Digital Commons Network^™

Onsite Water Reuse: Fate Of Indicator Bacteria, Antibiotic Resistant Genes, Environmental Impacts, And User Perceptions, Michelle B. Henderson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Changes in water use, climate, and urbanization have shifted how water resources are used and defined. Wastewater is increasingly regarded as a viable resource to address challenges in non-potable and potable water applications. When dealing with water reuse, water quality and quantity are of the utmost importance; and the final product must be suitable for its intended purpose and acceptable to users. The first portion of this research analyzed the performance and environmental impacts of pilot-scale Hybrid Adsorption Biological Treatment Systems (HABiTS) for onsite wastewater treatment and reuse. Various configurations were investigated to increase HABiTS performance and ability to produce …

The Weekly Challenger, April 14, 2022, The Weekly Challenger, Et Al

Weekly Challenger Newspaper Collection

The April 14, 2022, issue of The Weekly Challenger.

An Investigation Into The Protein Dynamics And Proton Transfer Mechanism Of Class-A Β-Lactamase (Ctx-Ms) By Nmr Spectroscopy, Radwan Ebna Noor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Extended-spectrum β-lactamases (ESBLs) of different Enterobacteriaceae (e.g. Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae) have developed significant resistance mechanisms against antibiotics. ESBLs, like class A CTX-Ms (cefotaximases) enzymes hydrolyze the β-lactam ring of different antibiotics such as penicillins and third-generation oxyimino-cephalosporins. Although CTX-Ms are repeatedly found in many clinical and community settings, molecular-level information on their function/activity is currently limited to structural studies performed by X-ray crystallography. In order to gain further insights into the structure and functions of this class of proteins, it is also essential to fully understand their dynamic and chemical properties in solution. In order to better understand the …

Machine Learning Analytics In Real Time For Health Services, Abolfazl Saghafi, Chris P. Tsokos

USF Patents

Methods and systems detect a random state change in a subject in real time. Eye state changes may be identified in encephalogram brain signals, or honeybee dance patterns may be classified. Multivariate signals including state change information are received via a plurality of channels. The signals are sampled and may be filtered to remove DC components. Statistical characteristics of the signals are monitored. When the statistical characteristics exceed a threshold during a critical time interval, a potential change of state is detected. The critical time segment of the signals may be filtered to generate respective state change artifact signals. The …

Crow's Nest, April 11, 2022, Crow's Nest Staff

Crow's Nest

The April 11, 2022, issue of the Crow's Nest.

Measuring Sustainable Development Through Tax Increment Financed Brownfield Redevelopment Statutes: A Florida Case Study, Jeff Burton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research measures the theoretically sustainable development synergy of United States’ redevelopment, tax increment, and brownfield statutes and questions local redevelopment professionals on this combination’s implementation. This policy’s integration and application measurements guide increased knowledge and best practice methods in the path of America’s population migration into urbanized areas, thus managing the economic, environmental, and social impacts for future generations.

This examination used a pragmatic, qualitative, and quantitative mixed-method approach to identify, collect, code, and analyze redevelopment, tax increment, and state brownfields laws. An exhaustive literature review of the laws’ histories explained when and why they exist. In addition, a …

Conference Award Ceremony*, Office Of High Impact Practices And Undergraduate Research

OneUSF Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Crow's Nest, April 4, 2022, Crow's Nest Staff

Crow's Nest

The April 4, 2022, issue of the Crow's Nest.

Using Prevent-Teach-Reinforce For A High School Student With Emotional And Behavioral Disorder: A Case Study, Alexis Lopez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the school setting school-based professionals have difficulty using function-based approaches to support students engaging in consistent problem behaviors, specifically in students with emotional and behavioral disorder (EBD). This study evaluated the use of the Prevent-Teach-Reinforce (PTR), an individualized function-based intervention model for a 16-year-old high school student with EBD who was served in an alternative education setting. Through a team-based planning process that included the student and his classroom teacher, a function-based PTR intervention plan was implemented to address the student’s disruptive behavior and teach replacement behaviors of academic engagement and asking for help. An A-B design was used …

Graduate Teaching Assistants’ Knowledge And Attitudes Toward Students With Disabilities In Higher Education, Yanlys De La Caridad Palacios

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Students with disabilities are entering higher education at increased rates (National Center Educational Statistics, 2016). The aim of this study was to investigate graduate teaching assistants’ knowledge, attitudes, and professional development needs regarding students with disabilities in higher education. A modification of Sniatecki’s (2015) Faculty Attitudes and Knowledge Regarding College Students with Disabilities Survey was used to gather responses from graduate teaching assistants through an online format. Results of the study indicate that graduate teaching assistants have positive attitudes towards students with disabilities yet lack specific knowledge on accommodations, disability law, and disability support services. Further, respondents expressed a willingness …

Host-Pathogen Coevolution Between Tasmanian Devils (Sarcophilus Harrisii) And Devil Facial Tumor Disease, Dylan Garret Gallinson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Coevolution is a driving force of rapid evolution, yet the complexity of coevolutionary interactions has made it difficult to characterize the genomic basis of traits mediating such relationships. Coevolutionary dynamics are especially important in host-pathogen systems where the host and pathogen must constantly adapt to one another. The Tasmanian devil and its species-specific transmissible cancer, devil facial tumor disease (DFTD), provide the rare opportunity to study host-pathogen coevolution in a complex natural system. Extensive spatiotemporal devil sampling, high linkage disequilibrium in devils, and a large selective pressure imposed by DFTD facilitate a system tractable for study. Here, we characterized devil …

Tampa Bay Citizens’ Academy On Transportation, Jason Jackman, Tia Boyd, Kristine M. Williams

Research Reports

Public involvement in local transportation decision-making is key to achieving a safe, equitable, and sustainable transportation system that meets the needs of all system users. Meaningful participation in the transportation decision-making process is best achieved when citizens are empowered with information and knowledge to help them navigate complex topics like transportation policy, multimodal planning best practices, budgeting, and the layered organizational context in which these decisions are made. With new transportation projects being planned and constructed throughout the Tampa Bay region, more education is needed to guide citizens toward a better understanding of how they can engage in the process …

Local Food Availability In Menus Of Hotels: The Case Of Batman, Turkey, Dilek Ginigen, Bülent Aydın, Caner Güçlü

Journal of Mediterranean Tourism Research

The purpose of this study is to find out the availability of the local dishes of the city of Batman in the menus of the accommodation establishments. Therefore, at first, the local dishes of this city were compiled via document analysis technique. As a result of this compilation, for the study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the managers or head chefs of 13 accommodation establishments located in Batman. As a result of these interviews, it was revealed that none of the accommodation establishments include local dishes in their menus. Furthermore, other results presented that the visitors have a demand towards …

Computing Group-By And Aggregate In Massively Parallel Systems, Chengcheng Mou

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The semiconductor industry has mainly exploited two routes for designing microprocessors. The multi-core route aims to speed up the performance of latency-oriented processing. In contrast, the many-thread route concentrates on throughput-oriented improvement of parallel processing. Many-thread microprocessors, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), are leading the computing capability for this past a decade. According to the current hardware market, at the similar price range, the ratio of peak computing power between multi-core CPUs and many-thread GPUs is up to 15X. This large performance gap on data processing has motivated many practitioners in database community to exploit computation-intensive parts on GPU …

Forum, Volume 46, No. 1, Spring 2022, Florida Humanities, Pam Daniel

FORUM: The Magazine of Florida Humanities

Contents: Letter from the Executive Director -- From the Editor -- Letter from the Secretary of State -- Humanities Live -- Oral History -- Treasure -- Creators -- The Soundtrack of Our State -- "I'm Florida, Need I Say More?" -- The Florida All-Stars -- The Hitmaker -- Traveling Down the Chitlin' Circuit -- Lift Every Voice and Sing -- State of Rock -- A Taste of Florida -- Sense of Place -- By Design -- More Perfect Union -- The Quiz -- On Exhibit

Promoting Cognitive Complexity Among Violent Extremist Youth In Northern Pakistan, Feriha Peracha, Sara Savage, Raafia Khan, Asma Ayub, Andleeb Zahra

Journal of Strategic Security

This article reports on the results of an intervention to promote cognitive complexity (measured by integrative complexity, IC) and perspective taking for youth detained for violent extremism at the Sabaoon Center for Deradicalization and Rehabilitation in northern Pakistan. Participants are sixty-four males (mean age 19.77, SD = 3.26) comprising three cohorts: CVE Detained, CVE Reintegrated, and PVE At-risk.

The Sabaoon IC intervention consists of eight sessions with action learning contextualized according to an assessment of the push, pull and personal factors that shape the life experience of the youth. Pre and post testing results show significant gain in IC in …

Revisiting Domestic Intelligence, John P. Sullivan, Genevieve Lester

Journal of Strategic Security

This article looks at the evolution of US domestic intelligence prior to and since 9/11 in light of the Capitol attacks. It also reviews the literature and practice of intelligence reform in the context of foreign comparative experience (France, UK, Canada, Australia). It looks at the promise of fusion centers, cocontemporay domestic intelligence models, and the continuing need for domestic intelligence reform.

Additional Keywords: Domestic Intelligence, Intelligence Reform, Intelligence Fusion

Understanding Food Insecurity As A Multidimensional Construct: A Mixed Methods Approach To Assess Changes In Food Insecurity Status Among People Seeking Emergency Food Assistance, Whitney M. Fung Uy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Background: In the United States, 13.8 million households were food insecure in 2020, or 10.5% of the country’s population. Although the annual food insecurity rates remained stable between 2019 and 2020, largely due to increased COVID-19 pandemic relief efforts, many households experienced food insecurity and hardship at unprecedented rates. Food assistance provided by the largest government nutrition and food program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and emergency food providers (EFPs) such as food banks and pantries intended to provide short-term solutions have ended up as chronic, long-term methods of survival for many of these families, especially during COVID-19 and the …

Noninvasive In Vivo Optoacoustic Imaging Of Alcohol Use Disorder Using A Mouse Model Of Alcohol Use Disorder, Augustine Meombe Mbolle

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research has two parts. The first part focuses on the use of photoacoustic imaging (PAI) to study alcohol-induced effects in the cerebral vasculature of selectively bred alcohol-preferring mice. Part two extends the application of PAI by developing a novel Photoacoustic imaging guided system for repetitive low intensity focused ultrasound (PAI-LIFU) stimulation treatment for alcohol use disorder in crossed high alcohol preferring (cHAP) mice.

Photoacoustic imaging is an emerging hybrid non-invasive optical imaging modality which relies on optical absorption contrast to visualize deep tissue structures and function. It combines the high contrast associated with pure optical imaging and the high …

An Exploratory Study Of Technology Use By Older/Senior Men For Enrichment, Communication, And Social Connectedness, Emerson Campbell Hardy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

More older adults are moving toward options for digital connection; keeping up with and learning technology is challenging. Older adults’ perceptions of the difficulty of learning to use technology may contribute to their hesitancy to adopt technology options (Barnard, Bradley, Hodgson, & Lloyd, 2013). The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to explore the experiences of older/senior men learning and using technology for enrichment, communication, and social connectedness; and (2) to identify learning experiences and/or supports that aided these older/senior men in building knowledge, confidence, and comfort in technology use.

This was an exploratory qualitative study utilizing in-depth interviews. …

Applied Anthropology Of Addiction In Clinical Spaces: Co-Developing And Assessing A Novel Opioid Treatment Pathway, Heather Diane Henderson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Historically, there has been no clear treatment pathway for opioid use disorder (OUD) patients who seek emergency care. Utilizing a trajectories of addiction framework, this dissertation presents insights from an applied anthropology of addiction study in an acute care setting to build a medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) treatment pathway, aiming to break down the stigma related to opioid use disorder (OUD) and mitigate a lack of treatment options. This dissertation took place in an urban trauma center in Florida, from 2018 to 2021. With almost 1500 hours of participant observation, hundreds of informal interviews, and 30 formal interviews, …

Development And Initial Validation Of The Parent And Family Engagement In Higher Education Measure, Michelle R. Mcnulty

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the history of higher education in the United States, parents and family members of college students have often found themselves as obsolete to the postsecondary experience. Minimal research has been dedicated to understanding the experience of parents and family members of college students until the millennial generation began their collegiate years (Harper et al., 2012; Wartman & Savage, 2008). In consideration of a new generation of college students (i.e., Gen Z) and the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it is crucial to illuminate the complexities of parent and family engagement in higher education and the needs of …

Empirical And Modeled Δ13c And Δ15n Isoscapes In The Gulf Of Mexico And Their Application To Fish Eye Lens Migration Studies, Brianna Michaud

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Isoscapes are depictions of the spatial patterns of isotopic values in a given area. Isoscapes can be created using measurements form samples (empirical isoscapes) or using statistical models of spatial isotopic variation (modeled isoscapes). Isoscapes have a wide variety of potential applications though, in the realm of marine ecology, they are most often used infer ecological processes, food web linkages, the origin of samples, and the movements of marine organisms.

However, to use isoscapes for these applications, it is necessary to have isoscapes at spatial scales relevant to the application in question. It is also necessary to have isoscapes that …

The Boy Scouts Of America Merit Badge Program And Career Development, Todd R. Van Auken

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the study was to determine whether a youth’s career development, as defined by the Career Maturity Inventory (CMI Form C), is associated with motivation, student grade level, and number of merit badges earned as a result of participation as Boy Scouts. For close to three decades there has been a call to improve career counseling for middle and high school youth. However, due to a shortage of school counselors in middle and high schools, counselors are inundated with heavy workloads of various responsibilities and do not always have the ability to focus on youth career development. Thus, …

Collaboratively Building A Teaching Model (Tttc) In A Doctoral Science Education Program: An Autoethnography, Alton George Declaire

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This autoethnography illustrates benefits of doctoral education consistent with the holistic paradigm underlying today’s society and development of a practice-research-practice cycle useful to science teacher educators. Emergent hypotheses indicate ways to increase a doctoral student’s well-being, intellectual risk taking, production of creative products, and expedite in-depth learning. The hypotheses were derived from the processes and pathways I used to make sense of the learning opportunities afforded me and features of my experience that led to my well-being and maintaining my enthusiasm despite the significant life challenges I encountered and the tedious parts of the doctoral process.The original research question was, …

The Weekly Challenger, March 31, 2022, The Weekly Challenger, Et Al

Weekly Challenger Newspaper Collection

The March 31, 2022, issue of The Weekly Challenger.

Finding Signal In The Noise: High-Fidelity, Quantitative, Optical Blood Perfusion Imaging With Interference, Abdul Mohaimen Safi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For label-free, non-invasive, wide field-of-view (FOV) imaging/monitoring of blood flow, speckle-based approaches are gaining popularity. However, to obtain quantitative flow information, speckle techniques rely on the multi-exposure scheme which requires complex, bulky, and expensive instrumentation, limiting its application to preclinical studies. This dissertation directly addresses these issues. In the first part of this dissertation, we report a novel single shot synthetic multi-exposure speckle imaging (syMESI) method to synthetically produce multi-exposure images from one short single exposure speckle image using spatial binning/averaging. We demonstrate that syMESI can reimagine conventional hardware based MESI, with low-cost single exposure laser speckle imaging (LSCI) instrumentation. …

Torn Between Two Worlds: Role And Identity In Hybrid Teacher Leadership, Lauriann Marie Messier-Jones

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Roles of Hybrid Teacher Leadership (HTL), positions which involve classroom teaching for part of the day and academic coaching, curriculum planning, department chair, or professional development responsibilities for the remainder of the day, are becoming more prevalent due to budgetary concerns and teacher shortages. This autoethnography analyzes the first year of my experience as a Hybrid Teacher Leader in a school district in the Southeastern United States to gain knowledge of my enactment of the role, the ways in which I can learn more about myself as an educator and an academic coach from my experiences in the role, and …

Who's Got Your Six: A Formative Evaluation Of A Military-Connected Student Cultural Competency Workshop, Wayne N. Taylor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The University of South Florida (USF) ranks as one of the top 50 public universities in the nation. As of Spring 2022, 14% of the student population identify as military-connected students (MCS). MCS comprises Active Duty, National Guard, Reserve, veteran or military dependents. Many student veterans choose not to embrace their veteran identity due to feeling unaccepted or viewed from a deficit mindset by faculty, staff, and other students. Veteran studies research identifies the significant influence faculty and staff possess when addressing MCS retention and graduation rates (Lim et al., 2018; Vacchi, 2012; Vacchi, 2018). USF’s Office of Veteran Success …

High-Risk Traffic Crash Pattern Recognition And Identification Using Econometric Models And Machine Learning Models, Runan Yang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Roadway crashes have become a major cause of human deaths and injuries and caused much economic damage. According to World Health Organization (WHO), about 1.35 million people died in traffic crashes and over 50 million people injured from traffic crashes in the year of 2016 (World Health Organization, 2020). Nationally, in the U.S., the latest decade witnessed an increase of over 10% in traffic fatalities (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 2019). Similarly, in state of Florida, the fatal crashes increased by 4.62% from 2019 to 2020 (Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, 2021). To prevent injuries and …