Digital Commons Network^™

Layla, Layla, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Layla left Ethiopia 10 years ago to look for work opportunities. She left behind a father and three brothers. She went to Syria on a three-year work contract. She worked in a house and learned Arabic. She then went to Turkey by boat and then went on to Greece for 5 years. She worked and learned the Greek language. When she became pregnant she had to stop working. She travelled to Serbia to Macedonia to Austria all on foot. Then the Red Cross moved Layla and her daughter to Giessen, Germany where a roommate periodically beat her baby. Seeking safety …

Fadel, Tsos, Fadel

TSOS Interview Gallery

Fadel's family was originally from Palestine. However, for reasons he couldn’t recall, they moved to Libya, where Fadel was born, and he grew up there. He recalled that life inLibya used to be good, but that it became dangerous. Fadel came to Italy alone. His parents died and left him nothing seven years ago. His siblings died as well. He came to Italy 6 months ago seeking asylum by way of Tripoli to Sabratha, and then to Sardinia and Calabria. He has been living on the streets, and because he couldn’t provide an address, he was denied asylum

Katja, Ketevahi 'Katje', Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Ketevahi “Katja” is from Georgia. She’s in her late 40’s. She grew up on a farm in the country and became the financial support for her family after her mother died and her father became “emaciated.” When Putin came to power, diplomatic ties deteriorated between Georgia and Russia, which eventually led to war. She fled her country using forged documents and first worked in Turkey but has now lived in Naples for nine years and regularly sends money home to her brother, who cares for their father.

Katja expresses her feelings about war, government, liberty, and what it means to …

Felix, Tsos, Felix

TSOS Interview Gallery

Felix is originally from Nigeria and has now been inItaly under a year. He came from a family with a polygamous father who “married” multiple wives illegally. After returning home from a service mission for his church, which his father supported, Felix began to study engineering. At some point conflict arose within the family that causedFelix to have to flee.He was smuggled through Niger to Libya, losing several friends along the way.There he was held for ransom, before taking a treacherous voyage across the sea in an overfilled boat, where he witnessed several drown. Now he lives in a camp …

Momo, Momo, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

When Momo was only nine years old, he returned home to find his parents and his six sisters and four brothers had been killed in their own home. Sometime after that, he and his uncle left Somalia together to live in Yemen. He stayed in Yemen until he was sixteen, but when things became unsafe there, he moved to Libya. He had hoped to get on a boat in Libya to go somewhere for a new life, but he was thrown in prison instead. He was harassed and told to ask his family to send money so that he could …

Aberrant Plant Diversity In The Purgatory Watershed Of Southeastern Colorado And Northeastern New Mexico, Joseph A. Kleinkopf, Dina A. Clark, Erin A. Tripp

Western North American Naturalist

Despite a dearth of biological study in the area, the Purgatory Watershed concentrated in southeastern Colorado and northeastern New Mexico is home to a number of unique land formations and endemic organisms. At onetime nonarable land where Dust Bowl storms of the 1930s originated, the Purgatory Watershed is presently home to the Comanche National Grasslands, the Picketwire Canyonlands, and the expansive Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site. The Purgatory Watershed is composed of deep canyons, eroded mesas, and extensive intact shortgrass plains, and is located at a crossroads of the biodiversity of the Southern Rocky Mountains, Great Plains, and Chihuahuan Desert. Here …

Mixed-Method Study Of Perfectionism And Religiosity Among Mormons: Implications For Cultural Competence And Clinical Practice, Samuel O. Peer, James S. Mcgraw

Issues in Religion and Psychotherapy

Extending prior research on perfectionism and religiosity, the current study investigated their relation among Latter-day Saints (LDS)–also known as Mormons–through a sequential mixed-methods design. An online community sample of 194 LDS completed the Religiousness Measure-Revised and the Hewitt Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale. Subsequently, six of these participants were interviewed to further explore how perfectionism manifests among Mormons in a qualitative pilot study. Quantitative results demonstrated significant positive correlations between religiosity and perfectionism, but only for self- and other-oriented perfectionism. Qualitative content analysis indicated further how adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism manifest in an LDS context. Implications for culturally competent practice and future …

Religion And Esotericism Among Students: A Crosscultural Comparative Study, Franz Höllinger, Timothy B. Smith

Faculty Publications

Analyzing the results of a study on religious and esoteric beliefs and practice among university students from five European and five American countries, we found that the level of religiousness of students depends very much on their cultural environment: the level of religiosity and esoteric beliefs is significantly higher among North- and South-American students than among European students. On the other hand, Asian spiritual techniques and esoteric methods of healing are practiced more frequently by students in North-Western European countries. In the second part of the paper, we examine the relationship between academic discipline and religious worldviews. According to our …

Relative Target Estimation Using A Cascade Of Extended Kalman Filters, Jerel Nielsen, Randal Beard

Student Works

This paper presents a method of tracking multiple ground targets from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in a 3D reference frame. The tracking method uses a monocular camera and makes no assumptions on the shape of the terrain or the target motion. The UAV runs two cascaded estimators. The first is an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), which is responsible for tracking the UAV’s state, such as position and velocity relative to a fixed frame. The second estimator is an EKF that is responsible for estimating a fixed number of landmarks within the camera’s field of view. Landmarks are parameterized by …

Bekenntnisse Einer Schönen Seele, Von Sich Selbst Geschrieben, Friederike Helene Unger

Resources

No abstract provided.

Almonds, A Fiesty Industry, Kenneth M. Petrowsky

Marriott Student Review

A bitter power struggle between the almond industry and the milk industry has become a test of the United States’ free market. The National Milk Producers Federation has turned to Washington for aid while the Almond board of California and the Blue Diamond co-op have focused on improving their product.

Evaluating A Chinese Adult Attachment Questionnaire Using A Taiwanese Sample, Hsin-Yao Chiu

Theses and Dissertations

Researchers have taken the adult attachment instruments established in the western countries into other cultural settings. Taiwan is one of the many countries to which cross-cultural adult attachment research has been extended to, and where translated attachment survey instruments were applied. The problem with these translated measurements in Taiwan, however, is that the commonly-used instruments were not peer-reviewed, and often no reliability tests were even done, and the cultural appropriateness of these translated measurements was not evaluated. The usage and results of these instruments may therefore be questionable. The purpose of this current study is to present a Mandarin Chinese …

Using A Project-Based Language Learning Approach In The High School Spanish Classroom: Perceived Challenges And Benefits, Lisa D. Collier

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis documents the action research study done to investigate the perceived challenges and benefits of a project-based language learning (PBLL) approach in a high school Spanish classroom. The research involved four high school Spanish 3 classes taught by the same teacher. Two classes formed an experimental group and were taught one thematic unit using a PBLL approach, while the other two classes formed the control group and were taught by the same approach that had been used the rest of the year. Two of the objectives of the study were to see how the PBLL approach affected the achievement …

Single-Species And Multiple-Species Connectivity Models For Large Mammals On The Navajo Nation, Erica Fleishman, Jesse Anderson, Brett G. Dickson

Western North American Naturalist

Estimation of connectivity for multiple species could increase the efficiency of resource management and elucidate trade-offs among maintenance of connectivity for different taxa. We identified potential areas of high connectivity for 5 species of mammals on the Navajo Nation and adjacent lands in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, USA: mountain lion (Puma concolor), mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni), American black bear (Ursus americanus), and pronghorn (Antilocapra americana). These species were identified by the Navajo Nation as relevant to the benefit of their present and future …

The Impact Of Changing Toefl Cut-Scores On University Admissions, Laura Michelle Decker

Theses and Dissertations

As the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) is often used as a determiner for university admissions, this study observes the effect on the international student population at a large private university through the examination of the international student admissions data including TOEFL and first-year GPA from 2005-2015. With the anonymous data of 9,837 students, researchers analyzed the result of a cut-score change at the university. Results indicated that the number of international students decreased at the university. As expected, the TOEFL data revealed a normal distribution for the overall (combined) score and subsection scores, while the GPA …

Adapting Dracula: The Afterlives Of Stoker's Memes In Nosferatu (1922) And Dracula (1979), Ian Duncan Mcarthur

Theses and Dissertations

Dracula is a narrative that has risen above its own origins, having been translated and adapted across mediums it has inundated culture with vampires. However, with each adaptation the narrative and characters adapt into something new. This study is interested in the mechanism behind this evolution and argues that memes and, and their interpretations, are largely responsible for these shifts across adaptations. Three memes, in particular, tend to be adapted in films of Dracula. They include Dracula's appearance, Mina's empowerment, and the nature of the bite that they share. This analysis covers how these memes functioned in Stoker's original …

Comparing The Awl And Avl In Textbooks From An Intensive English Program, Michelle Morgan Hernandez

Theses and Dissertations

Academic vocabulary is an important determiner of academic success for both native and non-native speakers of English (Corson, 1997; Gardner, 2013; Hsueh-chao & Nation, 2000). In an attempt to address this need, Coxhead (2000) developed the Academic Word List (AWL)—a list of words common across a range of academic disciplines; however, Gardner & Davies (2014) identified potential limitations in the AWL and have more recently produced their own list of core academic vocabulary—the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL). This study compares the occurrences of the AWL and AVL word families in an intensive English program (IEP) corpus of 50 texts to …

A Latent Class Analysis Of American English Dialects, Stephanie Nicole Hedges

Theses and Dissertations

Research on the dialects of English spoken within the United States shows variation regarding lexical, morphological, syntactic, and phonological features. Previous research has tended to focus on one linguistic variable at a time with variation. To incorporate multiple variables in the same analysis, this thesis uses a latent class analysis to perform a cluster analysis on results from the Harvard Dialect Survey (2003) in order to investigate what phonetic variables from the Harvard Dialect Survey are most closely associated with each dialect. This thesis also looks at how closely the latent class analysis results correspond to the Atlas of North …

Relationship Between Using Korean Folktales In Foreign Language Class And Learners' Reading Comprehension And Cultural Understanding, Eunsun You

Theses and Dissertations

Language is a reflection of society, so knowing about a language also means knowing about a culture. Therefore, many types of literature have been used as a language education tool representing culture. This thesis proposed folktales as an effective material of not only introducing culture but also learning language. Since folktales are old stories that have passed from generation to generation for a long time, values and morals of a culture are naturally presented in the context of the stories. Furthermore, folktales could enhance students' reading comprehension because the story lines, phrases, and words in a story are used repeatedly. …

Current Patterns Of Ownership And Usage Of Mobile Technology In Older Adults, Karen E. Cottle

Theses and Dissertations

The older generation is growing at a rate surpassed only by the speed at which mobile technology is advancing. Technology has become so ubiquitous in daily life, that most older people have done their best to adopt it. The purpose of this study was to explore the older adult (>50 yrs.) learner's everyday approach to and regard for mobile technology. Paper surveys were distributed by hand to four geographically diverse audiences. Each audience was composed of a minimum of 20 adult learners of each gender across three age groups, accounting for 160 individual older adults in all. Returned survey …

Up In Smoke: Conservation And Gender On Mount Kilimanjaro, Garret Nash, Greg Thompson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Initially, this project aimed to examine cultural factors influencing fuel sourcing habits around Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. In 2008, a study conducted by Prof. Jeffery Durrant of the BYU Geography Department found that the Chagga (an ethnic group which lives on the lower slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro) hold a negative opinion towards the National Park and its staff. Specifically, I wanted to know if giving locals an opportunity to experience the park as tourists would change these perceptions and behavior when it came to conservation. However, as research progressed, it became clear that there were deeply seeded issues related to gender …

Haskell Island Woodcut And Letterpress Book, Adrian Tidd, Linda Reynolds

Journal of Undergraduate Research

When the word printing is used nowadays, it generally refers to the act of sending a file via computer to a machine that sprays ink onto cheap office paper. The result of such printing is plain white paper with imagery or text laid out in a pattern of small ink dots. There is no human element or quality in this process and the result is mediocre; even if quality paper is used, there is no character in the final outcome and the ink typically rubs off with very little effort. The project I proposed was to explore older methods of …

An Algorithm For Multiple Regression Variable Selection For Biochemical Oxygen Demand, Zach White, Dr. William Christensen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) is used to measure of the amount of oxygen required by aerobic bacteria and other microorganisms to stabilize decomposable organic matter. It is run as a laboratory based biodegradation test and relies upon the presence of a thriving microbial community that may be naturally present in the sample or artificially introduced by addition of a seed, commonly a known volume of sewage effluent of known BOD. A standard BOD test is run in the dark at a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius for 5 days. This is defined as a five-day BOD (BOD5), which is the …

Dislocation: An Exploration Of Cultural Hybridization In The Arts, Aloe Corry, Peter Everett

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My exhibition, titled Out of Order, was a series of paintings and two-dimensional artworks that explored the idea of dislocation that can occur physically, mentally, and culturally. Feelings of dislocation come most often to me as I move from a space I am comfortable in to a space that I have not yet encountered, especially when I am exposed to new ideas, images, and experience. However, one of the fastest ways for me to encounter dislocation is through travel. Because of this, I decided to create most of the works for this exhibition, Out of Order, during and after a …

Preserving A Sinking Culture: An Investigative Report On The Kiribati Community In New Zealand And Fiji, Ryan Turner, Steven Thomsen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

For thousands of years the peoples of the Pacific have been a people of exploration and travel. However, with the small country of Kiribati its people are now traveling to escape climate change and overpopulation¹. With such a small population at risk of relocating to another country its culture is at a severe risk of disappearing. With good sized populations of Kiribati immigrants already living in Fiji and New Zealand for several decades we can see how well that culture has survived in foreign countries. This research was looking for mixed results: on how Kiribati sees climate change and how …

Evaluating Fall-Of Curves With Straight-Line Or Least Cost Path Distance, Robert J. Bischoff

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

A fundamental part of interaction is distance. Interaction can be modeled by plotting distance against the frequency of an object. My purpose it to evaluate whether straight-line distance is an acceptable proxy for actual distance or whether using more realistic distance measures is required. In this poster, I use the distribution of San Juan Red Ware in a portion of the southwestern United States to examine the differences between straight-line distance, the length of least cost paths (LCP), and the time to travel the LCP between points. San Juan Red Ware was produced in southeastern Utah between approximately A.D. 750 …

Violence, Transcendence And Spectacle In The Age Of Social Media: #Jesuischarlie Demonstrations And Hollande's Speech After The 2015 Terrorist Attacks, Barbara Luisa Desoto

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the reactions — both in real life and on social media — to two terrorist attacks in Paris: satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and the Bataclan shooting in November 2015. Using Richard Sennett's Fall of Public Man and Antonin Artaud's Le théâtre et son double to explore these reactions as theater, this approach reveals the religious nature of supposedly secular reactions to religious extremism.

Hungry, Homeless, And Hopeless: The Injustices Of The China Hukou Registration System, Lauren Barden, Celeste Beesley

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This study analyzes the destructive social and economic consequences of the Chinese hukou registration system through quantitative analysis of the inequality gap between rural-urban migrants and urbanites in Chinese cities between 1995-2002. By performing statistical tests on individual-level survey data, this paper documents the economic gap between urban hukou holders and non-urban hukou holders in 1995. It also shows that rural-urban migrant inequality has not increased between 1995 and 2002, and that the costs of migrating to the cities under a rural hukou were less in 2002 than previously. However, results also confirmed that the hukou policy significantly restricted the …

An Annotated Critical Edition Of Wild Mike And His Victim By Florence Montgomery, Kristen Evans

Student Works

This paper is a critical edition of Wild Mike and His Victim by Florence Montgomery, a novel first published in 1875. This critical edition includes a critical introduction, footnotes, and appendices, as well as the original text.

Poe’S Gothic Soul In Metzengerstein: An Invitation To Look Inside, Elizabeth C. Peek

BYU English Symposium

The following paper examines Poe’s affair with German tradition, particularly gothic and romantic writing, through an analysis of his short story “Metzengerstein.” This short story is not only rich with the conventions of gothic fiction, but also rings with an autobiographical tone. The added piece of Poe himself in this text implies his own gothic origins. I argue that Poe was a natural romantic, with the purpose of bringing his own terror to a larger audience. The German gloom in “Metzengerstein” was authentic, not an imitation. I come to the conclusion that Poe’s production of literary horror—in the face of …