Digital Commons Network^™

2002-2003 Nova Southeastern University Farquhar Center For Undergraduate Studies Catalog, Nova Southeastern University

Undergraduate Programs Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Editorial Board & Iowa Academy Of Science Officers And Directors

Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science: JIAS

No abstract provided.

Passing The Torch Of Wildlife And Fisheries Management: Comparing The Attitudes And Values Of Younger And Older Conservation Professionals, Robert M. Muth, Rodney R. Zwick, Martha E. Mather, John F. Organ

United States Geological Survey: Staff Publications

Wildlife-related values in American society are undergoing considerable change. Within the last few decades, non-consumptive recreational use of wildlife has increased dramatically; groups that subscribe to animal protection values (ranging from animal welfare to animal rights to animal liberation) are exercising increasing influence over wildlife policy, and the ranks of people who practice wildlife rehabilitation have grown significantly. In this time of questioning and change, it should not be surprising that the attitudes and values of conservation professionals are in transition as well. Within many agencies and academic institutions, the traditional focus on game management (Geist et al. 2001) is …

Toward A Cognitive Taxonomy Of Medical Errors, Jiajie Zhang, Vimla L Patel, Todd R Johnson, Edward H Shortliffe

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

One critical step in addressing and resolving the problems associated with human errors is the development of a cognitive taxonomy of such errors. In the case of errors, such a taxonomy may be developed (1) to categorize all types of errors along cognitive dimensions, (2) to associate each type of error with a specific underlying cognitive mechanism, (3) to explain why, and even predict when and where, a specific error will occur, and (4) to generate intervention strategies for each type of error. Based on Reason's (1992) definition of human errors and Norman's (1986) cognitive theory of human action, we …

Kefahaman Pelajar Tingkatan Empat Tentang Kecerunan Garis Lurus, Latifah Hj. Arshad

Student Works (2000-2009)

Kajian ini dijalankan dalam rangka teori Fahaman Binaan dan mempunyai dua tujuan utama iaitu untuk mengenal pasti kefahaman tentang kecerunan garis lurus yang dipunyai oleh pelajar tingkatan empat dan cara yang digunakan oleh pelajar untuk menyelesaikan masalah yang melibatkan kecerunan garis lurus. Teknik temu duga yang berlandaskan model temu duga Klinikal Piaget digunakan u ntuk mengumpul data. Data bagi kajian ini merangkurni maklumat lisan dan bukan lisan yang dikumpul daripada tiga orang pelajar tingkatan empat yang berbeza dari segi pencapaian akademiknya. Empat aktiviti dalam tiga sesi temu duga klinikal telah dijalankan, iaitu (a) gambaran mental, (b) perwakilan, (c) makna kecerunan …

Inside Unlv, Diane Russell, Richard Jensen, Andy Grossman, Kevin Force

Inside UNLV

No abstract provided.

A Technique For Visualizing Software Architectures, Jon M. Inouye

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Software architecture appeared in the early 1990s as a distinct discipline within software engineering. Models based on software architecture attempt to reduce the complexity of software by providing relatively coarse-grained structures for representing different aspects of software development. A software architecture typically consists of various components and connections arranged in a specific topology. Elements of the topology can serve as abstractions on (for example) modules, objects, protocols or interfaces. The meaning of the topology depends on viewpoint.

Software architectures' can be described using an architecture description language (ADL). The key goals of ADLs are to communicate alternate designs to the …

The Design Of Online Learning Communities For Older Adults, Martha Marie Snyder

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Rapid, ongoing advancements in the growth of the Internet and web-based technology coupled with the steadily increasing number of older adults in our society create a significant need for the design of safe, convenient, and accessible online learning communities for this demographic. The primary goal of this dissertation was to conduct formative research into methodologies for developing a new instructional-design theory for establishing online learning communities for older adults. The aim of this work was to apply formative research, which is a type of developmental research used to create a new design theory or improve an existing theory, to the …

Missoula Ecopaws: Environmental Incentive Program To Combat Environmental Inaction, Jaymie Sanders, Valayna Cannon, Katy Mccumber, Hattie Ransom

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Climate change has had a drastic impact on the planet on a biological, political, and socioeconomic level. The excessive consumption of natural resources and human-induced pollution has contributed to rising temperatures, intensified weather patterns, and an increase in natural disasters (Nations, 2019). This has led to high levels of eco-anxiety and grief in younger generations, driven by psychological factors, misinformation, and governmental resistance to meaningful change which has influenced inaction in individuals (Hickman et al, 2021). In order to address these growing concerns, we have created a rewards program for our campus community to encourage eco-positive behavior. Missoula EcoPaws is …

The Feasibility Of Using Propositional Analysis As A Method For Understanding Differences Between Physicians And Nurses Reading Emrs, Constance M. Johnson, Todd Johnson, Vimla L. Patel, James P. Turley

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

No abstract provided.

Proceedings Of The First International Conference On Neutrosophy, Neutrosophic Logic, Neutrosophic Set, Neutrosophic Probability And Statistics, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In 1960s Abraham Robinson has developed the non-standard analysis, a formalization of analysis and a branch of mathematical logic, that rigorously defines the infinitesimals. Informally, an infinitesimal is an infinitely small number. Formally, x is said to be infinitesimal if and only if for all positive integers n one has xxx < 1/n. Let &>0 be a such infinitesimal number. The hyper-real number set is an extension of the real number set, which includes classes of infinite numbers and classes of infinitesimal numbers. Let’s consider the non-standard finite numbers 1+ = 1+&, where “1” is its standard part and “&” its non-standard part, …

The Cyborgian Self: Toward A Critical Social Theory Of Cyberspace, Michael Ian Borer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Contemporary social theory currently remains at a virtual standstill, quivering over the decision to radically leave the past behind or to continue within the historical narrative of the Enlightenment. Postmodern social theorists, advocating the position that we have, in fact, entered a new historical epoch, pose serious challenges to our perception of modernity and cultural identity. As an influential strategy that has infiltrated both the humanities and the social sciences for more than thirty years, postmodernism can no longer be dismissed as merely a fad or trend. In a world where the use of complex, and often mobile, …

Quantification Of Land-Use Impact On Stream Water Quality, Scott Dennis, Indrajeet Chaubey, Brian Haggard

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

Accelerated eutrophication of Beaver Lake in northwest Arkansas is a major environmental concern. When developing watershed-management plans to protect lake water quality, it is important that linkages among land-use activities and water quality of tributary streams be quantified. This study assessed longitudinal base-flow and storm-flow water quality at War Eagle Creek and quantified linkages between stream water quality and land-use conditions within the War Eagle Creek sub-watershed of the Beaver Lake watershed. We collected six water samples: three from base-flow conditions and three from storm-flow conditions during Spring 2002. In general, concentrations of nitrate nitrogen (NO3-N), total N (TN), total …

Navigating The Starless Night: Strategies For Understanding Autobiogeography, Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Ancient mapmakers relied upon the presence of celestial bodies for their conceptualization of the world, for their external knowledge-making tools, as if a far-off body could help to make sense of our terrestrial life/as if it couldn't. Cosmology, as a practice, relied on the construction of an external body of knowledge that the local meaning-maker could situate him- or herself into, and more broadly, their entire society and culture -- the interior is determined by its relationship to the exterior (or the exteriorized). For the ancient Greeks then, the font of Western culture, this cosmology works at once …

Designing Human-Centered Distributed Information Systems, Jiagie Zhang, Vimla L. Patel, Kathy A. Johnson, Jane Malin, Jack W. Smith

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Many computer systems are designed according to engineering and technology principles and are typically difficult to learn and use. The fields of human-computer interaction, interface design, and human factors have made significant contributions to ease of use and are primarily concerned with the interfaces between systems and users, not with the structures that are often more fundamental for designing truly human-centered systems. The emerging paradigm of human-centered computing (HCC)-which has taken many forms-offers a new look at system design. HCC requires more than merely designing an artificial agent to supplement a human agent. The dynamic interactions in a distributed system …

Evaluating A Medical Error Taxonomy, Juliana Brixey, Todd R. Johnson, Jiajie Zhang

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Healthcare has been slow in using human factors principles to reduce medical errors. The Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) recognizes that a lack of attention to human factors during product development may lead to errors that have the potential for patient injury, or even death. In response to the need for reducing medication errors, the National Coordinating Council for Medication Errors Reporting and Prevention (NCC MERP) released the NCC MERP taxonomy that provides a standard language for reporting medication errors. This project maps the NCC MERP taxonomy of medication error to MedWatch medical errors involving infusion pumps. Of …

The Impact Of Using Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Tools On Moral Reasoning In A Multi-Institutional Computer Ethics Module, Joe Griffin, Frances Grodzinsky, Pat Jefferies

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

Concerns about the increased use and abuse of information technology have evolved into more formalized evaluations of computer ethics in many organizations. This trend extends to most of the universities where they provide different modules related to professional computer ethics. Although these formalized evaluations have become more common, very little is known about the effects of collaborative learning on students’ moral reasoning and how to assess it. This study uses an experiment, involving students in three universities: University of Limerick in Ireland, De Montfort University in England and Sacred Heart University in the USA. The authors will describe the implementation …

Blackboard: A Web-Based Resource In The Teaching Of A Multi-Disciplinary/Multi-Institutional Computer Ethics Course, Frances Grodzinsky, Joe Griffin

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper will focus on the use of a commercially available collaborative learning management tool ( C L W . Blackboard and how if has been used to enhance the teaching of professional issues in a large cohort given at the University af Limerick in Ireland and a small writing-based -senior ethics course given at Sacred Heart University. This study details the various facilities offered by Blackboard, some of the ways in which the tools were used to enhance learning and critical thinking and some reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the tool. A prospective design and implementation of …

Peer Nutrition Education: A Model For Nutrition Education Among Spanish-Language Participants Of The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program For Women, Infants And Children (Wic), Maximino Alfredo Mejía

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Despite the steady improvement in the health status of Americans, Hispanics are a minority in the United States with greater prevalence of several infectious and chronic diseases and less health knowledge than the average citizen. Nearly half of the Hispanics living in this country die of preventable nutrition-related conditions, with heart disease and cancer being the leading causes. Since this minority has limited access to health care and preventive services, there is a need for an inexpensive, viable model of health education for this underserved segment of the population in order to lower the excess of preventable diseases. We trained …

The Role Of Diet And Physical Activity For Ovarian Cancer Results From The Adventist Health Study, Fatemeh Kiani

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

A few aspects of the epidemiology of ovarian cancer are well understood, such as the inverse relationship with parity and oral contraceptive (OC) use. The role of other factors such as the potential influence of diet or physical activity is far from being established. A few studies, however, have been able to identify dietary risk factors for ovarian cancer. In this dissertation, I have conducted two studies that investigate the relationship between dietary factors and physical activity and the three endpoints: 1) nonfatal ovarian cancer (1976-1982; time to diagnosis), 2) fatal ovarian cancer (1976-1988; time to death), and 3) total …

An Investigation Into The Concepts And Applicability Of Agent Technologies, Anne White

Theses

The software world is one of great richness and diversity

Even though the concept of software agents date back to the days of AI (Artificial Intelligence) work (1970’s) the word “Agent” is currently in vogue in the computing press and computer science communities.

This thesis presents a review of the ongoing evolution of software agents, places agents in context within today’s software domain, and takes a closer look at the ongoing debate of what really constitutes an '"Agenf\ The numerous dimensions of classification are studied and an opinion of the attributes that an agent should encompass is put forward. Leading …

The Observing Body: Quantum Mechanics, The Anthropic Principles, And Panopticism, C. Jason Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

When philosopher of history and science Michel Serres wrote of that rare and narrow passage between the human sciences and the exact sciences [1], he intended to suggest not only the infrequency and difficulty of such contact, but also the unwillingness on either side to engage in what could be a dangerous, low-profit venture. It seems a long haul back to our common origins in philosophia, and typically, efforts to regain common ground between the disciplines have approached the problem as a one-sided move from the exact sciences to the study of the humanities. Notable exceptions such …

A Comparison Of The Use Of Artificial Neural Networks, Fractal Time Series And Fractal Neural Networks In Financial Forecasts, Beverly A. Swisshelm

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Effective prediction of future financial states has been a major quest for groups ranging from national governments to individual investors. The size, diversity and complexity of financial markets make traditional statistical methods ineffective in predicting beyond a very short time frame. Alternative models using artificial neural networks and fractal time series have had better results in long-term predictions, but still do not work in all situations. This dissertation combined features of artificial neural networks and fractal time series to create a fractal neural network. Fractals exhibit repetitive patterns when a unit is broken down into its components. This similarity property …

Variables Related To The Successful Completion Of The First Course In Business Calculus At Three Jamaican Universities, Martin Nkhrama Richards

Dissertations

Problem. Many students at all levels of the education system in Jamaica perform poorly at mathematics. In particular, the results of both the Caribbean Examinations Council and Business Calculus 1 at the university level have reflected a declining trend in mathematics performance in recent years. Consequently, this study sought to investigate the variables related to the successful completion of the first course in business calculus at Jamaican universities. To this end, the study looked at perceptions of students and their professors regarding students' cognitive, affective, and professor effectiveness variables impacting success.

Method. The sample for this study consisted of 389 …

A Method For The Perceptual Optimization Of Complex Visualizations, Donald H. House, Colin Ware

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

A common problem in visualization applications is the display of one surface overlying another. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to do this clearly and effectively. Stereoscopic viewing can help, but in order for us to be able to see both surfaces simultaneously, they must be textured, and the top surface must be made partially transparent. There is also abundant evidence that all textures are not equal in helping to reveal surface shape, but there are no general guidelines describing the best set of textures to be used in this way. What makes the problem difficult to perceptually optimize is that …

The Use Of A Genetic Algorithm To Evolve Networks For A Natural Language Processing Task, Alexander E. Dimov '02

Honors Projects

In this project a novel approach was taken for performing a natural language task. The task requires a neural network to predict the grammatical category of the next word in a stream of sentences. There are two main reasons why this task is interesting. In natural language processing, it is sometimes very difficult to determine the grammatical category of a word in a sentence when that word could belong to different grammatical categories depending on the context. For example, the word "run" can either be a noun or a verb in a certain sentence. The ability to correctly determine the …

Experience-Based Language Acquisition: A Computational Model Of Human Language Acquisition, Brian Edward Pangburn

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Almost from the very beginning of the digital age, people have sought better ways to communicate with computers. This research investigates how computers might be enabled to understand natural language in a more humanlike way. Based, in part, on cognitive development in infants, we introduce an open computational framework for visual perception and grounded language acquisition called Experience-Based Language Acquisition (EBLA). EBLA can “watch” a series of short videos and acquire a simple language of nouns and verbs corresponding to the objects and object-object relations in those videos. Upon acquiring this protolanguage, EBLA can perform basic scene analysis to generate …

Editorial Board & Iowa Academy Of Science Officers And Directors

Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science: JIAS

No abstract provided.

Component-Based Development Using Uml, L. Zhao, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Component-based software development (CBD) is a potential breakthrough for software engineering. Unified Modeling Language (UML) can potentially facilitate CBD design and modeling. Although many research projects concentrate on the conceptual interrelation of UML and CBD, few incorporate actual component frameworks into the discussion, which is critical for real-world software system design and modeling. This paper reviews component-based development, including the use of UML for modeling CBD. The paper then discusses the means by which UML extension mechanisms can be used to better support the popular component framework -- CORBA. Two other important component frameworks, DCOM and Web Services, are also …

Multimedia Tools For The Creation Of Online Learning Materials : A Critique, Victor Augustine Udosen

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.