Digital Commons Network^™

Does Optic Flow Provide Information About Actions?, Hannah Masoner

Dissertations

Optic flow, the pattern of light generated in the visual field by motion of objects and the observer’s body, serves as information that underwrites perception of events, actions and affordances. This visual pattern informs the observer about their own actions in relation to their surroundings, as well as those of others. This study explored the limits of action detection for others as well as the role of optic flow. First-person videos were created using camera recordings of the actor’s perspective as they performed various movements (jumping jacks, jumping, squatting, sitting, etc.). In three experiments participants attempted to detect the action …

Nurses' Voice: The Meaning Of Voice To Experienced Registered Nurses Employed In A Magnet Hospital Workplace, Julie A. Beck

Dissertations

Magnet Hospitals are healthcare environments that have recognized excellence in nursing care. These accredited Magnet Hospitals, a term coined in the early 1980's, were seen to have the ability to attract nurses. These hospitals have quantitatively documented greater patient satisfaction, greater nurse autonomy, lower incidence of nursing burnout and greater nursing retention. As healthcare faces one of its most significant nursing shortages, Magnet Hospitals illustrate an organizational and corporate strategy that aims to recognize nursing and hopefully retain and recruit nurses during this challenging time.

While there are numerous quantitative studies that examine aspects of Magnet Hospitals such as nursing …

A Study Of Relationships Among Three Assessment Methods For Nurse Anesthetists, Nicholas W. Gabriel

Dissertations

The current measures of competency for nurse anesthetists for recertification are continuing education units for each biennial recertification cycle, and records of current practice and state licensure. Recently, the National Board of Certification and Recertification of Nurse Anesthetists (NBCRNA) adopted new standards that include a written examination every 8 years, an increase of 40 continuing education units per year, and completion of four core competency modules each four-year recertification cycle. However, little is known about the validity of these competency measures.

The purpose of this study was to determine relationships between written examination scores, self-assessment scores, and performance scores in …

Mental Construal And Alterations In Emotional Memory, Olivia D. Beers

Dissertations

Psychological distancing refers to a shift from a psychologically immersed perspective that involves thinking about the details of an event (concretely) or stepping back from it and watching the event from an outside point of view (abstractly)––this can help individuals change how they feel about the experience. Investigating how construal levels affect emotional memories may provide more insight into how individuals may potentially alter the recall of their memories. The current study reflects a new examination of the effect of primed high and low construal levels on the recall of positive and negative arousing stimuli. This study included a pilot …

The Experience Of Non-Spousal Close Intimate Relationships For Women With Breast Cancer: A Journey Of Support, Erin B. Dooley

Dissertations

An estimated 331,530 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019 ("American Cancer Society," 2019, p. 10). The purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological, descriptive study was to explore the lived experience of non-spousal close/intimate relationships of women with breast cancer. There are very few studies in the literature examining relationships between women with cancer other than those of partner or spouse. This study's participants consisted of six women, ages 32 to 68. Analysis of these data identified themes reflected along their breast cancer trajectory (1) The journey starts (2) Mid-journey passage, and (3) Journeys end/coming home, as well as …

The Lived Experience In The Clinical Setting Of Nursing Students With Disabilities, Amy Luckowski

Dissertations

With the implementation of the 504 Rehabilitation Act, the American with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA), more students with disabilities are being admitted into universities and into nursing programs. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences in the clinical setting of nursing students with disabilities. Moustakas's psychological phenomenology was utilized to describe the meaning of the student's experiences. A purposeful sample of 13 junior and senior baccalaureate nursing students with disabilities from two northeastern baccalaureate nursing programs who had at least one semester of clinical experience were interviewed …

The Lived Experience Of Observant Jewish Nursing Students: A Phenomenological Study, Toby Bressler

Dissertations

With expanding cultural diversity in the United States (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2009), it is essential to increase the diversity of the nursing profession to match the patients who are being cared for in our healthcare system (IOM, 2003; Sullivan Commission, 2004). Despite improvements to the demographic composition of the nursing workforce in recent decades, the nursing workforce has remained predominantly homogeneous and to meet the current and future health needs of the public while providing culturally relevant care, the nursing workforce needs to increase its diversity (IOM, 2010). This demographic shift creates a social imperative that …

More Than Midnight Feasts?: A Gastrocritical Reading Of Enid Blyton’S Malory Towers, St. Clare’S And The Naughtiest Girl In The School Series, Rebecca Broomfield

Dissertations

Food is fundamental to life. It is also fundamental to culture; through our production, manipulation and consumption of foodstuffs, the way in which we eat has amassed a range of rituals and rules. This suggests that food can be used to indicate more than mere biological need. Food and foodways are a common occurrence throughout literature, not least children’s literature. This thesis applies gastrocriticism as a paradigm to investigate the use of food and foodways in Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers, St. Clare’s and The Naughtiest Girl school series. Gastrocriticism is an emerging form of literary criticism that considers the complex …

Improving Dysarthric Speech Recognition By Enriching Training Datasets, Sophie Cullen

Dissertations

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder that results from disruptions in the neuro-motor interface and is characterised by poor articulation of phonemes and hyper-nasality and is characteristically different from normal speech. Many modern automatic speech recognition systems focus on a narrow range of speech diversity therefore as a consequence of this they exclude a groups of speakers who deviate in aspects of gender, race, age and speech impairment when building training datasets. This study attempts to develop an automatic speech recognition system that deals with dysarthric speech with limited dysarthric speech data. Speech utterances collected from the TORGO database are …

Does Co-Speech Gesture Support Children’S Analogical Reasoning? An Investigation Into The Differential Effects Of Gesture On Learning, Katharine F. Guarino

Dissertations

Although the general consensus is that gesture supports learning across a wide range of learning contexts, nuances to gesture’s effects are found across the gesture-for-learning literature. The purpose of this body of research was to advance our understanding of gesture’s effect on learning. Specifically, we explored the utility of gesture in a domain that had not been considered in the gesture literature previously: analogical reasoning (Study 1). We aimed to understand whether gesture supports children’s analogical reasoning ability and why gesture might support this type of reasoning. Specifically, we investigated whether gesture could support learning through directing visual attention, thereby …

Deep Deification: Soteriology For A World In Ecological Crisis, Kathleen Mcnutt

Dissertations

What might an adequate soteriology look like for a world in ecological crisis? This dissertation constructively addresses this problem at the intersection of contemporary ecofeminist theology and Patristic soteriologies of theosis or deification. I examine ecofeminist soteriologies, drawing on the work of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sallie McFague, and Elizabeth Johnson in particular, and deification soteriologies, especially that of Maximus the Confessor, arguing that each of these trajectories offers both fruitful possibilities for a reconstruction of soteriology but that each also raises some problems. In bringing these two trajectories into conversation, I suggest directions for a constructive theology of salvation that …

Scrolling Vs Paging: Reading Performance And Preference Of Reading Modes In Long-Form Online News, Richard Herlihy

Dissertations

This study explores the impact of scrolling and dynamic pagination in long-form online documents on reader performance and reader experience. Previous research has produced mixed results, indicating no difference between modes, or a positive effect favouring scrolling. Recent advances in web standards have enabled simpler, dynamic, performant methods of pagination to tailor content responsively to any screen, meriting renewed study in this area. This paper uses one such method to load subsequent online news pages instantly without buffering. In an online browser experiment with 38 participants, an increase in reading speed in the scrolling mode was found at a level …

Racial Identity, Hair Esteem, Hair Texture, And Hairstyle Choice As Correlates Of Psychological Well-Being Among Afro-Latinas In The United States, Marielsy Esther Pimentel

Dissertations

Problem

During the Colonial period, hair was one of the designated phenotypic markers of racial group membership used to assign or deny privilege. Privileges are still assigned to people based on their racial group membership and their proximity to Whiteness. As such, Hair remains a salient part of Afro-Latina women’s lives and identities, with its influences seen in the personal, social, and mental realms. How an Afro-Latina wears her hair can have legal, social, and intrapersonal consequences. The subsequent treatment of Afro-Latinas because of their hairstyle can affect how they view themselves and even how they relate to others, especially …

Indicators Of Typology In The Narrative Of Elijah: An Investigation Into The Predictive Nature Of Biblical Theology, JôNatas De Mattos Leal

Dissertations

Elijah is among the most popular prophets in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In Judaism, the hope for his return has evolved into a plethora of legends in which he functions as a helper to the righteous in the present and avenger to the wicked in the future eschaton. In Christianity, the expectation involving his return has also a multitemporal dimension, but its fulfilment is typologically oriented. More often, scholars study the fulfilment of the Elijah typology from the NT perspective in a backward movement. This dissertation investigates this typology in a forward movement going from the OT to the NT while …

Evaluating The Performance Of Vision Transformer Architecture For Deepfake Image Classification, Devesan Govindasamy

Dissertations

Deepfake classification has seen some impressive results lately, with the experimentation of various deep learning methodologies, researchers were able to design some state-of-the art techniques. This study attempts to use an existing technology “Transformers” in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) which has been a de-facto standard in text processing for the purposes of Computer Vision. Transformers use a mechanism called “self-attention”, which is different from CNN and LSTM. This study uses a novel technique that considers images as 16x16 words (Dosovitskiy et al., 2021) to train a deep neural network with “self-attention” blocks to detect deepfakes. It creates …

An Investigation Of The Relationship Between Subjective Mental Workload And Objective Indicators Of User Activity, Greg Byrne

Dissertations

Whilst the concept of physical workload is intuitively understood and readily applicable in system design, the same cannot be said of mental workload (MWL), despite its importance in our increasingly technological society. Despite its origin in the mid 20th century, the very concept of ”mental workload” is still a topic of debate in the literature, although it can be loosely defined as “the amount of mental work necessary for a person to complete a task” (Miller, 1956; Longo, 2014). Several methods have been utilized to measure of MWL, including physiological methods such as neuro-imagery, performance-based metrics, and subjective measures via …

Kg-Cnn: Augmenting Convolutional Neural Networks With Knowledge Graphs For Multi-Class Image Classification, Aidan O'Neill

Dissertations

Computer vision is slowly becoming more and more prevalent in daily life. Tesla has recently announced that it plans to scale up the manufacturing of their Robotaxis by 2024, with this increase in self-driving vehicles being just one example, the importance of computer vision is growing year by year. Vision can be easy to take for granted, as most humans grow up using vision as their primary way of absorbing environmental information. The way humans process and classify visual information differs significantly from how current computer vision systems process and organise visual information. The human brain can use its past …

Nanomaterials In Theranostics : Therapeutics And Diagnosis Against Infectious Diseases, Unnatiben S. Patel

Dissertations

Nanomaterials-based hybrid nano therapy is gaining attraction as a promising way to treat intracellular bacterial infections. Gold-based nanomaterials have been widely used for biomedical applications such as photothermal therapy (PTT). This thesis discusses the development of a combination therapeutic approach that kills intracellular bacteria in conjunction with photothermal and antibiotic therapy using gold nanorod (GNR) based nano-assembly. This NIR laser-activated nano-assembly delivers antibiotics to the site of infection and offers PTT. The synergistic application of both therapies increases the efficacy of treatment. The protected delivery of antibiotics and their release in the proximity of the bacterial surface decreases off-target toxicity …

An Investigation Of The Relationship Between Subjective Mental Workload And Objective Indicators Of User Activity, Greg Byrne

Dissertations

Whilst the concept of physical workload is intuitively understood and readily applicable in system design, the same cannot be said of mental workload (MWL), despite its importance in our increasingly technological society. Despite its origin in the mid 20th century, the very concept of ”mental workload” is still a topic of debate in the literature, although it can be loosely defined as “the amount of mental work necessary for a person to complete a task” (Miller, 1956; Longo, 2014). Several methods have been utilized to measure of MWL, including physiological methods such as neuro-imagery, performance-based metrics, and subjective measures via …

Impact Of Parent Presence On Stress In Infants In The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Susan M. Horner

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine potential relationships between cumulative stress exposure in infants in neonatal intensive care units (NICU), as measured using a resting salivary cortisol level at NICU discharge, and the amount (hours per week) or frequency (days per week) of parent presence and skin-to-skin care (SSC). This descriptive study was conducted via a secondary analysis of a dataset representing 78 NICU families from a tertiary level NICU in the Midwest. Median length of stay was 33 days, and a resting salivary cortisol level collected at one month of age was used for infants not discharged …

The Emotional Side Of Dynamic Assessment: L2 Writing From Vygotsky's Perezhivanie Lens, Ali Kushki

Dissertations

This qualitative multiple-case study investigated the emotional perceptions of English-as-a-foreign language learners (EFLs) and an English writing instructor as they met online via the Zoom application. Dynamic Assessment (DA) and the Vygotskyan perezhivanie notion guided the study. DA is an interactive assessment approach that combines instruction and assessment processes during student-instructor interactions with the goal of diagnosing and developing learners’ abilities. As to the perezhivanie notion, Vygotsky (1994) argued for uncovering the particular prism through which the individual refracts (i.e., shapes) the influence of the environment, and how she “becomes aware of, interprets, and emotionally relates to a certain event” …

Things Of Beauty: Aesthetics For Environmental Education, Annie Schultz

Dissertations

As environmental crisis looms large, most agree that human reeducation is necessary in order to improve our relationship to the natural environment. Yet, there is currently no comprehensive interdisciplinary philosophy of education for environmental awareness. While there is writing in the field of philosophy of education on ecologizing education and literature which draws connections between aesthetic education and the appreciation of nature, there is little literature on the explicit ways in which aesthetic and art education can inform environmental justice initiatives. This dissertation examines aesthetic and art education’s relationship to the environment and how aesthetics can inform a moral relationship …

Things Of Beauty: Aesthetics For Environmental Education, Annie Schultz

Dissertations

As environmental crisis looms large, most agree that human reeducation is necessary in order to improve our relationship to the natural environment. Yet, there is currently no comprehensive interdisciplinary philosophy of education for environmental awareness. While there is writing in the field of philosophy of education on ecologizing education and literature which draws connections between aesthetic education and the appreciation of nature, there is little literature on the explicit ways in which aesthetic and art education can inform environmental justice initiatives. This dissertation examines aesthetic and art education’s relationship to the environment and how aesthetics can inform a moral relationship …

B Cells In The Gut Associated Lymphoid Tissue (Galt), Ameera Bukhari

Dissertations

The gut-associated lymphoid tissue (GALT) is the largest mass of lymphoid tissue in the body, and it is a unique line of defense where immune cells are in constant contact with gut commensals and pathogens. B lymphocytes constitute most of the lymphatic tissues of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and they play a critical role in protecting from infections, promoting tolerance, and shaping microbiota in the gut through the production of immunoglobulins (Ig). Previous studies on GALT B cells in human showed that large B cell clones in the body partition into two broad networks: one includes the blood, bone marrow, …

Molecular Mechanisms Of Oxidative Stress-Induced Corneal Damage And The Use Of Antioxidants And Therapeutics, Anita Kirti Ghosh

Dissertations

Dry eye disease represents an urgent unmet clinical need. This dissertation explores the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms of ocular surface disease in small and large animal models and provides feasibility for the development of antioxidants as novel therapeutics for dry eye disease. Dry eye disease affects 50 million Americans every year, and costs about $55 billion annually in the USA. The disease manifests as ocular irritation, burning, foreign body sensation, and blurry/cloudy vision. While it is widely accepted that oxidative stress plays a critical role in the pathophysiology of the disease, little is understood about the underlying molecular mechanisms. The purpose …

A Phenomenological Study Of Catholic Priests Working And Headteachers In Government - Funded Catholic Secondary Schools, Joseph Kaye

Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study is to explore the skills, behaviors and lived experience of priests who are headteachers in government-funded Catholic secondary schools in Butare Catholic diocese. This study might help the bishop and diocesan policy makers in identifying the type of formation, skills and behaviors priests need to be effective headteachers in Catholic schools. To achieve the purpose of this study, I used a phenomenological methodology to collect and analyze the data. The participants in this study are priests who are headteachers in government-funded Catholic secondary schools of Butare Catholic diocese. The major goals of …

Abl2 Promotes Alcohol-Associated Liver Disease Via Ppar Gamma Regulation, Gregory Malnassy

Dissertations

Alcohol-associated liver disease (AALD) is an umbrella term for a spectrum of diseases resulting from chronic alcohol (e.g. ethanol) abuse ranging in severity from reversible conditions such as alcohol-induced steatosis to advanced and largely irreversible liver pathologies including alcoholic steatohepatitis (ASH), alcoholic hepatitis (AH), fibrosis, cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). AALD is one of the primary causes of chronic liver disease worldwide and accounts for 44% of liver disease deaths in the United States. Drinking rates, both in the United States and globally, have increased year over year for the past three decades, a trend which has resulted in significantly …

Elucidating The Role Of Kmt2d In Her2+ Breast Cancer, Emily Ma

Dissertations

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women in the US. Histone modifications are common epigenetic changes that have been implicated in several breast cancers, including HER2+ breast cancers. Current therapies, such as trastuzumab, block the HER2 receptor to reduce tumor growth. Unfortunately, HER2+ breast cancers have found ways to overcome these therapies, leading to tumor resistance, metastases, and poor survival outcomes. A better understanding of the underlying mechanisms contributing to HER2+ breast cancer resistance may lead to the discovery of novel therapeutic strategies to improve patient outcomes.One prognostic marker for poor survival in women with …

Unlocking Desistance: The Role Of Executive Functioning In The Rehabilitation Of Correctional Populations, Danielle Nesi

Dissertations

In a secondary analysis of data collected by Fishbein and Sheppard (2006), the current study sought to explore the relationships among age, executive functioning and antisocial behavior (e.g., changes in institutional infractions, self-reported aggression and reactivity) among a sample of incarcerated men enrolled in a correctional Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) program between 2003 and 2005. Specifically, the current study examined whether baseline executive abilities predicted misconduct and whether this relationship was mediated by treatment engagement. The relationships among age, treatment engagement, and changes in executive functioning post-treatment were also considered. It was predicted that improvements in executive functioning would vary …

Leveraging Moral Foundations To Increase Covid-19 Vaccination, Cara Elizabeth Ray

Dissertations

Despite the vast majority of the eligible U.S. adult population being vaccinated against COVID-19, geographical clusters of unvaccinated individuals pose a substantial risk of outbreak. It is important to encourage as many individuals as possible to vaccinate against COVID-19 to reduce its spread and severity. Past research has identified endorsement of the purity and liberty moral foundations – intuitive domains of moral concern – as predictors of vaccine hesitancy and political conservatism, while conservatism is itself associated with vaccine hesitancy. Across two online surveys, I examined the effects of a message invoking the purity and liberty foundations as well as …