Digital Commons Network^™

Academic Writing Development Through Dialogues Between Tutors And Second-Language Learners, Fabio De Oliveira Coelho

Master's Theses

This thesis presents an analysis of dialogues between writing tutors and second-language learners in a writing center setting. The analysis includes a discussion about session appropriation by tutors, the validity of addressing sentence-level mistakes during writing conferences, and strategies that tutors may use to make the sessions beneficial to second-language learners. Among the literature covered throughout the study are studies on Educational Psychology, L1 and L2 Composition, and Cognitive Linguistics (Situated Learning). Collected data include measurements of dialogical patterns in the sessions and qualitative data extracted from session recordings and interviews with interlocutors. Study results suggest that a) sentence-level correction …

Synthesis Of Hybrid Inositol Glycan Analogues, Smita Fulzele

Master's Theses

Inositol glycans (IGs) are small oligosaccharides exhibiting insulin-like metabolic activities in insulin-sensitive cells. The signal transduction pathways activated by IGs in these cells are still under study, but it is known that there is cross talk between the IG-signaling pathway and the insulin-signaling pathway downstream of the insulin receptor. Therefore, IGs may have potential for use in the treatment of type II diabetes mellitus. However, natural IGs are heterogeneous and difficult to isolate. Hence, synthetic IGs and their analogues have been chemically synthesized and evaluated for insulin-mimetic properties by various research groups. Unfortunately, the most biologically active IG analogues are …

Teaching And Learning Of Proof In The College Curriculum, Maja Derek

Master's Theses

Mathematical proof, as an essential part of mathematics,

is as difficult to learn as it is to teach. In this thesis, we

provide a short overview of how mathematical proof is understood

by students in K-16. Furthermore, we answer questions about

mistakes students usually make in the transition period from high

school to college in understanding mathematics and mathematical

proof. Through a case study, we learned that deduction mistakes

characteristic for early mathematical education, such as arguing

from an example, can be abandoned very easily as students begin to

understand the inadequacy of one, or finitely many, examples when

arguing …

The Impact Of Instructor-Provided Lecture Notes And Learning Interventions On Student Note Taking And Generative Processing, Karen Lynn Gee

Master's Theses

While the review (memory storage) function of student lecture notes is well established, research findings on the learning benefits of actually taking these notes (memory encoding) has been mixed. The current study provided all students with a complete content outline for use in studying, so the effects of taking personal notes could be isolated. Students who received the complete outline before the lecture took significantly fewer personal notes than did students who received the outline after lecture, though both groups performed similarly on factual and application tests. Students who were directed to generate novel examples for each topic also performed …

Social Support And Gender Effects On Academic Confidence In Foster Youth, Carolyn Suzanne Gillard

Master's Theses

Finding the predictors for academic success is critical for foster youth to become productive citizens as adults. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of social support in the academic confidence of transitional foster youth. Because the literature suggests men and women benefit from social support differentially, I also examined gender as the moderating variable for social support and academic confidence. A sample of 82 foster youth (15-18 years old) from San Joaquin County's Human Service Agency volunteered to participate. Participants were given the Student Perceived Availability of Social Support Questionnaire (SPASSQ) to assess their perceptions of …

Million Dollar Red, Jennifer Marie Ghastin

Master's Theses

The novel Million Dollar Red connects the lives of six women in Eastside San Jose in pursuit of a common set of desires to be beautiful, happy, and something other than what they were when they walked into Quynh's Nail Salon. The third person limited point of view shifts protagonists every time a character comes into contact with a certain shade of red nail polish, Million Dollar Red. According to Quynh, the owner of the salon, the polish has the magical power to give women what they need but not what they want. Once the six women have encountered the …

Problem Solving With Geographic Networks In The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, Steven Hong

Master's Theses

The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (Delta) serves as the crossroads for many geographic networks that crisscross California. These include a conveyance network for drinking water, a biological network for delta smelt, and a transportation network for roads. As a result, local Delta issues concerning flooding and endangered fish hold implications for the entire state. This thesis explores these underlying network structures that pass through the Delta as a means for solving subsets of these most difficult challenges.

Recognition of these larger networks enable the transformation of the Delta's convoluted maze of waterways and islands into a series of nodes and segments. …

The Environmental Impact Of The Retail Photoprocessing Industry In Santa Clara County: 1996 Vs. 2006, Benoit Delaveau

Master's Theses

Consumer digital cameras appeared on the market in 1994. Consequently, the photoprocessing industry experienced a downturn beginning in 2000, with a sudden drop in activity. This study focuses on the evolution of the retail photoprocessing industry between 1996 and 2006 and evaluates its four major environmental impacts: (1) energy use, (2) associated greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), (3) silver discharge, and (4) water consumption. The main method used for data analysis is based on the ISO 14040 standard for Life Cycle Assessment. The study utilizes data from: (a) impact quantification for two photoprocessing labs in Santa Clara County, and (b) a …

The Impact Of Hurricane Katrina On Gulf Coast Libraries And Their Disaster Planning, Jeffrey Frank

Master's Theses

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast, becoming infamous for the destruction it wrought to communities from Louisiana to Alabama. Most notably, it caused massive flooding in New Orleans and surrounding parishes by breaching the levee system. The storm's impact on the region's population, buildings, and collective psyche is impossible to measure. As was the case with other Gulf Coast institutions in the path of Hurricane Katrina, the region's libraries also suffered extensively.

Through examination of the available literature and first-hand accounts of library professionals, this thesis examines the impact that Hurricane Katrina had on libraries …

Dangerous Decor: Consumer Knowledge Of Health Risks Within Interior Spaces, Kaitlin Keith

Master's Theses

Interior décor is an ever-present part of people's daily lives. The furnishings and finishes with which people surround themselves are part of their personal expression, but these components in people's homes and work spaces can negatively affect their health. Products such as furniture and paints can contain harmful chemicals, including volatile organic compounds (VOCs) so toxic they are pollutants regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. With the rise in the "green" movement, healthy and environmentally safe alternatives such as low or zero-VOC paints are becoming more available. This study assessed how aware consumers and design professionals are of environmentally …

Reducing Disturbances To Marine Mammals By Kayakers In The Monterey Bay, Megan Maye Gunvalson

Master's Theses

Team OCEAN is a kayaker-outreach program located in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary under the direction of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose goal is to reduce disturbances to marine mammals by kayakers. This study documented the interactions between kayakers and resting harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) and southern sea otters (Enhydra lutris nereis) at Team OCEAN's two outreach sites, Cannery Row and Elkhorn Slough, to determine if outreach was effective in reducing disturbances to harbor seals and sea otters.

No difference was observed in the percentage of kayaks causing disturbances to resting harbor seals when comparing days Team OCEAN …

Mythology Of Love, Samantha Le

Master's Theses

This collection of love poems is divided into three parts. Section 1 is a collage, taking the reader through the moments of childhood infatuation, adult obsession, and weathered devotion. Thematically, the poems in this section, mostly confessional and persona in the form of dramatic monologues, follow a temporal and social structure. Grounded in memory, they capture a nostalgia for moments that are gone and the desire to revisit them. These poems, taking place both in the past and present, are about other people: "the others."

Section 2 is a conversation about romantic love. Confessional and narrative in nature, these poems …

Post-Fire Analysis Of Sequoia Sempervirens Forests On The Central Coast Of California, Rachel Anne Lazzeri-Aerts

Master's Theses

The public perception of wildfire is that it destroys forests and that all fires should be quickly extinguished. However, fire plays a central role in determining structure, composition, and recruitment in many forest types. In coast redwood forests, the role of fire is not well understood, particularly in the southern part of the range. Observational data suggest that redwoods are relatively unaffected by fire. The sites of three 2008 and 2009 fires were sampled for this study: the Martin Fire in Bonny Doon, California, the Whitehurst Fire near Gilroy, California, and the Lockheed Fire near Swanton, California. Randomly selected ten-meter …

Modeling Of The Impact Of Electrical Stressors On The Degradation Process Of Power Mosfets, Shompa Shohiny Mahiuddin

Master's Theses

This research focused on building a model based on collection of experimental data acquired with high electrical stressors at the gate of the power MOSFET under an isothermal condition to analyze certain deviations of intrinsic properties leading to degradation. The primary indicators were threshold shift, deviation in switching characteristics, and significant expansion of the Miller Plateau due to accelerated stressing of the device from the pristine condition. The intrinsic mechanism associated with the threshold shift and changes in the parasitic capacitances were observed and analyzed with mathematical precision and device parameter simulation. It was seen that, in addition to altered …

Dialectical Tensions: Drunk Driving-Related Loss Among Emerging Adult Siblings, Krista Nilsen

Master's Theses

The longest relationship many of us will share in our lifetime is that with our siblings. Siblings sometimes experience the loss of their brothers and sisters to drunk drivers. Despite the risks associated with drinking and driving, this behavior continues to occur. This study explores drunk driving, sibling loss, and loss during emerging adulthood. This study explores the ways in which dialectical tensions and liminality take shape across educational and professional contexts when emergent adults lose her/his siblings to drunk drivers.

Two dialectical tensions emerged in this work: openness-closedness and connectedness-autonomy. Surviving siblings engage in four patterns of praxis in …

Development Of A Chemically Reacting Flow Solver On The Graphic Processing Units, Hai Le

Master's Theses

The focus of the current research is to develop a numerical framework on the Graphic Processing Units (GPU) capable of modeling chemically reacting flow. The framework incorporates a high-order finite volume method coupled with an implicit solver for the chemical kinetics. Both the fluid solver and the kinetics solver are designed to take advantage of the GPU architecture to achieve high performance. The structure of the numerical framework is shown, detailing different aspects of the optimization implemented on the solver. The mathematical formulation of the core algorithms is presented along with a series of standard test cases, including both nonreactive …

Rock The Field, Laura Long

Master's Theses

The title of this screenplay, Rock the Field, is a color guard slang term for performing with power. This script is a narrative feature length film that looks at marching band competition from the point of view of a 16-year-old high school color guard girl, Chloe Johnson. Underneath the dynamics of the intensity of the competition, this is actually a story about Chloe and her mother Sarah rediscovering their strength to carry on in life while mourning the sudden loss of Chloe's father to cancer. The script is structured with Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, except in this case the heroes …

Energy And Exergy Analysis Of Data Center Economizer Systems, Michael Elery Meakins

Master's Theses

Electrical consumption for data centers is on the rise as more and more of them are being built. Data center owners and operators are looking for methods to reduce energy consumption and electrical costs. One method of reducing facility costs for a chilled water plant is by adding an economizer. Most studies concerning economizer systems are conducted largely by looking at energy alone since the primary focus is reducing electrical costs. Understanding how much exergy is destroyed, where it is destroyed, and why it is destroyed provides a more complete view on how environmental impacts can be minimized while reducing …

The New Playgoer's Club: The Emergent Theater Weblog Culture And The Practice Of Theater Criticism, Elizabeth Hunter Spreen

Master's Theses

New York City has one of the most active and engaged theater blogging communities in the country. It is common practice for theater bloggers to supplement and comment on the journalistic and critical practices of the New York Times, Time Out, New York, and The Village Voice, but the idea of a theater blogosphere is still a relatively new phenomenon. The emerging role of blogger-critics and their critical practice is largely uncharted and far from understood. While sharing some of the same tasks as the journalist-critic, blogger-critics are still defining and identifying the scope of their practice and, in some …

Evaluating Trademark Design, Katherine L. Spencer

Master's Theses

Trademarks serve as visual representations of a company's name, product, or values. This research sought to determine the effect of the application of human factors principles and graphic design principles on trademark design. A computerized questionnaire was employed to investigate the emotional impact, comprehension, and recall of trademarks based on their type (typographic elements or graphic elements), their subject-content compatibility, and their adherence to human factors and graphic design principles. Trademark type had a significant effect on comprehension of trademarks but no significant effect on emotional impact or recall. Trademarks with high subject-content compatibility and trademarks that use visual metaphor …

A Multi-Scale Evaluation Of Landscape Relief Using Digital Elevation Data, Tania Michelle Treis

Master's Theses

Geomorphologists commonly use the term "relief" to define the difference in elevation of a landscape over a fixed horizontal distance or window size. Relief is typically measured using a fixed-size sliding window analysis where the window size is arbitrarily chosen. This method, however, does not provide insight on how relief changes with or depends on scale.

A multi-scale analysis of digital elevation data (DEDs) was undertaken in this study. A sliding window analysis was employed, but the size of the window was varied from small to large for each landscape. A relief curve was generated and fitted to a saturating …

African American Community College Student Perceptions Of Mathematics Instructor Immediacy Behaviors And Perceived Cognitive Learning, Georgia Lynne Toland

Master's Theses

The purpose of this research is to examine what instructor immediacy behaviors are perceived to most positively affect the perceived cognitive learning of African American community college mathematics students. Data were provided via voluntary student surveys collected in various mathematics classrooms at two community colleges. The survey instrument was modeled from the works of Gorham (1988) and Sanders and Wiseman (1990) and included an experimental survey method of direct questioning. The perceptions of African American community college students regarding the behaviors of their mathematics instructors, along with their stated preferred instructor behaviors, produced a subset of effective strategies similar to …

An American Word For War, David Wirth

Master's Theses

Jesse is in his early twenties and stuck in Salinas, California. He works at Lenscrafters, making glasses, making decent money and he is comfortable. The novel opens when Jesse’s high school friend, Ben, is visiting from Los Angeles, where he is a screenwriter. The two go to a party for another old acquaintance, Ian, who has just returned from a tour in Iraq. Their encounter with Ian sets the rest of the novel in motion. They are exposed to something big in the world (the machinery of a war that up to that point had been nothing more than words …

Can't Sing, Can't Dance, Can't Draw: How Leisure Constraints And Negotiations Impact Midlife Women's Participation In The Creative Arts, Debra Ann Ullmann

Master's Theses

This qualitative, exploratory study involving semi-structured interviews of 12 midlife women, ages 45 to 65, sought insight into how intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural constraints, constraint negotiations, and motivations facilitate or impede midlife women's active participation in the creative arts. The data were analyzed within a socio-cultural context using grounded theory. Findings indicate that dynamic interactions involving social comparison result in judgment by others, of others, and of self. This spiraling effect is often initiated in childhood or adolescence. Once a woman internalizes the notion that she "can't sing, can't dance, can"t draw," there is seldom any attempt to negotiate constraints …

Visual Articulation Of Modernism: Self-Portraiture In Colonial Korea, 1915-1932, Julie Chun

Master's Theses

From about 1914, Korean artists began painting on canvas using the Western medium of oil. This seemingly benign shift from ink on paper and silk to oil on canvas was pivotal in engendering Korean painting into the assured phase of artistic modernism. Prescribed conventions that had governed ink painting for over nine hundred years came to be supplanted within a few short years by a divergent artistic paradigm that centralized subjective identity and visually described the ambiguities of contemporary conditions.

The training and production of these early works of art took place not in Korea but in Japan where most …

Pid Tuning Of Plants With Time Delay Using Root Locus, Greg Baker

Master's Theses

This thesis research uses closed-loop pole analysis to study the dynamic behavior of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controlled feedback systems with time delay. A conventional tool for drawing root loci, the MATLAB function rlocus() cannot draw root loci for systems with time delay, and so another numerical method was devised to examine the appearance and behavior of root loci in systems with time delay.

Approximating the transfer function of time delay can lead to a mismatch between a predicted and actual response. Such a mismatch is avoided with the numerical method developed here. The method looks at the angle and magnitude conditions …

Regional Identification Methods And Extratropical Dynamical Linkages To Surge Events In The North American Monsoon System, James Elda Favors

Master's Theses

Transient behavior of the North American monsoon allows for episodic northward pulses of atmospheric moisture into the southwestern US. These surge events pose a difficult forecasting issue due to a lack of an accepted means to qualify their occurrence and the ill-defined influence of tropical and extratropical features that enable and drive them. Surge events have often been misidentified because of biases in ground observation site data related to localized influences not associated with surges. In this study, a novel method for the classification of surges is proposed based on their regional, rather than local, signature. This method is shown …

Surface Nitriding And Oxidation Of Nitinol, Edin Bazochaharbakhsh

Master's Theses

Nitinol has been widely employed in biomedical devices due to its unique mechanical properties such as superelasticity, shape memory, and good biocompatibility. However, nickel ion release from the surface of the Nitinol is an issue. Surface nitriding and oxidation was performed on the Nitinol specimens to develop a nickel-free oxide layer on the surface. Nitinol specimens were nitrided in nitrogen + 4% hydrogen at 800 - 1000oC for 10 - 30 min and further nitrided in nitrogen + 5% ammonia at 500 - 675oC for 0 - 30 min. The thickness and chemical composition, specifically the nickel content of the …

Non-Homogeneous Hybrid Rocket Fuel For Enhanced Regression Rates Utilizing Partial Entrainment, Kenny Michael Boronowsky

Master's Theses

A concept was developed and tested to enhance the performance and regression rate of hydroxyl terminated polybutadiene (HTPB), a commonly used hybrid rocket fuel. By adding small nodules of paraffin into the HTPB fuel, a non-homogeneous mixture was created resulting in increased regression rates. The goal was to develop a fuel with a simplified single core geometry and a tailorable regression rate. The new fuel would benefit from the structural stability of HTPB yet not suffer from the large void fraction representative of typical HTPB core geometries.

Regression rates were compared between traditional HTPB single core grains, 85% HTPB mixed …

John Bell Hood: Extracting Truth From History, Thomas John Brown

Master's Theses

The year 2011 brings us the Sesquicentennial celebration of the American Civil War. Surprisingly, one hundred and fifty years later, students continue to find themselves asking many of the same questions about the great national tragedy faced during the Centennial in 1961. For example, did slavery cause the great conflict, or did constitutional questions act as the catalyst? Does the Battle of Gettysburg represent the turning point of the War, or did that occur elsewhere?

In connection with the last question, Lost Cause advocates, those great pro-Confederacy propagandists, found convenient villains to blame for the southern defeat. One of these, …