Digital Commons Network^™

Soundscape Ecology: Rich Contexts For Investigating Conservation Biology & The Effect Of Informal Environmental Experiences On Youth’S Conceptual Understanding, Interest And Identity Development, Maryam Ghadiri Khanaposhtani

Open Access Dissertations

Recent educational studies have shown increasing lack of interest and participation of youth (ages 10-14 years old) in various STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields in the U.S. The decline in the number of youth choosing to study STEM fields in higher education and the resulting lack of STEM professionals in the society has drastic economic impacts. Therefore, it is critical to introduce youth to quality STEM education that engages them with science practices and triggers their interest and curiosity in order to increase their participation in those fields. To address this issue, the aim of this study is …

Baroque Modes Of Seeing: Reinventing Neo-Baroque In Contemporary Latin American Cinema, Liana Hakobyan

Open Access Dissertations

While the Latin American literary neo-baroque garnered significant attention, scholarship on its cinematic counterpart has been relatively scarce. What is more, existing studies situate this aesthetics within the anti-dictatorship contexts of the 1970s-80s, which contradicts major neo-baroque theories that view it as an ahistorical aesthetics relevant to Latin American modernities. “Baroque Modes of Seeing: Reinventing Neo-baroque in Contemporary Latin American Cinema” is a dissertation that addresses this gap in research and argues for the relevance of the neo-baroque in contemporary Latin American cinema. I engage texts by Severo Sarduy, José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, Serge Gruzinski, Irlemar Chiampi and others …

Characterizing Trade-Off Decisions In Student Designers, Molly Hathaway Goldstein

Open Access Dissertations

Decision-making and design in uncertain situations in which information is limited and goals are ambitious or conflicting are a part of common practices of engineers. Such abilities in engineering practices are important to develop for all students from elementary school through college and graduate school. An important aspect of decision-making in design are the trade-offs decisions designers make throughout a project. Trade-offs are a complex element of a decision, that involves weighing possible outcomes against their respective benefits and costs in areas such as aesthetics, cost, degree of safety, and various performance indicators. Making trade-off decisions is an effective design …

Native Graph Support In Relational Data Systems, Mohamed S. Hassan

Open Access Dissertations

A variety of data management applications spanning various domains, e.g., social networks, transportation, and bioinformatics, have graphs as first-class citizens. Specialized graph databases can serve these applications to evaluate vital graph-traversal queries, e.g., shortest path and reachability queries. However, specialized graph databases are not as mature as the pervasive relational database systems. Although the literature has several proposals to process graph queries inside an RDBMS, none of these proposals process graphs natively inside an RDBMS for potentially better performance, which is particularly challenging due to the impedance mismatch between the relational and the graph models. Additionally, to scale for large …

An Examination Of Underrepresentation In Florida, Indiana, And Washington, Jaret Hodges

Open Access Dissertations

Black, Latinx, and Native American students are underrepresented in gifted education programs across the United States. This underrepresentation is one way in which the excellence gap manifests in gifted education. In turn, the underlying causes for underrepresentation are debated by scholars. This dissertation examines the issue of underrepresentation through three case studies. In all case studies, a generalized linear mixed model is used as the framework to analyze publicly available data acquired from the associated state departments of education.

The first case study examines underrepresentation in the state of Florida. In this study, the influence of socioeconomic status on rates …

The Regulatory Role Of Isopentenyl Phosphate Kinase In Plants And The Evolution Of Terpenoid Diversity In Lamiaceae, Laura K. Henry

Open Access Dissertations

Chapter 1 of this dissertation provides background information into the two plant terpenoid biosynthetic pathways, the mevalonate (MVA) and 2-C-methyl-D-erythritol 4-phosphate (MEP) pathways. These pathways are responsible for the formation of the five-carbon building blocks isopentenyl pyrophosphate (IPP) and dimethylallyl pyrophosphate (DMAPP). These metabolites are then condensed to form various chains of C5x terpenoids. The diversity of terpenoids within the diverse Lamiaceae is also discussed.

Chapter 2 looks at the role of a homolog of the archeal gene isopentenyl phosphate kinase (IPK) in plants. IPK is found in all sequenced plant genomes and acts in parallel with the canonical MVA …

Quantification Of Morphogen Gradients And Patterning Scale Invariance Along Dorsal-Ventral Embryonic Axis, Yan Huang

Open Access Dissertations

Morphogen gradients provide positional information to underlying cells that translate the information into differential gene expression and eventually different cell fates. Scale invariance is the property where the gradients of the morphogen adjust proportionately to the size of the domain. Scale invariance of morphogen gradients or patterns of differentiation is a common phenomenon observed between individuals within the same species and between homologous tissues or structures in different species. To determine whether a pattern is scale invariant, we and others developed definitions and measurements of gradient scaling. These include point-wise and global scaling errors as well as global scaling power. …

Pathways To Persistence: A Study Of The Effects Of Neighborhood Stress And Family Communication Patterns On Community College Student Outcomes, Jill Marie Inderstrodt

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation draws upon literature from family communication, sociology, public health, and education to determine what neighborhood and family factors contribute to a community college student’s commitment to the goal of completing college. Community college students are more likely to come from low socioeconomic conditions, are more likely to have parents who did not earn a college degree, and are more likely to be ethnic or racial minorities than traditional four-year college students. Because of these demographics, community college students are also more likely to live in neighborhoods with high levels of neighborhood stress: noise and other pollution, crime, high …

Resource Allocation In Nanocommunication Networks And Online Service Platforms., Wei-Kang Hsu

Open Access Dissertations

Resource allocation appears in various forms in communication and networking systems. In this thesis, we start with relay-based nanonetwork communications and analyze the message delay with bacteria-inspired message transfer carriers. Modeling the message transfer as a renewal process, we draw the connection to the mobility model of ad-hoc networks and show that the expected message delay between two nodes is a convex function of the number of available carriers. We then design a decentralized carrier-allocation strategy such that the systematic message delay is minimized. We show that the proposed policy can effectively reduce weighted delays when different message priorities are …

The Alien Eye: Chinese Self-Images And The External Observer, 1874–1911, Yingying Huang

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation is a literary study of how and why late Qing Chinese self-image formation involved the “alien eye,” by which I mean the view of the foreigner observing and writing about China. I investigate writings and occasionally images produced within the period from 1874 to 1911, framed by the founding of the first Chinese-owned modern newspaper and the overthrow of the Qing empire. The literary genres I address include essays, short stories, novels, and plays. While effects of foreign views of China on the Chinese varied from positive stimulation to psychological damage, I argue that Chinese’ appropriation of the …

A Multi-Agent Control Approach For Optimization Of Central Cooling Plants, Rita Jaramillo

Open Access Dissertations

This research focuses on the application of a multi-agent control approach to optimal supervisory control of central cooling systems. Most of the research related to supervisory control of central cooling systems has focused on centralized control approaches. Although these approaches can be effective at reducing operational costs, the high initial costs associated with site-specific controller design and implementation, and the need to update the plant model and control sequences every time a modification is made, have prevented a greater penetration of these technologies in the market. In light of these limitations, the goal of this research is the development and …

Essays On Labor Economics, Xuan Jiang

Open Access Dissertations

Quantum annealing (QA) uses the principles of quantum mechanics for solving unconstrained optimization problems. Since its initial proposal, there has been much interest in the search for practical problems for which QA has advantage over classical algorithms. Although it is believed that quantum computers cannot in general solve NP-complete problems effciently, there has been evidence suggesting that effects such as quantum tunneling can bring quantum speedup over classical computation for some problems in NP.

In this dissertation, we consider two problems that have both theoretical and practical importance. One is the Set Cover with Pairs problem. The other is the …

Early Social Origins Of Premature Aging: How Do Childhood Exposures Shape Aging And Mortality?, Blakelee R. Kemp

Open Access Dissertations

The early origins of health literature documents a distinct link between early life exposures and a range of pathologies in later life. However, it is still unclear if and which types of childhood events and experiences shape biological aging or increase mortality risk among older adults. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine (1) what types of early life exposures influence biological aging and mortality and for whom and (2) whether biological age acts as a marker of early life stress and a predictor of mortality. Drawing from cumulative inequality theory, this dissertation uses six waves of data (2004-2014) …

Agent-Based Approach For System Identification And Optimal Control Of High Performance Buildings, Jaewan Joe

Open Access Dissertations

Commercial buildings have strong impacts on humans and the environment. They not only affect occupants’ comfort, health, and well-being but also consume more than 19% of the total energy consumption in the US. High performance building designs can achieve significant energy savings, with new building technologies such as advanced building envelopes, thermally activated building systems, on-site power production and thermal storage; dynamic effects related to variability in occupancy and environmental conditions; diversity in occupant thermal preferences; and the integration of these diverse technologies into an overall control system design. Model-based predictive control (MPC) is a promising approach for the realization …

Assessment Of Dcnet: A New Data Center Network Architecture, Rajas H. Karandikar

Open Access Dissertations

Migration of enterprise computation and storage to cloud data centers has imposed new communication requirements and a need for fundamental changes in infrastructure. As more applications are hosted inside virtual machines and containers in the cloud, a significant amount of networking occurs within data centers, increasing the so-called east-west communication. With the increasing use of virtual machines and their migration across physical servers, future data centers must support efficient mobility in addition to traditional requirements of scalability and easy manageability. This dissertation proposes and analyzes a radical redesign of data center networks, using a new approach called DCnet. DCnet changes …

“Muthologos Has Lost Such Ground”: Myth, History And Orality In The Poetics Of Charles Olson, Matthew L. Kroll

Open Access Dissertations

American poet Charles Olson (1910-1970) spent the last two decades of his life composing his magnum opus, the three-volume modern verse epic The Maximus Poems (Maximus). He began composing Maximus in 1950, the same year he published his poetics manifesto “Projective Verse.” Taken together, these two moments in Olson’s career can be read as marking the beginning of his mature poetics and poetry. However, the concepts he develops and the projective verse style he proclaims in the first half of the 1950s can already be seen emerging in his earlier publications.

Beginning with two of his most significant publications of …

Refracting Gender: Experiences Of Transgender Students In Postsecondary Stem Education., Elizabeth Kersey

Open Access Dissertations

Transgender students are often an invisible minority in postsecondary education, particularly in STEM fields. I am addressing the lack of research in this area with an exploratory narrative study designed to answer two questions: (1) How have the experiences of postsecondary transgender students in STEM education varied with their gender presentation? (2) How do their experiences with mathematics compare with other STEM fields? I conducted a sequence of three interviews each with three participants to gather information about their life histories relating to gender and STEM. This information was then restoried utilizing the three-dimensional space of narrative inquiry proposed by …

Understanding Autism Spectrum Disorder Through A Cultural Lens: Perspectives, Stigma, And Cultural Values Among Asians, Ankita Krishnan

Open Access Dissertations

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that has become increasingly prevalent in cross-cultural literature. Despite the well-supported finding that culture informs perceptions, belief patterns, values, there is little research illuminating this association or the fundamental role of culture for understanding ASD as a whole. The present study investigated the relationships among knowledge of ASD, stigma related to ASD, and cultural values among self-identified Asian individuals living in the United States (N= 373). Exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) was used to examine model fit of ASD knowledge assessment and cultural values in this sample, as well as to investigate …

To Give Or To Act? The Transition Of Ngos From Aid Donors To Human Rights Advocates, Junhyup Kim

Open Access Dissertations

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become increasingly important as a political group of actors in international politics since the 1990s. Above all, the NGOs engaging in economic aid have greatly contributed to foreign aid to developing countries. The significance of this study is placed on the transition of NGOs from aid providers to human rights advocates. The transition to human rights advocates signifies that charity organizations have now become a major form of political actor. The research question is why some aid NGOs engage in human rights issues, while others do not. I argue that contact with human rights norms is …

An Examination Of Marketing Factors That Influence Nontraditional Student Enrollment Decisions, Jianping Landrum

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine marketing factors that influence the decisions of working professionals to enroll as nontraditional students in the University of their Choice. Research has shown that factors such as affordability, access, and availability matter to nontraditional students. Marketing campaigns have often focused on these three factors, perhaps to the exclusion of other factors that may be equally important and compelling in helping working professionals decide to return to college for an advanced degree. This research explored seven marketing mix factors (Price, Promotion, Physical Evidence, People, Product, Process, and Place) and the extent to which …

Combatting Advanced Persistent Threat Via Causality Inference And Program Analysis, Yonghwi Kwon

Open Access Dissertations

Cyber attackers are becoming more and more sophisticated. In particular, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is a new class of attack that targets a specifc organization and compromises systems over a long time without being detected. Over the years, we have seen notorious examples of APTs including Stuxnet which disrupted Iranian nuclear centrifuges and data breaches affecting millions of users. Investigating APT is challenging as it occurs over an extended period of time and the attack process is highly sophisticated and stealthy. Also, preventing APTs is diffcult due to ever-expanding attack vectors.

In this dissertation, we present proposals for dealing with …

Beyond Animation: Toward A Rhetoric Of Motion Design For Technical And Professional Writing, Daniel Joseph Liddle

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation grounds the relationship between visual rhetoric in professional and technical communication and motion design, a sub-discipline of graphic design that focuses on the movement of typography, color, and abstract shapes. Although scholars in professional and technical communication readily discuss the problematic use of animation in web design and presentation graphics (PowerPoint, Prezi, etc), there has been little recognition of the growing use of animated motion in contemporary multimedia design. I argue that these connections are necessary given the increasingly standard role of motion as a design element in common genres in professional communication, including user interfaces, explainer videos, …

Optimal Placement Of A Small Order In A Diffusive Limit Order Book, Hyoeun Lee

Open Access Dissertations

A Limit Order Book (LOB), a trading system used by most of the electronic financial trading exchanges across the world, collects all the buy and sell limit orders: orders that specify a desired price and quantity. Limit orders are executed by matching them to the market orders: orders to buy or sell certain quantities or shares at the best available prices out of the standing limit orders in the book. In an order-driven market using the LOB system, one of the stock trader’s major concerns is to clear his/her inventory, by using a combination of limit orders and market orders. …

Disciplinary Differences In A Community Of Inquiry, Jieun Lim

Open Access Dissertations

The Community of Inquiry framework has been used in numerous studies, with over 1800 citations to date (Google Scholar, January 2018). These studies mostly involve the study of a single discipline and rarely examine disciplinary differences as a potential factor in student outcomes. To address the research gap this study examined the differences in students’ social, cognitive, and teaching presence and the effects of those presences on the students’ learning outcomes according to their academic disciplines.

This study used an explanatory sequential mixed-method design in two phases. The data were collected from 25 undergraduate online courses at two large public …

Web Site Analytics: The Potential For The Transformation Of A Restaurant’S Marketing Strategy - A Case Study Of A Casual Dining Restaurant In The Midwest, Stephen Rolan Leitch

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to show independent restaurateurs the value that Web site analytics can have on providing data about the visitors to their Web site and the marketing opportunities these data provide. The study surveyed customers about their restaurant Web site browsing behaviors and analyzed Web site analytical data of a casual dining restaurant in the Midwest. Analysis was conducted using t-tests and analysis of variance. Findings indicated that certain browsing behaviors were associated with an increased number of reservations and visitation to the restaurant Web site prior to dining impacted average check. The study is the …

Large Scale Data Analysis In Parallel R And Its Use In Efficiently Scheduling Batch Jobs In The Cloud, Hao Lin

Open Access Dissertations

Large-scale data management and deep data analysis are increasingly important for both enterprise and scientific applications. Statistical languages provide rich functionality and ease of use for data analysis and modeling and have large user bases. R is among the most widely used of these languages, but is limited by a single threaded execution model and problem sizes that fit in a single node. We propose a highly parallel R system called RABID (R Analytics for BIg Data) that maintains R compatibility, leverages the MapReduce-like Spark framework and achieves high performance and scaling across clusters. RABID preserves the R programming model …

I Just Don't Feel Like I Am The Authentic Me: Navigating Identity And Organizational Identification Through Experiences Of Workplace Incivility, Jennifer S. Linvill

Open Access Dissertations

Workplace incivility is a pervasive problem in organizations worldwide. Given the current political and social climates in the United States, it is a relevant and timely topic that requires further understanding. The current study contributes to this growing body of empirical research by examining how individuals’ multiple identities (i.e., age, gender, national origin, race, sexual orientation) and organizational identification relate to their experiences with workplace incivility. Additionally, this project explores how targets’ experiences with workplace incivility relate to power and control. Through in-depth interviews with individuals who have experienced workplace incivility, the study makes several important contributions.

This study provides …

Do You Smoke?: How Physicians Navigate Conversations About Smoking And Lung Cancer, Mary E. Marshall

Open Access Dissertations

Lung cancer, the second most commonly diagnosed cancer, is a leading cause of death among older adults (Cronin et al., 2018; Siegel, Miller, & Jemal, 2017). While there are numerous health benefits associated with smoking cessation in patients with advanced lung cancer (Gemine & Lewis, 2017; Parsons, Daley, Begh, & Aveyard, 2010), conversations about smoking cessation are infrequent and often lack physician support for cessation (Warren, Marshall, et al., 2013; Wells et al., 2017). Physicians may avoid lengthy conversations about smoking to protect patients from feeling shame and guilt due to the perceived stigma associated with smoking and a lung …

Hablar De Memoria: Trauma Y Recuperación Del Discurso En La Joven Narrativa Chilena, Carmen Martin Quijada

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between trauma, memory and discourse in the work of the most recent generation of Chilean authors, seeking to determine how these young writers review Chilean history from the perspective and interpretative possibilities of literary texts. Based on the notion of trauma as an impossibility to narrate and communicate the past, this study describes how, in each of the novels studied, a renewed awareness of the traumatic effects of the military dictatorship's violence can be perceived in Chile, as well as a firm intention to review that past and reverse the effects that violence has had …

Evaluating The Efficacy Of Correlation-Based Meta-Analytic Structural Equation Modeling Under Different Patterns Of Missing Correlations, Jing Lv

Open Access Dissertations

Missing correlations often happen in the primary correlation matrices and create major problems for the performance of meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM). In current literature, methodological investigation regarding the performance of MASEM methods paired with a large proportion of missing data is limited. This simulation study was designed to investigate the impacts of missing conditions on the correlation-based MASEM performance, utilizing weighted-covariance generalized least squares (W-COV GLS) with pairwise deletion (PD), W-COV GLS with multiple imputation (MI), and two-stage structural equation modeling (TSSEM) to pool the correlation matrices. Specifically, impacts of the study number (k), the within study sample size …