American Studies Commons^™

A Lone Nut In Compton:Lessons In Community Engagement With Treepeople In South Los Angeles, Jason Schlatter

Capstone Collection

The following study was conducted as an exploration of the community engagement practices of the Los Angeles based nonprofit organization, TreePeople. The intention of this study was to foster a deeper understanding about the theories and practice of the “outsider” TreePeople’s community engagement initiatives in the region of South Los Angeles, with particular emphasis on the communities of Compton, Inglewood, and historic South Central. I attempted to synthesize a collective narrative about the way TreePeople interacts with its constituents and community partners by drawing upon the experiences and perceptions of TreePeople staff, community partners, and community members. The individual experiences …

Lost In Space No Longer: The Visionary Union Of 'The Wire', Brett Dupré

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In its serial space, David Simon’s The Wire season two relates the seemingly “disconnected” union men, foreign sex worker women, and African-American drug traders and crosses constructed boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and geography to evoke the possibility of a transnational working class. The Wire’s serialized narrative trespasses the limitations of money and numbers games and of individual characters to build, scene by scene, what Roderick Ferguson calls in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique “the location for new and emergent identifications and social relations” (108).

Hope And Despair: The Farm Security Administration Photographs, Marjorie Jo Hunter

Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the Farm Security Administration's photographic record of the Mississippi Delta region in Arkansas primarily in the Blytheville to Helena corridor. Each chapter analyzes the images captured by such renowned photographers as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Carl Mydans as they traveled extensively throughout the South to document the American experience during the Great Depression. Natural disasters such as the 1937 Ohio-Mississippi River flood contributed greatly to the need for federal assistance in eastern Arkansas. Raging waters destroyed crops, homes, and livestock in record amounts. The images reflect economic hard times for Arkansas residents compounded by a devastating …

Walking Los Angeles, Zoe R. Carlberg

Pomona Senior Theses

This paper is about my experience walking through Los Angeles County. My principal motivations were to explore what it means to be a pedestrian in an urban landscape that generally does not recognize walkers and to give value to often overlooked spaces. The paper includes a brief history of the Los Angeles region, methodology, an analysis of some other art projects that have been done about walking, and a vignette of the experience.

The Action Of Grace In Territory Held By The Devil: Flannery O’Connor And Cormac Mccarthy, Scott A. Singleton

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

This paper compares the lives and work of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy. The two authors share similarities in their backgrounds, careers, and work. The paper begins with an examination of biographical information of both authors to contextualize their work and note commonalities in their lives and careers. The central idea is that Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy both create grotesque characters to reveal the depraved condition of humanity in order to highlight the need for redemption and the possibility of divine grace. To prove this, examples are discussed from multiple pieces of work by O’Connor and McCarthy including The …

A Location-Based Incentive Mechanism For Participatory Sensing Systems With Budget Constraints, Luis Gabriel Jaimes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Participatory Sensing (PS) systems rely on the willingness of mobile users to participate in the collection and reporting of data using a variety of sensors either embedded or integrated in their

cellular phones. Users agree to use their cellular phone resources to sense and transmit the data of interest because these data will be used to address a collective problem that otherwise would

be very difficult to assess and solve. However, this new data collection paradigm has not been very successful yet mainly because of the lack of incentives for participation and privacy concerns. Without adequate incentive and privacy guaranteeing …

Daily Experiences Of Older Adults With Mild Cognitive Impairment, Elizabeth Hahn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rationale and study aims: Persons with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) experience declines in everyday functioning and cognitive performance greater than what is experienced in normal aging but less than that of dementia. Daily stress and daily memory complaints associated with cognitive deficits may contribute to greater psychological distress in the day-to-day experiences of persons with MCI. However, research examining the occurrence of daily stressors, daily memory complaints and psychological distress in MCI is limited, and it is not clear how the daily processes of stress and affect in persons with MCI compare to cognitively healthy older adults. This dissertation examined …

A Framework For Participatory Sensing Systems, Diego Mendez Chaves

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Participatory sensing (PS) systems are a new emerging sensing paradigm based on the participation of cellular users in a cooperative way. Due to the spatio-temporal granularity that a PS system can provide, it is now possible to detect and analyze events that occur at different scales, at a low cost. While PS systems present interesting characteristics, they also create new problems. Since the measuring devices are cheaper and they are in the hands of the users, PS systems face several design challenges related to the poor accuracy and high failure rate of the sensors, the possibility of malicious users tampering …

Two Essays On The Sell-Side Financial Analysts, Xi Liu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the first essay titled "The Information Role of Analysts' Contrarian Revisions," I study a special group of revisions: contrarian revisions, defined as recommendation changes that are inconsistent with sizable stock price movements during the past week. I find that contrarian revisions are relatively more informative than trending revisions. In particular, contrarian revisions are associated with a both statistically and economically larger post-announcement drift. I also find contrarian downgrades are less likely to be issued by all-star analysts and analysts with more experience. After implementation of Regulation RD, the market reaction to contrarian revisions issued by all-stars significantly decreases, indicating …

American Made: Ansel Adams And The Bishop National Bank's "The Islands Of Hawaii", Lauren Walton

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

“To Make Myself For A Person”: The Bildungsroman In Modern Jewish-American Literature, Kari Lynn Keeling

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers and Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky share many similarities: they both feature young Jewish protagonists who immigrate to America in search of the better life they believe America can provide. Though their novels have similar trajectories, each author answers the still relevant question of how immigrants might successfully assimilate into American culture in contrasting lights. Cahan's protagonist, in a superficial sense, achieves the "American dream," while Yezierska's Sara achieves a more modest success. However, Sara ultimately navigates the trials of cultural assimilation and identity formation more successfully. Levinsky gains monetary wealth by adapting to …

Eclectic Book Club (Mss 407), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 407. Minute book, yearbooks, and financial data of the Eclectic Book Club, a women's literary club in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Fathers And Phiilosophers, Jonathan Campana

Honors Thesis and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Disaster Vulnerability Of University Student Populations, Jamie Lynn Auletta

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Student populations at Gulf Coast universities and colleges are subjected to multiple forces working together making them an especially vulnerable sub-group to hazards. Research has suggested that college students represent a segment of the population that hazards research has frequently overlooked and maybe not fully appreciated in university emergency planning. Most prior research has focused on university disaster experiences, highlighting what went wrong, and what should be done but little research focuses on what is actually taking place. The primary intent of this research was to gain better insight into university emergency planning and identify areas universities have neglected with …

On Algorithmic Fractional Packings Of Hypergraphs, Jill Dizona

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Let F₀ be a fixed k-uniform hypergraph, and let H be a given k-uniform hypergraph on n vertices. An F₀-packing of H is a family F of edge-disjoint copies of F₀ which are subhypergraphs in H. Let n_F0(H) denote the maximum size |F| of an F₀-packing F of H. It is well-known that computing n_F0(H) is NP-hard for nearly any choice of F₀.

In this thesis, we consider the special case when F₀ is a linear hypergraph, that is, when no two edges …

On The Design Of Socially-Aware Distributed Systems, Nicolas Kourtellis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social media services and applications enable billions of users to share an unprecedented amount of social information, which is further augmented by location and collocation information from mobile phones, and can be aggregated to provide an accurate digital representation of the social world. This dissertation argues that extracted social knowledge from this wealth of information can be embedded in the design of novel distributed, socially-aware applications and services, consequently improving system response time, availability and resilience to attacks, and reducing system overhead. To support this thesis, two research avenues are explored.

First, this dissertation presents Prometheus, a socially-aware peer-to-peer service …

Impact Of Life History Theory On Host Compentence Through The Selection Of Divergent Immunological Strategies, Alessandra Araujo

Honors Thesis and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Surface Mass Transfer In Large Eddy Simulation (Les) Of Langmuir Turbulence, Cigdem Akan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Over the past century the study of gas exchange rates between the atmosphere and the ocean has received increased attention because of concern about the fate of greenhouse gases such as CO₂ released into the atmosphere. Of interest is the oceanic uptake of CO₂ in shallow water coastal regions as biological productivity in these regions is on average about three times larger than in the open ocean. It is well-known that in the absence of breaking surface waves, the water side turbulence controls gas transfer of sparingly soluble gases such as CO₂ from the air to the …

The Ecological Role Of Rhizophytic Green Algae In Soft-Bottom Habitats, Laura Bedinger

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rhizophytic algae are large, abundant primary producers throughout tropical and subtropical areas worldwide where they grow as an understory in seagrass beds, as well as form mixed or monospecific beds of exclusively rhizophytic algal species. In this dissertation, "rhizophytic algae" refers to coenocytic green algae (Chlorophyta) in the order Bryopsidales that use a net of rhizoids to anchor in unconsolidated sediments. In the development of seagrass beds, rhizophytic algae colonize bare patches and are thought to facilitate seagrass colonization by stabilizing sediments and providing organic matter. However, despite their prominence little is known about many aspects of the ecology of …

Listening To The Shield Of Achilles: Sound & Motion In Ancient Ekphrasis, Darin Peachee

Honors Thesis and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.