Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Lytic Bacteriophages And Lactic Acid As Processing Aids Against Salmonella Spp. And Escherichia Coli O157:H7 On Marinated And Tenderized Pork Loins, Sherita Li

Master's Theses

Within the last decade, pork consumption has steadily increased and continues to be the most consumed meat globally. However, pathogenic bacterial strains resistant to antibiotics have also been increasingly found in pig farms, animals, and the environment. Bacterial food poisoning cases due to Salmonella spp. and Escherichia coli (E. coli) O157:H7 appear to be linked with a variety of pork products. The meat industry has recognized that research is needed to combat the multi-drug resistance in foodborne pathogens with alternative methods of control. This study evaluated the effects of both E. coli- and Salmonella-specific lytic bacteriophages and …

Fire Effects In Montane Meadows, Rosie Deak

Master's Theses

The impact of forest fires on downstream meadow communities across California is of great ecological interest, as meadows are an important source of biodiversity in this region. Over a century of fire suppression has led to increased forest stand densities, which in turn has resulted in less water availability due to increased transpiration of densely growing trees. This potentially has left less available water for downstream plant communities in meadows. If true, then high mortality wildfires in surrounding forest are predicted to lead to an increase in available downstream moisture where obligate and facultative-wetland taxa increase and dry-adapted upland taxa …

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 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. …

Influence Of Acute Online Guided Meditation On Inhibitory Control And Stimulus Discrimination In College-Aged Adults, Praveen A. Pasupathi

Master's Theses

Today’s young adult experience a world designed to constantly demand the individual’s attention through a barage of stimuli, making the ability to adequately inhibit irrelevant stimuli a necessary skillset for this population. While health behaviors such as exercise have shown positive effects on this ability, other behaviors such as mindfulness meditation have been less explored. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the influence of an acute bout of guided mindfulness meditation on inhibition aspects of attention in college-age adults. Using a within-subjects repeated measures design, twenty-four participants (age = 21.35 ± 0.92 years) engaged in both a …

Virtual Teams During Covid-19: A Study On Group Perceptions, Emergent States, And Outcomes, Thomas Montagna

Master's Theses

Due to the COVID‐19 pandemic, university students were forced to transition to emergency remote learning that, for many, required an abrupt shift from traditional face-to face instruction. The current study leveraged the unique opportunity provided by the change in communication modalities to compare pre and post pandemic perceptions of teamwork. Using the input-mediator-output-input (IMOI) framework, this study sought to discover how group processes, emergent states, and outcomes differed for face-to-face and virtual group work. As part of a retrospective pretest design, a convenience sample of fifty-two graduate students from the University of New Haven completed a single survey that asked …

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 …

Translatina Immigrant Mental Health Wellness: Suggestive Intervention Strategies The City Of San Francisco Should Consider Adopting, Valeria Vera

Master's Theses

Translatina immigrants in the United States often suffer from intersectional traumas due to their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and immigration status — putting them in a vulnerable position socially, psychologically, economically, and medically. Due to their positionality in the intersections of migration, criminalization, cissexism, and mental health, they are often more marginalized and have greater needs than communities with privileged sociocultural identities. As a particularly vulnerable group, they need guaranteed access to gender-affirming healthcare that is inclusive of mental health services. Despite Translatinas’ need for mental health services, there exist many barriers making services inaccessible and insufficient in San …

Industry And Malady: Entanglements Of Power, Culture, And Disease Afflicting Breast Cancer Patients In The Bay Area, Brieann N. Deornellas

Master's Theses

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States and, apart from some forms of skin cancer, is the most common cancer diagnosis for women. In 2021, the U.S Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results reported that approximately 281,550 women were diagnosed with, and 43,600 died of the breast cancer. Despite advancements in testing and treatments, about one in eight women will develop breast cancer in her lifetime, and breast cancer has the highest cancer death rate for women, excluding lung cancer.Studies have also shown that breast cancer prognosis and mortality is not uniform, and is statistically …

Use Of A Utility-Scale Solar Energy Facility By Avian Populations In Central California, Quratulain Ahmed

Master's Theses

With an ever-increasing demand for renewable energy in response to climate change, utility-scale solar energy (USSE) is on the rise, particularly in California. Although solar energy is viewed as an essential resource for transitioning from a fossil fuel economy, USSE installations can cover thousands of acres of habitat used by avian species. Little is known about the effects of USSE on avian populations, although some evidence suggests that USSE facilities may be leading to bird mortality. The lake-effect hypothesis suggests that birds may mistake solar arrays for large bodies of water resulting in injury or mortality. Though several studies describe …

Motivational And Participatory Experiences Of Female Service Members In Crossfit, Nicole M. Levine

Master's Theses

CrossFit is a high-intensity exercise program that has expanded globally over the last several years. Its minimalistic approach targeted at multiple aerobic and muscular strength domains make it accessible and applicable to populations with limited space and equipment, such as overseas military installations. Despite several studies examining the motivational factors of individuals engaging in CrossFit, research is scant on the motivational factors of military professionals participating in CrossFit outside of their formalized operational training. Additionally, there is no specific literature on female military participation in CrossFit. This study qualitatively explored the participatory motivations of 15 female U.S. military service members …

Impacts Of Transit-Oriented Development Through The Eyes & Lives Of Low-Income Latinx Residents: A Case Study In Fruitvale, Oakland, Diana Saavedra

Master's Theses

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is often showcased as a solution for private vehicle dependency and growing climate issues. Although TOD seems promising, it usually has harsh, unforgiving effects such as ecological gentrification. Ecological gentrification occurs when lower-income communities, especially of color, are pushed out of their neighborhoods due to the implementation of an environmental amenity, benefit, or service. However, research suggests that TODs that apply Transportation Justice principles seem to produce more equitable results. This study explores the Fruitvale Village TOD, located in Fruitvale, Oakland, California. This TOD was selected because it is unique in its conception and implementation, as it …

The Relationship Between Transformational Leadership And Affective Commitment And Intent To Leave The Organization: The Mediating Role Of Psychological Empowerment, Neiry Lara

Master's Theses

The leadership style of organizational leaders has important implications for organizations and their employees. Transformational leadership has been studied extensively due to the numerous positive outcomes. Unfortunately, not much research has focused on the mediating mechanism between transformational leadership and outcomes. Therefore, the present study explored the mediating role of psychological empowerment on the relationship between transformational leadership and the outcomes of affective organizational commitment and turnover intentions. It was hypothesized that psychological empowerment would act as a mediator between transformational leadership and affective organizational commitment and turnover intentions. Results of an online survey from 111 employed individuals showed that …

Evaluation Of The Offline-Coupled Gfs-Cmaq In Recent Wildfires In Northern California, Joyce Leung

Master's Theses

As wildfires become more frequent and severe under climate change, there is a growing need to simulate the impact of fires on air quality and human health using numerical models. The National Air Quality Forecast Capability is an operational air quality forecasting system that provides nationwide ozone and particulate matter (PM2.5) prediction. It is made up of a chemical transport model – the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model – driven by a meteorological model. Recently, the Global Forecast System (GFS) replaced the North American Mesoscale Forecast System (NAM) to drive CMAQ. In addition to these two modeling systems, the …

Characterizing Metabolic Changes In Cancer Cells After Treatment With An Extract Created From Walnuts, Codey Y. Huang

Master's Theses

Cancer cells undergo metabolic reprogramming to meet the energy and metabolite demands of constant proliferation. Originally observed as the Warburg Effect, where cancer cells are more glycolytically active, recent research has shown that cancer cells can also utilize oxidative phosphorylation to meet these demands, better known as metabolic flux. Previous work from our lab showed that treatment with a Walnut Extract (WE) induced cell death in MDA-MB-231 and HeLa cells by destabilizing the mitochondrial outer membrane potential, suggesting that the extract may be able to impact oxidative phosphorylation. The aim of the current research was to further characterize the impact …

Inverse Association Between Yogurt Consumption And Metabolic Syndrome Prevalence In United States Adult Males, But Not In Females Or In The Total Population: Nhanes 2017-2018, Diana K. Lee

Master's Theses

Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is prevalent in the United States (US) population andconcerns lie in related chronic diseases and financial burdens. To mitigate MetS, modifying the diet is a possible solution. Yogurt is known for its nutrient density and is a possible health food. The growing interests in yogurt and the growing concerns for MetS are met with the gap of unraveling the yogurt consumption status and MetS prevalence in the US. We evaluated the association between yogurt consumption and MetS using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2017-2018 and Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies data. The …

"For Better Or Worse": Imagining Innovation In Smart City Municipal Design, Kevin M. Kochever

Master's Theses

The smart city concept recently (ca. 2010) emerged as a corporate-led system-as-a-service (SaaS) tool to meet city needs of accessibility and efficiency. I looked at three Western cities—Reykjavík, San José, and Toronto—to discover what it meant for city managers to meet municipal needs by embracing smart initiatives. Senior-level city managers, consultants, and technologists invoked vocabularies of smartness and innovation, adopting Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) as tools to facilitate human resource and service efficiency needs. I found persistent ambiguity in how city managers described and measured outcomes for city smartness. I also found stakeholders used smartness to …

Acoustic Lens Design Using Machine Learning, Wei-Ching Wang

Master's Theses

This thesis aims to contribute to the development of a novel approach and efficient method for the inverse design of acoustic metamaterial lenses using machine learning, specifically, deep learning, generative modeling, and reinforcement learning. Acoustic lenses can focus incident plane waves at the focal point, enabling them to detect structures non-intrusively. These lenses can be utilized in biomedical engineering, medical devices, structural engineering, ultrasound imaging, health monitoring, etc. Finding the global optimum through a traditional iterative optimization process for designing the acoustic lens is challenging. It may become infeasible due to high dimensional parameter space and the compute resources needed. …

Historic Ohlone Resource Distribution Within The Alameda Creek Watershed, Naseem Fazeli

Master's Theses

The Alameda Creek watershed is located within the ancestral homeland of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area. Their ancestors historically utilized a variety of plants for food, medicine, ceremonies, and building materials, with their understanding of the value of the plants based on traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). The arrival of Spanish, and later Anglo/American, colonists beginning in the mid-18th century introduced urbanization and European agricultural practices, which have degraded wildlands and impacted species richness and diversity. As interest in environmental restoration has been increasing in recent decades, the present-day Muwekma Ohlone Tribe has an opportunity to …

No Association Between Macronutrient Intake And Body Composition Indices In Collegiate Athletes, Bryan Singharaj

Master's Theses

A scarcity of literature follows the relationship between macronutrient intake and bodycomposition indices within an athletic population. Therefore, the primary aims of the present study were to evaluate the relationship between the percent intake of carbohydrates, dietary fat, and protein with fat-free mass percentage (FFM %), fat mass percentage (FM %), fat mass index (FMI), and lean mass index (LMI). In addition, a secondary objective was to determine if there were any sex differences in the relationship between macronutrient intake and body composition indices. A total of 58 San José State University student-athletes from multiple sports were included in the …

An Empirical Assessment Of Environmental Variable Combinations For Use In Fire Weather Forecasts, Daniel Sunvold

Master's Theses

Predicting high fire danger conditions is paramount to mitigating the impacts caused by wildfires. Such warning systems as red flag warnings (RFWs) and the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) utilize atmospheric and fuel moisture properties to warn public and government entities about conditions that may lead to the ignition or rapid growth of wildfires. In this study, we use high-resolution reanalysis and wildfire growth data from 2003-2020 in California to test a variety of different variables to determine if a more viable variable combination exists that could be used to create a better warning index which would allow for …

Amplifying Testimonios Of Latino Male Student Success, Jilian Gómez

Master's Theses

The purpose of this qualitative counternarrative ethnographic study was to explore the success stories and lived experiences of six Latino male students, utilizing an asset-based approach and consideration of intersectional identity, cultural wealth, and contextual settings. This asset-based theoretical framework, the Latino Male Student Success Paradigm, was developed and used to contextualize the Latino male students' testimonios of their experiences and how they advanced their academic success. A semi-structured interview protocol was used to invite testimonios from the research participants, which included discussions about their academic success. The testimonios provided insight into what facilitated their resiliency when facing adversity within …

Black, Green, And Young: A Case Study Assessing Implementation And Outcomes Of An Environmental Science, Technology, Engineering And Math Curriculum For Youth In West Oakland, California, Ashari A. Taylor-Watson

Master's Theses

Environmental racism plagues low-income communities of color through exposure to environmental hazards, and the youth are most vulnerable. Environmental science, technology, engineering, and math (E-STEM) curriculums promoted as tools for corrective justice. Using a West Oakland, California Boys and Girls Club as a case study, I first describe the environmental awareness, attitudes, and actions of a group of six- to 13-year-old, predominantly African - American, children from this low-income community. I then examine the possible impacts of an E-STEM curriculum on participants, and I identify staff- and researcher-identified challenges to its implementation. During the study, the cohort experienced a heightened …