Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Data-Driven Studies On Social Networks: Privacy And Simulation, Yasanka Sameera Horawalavithana

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social media datasets are fundamental to understanding a variety of phenomena, such as epidemics, adoption of behavior, crowd management, and political uprisings. At the same time, many such datasets capturing computer-mediated social interactions are recorded nowadays by individual researchers or by organizations. However, while the need for real social graphs and the supply of such datasets are well established, the flow of data from data owners to researchers is significantly hampered by privacy risks: even when humans’ identities are removed, or data is anonymized to some extent, studies have proven repeatedly that re-identifying anonymized user identities (i.e., de-anonymization) is doable …

Improving Environmental Protection: One Imagined Touch At A Time, Luke Ingalls Liska

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Can imagined touch of flora and fauna (i.e., the plants and animals of the natural world) make you more willing to support environmental protection efforts? Across seven studies, I demonstrate that by asking consumers to imagine touching fauna, marketers can encourage consumers to become more engaged in environmental protection efforts. This effect occurs because imagined touch generates haptic imagery, which enhances a consumer’s emotional attachment to fauna. I demonstrate that emotional attachment to fauna induced via imagined touch enhances individual’s willingness to share Facebook posts, improves their willingness to support increased fines for environment-related offenses, and increases the number of …

Designing Targeted Mobile Advertising Campaigns, Kimia Keshanian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the proliferation of smart, handheld devices, there has been a multifold increase in the ability of firms to target and engage with customers through mobile advertising. Therefore, not surprisingly, mobile advertising campaigns have become an integral aspect of firms’ brand building activities, such as improving the awareness and overall visibility of firms' brands. In addition, retailers are increasingly using mobile advertising for targeted promotional activities that increase in-store visits and eventual sales conversions. However, in recent years, mobile or in general online advertising campaigns have been facing one major challenge and one major threat that can negatively impact the …

Green Business And The Culture Of Capitalism: Constructing Narratives Of Environmentalism, Julia S. Jester

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are widespread colloquial arguments claiming that any actions taken to combat climate change will be bad for business and the economy, scaring people into continuing their support for the status quo for fear of their financial security. Alternatively, those attempting to combat ecological destruction have subsequently made transitions to sustainable development of products and shifting consumer behavior within this system. There is one core argument that both sides have, albeit in different ways – capitalism and environmentalism are seemingly incompatible; one cannot be successful without the eradication of the other. While it may appear there are only strict binary …

Adaptive Network Slicing In Fog Ran For Iot With Heterogeneous Latency And Computing Requirements: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach, Almuthanna Nassar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In view of the recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the emerging new breed of smart city applications and intelligent vehicular systems driven by artificial intelligence, fog radio access network (F-RAN) has been recently introduced for the next generation wireless communications. The capability of F-RAN has emerged to overcome the latency limitations of cloud-RAN (C-RAN) and assure the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of the ultra-reliable-low-latency-communication (URLLC) for IoT applications. To this end, fog nodes (FNs) are equipped with computing, signal processing and storage capabilities to extend the inherent operations and services of the cloud to the edge. However, …

Optimization And Machine Learning Methods For Solving Combinatorial Problems In Urban Transportation, Aigerim Bogyrbayeva

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates three applications of emerging technologies for urban trans- portation. In the first chapter, we design a new market for fractional ownership of au- tonomous vehicles (AVs), in which an AV is co-leased by a group of individuals. We present a practical iterative auction based on the combinatorial clock auction to match the interested customers together and determine their payments. In designing such an auction, we con- sider continuous-time items (time slots) which are defined by bidders, and naturally exploit driverless mobility of AVs to form co-leasing groups. To relieve the computational burdens of both bidders and the …

A Macro Analysis Of Illegal Hunting And Fishing Across Texas Counties: Using An Economic Structural Approach, Leo J. Genco Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this disseration is to examine the distribution of illegal hunting and fishing violations across Texas counties in respect to the economic structure. Illegal hunting plays a part in the extraction of resources that are overly withdrawn, and criminologists have ignored this form of deviancy that has large ramifications for the environment. To view this criminal phenomenon, the study uses the Treadmill of Production theory to determine economic structural factors and whether those factors explain the distribution of illegal hunting and fishing. Using regression analyses and SatScan, the findings suggested that while there are significant factors related to …

The Communicative Constitution Of Environment: Land, Weather, Climate, Leanna K. Smithberger

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My project examines the communicative constitution of environment: how we mediate environment in discursive practice, and arrange chaotic and complex timeplaces into organized relationships of agents and objects which act and are acted upon. Climate scholars across disciplines are calling for a paradigm shift in how we understand, study, inhabit, and relate to Earth’s varied environments. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how communication practices do the work of constituting the environment as we know it, and therefore conclude with the hopeful suggestion that these same practices can be used to do the work of a paradigm shift — that is, …

The General Psychopathology Factor (P) From Adolescence To Adulthood: Disentangling The Developmental Trajectories Of P Using A Multi-Method Approach, Alexandria M. Choate

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Considerable attention is directed towards studying co-occurring psychopathology through the lens of a general factor (p-factor). However, the developmental trajectories and stability of the p-factor have yet to be fully understood. Study 1 first examined the explanatory power of dynamic mutualism theory — an alternative framework positing the p-factor to be a product of lower-level symptom interactions rather than the inherent cause of them. Predictions of dynamic mutualism were tested using three distinct statistical approaches including: longitudinal bifactor models, random-intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPMs), and network models. Next, given prior suggestions that borderline personality disorder (BPD) could be a marker …

Maternal Social Status, Offspring 2d:4d Ratio And Postnatal Growth, In Macaca Mulatta (Rhesus Macaques), Juan Pablo Arroyo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Early life exposure to stressors can disrupt growth and development, resulting in long-term compromised function and increased risk for disease throughout the lifecourse. Maternal exposure to psychosocial stressors (i.e., stressors derived from social status, social inequalities, and social interactions) during pregnancy has been associated with reduced fetal growth, adverse birth outcomes, and increased morbidity for the offspring later in life. Maternal hormonal responses to stress, such as fluctuations in glucocorticoids (e.g., cortisol) and androgens (e.g., testosterone), can result in increased developmental instability, interfere with offspring growth in-utero, and may alter developmental processes of sexual dimorphism. Second digit to fourth digit …

Save Water Drink Wine: Challenges Of Implementing The Ethnography Of The Temecula Valley Wine Industry Into Food-Energy-Water Nexus Decision-Making, Zaida E. Darley

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study demonstrates the interrelationships of people, food, energy, and water associated with Temecula Valley’s wine industry and reveals contradictions and biases in how people view these resources, which ultimately shape management and policies. The FEW (Food, Energy, and Water) Nexus is an approach increasingly used by policy- and decision-makers to understand the interrelationship of several resources. However, a FEW Nexus approach often lacks in social aspects that influence environmentally and economically sustainable outcomes, especially in the wine and wine tourism industry. When quantitative and qualitative data are available, the other challenge is which assessment to use. Two assessments often …

Multimodal Data Fusion And Attack Detection In Recommender Systems, Mehmet Aktukmak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The commercial platforms that use recommender systems can collect relevant information to produce useful recommendations to the platform users. However, these sources usually contain missing values, imbalanced and heterogeneous data, and noisy observations. Such characteristics render the process of exploiting the information nontrivial, as one should carefully address them during the data fusion process. In addition to the degenerative characteristics, some entries can be fake, i.e., they can be the outcomes of malicious intents to manipulate the system. These entries should be eliminated before incorporation to any recommendation task. Detecting such malicious attacks quickly and accurately and then mitigating them …

Digital Identity: A Human-Centered Risk Awareness Study, Toufic N. Chebib

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cybersecurity threats and compromises have been at the epicenter of media attention; their risk and effect on people’s digital identity is something not to be taken lightly. Though cyber threats have affected a great number of people in all age groups, this study focuses on 55 to 75-year-olds, as this age group is close to retirement or already retired. Therefore, a notable compromise impacting their digital identity can have a major impact on their life.

To help guide this study, the following research question was formulated, “What are the risk perceptions of individuals, between the ages of 55 and 75 …

Using Geospatial Data To Predict The Locations Of Groundwater Discharge To Salmon-Bearing Streams, Alaska, Mary Gerlach

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Identification and protection of groundwater resources are considerations of increasing interest as climate shifts but can be challenging to accomplish in remote areas. To that end, a series of GIS techniques and weight of evidence approach were applied to determine the feasibility of remotely identifying likely areas of ground discharge. Through the confluence of topographic analyses and a novel geologic dataset, these techniques were found to consistently identify areas characterized by either shallow subsurface or aquifer-fed groundwater discharge or evidence of ephemeral surficial water features. Two distinct GIS techniques to build spatial proxies of the effects of topography and geology …

A Sustainability Machine: The Incineration-Based Waste Regime In Tampa, Fl, Usa, Kevin P. Martyn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent history has seen some significant changes in terms of how society thinks about and deals with its wastes. Increasingly troubling indications of the immediacy of ecological concerns, now often described by the Anthropocene concept, have been provocative of a reinvigorated fervor for a sustainability transition. As a result, sustainability has become well-established as both an urgent pursuit and an eminently pliable buzzword. This research describes and explains one key aspect of society’s pursuit of some version of sustainability: our relationship with waste.

The site of this research is Tampa, Florida, a sunbelt city with a unique waste management system. …

An Ethnography Of Wash Infrastructures And Governance In Sulphur Springs, Florida, Mathews Jackon Wakhungu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation describes the forces that shape the perceptions and practices in Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WaSH) services in the community of Sulphur Springs, Tampa, Florida. It also explores how these forces, perceptions, and practices produce adverse experiences and inequalities in water, sewer, drainage, and laundry services. This ethnographic study combines participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, freelisting, oral history, and GIS to uncover the context, experiences, and perceptions about WaSH in Sulphur Springs. The study finds that the present conditions and perceptions about WaSH are embedded into the historical contexts—especially racial segregation, the construction of the interstate, and multiple economic downturns …

The Perceived Usefulness Of A Weather Radar Display By Tampa Bay Residents, Michelle E. Saunders

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A weather radar display is a tool that provides spatially oriented, timely information about an impending weather event. While radar is frequently used by meteorologists, emergency managers, and pilots, this tool is now readily available for individuals to use on a variety of platforms including television, computer/laptop, smartphones and tablets. Most importantly, there are hundreds of mobile weather applications available as well as online sources that provide a weather radar display. However, little is known about how individuals use a weather radar display. Therefore, the purpose of this dissertation is to understand why radar is sought out as a tool …

Reimagining Bottom-Up Participatory Climate Change Adaptation In The Philippines, Emily Clark Nabong

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While climate change trends indicate the progression towards more widespread and severe impacts across the world, current consequences of society’s climate inaction are already being felt by many vulnerable populations. Low-lying and coastal areas are particularly at risk from climate-related hazards such as sea level rise and increased intensity storms. In order to protect residents, countries and regional governments have begun to plan and implement adaptation strategies to minimize the impact of future climate change related disasters.

This thesis explores the current status of bottom-up participatory climate change adaptation planning in the Philippines and offers new insights into making this …

Post-Overlay Flexible Pavement Performance Modeling And Its Application In Sustainable Asphalt Overlay Policy Making, Chunfu Xin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Highway pavement is a critical component of the highway transportation infrastructure. After the construction of a pavement system, pavement condition will deteriorate over time due to a combination effect of material aging, traffic loading, and environmental impact. To restore the pavement performance and to reduce its adverse effects on public users and environment, asphalt overlay activities are conducted frequently during the service life of a pavement. As a key component that bridges the overlay policies with future pavement performance, economic cost and environmental impact, the forecast accuracy of post-overlay pavement performance model is extremely important. However, most of previous studies …

Models Of Secure Software Enforcement And Development, Hernan M. Palombo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Computer Security has been a pressing issue that affects our society in multiple ways. Although a plethora of security solutions have been proposed and implemented throughout the years, security continues to be a problem for at least two important reasons, (1) implementations of runtime enforcement mechanisms have not been modeled rigorously and thus may not be enforcing the policies that are expected to enforce, and (2) there are conflicting tensions in the software development process that hinder the implementation and maintenance of secure software. To investigate these issues, this dissertation is divided into two parts.

The first part of this …

Fields Brook Superfund Site: Race, Class, And Environmental Justice In A Blasted Landscape, Richard C. Bargielski

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1980, the United States Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). This federal law provided the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with the legal tools necessary to pursue polluters who had improperly stored or disposed hazardous wastes. Since its passage, more than a thousand sites have been added to the National Priorities List (NPL), but only a fraction have been cleaned up. Proponents of neoliberalism argue that aggressive environmental policies such as CERCLA harm workers by making it impossible for businesses to operate profitably. This coincides with a drop of nearly 50% in the U.S. …

Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy For Elemental Analysis In Bioarchaeology And Forensic Anthropology, Kelsi N. Kuehn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Within bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology, the current processes of differentiating between individual human skeletal remains are imprecise, costly, and inefficient. A novel analytical technique within anthropology, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) can aid in the identification of human remains using rapid laser ablation occurring at the micro-scale, making the technique virtually non-destructive to the sample. Considering this, LIBS could offer a superior method for materials discrimination and human identification. This research sought to examine whether LIBS can be used to obtain elemental signatures within bones to distinguish individuals from one another in a rapid, non-destructive manner. Seven human skeletal donors and …

Toward Culturally Relevant Emotion Detection Using Physiological Signals, Khadija Zanna

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research shows that emotional distress has a statistically significant impact on a student’s grade point average and intent to drop out of college. Because students of different races have varying college experiences, it is important to understand the emotional experiences of different racial groups to better support students’ needs and academic success. In this work, we explore several physiological responses to ten different emotional stimuli captured from 140 students. We employ unsupervised learning via the Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) algorithm and supervised learning via Random Forests and Support Vector machines to analyze clustering partitions and classification …

Elemental Climate Disaster Texts And Queer Ecological Temporality, Laura Mattson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis approaches climate disaster texts as an opportunity to challenge constructions of the body, space, and time. Developed from embodied experiential knowledge about hurricanes, my work will explore how climate disasters can teach us to reimagine human-nature relationships. In my two analysis chapters, I use critical textual analysis and autoethnography to challenge particular representations of the human-nature relationship as a binary between nature and culture. By intervening in the nature-culture binary, I theorize queer ecological temporality as an opportunity to reveal and challenge constructions of nature and time. Working at the intersections of queer and ecocritical theory, this thesis …

Algorithms To Profile Driver Behavior From Zero-Permission Embedded Sensors, Bharti Goel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we design algorithms to profile driver behavior from zero-permission sensors embedded in modern smartphones and wearables. These sensors are typically the accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, pressure sensor and a few more than are now available in most modern smartphones and wearables. In order to profile driving behavior, we devised algorithms for detecting distraction while driving due to the use of modern-day smartphones (e.g., calling, texting and reading while driving) in real-time.

To do so, we conduct an experiment with 16 subjects on a realistic driving simulator, where each subject, where each subject carries a smartphone and a wearable …

Assessment Of Land Cover Change In St. Martin’S Marsh Aquatic Preserve, Florida, Usa, Katie Wagner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

St. Martin’s Marsh Aquatic Preserve (SMMAP) is a 28,461 acre (115.18 km2) preserve located on the coast of Citrus County, Florida, USA. There has been no published research that focused on coastal change on this unique coast. This thesis research focuses on coastal land cover change that has occurred within the preserve from 1988 to 2018. Multitemporal Landsat images were classified using a support vector machine (SVM) classification, while changes in vegetation were evaluated using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). Field research was conducted to examine nineteen sites for classification training and test data and notes on habitat composition. …

Exploration Of Factors Associated With Perceptions Of Community Safety Among Youth In Hillsborough County, Florida: A Convergent Parallel Mixed-Methods Approach, Yingwei Yang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Youth perceived safety is not only linked to crime and violence in a neighborhood but is also associated with health risk behaviors and certain neighborhood characteristics. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to measure the co-occurring effects of individual and community risk factors by conducting a secondary data analysis using structural equation modeling (SEM) and to explore reasons for youth feeling safe/unsafe in their community using photovoice methodology.

Methods: Syndemic theory/model served as the theoretical framework to guide this mixed-methods study with a convergent parallel design. The quantitative strand (first manuscript) utilized an existing dataset collected from middle …

The Author’S Reflections On No B.S. (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe In Black People Enough Not To Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear About Black People, Ivory A. Toldson

Numeracy

Toldson, Ivory. A. 2019. No BS (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe in Black People Enough Not to Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear About Black People (Boston, MA: Brill-Sense) 194 pp. ISBN 978-9004397026.

This essay provides an introduction to No BS (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe in Black People Enough Not to Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear About Black People. In the essay, the author discusses how cynical views about the educational potential of Black children motivated him to write a book that challenges negative statistics. The essay also outlines the harmful …

Effects Of Quantitative Literacy On Healthcare Decision-Making: An Aural Context, Robert G. Root, Sonia Bhala

Numeracy

We propose a relationship between sensory modality, numerical formatting, and performance on a survey simulating healthcare decision-making. We examine the current literature on aural health literacy, and specifically aural literacy coupled with health numeracy. We then create a survey instrument called the Bhala test for this purpose and demonstrate that it is moderately internally consistent and provides results that correlate with the NUMi assessment, a widely accepted measure of health numeracy. The quantitative information provided in the Bhala test has two treatments, percentage and natural frequency formats, in an effort to determine which format is easier for subjects to use …

Energy Transition Modeling: Social And Technical Dynamics Of Moving To Renewable Energy, Lawrence Gottschamer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The majority of global electricity is generated using fossil fuels as an energy source, and the science linking fossil fuel combustion with negative environmental impacts is clear. Recognizing this link, decarbonizing the electricity system is a critical component of climate change mitigation. However, moving electricity generation, distribution, and end-use behavior patterns to renewable energy is a complex socio-technical energy transition challenge with a number of economic, policy, technological, societal and environmental barriers. Energy transition work tends to be siloed within these topics; ignoring complex socio-technical interdependencies impacting electricity system transition dynamics. This work fills the knowledge gap with a ‘systems …