Digital Commons Network^™

Water Use, Wastewater Disposal, And Water Conservation Attitudes In The Monteverde Zone, November 2008, Jenna Rasmusson

Monteverde Institute: Tropical Ecology and Conservation

The residents of the zone of Monteverde, Costa Rica represent a wide array of demographics and other factors such as income, education level, town of residence, and water source, which may impact their water use, wastewater disposal, and water conservation attitudes. In order to study these relationships, a survey was conducted in four different Monteverde towns. The survey consisted of questions on demographic variables, water consumption patterns, methods of disposal, and water shortages, and lastly, addressed attitudes toward water conservation. Data were collected from 64 surveys and analyzed using regression analyses and chi-squared tests. Thirteen significant results and several trends …

Beneath The Forest, Volume 1, No. 1, Fall 2008, Johanna L. Kovarik

Beneath the Forest

Contents: Welcome from Courtney Cloyd - Tongass cave Geomicrobiology Investigations - Transforming Files into Caves - On your Knees Cave Human Remains Reburial - Show Cave Management at Blanchard Springs Cavern - Cave Research Foundation on the Mark Twain NF - Karst Hydrologic Investigations in South Carolina - MOU with Cavers on the Ozark-St Francis NF

The Social Context Of Stress And Social Support Among Immigrant Latinas Diagnosed With Breast Cancer, Dinorah Martinez Tyson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social support plays a crucial role in both the physical and mental adjustment to the diagnosis of breast cancer and its treatment. However, the mediating effects of social support are embedded within the larger, social and cultural contexts in which support given and received. Due to language, culture and economic issues, immigrants may find themselves without the social support and networks that had previously enabled them to cope with illness and disease. This research grounds our understanding of social support and breast cancer within that larger context that includes the social environment and the experience of health disparities.

Ethnographic methods …

Cultural Factors And Concepts Of Pollution: Colorectal Cancer And Health Behaviors Among Ashkenazi Jewish Women, Karen Besterman-Dahan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence in Ashkenazi Jews has been found to be highest of any ethnic group in the world (Feldman, 2001). It is currently unclear how culture and religion influence health behaviors of U.S. Ashkenazi Jews, as well as what other socio-cultural factors influence AJ women's attitudes towards CRC risk and screening practices. This study aimed at exploring and describing the cultural and religious influences on health behaviors and beliefs related to CRC in Ashkenazi Jewish women. Research participants included seven key informants (rabbis) and forty-two Ashkenazi Jewish women ages 50 and up. Methods included in-depth, qualitative interviews …

The Social Context Of Cervical Cancer Knowledge And Prevention Among Haitian Immigrant Women, Janelle Marie Menard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cervical cancer is the primary cause of cancer deaths among Haitian women; however, the social context of cervical cancer among Haitian immigrant women has not been systematically examined. The ways in which women assign meaning to this disease, understand its causality and situate it within the broader context of gynecological health are poorly understood. Further, Haitian immigrant women's perceptions of disease risk, including knowledge and understanding about Human Papillomavirus (HPV), the primary etiologic factor in cervical cancer, have not been explored. Few studies have assessed health behaviors, including culturally mediated feminine hygiene practices, among Haitian immigrant women, which may negatively …

Artist Colonies In Europe, The United States, And Florida, Jennifer L. Aldrich

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

During the nineteenth century, an artistic trend spread across Europe. As urban centers housed the majority of professional artists, individuals and groups relocated to remote, bucolic areas to form art colonies. Artist colonies are typically defined as a group of artists, generally painters, writers, and composers who worked and lived as a community for a certain period of time¹. Artists left their city lifestyles as a response to urbanization and industrialization. In other words, the movement encouraged reform of social, environmental, and economic conditions to prevent the decline of true artisanship. The artistic response personified an underlying utopian …

Negotiating Democracy In Brazil: The Politics Of Exclusion, Bernd Reiter

Government and International Affairs Faculty Publications

Do societal inequalities limit the effectiveness of democratic regimes? And if so, why? And how? Addressing this question, Bernd Reiter focuses on the role of societal dynamics in undermining democracy in Brazil. Reiter explores the ways in which race, class, and gender in Brazil structure a society that is deeply divided between the included and the excluded—and where much of the population falls into the latter category. Tracing the mechanisms of the profound cultural resistance to genuine democratization that he finds dominant among the elite, his theoretically and empirically rich analysis offers an alternative way of understanding both the nature …

Sbe Notícias, Ano 3, No. 95, August 11, 2008, Marcelo A. Rasteiro, Delci K. Ishida

SBE Notícias

Aurora sedia a 7ª expedição SBE-Tocantins - Colocar cal na água do mar pode reduzir CO2 na atmosfera - Nova teoria para o povoamento das Américas - DNA de Neanderthal é sequenciado - Seminário de técnicas verticais e resgate em cavernas na Argentina - Therion: mapas digitais de cavernas - Morrem 38 indígenas com suspeita de raiva na Venezuela - Rua afunda em Teresina-PI - 1º EIAA: Encontro Internacional de Arqueologia Amazônica - Palestra sobre geomorfologia na USP - Foto do Leitor: Gruta Serra Grande(MG-1365).

Commencement Convocation Program, Usf, August 9, 2008, University Of South Florida

USF Graduation and Convocation Programs

King O'Neal Scholar - Shamik Dwivedi

Journal Of Cave And Karst Studies, Volume 70, No. 2, August 2008, Table Of Contents, National Speleological Society

KIP Articles

No abstract provided.

The Injustice Of Local Justice: Truth, Reconciliation, And Revenge In Rwanda, Jennie E. Burnet

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Based on long-term fieldwork in urban and rural Rwanda between 1997 and 2002 as well as on recent focus groups and interviews conducted in May and June 2007, this article explores local perceptions of the Gacaca process and asks whether Gacaca is fulfilling its primary goals to ‘‘end impunity,’’ promote reconciliation, and establish, in the words of Paul Kagame, the ‘‘real truth of what happened during the Genocide.’’ The findings indicate that how well Gacaca is functioning varies a great deal from community to community. The most important variable appears to be the character of the inyangamugayo (‘‘persons of integrity’’) …

Author Biographies

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Access To Women’S Health Information In Monteverde, July 27, 2008, Emily Balf, Janelle Christensen, Stephanie Melton, Kristin Monnard

Monteverde Institute: Culture, Community, and Health

A research project exploring women's health in the Monteverde region.

Face To Face: English Uses And Understanding Of The Beard In Early Virginian Contacts, Jacqueline Colleen Barber

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many historians agree that categories of human division underwent a drastic change due to European New World encounters. The shift from religious divisions to ones based on ethnicity and skin color gradually developed in early modern Europe. Hence, before natives became "red," and Europeans "white" a period existed where the differences between these cultures were utilized in a variety of means to prove similarity and difference.

One element signifying difference during the early contact period was that of the beard. Hair as an identifier has a long history: through the middle ages, wildness was conveyed by hair and at times …

Annual Report, Special Collections And Archives, 2007-2008, James Anthony Schnur

Library Department and Committee Reports

Annual report for Special Collections and University Archives at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg's Nelson Poynter Memorial Library for the 2007-2008 academic year.

Gardens At Home, Gardens At School: Diet And Food Crop Diversity In Two Q'Eqchi' Communities In Southern Belize, Douglas Carl Reeser

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A district-wide school garden project has been initiated in the Toledo District of Southern Belize in response to reported high rates of poverty and undernutrition. This paper will discuss research conducted in the summer of 2007 with Q'eqchi' Maya in the Toledo District to determine the effect of school gardens on household diet and gardening, the composition of the household diet, and the makeup of homegardens. Food frequency questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were conducted in two rural villages, one with a school garden program and one without. Various members of NGOs working on school garden projects in the district were …

Psycho-Socio-Cultural Risk Factors For Breech Presentation, Caroline Peterson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Breech Baby Study is a mixed methods study which combines qualitative and quantitative inquiry. This study explores psycho-social-cultural risk factors for breech presentation from an evolutionary perspective. The quantitative component of the study uses Florida birth certificate and Medicaid data sets from 1992-2003 to evaluate the influence of ethnicity and socio-economic status on breech presentation.

Ethnicity and socio-economic status account for less than two percent of the variance of risk factors for breech presentation. The qualitative study includes 114 mothers of breech and cephalic presentation babies who completed the State Trait Personality Inventory and a socio-demographic survey. Of these, …

Uis Bulletin, Volume 51, No. 2, 2008, Fadi Nader

UIS Bulletin

Contents: Message from Fadi Nader, UIS -- 15th International Congress of Speleology -- News from Commissions -- News from National Delegates -- Just Published -- News from Cavers -- Special Feature -- News -- Speleo Events

Disgusted By Food: Explanatory Models Of Anorexia Among Young Taiwanese Adults, Donald E. Mclawhorn Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Anorexia as a nosological category has developed in a western context and is now being applied to people around the world. In order for researchers to know they are asking the right questions about AN as knowledge expands, it is important to understand what meanings Anorexia carries and how those meanings manifest locally. The present study to aid in that understanding by employing a mixed methods (survey and in-depth interviewing) research approach in answering the following question: In what ways are Taiwanese students' explanatory models of anorexia nervosa (AN) congruent with or different from professional understandings derived from the western …

State Dominance And Political Corruption: Testing The Efficacy Of An Alternate Configuration Of Institutional-Anomie Theory Cross-Nationally, Carol L. S. Trent

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Extant assessments of Messner and Rosenfeld's institutional-anomie theory (1994) have generally supported the thesis that, in social collectives where the economy dominates, non-economic institutions (i.e. the family, education, polity) are rendered feeble, unable to exert their normative controls. The cultural values of these societies place primacy on "making it" (monetary success), while at the same time placing a much weaker emphasis on the licit means of achieving these goals. The resultant state is one of anomie, conducive to crime. Messner and Rosenfeld have extended their argument stating that it is not economic dominance per se that contributes to high crime …

Net/Work: Composing The Posthuman Self, Julia L. Mason

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The overall question this dissertation asks is: what does it mean to teach posthumans? To answer this question, this dissertation turns toward scholarship on the body in order to understand the virtual and material presence that students develop, it looks to online video gaming communities as alternative classrooms providing effective models of learning, and it investigates the circulation of service learning pedagogies within academic institutions as a marker of the persistence of humanistic values within the framework of a posthuman work environment.

The American university in general, and the humanities specifically, is struggling to make sense of its place in …

The Autoethnographic Call: Current Considerations And Possible Futures, Kendall Smith-Sullivan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research examines the increase of personal narratives in the past several decades, particularly the autoethnographic approach. The project begins with a historical contextualization of personal writing and autoethnography in relation to the crisis of representation and other diverse socio-political shifts. One outcome of these cultural transitions was a proliferation of illness narratives, narrative therapy, therapeutic writing, and narrative health communication. Also included in this research are data from interviews with emerging autoethnographers and participant observation that occurred at the Third International Qualitative Inquiry Congress. The conference served as prism through which to view qualitative scholarship as a whole, as …

Life On The Campaign Trail: The Political Anthropology Of Local Politics, E.J Ford

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This document is an ethnographic account of one researcher's experience during an election season spent with one candidate. The document considers the history of political anthropology as a subfield of anthropology, the deployment of ideology and hegemony as theoretical concepts, and includes a brief history of Tampa and Hillsborough County politics. The document attempts to make connections between the practical necessities of campaigning, with reference to the processual approach of examining micro-political process, and theoretical issues related to the subject of political anthropology, notably the concepts of ideology, hegemony, and the subject of elites in human social organization.

Evangelical Students In American Higher Education, Joseph C. Fox

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study explored the perceptions of evangelical freshmen students attending the University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Texas at Dallas during the spring semester of 2006 in the context of student alienation. The purpose of this study was to explore the possibility that evangelicals attending secular universities were perceiving alienation through their interactions with their universities. It was hypothesized that the modern university, having evolved into its present naturalistic worldview condition, might prove alienating to evangelicals from a worldview standpoint. Assuming the possibility that alienation might prove to be a reality for evangelicals, the subordinate purposes …

Sbe Turismo E Paisagens Cársticas, Volume 1, No. 1, June 2008, Heros Augusto Santos Lobo

KIP Articles

Contents: Narrativa Sobre a Efetivação de Um Parque e Algumas de Suas Humanidades -- “Mal Para Nós, Bem Para o Mundo?” Um Olhar Antropológico Sobre a Conservação Ambiental no Parque Estadual Turístico do Alto Ribeira (PETAR) -- Estudo das Transformações da Estrutura Física do Bairro da Serra, Entorno do PETAR, em Decorrência da Atividade Turística -- Níveis de Radônio em Cavernas do Parque Estadual Turístico do Alto Ribeira (PETAR) -- Espeleoturismo e Educação Ambiental no PETAR - SP -- Ecoturismo e Percepção de Impactos Socioambientais sob a Ótica dos Turistas no Parque Estadual Turístico do Alto Ribeira - PETAR -- …

Commencement Convocation Program, Lakeland Campus, May 5, 2008, University Of South Florida

USF Graduation and Convocation Programs

Outstanding Senior - Amanda Robinson; King O'Neal Scholar - Mari Nichole McKinley

Commencement Convocation Program, Sarasota - Manatee Campus, May 4, 2008, University Of South Florida

USF Graduation and Convocation Programs

King O'Neal Scholar - Linda Gabriel; Outstanding Professor - Michael Sheldon; Sarasota-Manatee Outstanding Senior - Ashley Morey; Golden Bull Award - Aaron Wiseman

Commencement Convocation Program, St. Petersburg Campus, May 4, 2008, University Of South Florida

USF Graduation and Convocation Programs

King O'Neal Scholars - Jacquelyn Renee Hicks, Ashley Nicole Hopping, and Zoe Rita Placiotis; Outstanding Graduate - Susan M. Herbert

Script, Commencement Convocation, May 4, 2008, University Of South Florida St. Petersburg

USF St. Petersburg Graduations and Commencements

A script for the University of South Florida St. Petersburg commencement ceremony on May 4, 2008.

Commencement Convocation Program, St. Petersburg Campus, May 4, 2008, University Of South Florida St. Petersburg

USF St. Petersburg Graduations and Commencements

King O'Neal Awards: Jacquelyn Renee Hicks, Ashley Nicole Hopping, Zoe Rita Placiotis; Outstanding Graduate: Susan M. Herbert