Digital Commons Network^™

Family Dining: Food And Drink In The Sopranos – A Gastrocritical Approach, Lisa Davies

Dissertations

This thesis uses gastrocriticism to explore food and drink in the 86 episodes of the long-form narrative HBO television series The Sopranos. Gastrocriticism is an emerging branch of literary criticism that draws on scholarship from a range of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. A deeper understanding of the series was gained by using a structured framework of enquiry to explore narrative, setting, characterisation and genre through the lens of food and foodways. The Sopranos is a story of an Italian-American crime family and food is abundant in the series and bound up with the identity of …

Exploring The Fifth Quarter: An Enquiry Into Offal Eating In Contemporary Irish Food Culture, Its History, And Its Future, Niall Toner

Dissertations

Animal offal and organ meats seem to have all but disappeared from domestic cuisine in Ireland, despite the recent renaissance in the country’s food culture. This thesis has examined the extent and nature of the consumption of these comestibles in contemporary Irish food culture, and the perceived decline in offal’s popularity in Ireland in the past fifty years. It also sought to discover whether offal and organ meats might have a place in the future of our cuisine, and whether the consumption of more offal and organ meats in Ireland might contribute towards a more sustainable food production system, and …

Administrative Leaders' Viewpoints About The Significance Of Art Education In Schools, Jennifer Luckett

Dissertations

The value of art education and people’s perspective of its value have been subjects of research throughout the years. Art programs are usually the first to be eliminated when there are budget cuts in the public-school systems. This study examines policy, history, and teachers’, parents’, and students’ viewpoints of the value of art education. It also analyzes the researched value that an art education provides. As there is little to no research on administrative leaders’ viewpoints, this research study utilized Q-methodology to determine administrators’ viewpoints on their personal value of art education. The main goal of this research was to …

Concurrent Study Of The Impact Of An Institutionalized Diversity Plan On The Perceived Sense Of Academic Achievement, Sense Of Belonging, And Program Completion Among African American Students In A Midwest Community College, Tyianna Thompson

Dissertations

This dissertation explored how an institutionalized diversity plan impacts perceived academic achievement, sense of belonging, and program completion among African American students. The concurrent mixed-methods methodology followed a single case study design to explore the impact of an institutionalized diversity plan in a Midwest community college. Both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered and analyzed. The results of this study revealed that although diversity and inclusion programs are somewhat effective in higher education, more needs to be done to satisfy the needs of minority students in higher education. According to the findings of this study, most students felt a sense …

Faculty Perception Of The Impact Of Covid-19: A Descriptive Case Study Analysis, Traci Pooler

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to get an understanding of college faculty experiences and perceptions of student learning outcomes during forced virtual instruction in the spring 2020 semester. The study was limited to faculty who taught at one of the 18 member institutions of the Association of Kentucky Colleges and Universities (AIKCU). Factors such as the discipline being taught were considered. Other factors considered were faculty experience with virtual instruction, the availability of technology for faculty and students, and the support provided to students and faculty amid the transition to virtual instruction. The survey reviewed responses from each AIKCU …

Agreement Of Psychiatric Diagnoses Within And Between Groups Of Mental Health Clinicians From Different Disciplines, Wade Mcguire

Dissertations

The development of therapy as a treatment option for mental health problems has led to the creation of different disciplines. Each discipline has developed its own conceptualization of classification and treatment of mental health problems. These conceptualizations have led to different areas of focus for each of the disciplines, specifically counseling, psychology, and social work. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether these areas of focus influence how each discipline diagnoses. For this study, data was collected by having clinicians provide diagnoses for three fictitious clients. The vignettes for the clients were taken from a psychopathology textbook to …

Examining The Relationship Between Psychological Well-Being And Academic Performance Among First-Year College Students In A U.S. Mid-South University, Ya-Hsin Hsiao

Dissertations

This study examined the relationship between psychological well-being and college students. In addition, I looked at how COVID-19 impacted their psychological well-being. I used Ryff and Keyes’ (1995) 18-item Scale of Psychological Well-Being (SPWB-18) to measure participants' psychological well-being. Other demographic information such as race, gender, first-generation college student status, college readiness, and Pell Grant eligibility were collected from the WKU’s Institutes of Research.

Data were analyzed using multiple regressions that controlled for the effects of ethnicity, gender, first-generation status, and socioeconomic status. Moreover, the impact of COVID-19 on psychological well-being was evaluated and reported. In this dataset, the internal …

The Effects Of Personalized Learning On Student Achievement, Keile Phillips

Dissertations

Although many studies have been conducted on personalized learning strategies, teacher attitudes and perceptions, and student engagement, few studies have focused on personalized learning and its impact on student achievement when compared to the traditional classroom. The purpose of this study was to determine if personalized learning increased student achievement in three school districts by analyzing student assessments for three consecutive school years. The study utilized data from three school districts located in Western Kentucky for the 2016-2017, 2017-2018, and 2018-2019 school years. The data were collected from Renaissance Learning for math and reading. In addition to examining the students’ …

Developing Mental Health And Wellness Awareness In Schools, Leah Wood

Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic increased concerns for anxiety and depression in adolescents (Jones et al., 2021). As these concerns increased, students’ coping skills and mental health declined (Meherali et al., 2021). This mixed-methods study based in improvement science sought to develop mental health supports for teachers and students in a secondary setting. A mental health team convened for the purpose of this study completed a root cause analysis for a high school to determine the barriers to mental health supports. We identified the problem and potential barriers preventing proper mental health education and supports for teachers, students, and parents. The analysis …

A Computational Model Of Trust Based On Dynamic Interaction In The Stack Overflow Community, Patrick O’Neill

Dissertations

A member’s reputation in an online community is a quantified representation of their trustworthiness within the community. Reputation is calculated using rules-based algorithms which are primarily tied to the upvotes or downvotes a member receives on posts. The main drawback of this form of reputation calculation is the inability to consider dynamic factors such as a member’s activity (or inactivity) within the community. The research involves the construction of dynamic mathematical models to calculate reputation and then determine to what extent these results compare with rules-based models. This research begins with exploratory research of the existing corpus of knowledge. Constructive …

Development Of A Hospital Discharge Planning System Augmented With A Neural Clinical Decision Support Engine, David Mulqueen

Dissertations

The process of discharging patients from a tertiary care hospital, is one of the key activities to ensure the efficient and effective operation of a hospital. However, the decision to discharge a patient from a hospital is complex, as it requires multiple interactions with nurses, family, consultants, health information records and doctors, which can be very time consuming and prone to error. This thesis descries how a neural network based Clinical Decision Support system can be developed, to help in the decision making process and dramatically reduce the time and effort in running the discharge process in a hospital. A …

Exploring Gender Bias In Semantic Representations For Occupational Classification In Nlp: Techniques And Mitigation Strategies, Joseph Michael O'Carroll

Dissertations

Gender bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP) models is a non-trivial problem that can perpetuate and amplify existing societal biases. This thesis investigates gender bias in occupation classification and explores the effectiveness of different debiasing methods for language models to reduce the impact of bias in the model’s representations. The study employs a data-driven empirical methodology focusing heavily on experimentation and result investigation. The study uses five distinct semantic representations and models with varying levels of complexity to classify the occupation of individuals based on their biographies.

Evaluating The Performance Of Vulkan Glsl Compute Shaders In Real-Time Ray-Traced Audio Propagation Through 3d Virtual Environments, James Buggy

Dissertations

Real time ray tracing is a growing area of interest with applications in audio processing. However, real time audio processing comes with strict performance requirements, which parallel computing is often used to overcome. As graphics processing units (GPUs) have become more powerful and programmable, general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) has allowed GPUs to become extremely powerful parallel processors, leading them to become more prevalent in the domain of audio processing through platforms such as CUDA. The aim of this research was to investigate the potential of GLSL compute shaders in the domain of real time audio processing. Specifically …

The Effects Of Disinformation Upon National Attitudes Towards The Eu And Its Institutions, Alex Murphy

Dissertations

This work explores the effects of misinformation and disinformation upon national attitudes towards the EU. Several nations, in particular the Russian Federation, have been working for decades to spread narratives that debase the political processes of healthy democracies around the world. There is strong evidence to show that extensive efforts have been made to disrupt the inner workings and overall membership of the EU, to support disruptive policies in the United States such that political deadlock is maintained indefinitely. These efforts are largely based on the spreading of misinformation and disinformation across social networks that have done very little to …

Evaluation Of Text Transformers For Classifying Sentiment Of Reviews By Using Tf-Idf, Bert (Word Embedding), Sbert (Sentence Embedding) With Support Vector Machine Evaluation, Mina Jamshidian

Dissertations

As the online world evolves and new media emerge, consumers are sharing their reviews and opinions online. This has been studied in various academic fields, including marketing and computer science. Sentiment analysis, a technique used to identify the sentiment of a piece of text, has been researched in different domains such as movie reviews and mobile app ratings. However, the video game industry has received relatively little research on experiential products. The purpose of this study is to apply sentiment analysis to user reviews of games on Steam, a popular gaming platform, in order to produce actionable results. The video …

Explaining Deep Q-Learning Experience Replay With Shapley Additive Explanations, Robert S. Sullivan

Dissertations

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in optimizing complex control and decision-making processes but Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) lacks interpretability, limiting its adoption in regulated sectors like manufacturing, finance, and healthcare. Difficulties arise from DRL’s opaque decision-making, hindering efficiency and resource use, this issue is amplified with every advancement. While many seek to move from Experience Replay to A3C, the latter demands more resources. Despite efforts to improve Experience Replay selection strategies, there is a tendency to keep capacity high. This dissertation investigates training a Deep Convolutional Q-learning agent across 20 Atari games, in solving a control task, physics task, …

The Use Of Data Balancing Algorithms To Correct For The Under-Representation Of Female Patients In A Cardiovascular Dataset, Sian Miller

Dissertations

Given that women are under-represented in medical datasets, and that machine learning classification algorithms are known to exhibit bias towards the majority class, the growing application of machine learning in the medical field risks resulting in worse medical outcomes for female patients. The Heart Failure Prediction (HFP) dataset is a historical dataset used for the training of models for the prediction of heart disease. This dataset contains significantly fewer female patients than male patients, and as such it is expected that models trained using this data will inherit a gender bias to favour male patients. This dissertation explores the use …

Probability Expressions In Ai Decision Support: Impacts On Human+Ai Team Performance, Elias Spinn

Dissertations

AI decision support systems aim to assist people in highly complex and consequential domains to make efficient, effective, and high-quality decisions. AI alone cannot be guaranteed to be correct in these complex decision tasks, and a human is often needed to ensure decision accuracy. The ambition is for these human+ AI teams to perform better together than either would individually. To realise this, decision makers must trust their AI partners appropriately, knowing when to rely on their recommendations and when to be sceptical. However, research has shown that decision makers often either mistrust and underutilise these systems, or trust them …

The Vulnerability Through Cyberattacks Related To Technological Differences Between Centralized, Server-Based And Ethereum Based Smart Home Systems, Friederike Johanna Haberl

Dissertations

Many people use the digital support of smart home systems to improve their homes' comfort, security, and efficiency (Komninos et al., 2011). However, with the growing number of users comes an increasing number of security challenges that must be addressed (Albany et al., 2022). To mitigate these concerns, the smart home industry is exploring new technologies beyond the traditional centralized server model. One promising technology is the Ethereum blockchain, a distributed database technology. However, it is unclear which concrete security advantages the use of this technology offers in the smart home area. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to …

Application Of Shallow Neural Networks To Retail Intermittent Demand Time Series, Urko Allende

Dissertations

Accurate sales predictions are essential for businesses in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry. However, their demand forecasts are often unreliable, leading to imprecisions that affect downstream decisions. This dissertation proposes using an artificial neural network to improve intermittent demand forecasting in the retail sector. The research investigates the validity of using unprocessed historical information, eluding hand-crafted features, to learn patterns in intermittent demand data. The experiment tests a selection of shallow neural network architectures that can expedite the time-to-market in comparison to conventional demand forecasting methods. The results demonstrate that organisations that still rely on manual and direct forecasting …

Closing The Preparedness-Readiness Gap In New School Administration, Melissa Williams Stephanski

Dissertations

School leadership is a vital aspect of K-12 public education. As graduates exit university principal preparation programs, they possess certification indicating preparedness for the role of a school administrator. Upon being hired, new school administrators frequently find themselves theoretically prepared but, in reality, unready for the myriad of responsibilities, isolation, and accountability accompanying the title. Over the years, the role of the school administrator has become overwhelming, often hindering the effectiveness of those doing the job, especially those new to the profession. The gap between the preparedness and readiness of new school administrators is a critical issue to be addressed …

La Vraie Bouillabaisse: An Investigation Into The History And Current Practice Of The Provencal Dish Bouillabaisse, And Its Significance As A Traditional Dish, Mathieu Belledent

Dissertations

This thesis examines the history and the current practices (popularity, service styles, and recipes) of the Provencal dish bouillabaisse. It aims to establish the evolution and the traditional characteristics of the dish. It also explores the historical and contemporary popularity as well as the everyday role that bouillabaisse plays in the regional identity of Provencal cooking. Finally, the research questions if bouillabaisse would benefit from a European Union quality schemes protection or official recognition by UNESCO. This research uses an exploratory sequential mixed methods model combining qualitative and quantitative data collection which are analysed in a sequence of phases. …

On The Edge Of Leadership: Narratives Of Asian Indian American Women In Higher Education In The United States, Denozy Sharma

Dissertations

This study was an investigation of the experiences of Asian Indian American Women (AIAW) in higher education in the United States. The motivation of this study was to gain a better understanding of Asian Indian American Women who, in spite of their rising presence in academia and educational attainment, are noticeably underrepresented in academic leadership roles. Asian Indian American women fall far behind White females in leadership positions in higher education.

A qualitative research methodology has been conducted. The investigation involved the narratives of the five female participants (faculty members and/or administrators in U.S. higher education) who identified themselves as …

The Prevalence Of Mirror Gazing Behaviors In Men, Rutuja Pramod Chinchankar

Dissertations

Muscle Dysmorphia is when the individual is preoccupied with the idea that his or her body build is too small or insufficiently muscular. This study looked at the distinct criteria of MD, which is persistently and obsessively checking one’s appearance in the mirror and being dissatisfied with it. It studied the reasons behind these repetitive mirror-gazing behaviors. This study also attempted to understand the effect of an individual’s age, educational background, religious orientation, sexual orientation, and socio-economic status on his predisposition to MD via mirror-gazing behaviors. This study used a qualitative research design. Part I of the study included participants …

Implications Of The Improvement Science Process On Swpbis Implementation At A Title I High School, Cody Rich

Dissertations

Disparities in discipline are well documented throughout our nation as the gap continues to increase (Losen et al., 2015; Losen & Skiba, 2016; Raush & Skiba, 2004; The Civil Rights Data Collection, 2014). Though Black students comprise only 16% of the student population in the United States, they account for nearly half of school suspensions and expulsions (The Civil Rights Data Collection, 2014). In the context of RHS (location of this dissertation in practice), Black students encompass nearly 20% of the student population while accounting for approximately 30% of the total number of referrals. More alarming is that administration suspended …

An Investigative Analysis On Female Presence And Highly Ranked Positions In Professional Kitchens In Ireland, Roann Byrne

Dissertations

This study aims to gain an understanding of the state of the cheffing industry currently, to analyse whether there is a lack of women within the industry particularly in positions of high power. This research intends to understand the causes for the lack and showcase possible solutions and recommendations for this. It exists as a role of advocacy; hoping to inspire more people into the career of cheffing, and to retain women within it. It aspires to challenge and thus forth change the narratives that have pushed many people, particularly women, out of this work for so long. This research …

Collaboration Among Parents Of African-American Students And A Church Sponsored Tutoring Program, Latiya Evette Kirby-Curlin

Dissertations

This study examines the lived experiences of African-American parents with children who attend a church-sponsored tutoring program. While this study focuses on the African- American parents' perspectives and lived experiences, the study provides an insight into the barriers that impact the implementation and success of the program, challenges of parental involvement, and promotes a higher level of academic achievement in education. This study provides information about lessening the barriers and the way in which parent involvement plays an essential part in a child's education. This qualitative study consisted of nine semi-structured interviews that focused on capturing information as well as …

Black Women Vice Presidents Of Student Affairs At Community Colleges Leadership Pathways And Barriers, Danielle Sims Brooks

Dissertations

This study explored the lived experiences of five Black women Vice Presidents of Student Affairs (VPSAs) at community colleges through narrative inquiry to get a better understanding of the strategies Black women deploy to be successful as well as the challenges and barriers they must navigate. Data was analyzed from a purposeful sample of five Black women VPSAs to get a better understanding of the experiences of Black women executive leaders in higher education. Participants shared many similarities in their educational and professional backgrounds in higher education by their experiences with leading and developing essential areas in student affairs. Findings …

Reflections On Professional Development: An Autoethnographic Study In Theories Of Practice, Sara Elizabeth Jennings

Dissertations

This autoethnographic project extends the work of Argyris and Schön (1974); Houchens (2008); Houchens and Keedy (2009); Houchens, Hurt, Stobaugh, & Keedy (2012); and Houchens, Stewart, and Jennings (2017) by replicating an experiment in reflective practice using a self-coaching protocol as a means for mapping one’s own theories of practice. Relying on selfreflexivity to study professional learning in a culture of school reform, the author used Argyris and Schon’s (1974) theories of practice as a conceptual framework by adapting a self-coaching protocol (Houchens, 2008; Houchens et al., 2012; Houchens et al., 2017) and pairing it with selfobservations of video-recorded instructional …

The Perceptions Of Educators On Transition Planning & The Postsecondary Transition Readiness Outcomes Of Students With Disabilities, Marisa Duarte

Dissertations

The purpose of this quantitative descriptive research was to gain the perspective of educators on transition planning for students with disabilities in two public school districts in the state of Kentucky. The Individual Disabilities Education Act and Workforce Innovation Opportunities Act are laws requiring students with disabilities to be transition ready upon their graduation from high school. A sample of 12 educators, representing two Kentucky districts, who participate in transitioning students with disabilities, completed The Secondary Educator Transition Questionnaire survey. Data from the districts’ state report cards indicated students with disabilities were not transition ready in comparison with students without …