Digital Commons Network^™

The Effects Of Acute Urban Mixture Exposure On The T Cells Of Fathead Minnows (Pimephales Promelas), Cameron Johnson

Culminating Projects in Biology

Contaminants of emerging concern (CECs), including pharmaceuticals, personal care products, industrial, and agricultural byproducts, have a myriad of effects on aquatic organisms. Numerous endpoints were studied in fathead minnow, which is a native species in the Great Lakes tributaries, and a standard model for aquatic toxicology research. It is critical to investigate the effects of urban CECs on the adaptive immune system due to its importance as a defense system in vertebrates. However, there are rare investigations into the effects of CECs on the adaptive immune system of fathead minnows. Generally, T cells and their major subpopulations, T helper and …

A Systematic Literature Review Of Behavioral Interventions For Phelan-Mcdermid Syndrome, Kate Anne Schroeder

Culminating Projects in Community Psychology, Counseling and Family Therapy

Abstract

The purpose of this review was to summarize literature relating to treatment of Phelan-McDermid syndrome and identify ways in which applied behavior analysis can benefit this population. A systematic literature search revealed 23 articles focusing on treatment of Phelan-McDermid syndrome. Results indicated that previous interventions included: hormones, antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, antidepressants, selective reuptake inhibitors, psychotropics, and anxiolytics/sleeping pills. Despite reported medical successes, behavioral challenges facing the Phelan-McDermid syndrome community parallels those behavior analysts routinely address. To that end, the review concludes with ways in which applied behavior analysis can support those affected by Phelan-McDermid syndrome.

Keywords: Phelan-McDermid Syndrome, 22q13, …

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: A Computer-Aided Error Analysis Of Grammar Errors In Eap Writing, Shaya Kraut

Culminating Projects in English

This study consists of a computer-aided error analysis of grammar errors in 70 university placement essays, scores on which resulted in students being either placed in EAP (English for Academic Purposes) Level 1, placed in EAP Level 2, or exempted from the EAP program. Essay scoring happened prior to the study, using the department process whereby each essay was scored by at least two raters using an analytic rubric. An error taxonomy of 16 categories based on Lane and Lange (1999) was used to code the essay data. Data was assembled into a corpus and tagged using the text analysis …

Social-Emotional Skills Of Somali Students With Limited Or Interrupted Formal Education, Lauren Thoma Ergen

Culminating Projects in English

This study examines the social-emotional skills of Somali students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE). The participant group was Somali students, age eighteen to twenty-one, who self-identified as having limited or interrupted formal education. Participants reported their personal perceptions of their social-emotional skills using a Likert style questionnaire. Some participants were randomly selected to also participate in an interview during which participants provided clarifying examples which supplement the questionnaire data. The questionnaire and interview questions used the five main competencies of social-emotional learning as described by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) (2017) to measure the …

English Intelligibility Issues In Outsourcing Of Marketing And Call Centers, Eunice Gyamerah

Culminating Projects in English

Abstract

Worldwide, most multinational companies have outsourced their call centers in India, the premiere outsourcing destination of services. However, some U.S. companies have brought back their outsourced services in response to U.S. customers’ complaints of communication breakdowns in their phone interactions with Indian call agents.

This thesis researches English intelligibility issues of outsourced telemarketing and call centers in India. The observations made in the thesis extend to all call agents originally from the Outer Circle of English countries, part of the three Concentric Circles of World Englishness model developed by Kachru (1975). English in Outer circle countries serves as lingua …

Intercultural Adjustment For Teachers Abroad, Rachel Bassett

Culminating Projects in English

The purpose of this research was to analyze how teachers adjusted to living and teaching overseas. Many teachers choose to move abroad for their careers, or for a portion of their careers. It is therefore vital that they adjust to the host culture and host culture within the educational institute, with a level of adaptability and cultural sensitivity. Some teachers appear to adapt well while others seem to struggle, causing distress for themselves and their workplace. The scope of this research was wide, searching for common themes regarding cultural adjustment among those living abroad as teachers. Eleven teachers were interviewed …

Lithic Resources, Workshops, And Consumption In Northwestern Belize, Hollie Lincoln

Culminating Projects in Cultural Resource Management

Stone tools played an important role in the everyday life of the ancient Maya. Whether for ritual or domestic uses, stone tools were required to complete everyday tasks. Access to stone resources used to make tools, including chert, likely influenced the sociopolitical relationships between communities and cities across the ancient landscape. Through various methods including field survey, lab analysis, and statistical analysis, various chert resources in Northwestern Belize are identified and analyzed in order to recognize chert procurement locations and possible tool production sites or workshops. In addition, an overall analysis of chert quality is included to form a better …

Reluctance Toward Online Teaching, Sally Dufner

Culminating Projects in Higher Education Administration

Online education has become a staple in the American higher education system. A shortage of qualified and motivated online instructors exists as online learning demand increases. The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify why faculty members are not motivated to teach online courses. This study sought to answer the following three questions: (1) Why are faculty members not participating in online instruction? (2) What incentives, if any, are likely to motivate non-participating instructors to adopt online instruction? and (3) What are the differences in perceptions regarding online instruction between faculty members who had been asked or had an …

Suicide Among Emergency Responders In Minnesota: The Role Of Education, Chris Caulkins

Culminating Projects in Higher Education Administration

The primary purpose of this quantitative study is to understand suicide among emergency responders. The secondary purpose is to examine how educators can use information about suicide among emergency responders to develop and adapt curriculum to mitigate psychological trauma experienced by those in emergency medical services (EMS), the fire service, and law enforcement. I use social cognitive theory to investigate responder suicide and as a framework to understand the role of education. Official death records were cross-referenced with data possessed by responder credentialing agencies. I analyzed the records to determine the suicide rates of responders compared to the general population …

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder And Dementia In Aging Veterans: An Overview For Health Care Professionals, Bethany Mary

Culminating Projects in Gerontology

This paper explores how aging veterans cope with post-traumatic stress disorder in later life, especially when they have the potential to experience this in conjunction with a dementia. This project discusses symptoms and changes in neuroanatomy that are similar in both disorders, and a possible causal relationship. The collection of research presented should raise awareness of the disorders and therapy options, and the question of how to best provide care for older veterans with this unique set of memory-centered comorbidities.

Learner Background And Approaches To Vocabulary Learning, Samantha Carley

Culminating Projects in English

Language learners have many assets to consider in the process of planning language instruction (Echevarría et al., 2017). One of the most obvious areas of difficulty in predicting students’ prior knowledge is in vocabulary. Teachers must be aware of their students’ approaches to independently learning new vocabulary in order to plan effective instruction (Nation, 2013; Yang & Wang, 2015; Alharbi, 2015; Echevarría et al., 2017; etc.). Brown (2013) and the pilot for this study have found inconsistencies in students’ approaches. This study sought to determine whether these inconsistencies were predictable based on the variables of gender, academic major, and linguistic …

An Acoustic Phonetic Analysis Of Mandarin English Vowel Spaces, Liping Ma

Culminating Projects in English

Abstract

The objective of this project is to investigate whether or not Mandarin speakers produce English vowels intelligibly. This research replicates the methodology used by Peterson and Barney (1952) and Hillenbrand et al (1995) in their studies of General American English and Midwest English. In this study, 20 Mandarin speakers of English (10 males and 10 females) are asked to read 11 words contain all 11 English phonetic vowels. The participants in the study are college-aged students studying at Saint Cloud State University. They are divided into 4 subgroups based on their genders Length of Residency (LOR) in the USA. …

Randomization In Multiple Baseline Designs, Lissa Bonnstetter

Culminating Projects in Community Psychology, Counseling and Family Therapy

In empirical work, randomization is seen as an effective means of controlling for potential biases. This thesis reviews the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) multiple baseline design articles from 1968-2017 to identify if and how articles randomize their participants, phases, trials, settings, or other factors. In this review, we suggest the requirement of randomization in multiple baseline design articles that is determined prior to the start of baseline to improve internal validity.

An Acoustic Phonetic Analysis Of Northern Minnesota English Vowel Spaces, Michel Backstrom

Culminating Projects in English

The dialect of Northern Minnesota English (NMNE) has been acknowledged as a leading suspect in the search for the Minnesota accent. The majority of the commenters who accept the Minnesota accent at the bottom of a Youtube video page (Bartholid 2015: Are You MN Enough?) indicate that if any Minnesotans have this accent, it is probably the residents of Northern Minnesota. Thus, this study begins to reveal just what that particular dialect of Northern Minnesota actually looks like acoustically. Twenty speakers from the queried region were recorded saying the following eleven vowel phonemes three times [i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ, …

Lavender Linguistics & Hiv Discourse: How Do Gay Aids Generation And Millennial Men Talk About Hiv?, David Anderson

Culminating Projects in English

William Leap coined the term lavender linguistics in the early 1990’s. The expression refers to linguistic features unique to the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) community. Lavender linguistics (Leap, 1995) in HIV discourse is no exception. Although few studies exist in lavender linguistics and HIV discourse, a broad spectrum on this topic has been gained from these studies. Topics in the language marked specifically by LGBT speakers in HIV discourse include racial/ ethnic backgrounds, blood, art and entertainment, activism, camp humor, sex, drugs, online language, HIV treatment, and HIV prevention. Applying lavender linguistics in general, Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1998), …

Mcc Nipissing East 2 (20.Ir.253) And Mcc Nipissing East 3 (20.Ir.254): A Cross Site Comparison Of Archaic Sites On Isle Royale National Park, Samantha J. Olson

Culminating Projects in Cultural Resource Management

This thesis will discuss recent excavations and subsequent analysis, of two previously unknown sites located on Mid-Late Archaic relict beach shores at Isle Royale National Park. The sites are believed to possibly be connected to the Minong Mine, the oldest and largest precontact copper mine in North America to date, located in the McCargoe Cove area of the island. At these sites, lithics and copper were recovered as the only cultural remains of the people who inhabited these two areas. The sites were compared, not only to each other, but also to other Archaic sites found on similar relict beaches …

Privacy Regulations In The Context Of Finance: Comparison Between Developing And Developed Countries, Dimuthu Candauda Arachchige Sarathchandra

Culminating Projects in Information Assurance

Information security and privacy regulation are significant areas of legislation in the financial and micro-finance sectors in the world. There are significant disparities between the developed and developing countries concerning adoption and application of the data protection laws. The developed world has exemplified its laws in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) clause of the European Union that comes into effect on May 18, 2018. In the US, the main law has been the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) of the late 1990s. The developing countries, on the other hand, exhibit slow drafting of new finance and micro-finance privacy laws and still …

Security And Privacy Of Wearable Internet Of Medical Things: Stakeholders Perspective, Swapnika Reddy Putta

Culminating Projects in Information Assurance

Internet of medical things (IoMT) is a fast-emerging technology in healthcare with a lot of scope for security vulnerabilities. Like any other internet connected device, IoMT is not immune to breaches. These breaches can not only affect the functionality of the device but also impact the security and privacy (S&P) of the data. The impact of these breaches can be devastating as well as life-threatening. The proposed methodology used a stakeholder-centric approach to Improve security of wearable IoMT devices. The proposed methodology firstly relied on a set of S&P attributes for wearable IoMTs that are identified to quantify security in …

Testing The Security Onion, Kayla Jansen

Culminating Projects in Information Assurance

Security professionals utilize different types of systems, tools, and software in an attempt to secure an organization from external threats. There are many challenges that professionals face, when attempting to choose and execute a system into their framework. Because of these challenges, professionals may decide to go with a free open source system, such as the Security Onion. However, there is little information or results that show the effectiveness of the system. Several articles indicate ways of configuring the system or examining certain components within it. This project aims to examine the effectiveness of the Security Onion through a controlled …

Analysis Of Ssd’S Performance In Database Servers, Venkatesh Kandula

Culminating Projects in Information Assurance

Data storage is much needed in any type of device and there are multiple mechanisms for data storage which vary from the device to device but at the end it’s a magnetic drive which holds the data and stored in the form of digital format. One predominant data storage device is hard disk drive also called as HDD. Hard disk drives are used in a wide range of systems like computers, laptops and netbooks etc., it has magnetic platter which is used for reading and writing operations. (Hard disk drive, n.d.) With the emerging technologies and modularization of web application …

Creating A Fake Cryptocurrency Unit, Sai Venkatesh Pabba

Culminating Projects in Information Assurance

In the recent years, cryptocurrencies gained lots of popularity. Many new cryptocurrencies are introduced day by day. Though new cryptocurrencies are being introduced, they are based on the same Blockchain technology. Cryptocurrencies are virtual currencies and differ from traditional money in a way which made them very popular among the users. Bitcoin which was the first cryptocurrency introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in late 2008 as a Peer-to-Peer Electronic cash system. The most important feature of this system was that it was de-centralized meaning that there is no centralized authority controlling the payment network. Instead, every single entity of the network …

Bring Your Own Device (Byod): Risks To Adopters And Users, Obinna G. Otti

Culminating Projects in Information Assurance

Bring your own device (BYOD) policy refers to a set of regulation broadly adopted by organizations that allows employee-owned mobile devices – like as laptops, smartphones, personal digital assistant and tablets – to the office for use and connection to the organizations IT infrastructure. BYOD offers numerous benefits ranging from plummeting organizational logistic cost, access to information at any time and boosting employee’s productivity. On the contrary, this concept presents various safety issues and challenges because of its characteristic security requirements. This study explored diverse literature databases to identify and classify BYOD policy adoption issues, possible control measures and guidelines …

Sql Injection Prevention Technique Using Cryptography, Jayakrishnan S. Karunanithi

Culminating Projects in Information Assurance

In our day-to-day life, web applications play an important role such as shopping, making financial transactions, social networking, etc. Most of the business prefer online services instead of in-person services because it is easier for both customers and organizations. Making a web application available to everyone makes it more vulnerable. One of those vulnerabilities is SQL (Structured Query Language) injection. SQL injection is a technique where attackers inject malicious code through user inputs or URLs and gain access to the database. Through this attack, hackers can destroy or change the data present in the database. This paper focuses on how …

Steganography A Data Hiding Technique, Naga Ranijth Kumar Kesa

Culminating Projects in Information Assurance

Steganography implements an encryption technique in which communication takes place by hiding information. A hidden message is the combination of a secret message with the carrier message. This technique can be used to hide the message in an image, a video file, an audio file or in a file system. There are large variety of steganography techniques that will be used for hiding secret information in images. The final output image is called as a stego-image which consists of a secret message or information. Imperceptibility, payload, and robustness are three most important parameters for audio steganography. For a more secure …

Emv Chip And Pin : A Feeble Upgrade, Naga Suraj Maddi

Culminating Projects in Information Assurance

The most dominant protocol used in the smart card payments all over the world is called EMV (EMV, n.d.) which stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa. The EMV cards are used for processing transactions through payment terminals and ATMs (automated teller machine). These are widely used in Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia, South America and was also implemented in USA (Huq, 2015). The transactions of the EMV are secured by using a variety of cryptographic authentication codes, digital signatures and an entry of a PIN. But in US there was a slightly different implementation which led to a disaster as they …

Using Contingency-Specifying Statements As Discriminative Stimuli In Functional Analyses, Erin R. Wylie

Culminating Projects in Community Psychology, Counseling and Family Therapy

This study expanded on current research regarding discriminative stimuli (S^Ds) included in functional analyses (FA) by comparing conditions with pre-session statements that do not specify contingencies in place to conditions that have pre-session statements that specify contingencies in place (e.g., starting a condition with “I need to do some work” versus “I need to do some work, if you yell I will ask you to stop.”) A multi-element design consisting of at least four trials of three different conditions with general statements, followed by the same conditions with contingency-specifying statements was used. Three BCBAs with at least 10 …

A Component Analysis Of Low-Cost Interventions To Decrease Cigarette Butt Litter In The Natural Environment, Julia Turner

Culminating Projects in Community Psychology, Counseling and Family Therapy

The current study examines the effects of low-cost interventions such as prompts, feedback, and the addition of receptacles on littering behavior of cigarette butts in the natural environment. Two receptacles were placed at each experimental hole, one within twenty feet of the tee box, and a second within twenty feet of the edge of the green. Prompts included (1) a reminder of the location of receptacles, (2) a slogan prompting proper disposal of cigarette butts, and (3) one piece of information regarding consequences of cigarette butt litter. Feedback included a barometer specific to each hole indicating the decrease in cigarette …

Signaling The Availability Of Varying Quality Of Reinforcement In A Token Economy, Caitlin Macdonell

Culminating Projects in Community Psychology, Counseling and Family Therapy

Token economies are commonly used to both increase and decrease behavior. Salient signaling may enhance the discriminability within a token economy system, thus increasing treatment effectiveness. Varying the quality of reinforcement to match the behavior of an individual may also impact responding. The current research compared the effectiveness of a no-signal condition, within-stimulus prompt condition, and an extra-stimulus prompt condition to signal the varying quality of reinforcement within a token economy system. Tokens were delivered to participants contingent on correct responding in a mastered skill task. In addition, Xs were delivered contingent on target behavior during session, with varying magnitudes …

Chained Schedule Thinning To Increase Compliance Within A Functional Communication Training Context, Bryce Bennett

Culminating Projects in Community Psychology, Counseling and Family Therapy

Functional communication training (FCT) is a popular intervention for reducing problematic behaviors and promoting communication for individuals with developmental disabilities. The present study investigated the application of a chained schedule arrangement to increase compliance for academic instruction and food acceptance within an FCT context for two individuals, and evaluated an expedient thinning procedure for achieving practical response rates. Participants were taught functionally communicative responses (FCRs) to replace problem behaviors. Demands were presented to either complete academic tasks or accept bites of food. Schedules were thinned to increase the number of demands presented per session. Results showed that for both participants, …

Impact Of Exchange Rate On Trade Competitiveness In The Cfa Zone, Abdoul Naze

Culminating Projects in Economics

Created out of the need to integrate France with its former colonies, the CFA Franc was launched in 1945 and pegged to the French Franc until the arrival of the euro when the peg was changed to 655.957 CFA per euro. While a fixed-exchange-rate, a priori, helps mitigate exchange rate risks and thus, promotes trade and investment, economic growth in the region remains sluggish and uneven, at least partly due to a lack of autonomous, country-specific monetary policy confronting the asynchronous business cycles among the member nations. Also, currency devaluation is not a policy option that could help correct …