Digital Commons Network^™

Attitudes And Norms Affecting Scientists’ Data Reuse, Renata Gonçalves Curty, Kevin Crowston, Alison Specht, Bruce W. Grant, Elizabeth D. Dalton

DataONE Sociocultural and Usability & Assessment Working Groups

The value of sharing scientific research data is widely appreciated, but factors that hinder or prompt the reuse of data remain poorly understood. Using the Theory of Reasoned Action, we test the relationship between the beliefs and attitudes of scientists towards data reuse, and their self-reported data reuse behaviour. To do so, we used existing responses to selected questions from a worldwide survey of scientists developed and administered by the DataONE Usability and Assessment Working Group (thus practicing data reuse ourselves). Results show that the perceived efficacy and efficiency of data reuse are strong predictors of reuse behaviour, and that …

Factoring Economic Costs Into Conservation Planning May Not Improve Agreement Over Priorities For Protection, Paul R. Armsworth, Heather B. Jackson, Seong-Hoon Cho, Melissa Clark, Joseph E. Fargione, Gwenllian D. Iacona, Taeyoung Kim, Eric R. Larson, Thomas Minney, Nathan A. Sutton

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Conservation organizations must redouble efforts to protect habitat given continuing biodiversity declines. Prioritization of future areas for protection is hampered by disagreements over what the ecological targets of conservation should be. Here we test the claim that such disagreements will become less important as conservation moves away from prioritizing areas for protection based only on ecological considerations and accounts for varying costs of protection using return-on-investment (ROI) methods. We combine a simulation approach with a case study of forests in the eastern United States, paying particular attention to how covariation between ecological benefits and economic costs influences agreement levels. For …

Head Over Heels: Women In Supply Chain Management, Mary Margaret Mobley

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

Being a woman in the Supply Chain Management major, I have seen the challenges females face in a male-dominated field. Just why is it that we see so few women in executive roles in the Supply Chain field? Is it because of the gender challenges, or is there another underlying issue that is causing the lack of women in upper-level Supply Chain roles? Through this research study, twelve female participants will tell about their experiences being an entry-level woman in Supply Chain field. These challenges will help to determine if these entry-level challenges are the reason why women are either …

Book Review Of "The United Nations, Peace And Security: From Collective Security To The Responsibility To Protect" By Ramesh Thakur, Arjun Banerjee

International Journal of Nuclear Security

This is a review of the second edition of the book by the writer and former UN man, Prof. Ramesh Thakur, that traces the metamorphoses of UN policies from that of collective security in 1945, when it was founded, to the more contemporary notion of the responsibility to protect (R2P) - the notion that sovereignty entails a responsibility to protect all populations from mass atrocity crimes and human rights violations.

Thakur’s book is a critique of UN policies and a revelation of the good, bad, and ugly within the system. However, it conjures up an ultimately optimistic image and has …

Table Of Contents

International Journal of Nuclear Security

No abstract provided.

From The Editor, Russel K. Hirst

International Journal of Nuclear Security

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of "Right Of Boom: The Aftermath Of Nuclear Terrorism" By Benjamin E. Schwartz, Kyle Mangrum

International Journal of Nuclear Security

Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism is Benjamin Schwartz’s first book. An ex-U.S.-government official, Schwartz presents a hypothetical scenario in which an unknown terrorist organization uses an Improvised Nuclear Device to attack Washington D.C. The book explores the possible consequences of such an attack on U.S. domestic and foreign policy, as well as upon the rest of the world. Schwartz projects outcomes by considering how past interactions and crises involving nuclear weapons have been handled. Thus, the book serves as a history of nuclear security interspersed with extrapolations into the future of nuclear terrorism, based on historical precedents …

Efficient Algorithms For Solving Facility Problems With Disruptions, Kaike Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

This study investigates facility location problems in the presence of facility disruptions. Two types of problems are investigated. Firstly, we study a facility location problem considering random disruptions. Secondly, we study a facility fortification problem considering disruptions caused by random failures and intelligent attacks.We first study a reliable facility location problem in which facilities are faced with the risk of random disruptions. In the literature, reliable facility location models and solution methods have been proposed under different assumptions of the disruption distribution. In most of these models, the disruption distribution is assumed to be completely known, that is, the disruptions …

A Knowledge Assessment Of Prescription Drug Use Among Student-Athletes At A Southeastern College, Marcus L. Amos

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examined prescription drug use at a small Division III college in the Southeast. Prescription drug use and misuse is a documented trend among college students. Medication therapy due to injuries is a common means of rehabilitation in sports. Because of this, there have been recent incidences documented in which student-athletes have become victims of accidental drug overdoses, and in some cases, have resulted in their death. In this study, areas examined were the awareness of the culture of prescription drug use among student-athletes, personal use of prescription drugs among student-athletes, and personal knowledge and awareness about prescription drug …

Expanding Secondary Science Teachers' Instructional Practice To Include English Learners Through Professional Learning Communities, Betty R. Thomason

Doctoral Dissertations

English Learners (ELs) are the fastest growing subset of the population in U. S. k-12 schools. ELs are students whose primary language is one other than English and who qualify for specialized services based on an English language proficiency test (Francis, Rivera, Lesaux, Kieffer & Rivera, 2006). One popular approach for supporting ELs academically is the inclusion model (Reeves, 2004). The inclusion method places ELs in classes with Native English Speakers (NES) in which teachers are required to teach English and content to ELs and grade level content to NESs. However, due to the failure of many pre-service programs, teachers …

A Deep Breathing Intervention For Stress Reduction In 5-Year-Old Children, Tara Jean Veerman

Doctoral Dissertations

This multi-manuscript dissertation concentrates on child stress, an important area of attention for social workers. Many children we work with are exposed to chronic stressors such as poverty, child maltreatment, and other forms of stressors and/or trauma. These experiences can be damaging to a child’s development, especially if they occur early in life, and the effects may be long-lasting. The first manuscript provides an overview of the human stress response and its potential deleterious effects on child brain development. It highlights specific brain regions affected by stress, and possible physical and mental health consequences of stress later in life.Building on …

"Living It In The Day To Day": Narratives Of Advanced Martial Artists, Michael Duncan Overton

Doctoral Dissertations

Western perspectives of learning often marginalize other-ways-of-knowing. A need to further understand other-ways-of-knowing, in particular non-Western perspectives, is a growing concern of the adult and continuing education field. Prior research supports the martial arts as a non-Western and other-way-of-knowing. However, the adult and continuing education field have underutilized the martial arts in research. The purpose of this narrative study was to explore adult learners’ lived experiences of learning and practicing martial arts in the southeastern United States of America. The two research questions that guided this study were “What experience(s) led adult learners to practice martial arts?” and “What are …

Philanthropic Influence On Public Education: A Study Of High-Leverage Venture Philanthropy Through Educational Investments Of Local Education Foundations In Tennessee, Joshua Adam Lowe

Doctoral Dissertations

More than $500 billion of funding went to public education in 2005 to support educational programming and instruction. At the same time, some of the most prominent, nationally-organized private foundations have sought to influence education by using high-leverage venture philanthropy grants. However, little research has been done to assess whether more local foundations have been following the lead of these national foundations with regards to increasing investments through high-leverage venture philanthropy to education. Being closer to local educational policy makers, the local foundations have great potential influence on local education.The purpose of this study is to analyze the philanthropic investments …

Nonlinear Control And Estimation Of An Infammatory Immune Response, Ouassim Bara

Doctoral Dissertations

The immune response is a complex mechanism that can be triggered by biological or physical stresses on the organism. However an excessive and dys-regulated inflammatory response may lead to sepsis, a critical state, promoting tissue damage, organ dysfunction or even death.The main objective in this dissertation is to derive a strategy consisting of manipulating pro and anti-inflammatory mediators in order to direct the state of a virtual patient to a healthy equilibrium, after some disturbance from health due to infection. Two key challenges need to be addressed in solving such a problem: estimating the unmeasurable states of the inflammatory model …

Novel Sustainable Anode Materials And Interfacial Chemistry For Improved Rechargeable Batteries, Yunchao Li

Doctoral Dissertations

The fast growth of the renewable energy market leads to a rapidly increased demand for high-performance energy storage. Despite the great success of the current lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) in portable electronics, the findings of new applications such as in electric vehicles and in large-scale energy storage revealed the limitations of current LIBs in terms of performance, cost, life time and safety. To meet the future application requirements, this dissertation is focused on the innovation and improvement of anode materials, characterization and understanding of material surface properties and modification of the anode materials.A new carbon material recovered from waste tire with …

Feasibility, And Resiliency, And Economic Impacts Of Energy Storage In Urban Water Systems: Case Study Of Cleveland, Tennessee, Susanna Hannah Sutherland

Doctoral Dissertations

This research reduces the knowledge gap around how the water-energy nexus can be applied at the urban level, clarifying how a city water distribution system might be used to offset community energy consumption. The created methodology includes 3 research objectives. First, model scenarios are developed to determine opportunities for energy storage in urban water systems. Then, how increased energy storage capacity impacts water system resiliency is examined. Finally, the financial implications of scenarios are calculated.A closed-loop water system model (EPANET2) simulates Cleveland, Tennessee’s water distribution system, resolved to the neighborhood scale. Sectoral aggregated hourly energy use data provides a comparison …

Investigating Trends And Processes That Impact Tree Species Diversity Of Southern Forests At The Landscape Level, Andrew J. Hartsell

Doctoral Dissertations

Global biodiversity is currently being threatened by multiple anthropogenic sources. The increase in genetically modified, artificially regenerated forests has raised concerns that this management scheme may be a source of species loss. This study investigates the impacts of urbanization, agricultural development, and southern yellow pine plantation establishment on tree species evenness, Shannon-Wiener index, and Simpson’s index of forest communities within the Gulf Coastal Plain of the southeastern United States. The impacts of varying spatial scale on possible predictors was investigated by utilizing nested watersheds from the Watershed Boundary Dataset (WBD). Techniques used in the analysis included Getis-Ord Gi* analysis, Local …

A Phenomenological Study Of Adolescent Pregnancy Loss, Jenny Stout Webb

Doctoral Dissertations

Very little is known about the experience and long-term effects of pregnancy loss during adolescence. The purpose of this existential phenomenological research study was to gain a better understanding of the meanings adolescent mothers give to their experience of pregnancy loss. For this study, four participants were interviewed using unstructured, phenomenological interviews. The participants were 17 (3) and 18(1) at the time of the loss and ranged in age from 29 to 58 years at the time of the interviews. Data analysis resulted in the development of five themes to describe the experience of pregnancy loss during adolescence: 1) “It …

Optimal Allocation Of Dynamic Var Sources Addressing Fidvr Issues, Weihong Huang

Doctoral Dissertations

Dynamic reactive power sources, also called dynamic var sources such as SVCs and STATCOMs; can effectively mitigate fault-induced delayed voltage recovery (FIDVR) and short-term voltage stability issues. Allocation of dynamic var sources has become an essential research topic. Currently, the allocation of dynamic var sources needs to address three problems, including the optimal placement, optimal sizes, and optimal settings of var sources, which are usually solved separately.Optimization of placement, sizing, and setting of dynamic var sources are complicated nonlinear optimization problems due to their non-convexity and the dependence of the constraints on time-series trajectories of post-fault responses. Thus, solving those …

Habitat And Population Assessments Of The Lake Sturgeon Acipenser Fulvescens Reintroduced To The Upper Tennessee River, Daniel James Walker

Doctoral Dissertations

The Lake Sturgeon Acipenser fulvescens historically occurred throughout the United States and Canada. However, due to widespread overfishing and habitat loss it was extirpated from much of its range, especially in the lower latitudes. Since the year 2000, fisheries managers have been working to restore this species to the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers where it has been extirpated since c. 1961. This reintroduction is comprised of annual releases of young-of-the-year Lake Sturgeon reared in head-start aquaculture facilities around the Southeastern U.S., and annual monitoring efforts that track the spread and growth of reintroduced individuals. In 2015, a management plan guiding …

Singled Out: Genomic Analysis Of Uncultured Microbes In Marine Sediments, Jordan Toby Bird

Doctoral Dissertations

The vast majority of abundant taxa in marine sediment environments have not yielded to culture, leaving questions about their relationship to other taxa and their functional potential unanswered. However, in the absence of active cultures, careful application of various omics methods can be used to help us make useful inferences about their evolutionary history and how they have continued to survive in environments of extreme energy deprivation. For this dissertation, I have applied comparative genomics methods to members of two uncultured groups, the recently proposed Altiarchaeales order and a cosmopolitan taxon associated with the Actinobacteria phylum. Additionally, I combined transcript …

Discovering The Impact Of Diet, Genetic, And Sex Effects On Adipose, Skeletal Muscle, And Liver Metabolomes In Mice Using Untargeted Liquid-Chromatography Mass-Spectrometry, Ann Elizabeth Wells

Doctoral Dissertations

The metabolome is the end product of all biochemical reactions in the body and is sensitive to external perturbations, such as diet, genetics, sex, disease, and environment. Understanding the dynamic relationship between metabolites and external inputs is key to delineating the metabolic underpinnings of disease. Mass-spectrometry based metabolomics provides a means through which the metabolome can be systemically and systematically profiled to discern alterations across thousands of metabolites at a time. The research in this dissertation characterized the effects of diet, genetics, and sex on the tissue metabolome. Adipose, skeletal muscle, and liver tissue were chosen due to their role …

A Framework For Reconciling Expert Opinions And Empirical Data For Hydropower Asset Management Decision-Making, Stephen Robert Signore

Doctoral Dissertations

This research develops a framework for reconciling expert opinions of component lifetimes and empirical failure data to predict powertrain failure probabilities for Asset Management decision making purposes. Using probability models of component failures, fleetwide dispatch and component replacement history along with a large hydroelectric utility’s powertrain expert elicitation we propose a four use cases. The first use case enables a more detailed calculation of average component life. The second use case provides risk managers the ability to understand how dispatch affects the risk of a single component failure. The third and fourth use cases enables the recommendation of the distribution …

Noncontact Vital Signs Detection, Lingyun Ren

Doctoral Dissertations

Human health condition can be accessed by measurement of vital signs, i.e., respiratory rate (RR), heart rate (HR), blood oxygen level, temperature and blood pressure. Due to drawbacks of contact sensors in measurement, non-contact sensors such as imaging photoplethysmogram (IPPG) and Doppler radar system have been proposed for cardiorespiratory rates detection by researchers.The UWB pulse Doppler radars provide high resolution range-time-frequency information. It is bestowed with advantages of low transmitted power, through-wall capabilities, and high resolution in localization. However, the poor signal to noise ratio (SNR) makes it challenging for UWB radar systems to accurately detect the heartbeat of a …

Evaluation Of Inveon Pre-Clinical Positron Emission Tomography (Pet) Scanner Geant4 Application For Tomographic Imaging (Gate) Model For Multi-Positron Emission Particle Tracking (M-Pept), Roque Antonio Santos Torres

Doctoral Dissertations

A Sodium-22 point source of activity 10 μCi [microcurie] is moved through an Inveon Pre-Clinical Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner, and the scan data are sent to Multi-Positron Emission Particle Tracking (M-PEPT) software to recreate the particle track. A Geant4 Application for Tomographic Imaging (GATE) model of the Inveon is used to simulate the scanner response to point source movements identical to those prescribed in experiments. Simulated and physical experiment outcomes are compared to qualify the GATE model for the M-PEPT application. GATE over predicts the number of detected coincident lines (CL). The standard deviation of particle positions predicted by …

Hungaria Asteroid Region Telescopic Spectral Survey (Hartss): Establishing Asteroid-Meteorite Connections Between Hungaria Asteroids And Meteorites Of The Acapulcoite-Lodranite Clan, Michael Peter Lucas

Doctoral Dissertations

Hungaria region asteroids are survivors of giant planet migration that destabilized a now extinct inner-portion of the primordial asteroid belt. In this scenario, the Hungaria region represents a “purgatory” for the closest, preserved samples of material from which the terrestrial planets accreted. Deciphering the surface composition of these samples may provide constraints on the nature of the primordial building blocks of the terrestrial planets. We carried out a two-phased ground-based observational campaign—Hungaria Asteroid Region Telescopic Spectral Survey (HARTSS)—to record their visible and near-infrared reflectance spectra. We analyzed these spectra to characterize the taxonomy, surface mineralogy, and potential meteorite analogs of …

Almost Symmetries And The Unit Commitment Problem, Bernard Albert Knueven

Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis explores two main topics. The first is almost symmetry detection on graphs. The presence of symmetry in combinatorial optimization problems has long been considered an anathema, but in the past decade considerable progress has been made. Modern integer and constraint programming solvers have automatic symmetry detection built-in to either exploit or avoid symmetric regions of the search space. Automatic symmetry detection generally works by converting the input problem to a graph which is in exact correspondence with the problem formulation. Symmetry can then be detected on this graph using one of the excellent existing algorithms; these are also …

Prediction Of Host-Microbe Interactions From Community High-Throughput Sequencing Data, Joshua Michael Stough

Doctoral Dissertations

Microbial ecology is a diverse field, with a broad range of taxa, habitats, and trophic structures studied. Many of the major areas of research were developed independently, each with their own unique methods and standards, and their own questions and focus. This has changed in recent decades with the widespread implementation of culture-independent techniques, which exploit mechanisms shared by all life, regardless of habitat. In particular, high-throughput sequencing of environmentally isolated DNA and RNA has done much to expand our knowledge of the planet’s microbial diversity and has allowed us to explore the complex interplay between community members. Additionally, metatranscriptomic …

Development Of A Biaxial Stretch Bioreactor And Finite Element Models For Mechanobiological Study Of Aortic Valve Leaflets, Ying Lei

Doctoral Dissertations

Aortic heart valve disease is a significant cause of mortality worldwide; and replacement surgery is necessary in 70% of cases. Tissue engineered heart valves (TEHVs) are biocompatible and biodegradable, with ability to grow with the patient. However, to date, TEHVs mostly lack ability to withstand native mechanical forces since they are unable to mimic the heterogeneous and anisotropic structure of extracellular matrix (ECM) in native valves. Cyclic stretch is known to modulate ECM fiber synthesis and alignment. However, little tools are available for studying the interaction between aortic tissues and stretch condition. Finite element method is a powerful tool to …

The Effectiveness Of Mixed Reality-Based Intervention For Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Meta-Analysis And Single-Case Study, Byungkeon Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

The development of technology has led to the development of various software and application as well as computer-based devices, and is extending its influence even to the mixed reality domain. These technologies are being used actively in the education field for students without disabilities as well as for students with disabilities. In recent years, the instructional application of technology has been accelerated by the development and dissemination of hand-held smart devices. These technologies are increasingly promoting the participation of students with ASD in education and rehabilitation programs. Currently, the number of apps developed as interventions for students with ASD is …