Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Spatial Dimensions Of Tower Karst And Cockpit Karst: A Case Study Of Guilin, China, Wei Huang

Theses and Dissertations

Tower karst (fenglin) and cockpit karst (fengcong) are two globally important representative styles of tropical karst. Previously proposed sequential and parallel development models are preliminary, and geomorphological studies to date do not provide enough satisfactory evidence to delineate the spatial and temporal relation between the two landscapes. This unclear interpretation of tower-cockpit relationships not only obscures understanding of the process-form dynamics of these tropical karst landforms, but also confuses their definition. Moreover, previous technological limitations, as well as the fragmental nature of the karst landscapes, has limited incorporation of geologic and other data into broad geospatial frameworks based on geographic …

Mind & Matter: The Discursive Construction Of The Iphone In Apple's Advertising, Nicholas Stratton

Theses and Dissertations

The widespread adoption of smartphone technology in the contemporary United States requires critical reflection on its role within society. This thesis compares the way Apple's television advertising discourse, from 2007 to 2011, frames the iPhone to consumers with the way Apple's iAd promotional material frames the iPhone to advertisers, and considers what the disparity between these two frameworks says about the still-evolving role of smartphone technology in society. It argues that the disparity between these two frameworks is indicative of a fundamental tension within smartphone technology. This tension is reflected in Apple's ability to discursively construct the iPhone as a …

Inferential Procedures For Dominance Analysis Measures In Multiple Regression, Shuwen Tang

Theses and Dissertations

In order to better interpret a selected multiple regression model, researchers are often interested in whether a predictor is significantly more important than another or not. This study investigates the performance of the Normal-Theory based (asymptotic) confidence interval and bootstrap confidence intervals for predictors' dominance relationships using both normal and non-normal data. The results show that asymptotic confidence interval method is adequate to make inferences for comparing two general dominance measures when the distribution is multivariate normal or slightly non-normal and when the effect size is no less than 0.15 and the sample size is at least 100. However, the …

Text Mining Of Patient Demographics And Diagnoses From Psychiatric Assessments, Eric James Klosterman

Theses and Dissertations

Automatic extraction of patient demographics and psychiatric diagnoses from clinical notes allows for the collection of patient data on a large scale. This data could be used for a variety of research purposes including outcomes studies or developing clinical trials. However, current research has not yet discussed the automatic extraction of demographics and psychiatric diagnoses in detail. The aim of this study is to apply text mining to extract patient demographics - age, gender, marital status, education level, and admission diagnoses from the psychiatric assessments at a mental health hospital and also assign codes to each category. Gender is coded …

Making Water Resource Decisions More "Informationally" Efficient: Development Of A Geospatial Water Rights Decision Support System For Kittitas County, Washington, Michael Pease, Jeremy Murray

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

In semi-arid river basins like the Yakima River Basin in central Washington State, United States of America, water demand can exceed available supply on an annual basis. More informed decisions about water supply and current allocation have the potential to improve water management. This research created a geospatial water rights database for the Yakima River Basin. The creation of a publicly available decision support system mapping water rights can provide water managers another tool to help achieve this goal. This paper describes the creation of the Decision Support System. In addition it looks at the current utility of the system, …

Uncovering The Influence Of Household Sociodemographic And Behavioral Characteristics On Summer Water Consumption In The Portland Metropolitan Area, Chang-Yu Hong, Heejun Chang

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

As urban areas continue to expand, sustainable urban water resource management has become an important issue in green and sustainable city planning. Using single-family residential (SFR) household survey, we identified the determinants of household summer daily water consumption from 2000 to 2005 in Portland, Oregon. The multiple regression results show that approximately 41% of variations in SFR water consumption is explained by average building size, household attitude to water conservation, community engagement of household, and presence of native plants in the garden. The multi-level modeling results show that household attitude to water conservation is an important predictor of SFR water …

Assessing The Impacts Of Climate Change, Urbanization, And Filter Strips On Water Quality Using Swat, Mike Psaris, Heejun Chang

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

Precipitation changes and urban growth are two factors altering the state of water quality. Changes in precipitation will alter the amount and timing of flows, and the corresponding sediment and nutrient dynamics. Meanwhile, densification associated with urban growth will create more impervious surfaces which will alter sediment and nutrient loadings. Land and water managers rely on models to develop possible future scenarios and devise management responses to these projected changes. We use the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) to assess potential changes in stream flow, sediment, and nutrient loads in two urbanizing watersheds in Northwest Oregon, USA. We evaluate …

Complex Network Analysis For Scientific Collaboration Prediction And Biological Hypothesis Generation, Qing Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

With the rapid development of digitalized literature, more and more knowledge has been discovered by computational approaches. This thesis addresses the problem of link prediction in co-authorship networks and protein--protein interaction networks derived from the literature. These networks (and most other types of networks) are growing over time and we assume that a machine can learn from past link creations by examining the network status at the time of their creation. Our goal is to create a computationally efficient approach to recommend new links for a node in a network (e.g., new collaborations in co-authorship networks and new interactions in …

The Implications Of Content Analysis For The Interpretation Of Unguentaria In Museum Collections, Jenna L. Mortensen

Theses and Dissertations

Scent has traditionally been an ephemeral component of rituals in ancient societies, including burial and other practices associated with the anointing of the body (Classen et al. 1994: 43; Houston and Taube 2000: 271). This thesis investigates the possible signifiers and social impact such scents might have had for individuals participating in such rituals by using the little explored approach of sensory archaeology. A discussion of the correlation between olfaction and the triggering of both the experiential and emotional aspects of memory contributes to a broader view of these rituals in the anthropological literature (Classen et al. 1994), while Houston …

#Mplp: A Comparison Of Domain Novice And Expert User-Generated Tags In A Minimally Processed Digital Archive, Edward A. Benoit Iii

Theses and Dissertations

The high costs of creating and maintaining digital archives precluded many archives from providing users with digital content or increasing the amount of digitized materials. Studies have shown users increasingly demand immediate online access to archival materials with detailed descriptions (access points). The adoption of minimal processing to digital archives limits the access points at the folder or series level rather than the item-level description users' desire. User-generated content such as tags, could supplement the minimally processed metadata, though users are reluctant to trust or use unmediated tags. This dissertation project explores the potential for controlling/mediating the supplemental metadata from …

Urban River Restoration And Environmental Justice: Addressing Flood Risk Along Milwaukee's Kinnickinnic River, Nicholas Joel Schuelke

Theses and Dissertations

Flood risk has only recently received attention in environmental justice research. Few `flood justice' studies in the US have focused on urban inland flooding or flood control efforts. I develop a conceptual framework of a paradigm shift from a technocratic, utilitarian approach to river engineering to that of bioengineering and public participation. Qualitative analysis of a combination of archival, interview, and observational data is conducted using the Kinnickinnic River in Milwaukee as a case study. I demonstrate that the channelization of the river in the early 1960s was largely the result of political pressures following significant flood events, rather than …

Measuring Spatial Health Disparity Using A Network-Based Accessibility Index Method In A Gis Environment: A Case Study Of Hillsborough County, Florida, Huairen Ye, Hyun Kim

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

In recent decades, the health care delivery system in the United States has been greatly transformed and more widely examined. Even with one of the most developed health care systems in the world, the United States still experiences great spatial disparity in health care access. Increasing diversity of class, culture, and ethnicity also has a significant impact on health disparity. The goal of this paper is to address the spatial disparity of health care access using a network-based health accessibility index method (NHAIM) in a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment. Ensuring a desired level of accessibility for patients is the …

Sensitivity Of Urban Water Consumption To Weather And Climate Variability At Multiple Temporal Scales: The Case Of Portland, Oregon, Heejun Chang, Sarah Praskievicz, Hossein Parandvash

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

The sensitivity of municipal water consumption to climate and weather variability is investigated for Portland’s water provider service area between 1960 and 2013. The relationship between detrended seasonal urban water use (the difference between total water use and base use) and weather and climate variables (precipitation, maximum temperature) is examined at daily, monthly, and seasonal scales using stepwise multiple regression and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models. At a seasonal and a monthly timescales, interannual variation in maximum temperature is the most important predictor of seasonal water consumption per capita, explaining up to 48% of the variation in seasonal monthly …

Using Fine Resolution Orthoimagery And Spatial Interpolation To Rapidly Map Turf Grass In Suburban Massachusetts, Daniel S.M. Runfola, Thomas Hamill, Robert Gilmore Pontius Jr., John Rogan, Nick Giner, Albert Decatur, Samuel Ratick

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

This paper explores the use of spatial interpolative methods in conjunction with object based image analysis to estimate turf grass land cover quantity and allocation in Greater Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The goal is to learn how accurately turf grass can be estimated if only a limited portion of the study area is mapped. First, turf grass land cover is mapped at the 0.5 m resolution across the entire Plum Island Ecosystems (PIE) Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site, a 1143-km² area. Second, the turf grass map is aggregated into 120 m cells (N = 84,661). Third, a random sample …

Effects Of Land Cover Change On Water Quality In Urban Streams At Two Spatial Scales, Sonia Singh, Heejun Chang

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

This study examines the relationships between land cover change and water quality change in three urbanizing watersheds in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States: Burnt Bridge Creek, Salmon Creek, and the Tualatin River. All three watersheds have had many of their water quality parameters exceeding Total Maximum Daily Loads as required by their state’s environmental agencies in the past decades. By using the National Land Cover Datasets classified by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) for 1992, 2001 and 2006 and water quality data for a period between 1991 and 2010, this paper aims to examine whether changes …

Impacts Of Remotely Sensed Land Use Data On Watershed Hydrologic Change Assessment, Gi-Choul Ahn, Steven I. Gordon, Carolyn J. Merry

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

Urbanization affects the stream system of a watershed. Increased urbanization alters the land cover and surface characteristics, the stream channel characteristics, and pollutant load of a stream system by increasing the amount of impervious surface. Once rural, forest, or wetland areas are changed to streets, highways, parking lots, sidewalks, and building rooftops. This results in large volumes of runoff being generated for an intense storm over a relatively short time period. As a result, sensitive ecosystems are likely to be damaged by increased urbanization.

Projecting the impact of land use changes on a watershed scale often requires the use of …

Measuring And Modeling Of Urban Growth And Its Impacts On Vegetation And Species Habitats In Greater Orlando, Florida, Sunhui Sim, Victor Mesev

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

Urban growth is widely regarded as an important driver of environmental and social problems. It causes the loss of informal open space and wildlife habitats. Timely and accurate assessments of future urban growth scenarios and associated environmental impacts are crucial for urban planning, policy decision, and natural resource management. In this study, five distinct scenarios ("no constraints", "compact development", "transit-oriented development", "agriculture protection" and "environmental protection" scenarios) were tested on Greater Orlando, Florida, along with conservation objectives and projections for future land use/cover from development demands. The study examined the consequences of alternative scenarios of urban growth on potential habitat …

Introduction: Geospatial Analysis Of Urban Environment, Changjoo Kim

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

To provide a timely snapshot of current research that utilizes geospatial analysis and modeling in urban environment, the Korea-America Association for Geospatial and Environmental Sciences (KAGES) and the editorship of the International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research (IJGER) organized a special issue of IJGER on the theme of geospatial analysis and urban environment. Eight articles out of 13 submitted manuscripts have been published in this issue. This article provides an overview of the articles published in the special issue.

Assessing Survivability Of The Beijing Subway System, Yan Li, Hyun Kim

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

The Beijing subway system, the third largest in the world, serves more than ten million passengers a day. As Beijing is the capital city of China and thus a booming urban center, its subway system has experienced rapid evolution from a local single line system to a complicated network. Due to its constantly increasing complexity, the system is both a critical asset for a local transit artery and a bridge between intercity transportation modes, increasing the issue of network survivability in the face of potential outages of network components. In this study, we provide a connectivity-based survivability measure with which …

Precipitation Patterns And Trends In The Metropolitan Area Of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Anke P.M. Keuser

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

This study investigated changes in mean and extreme precipitation in the metropolitan area of Milwaukee, Wisconsin in an attempt to find the effects of urban areas on precipitation patterns. Precipitation data were obtained from a gridded (8-km spacing) historical climatic dataset for Wisconsin for 1950-2006. The Mann-Kendall test and the Sen’s slope test were applied to investigate temporal trends. Monthly wind directions were examined against monthly precipitation patterns. Main findings from the study include the following: (1) Annual precipitation significantly increased in the northern part of the study area during 1950-2006, whereas extreme precipitation showed virtually no trends; (2) The …

Google Books As Infrastructure Of In/Justice: Towards A Sociotechnical Account Of Rawlsian Justice, Information, And Technology, Anna Lauren Hoffmann

Theses and Dissertations

The Google Books project is germane for examining underappreciated dimensions of social justice and access to information from a Rawlsian perspective. To date, however, the standard account of Rawls as applied to information and technology has focused almost exclusively on rights to access and information as a primary good (Drahos 1996; van den Hoven and Rooksby 2008; Duff 2011). In this dissertation, the author develops an alternative to the standard account--the sociotechnical account--that draws on underappreciated resources available within discussions of Rawls' work. Specifically, the author focuses on the importance of Rawls' basic structure argument and the value of self-respect--two …

Impacts Of Spatial, Environmental, And Compositional Differences On Community-Level Flowering Phenology, Isaac William Park

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates three important topics related to flowering phenology throughout the United States. First, this work evaluates the utility of herbarium records for estimating historical variation in community-level flowering phenology, and evaluate the relationship of such estimates to satellite-derived greenup timing at regional scales. This dissertation then reconstructs historical variations in flowering phenology throughout the spring, summer, and autumn across South Carolina for the years 1951 through 2009. These estimates will then be compared to seasonal temperature variations throughout this period. Finally, this dissertation develops novel herbarium-based methods to separate intraspecific phenological variations over space from changes in flowering …

Re-Examining An Air Mass-Based Approach To Detecting Structural Climate Change, 1948-2011, Joseph James Larsen

Theses and Dissertations

Air mass-based approaches to observing changes in climate can have considerable value beyond simple trends of temperature and moisture, providing more thorough understanding of structural climate patterns. Few methodologies have adequately characterized recent air mass modification, however. This research seeks to update and improve upon the methods of a prior study, providing new data from 1948-2011, as well as more rigorous statistical analyses. Air mass types were created, and monthly averages of temperature, dewpoint, and relative frequency were calculated for each of the air masses in all four seasons; then the time series were submitted to regression analysis. The results …