Digital Commons Network^™

'As Vivid As Blood In A Sink': (Re)Reading Queerness And Repression In Teju Cole's Open City, Jack Hoda

Master's Theses

Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) is an exemplar work of contemporary fiction. For its complex representation of subjectivity, hypnotic narrative tone, and global political scope, the novel has been praised by readers and critics alike. Julius, the text’s first-person narrator, guides us along seemingly innocent wanderings throughout New York City, ruminating on history, art, and politics while presenting himself as the enlightened, cosmopolitan ideal. However, the shocking penultimate revelation that Julius raped a young woman from his past alters our encounter with the text and its narrator. We come to realize that this meandering novel is, in reality, a carefully …

Examining The Association Between Fictive Kin Care, Parental Attachment And Emotional Distress In College Students, Roxanne Watts

Master's Theses

Having a supportive and secure relationship with parents can predict less emotional distress in college students. In addition to parental support, many families leverage fictive kin caregivers to provide support. This is especially true in communities of racial and ethnic minorities. The present study investigated the association between fictive kin care, parental relationships, and emotional distress in college students. One hundred fourteen (N = 114) college students completed measures that assessed parental and fictive-kin relationships, social support, and emotional distress. A COVID-19 pandemic-related distress measure was also administered. Three hypotheses were tested. First, it was hypothesized that fictive kin …

Intermittent Standing And Prior Exercise As Strategies To Prevent Arterial Stiffening That Can Arise From Prolonged Sitting, Alexander Wright

Master's Theses

Prolonged sitting can cause adverse vascular responses, including elevations in aortic stiffness which might contribute to cardiovascular disease (CVD). Few studies have investigated the impact of intermittent standing and/or prior exercise as strategies to mitigate these deleterious vascular changes. Purpose: to explore vascular health responses to prolonged sitting, with and without intermittent standing and/or prior exercise. Methods: 15 males aged between 18 and 31 years were recruited. Participants completed a control condition (Sitting Only), and three randomized strategy conditions (Sitting Plus Standing, Exercise Plus Sitting, Exercise Plus Sitting Plus Standing). For all conditions, measurements of carotid-femoral PWV (cfPWV) were taken …

Emotions In Work And War: Comparisons Of Emotional-Cultures Of New Deal Ccc Enrollees And Wwii U.S. Army Enlistees, 1933-1945, Maeve Losen

Master's Theses

Though the Great Depression and Second World War were consecutive eras and overlapped in numerous aspects, scholarship often overlooks the commonalities between these periods. To demonstrate these eras’ shared qualities, this thesis examines the relationship in emotional-cultures—the cultural norms that dictated how individuals felt and demonstrated their emotions—among Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enrollees and U.S. Army enlistees during WWII.

The broad intent of this undertaking is to place the cultural history of the Great Depression and WWII in conversation and to show the advantage of inter- and multidisciplinary work by applying anthropological and historical theories of emotion. Though the historical …

Examining Parenting Practices And Routines As Possible Mediators Of Parenting Inflexibility And Child Behaviors, Lauren S. Erp

Master's Theses

Due to the high prevalence rates of child behavioral problems, considerable research has focused on factors that contribute to child behavioral problems. Parenting inflexibility has been shown to relate to child internalizing and externalizing behaviors through ineffective parenting practices. However, child routines, another related yet distinct parenting behavior, has yet to be explored in this relationship. The primary purpose of this study was to examine parenting practices and child routines as mediators of the relationship between parenting inflexibility and child behavioral outcomes. Mothers of school-aged children (N = 157) were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and completed self-report measures of …

Using Deep Learning And Uav Imagery To Detect Elkhorn Coral In St. Croix’S East End Marine Park, Samuel Wyatt

Master's Theses

Elkhorn coral, or Acropora palmata, is an important reef building species that promotes species abundance and other ecological services to the communities in the US Virgin Islands. We captured high resolution imagery of a reef in St. Croix’s East End Marine Park using a Wingtra One UAV. We then used deep learning techniques to detect individual coral colonies. We compared two deep learning models, FasterRCNN and MaskRCNN, and found that the models achieved accuracy shores up to 0.78. These scores improved when examining only larger corals in shallow waters. The model was able to both detect Elkhorn coral and …

Sensitivity Of A Lamp Assay For Detection Of The Dinoflagellate Amyloodinium Ocellatum In Simulated Field Conditions And Freeze Tolerance Of The Parasite, Robert Gonzales

Master's Theses

The obligate parasitic dinoflagellate Amyloodinium ocellatum causes amyloodiniosis in warm water marine fishes. The prolific parasite, which has a direct, three-stage life cycle, is highly infectious and can cause heavy losses in aquaculture. Prevention, biosecurity, and early detection are vital for control. In this work, microscopy and a loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay were compared for early diagnosis of A. ocellatum in cultured stocks, and the freeze tolerance of tomonts was assessed to determine if frozen wild fish used as fish food can serve as a potential vector for the parasite.

The lowest dinospore concentration that could be detected by …

Assessing The Effect Of Negative Mood States On Valence-Dependent Belief Updating, Aleksandr Karnick

Master's Theses

Individuals consistently tend to underestimate the likelihood of negative events happening to them and fail to update these beliefs adequately when provided with statistical evidence. However, depressed populations are better able to accurately update beliefs. It is not clear if the ability to update beliefs effectively is due to overall dysphoria or are partially due to momentary fluctuations of acute affective states. Undergraduates (N=83) completed a belief updating task where they estimated the likelihood of a negative event happening to them, were presented with the actual likelihood of the event, and then re-estimated the likelihood of the event happening to …

The Thin Ideal And Body Positivity: How Do Influencers Affect Female Instagram Users?, Jeralynn Servos

Master's Theses

With the vast increase in social media use, there has also been an increase of exposure to body image ideals via photos shared online. Accordingly, it has become more important to understand the association between social media and how its users view their body image, as well as how social media users’ practices are affected by posted pictures. Therefore, this study employed three focus groups to explore young women’s perceptions of potential ideal images, how they compare themselves to these images, and how these ideas affect the practices used within their own Instagram accounts. An analysis of the qualitative data …

There’S No Crying In Baseball (Until Coronavirus Comes Around), Jessica Payne

Master's Theses

This study sought to investigate fan reactions to the NCAA communication around the elimination of NC State from the 2021 Baseball College World Series. NC State was eliminated due to Covid-19 protocols. A content analysis was conducted by looking at posts from various NCAA related accounts on Instagram and Twitter: @ncaabaseball, @ncaa, @ncstatebaseball, @vandyboys, @hailstatebb, and @texasbaseball. Content was analyzed using frames such as Health/Covid-19, Fans, Team Spotlight, Game Update, Elimination, Hype, Merch, and Sympathy. The study concluded that the while NCAA accounts ignored the incident and Health/Covid-19 frames altogether, the posts about Health/Covid-19 from team accounts actually gained a …

Acl Risk Data Comparison And Turnout Analysis Of Female Dancers Trained In Ballet And Female Traditional Jumping Sport Athletes, Samantha A. Campbell

Master's Theses

INTRODUCTION: An increase in participation in females sports has created an increase of female athletes at risk for injuring their Anterior Cruciate Ligament(ACL)[12,21,29,44]. Traditional jumping sports have the highest rate of non contact ACL injuries, due to the use of movements of cutting, pivoting and landing on one foot[5,8,32,33,38]. ACL injuries can also be attributed to neuromuscular deficits such as the ‘Ligament Dominance Theory’, ‘Quadricep Dominance Theory’, ‘Trunk Dominance Theory’ and the ‘Leg Dominance Theory’[24,33]. The neuromuscular deficits are muscle strength, power or activation patterns that can cause an individual to have an increased risk of ACL injury[33]. Female traditional …

Spatial And Temporal Variation In Growth Rate Of Blue Rockfish (Sebastes Mystinus) In Nearshore Central California Determined Using A Physiological Biomarker, Ellie M. Brauer

Master's Theses

Identifying areas of high fish population productivity is crucial for protecting habitats essential to fish growth and reproduction and, ultimately, for achieving sustainable fisheries. Historically, evaluations of habitat quality have relied heavily on linking spatial variation in fish abundance to environmental parameters such as substrate category, depth, or bathymetry. That approach, however, assumes that areas of high fish abundance best support growth and reproduction of a species and thus may fail to detect spatial or temporal variation in population attributes, such as somatic growth rate, which can be central to recruitment success and survival. In this study, we employed a …

Optimization Of A Novel Nipam-Based Thermoresponsive Copolymer For Intramuscular Injection As A Myoblast Delivery Vehicle To Combat Peripheral Artery Occlusive Disease, Quentin R. Klueter

Master's Theses

There is a need for a minimally invasive delivery method to enable cell therapies to combat peripheral artery occlusive disease (PAOD) in end stage patients. Myoblasts show promise as a cell mediated therapy but warrant an improved delivery method to increase cell retention in the region of interest because of their adherent nature, relative to previously used BM-MNC’s that are non-adherent. Contemporary issues with achieving successful cell therapies of vasculature can be mainly characterized by the lack of clinical translation from promising animal studies and absence of cell delivery scaffolding. Naturally, polymers have been widely experimented with as grafts to …

Impact Of Primary Myoblasts On Macrophage Polarization In-Vitro, Olivia Welch

Master's Theses

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) is characterized by the development of atherosclerotic plaques on arterial walls, leading to the narrowing of blood vessels, resulting in ischemia in the downstream tissue. In the United States, 12% of the adult population is affected by PAD and its related symptoms. Current surgical revascularization techniques can be effective in part of the patient population, but there is a need for other options. Alternatively, collateral blood vessels, or natural bypass arteries, enlarge to increase blood flow to the ischemic tissue in a process called arteriogenesis, which has been studied as a therapeutic option. Cell-based therapies, such …

Implementation And Analysis Of The Entity Component System Architecture, Shawn M. Harris

Master's Theses

The entity component system architecture (ECSA) is a data-oriented composition pattern and a data-driven design pattern. Data-oriented software takes into consideration generalized knowledge of hardware. Data-driven design is a methodology used to replace inflexible code with reusable components that can be added, deleted, or modified in interactive systems and games. This thesis explores the ECSA and its alternatives and their strengths and weaknesses. The paper details the creation of an ECSA and benchmarks its performance against object-oriented architectures. The hypothesis of this thesis is that the ECSA has CPU cache performance advantages over object-oriented architectures as tested by multiple benchmarks. …

Assessing The Impact Of Bicycle Infrastructure And Modal Shift On Traffic Operations And Safety Using Microsimulation, Katherine E. Lee

Master's Theses

A transportation system designed to prioritize the mobility of automobiles cannot accommodate the growing number of road users. The Complete Streets policy plays a crucial part in transforming streets to accommodate multiple modes of transportation, especially active modes like biking and walking. Complete streets are referred to as streets designed for everyone and enable safety and mobility to all users. A strategy of complete streets transformation is to connect isolated complete street segments to form a complete network that improves active mobility and public transit ridership.

This research assessed the impact of efficiently and equitably connecting and expanding the biking …

Youth Pitching Kinematics: Associations With Body Overweight Parameters, Christina K. Fong

Master's Theses

The objective of this study was to investigate associations between injury-related kinematic parameters and overweight measures for youth baseball pitchers. The injury-related kinematic parameters considered were measurements 1) at foot contact: stride length, front foot position, shoulder external rotation, shoulder abduction, and elbow flexion; 2) between FC and ball release: peak knee extension; and 3) at BR: shoulder abduction. Data from three separate collection sites examined pitching mechanics of 18 10- to 11-year-old pitchers, 11 14- to 16-year-old pitchers, and 104 16- to 18-year-old pitchers Linear regression analyses were performed to determine significant correlations between kinematic parameters and body mass …

Development Of A Prototype Ball-And-Plate Balancing Platform, Scott J. Mangin

Master's Theses

Ball-and-plate balancing platforms have been utilized throughout academia to further understanding of nonlinearities that can occur when applying control algorithms to nonholonomic and underactuated systems. The objective of this thesis is to build upon an existing ball-and-plate balancing platform used in the Intro to Mechatronics class and create a robust platform system that can be utilized by future students to test various controller designs derived from MATLAB/Simulink®. The ball-and-plate platform design uses a myriad of sensors to track the system components in real time: a resistive touch panel is used to track the position of the ball on the plate, …

Aeroelastic Analysis Of Small-Scale Aircraft, Kent Roberts

Master's Theses

The structural design of flight vehicles is a balancing act between maximizing loading capability while minimizing weight. An engineer must consider not only the classical static structural yielding failure of a vehicle, but a variety of ways in which structural deformations can in turn, affect the loading conditions driving those deformations. Lift redistribution, divergence, and flutter are exactly such dynamic aeroelastic phenomena that must be properly characterized during the design of a vehicle; to do otherwise is to risk catastrophe. Relevant within the university context is the design of small-scale aircraft for student projects and of particular consideration, the DBF …

Underground Transmission For Renewable Energy: Design, Modeling, And Analysis, Matthew Suen

Master's Theses

A microgrid is a local energy grid that could be disconnected from the larger grid and operate autonomously. This particular segment of the power industry is growing due to its reliability during times of emergency and crisis. Among these benefits are improved efficiency, lower operating costs, renewable generation sources, and improved resiliency of the regional electric grid. Communities can better prepare for unprecedented weather like wildfires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. Regions that produce renewable energy can export their surplus through high voltage transmission lines to balance power supply and demand needs.

This Underground High-Voltage Transmission Network project aims to …

Parametric Paraglider Modeling, Peter F. Heatwole

Master's Theses

Dynamic simulations are invaluable for studying system behavior, developing control models, and running statistical analyses. For example, paraglider flight simulations could be used to analyze how a wing behaves when it encounters wind shear, or to reconstruct the wind field that was present during a flight. Unfortunately, creating dynamics models for commercial paraglider wings is difficult: not only are detailed specifications unavailable, but even if they were, a detailed model would be laborious to create. To address that difficulty, this project develops a paraglider flight dynamics model that uses parametric components to model commercial paraglider wings given only limited technical …

System Performance Model And Control System For A Small-Scale Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine, Niko Banks

Master's Theses

Predicting the performance of wind turbines is a key part of the turbine design process and operation, as predictive models play a large role in determining potential power output and efficiency at different operating conditions to help maximize production. On small-scale wind turbines performance models become more complex, as the rotor aerodynamic performance depends not only on the tip speed ratio, but also on the flow Reynolds number. An accurate predictive model that includes this behavior on small-scale wind turbines can be used to find the optimal operating conditions for power output, and is also a critical component of the …

Investigation Of Green Strawberry Detection Using R-Cnn With Various Architectures, Daniel W. Rivers

Master's Theses

Traditional image processing solutions have been applied in the past to detect and count strawberries. These methods typically involve feature extraction followed by object detection using one or more features. Some object detection problems can be ambiguous as to what features are relevant and the solutions to many problems are only fully realized when the modern approach has been applied and tested, such as deep learning.

In this work, we investigate the use of R-CNN for green strawberry detection. The object detection involves finding regions of interest (ROIs) in field images using the selective segmentation algorithm and inputting these regions …

Impact Of Teaching Practices And Communication Climates On Participation In Computer Science Education, Jackie Krone

Master's Theses

One way to understand teaching is to view it as a people process rather than a presentation of knowledge. It follows that the role of an educator often extends beyond the primary subject matter and into the realm of classroom management. With this in mind, our research aimed to capture the various teaching practices, participation patterns, and communication climates that occur in virtual computer science classrooms. We sought to answer the following research questions related to virtual computer science classrooms at our institution: Who participates in virtual computer science classrooms, and is participation proportional to student demographics? Is there any …

The Impact Of Formal Education, Specialized Training, And Offense Type On Perceptions Of Employability: Can Bias Toward Hiring A Person With A Criminal History Be Mitigated?, Rheanna Standridge

Master's Theses

Gaining employment for returning citizens has been shown to reduce recidivism and contribute to a successful community reintegration. Yet, many employers remain skeptical when it comes to hiring formerly incarcerated job candidates for a variety of reasons. Though hesitations are often related to assumptions about a person’s dangerousness, there remain legitimate reasons, such as limited formal education and basic skills, that prevent returning citizens from finding work. Further, previous research suggests that hiring decisions are confounded by offense type, even if an employer would otherwise consider a person with a criminal history. Thus, it is unclear whether returning citizens’ level …

Impact Of Biodegradable Materials On Healthy And Diseased Brain Cells: Function And Viability, Kyle Mason Rugg

Master's Theses

With the recent creation of Metal Organic Biohybrids (MOBs) from the DeCoster lab group at Louisiana Tech University, a new class of nano and micro particles needs to be investigated. The amalgamation of metals such as copper and an amino acid have already shown promise for biomedical applications such as delayed drug delivery or time delayed anti-microbial effects1. In this study the effects of cobalt, copper, and zinc-based MOBs have been compared against silicon dioxide nanoparticles, a negative control, and copper oxide nanoparticles, a positive control, in order to observe their effects on cancerous glioma cells and healthy astrocyte cells. …

Characterization, Design, And Optimization Of Dual-Purpose Wind Turbines And Frost Protection Fans, Ethan Narad

Master's Theses

This thesis report outlines the creation of a MATLAB tool to design reversible machines that can function as both wind turbines and as agricultural frost protection fans. Frost protection fans are used to prevent crop loss during radiative freeze events during which a temperature inversion is present. Such a dual-purpose machine fundamentally has the constraint that it must use symmetric airfoils, so a suite of tools for automatically designing an optimized wind turbine blade with symmetric airfoils using the Blade Element Momentum (BEM) theory approach is presented. The BEM code is then re-derived and adapted for use with a frost …

Integration Of Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy For Multichannel Cell Culture Measurement, Conard Chan

Master's Theses

ELECTROCHEMICAL IMPEDANCE SPECTROSCOPY (EIS) has been widely used to study the electrical properties of biological material due to its non-invasive nature and experimental reliability. However, most of the precision impedance analyzers used in EIS only provide single- or two-channel measurements which are inadequate for larger-scale multiplexed measurements, such as those found in modern microfluidic cell culture experiments. The Biomedical Microsystems Laboratory has developed a 16-channel cell culture platform with integrated electrode arrays for monitoring cell growth and electrical properties (i.e., the so-called “electrical phenotype”). In this paper, a system consisting of a 16-channel solid-state analog multiplexer (MUX)paired with a low-cost, …

The Relationship Between Goal Types And Job Performance: Exploring The Moderating Effect Of Self-Efficacy, Stefani Ewell

Master's Theses

Motivation to improve performance within the workplace has long been an area of interest for leaders in organizations. While goal setting is often used as a motivational theory to improve performance, further guidelines are needed to ensure the full positive effects of goal setting are realized. The purpose of this study was to understand the effect of four goal types (outcome, performance, process, and personal-best goals) on performance in the workplace. Another purpose of this study was to examine whether the effectiveness of goal types may change as a function of self-efficacy. Performance was measured in two ways: completeness and …

The Effect Of Submarine Volcanism On Foraminifera At Axial Seamount Of Juan De Fuca Ridge, Gabriela Marie Diaz Santana

Master's Theses

Submarine volcanoes contribute more than 75% of global volcanic eruptions annually and have the potential to change the surrounding submarine ecosystems. The species richness, abundance of foraminifera assemblages and the average test size of samples recovered from marine sediment cores are a proxy for past environmental changes on the seafloor and in the water column. This study evaluates the ecosystem impact of multiple eruptions that formed a massive caldera at Axial Seamount between 1300 and 800 years before present (BP). An examination of the diversity, abundance, and size of planktic and benthic foraminifera assemblages recorded in volcanic and hemipelagic sediments …