Digital Commons Network^™

A Novel Magnetic Respiratory Sensor For Human Healthcare, Kee Young Hwang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Breathing is vital to life. Therefore, the real-time monitoring of a patient’s breathing pattern is crucial to respiratory rehabilitation therapies such as magnetic resonance exams for respiratory-triggered imaging, chronic pulmonary disease treatment, and synchronized functional electrical stimulation. While numerous respiratory devices have been developed, they are often in direct contact with a patient, which can yield inaccurate or limited data. In this study, we developed a novel, non-invasive, and contactless magnetic sensing platform that can precisely monitor a patient’s breathing, movement, or sleep patterns, thus providing efficient monitoring at a clinic or home. A magneto-LC resonance (MLCR) sensor converts the …

The Power Of Non-Compliant Logos: A New Materialist Approach To Comic Studies, Stephanie N. Phillips

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to understand how an image becomes a meaning-making actant. By tracing the lifecycle of an image starting with its production, I analyze how the image changes and transforms as it circulates and enters into new and sometimes unexpected relationships. Specifically, I look at the NC logo, an image found in the popular comic book Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine de Landro. The NC logo, which stands for “non-compliant,” is a fictitious symbol used on prisoner uniforms in the science-fiction comic series, and marks women who have failed to conform to societal guidelines set by …

Laser-Induced Modifications In Two-Dimensional Materials, Tariq Afaneh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials have attracted a growing interest in the lastdecade from the fundamental point of view as well as their potential applications in functional devices. Due to their high surface-to-volume ratio, the physical properties of 2D materials are very sensitive to the environmental factor such as surrounding media and illumination conditions (e.g. light-mater interaction). In the first part of this dissertation I will present recent advances in developing laser-assisted methods to tune the physical properties of 2D transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). We demonstrate laser-assisted chemical modification ultrathin TMDs, locally replacing selenium by sulfur atoms. The photo-conversion process …

Bidirectional Influences Of Decisions And Outcomes On Organizational Identity And Sustainable Viability In Small, Private, Nonprofit, Mission-Focused Higher Education Institutions, Brian J. Gilliam

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As educational leaders in small, private, nonprofit, mission-focused higher education institutions confront challenges, their decisions influence organizational identity, culture, and viability. Decision-making is informed in a complex environment of internal and external influences. The purpose of this research is engaged scholarship to inform practitioners of decision-making in mission-focused institutions with better understanding of why and how adaptation is occurring, and provide a conceptual framework for decision-making and further study of organizational leadership in this important sector of higher education.

Four-year private, nonprofit, degree-granting institutions represent 34% of all accredited institutions in the United States and serve over 5 million students. …

Controlling Properties Of Light: Metamaterials Design And Methodology, Darrick Hay

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Electromagnetic metamaterials are materials that have designed electromagnetic properties. In general metamaterials are subwavelength and can be treated as homogeneous media with an effective permittivity and permeability. Early metamaterial designs were developed to exhibit electromagnetic responses not typically found in naturally occuring materials, but this is not a strict requirement. Metamaterials have shown promise for applications throughout the electromagnetic spectrum. The goal of this work is to present a coherent methodology for metamaterials design, fabrication and application while also describing all of the relevant physics of the designed metamaterials.

Chapter 1 is comprised of an introduction into the field of …

Crowd-Sourced Plagiarism Detection Of Essays, Zachariah Beasley

Southeast ICAI Sharing Conference

The aggregate guess of a sufficiently large and diverse group produces a precise result (the wisdom of the crowd). By applying this principle to peer review of essays or other open-ended questions, an instructor can organize their course and leverage a crowd to help identify and mitigate plagiarism.

Feasting On Words: What University Students Learn When They Study Food Writing And Food Media, Janet K. Keeler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The use of food in college curriculum is unique in its ability to create lasting impact because of the keen interest millennial and Generation Z students have in what they eat and drink. Studying media with food at its core is an underutilized mechanism to show how food intersects with the lives of all people thus encouraging students to look beyond their own experiences to consider the wider society. A program evaluation of 10 semesters of food writing and food media courses at a Florida public university reveals the ways in which students make deeper connections to culture and current …

Digital Identity: A Human-Centered Risk Awareness Study, Toufic N. Chebib

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cybersecurity threats and compromises have been at the epicenter of media attention; their risk and effect on people’s digital identity is something not to be taken lightly. Though cyber threats have affected a great number of people in all age groups, this study focuses on 55 to 75-year-olds, as this age group is close to retirement or already retired. Therefore, a notable compromise impacting their digital identity can have a major impact on their life.

To help guide this study, the following research question was formulated, “What are the risk perceptions of individuals, between the ages of 55 and 75 …

Origins Of Amyloid Oligomers And Novel Approaches For Their Detection, Jeremy Barton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Alzheimer’s disease, type II diabetes, and other amyloid diseases are known to be associated with the formation of amyloid aggregates. It has been thoroughly researched whether amyloid fibrils or oligomers are the main culprit for these diseases, and recent evidence has connected oligomers as the most disease relevant aggregate species. However, many difficulties have arose in confirming this hypothesis. Techniques for oligomer detection are often limited in their sensitivity, and in many cases are unable to distinguish oligomers from rigid fibrils. Additionally, the role oligomer splay in fibril assembly is still unclear, and has led to the belief that different …

Sustainable Non-Noble Metal Based Catalysts For High Performance Oxygen Electrocatalysis, Swetha Ramani

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Current energy crisis has dramatically shifted the focus of technological advancements towards clean and renewable forms of energy. Continued dependence and utilization of fossil fuels has created global awareness on harmful greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. A need for sustainable technology has gained a lot of significance in the recent years. This has led to the development of devices and technologies that rely on environmentally friendly electrochemical conversion and storage of energy. One such advancement that generates electrical energy from chemical reactions is known as fuel cell technology. While fuel cells have demonstrated potential in replacing the conventional technologies …

Beyond Victims & Villains: Teaching Cleland With Haywood & Behn, Christopher Nagle

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay explores strategies for teaching Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) in the introductory literature classroom, and why it might be especially valuable to do so at a time when issues surrounding sexual violence, rape culture, and the politics of consent continue to be prominent inside and outside the college classroom.

“Yield It Up Cheerfully”: Teaching Consent, Violence, And Coercion In Samuel Richardson’S Pamela, Leah Grisham

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Drawn from the author’s experience teaching Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela during the #Metoo movement, this essay argues that bringing current discourses of consent and gender-based violence into conversation with the novel deepens students’ engagement with and interest in the eighteenth century. While students identify specters of Pamela and Mr. B’s relationship in their own worlds, the novel is also a helpful tool in revealing the many ways in which consent can be coerced.

#Metoo Or "Me Too"?: Defining Our Terms, Caitlin L. Kelly

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

How we talk about misogyny and sexual violence in literary texts matters—to our students, to our colleagues, and to the future of the humanities and of higher education—and the “Me Too” movement has revived with new urgency debates about how to do that. In this essay, I explore the ethical implications of invoking the “Me Too” movement in the classroom, and I offer a model for designing a course that does not simply present women’s narratives as objects of study but rather uses those narratives to give students opportunities and tools to participate in the “Me Too” movement themselves. To …

A Novel Moment For #Writewithaphra, Laura Runge, Tonya Howe

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Introduction to the Fall 2020 issue that describes our summer 2020 writing camp #WriteWithAphra.

Crow's Nest, November 2, 2020, Crow's Nest Staff

Crow's Nest

The November 2, 2020, issue of the Crow's Nest.

Cutr Connections [November 2020], Cutr

CUTR Newsletters

No abstract provided.

Impact Assessment Of Full And Partial Stay-At-Home Orders, Face Mask Usage, And Contact Tracing: An Agent-Based Simulation Study Of Covid-19 For An Urban Region, Hanisha Tatapudi, Rachita Das, Tapas K Das

All publications

Purpose: Social intervention strategies to mitigate COVID-19 are examined using an agent-based simulation model. Outbreak in a large urban region, Miami-Dade County, Florida, USA is used as a case study. Results are intended to serve as a planning guide for decision makers.

Methods: The simulation model mimics daily social mixing behavior of the susceptible and infected generating the spread. Data representing demographics of the region, virus epidemiology, and social interventions shapes model behavior. Results include daily values of infected, reported, hospitalized, and dead.

Results: Results show that early implementation of complete stay-at-home order is effective in flattening and reversing the …

Florida Studies: Business & Implementation Plan, Andrew Huse

Special Collections Reports & Documents

No abstract provided.

Three Blended Librarians' Narratives On Developing Professional Identities, Adonis Amparo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A blended librarian holds two separate and distinct responsibilities in the academic institution. One relates to instructional technology, the other relates to the information professional. In this narrative inquiry, I explore the constructed identity of three blended librarians and offer insight to inform current and future blended librarians, instructional technologists and designers, and their academic institutions. Each librarian was hired between 2012 and 2013. Each participant was the first blended librarian at each of their universities. I explored themes of transformation, inclusiveness, and connectedness. I used Mezirow’s transformational learning theory with support from secondary theories, universal instructional design and TPACK …

Edge Computing For Deep Learning-Based Distributed Real-Time Object Detection On Iot Constrained Platforms At Low Frame Rate, Lakshmikavya Kalyanam

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the era of IoT (Internet of Things) and edge computing, there is a rising need for real-time applications in the domain of computer vision. The increase in hardware computing capabilities gave rise to applications of neural networks in various fields. Implementing IoT with neural networks in domains such as image and video recognition has shown promising performance when deployed in complex environments. There is an emerging demand for applications that require data computation in real-time with low latency. In an effort to address these issues, while keeping in mind the computing capabilities of IoT devices, we seek to develop …

Assessing Many-Body Van Der Waals Contributions In Model Sorption Environments, Matthew K. Mostrom

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The energy used in the separation and purification of small volatile atoms and compounds represents a sizablefraction of the world’s energy consumption as a whole 1 Noble gases in particular represent a unique challenge as their separation currently relies on distillation methods that work by virtue of small differences in the density of their pure phases. Highly porous Metal-Organic Materials (MOMs) offer a cheaper, more efficient alternative to cryogenic distillation, and studying their properties using various simulation methods has become an important and active area of research. The family of Potentials with “High Accuracy, Speed and Transferability” (PHAST) have been …

Applying The Situational Theory Of Publics To Children's Sex Education In China, Baoyi Zeng

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In China, "sex" is a sensitive, even taboo topic. In this special cultural background, the lack of sex education for children is worthy of attention. This study aims to extend the Situational Theory of Public (STP) to the field of sex education for children. The results of an online questionnaire survey among 424 Chinese parents show that a high degree of problem recognition and high level of participation in child sex education will lead Chinese parents to actively search for relevant information on this issue. Being able to identify children's sex education problems, having a low barrier to solving the …

One News Event, Three Media Frames, Le Xin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As a protest movement that has attracted international attention, the 2019 Hong Kong protest has become the focus of media and public attention due to political issues involving China mainland and Hong Kong. The reporting process and framing of news media for news events is actually a process of selecting and reorganizing related events. The media of different countries also reported the 2019 Hong Kong Protest like this process. However, the reporting frameworks in different media organizations are also completely different because of the differences in the nature, positioning, and political factors of those media. Based on the framing theory, …

Honokiol Loaded Mpeg-Pcl Micelles For The Treatment Of Age-Related Macular Degeneration, Amna Shahid

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Age related Macular Degeneration (AMD), a multi-factorial age-related retinal hypoxic disorder resulting in irreversible loss of vision is the foremost cause of blindness in United States. Current treatment strategies used to treat disease involve multiple intraocular injections of Anti – VEGF agents into the vitreous of eye. In addition to the issues of drug localization and targeted delivery, the need to frequently inject drug into the eye raise patient compliance issues. These challenges call for sustained drug delivery system. In this study, a sustained drug delivery system was prepared by loading an anti- HIF agent, honokiol into MPEG-PCL polymer. These …

The Weekly Challenger, October 29, 2020, The Weekly Challenger, Et Al

Weekly Challenger Newspaper Collection

The October 29, 2020, issue of The Weekly Challenger.

The Impact Of Sample Processing And Media Chemistry On The Culturable Diversity Of Bacteria Isolated From A Cave, Katey E. Bender, Katelyn Glover, Alexander Archey, Hazel A. Barton

International Journal of Speleology

Although molecular approaches can identify members of microbial communities in the environment, genomic information does not necessarily correlate with environmental phenotype. Understanding functional roles can be done by cultivating representative species, yet the culturablility of bacteria from caves remains low, at 0.02%, limiting our understanding of microbial community interactions and processes. We have investigated several factors influencing culturability of bacteria from a single sample location in Maxwelton Sink Cave, WV, USA. Extended incubation of inoculated plates showed a significant increase in colony counts from two to four weeks, indicating that extended incubations increase culturability. There were no significant differences in …

New Mechanisms That Regulate Dna Double-Strand Break-Induced Gene Silencing And Genome Integrity, Dante Francis Deascanis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Proliferating cells are constantly threatened by genotoxic stressors that can potentially lead to genomic instability. Breaks in the DNA, namely double-strand breaks, are detrimental sources of damage that must be repaired to maintain genomic integrity and prevent potential tumorigenesis. Here we discuss a gene silencing mechanism flanking damaged chromatin. Gene silencing and transcriptional repression at damaged DNA are necessary to prevent potential genomic aberrations from occurring through conflicts with the DNA repair machinery. BMI1, a core polycomb protein in the polycomb repressive complex 1 (PRC1) has been known to play a role in gene silencing at damaged chromatin. However, the …

The West Knows Best: East Germans Left Behind After Unification, Arwen A. Puteri

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The East-German euphoria of unification in 1989 and the subsequent transition from a communist to a market economy that had promised West German standards and prosperity in East Germany vanished rapidly. A hastily negotiated unification treaty and emerging West German dominance – in numbers and economic power – resulted in vast unemployment, bankruptcies, and the large-scale collapse of the East German economy. In addition, East-German culture, accomplishments, and experiences were not respected and valued in a unified country that was focused on Western values, languages, and ways of life. With nothing to offer, East Germans became hopeless and resentful and …

Humanistic Climate Philosophy: Erich Fromm Revisited, Nicholas Dovellos

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Given the current juncture in history, humanity is faced with the herculean task of adapting to a tumultuous present and a gimmer future. Should climate projections be accurate, there is little time to waste. This work makes the claim that we are not only in a political gridlock but also in an academic one. Researching climate philosophy from its inception, the concluding view is that no major progress, outside of a standardized descriptive analysis, has been achieved. Thus, the work evaluates an array of climate philosophers e.g. Stephen Gardiner, James Garvey, Peter Singer, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, etc., with specific emphasis on …

Regulation Of The Heat Shock Response And Hsf-1 Nuclear Stress Bodies In C. Elegans, Andrew Deonarine

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Heat Shock Response (HSR) is a highly conserved stress responsive molecular pathway that functions to promote appropriate protein folding in the cell. The HSR accomplishes this primarily through the use of molecular chaperones that serve to bind to misfolded or unfolded proteins to assist in stabilizing and folding proteins back to their native functional state. The master regulator of this pathway is a transcription factor known as Heat Shock Factor 1 (HSF1). HSF1 regulates molecular chaperone expression in the cell’s basal state, but can also be stress induced by diverse biotic and abiotic signals including thermal shock, oxidative stress, …