Kinetics of Competing Reactions of N-aryl-4-chloro-1,8-naphthalimides with Primary Amines

Color poster with text, diagrams, tables, and graphs.This study presented the mechanistic implications of the kinetics of competing reactions of N-aryl-4-chloro-1,8-naphthalimides with primary amines.University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire Office of Research and Sponsored Programs; Petroleum Research Fund

Exploring the Lives of Animal Activists: A Qualitative Study

The animal rights movement, despite its historical roots, has only recently garnered attention in the realm of social sciences, increasingly being recognized as a facet of social justice. This dissertation delves into the intersection of animal rights activism and gender, primarily focusing on the parallels drawn between the oppression of women and animals/nature. The noticeable dominance of women in the animal rights movement, as suggested by previous studies, formed the basis for adopting an eco-feminist approach to explore this issue, highlighting the shared oppression and exploitation faced by women and animals. In-depth, in-person interviews were used to collect data on the experiences of animal rights activists, probing how their interest was piqued, the nature of their participation, and the influence of their activism on their personal lives. This study also sought to explore potential gender-based differences in the experiences of activists. A constructionist research paradigm guided the qualitative inquiry, while a thematic analysis was employed to interpret the data. The results showed a significant female representation, aligning with existing research, with only one participant identifying as male. Emerging themes revealed the formative influence of early childhood experiences in fostering an interest in animal welfare, such as familial influence or key events. Participants’ involvement in animal activism manifested in various forms, such as volunteer work, fostering, lobbying, outreach, and education. Activism resulted both in benefits including social connectivity and personal growth and challenges like burnout and compassion fatigue. These findings enrich the current understanding of the animal rights movement and its relationship to eco-feminism, intersectional environmentalism, and eco-psychology, adding further weight to its relevance in social justice discourse

Meeting The DoD’s Tactical Weather Needs Using CubeSats

This thesis investigates a CubeSat design that uses Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components to capture, store, process, and downlink collected terrestrial weather data at resolutions near stat-of-the-art. The weather phenomena to be detected and transmitted in a timely manner are cloud formations, wind profiles, ocean currents, sea state, lightning, temperature profiles, and precipitation. It is hypothesized and shown that the proposed design will provide an improvement on the current U.S. tactical weather collection satellites because of the anticipated increased reliability and lowered cost to build and maintain the proposed CubeSat constellation. The methodology employed a multi-phase approach through the collective research of a team of Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) master’s students to develop an initial satellite and constellation scheme, with my contributions as the payload lead. This thesis documents the initial satellite design and, through my risk reduction effort to refine the payload, proposes a final payload configuration to meet tactical weather requirements. The final payload includes three types of sensors and is used in 198 identical CubeSats of a LEO Walker constellation. This research has the potential to increase the reliability of weather data collection for the military, while at a low cost

Universal Wait-Free Memory Reclamation

In this paper, we present a universal memory reclamation scheme, Wait-Free Eras (WFE), for deleted memory blocks in wait-free concurrent data structures. WFE's key innovation is that it is completely wait-free. Although some prior techniques provide similar guarantees for certain data structures, they lack support for arbitrary wait-free data structures. Consequently, developers are typically forced to marry their wait-free data structures with lock-free Hazard Pointers or (potentially blocking) epoch-based memory reclamation. Since both these schemes provide weaker progress guarantees, they essentially forfeit the strong progress guarantee of wait-free data structures. Though making the original Hazard Pointers scheme or epoch-based reclamation completely wait-free seems infeasible, we achieved this goal with a more recent, (lock-free) Hazard Eras scheme, which we extend to guarantee wait-freedom. As this extension is non-trivial, we discuss all challenges pertaining to the construction of universal wait-free memory reclamation. WFE is implementable on ubiquitous x86_64 and AArch64 (ARM) architectures. Its API is mostly compatible with Hazard Pointers, which allows easy transitioning of existing data structures into WFE. Our experimental evaluations show that WFE's performance is close to epoch-based reclamation and almost matches the original Hazard Eras scheme, while providing the stronger wait-free progress guarantee

The effects of the interaction of animals with children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and their families [abstract]

The CDC estimates that one in 110 children receive a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) annually. Pet dogs have been found to be a social catalyst and service dogs have demonstrated measurable benefits for children with ASD. Given that 39% of American households have a dog, this survey investigates the perceived benefits and barriers of having a dog in a family with a child with ASD

Highly Loaded Composite Strut Test Development

Highly loaded composite struts, representative of structural elements of a proposed truss-based lunar lander descent stage concept, were selected for design, development, fabrication and testing under NASA s Advanced Composites Technology program. The focus of this paper is the development of a capability for experimental evaluation of the structural performance of these struts. Strut lengths range from 60 to over 120 inches, and compressive launch and ascent loads can exceed -100,000 lbs, or approximately two times the corresponding tensile loads. Allowing all possible compressive structural responses, including elastic buckling, were primary considerations for designing the test hardware

Microtubules gate tau condensation to spatially regulate microtubule functions.

Tau is an abundant microtubule-associated protein in neurons. Tau aggregation into insoluble fibrils is a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia1, yet the physiological state of tau molecules within cells remains unclear. Using single-molecule imaging, we directly observe that the microtubule lattice regulates reversible tau self-association, leading to localized, dynamic condensation of tau molecules on the microtubule surface. Tau condensates form selectively permissible barriers, spatially regulating the activity of microtubule-severing enzymes and the movement of molecular motors through their boundaries. We propose that reversible self-association of tau molecules, gated by the microtubule lattice, is an important mechanism of the biological functions of tau, and that oligomerization of tau is a common property shared between the physiological and disease-associated forms of the molecule

Virial coefficients of trapped and un-trapped three-component fermions with three-body forces in arbitrary spatial dimensions

Using a coarse temporal lattice approximation, we calculate the first few terms of the virial expansion of a three-species fermion system with a three-body contact interaction in $d$ spatial dimensions, both in homogeneous space as well as in a harmonic trapping potential of frequency $\omega$. Using the three-body problem to renormalize, we report analytic results for the change in the fourth- and fifth-order virial coefficients $\Delta b_4$ and $\Delta b_5$ as functions of $\Delta b_3$. Additionally, we argue that in the $\omega \to 0$ limit the relationship $b_n^\text{T} = n^{-d/2} b_n$ holds between the trapped (T) and homogeneous coefficients for arbitrary temperature and coupling strength (not merely in scale-invariant regimes). Finally, we point out an exact, universal (coupling- and frequency-independent) relationship between $\Delta b_3^\text{T}$ in 1D with three-body forces and $\Delta b_2^\text{T}$ in 2D with two-body forces.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure