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Validity Of Intrinsic Foot Muscle Size Measured By Ultrasound And Mri, Dallin Swanson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Intrinsic foot muscles maintain foot structural integrity and contribute to functional movement, posture and balance. Thus, assessing intrinsic foot muscle size and strength are important. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been shown to accurately image the individual muscles but is costly and time consuming. Ultrasound (US) imaging may provide an alternative that is less costly and more readily available. The purpose of this study was to investigate the validity and reproducibility of US imaging in measuring intrinsic foot muscle size in comparison to MRI. US and MRI were employed to measure the intrinsic foot muscle size involving 35 participants (females …

Educational Intervention On Rheumatic Heart Disease In Samoa, Linda Loyda Ida Tovar

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper reviews the impact of rheumatic heart disease (RHD) in Samoa and assesses the effectiveness of a caregiver education intervention by using data collected during the 2019 Rheumatic Relief Program trip. A pre- and post- survey collection tool was used to evaluate the effectiveness of current educational efforts among Samoan child caregivers. Dr. Richard Gill and Dr. Lori Allen, who are both BYU Department of Biology professors and Rheumatic Relief directors, participated in the creation of this program evaluation and completion. This project aims to assess the current caregiver education intervention program used in Rheumatic Relief and provide clear …

The Political Nature Of Tourism: How A Country's Political Factors Influence Tourist's Willingness To Travel, Camilla Alarcon

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Hard currency earned from travel and tourism feeds an important share of currency reserves in many countries and is often a key source of income, but how do political factors influence travelers’ decisions to visit and spend money in destination countries? In this paper, I argue that political factors such as regime type, political violence, and corruption can override traditional tourism attractors in determining potential visitors’ professed likelihood of traveling to hypothetical vacation destinations. In addition, I expect that political factors will hold less weight in determining self-reported likelihood of traveling when proper nouns are used to describe country profiles …

Landscapes Of Medical Culture From The Amazonia Of Ecuador, Savannah Sorensen

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the relationships between humans and plants in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the role relationships and nature play in the affliction and healing of illnesses and diseases. Through animism, spirituality, and rituals, the Quechua and Canelos groups foster a deep connection with the land and each other which plays an important role in traditional medicine and healing; this important connection with each other and the land constitutes the main premise of this paper, the sociality of healing. Many other cultures such as the Kalahari Kang, Samoans suffering from cardiovascular problems, and Evangelical Christians take on a similar approach …

Racial And Ethnic Minority Groups Are Under-Represented And Under-Reported In Guideline-Informing Heart Failure Clinical Trials, Gerardo Gamino

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Heart failure (HF) is a common cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States that may disproportionately affect certain racial/ethnic groups. Compared with White individuals, HF may affect Black individuals at a younger age with less favorable prognosis, and this excess risk may be partially explained by differences in HF risk factor burden. It is crucial for guideline informing HF clinical trials to adequately reflect the racial/ethnic diversity in the population. We assessed the extent of reporting and representation of race/ethnicity in HF clinical trials referenced in the 2013 ACC/AHA Guideline for the Management of Heart Failure and the …

A Fret Flow Cytometry-Based Screening Assay For Multiplex Analysis Of Metabolites In T. Brucei, Ronald A. Zegarra

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Kinetoplastid parasites are a significant public health issue in some tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Kinetoplastid parasites all require glycolysis for survival, with host glucose key for ATP production. One such parasite, Trypanosoma brucei, exclusively metabolizes glucose in its bloodstream form. Trypanosomal glycolysis is unique because it displays unconventional structural features. Hence, glucose metabolism has been studied extensively in T. brucei and is a therapeutic target in kinetoplastid parasites.The lack of in vivo analytical techniques for measuring vital glycolytic metabolites in situ has restricted the ability of researchers to test, with high sensitivity and specificity, the essential roles …

Abundance And Activity Of Domestic And Wild Medium-Sized Mammals In A Protected Mangrove Remnant, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, Beatriz F. García-Padilla, Sylvia S. Zalapa, Sergio Guerrero-Vázquez, Alejandro Pérez-Arteaga, Agustín Camacho-Rodríguez

Western North American Naturalist

Domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) and cats (Felis catus) in natural reserves can affect wild mammal populations through predation, diseases, and disturbance, particularly when habitat patches are small. In Estero El Salado, a remnant mangrove in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, we used camera trapping to obtain independent observations (n = 1224) to determine abundance, spatial overlap, and activity of medium-sized mammals (domestic dog, domestic cat, northern raccoon [Procyon lotor], Virginia opossum [Didelphis virginiana], gray fox [Urocyon cinereoargenteus], ninebanded armadillo [Dasypus novemcinctus], and jaguarundi [Herpailurus yagouaroundi]). Our …

Determining Predictors Of Peer Relations: A Study On Youth Inethiopia, India, Peru, And Vietnam, Susanna Fullmer

Theses and Dissertations

Across the world countries are currently striving to eliminate poverty, improve the quality of education, optimize well-being, among other areas of improvement. In an effort to help such improvements, a group called Young Lives ran a longitudinal study on youth in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam that studied the many facets of poverty. The purpose of this study is to utilize the Young Lives dataset to determine how countries can more readily improve social-emotional skills by looking at important experiences in adolescents' lives. Specifically, this study examines what factors increase a child's ability to socialize with peers, which is shown …

Effectiveness Of A Vaccination Education Module For College Freshman, Gavin Robert Behunin

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate a vaccination education module and evaluate its effectiveness to improve vaccine beliefs and behaviors among college freshmen. The participants included 177 college freshmen at one Utah university. Participants were eligible for this study if admitted as a new freshman during the 2019-2020 school year. The study was a cross-sectional pre- and post-education evaluation assessing vaccine beliefs and behaviors using a Likert-type scale. After completing the vaccination education module, participants' vaccine beliefs and behavioral intentions improved. Participants reported they were more likely to be up-to-date on personal vaccines and more likely to expect …

Autistic Traits, Sensory Processing, And Intolerance Of Uncertainty: Neurobiological And Behavioral Correlates, Maggie Buckhannon

Theses and Dissertations

Sensory processing challenges are common and often difficult for children on the autism spectrum and can affect some neurotypical children. Furthermore, sensory processing atypicalities are associated with autistic traits and other co-occurring behaviors associated with autism, such as intolerance of uncertainty. As such, traits common to autism may vary continuously across diagnostic boundaries (i.e., Broad Autism Phenotype). Working to uncover behavioral and neurophysiologic correlates of sensory differences could positively impact clinical support of children with and without a diagnosis of autism. Therefore, this study examined relationships between sensory processing, intolerance of uncertainty (a possible measure of prediction), autistic traits, and …

Perceptions Of Special Education Services Delivered Through Online Learning Environments During Covid-19, Alex W. Wheatley

Theses and Dissertations

Elementary and secondary schools saw a major shift in how instruction was delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools across the United States shut down or participated in online learning. This shift to online learning led many to question how special education services should be delivered to students with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to gauge perceptions of special education services delivered in a remote learning environment during a public health crisis. Teachers, related service providers, and parents of students with disabilities (n = 108) from across the United States were surveyed. Results showed synchronous online learning to be …

A New Method Of Measuring Flow Stress For Improved Modeling Of Friction Stir Welding, David John Prymak

Theses and Dissertations

Deficiencies in friction stir welding (FSW) numerical modelling are identified. Applicability of flow stress data derived from hot compression, hot torsion, and split Hopkinson bar testing methods is assessed. A new method of measuring flow stresses in the stir zone of a friction stir welding tool is developed. This test utilizes a non-consumable flat-faced cylindrical tool of different geometries that induces a vertical and rotational load on the material of interest. A constant vertical load and rpm value is used for each test yielding the resulting motor torque and temperature generation to define the material response. Experimental samples are cross-sectioned, …

Is Variability In Inhibition-Related Neural Activation After Sleep Restriction Associated With Eating Behavior In Adolescents?, Kimberly A. Barnett

Theses and Dissertations

The primary aim of the present study was to evaluate whether intra-individual variability in inhibition-related neural activation in response to sleep restriction is associated with eating behavior in adolescents aged 12-18 years. In addition, the potential moderating effects of sex and body mass index on the association between sleep and variability in neural activation were examined. This study employed a within-subjects crossover design that randomized subjects to both a 5 hours per night (sleep restricted) and 9 hours per night (well-rested) sleep condition for 5 nights, with experimental conditions separated by four weeks. On the 6th day of each study …

The Use Of Nonword Repetition Tasks In The Assessment Of Developmental Language Disorder In Bilingual Children, Kirsten Kelly

Theses and Dissertations

To address the needs of the growing number of Spanish-English bilingual children in the United States, Nonword Repetition (NWR) tasks were created to reduce testing bias in the assessment and diagnosis of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Several studies have shown promising results in the use of NWR tasks; however, fewer studies have addressed questions such as the use of different scoring methods or analyzing error patterns. Thus, this study was conducted to address these gaps in the research. An English and a Spanish NWR task were administered to 26 Spanish-English bilingual school aged children (6;0-9;4). Two different scoring …

A Feasibility Study Of A Group-Format, Ecologically Oriented Neurorehabilitation Of Memory (Eon-Mem) Program In Older Adults, Kayla Michelle Frodsham

Theses and Dissertations

Older adults often show declines in subjective and objective memory performance relative to younger adults. One potential path for helping older adults with memory may be compensatory memory training programs. Compensatory memory training programs teach strategies to manage memory impairment. Traditional compensatory memory training programs tend to be highly specific to a task and often do not generalize to other memory tasks. Ecologically Oriented Neurorehabilitation of Memory (EON-Mem) is a method for teaching memory strategies that may generalize for efficient use in everyday contexts. We performed a feasibility study to determine the value of pursuing a group-based version of EON-Mem …

The Effect Of Rate Control Cueing Modality On Articulatory Patterns, Amelia Caroline Jackson

Theses and Dissertations

The current study examined the change in articulatory patterns when speakers were asked to increase and decrease their speaking rate by matching metered and rhythmic audio recordings and by matching metered and rhythmic audiovisual recordings. There were 10 participants, five male and five female, ranging in age from 20 to 36 with a mean age of 25. Participants spoke the sentence "Don't fight or pout over a toy car"under rhythmic, metered, fast and slow conditions and in response to audio only or audiovisual models, resulting in eight speaking conditions: audio metered fast, audiovisual metered fast, audio metered slow, audiovisual metered …

Impact Of Second Language Acquisition On Cerebral Matter In Adult Monolinguals, Benjamin D. Jorgensen

Theses and Dissertations

Second language acquisition has proven to impact the brain in many ways. Studies have shown a distinct difference between the monolingual and the bilingual brain. These structural differences have included an observable increase in cortical thickness in bilingual individuals when compared to monolinguals. This is a significant observation since many neurological diseases and impairments have been connected to a decrease in cortical thickness. However, previous studies have focused solely on bilinguals who had acquired their second language early on in life. These studies have failed to focus on the potential impact that could be observed on the cortical thickness of …

Zero-Energy Tuning Of Silicon Microring Resonators Using 3d Printed Microfluidics And Two-Photon Absorption Induced Photoelectrochemical Etching Of Silicon, Kevin Eugene Larson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a novel method of modulating silicon photonic circuits using 3D printed microfluidic devices. The fluids that pass through the microfluidic device interact directly with the silicon waveguides. This method changes the refractive index of the waveguide cladding, thus changing the effective index of the system. Through using this technique we demonstrate the shift in resonant wavelength by a full free spectral range (FSR) by increasing the concentration of the salt water in the microfluidic device from 0% to 10%. On a 60 μm microring resonator, this equals a resonant wavelength shift of 1.514 nm when the index …

The Eternal And The Transitory: Exoticism, Otherness, And Commodity In Giovanni Boldini's La Zingara, Brandon Esposto Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Giovanni Boldini's La Zingara is an image fraught with mystery. As a lesser-known artist, scholarship on him and this painting is sparse. This thesis details the innovations that Boldini exhibited as an artist working in nineteenth-century France, using the lenses of feminist and Marxist art historical readings for a new interpretation of this piece. Participating in the oppressive systems of capitalism, sexism, and prejudice, Giovanni Boldini created the image of La Zingara for personal gain. Painting a subject from a marginalized community, the Romani, Boldini benefitted from those systems. He "others"his Italian heritage and modern art developments to construct a …

Musical “Conquest”: The Spanish Use Of Music In The Spiritual Conquest Of The Nahua Peoples Of Sixteenth-Century Mexico, John Richardson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Historians have grown more interested in Spanish Conquest and colonialism in the last century. While earlier historians saw the conquest through a more euro-centric lens, recent historians have tried to take a more nuanced approach to understanding the conquest. Within this research, historians are questioning traditional narratives of the "spiritual conquest," or the conversion of native peoples to Christianity. Scholars have shown that "conquest" is not the best term for this process, as there was much more give and take at play.

My research seeks to strengthen this narrative of religious accommodation through the lens of music. The transmission of …

High-Speed Image Classification For Resource-Limited Systems Using Binary Values, Taylor Scott Simons

Theses and Dissertations

Image classification is a memory- and compute-intensive task. It is difficult to implement high-speed image classification algorithms on resource-limited systems like FPGAs and embedded computers. Most image classification algorithms require many fixed- and/or floating-point operations and values. In this work, we explore the use of binary values to reduce the memory and compute requirements of image classification algorithms. Our objective was to implement these algorithms on resource-limited systems while maintaining comparable accuracy and high speeds. By implementing high-speed image classification algorithms on resource-limited systems like embedded computers, FPGAs, and ASICs, automated visual inspection can be performed on small low-powered systems. …

Preparing K-12 Teachers For Blended Teaching: An Exploration Of Peer-Reviewed Research, Important Practices, And Teacher Experiences, Cecil R. Short

Theses and Dissertations

This multiple-article dissertation explores K-12 blended teacher preparation. A literature review describes research trends from 88 articles published in peer-reviewed journals. It reports that current K-12 blended teacher preparation research focuses on explorations of blended teaching literature; professional development and coursework used for blended teacher preparation; defining, developing, and implementing blended teaching competencies; and measuring blended teaching readiness. The literature review suggests that additional work is needed to uncover specific practices that K-12 blended teachers are using across disciplines and grade levels, as well as whether there are specific pedagogies that seem to be effective within specific disciplines and grade …

What Did You Say? Investigating The Relationship Of Self-Perceived Communication Competence And Mindfulness In Communication On Levels Of Organizational Trust In A Postsecondary Academic Library, Rebecca Jo Peterson

Theses and Dissertations

Successful educational systems are established, maintained, and cultivated on a foundation of trust. Effective communication among colleagues is widely accepted as a characteristic of groups who establish and maintain high levels of trust. Despite the importance of the relationships between interpersonal communication skills and levels of organizational trust in postsecondary educational settings, there is very little published on this topic. Further, no published research was located that examined relationships between measures of mindfulness in communication with levels of organizational trust in postsecondary educational settings. This study examined relationships between measures of competent and mindful communication with levels of organizational trust …

A Qualitative Analysis Of Incidents That Lead To High Quality Implementation Of Behavior Intervention Plans From The Perspective Of School Psychologists, Leah Hardy

Theses and Dissertations

This study illuminated the perspectives of school psychologists who have developed behavior intervention plans (BIPs) that support successful change in student outcomes. A total of 15 school psychologists from two different school districts were interviewed using the critical incident method; participants shared their perceptions of effectively implemented behavior intervention plans. The participants emphasized the need for consistent communication among the team members, collaboration with key stakeholders, making modifications as needed during the implementation period, and adequate time to for school psychologists to provide training to teachers. The findings of this study emphasized the importance for school teams and other school …

Student Preferences And Decisions For Online Or In-Person Class Sessions In Blended Learning, James Max Christensen

Theses and Dissertations

Online learning sessions are becoming increasingly common. In this study, we reviewed over 150 studies of online and blended learning, revealing that the factors that affect student preferences for online or in-person learning vary widely and compiled a table of these factors. They can be categorized as either learning preferences or current lifestyle conditions. To better understand these preferences, we implemented an intervention in which college-level engineering students were given the choice to attend either an online or in-person session for a class they normally attended in a different modality. We compared college students' stated preferences with demonstrated attendance for …

Exploration Of Fluorinated Α,Β-Dehydroamino Acids And Their Structure, Austin Lesueur

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores the synthesis of fluorinated α,β-dehydroamino acids, specifically a fluorinated dehydrovaline derivative. Previous work has been done on the equivalent dehydrovaline derivative without fluorine present and this work builds toward the fluorinated version with the goal of comparing the two structurally. The synthesis presented here pulls from previous synthetic strategies employed for dehydrovaline while also exploring the synthetic impact of the electronegative fluorine atoms.

A Systematic Review Of Mental Illness, Criminogenic Risk, And The U.S. Prison System, Eliza Esquibel

Student Works

The incarceration rates in the United States are the highest in the world. Within the U.S. prison population, mental illness is overrepresented as compared to the general population. The present study examined existing literature that researched the connection between the prison system and mental illness, and the potential solutions to this crisis. The studies looked at focused on psychiatric disorders, substance disorders, and trauma. They also focused on the intersection between race, mental illness, and the prison system, and the intersection between mental illness, gender, and the prison system. These studies revealed a high prevalence of untreated mental illness in …

Physiological Arousal, Emotion, And Word Retrieval In Aphasia: Effects And Relationships, Angela Lynne Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

People with aphasia are known to have poor word retrieval abilities in communicative tasks. It has also been reported that they have lower, non-optimal levels of physiological arousal, which may cause lower attention levels therefore contributing to poor performance on linguistic tasks. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between physiological arousal and word retrieval in adults with aphasia and neurotypical adults when presented with emotional stimuli within a confrontational naming task. Participants included 6 people with aphasia and 15 neurotypical controls. All participants completed a confrontational naming task within 3 emotional conditions (neutral, positive, negative) and …

Interpretable Fine-Grained Visual Categorization, Pei Guo

Theses and Dissertations

Not all categories are created equal in object recognition. Fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) is a branch of visual object recognition that aims to distinguish subordinate categories within a basic-level category. Examples include classifying an image of a bird into specific species like "Western Gull" or "California Gull". Such subordinate categories exhibit characteristics like small inter-category variation and large intra-class variation, making distinguishing them extremely difficult. To address such challenges, an algorithm should be able to focus on object parts and be invariant to object pose. Like many other computer vision tasks, FGVC has witnessed phenomenal advancement following the resurgence of …

An Evaluation Of Behavior Intervention Plans: Consideration Of The Interventionist And Contextual Fit, Carly Parkinson Atchley

Theses and Dissertations

Behavior Intervention Plans (BIPs) are used in public schools for students with disabilities, replacing target behaviors with socially appropriate behaviors using positive behavior support strategies. However, research suggests that BIPs are often poorly written or fail to be implemented as intended. One reason for the ineffectiveness of BIPs may be that the interventionist (e.g., classroom teacher or other staff member responsible for implementing the plan) and the context of his/her classroom is not considered when plans are written by specialists (e.g., school psychologist, special education teacher, etc.). The purpose of this study was to evaluate BIPs written and used for …