Digital Commons Network^™

Pollution Prevention And Water Reuse At Utah Department Of Transportation Facilities, Amanda Stoudt

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

As stormwater flows over roads, sidewalks, and other impervious surfaces, it picks up pollutants that are deposited on these surfaces. One common pollutant transported by stormwater is road salt. While the application of road salt is crucial for wintertime public safety, road salt has a host of negative environmental impacts. Road salt has been linked to increasing levels of dissolved solids in groundwater, vegetation damage, and behavioral changes in aquatic organisms. Studies have shown that these impacts are concentrated around salt storage facilities. As a result, the United States Environmental Protection Agency issued many state departments of transportation municipal separate …

Rural Sustainability In The Intermountain West, Mary L. Oliver

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Assessing the sustainability of communities is important for planners and citizens alike. Sustainability plays a central role in forming healthy, successful communities and in planning for responsible growth and development. Most current sustainability evaluations favor urban environments due to their high densities and resulting efficiencies, leaving rural areas labeled “unsustainable” because of their decentralized growth patterns. Characterized as “not urban,” they fall short of urban sustainability benchmarks (Isserman, 2005). The importance of rural sustainability to both small communities and regions leads to the question: how can rural sustainability be characterized and assessed?

This study applies a comparative assessment model to …

Applications Of Machine Learning In High-Frequency Trade Direction Classification, Jared E. Hansen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The correct assignment of trades as buyer-initiated or seller-initiated is paramount in many quantitative finance studies. Simple decision rule methods have been used for signing trades since many data sets available to researchers do not include the sign of each trade executed. By utilizing these decision rule methods, as well as engineering new variables from available data, we have demonstrated that machine learning models outperform prior methods for accurately signing trades as buys and sells, achieving state-of-the-art results. The best model developed was 4.5 percentage points more accurate than older methods when predicting onto unseen data. Since finance and economics …

Nonpoint Source Pollution Control Using A Multi-Objective Optimization Tool For Best Management Practices Selection And Spatial Placement In The Lower Bear River Watershed, Utah, Ali A. Salha

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation presents a set of approaches to help address water quality problems related to total phosphorus loads in water bodies. Water quality degradation is caused by many nonpoint sources such as agricultural runoff, fertilizers applications, and bank erosion. Three studies present methodologies for water quality protection from degradation in watersheds. The first study demonstrates the application of a watershed simulation tool that can quantify flows in the watershed, the amount of released pollutants and identify the areas contributing to the pollutants’ release in the watershed. The second study presents a simple combination tool that can pair potential management practices …

An Analysis Of Degree Completion Among Female Students At Utah Valley University: A Demonstration Case For An Individualized Analysis Model In Higher Education, Tara S. Ivie

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Higher education institutions are facing low degree completion rates on an epidemic scale. The role of a bachelor degree completion in the well-being and future life of college students is of paramount importance, impacting physical and mental health, financial stability, relationship satisfaction and duration, safety, and community engagement.

Institutions must be critical of and act to address barriers to degree completion. In addition to an intrinsic investment in the success of their students, institutions may be
motivated by institutional improvement, performance-based funding, and the ethical ambition to create an educated society. Understanding when and why students drop and stop out …

Utah County Level Drought Effect On Cattle Inventories 1981-2016, Fred Openshaw

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Utah cattle industry generates 20.6% of sales value for the agricultural sector. As well, this industry encompasses about 34.4% of Utah farms. Besides these figures, Utah cattle ranchers depend heavily upon both public and private lands for grazing as a primary source of feed for their herds. The soil moisture levels of pasturelands impacts the forage yield for a particular year. As a result, the primary purpose of this research is to determine if drought impacts Utah county cattle inventory numbers and what the magnitude of the impact is by analyzing data from 1981 to 2016. A secondary purpose …

Model-Based Properties Of Earth's Protective Shield: Relating Ut-Based Dependencies Of The Open/Closed Boundary, Cutoff Latitude, And L-Shell Parameter With Polar Cap Absorption Events, David A. Smith

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

High frequency radio continues to be an important communications medium. For example, commercial airlines use high frequency radios as their primary communications mode during transpolar crossings. It has been estimated that over 7000 transpolar flights occur each year. Unfortunately, during geomagnetic storms high frequency communications can become unreliable, especially near Earth's Polar Regions.

Space weather forecasters are burdened with the responsibility of predicting how radio signals might be affected during geomagnetic storms and passing that important information on to commercial airlines, allowing them to adjust flight plans accordingly. Such adjustments can be costly, but are necessary to ensure safety of …

Practical Optical Survey Strategies For Near Geostationary Orbital Debris, Akhter Mahmud Nafi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Uncontrolled space objects, more commonly known as space debris, consist of dead satellites, satellite deployment packages, and lost elements of these systems such as insulation blankets. These uncontrolled objects represent hazards to our nation’s most valuable space assets which include communication satellites, weather satellites, Earth monitoring systems, and military assets. To help mitigate this problem, this research proposes using the known astrodynamics of the near geosynchronous orbit (GEO) along with the known concentration of the uncontrolled GEO objects and observation constraints to design ground-based optical surveys that will detect uncatalogued debris. Furthermore, a scoring metric is developed to evaluate the …

Exploring Park Quality In Urban Setting With Environmental Justice, Alternative Measurements, And Social Interaction, Shuolei Chen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

With rapid urbanization, urban green resources, such as parks have become important assets for quality of life in urban settings. Parks provide urban residents with both physical and psychological health benefits through various mechanisms such as physical activity and social interaction. Quality is an important non-spatial dimension of urban parks and has started to gain attention among researchers. To better understand park quality in an urban setting, additional knowledge should be explored. This dissertation studies the quality of urban parks from three different perspectives: 1) the equal distribution of park quality resources and its relationship to environmental justice issues, 2) …

Working Memory And Syntactic Processing In Bilingual And Monolingual Children, Carla I. Orellana

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between complex auditory working memory, syntactic knowledge, and complex sentence comprehension in bilingual and monolingual children using both offline (behavioral) and online (eye-tracking) measures. There were 19 children in the monolingual group and 19 children in the bilingual group with an average age of 11 years. The children listened to sentences, while looking at a screen with three images of the three nouns in the sentence. They were instructed to select the doer of the action (agent). Their eye movements were recorded as they completed this task. The four sentence …

Characteristics Of Family And Consumer Sciences Teachers Adopting Instructional Technologies In The State Of Utah, Nicole J. B. Manwaring

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Effective instructional technology use increases student learning outcomes. There has been an increase in the number and variety of new instructional technologies, but previous research has not focused on the demographic of Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) teachers. More research was needed to identify correlations among technology adopters and how they perceived student learning.

The researcher developed an online survey adapted from previous research to identify technologies being used in FCS classrooms, teacher attitudes on technology integration and perceptions on student learning, and demographic information. A comparison of high school and middle school settings was conducted. It was found that …

Abstention And Costly Information Acquisition In Elections, Jacob Meyer

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Voter turnout rates are low in the United States. Even among citizens who show up to the polls, many do not vote in every race on the ballot. This is especially true for low-profile elections, and races where political party is not on the ballot. Both low turn out and incomplete ballots could be caused by high costs of information. Voters and non-voters have time constraints that can prevent them from researching every candidate or proposition on the ballot. One proposed solution to increase citizen informedness is to make voting mandatory. Mandatory voting imposes a penalty (usually a fine) if …

Decoding Ldpc Codes With Probabilistic Local Maximum Likelihood Bit Flipping, Rejoy Roy Mathews

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Communication channels are inherently noisy making error correction coding a major topic of research for modern communication systems. Error correction coding is the addition of redundancy to information transmitted over communication channels to enable detection and recovery of erroneous information. Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are a class of error correcting codes that have been effective in maintaining reliability of information transmitted over communication channels. Multiple algorithms have been developed to benefit from the LDPC coding scheme to improve recovery of erroneous information. This work develops a matrix construction that stores the information error probability statistics for a communication channel. This …

Development And Validation Of A Synchronous Model To Simulate Skeletal Muscle Damage Due To Spaceflight Ionizing Radiation And Microgravity, Lori M. Caldwell

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Astronauts traveling or researching in space are subject to a harsh environment that includes high levels of ionizing radiation and microgravity. Ionizing radiation is dangerous to overall health because it causes double-stranded DNA breaks, increases the production of free radicals or reactive oxygen species, and leads to an enhanced risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer over a person’s lifetime. Similarly, microgravity is hazardous to astronaut health because humans require gravity to maintain a healthy heart and muscular and vascular systems.

Both ionizing radiation and microgravity have been studied individually in previous research, but there is a lack of information on …

Do Didymosphenia Geminata Blooms Affect Fishes In The Kootenai River Basin?, Niall G. Clancy

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Didymosphenia geminata (Didymo) is a nuisance algae that can cover entire streambeds under certain environmental conditions. Numerous studies have shown that it changes the composition of stream invertebrates. Fishes in many headwaters are known to feed almost exclusively on invertebrates. Thus, there is concern changes to the amount or type of invertebrates caused by Didymo blooms will impact fishes such as trout, charr, and sculpin. In the Kootenai River basin of Montana and British Columbia, we examined stream invertebrates and fish diets, condition, and growth across 25 streams during the summers of 2018 and 2019. The severity of Didymo blooms …

The Influence Of Protein Concentration And Homogenization On Moisture Content, Curd Yield, And Fat Retention Of Model Cheese Made From Microfiltered Skim Milk Recombined With Cream, Richard Byron Geslison

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This project was funded by the Western Dairy Center at Utah State University as part of a multi-pronged approach to improve the current understanding of using concentrated milks in cheese making. Concentrated milk for this study was provided by South Dakota State University.

This study compared the effect of different concentration factors of milk on curd moisture levels, fat content, and cheese curd yields. To see if these results could be improved (i.e. remove more moisture and retain more fat) milk samples were also subjected to limited pressure homogenization (microfluidization) treatments.

It was found in the course of this study …

Improving Identification Of Pediatric Feeding Dysfunction Among Registered Dietitian Nutritionists, April Litchford

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

All Registered Dietitian Nutritionists (RDN) undergo extensive training to develop the ability to improve dietary intake among individuals of all ages. Treating children (0-18 years of age) is often challenging and requires specialized training. One area that is particularly challenging is identifying children that may not be able to eat appropriately to sustain rapid growth and development. An online survey of RDNs that work specifically with children was conducted to better understand how RDNs are identifying and treating children with feeding problems. From the survey we learned that the methods and procedures used by RDNs for identifying and treating children …

Perceptions And Behavioral Intentions Of Utah 4-H Equine Program Leaders In Teaching Equine Safety To Youth, Katelyn M. Huffman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

There is an inherent risk associated with working with youth and large equine. The Utah 4-H Equine program is a volunteer-based program that seeks to properly educate youth on equine husbandry, this includes the topic of safe equine handling practices. The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions and behavioral intentions of Utah 4-H Equine Program leaders about teaching equine safety, including attitudes, perceived behavioral controls and subjective norms. The survey instrument consisted of multiple choice, fill in the blank, and six-point Likert scale questions regarding personal demographics, experience teaching equine safety, attitudes towards safety, perceived behavioral controls, …

Club Athletes: Dietary Supplement Use And How The Registered Dietitian Can Better Serve This Population, Rachel E. Robbins

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Dietary supplements are a booming business in the United States. Currently over half of Americans have taken a dietary supplement in the last year. Collegiate and professional athletes are even more likely to take a dietary supplement to get a competitive edge over their opponents. The objective of this study was to assess dietary supplement use in club athletes at Utah State University. Club athletes are non-scholarship athletes associated with a university. They often do not the same level of funding or resources that NCAA or scholarship athletes have. A survey was sent to all 401 club athletes at Utah …

Teaching Distributed Application Design Using Drones, Cameron Frandsen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis provides a new platform that instructors can use to create a learning environment for students to learn how to design and implement distributed applications. One possible way to use the platform uses milestones to test the student’s understanding of different concepts. Milestones contain pretests that students can use to test their code. Each milestone focuses on a different concept, including interprocess communication, reliability, and security. A monitor process can be created by the students to provide away for the instructor to see how well the students are learning the concepts by using a monitor process. The platform gives …

Implementing Option Pricing Model, Zhao Ming

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

In this paper I replicate Clewlow and Strickland's control variates methods based on Greek letters method to test if it can improve the simulation efficiency. First, I use Black Scholes Merton formula for option pricing as a benchmark, to compare with the European call option price from Monte Carlo methods. Then I use Greek letters as control variates to reduce sample standard deviation and improve the efficiency of the Monte Carlo simulation. The whole process is programming in C++. C++ is a compiled language which can generate machine code from source code and provide a shorter running time. This paper …

Bookscapes: A Study In The Interconnectivity Of Landscape And Narrative Visualization And Communication In Landscape Architecture, Tonya Randall

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The fields of landscape architecture and literacy have the potential to be linked through a simulated environment. Through this connection, opportunity for education arises. This thesis creates and describes a program called Bookscapes, which presents a narrative inside a simulated landscape for the purpose of communicating landscape architecture/urban planning principles.

Bookscapes is a stand-alone computer program designed using theories in education and guidelines for virtual and restorative environments (including Huang’s elements, Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory for restorative environments, constructivist theory of situational learning) and the revolving design process in landscape architecture’s communication to clients through 3D modeling.

This thesis first …

New Perspectives On Promoting Efl Teaching And Learning In Oman, Jihan Sulaiman Al Naabi

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This portfolio is an accumulation of work that the author accomplished during her study in the program of Master of Second Language Teaching at Utah State University. It is an outcome of the author’s personal teaching experiences, insights gained from her master’s study, and several class observations as well.

The portfolio comprises three primary portions: (1) teaching perspectives, (2) research perspectives, and (3) an annotated bibliography. The teaching perspectives revolve around the author’s beliefs on the role of both teachers and students in L2 classrooms, the communicative teaching of grammar, and the value of a positive learning environment. The research …

Meeting The Needs Of Students In A Communicative Classroom, Rachel J. Singer

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This portfolio is a compilation of written pieces which highlight what the author believes to be key issues and perspectives in the field of second language teaching. The content of the portfolio is centered in second language acquisition theory and is framed by the author’s diverse teaching experiences as a university Arabic instructor, ESL aide, and middle school Spanish teacher.

The portfolio contains three sections: (1) teaching perspectives, (2) research perspectives, and (3) an annotated bibliography. The teaching perspectives section contains the author’s teaching philosophy statement which emphasizes communicative language teaching, target language use in the classroom, and the role …

Harmonizing Music And Language Acquisition: Learning Language With The Arts, Samantha Ontiveros

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This portfolio consists of select work the author completed during the Master of Second Language Teaching program at Utah State University. Throughout the portfolio, the author shares her personal ideas, opinions, teaching observations, and personal teaching examples utilizing song; all these were found to support the research presented in this portfolio.

This portfolio contains three main sections: (1) teaching perspectives, (2) research perspectives, and (3) an annotated bibliography. The focus of this portfolio is to find new ways to teach language using artistic and creative outlets, such as multimodality, technology, and most importantly, music. The portfolio contains effective ways to …

Student-Centered, Interaction-Based, Community-Driven Language Teaching, Sharon Lyman

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This portfolio is a compilation that highlights some of the author’s accomplished work while in the Master of Second Language Teaching (MSLT) program at Utah State University (USU). Organized into sections that reflect the author’s teaching and research perspectives as a MSLT graduate student and instructor, who taught intensive English reading, writing, and conversation courses for the Intensive English Language Institute (IELI).

In the first section, teaching perspectives, the author describes her desired professional environment, shares her personal teaching philosophy statement, and accounts for her professional development through classroom observations. In the second section, research perspectives, two research papers and …

Flash Lab: A High-Speed Imaging Laboratory, Cody D. Hatch

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

To help students become better acquainted with high-speed instrumentation and measurement techniques, a high-speed imaging laboratory for the College of Engineering is equipped with a high-speed camera and schlieren imaging device. The laboratory will be used for labs in classes, such as Instrumentation, Thermal/Fluids Lab, Experimental Solids, and Mechanical Experiments. In addition, graduate students will use it for research purposes. The laboratory also has the potential to have a course associated with it that would include the image processing techniques for a variety of applications (e.g., a course on high-speed imaging). The scope of this project will be to create …

Faculty Senate Agenda, April 27, 2020, Utah State University

Faculty Senate & Faculty Senate Executive Committee

Call to Order

• Approval of Minutes

University Business

Information

• EPC Monthly Report

Reports

• Committee on Committees
• Calendar Committee
• Recruitment & Retention

Old Business

• 404 - Student Involvement

New Business

• Faculty Senate President Elect

Concluding Remarks, Passing of the Gavel

College Caucus to Elect FSEC members

• Colleges needing an FSEC member

Considerations For Crop Rotation From Alfalfa To Corn, Earl Creech, Matt Yost, Grant Cardon, Corey Ransom, Jason Clark

All Current Publications

The importance of rotating out of a declining alfalfa stand is well established. As the alfalfa stand ages, forage yield and quality decline, while weed, insect, and disease pressures increase. Terminating the stand and growing one or more other crops for several (2–3) years allows a grower to press the reset button on a piece of ground. These years of growing another crop will result in more productive alfalfa when a new stand is planted again.

Genotyping-By-Sequencing And Ecological Niche Modeling Illuminate Phylogeography, Admixture, And Pleistocene Range Dynamics In Quaking Aspen (Populus Tremuloides), Justin C. Bagley, Neander M. Heming, Eliécer E. Gutiérrez, Upendra K. Devisetty, Karen E. Mock, Andrew J. Eckert, Steven H. Strauss

Ecology Center Publications

Populus tremuloides is the widest‐ranging tree species in North America and an ecologically important component of mesic forest ecosystems displaced by the Pleistocene glaciations. Using phylogeographic analyses of genome‐wide SNPs (34,796 SNPs, 183 individuals) and ecological niche modeling, we inferred population structure, ploidy levels, admixture, and Pleistocene range dynamics of P. tremuloides, and tested several historical biogeographical hypotheses. We found three genetic lineages located mainly in coastal–Cascades (cluster 1), east‐slope Cascades–Sierra Nevadas–Northern Rockies (cluster 2), and U.S. Rocky Mountains through southern Canadian (cluster 3) regions of the P. tremuloides range, with tree graph relationships of the form ((cluster 1, …