Digital Commons Network^™

Consumer Evaluation Of Cheese: Linking Hedonics, Emotions And Perception Of Product Attributes, Kristine Patricia Martinez

Master's Theses

As the food industry continues to grow and the marketplace becomes saturated with similar products, consumer researchers and sensory scientists are looking to dig deeper into the minds of consumers to reveal greater distinctions between products and ultimately deliver multi-dimensionally desirable products to consumers. Concurrently, rates of adult and childhood obesity have been increasing nationwide. Food companies are now facing a paradigm shift as health initiatives and consumers are beginning to demand healthier alternatives to commonly consumed food products. With this in mind, it has become imperative to identify product attributes that drive consumption so they can be replicated in …

Neuromodulation: Action Potential Modeling, Vladimir Ruzov

Master's Theses

There have been many different studies performed in order to examine various properties of neurons. One of the most important properties of neurons is an ability to originate and propagate action potential. The action potential is a source of communication between different neural structures located in different anatomical regions. Many different studies use modeling to describe the action potential and its properties. These models mathematically describe physical properties of neurons and analyze and explain biological and electrochemical processes such as action potential initiation and propagation. Therefore, one of the most important functions of neurons is an ability to provide communication …

Design And Validation Of A Wearable, Continuous, And Non-Invasive Hydration Monitor That Uses Ultrasonic Pulses To Detect Changes In Tissue Hydration Status, Zoie Engman

Master's Theses

Chronic dehydration is an endemic problem for many population groups. Current methods of monitoring hydration status are invasive, time consuming, cannot be performed while exercising, and require lab resources. A proposed solution is a wearable, continuous, and non-invasive device that uses harm-free ultrasonic pulses to detect changes in tissue hydration status over time. Customer and engineering requirements were defined and used to guide the design process. Literature reviews were performed to identify essential information on dehydration, assess current methods, discover state of the art devices, and describe ultrasonic theory. Market research was performed to identify athletes as the target population …

Climate Planning In Politically Conservative Cities: A Case Study Of Seven Climate Action Plans, Coleman Moore Frick

Master's Theses

Current research indicates that the potential risks associated with human-induced climate change are likely to increase in frequency and intensity. Although there have been several attempts, no effective international treaty or policy has been enacted by the United States with the purpose of combating this global issue. In the past decade, local climate action plans (CAPs) have emerged as a planning solution designed to reduce greenhouse emissions (GHGs). Previous studies have examined CAP attributes, but no research has focused solely on climate planning in politically conservative jurisdictions. This research finds that of 245 CAPs completed to date nationally, approximately 90 …

A Multi-Gpu Compute Solution For Optimized Genomic Selection Analysis, Trevor Devore

Master's Theses

Many modern-day Bioinformatics algorithms rely heavily on statistical models to analyze their biological data. Some of these statistical models lend themselves nicely to standard high performance computing optimizations such as parallelism, while others do not. One such algorithm is Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). In this thesis, we present a heterogeneous compute solution for optimizing GenSel, a genetic selection analysis tool. GenSel utilizes a MCMC algorithm to perform Bayesian inference using Gibbs sampling.

Optimizing an MCMC algorithm is a difficult problem because it is inherently sequential, containing a loop carried dependence between each Markov Chain iteration. The optimization presented in …

Defy: A Deniable File System For Flash Memory, Timothy M. Peters

Master's Theses

While solutions for file system encryption can prevent an adversary from determining the contents of files, in situations where a user wishes to hide even the existence of data, encryption alone is not enough. Indeed, encryption may draw attention to those files, as they most likely contain information the user wishes to keep secret, and coercion can be a very strong motivator for the owner of an encrypted file system to surrender their secret key.

Herein we present DEFY, a deniable file system designed to work exclusively with solid-state drives, particularly those found in mobile devices. Solid-state drives have unique …

Future Of Payment Platforms, Salim Benjamin Youssefzadeh

Master's Theses

With the vast increase in smartphones, there have been an increasing number of opportunities growing in the app industry. One in particular is the way we deal with money. There are huge overheads in the current payment systems around the world particularly in the United States, many of which include large transaction fees. Many new businesses have grown to solve these inefficiencies and create a new platform that provides a new user experience, security, and convenience among many other things. However, many of these platforms are still centralized, making them more susceptible to attacks. This thesis goes over the various …

Coffee: Context Observer For Fast Enthralling Entertainment, Anthony M. Lenz

Master's Theses

Desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and the Kinect, oh my! With so many devices available to the average consumer, the limitations and pitfalls of each interface are becoming more apparent. Swimming in devices, users often have to stop and think about how to interact with each device to accomplish the current tasks at hand. The goal of this thesis is to minimize user cognitive effort in handling multiple devices by creating a context aware hybrid interface. The context aware system will be explored through the hybridization of gesture and touch interfaces using a multi-touch coffee table and the next-generation Microsoft Kinect. …

Jester: A Device Abstraction And Data Fusion Api For Skeletal Tracking, Kevin Samuel Schapansky

Master's Theses

Humans naturally interact with the world in three dimensions. Traditionally, personal computers have relied on 2D mice for input because 3D user tracking systems were cumbersome and expensive. Recently, 3D input hardware has become accurate and affordable enough to be marketed to average consumers and integrated into niche applications. Presently, 3D application developers must learn a different API for each device their software will support, and there is no simple way to integrate sensor data if the system has multiple 3D input devices. This thesis presents Jester, a library designed to simplify the development and improve the accuracy of 3D …

Creating A Testing Framework And Workflow For Developers New To Web Application Engineering, Tag G. Ashby

Master's Theses

Web applications are quickly replacing standalone applications for everyday tasks.

These web applications need to be tested to ensure proper functionality and

reliability. There have been substantial efforts to create tools that assist with the

testing of web applications, but there is no standard set of tools or a recommended

workflow to ensure speed of development and strength of application.

We have used and outlined the merits of a number of existing testing tools

and brought together the best among them to create what we believe is a fully- featured, easy to use, testing framework and workflow for web application …

Development Of Novel Anti-Microbial Plant Essential-Oil Treatments To Reduce The Postharvest Incidence Of Botrytis Cinerea Of Strawberries, Ryan C. Brantley

Master's Theses

Fresh strawberries have grown into a multi-billion dollar industry over the last few decades in California. Botrytis cinerea or grey mold, is the worst pathological disorder affecting strawberry fruit causing cull rates of up to 30% in the worst seasons. Strawberry fruits are fragile and have a short shelf-life making timely harvest, cooling, and marketing an absolute necessity. The current industry standard is to ship strawberries in an overwrapped CO₂-enriched headspace pallet in refrigerated trucks at 33 °F. However, B. cinerea has the ability to grow at very low temperatures and continues to plague the strawberry industry during postharvest storage …

Predicting Music Genre Preferences Based On Online Comments, Andrew J. Sinclair

Master's Theses

Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) states that individuals adapt to each other’s communicative behaviors. This adaptation is called “convergence.” In this work we explore the convergence of writing styles of users of the online music distribution plat- form SoundCloud.com. In order to evaluate our system we created a corpus of over 38,000 comments retrieved from SoundCloud in April 2014. The corpus represents comments from 8 distinct musical genres: Classical, Electronic, Hip Hop, Jazz, Country, Metal, Folk, and World. Our corpus contains: short comments, frequent misspellings, little sentence struc- ture, hashtags, emoticons, and URLs. We adapt techniques used by researchers analyzing other …

A Proof Of Concept For Crowdsourcing Color Perception Experiments, Ryan Nathaniel Mcleod

Master's Theses

Accurately quantifying the human perception of color is an unsolved prob- lem. There are dozens of numerical systems for quantifying colors and how we as humans perceive them, but as a whole, they are far from perfect. The ability to accurately measure color for reproduction and verification is critical to indus- tries that work with textiles, paints, food and beverages, displays, and media compression algorithms. Because the science of color deals with the body, mind, and the subjective study of perception, building models of color requires largely empirical data over pure analytical science. Much of this data is extremely dated, …

Integrated Senior Housing, Kyungok Ha

Master's Theses

It is difficult to have an integrated population throughout all age strata in a society. Especially if one considers the growing percentage of the aged population and their feeling alienated in their current physical surroundings. In order to solve imminent problems with the growing elderly population, a primary task should be considering how to improve the housing of senior citizens. Furthermore, bringing the youth and elderly together would produce a functioning self-help system. It engenders interaction strategies by employing the strengths of one generation to serve another generation’s needs. This idea was introduced by the systemic family therapist Gerhard Schiele. …

Adapting The Job Demand/Control Model To A Team Level, Clark Calabrese

Master's Theses

A better understanding of sources of stress within a teamwork context might be gained by applying the Job Demands/Control Model of stress (Karasek and Theorell, 1990) to teams as the unit of analysis rather than only to individuals as it is conventionally done. Team performance is frequently treated as a shared team-level outcome; it seems reasonable to assume that shared team characteristics are likely to have effects on stress as well. In particular, teams are unique in their requirement for coordination between team members. Therefore, the present study proposes an adapted Team Job Demands/Control Model of team-level stress phenomena in …

Aiding And Abetting: The Illegality Of Morocco's Nationalist Expansion Into Western Sahara And Their Support From The United States, Rachid H. Yousfi

Master's Theses

This paper will address the illegality of Morocco’s nationalist annexation of Western Sahara and how the United States plays the accommodating role through the selling of arms, economic aid, and diplomatic support. Considered as Africa’s last colony, the Saharawi people have not experienced the basic human right to self-determination and the right for independence. These rights are continued to be withheld for the sake of Moroccan nationalism and their “rightful and ethnic” claims to the territory, disregarding the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s advisory opinion ruling in favor of Saharawi self-determination. It explores the chronology of the Saharawi population from …

Impact Of Mobile Money Usage On Microenterprise Evidence From Zambia, Laura I. Frederick

Master's Theses

Mobile money payment systems have spread rapidly around the world in the last decade. Given developing countries are powered by informal economies that traditionally have had limited access to information technologies, mobile payment system infrastructure has the potential to transform the way microenterprises conduct business. Through a pilot study in Livingstone, Zambia, I examine the effect of mobile money usage on microenterprise profits. I employ an instrumental variable strategy using the type of mobile operator as the instrument to address the selection bias in adoption, as mobile money services are available to everyone. In this urban context, I find initial …

How Is Sectoral Fdi Affecting Firms’ Performance In Mozambique?, Nilza A. Abdurramane

Master's Theses

I study the effect of sectoral FDI on firms’ performance in Mozambique from 2007 to 2010 through productivity and efficiency functions, using comprehensive firm level data. Although foreign ownership has a positive effect on firms’ productivity, my results show that in general, sectoral FDI has a negative and statistically significant effect on Mozambican firms’ productivity. The findings of this study are similar to previous studies that argued that positive foreign spillovers were not automatic. Using a stochastic frontier model, to measure efficiency, I find that in general foreign firms tend to be more efficient than domestic firms. However, using this …

Learning Together: A Case Study Of A Cooperative School’S Approach To Education, Ariana M. Ali

Master's Theses

This thesis is based on an in-depth case study of one cooperative pre-preschool and preschool in San Francisco. Qualitative research methods, such as observation and one-on-one interviews, were used to study the structure, culture, and community at the school. Cooperative schools have not been well researched or documented in academic literature and this study hoped to shed some light on this model of school organization. The parent-initiated and community-oriented nature of cooperative schools make them stand out as unique among the large, bureaucratically-run schools and daycares typically found in the United States. The results of this study highlighted four themes …

Can Community Water Projects Combat Child Diarrhea? Results From The Solomon Islands, Thomas G. Sackman

Master's Theses

There is a vast amount of existing literature that has empirically scrutinized whether or not community water projects have the ability to mitigate diarrheal disease. A strong and persistent belief thinks that community water projects do have the means, however, over the decades empirical work commonly finds this to simply not be true. This study expands the research question to the Solomon Islands. The research tests the hypothesis using a differences-in-differences identification strategy by utilizing the government’s staggered timing rollout of community water subprojects with whether or not a village received a community water subproject to test for a program …

High Order Statistics Of Natural And Manmade Sounds, Rahul Narayan

Master's Theses

Environmental sounds, both man-made and natural, vary on multiple time and frequency scales generating a large range of temporal, spectral and amplitude modulations that are evident in the high-order statistics of the sound spectrogram. Healthy hearing humans perceive high-order statistical regularities and use this information to categorize and discriminate sounds. This paper tests the hypothesis that biologically motivated sound statistics can enable/enhance discrimination and identification of sound categories from a computational standpoint. A large catalogue of natural and man-made sounds and their associated high-order contrast and intensity statistics were developed, and the information carrying content of each statistic for sound …

The Influence Of Geographic Location On Sexual Behaviors Related To The Transmission Of Hiv In Mainland Tanzania, Ashley E. Robinette

Master's Theses

Purpose of the Research:

The purpose of this study is to identify how differences in sexual behaviors related to HIV/AIDS are influenced by geographic location, specifically urban and rural regions of Tanzania. By analyzing populations from urban and rural areas, the social factors associated with the regions are hypothesized to influence HIV/AIDS-related behaviors differently with varied outcomes.

Methods Used:

This study used data from the 2011-12 Tanzania HIV/AIDS and Malaria Indicator Survey (THMIS). The data includes both individual and household responses concerning knowledge and attitudes about HIV/AIDS, access to health care and risky sexual behaviors. The sexual behaviors/practices included in …

Impact Of Natural Disaster Exposure On Prosocial Preferences And Public Goods Provision: Evidence From The Solomon Islands, Heather Belfor

Master's Theses

Natural disaster exposure can impact prosocial preferences, which indicate the level of social capital, as well as create a shift in investments from public to private goods. Both are important mechanisms to study in order to create optimal climate change adaptation policies. This study evaluates the impact of natural disaster exposure on prosocial preferences and public goods provision in the evaluated communities. The data used in this research comes from a process evaluation that was carried out in the Solomon Islands on the Rural Development Program (RDP) and a Structured Community Activity (SCA) experiment, which took place in 80 villages …

Connecticut Teen Pregnancy Prevention: Parental Attitudes About Reproductive Health Education Based On Racial Ethnic Backgrounds, Elizabeth M. Chasse

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Attitudes And Beliefs Regarding The Collection Of Race, Ethnicity And Primary Language Information In Healthcare Settings, Roberto A. Henry

Master's Theses

Public health researchers, practitioners and policy makers are increasingly trying to uncover, quantify and address health disparities, which are differences in health outcomes among population subgroups (Nepaul et al., 2007). Health disparities are understood to be the consequences of differences in care, the health services infrastructure, and information systems available to persons by virtue of their gender, race, ethnicity, education level, etc. (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2011; Institute of Medicine, 2009). In the United States, we commonly study health disparities occurring across racial and ethnic groups, requiring the collection of race, ethnicity and language data in order …

The Stress Response To An Acute Heavy Resistance Exercise Protocol, Adam J. Sterczala

Master's Theses

Exercise has been shown to induce significant stress and a subsequent inflammatory response characterized by changes in circulating leukocyte populations and inflammatory cytokines and has been well documented following aerobic exercise. Research in regards to the effects of resistance exercise on the stress induced inflammatory response is less prevalent and has shown divergent results, likely due to differences in the exercise protocols used, the time points measured and the subjects involved. Therefore, the purpose of this investigation was to analyze the stress response to an acute heavy resistance exercise protocol (AHREP) in resistance-trained men. Specifically, we examined effects on circulating …

Re-Emerging Vaccine Preventable Diseases: United States State Immunization Exemption Laws And The Relation To Annual State Pertussis Incidence-Trend Analysis, Evan M. Timme

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of Intermittent Hand Cooling On Rectal Temperature And Performance In The Heat While Wearing An American Football Uniform, Michael W. Sundeen

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

A Sea Test Of Mobile Underwater Localization, Huizhong Gao

Master's Theses

Localization and tracking of underwater moving objects are of great interest in

many applications. This thesis presents a recent sea test on underwater

localization carried out in the Sizihwan coastal area near Kaohsiung, Taiwan, May 2013,

where three stationary nodes are used to localize one mobile node via acoustic

communications based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)

modems. Experimental results show that the estimated trajectory of the

underwater mobile node agrees well with the track recorded by global

positioning system (GPS).

Bimodal Approach Using Spectroscopy And Digitial Imaging To Assist Otitis Media Diagnosis, Kaitlyn M. Longo

Master's Theses

Otitis Media is defined as inflammation of the middle ear region associated with middle ear fluid. This condition typically follows an upper respiratory infection, is commonly misdiagnosed by physicians and can potentially lead to the inappropriate use of antimicrobial agents. ^[1] This thesis describes the design of a novel medical device that utilized spectroscopy and digital imaging to provide physicians with a unique representation of the middle ear. Published literature has been reviewed to assess the different approaches that researchers have studied to improve the diagnosis of otitis media, where, for example, research conducted by Thorton et al. and Boppart …