Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Biophysical And Structural Studies On Telomeric G-Quadruplexes From Tetrahymena Thermophila, Dana Beseiso , '21

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

G-quadruplexes (GQs) are non-canonical DNA structures composed of stacks of stabilized guanine tetrads (G-tetrads). GQs are highly diverse structures that can be categorized by their strand directionality, number of G-tetrads, and loop types among other parameters. Due to their high guanine content, GQs are expected to fold in regions such as telomers or oncogene promoters. They are thus firmly established as biologically viable targets for the development of anticancer therapeutics. In order to harvest GQs’ therapeutic potential, extensive structural studies are required to elucidate the structures’ diverse topologies alone and in complex with selective ligands. Towards this goal, this thesis …

Kinetics Studies On Isomerization And Unimolecular Decay Processes Of The Criegee Intermediate, Methacrolein (Macr) Oxide, Hyun Kyung Lee , '21

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

Alkenes are one of the major components of hydrocarbons in our atmosphere. One of the most common alkenes in our atmosphere is isoprene (2-methyl – 1,3 – butadiene). Currently, it is known that isoprene ozonolysis can lead to the production of Criegee intermediates CH2OO, methacrolein (MACR) oxide, and methyl vinyl ketone (MVK) oxide. In part, we were interested in studying one specific Criegee intermediate, MACR oxide. The competition between the isomerization reactions and the unimolecular reactions became the focus of our study. Rate constants for the relevant reactions were calculated by implementing RRKM theory and using Master Equation modeling to …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Α-Diimine Complexes Of Aluminum, Judah B. Raab , '21

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

Conventional aluminum complexes are incapable of one- and two-electron redox chemistry. As a result, despite being the most abundant metal on Earth, aluminum is seldom used in redox catalysis—one of chemistry’s most impactful fields. We are motivated to break this barrier to provide a green alternative to the countless redox catalysts built around the toxic, mining-intensive platinum-group metals. To create aluminum complexes that do desirable redox chemistry, we coordinate redox-active α-diimine ligands to the metal center. These ligands are stable across multiple oxidation states, allowing for multi-electron redox chemistry for their aluminum complexes. This thesis will report the synthesis of …

Talking The Talk:” Mathematical Language, Linguistic Bias, And The Delusion Of Meritocracy In The Study And Practice Of Mathematics, Gene T. Witkowski , '21

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

Challenging the dominant narrative of meritocracy, objectivity and moral/ideological neutrality embraced by many mathematicians, this thesis critically interrogates the form and function of mathematical language within academic and professional mathematical spaces. Grounded in my own experience as a s tudent within the discipline and the frameworks of various scholars within the subdiscipline of literacy education, I offer an understanding of the language of these spaces as a veritable form of literacy implicated in a flexible sociocultural context and dependent on one’s access to forms of capital. I submit that this language serves various functions including, but not limited to: the …

Dijkstra’S Pathfinder, Taylor F. Malamut

Honors Theses

Dijkstra’s algorithm has been widely studied and applied since it was first published in 1959. This research shows that Dijkstra’s algorithm can be used to find the shortest path between two stations on the Washington D.C. Metro. After exploring different types of research and applying Dijkstra’s algorithm, it was found that the algorithm will always yield the shortest path, even if visually a shorter path was initially expected.

Visible Light Generation And Mechanistic Investigation Of High-Valent Metal-Oxo Species Supported By Different Ligands, Seth Ellis Klaine

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Numerous transition metal catalysts have been designed as biomimetic model compounds for the active site of metalloenzymes found throughout Nature, most notably cytochrome P450 monooxygenases that carry out the oxidative transformations of organic substrates with near-perfect chemo-, regio-, and stereo-selectivity. The primary active oxidants in catalytic and enzymatic cycles are fleeting high-valent metal-oxo intermediates where the oxo ligand can transfer to an organic substrate in a process known as oxygen atom transfer (OAT).

In the present work, porphyrin-manganese(III), salen-chromium(III), and salenmanganese( III) derivatives were successfully synthesized and spectroscopically characterized using 1H NMR and UV-Vis spectroscopies. A facile photochemical approach was …

Analysis Of Boundary Observability Of Strongly Coupled One-Dimensional Wave Equations With Mixed Boundary Conditions, Wilson Dennis Horner

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

*see note below

In control theory, the time it takes to receive a signal after it is sent is referred to as the observation time. For certain types of materials, the observation time to receive a wave signal differs depending on a variety of factors, such as material density, flexibility, speed of the wave propagation, etc. Suppose we have a strongly coupled system of two wave equations describing the longitudinal vibrations on a piezoelectric beam of length L. These two wave equations have non-identical wave propagation speeds c1 and c2. First, we prove the exact observability inequality with the optimal …

An Astronomer’S Journey Into Quantitative Reasoning, Jeffrey Bennett

Numeracy

The University of Colorado Boulder campus introduced what may have been the world’s first quantitative reasoning (QR) requirement in 1984 and started offering a QR course in 1988. Although I am an astronomer by training, I had the privilege of creating and teaching that course, which led to my co-authorship of the first textbook directed specifically at QR courses. In this “Roots and Seeds” piece, I will discuss how this course and textbook came to be, how I as an astronomer ended up involved in it, and how this work has connected with other aspects of my career.

Looking Back At Quantitative Reasoning, William Briggs

Numeracy

A teacher looks back on three decades of teaching, pondering, and writing about quantitative reasoning (QR) and shares a few lessons learned. The skills that we teach in QR courses are more important than ever in providing students with a sense of civic virtue: the ability to be engaged and informed citizens in an increasingly complex and quantitative world.

An Investigation On Flow Field Partitioning Related To The Rheological Heterogeneities And Its Application To Geological Examples, Ankit Bhandari

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Earth’s lithosphere is heterogeneous and composed of rheologically distinct elements at various scales of observations. This causes the flow of rocks to vary with space and time, which may influence the formation of various kinds of geological rock records. This thesis provides quantitative solutions to some first-order problems in structural geology regarding this heterogeneous flow variation and thereby the development of various geological rock records at different scales of observations.

Pressure in a rheologically heterogeneous element may deviate from its ambient value and if significant, may influence the metamorphic assemblages. This might cause problems in the routine use of geothermobarometry-based …

Sericea Lespedeza‐-A Natural Dewormer For Sheep And Goats, Thomas H. Terrill

IGC Proceedings (1993-2023)

No abstract provided.

Native Plant Development And Restoration Program For The Great Basin, Usa, N. L. Shaw, Michael Pellant, P. Olwell, S. L. Jensen, E. D. Mcarthur

IGC Proceedings (1993-2023)

No abstract provided.

Germination And Early Growth Of Slickspot Peppergrass (Lepidium Papilliferum) As Affected By Desert Soil Humic Acids, E. Loffredo, A. J. Palazzo, N. Senesi, C. E. Clapp

IGC Proceedings (1993-2023)

No abstract provided.

Estimation Of Location Parameter Within Pre-Specified Error Bound With Second-Order Efficient Two-Stage Procedure, Bhargab Chattopadhyay, Swarnali Banerjee

Mathematics and Statistics: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper develops a general approach for constructing a confidence interval for a parameter of interest with a specified confidence coefficient and a specified width. This is done assuming known a positive lower bound for the unknown nuisance parameter and independence of suitable statistics. Under mild conditions, we develop a modified two-stage procedure which enjoys attractive optimality properties including a second-order efficiency property and asymptotic consistency property. We extend this work for finding a confidence interval for the location parameter of the inverse Gaussian distribution. As an illustration, we developed a modified mean absolute deviation-based procedure in the supplementary section …

Learning To Fuse Asymmetric Feature Maps In Siamese Trackers, Wencheng Han, Xingping Dong, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Ling Shao, Jianbing Shen

Computer Vision Faculty Publications

Recently, Siamese-based trackers have achieved promising performance in visual tracking. Most recent Siamese-based trackers typically employ a depth-wise cross-correlation (DW-XCorr) to obtain multi-channel correlation information from the two feature maps (target and search region). However, DW-XCorr has several limitations within Siamese-based tracking: it can easily be fooled by distractors, has fewer activated channels and provides weak discrimination of object boundaries. Further, DW-XCorr is a handcrafted parameter-free module and cannot fully benefit from offline learning on large-scale data. We propose a learnable module, called the asymmetric convolution (ACM), which learns to better capture the semantic correlation information in offline training on …

Food Security As A Factor Of Sustainable Development Of The Country, Timur Nurimbetov

Karakalpak Scientific Journal

The article examines the state of the food market and the trends in ensuring the country’s food security. The article also analyzes the regional characteristics of the agricultural products market in the Republic of Karakalpakstan. The saturation level of regional food markets has been studied. Scientific conclusions and practical recommendations on the supply of food to the population have been made.

Influence Of Laterial State Of Pair Impurity Complex On Recombination Processes In Semiconductors, L Yu Leyderman, R A. Ayukhanov, Abat Uteniyazov, E S. Esenbaeva, Sh X. Annayeva

Karakalpak Scientific Journal

The paper analyzes the question of the possible influence of the lateral state of a paired impurity complex on the recombination processes. It is shown that the lateral state of the paired impurity complex does not affect the recombination processes of nonequilibrium carriers - they go through that component of the impurity complex that exchanges carriers with both bands (in this particular case, through the component). The second component of the complex () can apparently play some role in the processes of carrier attachment.

Socastee Interview, Participant #08, March 31, 2021, Jennifer Mokos, Jaime Mccauley

Flood Survivor Interviews

A community member of the Rosewood neighborhood in Socastee is interviewed by a CCU student.

Script For Estimating Error And Bias In Offline Evaluation Results, Mucun Tian, Michael D. Ekstrand

Computer Science Faculty Scripts and Data

This publication contains scripts to reproduce the paper “Estimating Error and Bias in Offline Evaluation Results” by Muncun Tian and Michael D. Ekstrand in Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR '20).

Script For Exploring Author Gender In Book Rating And Recommendation, Michael D. Ekstrand, Daniel Kluver

Computer Science Faculty Scripts and Data

This publication contains scripts to reproduce the paper:

Ekstrand, M.D. and Kluver, D. (2021). Exploring Author Gender in Book Rating and Recommendation. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11257-020-09284-2

*Date reflected refers to the publisher's online early release date.

Dogs, Stress, And Tests, Oh My! A Wellness Program For Students Taking A High Stakes Test, Kathryn (Tina) Alessandria

Sustainability Research & Practice Seminar Presentations

No abstract provided.

Polymer Based Triboelectric Nanogenerator For Cost‐Effective Green Energy Generation And Implementation Of Surface‐Charge Engineering, Diana Lopez, Aminur Rashid Chowdhury, Abu Masa Abdullah, Muhtasim Ul Karim Sadaf, Isaac Martinez, Brishty Deb Chowdhury, Serena Danti, Christopher J. Ellison, Karen Lozano, Mohammed Jasim Uddin

Chemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

Performance of triboelectric nanogenerators for harvesting mechanical energy from the ambient environment has been limited by structural complexity, cost-effectiveness, and mechanical weakness of materials. Herein, a cost-effective vertical contact separation mode triboelectric nanogenerator using polyethylene (PE) and polycarbonate (PC) in a regular digital versatile disc is reported. This cost-effective nanogenerator with simplified structures is able to generate an open-circuit voltage of 215.3 V and short-circuit current of 80 μA. The effects of the distance of impact and the air gap between the triboelectric layers have also been tested from 3 to 9 cm, and 0.25 to 1 cm, respectively. It …

Commodity Futures Returns And Policy Uncertainty, Deepa Bannigidadmath, Paresh Kumar Narayan

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2020 Elsevier Inc. This paper investigates whether economic policy uncertainty is predictable using three sets of commodity futures market variables, namely the equal-weighted average of futures excess returns, the excess returns on a portfolio of going long in backwardated commodities, and the excess returns on a portfolio of going short in contango commodities as predictors. We find significant evidence of both in-sample and out-of-sample predictability. Combination forecasts also reveal strong evidence of predictability. Our findings remain unchanged following several robustness tests.

What A Load Of Rubbish! The Efficacy Of Theory Of Planned Behaviour And Norm Activation Model In Predicting Visitors’ Binning Behaviour In National Parks, Kourosh Esfandiar, Ross Dowling, Joanna Pearce, Edmund Goh

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2021 The Authors A specific concern for many park managers is the generation of waste by visitors. One way to combat this issue in national parks is to encourage visitors to put their litter in a bin. This study investigates binning behaviour, as a type of pro-environmental behaviour, of visitors to Yanchep National Park, Australia. Using structural equation modelling, this study tested an integrated structural model combining the theory of planned behaviour and the norm-activation model with data from 219 visitors to this park. The study tried to move away from measuring visitors' pro-environmental intention and instead gathered data …

Financial News And Cds Spreads, Paresh Kumar Narayan, Deepa Bannigidadmath

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2020 Elsevier B.V. This paper examines whether financial news moves CDS spreads for a large number of U.S. stocks sorted into 19 panels consisting of sectors, sizes and credit quality. Using a unique financial news data set, we discover that while both positive and negative news predicts CDS spread changes in most of the panels, annualised mean–variance profits and utility gains are dominated by forecasting models that use positive news as a predictor. At best, risk factors only account for around 31% of observed profits.

Fourier Decompositions Of Graphs With Symmetries And Equitable Partitions, Darren Scott Lund

Theses and Dissertations

We show that equitable partitions, which are generalizations of graph symmetries, and Fourier transforms are fundamentally related. For a partition of a graph's vertices we define a Fourier similarity transform of the graph's adjacency matrix built from the matrices used to carryout discrete Fourier transformations. We show that the matrix (graph) decomposes into a number of smaller matrices (graphs) under this transformation if and only if the partition is an equitable partition. To extend this result to directed graphs we define two new types of equitable partitions, equitable receiving and equitable transmitting partitions, and show that if a partition of …

Effect Of Chromium Metal Accumulation On The Magnesium Absorption And Chlorophyll Content In Vegetables, Widya Sartika Sulistiani, Hening Widowati, Kartika Sari, Agus Sutanto

Makara Journal of Science

This study analyzed the effect of chromium metal accumulation on magnesium absorption and chlorophyll content in vegetables. The effect of accumulation was determined by performing controlled experimental methods on planting media supplemented with chromium and by directly observing vegetables grown in chromium-polluted areas, such as mountain, rice field, street, and industrial areas. The controlled experiments were carried out by varying the chromium contamination (1 and 3 ppm) and magnesium nutrition (0.4, 0.6, and 0.8 g/L) in planting media. The controlled experiment was compared with the results of field observation in several chromium-polluted areas. The effect of the treatment was analyzed …

Analysis Of Contextual Emotions Using Multimodal Data, Saurabh Hinduja

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Affective computing builds and evaluates systems that can recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotion. It is an interdisciplinary field, which includes computer science, psychology, and many others. For years, human emotion has been studied in psychology but recently has become a prominent field in computer science. Largely, the field of affective computing has been focused on analyzing static facial expressions to recognize human emotions, without taking bias (e.g. gender, data bias), context, or temporal information into account. Psychology has shown the difficulty of analyzing emotions without incorporating this type of information. In this dissertation, we have proposed new approaches to …

The Communicative Constitution Of Environment: Land, Weather, Climate, Leanna K. Smithberger

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My project examines the communicative constitution of environment: how we mediate environment in discursive practice, and arrange chaotic and complex timeplaces into organized relationships of agents and objects which act and are acted upon. Climate scholars across disciplines are calling for a paradigm shift in how we understand, study, inhabit, and relate to Earth’s varied environments. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how communication practices do the work of constituting the environment as we know it, and therefore conclude with the hopeful suggestion that these same practices can be used to do the work of a paradigm shift — that is, …

Galaxy And Mass Assembly (Gama): The Inferred Mass–Metallicity Relation From Z = 0 To 3.5 Via Forensic Sed Fitting, Sabine Bellstedt, Aaron S G Robotham, Simon P. Driver, Jessica E. Thorne, Luke J M Davies, Benne Holwerda, Andrew M. Hopkins, Maritza A. Lara-Lopez, Ángel R. López-Sánchez, Steven Phillipps

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

We analyse the metallicity histories of ∼4500 galaxies from the GAMA survey at z < 0.06 modelled by the SED-fitting code PROSPECT using an evolving metallicity implementation. These metallicity histories, in combination with the associated star formation histories, allow us to analyse the inferred gas-phase mass–metallicity relation. Furthermore, we extract the mass– metallicity relation at a sequence of epochs in cosmic history, to track the evolving mass–metallicity relation with time. Through comparison with observations of gas-phase metallicity over a large range of redshifts, we show that, remarkably, our forensic SED analysis has produced an evolving mass–metallicity relationship that is consistent with observations at all epochs. We additionally analyse the three-dimensional mass–metallicity–SFR space, showing that galaxies occupy a clearly defined plane. This plane is shown to be subtly evolving, displaying an increased tilt with time caused by general enrichment, and also the slowing down of star formation with cosmic time. This evolution is most apparent at lookback times greater than 7 Gyr. The trends in metallicity recovered in this work highlight that the evolving metallicity implementation used within the SED-fitting code PROSPECT produces reasonable metallicity results over the history of a galaxy. This is expected to provide a significant improvement to the accuracy of the SED-fitting outputs.