Digital Commons Network^™

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of A Transgender-Affirmative Care Training On Healthcare Workers’ And Trainees’ Attitudes Toward And Knowledge Of Routine Care And Transition Support For Transgender Individuals, Oakleigh Marshall Reed

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Objectives: Transgender individuals, often highly stigmatized and discriminated against, face challenging barriers regarding seeking routine- and transition-related physical and mental health care (James et al., 2016). What has been consistent throughout time is that contact as an intervention (i.e., personal contact, contact with educational materials, and/or contact with general media outlets) has been found to be associated with improved attitudes toward and knowledge of marginalized communities (Braun et al., 2017; Click et al., 2019; Reed, 2018; Stroumsa et al., 2019). The aim of the current study was to explore the impact contact with a transgender-affirmative care training may have on …

A Review And Evaluation Of Techniques For Improved Feature Detection In Mass Spectrometry Data, Annika R. Tostengard, Rob Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Mass spectrometry (MS) is used in analysis of chemical samples to identify the molecules present and their quantities. This analytical technique has applications in many fields, from pharmacology to space exploration. Its impacts on medicine are particularly significant, since MS aids in the identification of molecules associated with disease; for instance, in proteomics, MS allows researchers to identify proteins that are associated with autoimmune disorders, cancers, and other conditions. Since the applications are so wide-ranging and the tool is ubiquitous across so many fields, it is critical that the analytical methods used to collect data are sound.

Data analysis in …

Soda: An Open-Source Library For Visualizing Biological Sequence Annotation, Jack W. Roddy, Travis J. Wheeler

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Genome annotation is the process of identifying and labeling known genetic sequences or features within a genome. Across the various subfields within modern molecular biology, there is a common need for the visualization of such annotations. Genomic data is often visualized on web browser platforms, providing users with easy access to visualization tools without the need for installing any software or, in many cases, underlying datasets. While there exists a broad range of web-based visualization tools, there is, to my knowledge, no lightweight, modern library tailored towards the visualization of genomic data. Instead, developers charged with the task of producing …

Resilience, Childhood Trauma History, And Foster Care Experience In College Students, Ashlyn M. Kincaid, Ashlyn M. Kincaid

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Investigation Of Emissions And Chemistry Of Formic Acid And Acetic Acid In Wildfire Smoke, Catherine Elizabeth Wielgasz

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Formic acid (HCOOH) and acetic acid (CH₃COOH) are two of the most ubiquitous organic acids in the atmosphere. Chemical transport models consistently underestimate HCOOH and CH₃COOH concentrations in environments including fire smoke, implying our incomplete understanding of their global budget. Emissions and secondary production of HCOOH and CH₃COOH within complex mixtures in fire smoke is uncertain.

I used measurements from the NSF/NCAR C-130 aircraft during the Western Wildfire Experiment for Cloud Chemistry, Aerosol Absorption, and Nitrogen (WE-CAN) campaign to investigate emissions and photochemical production of HCOOH and CH₃COOH from smoke plumes. First, …

The Lost Histories Of The Shetayet Of Sokar: Contextualizing The Osiris Shaft At Rosetau (Giza) In Archaeological History, Nicholas Edward Whiting

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Osiris Shaft is one of many archaeological signatures associated with Egypt’s Giza Plateau, the most well-known of which are the Great Pyramids. However, the role(s) the Osiris Shaft feature played in the religious and daily practices of ancient Egyptians remain(s) unknown. This research seeks to contextualize the Osiris Shaft in Egyptian history to learn more about this feature’s story. In order to achieve this goal, this thesis examines funerary deities associated with Memphis theology and explores archaeological investigations related to the Osiris Shaft, including the work of Dr. Zahi Hawass and investigations by the Giza Mapping Project. Thanks to …

Promoting Physical Activity Among American Indian Older Adults, Maja R. Pedersen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Background: Physical activity (PA) promotion is acknowledged as a critical component to improve public health among the growing population of older adults in the U.S. American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) older adults experience disproportionately high rates of chronic disease and disability compared with non-Hispanic White peers, and demonstrate lower levels of PA, indicating a need for examination of unique factors influencing their PA behavior.

Purpose: This study revealed the current state of PA intervention research among AIAN older adults in the U.S. and utilized best practices to identify factors that can influence the development, adaptation, and implementation of PA …

Lifeglows Through The Anthropocene: Development Of The Radical Imagination And Response-Ability Within Superhero Comics, Reed G. Puc

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Scholars such as Amitav Ghosh, Timothy Clark, and Timothy Morton emphasize the importance of and challenge within the task of representing the power, scope, and scale of climate change in art and literature. These interrogations often emphasize the failures of extant works to animate their viewers towards action in a time of environmental crisis, but struggle to find any work that meets their expectations. This ‘game-over’ attitude, I argue, is the direct result of the cruel optimism present in the current scholarship’s attachment to ‘traditional’ forms of art and literature. By interrogating the conclusions Ghosh reaches about the novel’s function …

Gender And Sexuality Alliance Advisors' Perceptions Of Self-Efficacy And Social Emotional Competency: An Exploratory Study, Kelly Marie Davis

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Background: Literature consistently demonstrates mental health disparities among sexual and gender minority (SGM) youth due to their unique experiences of discrimination, victimization, and rejection on the basis of their sexual and/or gender identity. Findings from the resilience literature highlight the importance of emotion regulation skills, supportive communities, and a relationship with at least one supportive, stable adult in mitigating risk and thriving despite adversity. Relationships with adults confer tremendous benefit for youth and provide opportunities for youth to learn important social and emotional skills. However, due to the rates of family and school rejection that SGM youth often experience, they …

Gozen In The Kindergarten Co-Teach Classroom, Suzanne Johnstone

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This study analyzes the relationship between social emotional regulation and the program entitled GoZen!, for ten Kindergarteners in a Montana School over the course of a consistent nineteen weeks. To do this, a group of ten Kindergarten students’ behaviors were observed to compare the baseline number of visible self-regulation strategies to that following the initial modules, as well as following the entire GoZen! program. The data showed great promise with a 75% reduction in physical disruptions, an 85% reduction in harmful disruptions and a 18% reduction in verbal disruptions. The program used consisted of watching two-hundred and four short cartoon …

From The Eyes Of Yellowstone National Park Visitors: Current And Future Desired Conditions, Glenna J. Hartman

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

The Road To Self-Support: Vocational Rehabilitation And The Associational State, 1917-1945, William Jared Norwood

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

“The Road to Self-Support: Vocational Rehabilitation and the Associational State, 1917-1945” traces the origins and development of the Civilian Vocational Rehabilitation (CVR) program from its inception in 1920 until the conclusion of the Second World War. Rapid industrialization and the fallout of the First World War handed the nation a large amount of people with disabilities, which drew on already strained state and local welfare relief. The project examines the interwar period and finds it to be a battleground of differing governing strategies over how best to solve America’s growing level of disabled workers. The project argues that policymakers settled …

On Coloring Oriented Graphs Of Large Girth, Michael Morris

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Uncovering Cooperation In Housepit 54, Bridge River, British Columbia, Canada, Megan Denis

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

There is a significant amount of literature regarding the theory of cooperation, as well as ethnographies and data from modern populations that clearly show cooperation, yet it is difficult to tease that information out of the archaeological record. My thesis will focus on floors IIi to IIc of Bridge River’s Housepit 54 in British Columbia, Canada, which extends from the Bridge River 2 period to the Bridge River 3 period and includes two incidents of resource stress and one of resource plenty. These times of fluctuating resource availability should result in the population utilizing different approaches to social organization. By …

Forecasting The Daily Percentage Of Delayed Flights Based On The National Weather Data, Parto Mahmoudi

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Flight delays cost airlines and affect passenger’s satisfaction. In this research work, we predicted the daily percentage of delayed flights based on the national weather data using the multiple linear regression and the random forest models. We extracted the passenger flight on-time performance data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the weather dataset from NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information for the years from 2015 to 2019. We used the flight dataset for Seattle airport as the origin. We predicted the daily percentage of delayed flights for the Seattle-originated flights based on the features such as weather conditions of …

The Influence Of Ancestry, Sex, And Age On The Morphology Of The Frontal Sinus In Black And White Individuals, Hope Annelise Vance

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The frontal sinus is a cavity located in the frontal bone and is completely unique to every individual. The morphology is influenced by a number of factors, such as environment, genetics, and perimortem injury. This study focuses on the role that ancestry, sex, and age play in the appearance of this feature; the morphology and shape of an individual’s frontal sinus is influenced by their sex and ancestry to some degree. The following analysis observes the relationship between the maximum width (MW), maximum depth (MD), degree of asymmetry (DOA), and maximum height (MH) of the frontal sinus and the individual’s …

Social Connectedness, Community Participation, And Health, Ari B. Silverman

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Persons with disabilities (PWD) experience social, economic, and environmental disadvantages which have contributed to marginalization, health disparities, and challenges with community participation. Various forms of social closeness appear to serve as protective factors against physical and mental health for the non-disabled population, but it is unclear whether social connectedness is associated with community participation and health for PWD. This within-subjects, correlational design study used survey and Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) data from a sample of persons with mobility impairments (MI) to determine the direct and indirect effect of social connectedness and participation on health, the barriers and facilitators to participation …

In Defense Of Non-Anthropocentrism—A Relational Account Of Value And How It Can Be Integrated, Ian I. Weckler

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Climate change has been show to be caused by humans. Human-centric behaviors have affected the world to the extent that many believe we have entered a new geologic epoch. This epoch— the Anthropocene—has prompted exploration into the ethical relationship between humans and the rest of the world. We know that a purely anthropocentric ethical system of values has lead ecological imbalance and environmental destruction, and that a non-anthropocentric (or humancentric) ethical system of value would be better suited for maintaining and regaining a habitable environment. However, past conceptions of non anthropocentrism have relied on abstract conceptions of value that fail …

It’S The Little Things: An Exploration Of Small Rnas And Selfish Genetic Elements Of The Human Bacterial Pathogens Coxiella Burnetii And Bartonella Bacilliformis, Shaun Gregory Wachter

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Coxiella burnetii is a Gram-negative gammaproteobacterium and zoonotic agent of Q fever in humans. Previous work in our lab has demonstrated that C. burnetii codes for several small RNAs (sRNAs) that are differentially expressed between in vivo and in vitro growth conditions. sRNAs serve as post-transcriptional regulatory effectors involved in the control of nearly all biological processes. We demonstrated that several of the identified sRNAs, namely Coxiella burnetii small RNA 3 (CbsR3), Cbsr13, and CbsR16, represent members of two novel families of miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs), termed QMITE1 and QMITE2. Furthermore, we have characterized a highly expressed, infection-specific sRNA, …

Effects Of A Suicide Assessment And Intervention Training On Participant Preparedness, Comfort, And Competence, Kelley Margaret Donisthorpe

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This study evaluated the effects of a six-hour strength-based suicide assessment and treatment workshop on participants knowledge, feelings of comfort and preparedness, skills and confidence, and self-reported suicide competence. Participants included school and mental health counselors, as well as other professions in related fields who completed one of the three workshops in Billings, Bozeman, or Victor, Montana. Participants completed a pretest before engaging in the six-hour workshop, and then completed a posttest packet immediately following the workshop. Participants were assessed using the SCAF (Cramer et al., 2013), and three unpublished measures: Suicide Knowledge Quiz (SKQ), Suicide Skills Survey (SF-SSS), and …

Beyond Nationalism: James And Grace Lee Boggs And The Black Radical Tradition In 1980s Detroit, Ryan A. Mccarty

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper explores the Black Radical Tradition in the 1980s through the lens of James and Grace Lee Boggs and their dedication to grassroots, community organizing and evolving revolutionary rhetoric. Existing scholarship on the decade is largely dedicated to the dialectic fluctuation of Black Power ideology and liberal reform that created a more conservative political agenda centered around partisan politics. Alternatively, the activism of James and Grace Lee Boggs in the immediate aftermath of the Black Power Era presents a complex view of the decade, providing space for black radicalism. The adaptation of the couple’s theories and mobilization strategies …

School Counselor Self-Advocacy And Trait Emotional Intelligence As Predictors Of Professional Quality Of Life In School Counselors, Kindle Dawn Lewis

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

School counselors are integral to the holistic success of students and are needed now more than ever as high rates of youth mental health issues, traumatic events at schools and global crises have become part of every school year. Unfortunately, as with most helping professions, many school counselors are struggling with maintaining a healthy professional quality of life due to chronic stress work environments. School counselors who have higher levels of compassion fatigue (burnout and secondary traumatic stress) and lower levels of compassion satisfaction are more likely to have decreased quality of care for students, decreased self-efficacy, decreased overall wellbeing …

Three-Dimensional Geometric Morphometric Sex Determination And Modeled Fragmentary Analysis Of The Human Pubic Bone, Katherine Scot Baca

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Geometric morphometrics has become a more popular method in anthropology as three-dimensional data and research become more widely recognized and accessible. This research provides a refined method utilizing 3-D geometric morphometric analysis to determine sex from the human pubic bone. The study used a sample of N=378 individual pubic bones from the University of New Mexico Maxwell Documented Collection. Eight landmarks were digitized on each individual bone using a Microscribe Digitizer. Results from the Principal Components Analysis provide promising clustering between male and female groups, as well as indications that the method may be ancestry-specific, and that parity may have …

Wonder: A Phenomenological Exploration, Henry R. Kramer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper presents a phenomenology of wonder through careful description of the internal state of wonder, defined here as “full engagement with something that bewilders you.” This phenomenology explores what is at stake in regards to our inhibitions toward wonder, how we can overcome those inhibitions, what the experience of wonder is like, and what effects wonder can have on our lives and ethical activity. This includes an investigation of the relationships between wonder and topics such as judgment, attention, engagement, imagination, play, and our ethical treatment of the more-than-human world. This paper demonstrates that by cultivating wonder we are …

Microseismic Evidence For Bookshelf Faulting In Western Montana, Ellen Mcgough Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

One of the most seismically active regions in the western United States, far from any major plate boundary, is the Intermountain Seismic Belt (ISB). On 6 July 2017, a M5.8 earthquake occurred 11 km southeast of Lincoln, Montana within the ISB. This was the largest earthquake to occur in the state of Montana since the 1959 M7.3 Hebgen Lake earthquake. Data from the University of Montana Seismic Network (UMSN), the Montana Regional Seismic Network (MRSN), and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) were used to investigate the aftershock sequences following the M5.8 Lincoln event. We have manually picked P- and …

Characterization Of The Influences Of Human Cytomegalovirus Glycoprotein O (Go) Expression On Gh/Gl Complexes Assembly And Its Polymorphisms On Cell-Free And Cell-To-Cell Spread, And Antibody Neutralization., Le Z. Day

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is widely spread throughout the world and immunocompromised individuals can suffer severe diseases from HCMV infection. Once the infection is established, HCMV can spread through the body and infect many major somatic cell types. The glycoproteins H and L (gH/gL) on HCMV envelope can be bound by either gO or the UL128-131 proteins to form complexes gH/gL/gO and gH/gL/UL128-131 that are critical for viral entry and spread, and these two complexes are important targets of neutralizing antibodies. Strains of HCMV vary considerably in the levels of gH/gL/gO and gH/gL/UL128-131. gO is one of the most diverse loci …

Bird And Native Bee Responses To Habitat Treatments, Emily Bea Oja

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

As forests across the United States have been altered due to fire suppression in the last century, their structure has been altered, resulting in increased fuel loads. Subsequently, managers have been increasingly implementing habitat treatments including prescribed burning, mechanical thinning, and a combination of both treatments to reduce fuel loads and enhance habitat for ungulates. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation has partnered with agencies to complete over 10,000 of these treatments across the United States to enhance elk habitat. As treatment impacts to other wildlife species are not well understood, we evaluated the effects of these treatments on the bird …

Dark-Night And Nameless:Globalization In Murakami’S Kafka On The Shore And The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Thomas Velazquez Herring

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Understanding And Measuring Net Positive Business Strategies, Luke Ruffner Robinson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Despite their attempts to mitigate ecological impacts through sustainability initiatives, businesses are a major cause of the world's ecological problems. Some progressive businesses are attempting to move beyond “net zero” in terms of achieving neutral environmental impacts and instead are now pursuing a goal of net positive. Net positive refers to the idea that business activities could contribute value-added benefits to earth’s ecological systems, for example, by using technologies that sequester and store carbon. However, except for a handful of high-profile corporate case studies, little is known about how companies are developing their strategies to become net positive and …

Influence Of Locally Produced Wood Biochar On Soil Nitrogen And Phosphorus Dynamics In The Northwestern Us, Si Gao

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Wildfire cause a rapid and sometimes dramatic loss of carbon and nitrogen from forest ecosystems, but it also leaves behind ash and charcoal on the soil surface, both of which affect soil properties, processes, and function. Some of these effects may be induced by applying charcoal or biochar to surface soils. Biochar is the term given to the carbon rich product of thermochemical decomposition of organic material in an oxygen limited environment that is explicitly intended for soil application. Producing biochar from wood residues from timber harvest and applying it to nearby soils may represent a means of reducing carbon …