UARK (University of Arkansas )
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Sample Archival System for Quantum Device Manufacturing: Design, Construction, and Integration
Get PDFIn the manufacturing of quantum devices using 2-dimentional (2D) materials, current processes rely on manual operations of production. MonArk Quantum Foundry is developing a facility to semi-automatically, and ultimately automatically, produce 2D materials. One crucial step in the experimentation process is archiving these materials and completed chips for future access. The sample archival system robot was produced to fulfill this need. The system is a 4 Degree-of-freedom (DOF) cartesian storage system that stores custom aluminum chip trays of sixty samples, having a total storage capacity of 14,400 samples. The sample archive system meets key goals from: it integrates with the assembly line, maintains decent accuracy, and within space limits. However, finding reliable replacements for high-wear ABS parts and testing reliability is ongoing. This thesis outlines the design, construction, and integration of this robot into the 2D material manufacturing chain
Downloading the Ghost
No full textThe four sections of this manuscript explore grief, the natural world, mental illness, and romantic love, as well as the various ways in which these themes intersect. Many of the poems contained in this collection take place in or make reference to the state of Arkansas, displaying and investigating the Natural State’s role as both setting for and witness to the speaker’s psychological anguish, subsequent recovery, and eventual falling in love. The formal, tonal, and thematic diversity of these poems reflect various dichotomies of existence—the cold, sterile vacuum of space vs. the teeming, ever-evolving ocean; familial love vs. romantic love; the rich chaos of the natural world vs. humanity’s attempts to tame and organize it; the virtue of self-acceptance vs. the practice of self-improvement
Exploration of Polymorphic Gate-based Watermarking in Asynchronous Circuits
Get PDFWith the increasing demand for new state-of-the-art integrated circuits (ICs), intellectual property (IP) reuse has become more commonplace to both accelerate the design process and lessen the non-recurring engineering costs of a design. Reuseable IP poses significant security risks, not only to the creator of the IP, but also to the consumer purchasing the IP. For an IP vendor, this risk can come from illegal distribution, cloning, or overuse. For the purchaser, counterfeit IPs may be purchased from an unvetted vendor, leading to a substandard design, malfunctions, IP infringement, or security vulnerabilities. Hardware watermarking is a method to protect designers on both ends of a third-party IP purchase by either preventing misuse or proving that it occurred, as well as ensuring that the design has not been altered. For asynchronous Multi-Threshold NULL Convention Logic (MTNCL) circuits, a polymorphic watermarking scheme can provide proof of ownership that limits overhead on both the effort of insertion as well as the increase in area that comes from embedding additional circuitry. The objective of this thesis research is to explore the feasibility and benefits of using polymorphic gates to introduce a layer of security to a design by embedding a signature that can protect against IP misuse
Shortage to Surge - Studying the Post-COVID-19 Guitar Retail Market
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic was one of the most catalyzing events of the 21st century, leading to supply chain disruptions, lifestyle changes, and a massive shift towards digital technologies. During the COVID-19 lockdown, many people had more free time, and over 16 million individuals learned to play guitar in the first 2 years of the pandemic. According to a study by Fender, 62% of these new guitar learners cited the pandemic as their primary reason for learning the instrument. However, pandemic policies and supply chain disruptions meant that many guitar retailers were unable to satisfy demand, and backorders accumulated. After the pandemic, this demand dramatically shifted, leaving many companies with too much inventory. This student-led research project seeks to compare the guitar retail market to a similar retail market before and after the COVID-19 pandemic (2019-2023), discover guitar market category trends, and predict future guitar market growth to better inform manufacturers, retailers, and consumers. The study includes a literature review, hypothesis testing, a preliminary study of the datasets through summary statistics and basic visualizations (using Python), and several iterations of predictive/forecasting models (SARIMA, LSTM, etc.). The modeling results were subsequently compared with interviews with industry experts from the Northwest Arkansas region and the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) show in California, and an appropriate final model was selected to predict the guitar retail market’s growth in the next five years
Exploring Hybrid Cohort-Based Doctoral Program Features That Support Nontraditional Doctoral Students’ Persistence: A Preregistered Case Study.
Get PDFWith the rise of hybrid learning models, non-traditional learners have greater access to doctoral education. However, attrition rates from doctoral programs remain high, ranging from 40% to 50% across all doctoral programs and exceeding these levels in online non-traditional programs. Numerous causes of attrition or persistence in doctoral studies have been researched and can affect the student, the academic institution, and the broader academic society. This qualitative case study will explore adult and lifelong learning doctoral students\u27 perceptions of the programmatic and instructional support resources that have helped improve persistence in their program. Two of the important programmatic features of this program are the utilization of a cohort model and instruction through a hybrid model. This study will examine these, and any other programmatic or instructional support resources the students perceive helped them persist in their studies
Cartographic Representation and Analysis of Sand Dune Morphometry in Wadi Rum, Jordan
Get PDFSituated in southern Jordan, near the Saudi Arabia border, Wadi Rum boasts a dramatic landscape of towering sandstone inselbergs and vast dune fields. The UNESCO World Heritage site is known for its cultural, historical, and physical uniqueness. Due to the hyper-arid environment and sandstone weathering, the region provides a perfect outdoor laboratory for aeolian research.
While research on aeolian processes has grown in popularity in the past century, there is a lack of conventional cartographic and visualization techniques in the field of aeolian studies. This project corroborates findings from influential aeolian researchers such as R.A. Bagnold while also implementing traditional and innovative cartographic practices. With the aim of cartographically representing sand dune morphometry and particle size distribution, a set of 71 vials of sand grains were collected from the slip face of the Umm Ishrin sand ramp in Wadi Rum, Jordan. These vials were sorted by particle size and weighed to determine the distribution of various grain sizes along the collection transect. As a result, several maps were produced as a way of effectively visualizing particle size distribution across the Umm Ishrin dune.
While the resulting maps validated the findings of previous studies in regard to typical aeolian processes, the maps also served as a conventional technique that had not been seen in previous aeolian research. As found in recent research, changes in sand dune development and mobility are indicators of Earth’s changing climate. This project serves to prove that the utilization of traditional cartographic and visualization techniques will aid in future aeolian studies as well as climate change research
Systemic Racism, Media Coverage, Intersectional Identities, and Funding: Critical Policy Discourse Analysis of a State Takeover and Multilingual Learner Policies
No full textLanguage used in education policy and in written media about education policy covertly inscribes the values and relationships among and between policy actors, policy targets, problems, and solutions. The present research presents two studies that critically examined these discourses using critical policy discourse analysis. The first study examined media portrayal of the 2019 determination to continue or terminate state control of the Little Rock School District in Arkansas. The second study focused on policy related to English Learners across six states—New York, Utah, Indiana, Washington, Arkansas, and Kentucky. Findings from the studies suggested: (1) neoliberal policy vocabularies dominate the problematization and therefore proposed solutions within media portrayal around education policy and (2) subtle language distinctions socially construct English Learners in varying ways to either pushback upon or perpetuate systemic racism. These findings call attention to the need for sustained community and media participation, the importance of taking a critical stance to media coverage and policy, and the necessity to incorporate policy targets’ perspectives with a careful attunement to language to support the intersectional, multilingual, and multicultural identities of students through education policy
Impact of Smartphone Usage on the Performance and Satisfaction of Hospitality Employees
No full textThis study examined the impact of smartphone usage on the job outcomes (job satisfaction and performance) of employees, specifically focused on the hospitality industry, where employees’ income and performance heavily rely on emotional labor. The research was aimed to distinguish between negative smartphone activities (e.g., doomscrolling, social comparison) and positive activities (e.g., listening to calming music, engaging in stimulating games) to determine how these behaviors affect employees. Using the Stimulus, Organism, Response Cognitive Theory (SOR), the study examined if positive smartphone usage enhances well-being and job outcomes, while negative usage diminishes them. The results revealed that smartphone usage does not affect how psychological well-being impacts job performance and satisfaction. The literature and findings in this research help provide insights for further discovery and research in managing employees’ stress and enhancing workplace satisfaction and performance, for those with the intention of raising retention rates in the industry that faces the highest amount of turnover
BANG!: Real-time Measurements and Transcriptomics of Metabolic Reprogramming in Activated Macrophages at Fever Temperature
Get PDFWe investigated the real-time metabolic rates of activated macrophage cell lines derived from mouse, chicken and rainbow trout. Each species showed a different kinetic signature with metabolic rates accelerating under fever conditions specific to each organism. Upon activation mouse macrophages increased their rate of glycolysis early and then a later reprogramming phase occurred with a dramatic decrease in oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) accompanied by a reciprocal second increase in glycolytic rates. Chicken macrophages showed an initial increase in both glycolytic and OXPHOS rates. The late drop OXPHOS rates also occurred in chicken however there was no reprogramming that occurred as glycolytic rates steadily decreased. Although overall metabolic rates differed depending on stimuli and temperature, rainbow trout macrophages showed a response to temperature increases but weaker metabolic responses to activation. To determine the role of fever on the macrophage transcriptome, RNA sequencing was performed using mouse macrophages isolated from four time points, referred to as BANG, determined by distinct features in their metabolic signature. The results indicated that differential expression was most prominent at 39°C early after stimulation. It was confirmed that overall protein synthesis is upregulated when cells were exposed to fever temperatures. Additionally, fever showed increased regulation of inflammatory responses to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) either alone or with additional cytokine stimulus. The enrichment of the metabolic response showed both glycolysis and OXPHOS were differentially expressed early and at higher temperatures. This suggests that the acceleration of the metabolic response due to increased temperature is initiated early upon activation
Literary Postcritique and American Transcendentalism: Helping Students Practice Community-Building by Rewilding Literature in the Classroom
Get PDFLiterary postcritique is an emergent theoretical approach to literature that has elicited skepticism among many in academia because of its central claim that their unchecked overreliance on suspicious and symptomatic reading styles is diminishing the pedagogical potential of our reading together. To restore this potential, Rita Felski, a champion of literary postcritique, suggests adopting an aesthetic reading style, a mid-level interpretation that neither indulges in the formalists’ habits of close scrutiny nor in the cultural critics’ wider lens of political and social contexts. In The Limits of Critique and Hooked, Felski argues that an aesthetic reading style can develop in students vital relational understandings and re-sensitize them to shared affective experiences in their classrooms’ discursive communities. For this project, I suggest that Felski’s twenty-first-century post-critical option echoes the reformative work of a certain stripe of nineteenth-century Romantic thinkers: the American Transcendentalists. This project’s goal is to emphasize the democratic value of Felski’s work by translating the approach of literary postcritique into terms of American Transcendentalism. Its comparison of Felski’s theoretical approach and Henry David Thoreau’s ethical practices reveals that both provide readers with opportunities to reorient themselves within diverse social networks, improve their caring skills of attention, understanding, and responsiveness, and rescale viable, sustainable social reform to effect change through small, everyday interactions. These similarities serve to repackage literary postcritique and aesthetic reading styles as worthy of their skeptics’ reconsideration. The project concludes with an invitation to reimagine curriculum, instruction, and assessment in ways that align with Felski and Thoreau’s sincerest ambition: to repair our sociality