Digital Commons Network^™

Using Personality Traits To Predict Pectoral Fin Contact Initiation Role In Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops Truncatus), Riley Paige Macgregor

Master's Theses

Contact with the pectoral fin facilitates formation and maintenance of social relationships between dolphins (Dudzinski & Ribic, 2017). Additionally, several studies have shown that bottlenose dolphins have distinct personalities that are consistent across time and situation (e.g., Highfill & Kuczaj, 2007; Kuczaj, Highfill, & Byerly, 2012), and it has been suggested that these individual differences (i.e., personality) may influence tactile behavior exchanges. The current study therefore aimed to determine if bottlenose dolphin personality traits predict whether and how dolphins initiate contact as a rubber or rubbee during pectoral fin contact exchanges, and to identify whether the effects of personality traits …

A Computational Analysis Of The Gradient Concentration Profile Of Deet And The Mosquito Behavioral Response, Brandon Carver

Master's Theses

DEET is a common active ingredient in most spatial repellents. DEET is also a volatile organic compound. DEET prevents mosquitoes from detecting and coming into contact with an human individual. Gas sensing technologies such as metal oxide semiconductor sensors can detect VOCs. The World Health Organization provides the majority of efficacy testing methods. This research adapts methods from the WHO and use of MOS sensors to further understand how and why DEET affects mosquitos. A custom developed system is used to measure DEET dissipation and observe mosquito behavioral response to the DEET. DEET dissipations and mosquito behavior is measured within …

The Effect Of Spill Contaminants On Marine Biofilms And Microbially-Induced Corrosion Of Carbon Steel, Rachel Mugge

Master's Theses

There are over 2,000 known historic shipwrecks located in the northern Gulf of Mexico which are ecological and cultural resources that support the diversity of life found in the deep-sea when they become artificial reefs. Spilled crude oil and chemical dispersant from the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) spill may have impacted the preservation of deep-sea historic shipwrecks and their microbiomes if they are located in areas where oil and dispersant were deposited on the seafloor. Oil potentially accelerates corrosion of metal through a biologically-mediated process called microbially-induced corrosion (MIC). Introduction of spill contaminants may accelerate MIC on shipwreck hulls, which may …

Investigating Possible Scurvy In The Postclassic Maya Of Tipu, Emmalea Gomberg

Master's Theses

Although residing in a tropical environment, numerous researchers have posited the possibility of scurvy in the Maya in recent years. The historic population of Tipu in western Belize dating to AD 1541-1638 is one of the largest and best preserved Maya series, and was therefore evaluated for possible presence of scurvy since the diet appears typical of the pre-contact Petén populations. The temporal bones and greater wings of the sphenoid were analyzed for scorbutic activity in 143 individuals, along with periodontal disease and antemortem tooth loss to determine if there was a co-occurrence with scurvy.

Overall, 27% of the sample …

Pseudomonas/Brachypodium As A Model System For Studying Rhizosphere Plant Microbe Interactions Under Water Stress, Janiece Mcwilliams

Master's Theses

In contrast to well-studied mechanisms of drought tolerance in plants, the interactions between plants and their microbiome during water stress are still poorly understood. This missing knowledge is crucial for the exploitation of beneficial microbial communities to improve the sustainability of agriculture under changing climatic conditions. The research described here bridged this gap by focusing on the molecular interactions between beneficial rhizobacterium Pseudomonas synxantha 2-79 and annual grass Brachypodium distachyon Bd21. 2-79 exemplifies a group of rhizobacteria associated with dryland wheat, while B. distachyon originates from the Middle East and has emerged as a model for valuable biomass, food, forage, …

The Return Of The Dead: Resurrecting Chappell's Family Gathering, Jonathan Moore

Master's Theses

This thesis examines Fred Chappell’s virtually overlooked collection of poetry Family Gathering (2000), and how the poems operate within the mode of the grotesque. I argue that the poems illuminate both the southern grotesque and Roland Barthes’s theory of photography’s Operator, Spectator, and Spectrum. I address Family Gathering as a family photo album full of still shots, snapshots, and even selfies, which illumines how Chappell’s use of the grotesque in this collection derives more from its original association with visual arts rather than only depicting the grotesque typically associated with characteristics deemed explicitly shocking or terrifying. I argue that …

Determinants Of Team Resilience; The Role Of A Reset Process Across Conditions, Jeffrey Hanrahan

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Physiological Response Of The Giant Acorn Barnacle, Balanus Nubilus, To Air Exposure, Emily Jane Resner

Master's Theses

The giant acorn barnacle, Balanus nubilus, is a resident of the subtidal and low intertidal rocky shoreline on the Pacific Coast of North America (Alaska to Baja California). B. nubilusis notable for having the largest muscle fibers in the animal kingdom; fiber diameters that can exceed 3mm in adults! At such extreme sizes these muscle cells may be at risk for insufficient oxygen delivery to mitochondria owing to low SA:V ratios and long intracellular diffusion distances. Oxygen limitation to these muscles may be further exacerbated during low tide air exposure (emersion) or environmental hypoxia events, which are increasing …

Prophecy For Sale: On American Rails, Erik Bryan White

Master's Theses

Prophecy for Sale: On American Rails follows the poetic tradition of Walt Whitman and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This collection contains five numbered sections which show a progression of the human consciousness. Drawing on the works of Sylvia Plath, Weldon Kees, Jack Spicer, and others, the works in this collection exhibit a strong poetic American voice. Section “I: How Much Longer?” addresses class separation, racism, and inequality. Form mirrors content, confronting a world which seems bent on its own destruction. Section “II: The New Garden,” explores the human impact on nature in more detail and sets up solutions to the problems of …

(T)Witch Hunting: A Crusade Against Women And Femininity In The Digital Age, Marcus Garcia

Master's Theses

The digital world is an integral part of everyday life regarded as an extension of the self and the physical world. The advent of live video streaming services offers a more interactive form of social media than existing photo and video sharing platforms, like Facebook or Instagram. Twitch, a social video streaming service where people watch live broadcasts of video game play and other various forms of creative content, has contributed to the creation and growth of online communities where variations and similarities between online and offline self are made visible. Early research, specifically concerned with cyberbullying, identifies age, gender, …

An Examination Of The Demographic Antecedents And Job Outcomes Of Participation In Employee Resource Groups (Ergs), Emily Erin Lopez

Master's Theses

Employee resource groups (ERGs) are voluntary, employee-led groups formed in the workplace that focus on providing mutual support for members and that educate the organization about its members’ culture, identity, or experiences. The study’s purpose was to examine demographic antecedents and job outcomes associated with ERG participation. Specifically, this study examined gender identity and professional tenure as demographic antecedents of ERG participation and the relationship between ERG participation and employee outcomes, including job embeddedness and organizational commitment. Participants included 154 individuals employed at a technology company in the Northwestern United States who completed a survey regarding their personal characteristics and …

All Eyes On You: The Impact Of Increased Surveillance And Media Publicity On Police Identity, Sara Serpa Rodrigues

Master's Theses

The recent surge in media footage surrounding police killings of unarmed black men clearly signifies the national concern for police violence, yet researchers have yet to study police identity in connection with such publicized inequality. This qualitative study closes this gap in research by addressing the following questions: “How do patrolling officers think about and experience their jobs at this particular historical juncture of increased internet and media exposure?” and, “How does the mass exposure and scrutiny of police violence shape police perceptions of their work and impact their work identity?” Face to face semi-structured interviews, symbolic interactionism, and interpretive …

Personality, Motivation, And The War Between Facebook And Twitter, Elizabeth Shallal

Master's Theses

Social networking sites (SNSs) have recently become integrated in modern lives as entertainment, communication, and even careers have become more reliant on them. The current study explored the relationship between Facebook and Twitter attachment and demographic, motivation, and personality traits. Differing psychological relationships may explain why people become more attached to specific SNSs as well as explain their continuance of use. Using online self-report measures, this study measured motivations to use Facebook and Twitter, the Big Five personality traits, and Facebook/Twitter attachment of 109 participants who have been users of both Facebook and Twitter. Results of hierarchical multiple regressions showed …

For The Bible Tells Me So, Jade Dozier

Master's Theses

The relationship between the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning) community and the church has been studied for critical reasons. The connection between the two has been uneasy because of the religious beliefs from religious groups and the many misunderstandings of what the LGBTQ community believes in. I have been able to understand the poor relationship between the Black church and homosexuality from the sources that are examined in my Literature Review. I evaluated the similarities and differences between queer men and women based on upbringing, denomination, and familial acceptance. As a LA native, I narrowed research on Black …

Autonomy In Video Games And Gamification, Jonathan Leventhal

Master's Theses

In the past decade, gamification (using game elements in non-gaming tasks to enhance motivation and engagement) has become a popular concept in many industries, but few studies have explored the principles under which it works. Self-determination theory suggests three psychological needs that gamification fulfills: competence, relatedness, and autonomy. Autonomy, a person's perception that they have the ability to act however they choose, has emerged as an important, yet less-studied aspect in gamification. Inclusion of autonomy in gamification should foster engagement, enjoyment, and better performance. An experiment inspired by the above was carried out in which a sample of college students …

Job Level And Job Family As Predictors Of Preferences For The Physical Environment, Rachel Smith

Master's Theses

Previous research shows that the physical work environment is related to various work-related employee outcomes. However, researchers have not focused on employee preferences for the physical work environment, nor predictors of such preferences. The current study proposed that job level and job family might predict employee preferences for the layout and design of work environments. The study also examined gender and age as moderators of the relationship between job level and employee preferences, and the relationship between job family and employee preferences. The results of online surveys from 157 employees of a medical technology company showed that job level predicted …

The Effect Of Automating Routine Tasks On Air Traffic Controller Conflict Detection Performance, Lauren Claudatos

Master's Theses

The growing demand for air transportation necessitates the integration of automated support tools to assist air traffic controllers in managing the increase in number of flights. Using archival data from a human-in-the-loop simulation, the current study examined the potential consequence of integrating automated support on eight retired air traffic controllers’ performance and workload in current and projected future levels of air traffic. Two-way repeated measures ANOVA were used to examine workload and conflict detection performance across two levels of simulated air traffic density and two levels of automated routine task support. The participant controllers reported significantly higher workload and exhibited …

A Glottometric Subgrouping Of The Early Germanic Languages, Joshua Agee

Master's Theses

Historical Glottometry, introduced by Alexandre François (2014), is a wave-based quantitative approach to language subgrouping that is used to calculate the overall strength of a linguistic subgroup using metrics that capture the contributions of linguistic innovations of various scopes to language diversification, in consideration of the reality of their distributions. It primarily achieves this by acknowledging the contribution of areal diffusion to language diversification, which has traditionally been overlooked in cladistic (tree-based) models. In this thesis, the development of the Germanic language family, from the breakup of Proto-Germanic to the latest period of the early attested daughter languages (namely Gothic, …

Objects Of Politics, Objects Of Art: Three Studies On The Display Of American Political Prints, Ricardo Chavez

Master's Theses

Fueled by the radical political thinking of the 1960s and beyond, people in the United States produced artistic responses in the form of political prints and posters for both documenting and actively galvanizing the popular movements of this era. This study analyzes the display of these prints and posters within an art-viewing context. It argues that, with characteristics of both objects of politics and objects of art, these works possess dynamic meaning that can be impacted by the institutional narratives of the locations in which they reside. Looking at three examples of political print exhibitions organized individually by the Museum …

Biochemical Study Of A Chymotrypsin-Like Serine Protease, Aachymo, From The Female Aedes Aegypti Mosquito, Olive Escalicas Burata

Master's Theses

The Aedes aegypti female mosquito is a dominant vector of four bloodborne viruses: dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever, and Zika. Defenses against viral infection are reliant on human competence to limit interactions with the vector or through abatement using

methods that are either too expensive or ecologically invasive upon other species. An alternative vector control approach focuses specifically on blood meal protein digestion, which is a required process to fuel the gonotrophic cycle. Reduction of eggs laid can be

observed by inhibiting midgut serine proteases that are afterward released in the midgut in the presence of a blood meal. Trypsin-like serine …

Diets And Stable Isotope Signatures Of Yellowtail Rockfish (Sebastes Flavidus) In Central California, Jennifer Chiu

Master's Theses

Studies of fish diets can improve the understanding of trophic distributions and the predatory role of a species in an ecosystem. Identifying the spatial and temporal variability in the diets of fishes can provide useful information for stock assessments and management. Yellowtail Rockfish (Sebastes flavidus) are a commercially and recreationally important fishery species, and abundant along the central California coast, yet the most recent studies of diets occurred over 20 years ago in Oregon and Washington. To provide current information from California, I examined the food habits of Yellowtail Rockfish collected near Cordell Bank, the Farallon Islands, and Half Moon …

Modeling And Simulation Of Vehicle Performance In A Uav Swarm Using Horizon Simulation Framework, Adam J. Frye

Master's Theses

A UAV swarm is simulated using Horizon Simulation Framework. The asset utilized for the swarm agent is a simplified model of the MQ-1 Predator, a large fixed-wing aircraft. The simulated swarm utilizes a decentralized cooperative control approach to command the assets through the use of digital pheromones and a pheromone map. Each vehicle operates at steady-state flight conditions of 36 m/s with an altitude of 1,800 m, and utilize an LQR set-point controller to maneuver through the pheromone map. All pheromone and aircraft related models are written in Python to expand the HSF scripting capability and include airborne scenarios. The …

Auditory Brainstem Response And Language In Typically Developing Children And Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Lisa Tecoulesco

Master's Theses

Syntactic, semantic, and phonological knowledge are vital aspects of macro level language ability. Prior research has focused on environmental or cortical sources of individual differences in these areas. Subcortical contributions of the auditory brainstem have also been found to contribute to language ability in both typically developing (TD) populations and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study investigates whether one aspect of auditory brainstem responses (ABRs), response stability, a metric of the variability of instance to instance neural encoding of sound, can predict syntactic, semantic, and phonological performance in TD and ASD school-aged children. This study further investigates the …

Understanding Spatiotemporal Growth Of Ride Source Services In New York City, Lorenzo Roland Varone

Master's Theses

Ride source is among the fastest growing services in the transportation sector. While the service initially served a niche market, ridership has boomed in recent years. Daily ride source pickups in New York City have increased from about 60,400 pickups in January 2015 to about 550,000 pickups in December 2017, an 810% increase. Even though ride source broke into the transportation landscape almost seven years ago, research studying its effects has been stunted by the limited open source data made available by TNCs. In order to help city officials make smart policy decisions regarding ride source, transportation experts must continue …

Women With A Cause: Art, Representation, And Feminist Progress In Eighteenth-Century France, Darby Marie Leahy

Master's Theses

Throughout the eighteenth century the Age of Enlightenment transformed public discourse across Western Europe. In France, the salons of Paris became the primary institutions of Enlightenment thought. Hosted by women, the salons possessed a unique atmosphere in which men and women were regarded as intellectual equals. My thesis focuses on the role the female hostesses, salonnières, had in initiating French movements for gender equality that continued with great momentum throughout the French Revolution. By using popular artwork, literature, and memoirs I show how the efforts of French women to achieve gender equality helped give early rise to feminism.

Facilitating Effective Online Discourse: Investigating Factors Influencing Students’ Cognitive Presence In Online Learning, Xinran Zhu

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship among social presence, cognitive presence and teaching presence in online learning within a Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000). In addition, the study investigated the impact of individual’s motivational factors on the relationship among the presences. An online survey testing learner’s perceived social presence, teaching presence, cognitive presence, situational interest and online technology self-efficacy was distributed to students who were taking online courses. A follow-up interview process was conducted in order to further interpret the quantitative data. The findings show that within the CoI framework, social …

Substance Use, Hiv Serostatus Disclosure, And Sexual Risk Behavior In People Living With Hiv: An Event-Level Analysis, Matthew Sullivan

Master's Theses

Objective. Sexually active people living with HIV (PLWH) face difficult decisions about disclosing their HIV status to sexual partners. Alcohol and other drug use are prevalent in medically engaged PLWH, and could impact these decision-making processes. We sought to examine the event-level relationships between substance use, HIV disclosure, and condom use in PLWH.

Method. Adult PLWH were recruited from care settings in a southeastern US city. Participants reported psychosocial and health information at baseline, and reported their sexual behavior for 28 consecutive days via text message prompts. Multi-level modeling was employed to examine event-level associations between substance use, HIV disclosure, …

Can The Job Characteristics Model Be Used To Attract Applicants? A Policy Capture Model Of Symbolic Attraction, Alec J. Calvo

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Improving Diet & Physical Activity Behaviors Through Tailored Mhealth Messages: Application To Childhood Obesity Prevention In A Pediatric Emergency Department, Samantha Oldman

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Understanding How The Costimulatory Molecule Ox40 Engagement On T Cells Can Boost Immune Responses For Vaccine Applications And Immunotherapy., Archibald Agyekum-Yamoah, Archibald Agyekum-Yamoah

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.