abhishek Singh Gehlot, Sahal Shaji Mullappilly, Karthik Nandakumar

Computer Vision Faculty Publications

Accuracy of English-language Question Answering (QA) systems has improved significantly in recent years with the advent of Transformer-based models (e.g., BERT). These models are pre-trained in a self-supervised fashion with a large English text corpus and further fine-tuned with a massive English QA dataset (e.g., SQuAD). However, QA datasets on such a scale are not available for most of the other languages. Multi-lingual BERT-based models (mBERT) are often used to transfer knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages. Since these models are pre-trained with huge text corpora containing multiple languages, they typically learn language-agnostic embeddings for tokens from different languages. …

Relative Energy Comparison For Various Water Clusters Using Mp2, Df-Mp2, And Ccsd(T):Mp2 Methods, Qihang Wang

Honors Theses

The study of water clusters is an important area of research in many disciplines, such as biology, physical chemistry, and environmental studies. However, due to the difficulty in studying larger water clusters, such as clathrate hydrates, it is beneficial to obtain accurate descriptions of smaller water clusters to use as models for larger systems via computational methods. By starting with small water clusters, such as (H2O)₆, and moving into larger systems it is possible to build up data on various water structures that can determine the energetics of the various geometries within a certain number of water molecules. …

Using Connections To Make Predictions On Dynamic Networks, Rebecca Dorff Jones

Theses and Dissertations

Networks are sets of objects that are connected in some way and appear abundantly in nature, sociology, and technology. For many centuries, network theory focused on static networks, which are networks that do not change. However, since all networks transform over time, static networks have limited applications. By comparison, dynamic networks model how connections between objects change over time. In this work, we will explore how connections in dynamic networks change and how we can leverage these changes to make predictions about future iterations of networks. We will do this by first considering the link prediction problem, using either Katz …

Statistical Properties Of 2d Navier-Stokes Equations Driven By Quasi-Periodic Force And Degenerate Noise, Rongchang Liu

Theses and Dissertations

We consider the incompressible 2D Navier-Stokes equations on the torus driven by a deterministic time quasi-periodic force and a noise that is white in time and extremely degenerate in Fourier space. We show that the asymptotic statistical behavior is characterized by a uniquely ergodic and exponentially mixing quasi-periodic invariant measure. The result is true for any value of the viscosity ν > 0. By utilizing this quasi-periodic invariant measure, we show the strong law of large numbers and central limit theorem for the continuous time inhomogeneous solution processes. Estimates of the corresponding rate of convergence are also obtained, which is the …