Digital Commons Network^™

Geochemical And Radiological Baseline Studies And Environmental Impact Of The Area Surrounding Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, Uae, Mouza Rashed Mohamed Al Rashdi

Dissertations

Geochemical, mineralogical and natural radiation analysis techniques were used for establishment of geochemical and radiological baseline around Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, UAE. The natural radioactivity concentrations of ²³⁸U (²²⁶Ra), ²³²Th and ⁴⁰K were measured for soil, shore and bottom sediment samples, using gamma spectrometry equipped with HPGe detector. In addition, alpha spectrometry was used to measure ²³⁴U/²³⁸U ratio for some selected samples. Furthermore, inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy was used to measure the concentrations of heavy metals and Rare Earth Elements (REE). The grain size of the samples ranged from fine …

Community College Presidents And The Role Of Conversational Leadership, Jennifer K. Labounty

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this phenomenological research study was to describe the behaviors that exemplary community college presidents practice to lead their organizations through conversation as depicted by Groysberg and Slind’s (2012) four elements of conversational leadership: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality.

Methodology: This qualitative, phenomenological study described the lived experiences of exemplary community college presidents as they lead their organizations through the use of conversational leadership. The sample population for this study was community college presidents who met the criteria of exemplary from single-college districts in Southern California. Data were gathered and triangulated from semistructured, in-depth interviews, participant observations, …

Feeling Valued, Supported, And Satisfied: Perceptions Of Special Educators And Principals, Tanya Lynn Rapert

Dissertations

High teacher attrition and low teacher retention rates continue to plague the field of special education, which leads to teacher shortages year after year (Andrews & Brown, 2015; Vittek, 2015). Solutions for increasing special education teacher retention continue to be explored (Billingsley, 2005; Brownell & Sindelar, 2016; Tyler & Brunner, 2014). The purpose of this study was to discover trends or themes connecting special education teacher work conditions and job satisfaction, principal support, and decisions of teachers to continue teaching special education. Participants for this study were special education teachers and principals from 60 accredited public K-12 school districts in …

Examination Of The Educational Impact Of Delayed Identification Of Gifted Students, Timothy Perkins

Dissertations

Gifted programming provides many children with an opportunity to reach their potential (Olszewski-Kubilius & Thomson, 2015). For years, gifted studies have been underfunded (Azano, Callahan, Missett, & Brunner, 2014). A lack of research into gifted programming has left glaring holes in the current understanding of best practices (Plucker & Callahan, 2014). This study included an examination of gifted programming from the standpoint of cognitive theory. The researcher examined archival data from School District A to determine students’ overall academic success when compared to the number of years spent in gifted programming. The data yielded a negative correlation between years spent …

Haemosporidian Parasites And Host Immune Function Of Galapagos Avifauna, Maricruz Jaramillo

Dissertations

The large number of emergent infectious diseases witnessed in the past few decades has increased interest in the ecology and distribution of potentially threatening pathogens worldwide. Island species are often considered more vulnerable to parasites due to their impoverished parasite communities, long isolation from disease and low genetic diversity. Avian surveys done by our group on the Galapagos Islands have found various pathogens infecting their endemic avifauna, including haemosporidian parasites of the genera Plasmodium and Haemoproteus. My research seeks to understand the relationships between two haemosporidian parasites (blood parasites) and their multiple bird hosts in Galapagos and to explore …

Discovering The Best Practices For Design And Development Of High School Online Physical Education: A Phenomenological Study, Marie Crosby

Dissertations

Purpose: Online physical education (OLPE) is a burgeoning field with questions and disadvantages that need to be addressed for its continued growth. With out-of-date guidelines and best practice not established for OLPE, curricula are being designed and developed without consistency. Current standards are needed to assess the design of OLPE to ensure that courses meet state and/or national standards, and quality guidelines in the online environment. The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify and describe the best practices used in the design and development of high school OLPE curricula based on the International Association for K-12 Online Learning …

Genomic And Cellular Studies Establish The Pathogenesis And Cellular Mechanisms Of Disease-Causing Mutations In Families With Autosomal Recessive Disorders, Nesreen Khalid Ahmad Al Jezawi

Dissertations

The majority of the reported genetic disorders in the UAE population are of the autosomal recessive type, which is mainly due to high rates of consanguinity within the UAE national population, and within a significant proportion of other UAE expatriate communities; such as Arabs and Pakistanis. It is estimated that more than 50% of all marriages among Emiratis occur between biologically related couples, with first cousin marriages being the highest. That could be attributed to sociocultural values in the region. Successful management of genetic diseases can be achieved by the implementation of effective preventative programs that could help reduce the …

Equine Assisted Psychotherapy: A Transformational Path To Emotional Wellness For U.S. Military Veterans, Cathy Powalski

Dissertations

Purpose. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore and describe the impact of Equine Assisted Psychotherapy (EAP) on the reintegration of wounded veterans into civilian life as perceived by wounded U.S. military veterans participating in EAP.

Methodology. A qualitative multiple case study methodology was appropriate for this research due to its focus on analyzing a single entity (EAP) possessing unique characteristics within a system bound by participants (wounded U.S. military veterans as defined by this study), time (2015-2017), and/or place (California or Virginia) through events.

Findings. The 13 U.S. military veterans who participated in this study …

Visualization Of Co-Authorshipin Dit Arrow, Dan Xu

Dissertations

With the popularization of information technology and the unprecedented development of online reading, the management and service of the library are facing severe challenges; the traditional library operation mode has been challenging to optimize the service. At the same time, there is also a fatal impact on library collection and systematic management, however, with the development of visualization techniques in management and service, the library can alleviate the effect of the current network information basically, which achieves the intellectual development of library field. This study empirically provides the evidence to indicate that the force directed layout has the statistically significant …

Cultural Assets And Racial Discrimination: A Person-Based Exploration Of Culturally Relevant Coping With African American Male Adolescents, Emma-Lorraine Baaba Bart-Plange

Dissertations

African-American youth from economically-disadvantaged, urban families and communities are disproportionately exposed to stressful life conditions, including racial discrimination, placing them at increased risk for mental health problems (Gonzales & Kim, 1997; Grant et al., 2000). Though exposure to racial discrimination can span a lifetime, examining youths’ encounters with discrimination during adolescence allows us to better understand how they affect development during a critical period in which they are developing racial/ethnic identity and increasing their use of reasoning. Coping research with African American youth has found evidence for racial discrimination predicting use of culturally-relevant coping strategies (Gaylord-Harden & Cunningham, 2009) and …

Studying The Antagonistic Relationship Between Nkg2d And Tgf-Β Signaling In Cd8+ T Cells, Kushal Prajapati

Dissertations

Despite the remarkable success of cancer immunotherapies in treating patients with hematological cancers, the clinical response rates of immunotherapies in the case of solid tumors have been dismal. One major reason for the lower response rates is tumor-induced immune-suppression mediated by TGF-?, which directly suppresses the functionality of CD8+ T cells by inhibiting their activation, proliferation, and acquisition of inflammatory cytokines, granzyme B and perforin. On the other hand, NKG2D, a potent co-stimulatory receptor, has effects on CD8+ T cells opposite to that of TGF-?. In T cells from 22 healthy human donors, we found that the suppression by TGF-? …

Heteromerization Of G Protein-Coupled Receptors In Human Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells: Identification Of Hetero-Oligomeric Receptor Complexes Between Α1-Adrenergic Receptors, Arginine Vasopressin Recptor 1a, Chemokine (C-X-C Motif) Receptor Type 4, And Atypical Chemokine Receptor 3., Lauren J. Albee

Dissertations

G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) heteromerization is rapidly evolving field. Traditionally, GPCRs were thought to behave has independent entities or protomers. However, that line of reasoning has since been brought into question. Currently, it appears that many, if not all, GPCRs signal and function as heteromeric receptor complexes. The roles of GPCR heteromerization are vast and can include: maturation and trafficking; dynamic regulation; allostery and cooperativity; signal transduction; and receptor internalization.

The majority of studies identifying and characterizing GPCR heteromers were performed using recombinant receptors. Only four receptor pairs have been identified and validated in native tissues. The overall objective of …

The Experiential Effects And Relationships Between Student Anxiety In Music Performance And Classroom Assessment, Jordan Diego Chua

Dissertations

Both as an art and assessment, music demonstration and performance in test-taking are closely related. Particular traits are shared between performance in test-taking in the classroom and musical performance "on stage." Tests and performances are normally considered a "high-stakes" setting when the quality and perception of one's skill are under critical scrutiny. Since undergraduate and graduate music students experience assessments in both performance and academic areas, this study allowed consideration for the connections where these two areas overlap, and the possible interventions students may have initiated that are effective in stemming or reducing anxiety. Students' experiences regarding Music Performance Anxiety …

Not All Fun And Games: Sexism And College Women's Alcohol Consumption, Hannah R. Hamilton

Dissertations

Previous research has suggested that racial discrimination (Pascoe & Smart Richman, 2009) and sexist experiences (Zucker & Landry, 2007) are related to increased alcohol consumption. However, ambivalent sexism theory suggests that there are two forms of sexism (Glick & Fiske, 1996; 1997). While hostile sexism refers to overtly negative attitudes towards women, benevolent sexism refers to positively valenced attitudes towards women that still serve to reaffirm masculine dominance. Therefore, the current studies explore the differential effects of experiencing hostile vs. benevolent sexism on college women's alcohol consumption using correlational (Study 1) and quasi-experimental (Study 2) methodologies. In addition, the current …

Social Scientists' Conceptualization And Implementation Of Research Ethics And Integrity, Heather A. Pease

Dissertations

The purpose of the current study is to identify core themes, values, and principles through which social scientists conceptualize and implement research ethics and integrity. Periods of rapid growth and interest in research ethics and integrity often coincide with significant scientific discoveries (e.g., mapping of the human genome) or scientific misconduct (e.g., Tuskegee studies). Even though research policies are being developed, they are done in a manner which does not maximize the opportunities to regulate ethics and integrity within social science research. The laws and programs aimed at mitigating acts of misconduct were originally intended for biomedical sciences, yet they …

Ethnic Identity And Adult Attachment As Correlates Of Relationship Satisfaction Among White, Black, And Interracial Couples, Donalea Mcintyre

Dissertations

Problem

Relationship satisfaction is a broad construct that has been extensively researched. However, there are gaps in the literature pertaining to relationship satisfaction in minority and interracial couples. This present study examines the extent of the relationship between ethnic identity and adult attachment to relationship satisfaction in White, Black, and Interracial couples.

Method

Participants completed surveys that measure a) ethnic identity, b) adult attachment, and c) relationship satisfaction. Several statistical analysis methods were used to answer two research questions. These methods included descriptive statistics, one-way MANOVA, and Path Analysis. Six hundred and seven adults in the United States general population …

Protocol For Energy Efficient Cluster Head Election For Collaborative Cluster Head Elections., David Otu

Dissertations

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs) , energy is a major constrain.Energy efficient network protocols is required to maintain reliable sensing of the sensing field . WSNs that use LEACH protocol, have node in a cluster periodically take trials to become cluster - head,such that the nodes in the cluster becomes cluster - head evenly. Nodes with greater transmission distance to the base station in the cluster dies out faster because it performs more work in transmitting data when it is cluster-head. The distance-based algorithm presented in this project, ensures that work is allocated to the nodes in the cluster more …

An Application Of Natural Language Processing For Triangulation Of Cognitive Load Assessments In Third Level Education, Luis Alfredo Contreras

Dissertations

Work has been done to measure Mental Workload based on applications mainly related to ergonomics, human factors, and Machine Learning. The influence of Machine Learning is a reflection of an increased use of new technologies applied to areas conventionally dominated by theoretical approaches. However, collaboration between MWL and Natural Language Processing techniques seems to happen rarely. In this sense, the objective of this research is to make use of Natural Languages Processing techniques to contribute to the analysis of the relationship between Mental Workload subjective measures and Relative Frequency Ratios of keywords gathered during pre-tasks and post-tasks of MWL activities …

Augmented Reality As A Potential Tool For Filmmaking, Paul Blachfield

Dissertations

Augmented Reality (AR) has been used for a wide variety of industries. The purpose of this study was to determine the suitability of this technology for use in filmmaking. One of the problems on a film set is the time taken to block a scene. Blocking involves the placement of subjects and props within a scene. Different ideas have been used for blocking including previzualisation and Virtual Reality (VR). This study proposesed the use of AR as a tool to solve this problem. Marker-based and Markerless AR were assessed in turn to determine their suitability for addressing the problem. The …

Intergrating The Fruin Los Into The Multi-Objective Ant Colony System, Tirdad Kiafar

Dissertations

Building evacuation simulation provides the planners and designers an opportunity to analyse the designs and plan a precise, scenario specific instruction for disaster times. Nevertheless, when disaster strikes, the unexpected may happen and many egress paths may get blocked or the conditions of evacuees may not let the execution of emergency plans go smoothly. During disaster times, effective route-finding methods can help efficient evacuation process, in which the directors are able to react to the sudden changes in the environment. This research tries to integrate the highly accepted human dynamics methods proposed by Fruin into the Ant-Colony optimisation route-finding method. …

Supervised Learning Models To Predict Stock Direction Within Different Sectors In A Bull And Bear Market, Tiffany Razy

Dissertations

Forecasting stock market price movement is a well researched and an alluring topic within the machine learning and financial realm. Supervised machine learning algorithms such as Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) have been used independently to gain insight on the market. With such volatility in the market the scope of this study will utilized the RF and SVM in a very volatility market to determine if these models will perform at a high level or outperform each other in both markets. This relative study is performed on 16 stocks in 4 different sectors over the bear market …

Dynamic Cybersecurity Warnings : Subliminal And Supraliminal Approaches, Mini Zeng

Dissertations

People experience many cybersecurity attacks in their daily lives. They may also unnecessarily disclose private information. Computer warnings are used as one of the last lines of defense. Researchers and designers have actively sought to understand how users interact with security warnings and why warnings are often ignored. They want to design warnings to be effective but not interrupt people’s main tasks. In this dissertation, I propose a framework named the Leveled Human Behavior Warning (LHBW) model. We group computer warning designs and evaluations into five levels: warning stimuli, warning perception, warning storage and memory retrieval, decision-making, and behavior. The …

Investigating The Application Of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks In Semi-Supervised Video Object Segmentation, Jayadeep Sasikumar

Dissertations

This thesis investigates the different approaches to video object segmentation and the current state-of-the-art in the discipline, focusing on the different deep learning techniques used to solve the problem. The primary contribution of the thesis is the investigation of usefulness of Exponential Linear Units as activation functions for deep convolutional neural architectures trained to perform object semi-supervised segmentation in videos. Mask R-CNN was chosen as the base convolutional neural architecture, with the view of extending the image segmentation algorithm to videos. Two models were created, one with Rectified Linear Units and the other with Exponential Linear Units as the respective …

Homonymy And The Comparability Of Goods In Aristotle, Robert Duncan

Dissertations

My dissertation will draw attention to an underexplored problem in Aristotle's theory of the good and advance two alternative proposals about how it can be solved. Aristotle endorses an inconsistent triad of premises concerning homonymy, comparability, and goodness. First, he argues that the good is homonymous: there is no single characteristic, goodness, which is shared by all good things. Rather, he argues that different kinds of good things require different accounts specifying what it is for them to be good. Second, he holds that homonyms are incomparable. If two things are homonymously F, then we are not entitled to claim …

Global Stability And Traveling Wave Solutions For A Two-Competing-Prey And One-Predator Lotka-Volterra Model, Cuiping Wang

Dissertations

This dissertation consists of four chapters. In Chapter 1, I give an introduction of background, models to be investigated, and main goal of this dissertation. In Chapter 2, I study the space homogeneous model. The existence and local stability analysis of nonnegative equilibrium points in three cases, as well as the sufficient and necessary conditions for the existence of the positive interior equilibrium point are geiven in Section2.1. In Section 2.2, I perform a careful analysis to show the global stability of the boundary equilibrium point at which two prey coexist with extinction of predator for case 1. In Section …

Beef Cattle Instance Segmentation Using Mask R-Convolutional Neural Network, Mohammad Danish

Dissertations

Maintaining the cattle farm along with the wellbeing of every heifer has been the major concern in dairy farm. A robust system is required which can tackle the problem of continuous monitoring of cows. the computer vision techniques provide a new way to understand the challenges related to the identification and welfare of the cows. This paper presents a state-of-art instance segmentation mask RCNN algorithm to train and build a model on a very challenging cow dataset that is captured during the winter season. The dataset poses many challenges such as overlapping of cows, partial occlusion, similarity between cows and …

Image Classification Using Bag-Of-Visual-Words Model, Kaiqiang Huang

Dissertations

Recently, with the explosive growth of digital technologies, there has been a rapid proliferation of the size of image collection. The technique of supervised image clas sification has been widely applied in many domains in order to organize, search, and retrieve images. However, the traditional feature extraction approaches yield the poor classification accuracy. Therefore, the Bag-of-visual-words model, inspired by Bag-of Words model in document classification, was used to present images with the local descriptors for image classification, and also it performs well in some fields. This research provides the empirical evidence to prove that the BoVW model outperforms the traditional …

The Effects Of Using Expressive Intervention In Group Counseling On Acculturative Stress And Depressive Symptoms Among Korean Immigrant Women In South And Central Texas :A N Experimental Study, Sun-Kyung Chung

Dissertations

This study evaluated the relationship between acculturative stress and depressive symptoms in Korean immigrant women and evaluated the use of expressive group counseling interventions for these women's acculturative stress and depressive symptoms. Participants were randomly assigned to the intervention or control group. The intervention group received a total of four sessions of expressive group counseling interventions while the control group was asked to color pictures at home. Pearson correlations found statically significant relationships between acculturative stress and depressive symptoms in Korean immigrant women. The results of a one-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) indicated no statistically significant difference in the effect …

Hannah Arendt's Political Action: A Dialectic Of Expression And Deliberation, Paul Richard Leisen

Dissertations

Commentators disagree about what Hannah Arendt means by political action. One interpretation emphasizes that political action is rational deliberation, another interpretation identifies political action with expressiveness or the performative expression of personal virtuosity and greatness. Both interpretations fall short. The deliberative model captures the aspect of constituting political power through collective agreement based on reason-giving (combining a plurality into a polity). The expressive model captures the aspect of natality, originality, spontaneity, and freedom from conventional ways of reasoning. The deliberative and expressive models of Hannah Arendt's political action can be reconciled contrary to a claim that her theory is incoherent. …

The Concept Of Matter In Kant's Transcendental Idealism, Kyoungnam Park

Dissertations

I argue that in addition to having a constitutive conception of matter which can be determinately represented in terms of our spatiotemporal intuitions, Kant has a regulative conception of matter which cannot be perceived as having a spatiotemporal magnitude. Although Kant restricts the scope of our knowledge to empirical objects which can be determinately represented in terms of spatiotemporal magnitudes, he also implicitly introduces a regulative conception of matter as a metaphysical principle which grounds the material features of the empirical world. I investigate this metaphysical conception of matter which is operating in Kant's transcendental idealism in terms of how …