Digital Commons Network^™

Making Music Social: Creating A Spotify-Based Social Media Platform, Dalton J. Craven

Senior Theses

DKMS is a new type of social media platform for music lovers and groups of friends. It integrates tightly with Spotify, one of the largest music streaming services in the world. Users of DKMS can see what their friends are listening to, receive recommendations of new songs to listen to, and analyze their several key numerical metrics (happiness, danceability, loudness, and energy) of their top songs.

DKMS was built as part of the year-long Capstone senior design course at the University of South Carolina. A deployed app is visible at https://dkms.vercel.app, and the open-source code is visible at https://github.com/SCCapstone/DKMS.

After Erasure: Contingency And The Persistence Of Subjectivity, Nathan Deprospo

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation examines the relationship between contemporary posthumanist discourse in rhetoric and composition and the Hegelian dialectic. My basic premise is that the ethical and philosophical aspirations of posthumanist discourse—embrace otherness, improve social relations, foster inclusivity—are undercut by a persistent conservatism and destructiveness that runs throughout the social body. This is a Hegelian point: one should not treat social ills, such as racism, sexism, or classism, as merely unfortunate, cosmetic side effects of social organizations, but rather as fundamental human tendencies. For Hegel, there is a tendency towards exclusion, towards negating otherness, that is inherent in human subjectivity, and which …

“Oh My God, Everyone Was Staring At Us”: The Experiences Of Transracial Fostering From The Perspective Of White Foster Parents Raising Black Youth, Christian Holmes Gorchow

Theses and Dissertations

Racial-ethnic identity is an essential component of a Black child’s development. Little is known about how transracial foster parents support Black foster children’s racial-ethnic identity development. The purpose of this dissertation was to address this gap by: (1) exploring transracial foster parents’ racial socialization practices as it relates to the care of Black foster children, (2) understanding transracial foster parents’ experiences with addressing racism and racial bias directed towards Black foster children, and (3) exploring transracial foster parents’ knowledge as it relates to the cultural needs of Black foster children. Using a thematic analytic approach, a sample of 8 White …

The Widened Hearthstone Urban Playgrounds As The Infrastructure Of Public Mothering, 1900-1930, Alexandra Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the limitations on their formal political involvement, women across the United States took control of the Progressive Era playground movement, and playground advocates nationwide argued that urban play spaces constructed motherhood into the city. While many mothers used playgrounds for child care, playground directors used the maternal authority constructed into playgrounds to promote their ideas about ideal citizenship. One playground director, Mabel E. Macomber, called this aspect of playground work the “'mother' element,” believing, as did other workers and advocates, that playgrounds were part of the apparatus of urban mothering, and in the case of many poor working women, …

Essays On Consumer Returns And Environmental Sustainability In Operations Management, Aditya Balaram

Theses and Dissertations

Consumer returns and environmental sustainability greatly impact the operational decisions that firms make. Focusing on consumer returns, lenient return policies aid consumers with resolving uncertainty but impose additional reverse logistics costs on retailers. The current retail landscape has largely eliminated the possibility of offering more stringent return policies since consumers have come to expect such policies as a given. This has driven retailers to look for innovative solutions while still offering costly free return policies. With respect to environmental sustainability, a number of operational decisions have been examined in the academic literature. These have ranged all the way from examining …

Ideologies Of Race, Gender, And Religion In Pronunciation Perception At Evangelical Esl Programs, Ruthanne Joy Wenger Hughes

Theses and Dissertations

Nonnative English speakers are often judged based on their accent, but accent is perceived as well as produced. Race, gender, and religion interact to create complex and nuanced figures of personhood (Agha, 2005) impacting teachers' perceptions of students. Teachers' individual differences, including language proficiency, exposure to language, and previous training, also affect pronunciation ratings (e.g., Kang, 2008, 2012; Kang & Rubin, 2009). This dissertation investigated English as a second language teachers at evangelical English programs in South Carolina, addressing how teacher backgrounds interacted with institutionally circulating ideologies of race, gender, and religion, and these factors' impact on ratings of student …

Muon Intensity Measurement With The Majorana Demonstrator, Franklin Michael Adams Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

The Majorana Demonstrator (MJD) is a shielded radiation detection system located a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota. The system aims to detect the theorized, rare process of neutrinoless double-beta decay. The Demonstrator utilizes an array of scintillating acrylic detectors to veto any signals induced by earth-penetrating cosmogenic muons and reach background levels necessary for the detection of neutrinoless double-beta decay. Utilizing the data collected by the muon veto system, an analysis has been done to determine the differential muon intensity. The complex geometry of the interlacing detector panels requires the use of Monte …

Jewish Genetic Diseases: Knowledge Of Reproductive Risk And Cancer Predisposition Among Young Adults Of Ashkenazi Descent, Hayley Kathleen Granger

Theses and Dissertations

Founder mutations within the Ashkenazi Jewish (AJ) population are associated with significantly higher carrier rates for certain severe, life-limiting conditions collectively called Jewish Genetic Diseases (JGDs), and for pathogenic variants in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 (BRCA1/2) cancer susceptibility genes. Efforts to educate AJ individuals about the implications of these founder mutations and available testing have increased the past forty years; however, studies suggest AJ individuals are not well educated on the topic (Hardy et al., 2022; Kaback, 2001; Warsch et al., 2014). Studies evaluating the reason for this gap in knowledge of young AJ adults are lacking. This study aimed …

“It Looks Like The Future But Feels Like The Past”: Oral (Hi)Stories Of Appalachia As Covid-19 News Stories, Ashley Reid Mcgraw

Theses and Dissertations

Oral historians have often felt obligated to collect stories during disasters and crises, to preserve recollections of experiences and trauma of those affected. During the onset of COVID-19 in the United States, this surge was certainly present. Appalachia, although its boundaries are contested, has a strong association with oral histories, and thus was the focus of one project in particular: a collaboration with the Blue Ridge Public Radio and the Foxfire Appalachian Heritage Museum to collect, curate, publish, and broadcast oral histories of "local" individuals. But what does it mean to be local, in a region as broad as Appalachia? …

Expanding Tailorable Nanomaterial Synthesis With Persistent Micelle Templates, Eric R. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

The control of block polymer micelle dimensions while in solution is critical for a range of emerging applications in diverse fields from drug delivery and nanoreactors to use as sacrificial templates for porous nanomaterials. When under kinetic control, micelles will maintain a constant average size and thus aggregation number (N_agg) through the suppression of chain exchange mechanisms. Such kinetic control effectively enables the decoupling of micelle dimensions from solution conditions. In other words, kinetically trapped micelles can resist reorganizations brough about by e.g., the addition of metal nanoparticles. However, such micelles are traditionally governed by a fickle �� …

Impact Of Virtual Models On Students’ Multilevel Understanding Of An Organic Reaction, Eli Martin

Theses and Dissertations

As the number of STEM opportunities and the need for a scientifically literate society increases, educators in STEM fields require tools that help support these needs. Chemistry is one STEM content area that would benefit from exploring educational technology that supports conceptual understanding. An action research study was conducted to understand how students engage with the content and virtual representation to develop their understanding of a chemical reaction. This convergent mixed methods study looked at the effect of dynamic virtual molecular representation on students' ability to understand a reaction mechanism at the symbolic and subparticulate level by measuring content knowledge …

Rhetorical New Materialism, Queers, And Cringe, Katherine Anne Schell

Theses and Dissertations

Cringe, the negative reflexive reaction we experience when we witness something embarrassing or awkward, has a bad reputation in the queer community. In online and physical queer spaces, there is a pervading belief that “cringe culture” must be antithetical to queerness, that no queer community could possibly achieve liberation until it has eradicated the threat of cringe. This thesis revises that cringe vs. queer positioning by reimagining cringe as its own rhythm of queerness and examining the productive aspects of cringe through engagement with thinkers like Karen Barad and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The thesis, formatted as a response to a …

The Impact Of Opendyslexic Font On The Reading Comprehension Of Tier Ii And Tier Iii Reading Intervention Students, William David Whitmire

Theses and Dissertations

This mixed methods action research project measured the effect of OpenDyslexic font on the reading comprehension of MTSS Tier II and Tier III reading intervention students. A review of the literature revealed little research about OpenDyslexic font or its effect on reading comprehension. The study consisted of a 7-week period with 4^th grade Tier II and Tier III reading intervention students using OpenDyslexic font while reviewing previously taught comprehension strategies before end of the year testing. Results show positive growth for Tier II reading intervention students and results were inconclusive for Tier III students.

Evaluation Of Preferential Vaporization Characteristics Of Isolated Single Droplet Combustion In A Converging Channel, Claire Elizabeth Dixon

Theses and Dissertations

Preferential vaporization of isolated single droplets was evaluated in this study. A previously verified lab-scale experiment using flow acceleration to counteract the effects of buoyancy in a converging channel with a decreasing cross section was utilized to investigate the single isolated droplet combustion. The previous experimentation revealed differences between results and values predicted by a one-dimensional numerical simulation. To investigate if the observed differences were the result of turbulent flow and the development of a boundary layer within the channel, a model was designed and analyzed in Ansys Fluent.

The developed Ansys simulation indicated that turbulent flow and growth of …

Identity In Literacy Narratives: Toward Reflexive Pedagogy In First Year Writing, Laiken Elizabeth Harrigan

Theses and Dissertations

An ongoing discussion for composition pedagogues is the relation of individuals’ identities and discourse histories in relation to academic discourses. In this thesis, I argue that academic discourse cannot be entirely separated from personal discourse, as individuals are always in conversation with their discoursal histories and identities. In order to better understand how students perceive their relationships to academic discourse, I analyze how First Year Writing (FYW) students experience the discourse of FYW— where they either intertwine their identities or we see their personal identities collide with the academic space. I used open coding to conduct a textual analysis of …

Mathematics Teachers’ Attitudes And Intentions Towards Instructional Videos As Part Of A Flipped Learning Model, Jessica Lee Lambert

Theses and Dissertations

Teachers’ attitudes and intentions play an integral role in the integration of technology into their lesson designs for mathematics. All K-8 students at the research site are now one to one with a device, either a tablet or laptop, depending on their grade level. It is up to teachers to determine how and when to integrate technology into their instructional design for mathematics. The purpose of this action research was to evaluate and describe mathematics teachers’ attitudes and intentions for integrating instructional videos as part of a flipped learning instructional model. The following questions served to guide this cycle of …

The Impact Of The Flipped Classroom Model On Elementary Students’ Achievement And Motivation For Learning Geometry, Kimberly M. Smalls

Theses and Dissertations

National and state data show students in poverty perform lower on math standardized assessments than their peers who are not students in poverty. The purpose of this action research was to evaluate the implementation of the flipped classroom model on the achievement and motivation towards mathematics for fourth-grade students at an elementary school in the Southeast United States. Traditional teaching methods such as teacher-led modeling, the use of manipulatives, and small-group math instruction present barriers which have not led to overall academic improvement for these students. This study focused on three overarching questions: (1) Is there a difference in fourth-grade …

The Impact Of Interactivity On Information Processing For Virtual Tourist Destinations, Hongxiao Yu

Theses and Dissertations

The rapid development of virtual reality (VR) platforms offers great potential for the widespread consumption of VR tourism offerings. This creation of tourism experiences through VR significantly impacts tourism marketing strategies. Nevertheless, unprecedented development presents research challenges to better understand the effectiveness of VR interactivity in providing dynamic virtual experiences and shaping consumers’ intention to visit actual tourism destinations. Moreover, destination marketing managers face challenges in designing interactive features to leverage VR technology to influence consumers’ decision-making. To address these challenges, this dissertation extends the heuristic-systematic model to investigate how VR interactivity influences visit intention through engaging experiences with technology …

The Film Score Music Of John Williams: A Guide To Selected Works For The Principal Percussionist, Andrew Charles Crozier Patzig

Theses and Dissertations

John Williams is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. As one of the most well-known, awarded, and financially successful composers in US history, Williams has scored some of the most iconic films of all time. Of note, he has scored more than one hundred films, many of which were directed by Steven Spielberg.

This study explores Williams’ writing for pitched and non-pitched percussion, particularly in his scores for E.T the Extra-Terrestrial, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Hook, The Cowboys Overture, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

John Williams’ film music is often scored for an extensive inventory of percussion …

An Investigative Analysis Of Fernando Sor’S Introduction And Variations On “O Cara Armonia” From Mozart’S The Magic Flute, Luke James Nolan

Theses and Dissertations

Fernando Sor provides directions for fingering his Introduction and Variations on “O Cara Armonia” in the specific beaming and notation of the work. Although there are numerous publications of Sor’s Op. 9, most fail to provide elegant fingerings for his difficult passages. In these editions, the editor either failed to understand Sor’s intentions rendered in the notation, or disregarded Sor’s technical practices in favor of modern technical practices. Both avenues will lead to a disastrous reproduction of the work. While the piece may offer a challenge for the guitarist, the technical difficulties of Sor’s Op. 9 should not be readily …

An Artificial Intelligence Approach To Fatigue Crack Length Estimation From Acoustic Emission Signals, Shane T. Ennis

Theses and Dissertations

As in service aircraft begin to age and fatigue, a method for evaluating the operational life they are currently operating under and have remaining comes into question. Structural health monitoring is (SHM) is a popular method of structural analysis with growing interest in the aerospace industry. SHM is capable of damage assessment and structural life estimations.

The ultimate goal of the research presented in this thesis is to develop a methodology of classifying the length of a fatigue crack though the use of machine learning. The thesis has three major chapters as described below.

The first chapter deals with the …

Nurse Perceptions Of Caring And Professional Governance, Lan Angela Nguyen

Theses and Dissertations

Background: Caring, a characteristic of an effective work environment, and clinical nurse control over the professional governance of nursing practice results in higher nursing retention and better patient outcomes. Although the concepts of caring and professional governance of nursing practice, and their discrete associations with patient outcomes, are widely studied, little to no research is published on the nature of the relationship between caring and professional governance of nursing practice. Without understanding this relationship, it is challenging to explore the impact of this relationship on nursing practice and patient outcomes.

Aims: The purpose of this study was to describe nurse …

Hardly Working: The Labor Concerns Of Graduate Student Assistants In Writing Programs, Lily Victoria Howard-Hill

Theses and Dissertations

The instructors of undergraduate writing courses are very often graduate students who exist in a space between student and teacher, subsequently shouldering a dual burden of responsibility. This is particularly the case in freshman writing and composition classes. Graduate students that hold assistantships and work in writing programs have a number of concerns related to their academic labor, specifically the benefits and compensation they receive in exchange for their work. To further illustrate these issues, this project offers the results of an IRB-approved study that highlights the tight connection between graduate student assistants’ working conditions, the financial and material benefits …

Multisensory Phonics Instruction In Struggling Readers, Amanda M. Dixon

Theses and Dissertations

This paper describes a problem of practice that arose from a lack of consistent, systematic phonics instruction within a small rural school with a large percentage of students not mastering skills in a way that builds the needed foundation for reading. To address this problem, action research was conducted through a mixed methods approach to determine the impact of multisensory Orton-Gillingham based reading instruction on a small population of students’ phonetic development and how this specific type of instruction affected their attitudes about reading. In an attempt to collect quantitative data, this study was guided by two research questions: How …

Dust Production And Transport In A Long-Lived Fluvial-Eolian System In The Pampas Of South America, Blake Marcus Stubbins

Theses and Dissertations

Wind-blown dust from southern South America links the terrestrial, marine, atmospheric, and biologic components of Earth’s climate system. The Pampas of central Argentina (~33-40° S) contain an extensive upper Miocene to Holocene eolian record that spans the relatively warm conditions of the Late Miocene to cooler climates of the Plio-Pleistocene and Holocene. We collected 13 loess, paleosol, and fluvial samples from the upper Miocene Cerro Azul and Rio Negro Formations which resulted in n = 5129 new detrital zircon U-Pb ages. Late Miocene rivers conveyed sediment from northern Patagonia, the Andes adjacent to the Pampas, and the Sierras Pampeanas to …

Complex Stereotypes: Stereotypes Across The Intersections Of Gender, Sexuality, Age, Race/Ethnicity, And Social Class, Nicholas Heiserman

Theses and Dissertations

Research on stereotypes and their consequences often focuses on discrete categorical stereotypes in isolation from each other (e.g. gender or race categories), and rarely centers the fact that people belong to many social categories at once (e.g. gender and race categories). I address this issue using two large factorial experiment (N=1,762 and N=1,481) designed to measure two core aspects of stereotypes, warmth and competence, across the intersections of multiple social categories: Gender, Sexuality, Age, Race/Ethnicity (Chapter 3), and Social Class (Chapter 2). In Chapter 2, I develop a framework for analyzing intersectional complexity in these data, beginning with overall measures …

The Effects Of Feedback And Prior Knowledge On The Processing Of L2 French, Lesley Erin Smith

Theses and Dissertations

The strand of feedback research within the field of Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA) examines the effects of feedback on the development of second language (L2) knowledge and learning behaviors. While findings often make claims about the relationship between feedback and language processing, much of this research has not measured learners’ concurrent responses to feedback. By and large, the effects of feedback have been inferred from test scores collected after feedback is provided, with few studies analyzing how feedback affects L2 learning behaviors in real time (i.e., during a task). Consequently, we know little about how feedback affects language processing. …

Language Ideologies In Transgender Communities In The U.S. South, Archie Crowley

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how metalinguistic discussions within transgender communities in South Carolina are shaped by experiences, identities, and ideologies related to intersecting social dimensions, specifically, gender, age, race, and regional identity. Based primarily on 20 ethnographic group and individual interviews with 41 transgender individuals living in South Carolina, as well as over 24 months of participant-observation in two trans organizations, the analysis illustrates how trans South Carolinians simultaneously navigated changing norms of community language use, expectations of regional linguistic practices, and mainstream discussions of trans linguistic affirmation. I draw on these sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological methods to examine how discourses …

Increasing Phonemic Awareness In Intellectually Impaired Students By Using Wilson’S Fundations Phonics Program In A Self-Contained Classroom, Theresa Lynne Garcia

Theses and Dissertations

This study aims to investigate if students who have been identified intellectually disabled are able to gain phonemic awareness by using Wilson’s Fundations in a self-contained setting. Most research has focused on students who are not identified as intellectually disabled. In this mixed method action research study, the students were given a first grade reading fluency test and a first grade word reading test for six weeks as the quantitative data. Both instruments were tested using a two-tail t-test, week one’s results were compared to week six’s results on both tests. All five the participants showed growth over the six …

Novel Structures And Thin Film Techniques For Reconfigurable Rf Technologies With Improved Signal Integrity, Jinqun Ge

Theses and Dissertations

Over the past several decades, wireless communications have been tremendously developed with multiple frequency bands, standards, and functions to provide more convenient communication services. Nowadays, commercial wireless devices, especially customer premises equipment, are required for smaller size, higher integration, and higher data rates to meet the ever-increasing demands of communications. The transceiver front ends inside these devices need to provide high-speed and high-quality communication services without a substantial increase in cost and size. Hence, the primary objective of this research is to develop a few miniaturized, multifunctional, and reconfigurable RF technologies and to provide several signal integrity and heat dissipation …