Digital Commons Network^™

The Effectiveness Of Multimedia Digital Graphics In The Context Of A Simulated Content Environment, Christopher Knox

All Theses

The overall purpose of this thesis was to evaluate the effectiveness and potential benefits or shortcomings of digital motion graphics when utilized in the context of a real-world marketing effort. It is vital to evaluate whether or not the understanding we currently have of motion graphics as a tool for effective communication still remains consistent when principles of visual noise, attention capacity limits, pairing with physical materials, and coordination across mediums are taken into consideration. Participants in this study were asked to interact with prepared content within the framing of a simulated social media feed viewed on a computer or …

Cover Crop Biomass Production And Effects On Soil Moisture In The Upstate Of South Carolina, Ricardo St Aime

All Theses

Cover crops can protect soil health and increase climate resilience of the crop production systems. However, few agronomic crop producers in the southern USA currently use them. Constraints on producer use of cover crops in this region include, lack of knowledge regarding the best cover crops for their locality and cropping system and potential impacts on plant-available soil moisture along with concerns about the cost and labor associated with cover cropping. The present research evaluated biomass production, soil moisture retention, and water use efficiency of single species and multi-species fall-winter cover crops in South Carolina. Overall, a mixture of Austrian …

Lectin Coated Electrodes For Biosensor Water Testing Applications, Aniqa Nuzhat Chowdhury

All Theses

Waterborne diseases account for millions of deaths each year. Developing countries struggle with infectious outbreaks occurring due to the presence of microbial agents in the water supply, and the morbidity rate remains high due to lack of detection. Even in the United States with modern water treatment facilities, lost productivity due to waterborne pathogens costs an estimated $20 million per year. There are many contaminants that are difficult and costly to detect even in developed countries, such as cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria has particularly been a problem in upstate South Carolina, and the presence of this contaminant affects the quality of water …

Prebiotic Carbohydrate Profiles Of Lentil, Chickpea, And Common Bean, Niroshan Siva

All Dissertations

Pulses such as lentil (Lens culinaris Medikus), common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.), and chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) are a rich source of protein, prebiotic carbohydrates, and micronutrients. Prebiotic carbohydrates are utilized by beneficial gut microorganisms and produce short chain fatty acids which is associated with increasing mineral absorption and reducing obesity risk. The objectives of these studies were to 1) identify and quantify prebiotic carbohydrate profiles [simple sugars, sugar alcohols (SA), raffinose family oligosaccharides (RFO), fructooligosaccharides (FOS), resistant starch (RS), cellulose, hemicellulose, and amylose)] in different market classes of lentil, common bean, and chickpea, 2) determine the changes of SA, …

Development And Preliminary Validation Of Image-Enabled Process Metrics For Assessment Of Open Surgery Suturing Skill, Irfan Kil

All Dissertations

Suturing is a fundamental surgical skill required in a variety of operations, ranging from wound repair to delicate vascular reconstruction. It is essential that surgeons master requisite suturing skills so that he or she can deliver safe and effective care to patients. Due to an increased emphasis on standardized medical training, tools and methods are needed to provide objective assessment and feedback during the learning process. In this thesis, a new surgical simulator for assessment and training of open surgery suturing skill is introduced. The suturing simulator system design, force-based, motion-based, image-based and image-enabled metrics for skill assessment, and a …

Factors Influencing The Probability That Consumers Will Purchase Local And Organic Dairy Products, Caleb Edward Orr

All Theses

U.S. consumption of dairy products is trending upward, however, per capita consumption of fluid milk has decreased (USDA, 2017). By contrast, organic milk and other milk produced in non-conventional ways have experienced significant growth (AMS, 2017). By examining the preferences of specific consumer groups, dairy producers can make production decisions that better fit consumers' needs, which can in turn lead to a more efficient market for fluid milk in the U.S.

This thesis seeks to identify factors that can influence consumers' decision to purchase organic and local fluid milk. The data is obtained from a 2015 nationwide online survey of …

Last Chance To See? Motivations And Outcomes Of Last Chance Tourism Experiences In Arctic Alaska, Tana Kay Wilson

All Theses

The tourism market for endangered places and their vulnerable resources are booming and widely referred to as last chance tourism (LCT). People are planning trips to experience places or see species they may never have wanted to see until learning that the option to witness it could disappear in their lifetime. The notion of LCT was first introduced by the tourism industry to describe increasing tourist interest to endangered destinations. Utilizing visitor surveys, the purpose of this study was to identify LCT participants and quantify experiential outcomes of LCT (e.g., awe, epiphany and ambassadorship). This study specifically takes place at …

An Ex Vivo Model Of Elastin Degradation In Porcine Carotid Arteries For The Study Of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms, Hannah Gore

All Theses

Abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) are an area of dilation in the vessel that is greater than 3.0 cm in diameter or an area of the vessel that enlarged to greater than 50% of the vessel's original diameter. AAA are generally asymptomatic and if ruptured, have a mortality rate of 78-83%. AAA account for approximately 45,000 surgeries performed in the United States annually and are the 13th leading cause of death in the United States. Alterations of two extracellular matrix proteins, elastin and collagen, are associated with the formation of abdominal aortic aneurysms. AAA formation is marked by degradation of elastin …

Analyzing The Coiling Motion Of Plant-Inspired Soft Actuators With Tilted Helix Fiber Reinforcement, Ryan Kirby Geer

All Theses

Plants have unorthodox motion. The seed appendage of Stork's Bill plant (Erodium Gruinum) moves in such a way due to two physiological features. Plant cells are reinforced by cellulose fibers distributed in a tilted helix pattern — helixes that are tilted at a certain angle with respect to the longitudinal axis of the cell. Another feature is dehydration of cell tissue which causes volumetric shrinking. Due to the cellulose-fibers and dehydration of cell tissue, the seed appendage can coil and uncoil via a combination of twisting and bending. Coiling motion can be quite useful for robotic manipulation and locomotion purposes. …

Microfluidic Particle Separation Via Elasto-Inertial Focusing In Straight Rectangular Microchannels, Di Li

All Dissertations

Label-free separation of target particles or cells in a continuous flow is a crucial process in many commercial and industrial applications. Among the various particle and cell separation techniques, microfluidic separator based on elasto-inertial forces in the flow of non-Newtonian fluids has received increasing attention in the past decade. However, current studies have been mainly focused upon the use of viscoelastic forces to manipulate particles and cells. Little work has been done to obtain a fundamental understanding on how the fluid rheological properties, such as viscoelasticity and shear thinning, affect the motion of particles. This dissertation is aimed to address …

Melt-Spinning And Properties Of Soy-Filled Polyethylene, Polypropylene, And Poly-(Lactic Acid) Fibers, Ozgun Guzdemir

All Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Creativity And Information Systems: A Theoretical And Empirical Investigation Of Creativity In Is, Jackie Patrick London

All Dissertations

Be productive. Since the industrial revolution, managers have had an almost singular focus on equipping employees with productivity tools in productivity-supportive environments. Information technologies—systems designed to increase productivity—entered the marketplace in the 1980's and were initially credited with the subsequent boom. Eventually, innovation was shown to be the primary spark, and the managerial focus shifted. Increasingly, the imperative is: be creative. This dissertation investigates how a technology environment designed to be fast and mechanistic influences the slow and organic act of creativity. Creativity—the production of novel and useful solutions—can be an elusive subject and has a varied history within Information …

Performance Of Latent Dirichlet Allocation With Different Topic And Document Structures, Haotian Feng

All Dissertations

Topic modeling has been used widely to extract the structures (topics) in a collection (corpus) of documents. One popular method is the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). LDA assumes a Bayesian generative model with multinomial distributions of topics and vocabularies within the topics. The LDA model result (i.e., the number and types of topics in the corpus) depends on tuning parameters. Several methods, ad hoc or heuristic, have been proposed and analyzed for selecting these parameters. But all these methods have been developed using one or more real corpora. Unfortunately, with real corpora, the true number and types of topics are …

Self-Repair And Self-Cleaning Of The Lepidopteran Proboscis, Suellen Floyd Pometto

All Dissertations

The proboscis of butterflies and moths is a key innovation contributing to the high diversity of the order Lepidoptera. In addition to taking nectar from angiosperm sources, many species take up fluids from overripe or sound fruit, plant sap, animal dung, and moist soil. The proboscis is assembled after eclosion of the adult from the pupa by linking together two elongate galeae to form one tube with a single food canal. How do lepidopterans maintain the integrity and function of the proboscis while foraging from various substrates?

The research questions included whether lepidopteran species are capable of total self-repair, how …

The Job Demands-Resources Model: Understanding The Impact Of Job Characteristics On Healthcare Leaders, Nastassia Marie Savage

All Dissertations

The job demands-resources (JD-R) model is one of the most popular in occupational health psychology but it often overlooks a key group: leaders. This study applies this framework to leaders in healthcare, considering how challenge and hindrance demands and resources via their unit's perceptions of teamwork impact the affective states of the leader. This study also considers meaningful work, rather than engagement, as the motivational process as it is highly relevant in healthcare. Many JD-R models also include how the motivational and health impairment processes influence performance; this study considers the leader's rating of their unit's performance, accounting for the …

The Below-Ground Competitive Ability And Allelopathic Potential Of Palmer Amaranth (Amaranthus Palmeri) In Soybean, Dwayne D. Joseph

All Dissertations

Palmer amaranth (Amaranthus palmeri S. Watson) has quickly become one of the most economically important weeds in South Carolina soybean production. Its ability to rapidly accumulate root and shoot biomass allows it to effectively compete with crops for light, nutrients and water. To better understand the below-ground competition dynamics between soybean and Palmer amaranth, greenhouse and field experiments were conducted. In 2016 and 2017, field studies were initiated with a split-plot 3x2x2 factorial treatment design. Treatments factors consisted of: neighbor (Palmer amaranth, soybean, none), divider (with and without) and irrigation (irrigated and non-irrigated). The response variables measured were soil …

Targeted Edta Chelation Therapy With Albumin Nanoparticles To Reverse Arterial Calcification And Restore Vascular Health In Chronic Kidney Disease, Saketh Ram Karamched

All Dissertations

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of death globally. An estimated 17.9 million people died from CVDs in 2016, with ~840,000 of them in the United States alone. Traditional risk factors, such as smoking, hypertension, and diabetes, are well discussed. In recent years, chronic kidney disease (CKD) has emerged as a risk factor of equal importance. Patients with mild-to-moderate CKD are much more likely to develop and die from CVDs than progress to end-stage renal failure. Vascular calcification (VC), typical in aging, several genetic and metabolic disorders, is now recognized as a strong and independent predictor of cardiovascular events …

Toward New Ecologies Of Cyberphysical Representational Forms, Scales, And Modalities, Alexandre Gomes De Siqueira

All Dissertations

Research on tangible user interfaces commonly focuses on tangible interfaces acting alone or in comparison with screen-based multi-touch or graphical interfaces. In contrast, hybrid approaches can be seen as the norm for established "mainstream" interaction paradigms. This dissertation describes interfaces that support complementary information mediations, representational forms, and scales toward an ecology of systems embodying hybrid interaction modalities. I investigate systems combining tangible and multi-touch, as well as systems combining tangible and virtual reality interaction. For each of them, I describe work focusing on design and fabrication aspects, as well as work focusing on reproducibility, engagement, legibility, and perception aspects.

Pairing Passive Sampling With Epigenetic Biomarkers Of Exposure To Monitor Potential Toxic Impact Of Environmental Complex Mixtures, David C. Wyker

All Dissertations

The goal of this study was to develop a means of assessing and monitoring the potential impacts of complex mixtures in surface waters by utilizing environmentally representative mixtures collected using passive sampling devices and whole organism bioassays, which equally represent the complex biological systems they are acting on. Chemical monitoring across three watersheds and comprising seven sampling locations was conducted across Georgia and South Carolina using passive sampling devices (PSDs). Earlier research conducted in the lab showed differing, and significant responses from fish sampled at many of these sites using the ethoxyresorufin-O-deethylase (EROD) and glutathione S-transferase (GST) bioassays. The polar …

Experience Qualities Re-Examined: Improving The Measurement Of Experiential Conditions In Outdoor Recreation, Jessica Pearl Fefer

All Dissertations

Visitor use management (VUM) is the proactive and adaptive process for managing characteristics of visitor use and the natural and managerial setting using a variety of strategies and tools to achieve and maintain desired resource conditions and visitor experiences (IVUMC, 2018). For nearly 40 years, the application and operationalization of visitor use management has relied on a normative approach, which assumes that visitors to parks and recreation areas have shared attitudes and preferences about resource and social conditions. Visitor use management frameworks and the normative approach rely on defining management objectives, identifying indicators and thresholds for the visitor experience, monitoring …

Joint Management Of Biofuel Production And Food Production To Optimize Energy Return To Land Use In Thailand: A Regional Mathematical Programming Approach, Watcharapol Pumkaew

All Dissertations

This study approached the conflict between energy and food needs by balancing the allocation of land area devoted to food and feed with land area to grow biofuel feedstocks. The selected optimization model was a tool that included a regional approach to determine the optimum potential land area of Thailand to use in biofuel production without affecting the supply of food and feed. The selected crops were sugarcane, cassava, and palm oil with consideration of four geographic regions of Thailand, which were the Northern, Northeastern, Central and Southern regions. The optimum cropland area and crop types in each region were …

Evaluation Of The Potential For Ecological Treatment Technologies To Remediate Species Of Phytophthora From Irrigation Runoff, Natasha Lynn Bell

All Dissertations

Increased incidences and severity of drought have reduced reliable access to freshwater sources for irrigation purposes by nursery and greenhouse plant producers. Many plant producers are now considering onsite remediation and reuse of water captured from irrigation runoff. However, potential contamination of recycled water with plant pathogens, primarily species of Phytophthora, is the primary concern preventing many growers from reusing their water. Species of Phytophthora are capable of infecting thousands of host plants and cause some of the most economically important diseases of nursery and greenhouse crops worldwide. Phytophthora spp. produce motile, swimming zoospores that often serve as propagules …

Hydrogeologic And Geomorphic Processes In A Wastewater Spray Irrigated Agricultural System Located In A Karstic Seasonably-Cold Climate, Timothy J. Daniel

All Theses

Wastewater reuse, particularly via the use of spray irrigation of treated effluent, is a common practice worldwide and can help lessen the impact of the overconsumption of water resources. The increased recharge to the subsurface that enhances weathering and erosion during the irrigation application process makes it important to characterize any changes in the land surface over time. The Living Filter at Pennsylvania State University receives on average 1.5 million gallons per day (MGD) of secondary treated wastewater effluent year round. This Living Filter has been in continuous operation in some capacity for the past 55 years without any significant …

Evaluation Of Factors Influencing Irrigation Adoption Among Farmers In The Southeast, Patrick Carroll Combs

All Theses

Irrigation adoption can improve the yield and frequency of use of crop land, therefore increasing the quality and output of irrigated farms. With the expectation of water shortages out West, as well as an increasing population in the U.S., there is a greater opportunity for farmers in the Southeast to supply agricultural products, such as food and fiber. The proportion of farmers who irrigate, the proportion of farmland that is irrigated, and irrigated land's share of the area of farms that irrigate in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and the five-state region of the Southeast are used to …

The Soap Opera Of Predatory Publishing And Student Research, Jenessa Mcelfresh, Megan Sheffield

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Twenty-First Century Noir: From Stieg Larsson’S Trilogy To Dolores Redondo’S Trilogy And Eva García Sáenz De Urturi’S Trilogy, Salvador Oropesa

Publications

Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy has influenced twenty-first century Spanish noir, especially Dolores Redondo’s Baztán Trilogy and Eva García Sáenz de Urturi’s White City Trilogies. Larsson’s novels put mysoginy and its violent consequences at the center of noir and provided the development of constitutional rights as the solution to the problem. Following the logic of Western literature, all these texts use myths to make sense of modern problems. Pre-Christian mythology is presented as the root of contemporary evil acts. The novels warn their readers that the return to an ahistorical past and magic brings abomination and inordinate pain. In the …

Become A Presentation Powerhouse - Developing Skills For Effective, Meaningful Oral Presentations, Jenessa Mcelfresh

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Clemson University Latino Voices: Past, Present, Future, Derek Wilmott

Presentations

The Creative Inquiry program combines engaged learning and undergraduate research at Clemson University. This project challenged a Creative Inquiry class to produce a mini-documentary film through research in the Special Collections of the Latinx community's early histories; interviewing students, alumni, faculty, and staff; and using the Libraries' Adobe Digital Studio.

Of Sheep, Oranges, And Yeast: A Multispecies Impression / Julian Yates, Jim Beaver

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.

Addiction And Devotion In Early Modern England / Rebecca Lemon, Molly Hand

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.