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Seismic Design of a Prestressed Concrete Bridge
Get PDFLatest advancements in software have become an indispensable tool in structural analysis. The main goal of this thesis is to examine dynamic responses of bridges in seismic activity with the help of such tool as CSi Bridge. Therefore, throughout this study, a prestressed concrete bridge model will be thoroughly designed. In the first section, the required materials and structural components will be introduced. The following section will cover calculations required for modeling. The actual modeling of the structure will be carried out in Section 3. In Section 4, the set of required analysis for seismic design such as modal, pushover and response spectrum will be conducted. Lastly, in Section 5, analysis results will be evaluated. Thus, by examining the entire model, its construction, materials used, provided properties and conditions such as location on earth, seismic magnitude, it will be determined whether the design is sufficient and acceptable or not
The Politics of Land Distribution: Ingenio Victoria de Julio- El Timal, a Case Study of Nicaraguan Rural Conflicts after 1990
Get PDFOne of the greatest legacies of the Sandinista Revolution was agrarian reform. Despite the amount of land redistributed, this process happened without any form of legal documentation to support the transfer of property from one owner to the next. The end of the civil war, the peace accords and the transition of power from left to right-wing parties produced conflicting policies that would bring high levels of complexity to the system of land tenure in the country. The case of the state-owned sugar mill, Ingenio Victoria de Julio – El Timal is of one the most emblematic examples of how slow and inefficient Nicaraguan institutions have been in solving land tenure issues in 26 years
Feats and Failures of Corporate Credit Risk, Stock Returns, and the Interdependencies of Sovereign Credit Risk
Get PDFThis dissertation comprises two essays; the first of which investigates sovereign credit risk interdependencies, while the second examines the reaction of corporate credit risk to sovereign credit risk events. The first essay titled, Characterizing Sovereign Credit Risk Interdependencies: Evidence from the Credit Default Swap Market, investigates the relationships that exist among disparate sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) and the implications on sovereign creditworthiness. We exploit emerging market sovereign CDS spreads to examine the reaction of sovereign credit risk to changes in country-specific and global financial factors. Utilizing aVAR model fitted with DCC GARCH, we find that comovements of spreads generally exhibit significant time-varying correlations, suggesting that spreads are commonly affected by global financial factors. We construct 19 country-specific commodity price indexes to instrument for country terms of trade, obtaining significant results. Our commodity price indexes account for significant variation in CDS spreads, controlling for global financial factors. In addition, sovereign spreads are found to be related to U.S. stock market returns and the VIX volatility risk premium global factors. Notwithstanding, our results suggest that terms of trade and commodity prices have a statistically and economically significant effect on the sovereign credit risk of emerging economies. Our results apply broadly to investors, financial institutions and policy makers motivated to utilize profitable factors in global portfolios.
The second essay is titled, Differential Stock Market Returns and Corporate Credit Risk of Listed Firms. This essay explores the information transfer effect of shocks to sovereign credit risk as captured in the CDS and stock market returns of cross-listed and local stock exchange listed firms. Based on changes in sovereign credit ratings and outlooks, we find that widening CDS spreads of firms imply that negative credit events dominate, whereas tightening spreads indicate positive events. Grouping firms into companies with cross-listings and those without, we compare the spillover effects and find strong evidence of contagion across equity and CDS markets in both company groupings. Our findings suggest that the sensitivity of corporate CDS prices to sovereign credit events is significantly larger for non-cross-listed firms. Possible reasons for this finding could in fact be due to cross-listed firms’ better access to external capital and less degree of asymmetric information, relative to non-cross-listed peers with lower level of investor recognition. Our results provide new evidence relevant to investors and financial institutions in determining sovereign credit risk germane to corporate financial risk, for the construction of debt and equity portfolios, and hedging considerations in today’s dynamic environment
Phylogenetic Relationships and Evolution of Snakes
Get PDFSnakes represent an impressive evolutionary radiation of over 3,500 widely-distributed species, categorized into 515 genera, encompassing a diverse range of morphologies and ecologies. This diversity is likely attributable to their distinctive morphology, which has allowed them to populate a wide range of habitat types within most major ecosystems. In my first chapter, I provide the largest-yet estimate of the snake tree of life using maximum likelihood on a supermatrix of 1745 taxa (1652 snake species + 7 outgroup taxa) and 9,523 base pairs from 10 loci (5 nuclear, 5 mitochondrial), including previously unsequenced genera (2) and species (61). I then use this phylogeny to test hypotheses regarding heterogeneity in diversification rates and how this shaped overall patterns of snake diversity in Chapter 2. I also used the species-level phylogeny to test the evolution of habitat use in snakes, morphological variation, and whether distantly-related species exhibit morphological convergence in Chapter 3. Finally, in Chapter 4 I investigate how prehensile tails effect striking performance in arboreal snakes
Parents\u27 Perceptions Regarding the Special Education Classification of Other Health Impairment (OHI)
Get PDFStudents identified by the special education classification Other Health Impairment (OHI) represent the third largest group of students receiving special education services in the United States. The special education services offered these students include both academic and health related supports. The delivery of these services is enhanced when a partnership exits between the primary stakeholders; the student, parents, the school personnel, and the medical personnel. The use of Family Centered Care principles in the delivery of these services supports and maintains the partnership.
Following the qualitative analysis of a series of interviews of parents whose children were classified as OHI, descriptive and inferential themes were derived from the interview data. These themes are discussed relative to the parents’ belief that the classification provided;
access to appropriate special education and school-based health care allowing their children to achieve their maximum potential,
parental satisfaction with the special education and school-based health care services provided, and
the use of Family-Centered Care principles.
Key Words: special education, health impairment, OHI, famil
Territoriality and Spatial Structure in the Green Anole, Anolis carolinensis
Get PDFAnolis carolinensis has been a model organism for ecology and evolutionary biology since the seventies, yet there are still understudied aspects of their ecology. A five-year study has provided microsatellite genotypes to be used in building a pedigree and assess relatedness, enabling us to evaluate the spatial distribution of an urban population of A. carolinensis. Results indicate no correlation between a male’s size and the distance others keep from it; however, males belonging in the heavyweight morph are dictating the spatial distribution in this population. In addition, juvenile dispersal of male offspring and partial philopatry of female offspring are key in this dynamic, where a single heavyweight male will actively defend a small area that contains multiple females, some of which are be daughters, and multiple unrelated males, most likely sneaker males
Spatial Data Mining Analytical Environment for Large Scale Geospatial Data
Get PDFNowadays, many applications are continuously generating large-scale geospatial data. Vehicle GPS tracking data, aerial surveillance drones, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), world-wide spatial networks, and high resolution optical or Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery data all generate a huge amount of geospatial data. However, as data collection increases our ability to process this large-scale geospatial data in a flexible fashion is still limited. We propose a framework for processing and analyzing large-scale geospatial and environmental data using a “Big Data” infrastructure. Existing Big Data solutions do not include a specific mechanism to analyze large-scale geospatial data. In this work, we extend HBase with Spatial Index(R-Tree) and HDFS to support geospatial data and demonstrate its analytical use with some common geospatial data types and data mining technology provided by the R language. The resulting framework has a robust capability to analyze large-scale geospatial data using spatial data mining and making its outputs available to end users
Research Based Recommendation: Effective Parent Advocacy for Students who are Twice-Exceptional, Academically Gifted With Autism
Get PDFThis thesis’s purpose is twofold. The first purpose is to present both information about what twice-exceptionality is and to make recommendations based on the existing research as to how parents or guardians can become more effective advocates and advocate for effective programming and services for their children who are twice-exceptional. While this thesis focuses on a specific subset of twice-exceptional students, those who are both gifted and have autism, a good deal of the material presented will be applicable to children who are gifted with learning disabilities. Effective parent advocacy looks the same across exceptionalities: producing the best educational experience based on the child’s unique needs. Strengths-based programming has been demonstrated to benefit twice-exceptional students no matter the disability, however the areas of deficit will vary depending on the specific disability a child has and his/her unique learning profile. The resources for information on special education law and twice-exceptionality will be useful to parents regardless of the twice-exceptional child’s disability.
The second, and I feel most important, purpose of the thesis is to provide those parents/guardians with a “Quick Start Guide to Advocacy” to help them get started on the path to becoming the most effective advocate they can be for their child(ren). While educators and school administrators are expected to have a solid understanding of the rights and responsibilities of all stakeholders, many times parents are thrust into the world of special and gifted education with no preexisting knowledge. The aim of this thesis is to help bridge this gap for parents and guardians of this unique subset of students
Synthesis of Functional Recombinant Subunits of Phycoerythrin II
No full textCyanobacteria possess light-harvesting complexes called phycobilisomes (PBS). Chromophores, called bilins, direct light to the chlorophyll-containing reaction centers for photosynthesis. These bilins are attached to the phycobiliproteins by lyases at specific cysteine sites. The focus of this project, Synechococcus RS 9916, is a marine species of cyanobacteria that lives deep in the water column and can undergo chromatic acclimation, where it can alter its pigments to best absorb the blue or the green light available. It uses orange-colored phycourobilin and red-colored phycoerythrobilin to capture blue and green light, respectively. The proteins of interest, MpeA and MpeB, are the alpha and beta subunits of phycoerythrin II, which is the outermost protein in the rod in the PBS complex. The goal was to produce and test a construct that contains both mpeA and mpeB in one plasmid; each protein will be fused with a hexa-histidine tag (Ht), to allow for easy purification. The clones were transformed into E. coli to overexpress the proteins of interest in E. coli, which was verified by SDS-PAGE. Preliminary results suggest protein production is occurring. The most productive clones were then co-expressed in E. coli with known and putative lyases and bilin synthesis genes to validate the clones. Though mpeA and mpeB have been cloned and expressed separately, the goal is to produce these alpha and beta subunits together, as they exist in cyanobacteria—for use in further research