Digital Commons Network^™

Terrorist Attacks Of September 11,2001: Examination Of The Visual Agenda Set By Time And Newsweek, Paula Hoffman Hall

Student Work

This study examines the visual agenda relevant to the attacks of September 11, 2001, presented by media sources; Time and Newsweek magazine. Photographs immediately following the attack, six months later, one year later, and eighteen-months later, were observed in this study. The research produced a total of 493 photographs. Images were coded for the primary subject, portrayal, perspective, topic, and location. Crosstabs and Chi-square tests were run, and the data collected was used to answer the central research question and sub-questions developed with the assistance of past research. Significant differences in the visual agenda between Time and Newsweek magazine were …

Apd: The Multifunctional Antimicrobial Peptide Database And Analysis System., Zhe Wang

Student Work

As of late 2003, more than 500 antimicrobial peptides have been reported. However, the majority data of the antimicrobial peptides are scattered in the literature. In order to better understand the structure-function relationship of these peptides, and antimicrobial peptide database and analysis system (APD) was established based on an extensive literature search. The database contains detailed information for 525 peptides (498 antibacterial , 155 antifungal, 28 antiviral, and 18 antitumor). Based on the database, the system also provides database query, statistical data, prediction and peptide design functions. APD provides web-based interfaces that allow users to visit the system via a …

On Gene Prediction By Cross-Species Comparative Sequenced Analysis., Rong Chen

Student Work

The availability of large fragments of genomic DNA makes it possible to apply comparative genomics for identification of protein-coding regions. We have conducted a comparative analysis of homologous genomic sequences of organisms with different evolutionary distances and found the conservation of the non-coding regions between closely related organisms. In contrast, more distance shows much less intron similarity but less conversion on the exon structures. We sought to illuminate the impact of evolutionary distances on the performance of our gene-finding program based on the cross-species sequence comparison. Based on our finding and training of data sets, we proposed a model by …

Constructing Identity In Place : Celia Thaxter And The Isles Of Shoals, Deborah B. Derrick

Student Work

This study explores rhetorical constructions of place and self in the non-fiction narratives and letters of Celia Laighton Thaxter. Thaxter was a 19th century poet, journalist and writer who grew up on the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire. Widely published in her day, Thaxter was one of the foremothers of American nature writing. This study considers the significance of place in relation to Thaxter’s development as an individual and as a writer. The study finds that the Isles o f Shoals provided a foundation for Thaxter’s personal and professional identities. Thaxter’s relationship with the Shoals was …

Teachers' Perceptions Of Technology Professional Development In A Suburban School District, Victoria Ann Kaspar

Student Work

The purpose of this survey study was to explore teachers' perceptions of technology professional development. Data were gathered by using an online survey sent out electronically to randomly selected teachers in a suburban school district. Statistically significant differences in teacher's perceptions of technology professional development were found between middle and high school teachers and among the teachers with varied technology experience. Some of the other demographic variables studied included age, gender, school subject taught, years of teaching experience, and technology course topic.

Changes In Student Teachers' Perceptions Of Stress During The Student Teaching Semester, Connie L. Schaffer

Student Work

The purpose of this study was to examine the changes in the perceptions of stress during the student teaching semester. The pervasive theory regarding the changing stress of student teachers was developed by Fuller (1969). Fuller's developmental conceptualization theory involved three stages of concern or stress: (1) pre-teaching, non-concerns, (2) early-teaching phase, self-concerns and task concerns, and (3) late concerns, impact concerns. This study examined self-concerns, task concerns, and impact concerns and expanded the Fuller (1969) model to also include personal and career concerns.

Colombia's Rural Communities: Displacement, Plan Colombia And Alternative Models, Jasney Cogua

Student Work

The objective of this thesis is to determine whether or not Plan Colombia effectively addresses the problems and needs of rural Colombia. The classical views of Marx, Lenin and Chayanov, the Theories of Development and the postulates of neoliberal ideology are discussed as the theoretical context within which Plan Colombia emerged. This thesis was derived through a process of archival research, interviews (N=8) and direct observation and participation in peasant demonstrations, which occurred primarily during the summer of 2002. A general review of Colombian rural development models (haciendas, plantations, Import Substitution Industrialization, agrarian reform, Export Promotion Stragies and neoliberal postulates) …

Interactive Topographic Web Mapping Using Scalable Vector Graphics, Peter Pavlicko

Student Work

Large scale topographic maps portray detailed information about the landscape. They are used for a wide variety o f purposes. USGS large scale topographic maps at 1:24,000 have been traditionally distributed in paper form. With the advent of the Internet, these maps can now be distributed electronically. Instead of common raster format presentation, the solution presented here is based on a vector approach. The vector format provides many advantages compared to the use of a raster-based presentation. This research shows that Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a promising technology for delivering high quality interactive topographic maps via the Internet, both …

A Causal-Comparative Study To Determine Differences In Levels Of Awareness Of Racism Among Graduate Counseling Students, Sarah C. Wiegman

Student Work

The present study examined the differences in levels of awareness of racism among graduate counseling students. The researcher examined the hypotheses that there would be a significant difference in levels of awareness of racism between those who completed the Counseling Multicultural and Diverse Populations class and those who did not, as well as, there would be a significant relationship between levels of awareness of racism and number of credit hours completed in the counseling education program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. One hundred and six participants (91 female and 15 male) ranging in age between 22 and 57 …

A Study Of The Factors Related To The Successful Merger Of Information Technology Departments Within Local Government, Angela Patton

Student Work

This study focuses on the merger process of Information Technology (IT) departments within local government. The research that exists indicates that local government mergers, in general, have a high rate of failure. In addition, the political, managerial, cultural, and behavioral aspects that impact these mergers are ignored.

The importance of computers to the departments/agencies housed within local government has made the IT departments a critical part of the local government structure. This study looks at the problems faced by the merging IT departments within local government in order to gain a better understanding of this process and to increase the …

Variables Associated With The Likelihood Of Adopting A Policy Of Hiring Nonsmokers Only Among Nonprofit Organizations In Omaha, Nebraska, Jillian M. Golden

Student Work

Tobacco use in the U.S. is the cause of approximately 440,000 deaths annually and is the leading preventable cause of death. Smoking can result in death due to cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension, heart disease, and stroke. Smoking can also result in death due to cancers such as lung cancer, respiratory diseases such as pneumonia and bronchitis, and other deaths including diseases among infants and bum deaths (American Cancer Society, 2003). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that due to smoking, the cost of medical care and lost productivity added up to approximately $157 billion each year …

Variables Associated With The Likelihood Of Adopting A Policy Of Hiring Nonsmokers Only Among Nonprofit Organizations In Omaha, Nebraska, Jillian M. Golden

Student Work

To address the costs associated with employees who smoke, some organizations have adopted a policy of hiring nonsmokers only or may be considering such a policy. The purpose of this study was to explore the possible relationship between the degree of likelihood of adopting a policy of hiring nonsmokers only and four variables (type of service, number of employees, size of yearly budget, and the level of smoking policy). A written, mail-out/mail-back survey was sent to 130 nonprofit organizations in Omaha, Nebraska. Of the 130 participants in this study, 97 (75 percent) returned the survey. Descriptive statistics were calculated for …

A Study Of The Factors Related To The Successful Merger Of Information Technology Departments Within Local Government, Angela Patton

Student Work

This study focuses on the merger process of Information Technology (IT) departments within local government. The research that exists indicates that local government mergers, in general, have a high rate of failure. In addition, the political, managerial, cultural, and behavioral aspects that impact these mergers are ignored. The importance of computers to the departments/agencies housed within local government has made the IT departments a critical part of the local government structure. This study looks at the problems faced by the merging IT departments within local government in order to gain a better understanding of this process and to increase the …

The Effects Of Self-Efficacy And Locus Of Control On The Sexual Behaviors Of College Females, Michelle Noah

Student Work

This research examined the relationship between self-efficacy, locus of control, and sexual behaviors among college females. The research null hypotheses suggest that; 1) There is no correlation between self-efficacy and responsible sexual behaviors, and 2) There is no correlation between locus of control and responsible sexual behaviors. Questionnaire data were collected from 109 undergraduate females at a Midwestern University. The sample was primarily Caucasian (89%), heterosexual (96.3%), and single (73.4%) with a mean age of 23 years. An investigator designed questionnaire, adapted in part, from the Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control Scale (RIELC), The General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSE), and a …

A "Maximal Tree" Approach For Scheduling Tasks In A Multiprocessor System., Haiying Sun

Student Work

The problem of scheduling tasks across distributed system has been approved to be NP-complete in its general case. When communication cost among system processors is not considered, polynominal-time optimal algorithms for solving scheduling problem are exit only in three special cases. In attempting to solve the problem in the general case, a number of heuristics have been developed. These algorithms intend to reduce the input task graph to one of the special cases and then optimal scheduling can be obtained accordingly. In this paper, we study all these heuristics, and present a improved heuristic --- “Maximal Tree graph approach for …

Commercialism In Public Schools: A Study Of The Perceptions Of Teachers And Administrators On Accepting Corporate Advertising, Gerard Jude Kowal

Student Work

The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of teachers and administrators regarding the acceptability or unacceptability of corporate advertising in their schools, particularly about the acceptability or unacceptability of commercial advertising outside the school building, inside the school building, and inside the classroom.

Spatial Data Mining Using Branch Grafted R-Tree., Priyanka Dubey

Student Work

Spatial data mining is a process of extraction of implicit information, such as weather patterns around latitudes, spatial features in a region, et., with a goal of knowledge discovery. The existing spatial data mining methods typically identify a specific datamining task for knowledge discovery. An example of a mining task may involve finding weather patterns in the northwestern region of U.S.A. To find such weather patterns one could employ an existing data structure, such as a B+ tree followed by the analysis of the mined weather data for knowledge discovery. This is a typical top-down approach of identifying a task, …

The Motif Of Human Flying In Children's Literature, Kathleen M. Hinman

Student Work

The purpose of this study was to examine works of children's literature that included humans that could fly, and to further examine the reaction of students who were exposed to the specific works. Twenty-six books were studied and the results were compiled using qualitative procedures. The data that were examined in the study of the books included reviews and editorial commentaries from many sources and the researchers own notes, taken during the reading and studying of the books identified by this research. The research conducted with the literature details the patterns and similarities that can be found in the cross …

The Decline Of Trust And Civic Engagement Since Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy In America, Rebecca Jean Hannagan

Student Work

Since 1776 when the United States broke away from British colonial rule, Americans have considered themselves to be a profoundly free and equal people. When Alexis de Tocqueville toured the young nation in the 1830's he argued that a profusion of voluntary associations, egalitarian values, and a substantial and vibrant religious presence combined to make this fledgling country and unusually civic and participatory democracy. Despite our beginnings as a nation of joiners, Americans' engagement in political activity has fallen steadily. Voter turnout has been declining since the 1960's and polling data reflects a trend of distrust in government. As a …

Graph-Theoretic Approaches To Cluster Protein Sequences., Zhu Liu

Student Work

Finding homologous proteins (or cluster of homologous proteins) is a very important, since this information is required for nearly any further analysis of proteins. Two sequences are said to be homologous if they derive from a common ancestor. Generally, sequence similarity provides the base for the homology. There are several approaches to cluster proteins based on their homology. But very few methods involve graphic algorithms. In this project, five graph-based algorithms are implemented to cluster proteins. The five algorithms are finding strongly connected components (SCC) algorithm, finding partially strongly connected components (PSCC) algorithm, graph coloring algorithm, merging algorithm, random merging …

The Determinants Of Policing Unfounding And Prosecutorial Case Rejections In San Diego, California Sexual Assault Cases, Elizabeth M. Keller

Student Work

The vast amount of research that has been done on sexual assault in the past thirty years has yielded a great amount of knowledge bout the phenomenon of sexual assault and the way the criminal justice system responds to it. One hypothesis that emerges from this literature is that certain cases of sexual assault may be treated differently by police and.prosecutors because of characteristics of the victim, the suspect, or of the case itself This study tests that hypothesis, using data·collected by the San Diego Police Department's Sex Crimes Unit over a multi-year period in the 1990s. This study. specifically …

A Computational Approach To Reconstructing Gene Regulatory Networks., Xutao Deng

Student Work

Motivation: Many modeling frameworks have been applied to infer regulatory networks from gene expression data sets. Linear Additive Models (LAMs), as one large category of models, have been gaining more and more popularity. One problem associated with this kind of models is that the system is often under-determined because of excessive number of unknown parameters. In addition, the practical utility of these models has remained unclear. Methods: Based on LAMs, we developed an improved method to infer gene regulatory networks from time-series gene expression data sets. The method includes an incremental connectivity model with indexed regulatory elements and a linear …

Designing Sustainable Communities And Creating A Sense Of Community: A Fantasy Theme Analysis Of One Organization's Vision Of The Future, James L. Leighter

Student Work

The purpose of this study is to examine a discourse of sustainability. Proponents of particular environmental and development practices use the term sustainability in a variety of contexts in order to signify a variety of preferred states for the planet, and descriptions of a relationship between natural and man-made environments. I argue that this term should be studied in places where people are talking about, promoting, teaching and negotiating its meaning. Because sustainability discourse is ultimately concerned with places and times that are removed from the immediacy of the present, Fantasy Theme Analysis (FTA) is an ideal methodology for studying …

The Determinants Of Policing Unfounding And Prosecutorial Case Rejections In San Diego, California Sexual Assault, Cases, Elizabeth M. Keller

Student Work

The vast amount of research that has been done on sexual assault in the past thirty years has yielded a great amount of knowledge about the phenomenon of sexual assault and the way the criminal justice system responds to it. One hypothesis that emerges from this literature is that certain cases of sexual assault may be treated differently by police and prosecutors because of characteristics of the victim, the suspect, or of the case itself. This study tests that hypothesis, using data collected by the San Diego Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit over a multi-year period in the 1990s. This …

The Influence Of Mass Media Use On Individual Opinions Of Courts, Steven John Briggs

Student Work

This study analyses the influence of media consumption, specifically an individual's viewing of television and their reading of newspapers, on their perceptions of how the court system deals with suspected criminals during sentencing. Data are analyzed from the 1993 General Social Survey (GSS), which is a nationwide survey administered by the National Opinion Research Council (NORC) on a semi-annual basis. The variables related to mass media use are based on self-reporting. Two explanations, frequently cited in the criminal justice literature, the cultivation hypothesis (Gerbner et al., 1978) and Fiske’s (1986) and subcultural identities, also known as interpretive communities, will be …

Genuine Populist: William V. Allen In The United States Senate, 1893-1901, David W. Hoelscher

Student Work

This study examines the United States Senate career of Nebraska Populist William Vincent Allen (1893-1901). A relatively neglected figure in Populist historiography, Allen has been the subject o f widely divergent opinions on the part of those historians who have commented on his place in the movement. The dominant view reflected in the published literature is that Allen, who was elected with the help of Democratic votes in the Nebraska legislature, was, ideologically and politically, more of a Democrat than a Populist. On this view, Allen’s principal policy concern was promoting the cause of free silver coinage, and his primary …

An Evolutionary Approach To Routing In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Using Dominating Sets., Hiranmayi Sreenivas

Student Work

This thesis presents a new approach to routing in ad-hoc wireless networks using virtual backbones that may be approximated by the graph theoretic concept of dominating sets. · Ad hoc wireless networks provide a flexible and quick means of establishing wireless peer-to-peer communications. Routing remains the main challenging problem in an ad hoc network due to its multihop nature and dynamic network topology. Several protocols based on virtual backbones in ad hoc wireless networks have been proposed that may be used to simplify the routing process. However, little is known about the network routing performance of these protocols and no …

Effects Of Factors And People Of Influence On College Choice Comparing General Population And Top Academic Students, Winnie L. Callahan

Student Work

The purpose of this study was to determine if there were statistically significant differences in the factors or people who influenced general population students as compared to top academic students in their choice of college/university. Influences were delineated according to factors or people because recruitment strategies must differ based on these categories. These analyses determined the impact the demographic characteristics of students' gender, community type, high school size, high school type, and anticipated college/major had on higher education choice.

System User Perceptions And Enterprise Resource Planning (Erp) Implementation Success: An Exploratory Study, Shirley R. Shouse

Student Work

The study reports the results o f a survey undertaken to verify and quantify the potential relationship between system users’ perceptions of the quality and utility o f five variables o f Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation that influence ERP implementation success. Based on previous research four of the variables (Organizational Alterations, Training, Key System Users’ Involvement, and Project Management) were proposed to positively influence successful ERP implementation. One variable (Technical Alterations) was proposed to negatively influence successful ERP implementation. Results gleaned from a survey of 56 system users who took part in an ERP implementation at a mid-sized manufacturing …

Fourth-Grade Teachers' Perceptions Of Nebraska's State Standards Process In Elementary Schools, Richard J. Beran Jr.

Student Work

The purpose of this study was to explore fourth-grade teachers' perceptions of Nebraska's state standards process. Specifically, research questions sought to determine fourth-grade teachers' perceptions of the possible effects of state standards on schools, students, teachers, and administrators. The questions also explored any differences between subgroups based on teachers' gender, teachers' years of experience, schools' socio-economic status, school enrollment, and percentage of students that have met the state standards.