Digital Commons Network^™

Using Portable X-Ray Fluorescence To Predict Physical And Chemical Properties Of California Soils, Micaela D. Frye

Master's Theses

Soil characterization provides the basic information necessary for understanding the physical, chemical, and biological properties of soils. Knowledge about soils can in turn be used to inform management practices, optimize agricultural operations, and ensure the continuation of ecosystem services provided by soils. However, current analytical standards for identifying each distinct property are costly and time-consuming. The optimization of laboratory grade technology for wide scale use is demonstrated by advances in a proximal soil sensing technique known as portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (pXRF). pXRF analyzers use high energy Xrays that interact with a sample to cause characteristic reflorescence that can be …

The Role Of Speech-Language Pathologists In Trauma-Informed Practices: Feelings, Attitudes, And Reported Behaviors Of Colorado School Speech-Language Pathologists, Kallie Haritopoulos

Master's Theses

Research indicates that a majority of children in the United States will be exposed to at least one traumatic event before they turn 18, and some children experience multiple forms. Trauma can cause various adverse effects in physical, cognitive, linguistic, behavioral, social, and emotional functioning, which can affect educational performance and success. Despite the increased chance that children who have experience trauma will receive speech and language services, research surrounding trauma-informed practices predominantly focus on the role of general education teachers and mental health professionals. This qualitative study aimed to understand the feelings, attitudes, and reported behaviors of five Colorado …

Infidelity And The Bioecological Protective Factors For Mental Health: A Longitudinal Investigation, Lindy Williams

Master's Theses

Infidelity is an important topic of research due to the profound effects on the individual experiencing the trauma. Through the lens of bioecological systems and betrayal trauma, the impact of infidelity on mental health is examined in relation to the most proximal systems to an individual which include personality traits such as agreeableness and neuroticism as well as support from friends, family, and community. This research explores the hypotheses that more support leads to more positive mental health outcomes after the experience of infidelity and the possibility that support from friends, family, and community may buffer specific personality traits and …

Upland Migration Of Coastal Marshes As A Response To Sea Level Rise And Fire Management: Past, Present, And Predicted, Devin Jen

Master's Theses

Coastal marshes are one of the most productive and intensively used ecosystems in the world. However, they are under threat due to natural and anthropogenic stressors, such as sea level rise (SLR). SLR can cause marshes to drown, converting them to open water. Marshes can respond to SLR through landward migration when suitable habitat is available. My research focuses on the landward migration pattern and mechanisms. I evaluated the historical land cover changes at the Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and the Pascagoula River delta over two-time intervals since 1955 and focused on the forest-marsh dynamics. I found that …

Alt-Right Of The_Donald And Authoritarian Communists On Reddit: Internet Memes To Build Community, Joshua Hendricks

Master's Theses

This project infuses Lacanian psychoanalysis further into the rhetorical study by exploring authoritarian discourses on Reddit. I analyze the alt-right community that found a home on the subreddit r/The_Donald and chart their discourse as it shaped from the quarantine to the establishment of an independent forum called TheDonald.win. I selected memes and the comments around them to build the analysis. The second aspect of this thesis examines authoritarian communist discourse on Reddit. The leftist community splintered when r/socialism banned a community member because the person made catgirl art. The ban sent shockwaves through the leftist community on Reddit and generated …

A Bioarchaeological Investigation Of The Courtney-Anderson Cemetery, Lauren Scott

Master's Theses

Located in Perry County, Mississippi, the Anderson Family Cemetery represents an abandoned turn-of-the-century Piney Woods cemetery. The cemetery is located on land once owned by the Courtney and Anderson families, who farmed the area until it was taken under eminent domain by the United States government in 1942. The purpose of this thesis is to present three osteobiographies created from human remains and material culture recovered from three graves excavated from within the cemetery in 2022 to explore the lifeways of rural Piney Woods families of Mississippi at the turn-of-the-century.

Among the graves explored, one did not contain evidence of …

Effects Of Shoreline Development And Freshwater Discharge On Nekton Assemblage And Trophic Structure In A Northern Gulf Of Mexico Estuary, Glenn Schumacher

Master's Theses

Coastal salt marshes support a diversity of nekton and facilitate critical ecosystem functions but are threatened by shoreline development and climate change. Therefore, coastal ecosystem managers have begun incentivizing the use of living shorelines (LS), erosion control structures incorporating native plantings, to mitigate ecological consequences of marsh loss. However, post-restoration climate changes may shift habitat templates and negate positive effects of ecosystem restoration. I evaluated the ecology nekton along LS, natural marshes, hardened shorelines and greyed shorelines within Biloxi Bay, Mississippi, during a high freshwater discharge (HFD) period by comparing nekton assemblage (using species richness, Shannon-Wiener diversity, and relative abundance), …

Fabrication Of Lab-Scale Polymeric And Silicon Dioxide Nanoparticle-Enabled Thin Film Composite Reverse Osmosis Membranes For Potable Reuse Applications, Timothy J. Dinh

Master's Theses

Reverse osmosis (RO) is widely used for water reclamation and is one of the most feasible technologies for addressing water scarcity around the world. RO membrane fabrication procedures are continually being optimized and modified to enhance the treatment performance and efficacy of the RO process. A review of the existing literature published on membrane fabrication revealed that a detailed and reproducible methodology consistent among prior studies was not available. Therefore, the primary objective of this study was to utilize techniques from prior research to develop a reliable lab-scale membrane fabrication process for studying the potable reuse applications of TFC RO …

Strawberry Disease Management Improvement For Macrophomina Root Rot And Botrytis Fruit Rot, Yu-Chen Wang

Master's Theses

Strawberry production in California is limited by plant diseases such as Macrophomina root rot (caused by Macrophomina phaseolina) and Botrytis fruit rot (BFR) (caused by Botrytis cinerea). Current disease management strategies are compromised due to fumigant regulations or ineffective disease management practices. This thesis investigated methods to potentially improve the management of these two diseases.

Host plant resistance evaluations for Macrophomina root rot were conducted for the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 growing seasons. Fifty-one strawberry genotypes were screened in two field experiments where plants were inoculated artificially with Macrophomina phaseolina in both seasons. A wide range of plant resistance …

Deep Learning For Detecting Trees In The Urban Environment From Lidar, Julian R. Rice

Master's Theses

Cataloguing and classifying trees in the urban environment is a crucial step in urban and environmental planning. However, manual collection and maintenance of this data is expensive and time-consuming. Algorithmic approaches that rely on remote sensing data have been developed for tree detection in forests, though they generally struggle in the more varied urban environment. This work proposes a novel method for the detection of trees in the urban environment that applies deep learning to remote sensing data. Specifically, we train a PointNet-based neural network to predict tree locations directly from LIDAR data augmented with multi-spectral imaging. We compare this …

Investigation Of Dead Ocean Quahogs (Arctica Islandica) Shells On The Mid-Atlantic Bight Continental Shelf, Alyssa Leclaire

Master's Theses

Ocean quahogs, Arctica islandica, are a long-lived, widely dispersed, biomass dominate in the Mid-Atlantic; therefore, quahog shells are valuable resources for studying climate change over time. Recently, dead ocean quahog shells were discovered south and inshore of the present biogeographic range of this animal. The presence of ocean quahog shells outside the current range is presumably a consequence of past regressions and transgressions of the Cold Pool, the bottom-trapped, cool body of water that allows boreal animals to live at lower latitudes. Dead ocean quahog shells were collected offshore of the DelMarVa Peninsula then radiocarbon-dated, evaluated for taphonomic condition, …

Reinforcement Actor-Critic Learning As A Rehearsal In Microrts, Shiron Manandhar

Master's Theses

Real-time strategy (RTS) games have provided a fertile ground for AI research with notable recent successes based on deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, RL remains a data-hungry approach featuring a high sample complexity. In this thesis, we focus on a sample complexity reduction technique called reinforcement learning as a rehearsal (RLaR), and on the RTS game of MicroRTS to formulate and evaluate it. RLaR has been formulated in the context of action-value function based RL before. Here we formulate it for a different RL framework, called actor-critic RL. We show that on the one hand the actor-critic framework allows RLaR …

Population Genetics Of Cownose Rays, Rhinoptera Spp. In The Western Atlantic, Helen Weber

Master's Theses

Using molecular tools (e.g., the NADH subunit II mitochondrial gene), this study was the first to document the Brazilian cownose ray, Rhinoptera brasiliensis, within the northwestern Atlantic (NWA), and was the first study to examine population structure in R. brasiliensis within the NWA or northern Gulf of Mexico (GMX), revealing novel insights into the population biology of the animal and extending its range by nearly 1,500 km. This study also examined the sympatrically occurring American cownose ray, R. bonasus, and found population structure between the NWA and the GMX and the NWA and the southwestern Atlantic (SWA). High …

Relationship Among Department Satisfaction, Training, And Police Behavior, Matthew Garvin

Master's Theses

The call for police reform has been sparked by incidents involving the shooting and killing of individuals by the police. Public and political scrutiny of police behavior and procedures has created a social identity of “Us Versus Them” mentality among police officers. Proactive policing strategies have diminished in response to the heightened scrutiny of police procedures and behavior, in turn, initiating a reduction in police protection and an increase in crime. While research has identified the importance of police presence, the literature does not yet answer questions regarding factors which influence police proactivity. To address the gap in understanding, this …

Pressure Disturbance Upstream Of The Boundary Layer Data System, Michelle S. Leclere

Master's Theses

The primary objective for this work was to evaluate the reliability of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools in the prediction of upstream surface pressure disturbance and pressure drag of various instrument excrescence shapes for a small aircraft flight test device called the Boundary Layer Data System (BLDS). Insights on pressure disturbance will serve as a guide for the placement of BLDS probes/sensors, and pressure drag can be used to ensure sufficient adhesive is used to install BLDS instrumentation. The Mach number for all CFD cases was 0.12 and the Reynolds number based on excrescence height varied from 4 x 10 …

The Impact Of Environmental Variability On Perceptions Of Parental Ability From Bodily Cues, Kaitlyn Boykin

Master's Theses

This study aimed to extend work considering how bodily cues appear diagnostic of parental ability. I examined body adiposity and sexually dimorphic features for women (i.e., breast size) and men (i.e., muscularity). I further considered how salience of resource scarcity might heighten perceptions of a potential mate as an effective parent when possessing features that connote underlying resource availability (e.g., body fat). Participants were primed with resource scarcity or a control condition before assessing parental affordances of female and male targets. Targets were orthogonally manipulated to possess high and low levels of adiposity. Female targets were manipulated for breast size …

"Conserving" The Middle Ground: Tennessee's Unionist Press In The Secession Crisis, 1860-1861, Michael Singleton

Master's Theses

This thesis advances scholars’ understanding of how newspaper editors framed and presented news during the secession crisis of 1860-1861. Methodologically, it draws on the publications of seven Unionist editors from Tennessee who initially resisted secession but later pursued different courses during the Civil War. Through this period, editors balanced their roles as journalists and political actors working to advance an ideological cause. Guided by existing practices and their unique journalistic styles, these editors presented a near unified message—influenced by Whig political culture—that framed their response to outside events. This unanimity fractured in 1861 as local pressures, business interests, and personal …

Tropical Cyclone Storm Surge Detection In Slash Pine Radial Growth Along The Northern Gulf Of Mexico Coastline, Alyssa C. Crowell

Master's Theses

My thesis examines the ecological impact of tropical cyclone (TCs) storm surge on coastal slash pine (Pinus elliottii var. elliottii Engelm) communities along the Gulf of Mexico in the southern United States (U.S.). Previous research has shown slash pine radial growth trends can be examined to identify long and short-term growth changes associated with TC passage, providing insight into overall stand health and resiliency through time. However, this previous research encompasses just one site in Mississippi. My thesis expands the spatial footprint of TC-surge impact on slash pine radial growth with the addition of three new sites.

I examined …

Changes In The Morphology Of Widgeon Grass (Ruppia Maritima) With The Onset Of Reproduction And Impacts On Fish Assemblages At The Chandeleur Islands, La, Matthew Byrnes

Master's Theses

Seagrasses are important submerged coastal habitats that support nearshore communities. Ruppia maritima (widgeon grass) is a widespread species whose leaves branch extensively when reproductive. The goal of this study was to understand use of reproductive and non-reproductive R. maritima by fishes, recognizing the morphological change undergone by the plant when flowering. During the peak reproductive season in August and September 2021, R. maritima meadows at the Chandeleur Islands, LA were sampled to describe the spatial distribution and morphology of reproductive plants and investigate habitat use by fish assemblages. We assessed spatial trends in R. maritima presence and occurrence of reproduction …

Sedimentary Characteristics And Associated Carbon And Nutrients Of Overbank Sediments Deposited During The 2018, 2019, And 2020 Floods In Embanked Floodplains Along The Lower Mississippi River Near Natchez, Mississippi, Rachel Kelk

Master's Theses

The Lower Mississippi River (LMR) experienced major floods in 2018, 2019, and 2020. Sediment deposition in the embanked floodplains during floods represent important storage and sequestration opportunities for carbon and nutrients from ~40% of the continental USA. This research aims to compare depositional thicknesses, organic matter (OM), carbon (C), nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P) concentrations, and grain sizes in floodplain sediments deposited by the combined 2018-19 floods to the 2020 flood along the LMR near Natchez, Mississippi. Greater depositional thicknesses in 2018-19 are best explained by their combined flood durations; the 2019 flood was the longest in recorded history. Slightly higher …

Emplacement Of The Dadeville Complex Of The Southernmost Inner Piedmont Within The 7.5 Min. Cusseta Quadrangle, Chambers County, Alabama: Channel Flow, Klippe Kinematics, Or Orogen Parallel Translation, Timothy Black

Master's Theses

The Appalachian Mountains have a complex geologic history spanning three orogenic periods, the Taconic, the Acadian/Neoacadian, and Alleghanian orogenies. The Inner Piedmont of the Appalachian Mountains within Alabama contains two distinct lithologic complexes, the Dadeville Complex, and the Opelika Complex separated by the Stonewall Line. These complexes were formed during an arc-back arc fringing system during the Taconic orogeny and emplaced and recorded peak metamorphism during the Acadian orogeny.

The Dadeville Complex is an allochthonous arc terrain built on extended Laurentian crust. The mode of transportation and accretion after formation is not well understood, which has implications for the role …

Evaluating The Effects Of Mindfulness Practice On Attentional Control And Episodic Memory, Jacob M. M. Namias

Master's Theses

Mindfulness refers to a mental state of being that involves nonjudgmental acceptance of current cognitions and emotions with awareness of the present moment. Researchers and clinicians have shown the efficacy of mindfulness as a treatment for psychological disorders such as anxiety and depression and have found reductions in reported stress. Building on clinical benefits, mindfulness practice may also facilitate attentional processes as practitioners are required to inhibit distracting thoughts and re-direct their focus to the present moment. My thesis examined the relationship between mindfulness practice and attentional control and potential spillovers to episodic memory. Experiment 1 gauged the relationship between …

Psychosocial Maturity And Alcohol Outcomes: The Mediating Role Of Alcohol Protective Behavioral Strategies, Skyler Hoover

Master's Theses

The present study evaluated the mediating role of alcohol protective behavioral strategies on the relationship between temperance, responsibility, perspective (i.e., the facets of psychosocial maturity) and alcohol use outcomes. Potential invariant paths among graduate and undergraduate students were also explored. All participants were undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Southern Mississippi aged 18 to 25. Participants reported demographic information and completed measures of temperance, responsibility, perspective, alcohol use, and alcohol consequences. Results indicated the full mediation model showed poor fit the data; greater temperance predicted greater alcohol protective behavioral strategy use, greater responsibility and perspective predicted less alcohol …

Artist-Configurable Node-Based Approach To Generate Procedural Brush Stroke Textures For Digital Painting, Keavon Chambers

Master's Theses

Digital painting is the field of software designed to provide artists a virtual medium to emulate the experience and results of physical drawing. Several hardware and software components come together to form a whole workflow, ranging from the physical input devices, to the stroking process, to the texture content authorship. This thesis explores an artist-friendly approach to synthesize the textures that give life to digital brush strokes.

Most painting software provides a limited library of predefined brush textures. They aim to offer styles approximating physical media like paintbrushes, pencils, markers, and airbrushes. Often these are static bitmap textures that are …

Exploring The Impact Of Cognitive Awareness Scaffolding For Debugging In An Introductory Computer Science Class, Jiwon Lee

Master's Theses

Debugging is a significant part of programming. However, a lot of introductory pro- gramming classes tend to focus on writing and reading code than on debugging. They utilize programming assignments that are designed in ways such that students learn debugging by completing these assignments which makes debugging more of an im- plicit goal. In this thesis, we propose a cognitive awareness scaffolding in debugging to help students self-regulate their debugging process. We validate its effectiveness by conducting experiments with students in four sections of a Data Structures course, which is one of the introductory computer science classes at California Polytechnic …

Development Of A Dual-Band Radio Repeater To Be Carried By A Fixed-Wing Small Unmanned Aerial System, Carl Recine

Master's Theses

With the continued rise in wildfires in California, and around the world, technological advancements are needed to improve the safety and effectiveness of wildland firefighters. One area that provides an opportunity for such development is the deployment of temporary communications networks. Currently, radio repeaters are set up on mountain tops in the response area; such repeaters do not provide flexibility once installed, still have blind spots, and require the time of valuable assets like helicopters to install.

This thesis will establish the feasibility of airborne radio repeaters for wildland firefighting. In order to successfully demonstrate the feasibility of such an …

Increasing The Effectiveness Of K-12 Stem Worshops Through Targeted Context And Creative Technolgies, Melina Lopez

Master's Theses

Economic projections reveal a need for one million more Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) professionals over the next decade than the United States is producing at the current rate. As a result, STEM education is a major focus of recent legislation and funding in Congress as the number of STEM professionals is inadequate to support innovation and the ever-changing economy. In response to the urgent need for more competitive STEM professionals, there has been a widespread implementation of workshops, organizations, and school programs aimed at amplifying K-12 student STEM literacy and interest. Some programs are even created to specifically …

A Course On Advanced Real-Time Embedded Systems, Krista Round

Master's Theses

This thesis discusses the development of an advanced real-time embedded systems course offered at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, which aims to prepare students to design modern complex real-time embedded systems. It describes the goals of the real-time embedded systems curriculum, which includes an introductory and advanced course. Finally, this paper discusses the challenges of creating a successful advanced real-time embedded systems course and proposes changes to the current advanced real-time embedded systems course in response to those challenges.

Development Of A Body Weight Reduction Algorithm In Micro-Gravity Treadmills™, Alexander Hibbert

Master's Theses

Boost Treadmills™, a company specializing in the use of differential air-pressure (DAP) technology in the realm of exercise and rehabilitation, is developing their second-generation micro-gravity treadmill™ named the Boost 2. This machine will allow individuals in all types of fitness environments to move and exercise at a fraction of their normal body weight, reducing the impact forces on lower body extremities and allowing for accelerated returns to activity.

The purpose of this thesis was to create an algorithm to be implemented on the Boost 2 that related the percentage of body weight reduction of a user to a required pressure …

Comparing Learned Representations Between Unpruned And Pruned Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, Parker Mitchell

Master's Theses

While deep neural networks have shown impressive performance in computer vision tasks, natural language processing, and other domains, the sizes and inference times of these models can often prevent them from being used on resource-constrained systems. Furthermore, as these networks grow larger in size and complexity, it can become even harder to understand the learned representations of the input data that these networks form through training. These issues of growing network size, increasing complexity and runtime, and ambiguity in the understanding of internal representations serve as guiding points for this work.

In this thesis, we create a neural network that …