Digital Commons Network^™

Bridging The Gaps In Elementary Life Science Lessons, Kaitlin Cook

Honors Program Theses and Projects

The United States is experiencing a rise in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers while facing a shortage of STEM workers. This could partly be due to a decline in the amount of time allowed for science in elementary schools or possibly because many life science lessons in elementary school lack originality and may not stimulate an interest in science. Lack of captivating STEM education prior to college may be contributing to the decline of students graduating with STEM based degrees. My thesis focuses on getting out of the routine of using monotonous life science lesson plans. I identify …

Reconstructing Energy Flow Through Modern And Historical Marine Communities: Insights From Amino Acid Isotope Analysis, Emma A. Elliott Smith

Biology ETDs

The fundamental currency of life is energy. Organisms need energy to grow, to survive and to reproduce. Understanding the acquisition of energy by consumers is thus a foundational aspect of biological research. This is especially important in the modern era, as impacts of ongoing anthropogenic effects will be mediated or amplified through food webs. Here, I explore how isotopic analysis of individual amino acids – a technique new to ecological studies – can be used to trace energy flow through animal communities in modern and ancient time periods. In particular, I focus on kelp forest food webs, which are nearshore …

A Desire Fulfillment Theory Of Digital Game Enjoyment, Owen M. Schaffer

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Empirical research on what makes digital games enjoyable is critical for practitioners who want to design for enjoyment, including for Game Design, Gamification, and Serious Games. But existing theories of what leads to digital game enjoyment have been incomplete or lacking in empirical support showing their impact on enjoyment.

Desire Fulfillment Theory is proposed as a new theory of what leads to digital game enjoyment and tested through research with people who have recently played a digital game. This theory builds on three established theories: Expectancy Disconfirmation Theory, Theory of Basic Human Desires, and Flow Theory. These three theories are …

The Disposition Of Nature: Environmental Crisis And World Literature [Table Of Contents], Jennifer Wenzel

Literature

How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming.

The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel …

Use Of Word Embedding To Generate Similar Words And Misspellings For Training Purpose In Chatbot Development, Sanjay Thapa

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

The advancement in the field of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning has played a significant role in the huge improvement of conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI). The use of text-based conversation AI such as chatbots have increased significantly for the everyday purpose to communicate with real people for a variety of tasks. Chatbots are deployed in almost all popular messaging platforms and channels. The rise of chatbot development frameworks based on machine learning is helping to deploy chatbot easily and promptly. These chatbot development frameworks use machine learning and natural language understanding (NLU) to understand users' messages and intents and …

The Cognition Of Controversy: Examining Policy Elites’ Narrative Cognition And Communication Around Hydraulic Fracturing Practices In The U.S., Rachael M. Moyer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The use of hydraulic fracturing (HF) technologies to extract oil and gas in the United States has sparked contentious policy debates, producing inconsistent and inefficient policies that have done little to address the impacts of HF in any comprehensive way. Debates are accompanied by competing policy narratives that position HF as either an environmental threat or an economic opportunity, but little is known about how policy narratives around HF are used by individuals. This dissertation systematically examines how individuals cognitively internalize elements of competing HF policy narratives. Organized into three empirical chapters, this dissertation analyzes narrative cognition (Jones, Shanahan, and …

Benchmarking Applicability Of Cryptographic Wireless Communication Over Arduino Platforms, Carolina Vázquez Torres

University Honors Program Senior Projects

The spaces around us are becoming equipped with devices and appliances that collect data from their surroundings and react accordingly to provide smarter networks where they are interconnected and able to communicate with one another. These smart networks of devices and appliances along with the applications that utilize them build smart spaces known as Internet of Things (IoT). With the on growing popularity of such smart devices (e.g., smart cars, watches, home-security systems) and IoT, the need for securing these environments increases. The smart devices around us can collect private and personal information, and the challenge lies in maintaining the …

Social Groups Characterization And Dynamics: A Network Science Approach, Josemar Faustino Da Cruz

Theses and Dissertations

Over the course of our lives, we tend to transition through many social groups. From an early age, our first social group is our family, then we have our schoolmates, later in life, our coworkers, and likely another family. As we move from one group to another, we embed ourselves in the dynamics of social groups’ losses and gains of new members. These dynamics are a complex system of interactions, which at scale, form the structural basis of our societies. In many years of sociological research, the details of social group interactions remained poorly understood. Certainly, not because of lack …

International R D & E Investment: Revitalising The Skill Base In Grassland Research And Practice, Ralph Von Kaufmann

IGC Proceedings (1977-2023)

Grasslands make up about 40.5% of the world’s land surface, and almost everywhere they make vital contributions to food supplies, livelihoods, watersheds, conservation of biodiversity and to ameliorating climate change through carbon sequestration. However, grasslands are under-represented in discussions on food security and livelihoods. Despite large investments in building human capacity, improving production systems and in research, grasslands are continuing to degrade and there is no let-up in sight for the consequent strife, famines and conflicts among the pastoral and other communities that depend on them. This review of grassland issues identified many critical skills that are lacking but it …

Material And Seismic Assessment Of The Great House At Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, Arizona, Douglas W. Porter, Anjali Mehrotra, Matthew J. Dejong, Angelyn Bass, Matthew Guebard, John Ochsendorf

United States National Park Service: Publications

The authors characterized earthen wall materials and plasters in a mid-fourteenth-century Hohokam great house at Casa Grande Ruins National Monument (Arizona) and assessed the seismic susceptibility of its puddled earth walls. Characterization included determining the microstructure, microcomposition, porosity, aggregate mineralogy, and identification of phases in the binding matrix for each of 36 samples and reconstructing plaster technologies, including material selection, preparation, and application sequences. Findings support the ideas that earthen materials were manipulated to optimize their performance to suit the unique site conditions and needs of the ancient people using the structure and included finishes that were unusual in southwestern …

Using Paleosols To Reconstruct Past Environments Before, During And After Periods Of Anatomically Human Migration At Gona, Ethiopia, Kevin Takashita-Bynum

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

Environmental change is thought to have driven dispersals of Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH) out of Africa, yet the precise landscape context of these migrations remains unclear. Furthermore, river-based archives of paleoenvironment during periods of dispersal are scarce. Gona, an area in northeastern Ethiopia with one of the most continuous records of East African Paleolithic and Neolithic archaeology, contains abundant Middle to Late Pleistocene river deposits interbedded with volcanic ash. This study examines the physical and chemical changes of 11 fossilized soils (paleosols) extracted from Gona’s paleoanthropological sites that range in age from the Middle to the Late Pleistocene (~380-11 ka). …

Evidence Of Variable Climate And Resources During The Late Pleistocene And Holocene At Gona, Ethiopia, Marie White

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

The African Humid Period (AHP) spanned a period of approximately 15 to 5 thousand years ago (ka) and resulted in Northern and Eastern Africa being wetter than today. This climate change event impacted flora, fauna, and humans to an unknown extent. Much of the work on the AHP across Eastern Africa utilizes lacustrine and marine proxies rather than river-based (fluvial). Gona, located in the Afar region of Ethiopia, is known for its extensive archaeological and fossil records in fluvial deposits. However, the paleoenvironment of the AHP at Gona has not been investigated. This study uses stratigraphy, geochronology, and paleopedology to …

Residential Household Yard Care Practices Along Urban-Exurban Gradients In Six Climatically-Diverse U.S. Metropolitan Areas, Dexter H. Locke, Colin Polsky, J. Morgan Grove, Peter M. Groffman, Kristen C. Nelson, Kelli L. Larson, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, James B. Heffernan, Rinku Roy Chowdhury, Sarah E. Hobbie, Neil D. Bettez, Sharon J. Hall, Christopher Neill, Laura Ogden, Jarlath O'Neil-Dunne

Publications and Research

Residential land is expanding in the United States, and lawn now covers more area than the country’s leading irrigated crop by area. Given that lawns are widespread across diverse climatic regions and there is rising concern about the environmental impacts associated with their management, there is a clear need to understand the geographic variation, drivers, and outcomes of common yard care practices. We hypothesized that 1) income, age, and the number of neighbors known by name will be positively associated with the odds of having irrigated, fertilized, or applied pesticides in the last year, 2) irrigation, fertilization, and pesticide application …

The Chemical Ecology And Drug Discovery Potential Of The Antarctic Red Alga Plocamium Cartilagineum And The Antarctic Sponge Dendrilla Membranosa, Andrew Jason Shilling

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chemical ecology is the study of chemical interactions between organisms and their environment mediated by small molecules involved in nonessential physiological functions, known as secondary metabolites. These compounds can be crucial to survival of the organism, and have also provided the field of medicine with some of history’s most influential drugs, referred to in that context as natural products. Antarctica is a dynamic and understudied environment, which affords the opportunity to examine the chemical ecology of unique organisms while simultaneously evaluating their novel chemistry for potential therapeutic properties as natural products.

Plocamium cartilagineum is a red macroalgal species found in …

Comparison Of Extraction Methods For Recovering Ancient Microbial Dna From Paleofeces, Richard W. Hagan, Courtney A. Hofman, Alexander Hübner, Karl Reinhard, Stephanie Schnorr, Cecil M. Lewis Jr., Krithivasan Sankaranarayanan, Christina G. Warinner

Anthropology Faculty Research

Objectives Paleofeces are valuable to archeologists and evolutionary biologists for their potential to yield health, dietary, and host information. As a rich source of preserved biomolecules from host‐associated microorganisms, they can also provide insights into the recent evolution and changing ecology of the gut microbiome. However, there is currently no standard method for DNA extraction from paleofeces, which combine the dual challenges of complex biological composition and degraded DNA. Due to the scarcity and relatively poor preservation of paleofeces when compared with other archeological remains, it is important to use efficient methods that maximize ancient DNA (aDNA) recovery while also …

Comparison Of Extraction Methods For Recovering Ancient Microbial Dna From Paleofeces, Richard Hagan, Courtney A. Hofman, Alexander Hübner, Karl Reinhard, Stephanie Schnorr, Cecil M. Lewis, Jr., Krithivasan Sankaranarayanan, Christina G. Warinner

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Objectives: Paleofeces are valuable to archeologists and evolutionary biologists for their potential to yield health, dietary, and host information. As a rich source of preserved biomolecules from host-associated microorganisms, they can also provide insights into the recent evolution and changing ecology of the gut microbiome. How- ever, there is currently no standard method for DNA extraction from paleofeces, which combine the dual challenges of complex biological composition and degraded DNA. Due to the scarcity and relatively poor preservation of paleofeces when compared with other archeological remains, it is important to use efficient methods that maximize ancient DNA (aDNA) recovery while …

Early Anthropoid Femora Reveal Divergent Adaptive Trajectories In Catarrhine Hind-Limb Evolution, Sergio Almecija, Melissa Tallman, Hesham M. Sallam, John G. Fleagle, Ashley S. Hammond, Erik R. Seiffert

Peer Reviewed Articles

The divergence of crown catarrhines—i.e., the split of cercopithecoids (Old World monkeys) from hominoids (apes and humans)—is a poorly understood phase in our shared evolutionary history with other primates. The two groups differ in the anatomy of the hip joint, a pattern that has been linked to their locomotor strategies: relatively restricted motion in cercopithecoids vs. more eclectic movements in hominoids. Here we take advantage of the first well-preserved proximal femur of the early Oligocene stem catarrhine Aegyptopithecus to investigate the evolution of this anatomical region using 3D morphometric and phylogenetically-informed evolutionary analyses. Our analyses reveal that cercopithecoids and hominoids …

Gamma Ray Flashes Produced By Lightning Observed At Ground Level By Tetra-Ii, D. J. Pleshinger, S. T. Alnussirat, J. Arias, S. Bai, Y. Banadaki, M. L. Cherry, Anderson Sunda-Meya

Faculty and Staff Publications

In its first 2 years of operation, the ground-based Terrestrial gamma ray flash and Energetic Thunderstorm Rooftop Array (TETRA)-II array of gamma ray detectors has recorded 22 bursts of gamma rays of millisecond-scale duration associated with lightning. In this study, we present the TETRA-II observations detected at the three TETRA-II ground-level sites in Louisiana, Puerto Rico, and Panama together with the simultaneous radio frequency signals from the lightning data sets VAISALA Global Lightning Dataset, VAISALA National Lightning Detection Network, Earth Networks Total Lightning Network, andWorld Wide Lightning Location Network. The relative timing between the gamma ray events and the lightning …

2019 Celebration Of Scholarship, Creativity, And Engagement, Beth Heldebrandt, Todd Bruns, Seth Yeakel, Matthew Eifrid

Programs

Scholarship, creativity, innovation, and the many forms of collaborative engagement that shape faculty life and student learning are central to the mission of Eastern Illinois University. For that reason, our faculty, department chairs, college deans, the Provost, and the entire campus community celebrate the achievements and outstanding contributions of our colleagues and students to their disciplines and professions every year. And, as the following pages illustrate, faculty engaged in continuing scholarly and creative activities that have provided outstanding mentoring experiences for our undergraduate and graduate students.

In addition to recognizing faculty performances, shows, publications, grants and other professional efforts, the …

Fewer Wetlands More Connectivity: Implications Of Land Use-Land Cover Change In An Agricultural Landscape, Stephanie Lawlor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

St. Lucie County (SLC) is a 1,782 km2 area in east-central Florida that drains to the Nationally Significant Indian River Lagoon (IRL). It is low lying and nearly level, with widespread non-floodplain wetlands (NFWs) and few natural channels. NFWs comprise the vast majority of SLC wetlands, both in terms of numbers and area. Since the early 20th century, SLC has undergone extensive land use-land cover (LULC) change and is now characterized by citrus farming in the interior and municipalities on its eastern coast on the Atlantic Ocean. This LULC change has been made possible by the construction of an extensive …

Sundaas Story: A Mixed-Methods Study Of Household Sanitation Provisioning In Urban Informal Housing In India, Sarita Vijay Panchang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aims of this research were to examine sanitation insecurity in urban informal housing through the lens of the built environment, social disparities, and health implications. While the Millennium Development Goals for halving the global proportion of people without access to safe drinking water were met ahead of schedule, progress fell short for sanitation, creating new objectives for the Sustainable Development Goals to be met in 2030. Much research in the Global South is dedicated to community-level sanitation promotion, but often presumes a rural rather than urban setting. Urban informal housing settings constitute a unique challenge due to the range …

From The Human To The Planetary: Speculative Futures Of Care, Miriam Ticktin

Publications and Research

This is largely a theoretical, speculative essay that takes on the question of what ‘care’ looks like at a moment when climate change is increasingly taking center stage in public and political discussions. Starting with two new practices, namely, humanitarian care for nonhumans and One Health collaborations, I seek to determine what forms of political care can incorporate the well-being of future generations and future iterations of the earth. After an exploration of One Health as an approach to planetary care, I ask what its parts enable us to think, despite its limitations; I focus on the new human-nonhuman assemblages …

Spread Of Domestic Animals Across Neolithic Western Anatolia: New Stable Isotope Evidence From Ugurlu Höyük, The Island Of Gökçeada, Turkey, Suzanne E. Pilaar Birch, Levent Atici, Burcin Erdogu

Anthropology Faculty Research

The origins of agriculture in Southwest Asia over 10,000 years ago and its subsequent spread into Europe during the Neolithic have been the focus of much archaeological research over the past several decades. Increasingly more sophisticated analytical techniques have allowed for better understanding of the complex interactions that occurred amongst humans, animals, and their environments during this transition. The Aegean Islands are critically situated where Anatolia and the mainland Greece meet, making the region pivotal for understanding the movement of the Neolithic into Europe. Located on the largest Turkish Aegean island of Gökçeada, the site of Uğurlu Höyük dates to …

Adaptive Randomized Rounding In The Big Parsimony Problem, Sangho Shim, Sunil Chopra, Eunseok Kim

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Human Rights, Environmental Justice, Social Justice, Faith Values And Ethics: Building Stronger Partnerships For The Common Good By Understanding The Differences, Theresa Harris, Leanne M. Jablonski, Sarah Fortner, Malcolm Daniels

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Partnerships between human rights practitioners, local communities, scientists, engineers, and health professionals have shown potential to address deeply rooted, systemic human rights concerns. These collaborations are essential for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and for engaging the perspectives and expertise of all constituents. However, even when the individuals in these partnerships or the organizations they represent have common goals, their motivations, analyses, and solutions often come from different perspectives. Members of good will can inadvertently alienate one another when attempting to work together. The fields of human rights, social justice, environmental justice, and ethics have each developed their …

Ethnobotany And Dai Medicine: Herbal Roots, Jasper Tsai

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Xishuangbanna is home to one of the most biologically and culturally diverse regions in China. Dai medicine from the Dai people has been recognized by China as one of the four major ethnic minority medicines. With over 2,500 years of practice, Dai medicine utilizes the herbs found in the diverse region mixed with principles and theories from Buddhism. There have been over 500 unique herbs used in Dai medicine, each with different properties and functions. As Xishuangbanna continues to develop as a city and expand its rubber and banana plantations, it has large impacts on the environment, living standard, education, …

Changes In The Greenland Ice Sheet Of The Southeastern Maniitsoq Coast From 1994-2004 And 2009-2019, Alyssa J. Kaewwilai, Charlie E. Reisman

Student Publications

Remote sensing mechanisms through the use of technology like the Landsat 5-7 Land Manager satellites are commonly used in conjunction with multispectral methods such as unsupervised classification to record and analyze changes in snow and ice over time in areas such as the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). Unsupervised classification is a method of identifying, grouping, and labeling features in an image according to their spectral values and is therefore a good method of classifying snow and ice in areas such as Greenland. The goal of unsupervised classifications is to assign pixels into potentially meaningful subsurface classes based on similarities of …

E-Waste Shouldn’T Be Waste: A Study On The Practices, Perceptions, And Policies On E-Waste In Urban Arusha, Tanzania, Melanie Mckenzie

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study examines the e-waste stream in urban Arusha, answer the questions of where electronics go, how people usually dispose of them, if people are aware of the impacts of e-waste, and what next steps are necessary. The study took place in November 2019 in urban Arusha, Tanzania. Through snowball and convenience sampling in 4 quotas (community members, electricians, business members, and a policy maker), the study finds that there is no place for the proper disposal of e-waste in Arusha. Many electronics are disposed of improperly by being put into the landfill or burned. Most participants were unaware of …

Impacts Of Agricultural Practices On Soil Quality And The Resulting Soil Conservation Implication In Kizanda Village, Lushoto Region, Tanzania, Sarah Maccormick

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study examined soil conservation in Kizanda Village which is in the Lushoto District, Tanga Region in the West Usambara Mountains of Tanzania. In Tanzania, and more specifically, the rural montane area, agriculture is an important part of both social and economic development. Due to a reported high rate of land degradation in Tanzania, this development is threatened though the lack of soil conservation. This study conducted structured interviews with farmers in Kizanda through snowball sampling to collect information about local agricultural practices and farmers’ perceptions on soil conservation issues. Soil samples were then collected from the corresponding farms (n= …

Water And War: The Potential For Perpetuation Of Conflict Due To Climate Change, Kaufman Butler

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Climate change has had a dramatic impact on the world’s weather for years, scientists can only make predictions about how global climate will continue to change going forward; but in all scenarios the circumstances are quite dire. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) will see some of the most severe effects of climate change, which will permanently alter the lives of millions of people in the region. In the MENA region, climate change is projected to result in extreme drought and temperatures which will lead to increased water scarcity, in what is already the most water poor region in …