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Featured Bookshelf: 2021 Asian Pacific American Heritage, Megan M. Haught

Featured Bookshelf

Welcome to Asian Pacific American Heritage Month!

It has been a difficult 14 months for the world, but our Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) brothers and sisters have faced even more struggles. From small harassments to intense acts of violence, the AAPI community has borne the brunt of American fears and grief relating to the pandemic. These malicious acts demonstrate as a country we are not living up to the ideals of our nation. As Americans and Knights, we need to demonstrate these ideals are worth fighting for. Actions you can take range from learning more about the AAPI experience …

The Physics Of Nanoaperture Optical Traps: Design, Fabrication And Experimentation, Chenyi Zhang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Recent progress in nano optics, spurred by progress in nanofabrication, has allowed us to overcome these challenges. We use surface plasmon polaritons to break the optical diffraction limit and squeeze the photon energy into a local hot spot. The small mode volume of a plasmonic antenna or nanoaperature significantly enhances the local field and can be designed to resonate at a desired wavelength. By designing, fabricating, and testing these nanoapertures, I trap single nanoparticles with significantly reduced laser power by measuring the monochromatic transmission change of a resonant aperture. A freely diffused nanoparticle, behaving like a dipole antenna, interacts with …

Investigating Topologic And Geometric Properties Of Synthetic And Natural River Networks Under Changing Climate, Shiblu Sarker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

River networks are important landscape features that collect and transport water, sediment and nutrients from regions of higher elevation to lower elevations. These networks have been studied for several decades from a range of geomorphological and hydrological perspectives. Investigating the geometric and topological properties of river networks is important for developing predictive models describing the network dynamics under changing climate as well as for quantifying the physical processes operating upon them. Although these networks have been characterized for a wide range of geomorphic properties, topological properties, and in particular, spectral properties of river networks received limited attention. In this dissertation, …

Covid-19: Exploring The Probability Of Disease Extinction - A Modeling And Simulation Study, Donald Porchia

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

There are two distinct topics considered in this dissertation. The first is the formulation of a compartmental model using reactive social distancing in which disease transmission changes as a function of the state variables of the model; in this case, the cumulative incidence. The model assumes a single strain epidemic of Covid-19 in the United States and is used to estimate the cumulative number of deaths due to the epidemic where incidence data is used to calibrate and validate the model. The second topic concerns the use of the stochastic threshold to determine disease persistence or extinction. The Covid-19 pandemic …

Surface Engineering Of Cerium Oxide Nanocyrstal Dispersions: Colloidal Properties, Ageing Effects, & Electroanalysis, Craig Neal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Colloidal materials are highly diverse and present complex physicochemical properties which define their utilities in applications spanning diverse industries. In particular, nano-scale colloids have received tremendous attention due to their unique, specific activities as compared to larger-sized preparations. Within the biomedical sciences, nano-colloids are routinely used as inert carriers of therapeutics and/or diagnostic agents. Beyond this, researchers have developed functional colloids which demonstrate bio-active or diagnostic properties themselves: often related to an optimized, or tuned, surface character. Among these, nanoscale cerium oxide (nanoceria) has shown great promise as a bi-functional, therapeutic material: producing pro- or anti- oxidative chemical response in …

A Scientist Observes Florida: 1870, John Large, Jr.

Florida Historical Quarterly

No roll of nineteenth century America’s eminent men of science would be complete without the name of Jared Potter Kirtkurd. His noteworthy career was no less of an ornament to the historical recollection of northeastern Ohio than to the scientific fraternity of the country as a whole. Kirtland’s endeavors led him into many areas of public enlightenment. Born in Connecticut in 1793, of deeply-rooted New England ancestry, young Jared had shown an early enthusiasm for horticulture and natural history. At the age of fifteen years he made an original scientific contribution. Later in 1815, at Yale Medical College, he received …

Suggestions For Research In The Culture And Society Of A Spanish Florida, William B. Griffen

Florida Historical Quarterly

Florida was established as a functional part of the Spanish colonies in 1565. Saint Augustine was from the beginning the focal point of the Spanish Empire in Florida from which the social and cultural influences of the Iberian civilizers were radiated into the hinterland, transforming to some degree both the physical environment and the human groups bearing different ways of life which were encountered. But, not only from the standpoint of Spanish-Indian culture contact and acculturation does early Florida hold interest for the anthropologist. The imported European culture is also of tremendous importance to be understood in the development of …

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume. Volume 2

Human-Machine Communication

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 2.

Artificial Intuition In Tech Journalism On Ai: Imagining The Human Subject, Jacob Johanssen, Xin Wang

Human-Machine Communication

Artificial intuition (AI acting intuitively) is one trend in artificial intelligence. This article analyzes how it is discussed by technology journalism on the internet. The journalistic narratives that were analyzed claim that intuition can make AI more efficient, autonomous, and human. Some commentators also write that intuitive AI could execute tasks better than humans themselves ever could (e.g., in digital games); therefore, it could ultimately surpass human intuition. Such views do not pay enough attention to biases as well as transparency and explainability of AI. We contrast the journalistic narratives with philosophical understandings of intuition and a psychoanalytic view of …

Social Responses To Media Technologies In The 21st Century: The Media Are Social Actors Paradigm, Matthew Lombard, Kun Xu

Human-Machine Communication

Clifford Nass and his colleagues proposed the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm in the 1990s and demonstrated that we treat computers in some of the ways we treat humans. To account for technological advances and to refine explanations for CASA results, this paper proposes the Media Are Social Actors (MASA) paradigm. We begin by distinguishing the roles of primary and secondary cues in evoking medium-as-social-actor presence and social responses. We then discuss the roles of individual differences and contextual factors in these responses and identify mindless and mindful anthropomorphism as two major complementary mechanisms for understanding MASA phenomena. Based …

Moving Ahead With Human-Machine Communication, Leopoldina Fortunati, Autumn P. Edwards

Human-Machine Communication

In this essay, we introduce the 10 articles comprising Volume 2 (2021) of Human-Machine Communication, each of which is innovative and offers a substantial contribution to the field of human-machine communication (HMC). As a collection, these articles move forward the HMC project by touching on four layers of important discourse: (1) updates to theoretical frameworks and paradigms, including Computers as Social Actors (CASA), (2) examination of ontology and prototyping processes, (3) critical analysis of gender and ability/disability relations, and (4) extension of HMC scholarship into organizational contexts. Building upon the insights offered by the contributing authors and incorporating perspectives …

The Impact Of Skeletal Muscle Disuse On Distinct Echo Intensity Bands: A Retrospective Analysis, Zachary Logeson, Gerard-Kyle Abad, Johnathon Methven, Molly Gradl

UCF DPT Research Capstone

Echo intensity (EI) is a novel tool for assessing muscle quality. EI has traditionally been reported as the mean of the pixel histogram, with 0 and 255 arbitrary units (A.U.) representing exceptional and poor muscle quality, respectively. Analyzing specific EI bands, rather than the mean, may provide novel insight into changes in muscle quality.

PURPOSE: As our previous work showed deterioration of muscle quality after knee immobilization, we sought to retrospectively explore whether the increase in EI following disuse was limited to specific bands of the EI histogram.

METHODS: Thirteen females (age = 21 yrs) underwent two weeks of knee …

Assessing Change In Runoff Water Parameters Through Road Shoulder Vegetated Filter Strips: Experimental Comparison Of Soils And Engineered Infiltration Media, Andrew Corrado, Mohammad Shokri

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

Placement of Vegetated Filter Strips (VFS) along roadways may facilitate removal of nutrients from stormwater runoff. The objective of this research is to compare water quality performance of a VFS containing engineered media to that of typical Florida sandy soil. Storms of variable intensity were simulated over two 1:1 scale physical models of typical one- and two-lane roadway shoulders, one with engineered media (treatment), and one without (control). Simulated roadway runoff was introduced as sheet flow from the roadway and precipitation was applied with a rainfall simulator. Samples of runoff and infiltrate were tested for Dissolved Oxygen (DO) concentration and …

Microplastics, Oysters, And The Indian River Lagoon – Final Report To Irl Nep, March 2021, Linda Walters, Casey Craig

CEELAB Research Data

UCF and partners initiated microplastics (MP) sampling in the Indian River Lagoon in March 2019, with monthly sampling of water samples at 35 locations, and quarterly sampling of oysters through February 2020. Additionally, the ability of the eastern oyster Crassostrea virginica to excrete microplastics was examined. Forty-four percent of water samples contained MP and there was an overall mean (± S.E.) of 1.47 (± 0.05) MP per liter of lagoon water (range: 0 – 25 MP). Fibers were the dominant MP type of MP (95.6%) and no nurdles or microbeads were collected. The dominant color of MP in water was …

Early Education In Tallahassee And The West Florida Seminary Now Florida State University, Part I, William G. Dodd

Florida Historical Quarterly

The school problems of early Tallahassee, after a long process of trial and error, were finally solved by the establishment, on January 1, 1857, of the West Florida Seminary. Though the Seminary was nominally a State institution, actually for many years nearly all of its students were from Tallahassee and vicinity, and it was to all intents and purposes a Tallahassee school. With its location in the town, citizens were at last assured of a permanent means of educating their sons, and a little later, their daughters also. Until this fortunate event, Tallahassee, like the other towns of the Territory …

Book Review, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

A review of The Everglades: River of Grass. By Marjory Stoneman Douglas (New York : Rhinehart and Company, 1947. pp. 406. $3.50)

Vertebrate Impact On A Newly Deployed Shoreline Stabilization Project By Wildlife Camera Analysis, Julia Rifenberg, Jason Litwak, Rebecca Fillyaw

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

Living shoreline stabilization is a technique that utilizes plants and other natural elements to protect estuarine coasts. Research has provided minimal information about which vertebrate species utilize living shorelines post-deployment. For this project, ten wildlife cameras were placed along a living shoreline site in Canaveral National Seashore (CANA) to document which vertebrate species utilize the living shoreline and surrounding vegetation. This shoreline was stabilized with red mangroves (Rhizophora mangle) and eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) shell bags in June 2019. The cameras, activated by motion sensors, remained at the site for five days a month for seven …

Knowledge Organization Systems & Their Applications, Sai Deng

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This training session introduces Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) and their applications especially in the Library and Information Science (LIS) field. It talks about various KOS systems including term lists, subject headings, categorization schemas, classification schemas, taxonomies, thesauri, semantic networks and ontologies. It gives many KOS examples especially those pertain to LIS such as BIBFRAME. It also discusses the process and different methods of creating categories, tag libraries and taxonomies. It was delivered to librarians and staff members in Technical Services at the University Central Florida Libraries and aimed to help catalogers better understand knowledge organization related concepts and systems in …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Includes Clark’s translation of Espinosa, Albert Manucy; The Letters of Don Juan McQueen, Katherine S. Lawson

Success Of Glover’S Reef Marine Reserve On Queen Conch (Strombus Gigas) Populations In Belize, Gianna Fanelli, Ciera Jarrett, Sara Joralemon

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

The queen conch (Strombus gigas) provides important economic, ecological, and societal benefits to local communities throughout the Caribbean. The species, however, has fallen victim to commercial exploitation and overfishing in many areas. In Belize, even with restricted harvesting seasons, size restrictions, and regulations set by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), harvesting practices have significantly depleted populations. Marine reserves, including the Glover’s Reef Marine Reserve, were established to protect biodiversity and maintain populations of Belize’s natural coral reefs. Utilizing size, frequency, and evidence of harvesting (shell notches), the 2018 Tropical Marine Biology (BSC 3355) course …

Research Projects On Florida Subjects, Watt Marchman

Florida Historical Quarterly

Walter B. Hill, librarian, University of Florida; Louise Richardson, librarian, Florida State College for Women; Charlotte Smith, librarian, John B. Stetson University; G. A. Nuermberger, reference librarian, Duke University ; Robert J. Usher, librarian, Tulane University; and to Mrs. Sarah H. Hall, University of Georgia Library. Without constant cooperation and advice of Professor A. J. Hanna, chairman, Advisory Council, Union Catalog of Floridiana, the compilation would not have been possible. An alphabetical arrangement has been adopted. Abbreviations are : contem. (contemplated) ; compl. (completed) ; prog. (in progress) ; print. (in press) ; art. (article).

The Tekesta Indians Of Southern Florida, John Mann Groggin

Florida Historical Quarterly

The Tekesta Indians at the time of the discovery of America occupied a portion of southeastern Florida. This area seems to have comprised the greater part of Dade county and possibly to have extended north to Pompano in Broward county. To the south toward Cape Sable it is difficult to tell where the boundary between the Calusa and the Tekesta was, although Barcia says there was a Tekesta village named Abayoa at the southern extremity of the Florida peninsula (probably Cape Sable). (Barcia, Ensayo 2, bibliography, post). However, archaeological evidence seems to indicate that sites about Cape Sable are more …

Setting The Stage: Metadata & Kos Considerations, Sai Deng

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This talk addresses how to select metadata standards and prepare for a Knowledge Organization System (KOS) in planning a digital project. It compares several metadata standards mostly related to bibliographical information, talks about various KOS systems including term lists, subject headings, categorization schemas, classification schemas and taxonomies. It also gives a list of KOS examples and projects related to or designed for philosophy resources. Furthermore, it discusses the process and different methods in creating categories, tag libraries and taxonomies. It is prepared for students who work on a bibliographic database class project in the Texts and Technology program at the …

Effects Of Varying Heat Indexes On Habitat Utilization And Behavior On Captive Red-Ruffed Lemurs (Varecia Rubra), Jeffrey Gammon

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

The two captive red-ruffed lemurs (Varecia rubra) at the Central Florida Zoo experienced a more temperate climate and utilized a differing habitat than they would in their native range, Madagascar. Proper management of the species in captivity is crucial for its long-term survival as they are critically endangered. Over a four month period, heat index temperature, lemur behavior, and habitat utilization data were collected via an instantaneous scan sample. Variables were analyzed to characterize how variations in heat index alter habitat utilization and behavior of the captive lemurs. As the heat index increased, habitat use became more restricted …

Academic Affairs Diversity Taskforce Enewsletter #004, Academic Affairs Diversity Taskforce

Academic Affairs Diversity Taskforce

February 2021 edition of the UCF Academic Affairs Diversity Taskforce Newsletter calls for volunteers from other departments and colleges, shares new subcommittees, a Black History Month Reading List, and Women's History Month virtual events.

“Committed to a globalized, competitive and innovative workforce through diversity and inclusiveness” Academic Affairs Diversity Taskforce Newsletter Information on professional development and Diversity & Inclusion related news and events delivered directly to your inbox every semester.

Behavioral Analysis Of The Cryptoprocta Ferox In An Ex-Situ Condition, Emilie Alfonso

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

Fossas (Cryptoprocta ferox) are the top, endemic predators of Madagascar. Their populations are dwindling and are reported as “Vulnerable” by IUCN. In an effort to combat this, zoological facilities have placed the species on a captive breeding program. This study focuses on concerns one of those zoos had about their captive C. ferox. The purpose of this study was to collect activity budgets on the C. ferox to determine if there is a change in behavior due to construction occurring around the C. ferox’s habitat, analyze behavior changes during estrus, determine any behavior changes, as well …

The Relationship Between Depression And Cardiovascular Disease, Jomaries O. Gomez

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

While there has been extensive research on the link between depression and cardiovascular disease, few reviews have summarized the array of findings. In this literature review, we examined approximately 50 clinical papers and research studies to determine if reducing depression could reduce the risk of having a cardiovascular incident and if reducing the severity of cardiovascular disease could reduce depression. We identified two major mechanisms through which depression affects the cardiovascular system. We present evidence that depression and cardiovascular disease may have a reciprocal relationship. For instance, depression is as much of a risk factor for heart disease as smoking …

Observational Study Of Two Ex Situ North American River Otters (Lontra Canadensis), Julia Rifenberg

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

Zoos enable the ability to study how captive conditions impact the behaviors of animals. In this study, I observed two North American river otters housed at the Central Florida Zoo to evaluate behavioral changes after the male had been removed from the female for a month-long medical examination. The aim of this study was to 1) determine if mating behaviors were still occurring between the two river otters following the male’s removal and 2) to assess the welfare of the male and female river otters in captivity by observing their interactions and individual behaviors. Observed behaviors were compared to documented …

Total Salivary Protein Concentration And Its Correlation To Dental Caries, Emyli Peralta, Jonathan Joseph

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

According to the World Health Organization, dental cavities are the number one chronic disease in children. Saliva coats the teeth all day and serves many functions to maintain and protect teeth. Saliva has many proteins that can be both detrimental and essential to the preservation of tooth enamel. The purpose of this study was to determine if a correlation exists between the total protein concentration in saliva and the prevalence of cavities in the mouth. We hypothesized that there would be a positive correlation between total salivary protein concentration and the prevalence of cavities in the participant.Saliva samples were collected …

Personality Patterns In Psychopathology: An Examination Of Lower-Order Personality Facets, Depression, And Anxiety, Tori Jansen

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

Past research concerning personality and psychological disorders have focused predominantly on higher- order personality traits. However, investigating the lower order facets of personality traits may reveal unique aspects of psychological disorders. Participants were asked to complete a survey evaluating the relationships between symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and Social Anxiety Disorder. Associations between these disorders and positive and negative affect were also investigated. This study revealed numerous associations between each of the disorders and various facets compiling each trait. Of particular interest are the links found between facets of Agreeableness and Openness to Experience and all three …