Digital Commons Network^™

Adopt Me: An Interactive Video Game To Encourage People To Adopt Animals From Shelters, Ying Xing

Theses

People buy pets and use their imagination in envisioning how their pet will ideally be, not the reality of raising a pet. More and more pets are abandoned by their owners for various reasons and the stray animals often cause accidents. But people keep purchasing animals from puppy mill stores. That is the main reason why the number of animals taken into shelters is increasing, along with the rate of euthanization. These factors are of interest for people who care about animals.

To address this problem, research was focused on the reasons why people abandon their pet and the factors …

Protect Me: An Interactive Mobile Educational Tool For Children To Help And Prevent Sexual Abuse., Yushinan Shan

Theses

Recently, cases of child sexual abuse have drawn considerable attention in China. According to the data released by the China Children's Culture and Arts Foundation, the number of childhood sexual abuse cases reported by the media in 2018 was 318. However, the lagging sex education provides criminals with chances to escape prosecution. Many children who have been sexually abused do not understand what sexual behavior is, do not even know where they have been hurt, and can't tell which part of their body has been violated. In China, 90% of parents do not talk with their children about "sex". Less …

Food Waste Management Networks: Novel Methods For Overcoming Emerging Logistics Challenges, William R. Armington

Theses

The U.S. produces an estimated 63 million tons of food waste per year. Interest from state and local governments in diverting unused food from landfills to alternative treatment facilities is growing. However, this emerging food waste (FW) stream will face logistics challenges as diversion networks expand. Current methods for evaluating challenges are insufficient for providing solutions for network development because they do not explore the impacts of variability in the food waste management system. This dissertation aims to fill this knowledge gap by exploring three key research areas.

First, variability in FW generation from different types of commercial generators is …

Origins, Zoey M. Perse

Theses

Origins are beginnings. Everyone has an origin, a point from which their path brought them to the person that they are today. Some origins are from birth and lead in winding lines to a person’s present. Some origins come after birth and may take the form of an event, person or place that touched a life and drastically affected their path, pushing or pulling them to become an entirely different person than would have otherwise come about.

My own origin was the moment I was given into the arms of my adoptive parents. I was wrapped in layers of clothes, …

Flightless, Danielle Gorin

Theses

The stories in this collection occupy a range of genres: realist literary fiction, slice of life, horror, magical realism/fabulism. While most of the pieces are short fiction, there is one short short, and one flash piece. What unites these disparate styles and forms is a concern with the everyday, with family dramas. Flightless is interested in exploring the dynamics of different familial relationships, particularly that of mothers and their children. These relationships, even good ones, can be fraught with expectations, guilt, and feelings of obligation unique to the expected roles of mothers and children, and my stories seek to investigate …

Vertical, Thermal, And Geographic Habitats Of Whale Sharks (Rhincodon Typus) Tagged Along Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia, Rachel Steinberg

Theses

Though whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) are the largest fish in the ocean there is little known about the species’ life history. Juvenile males are often observed at a number of locations world-wide but adult females, adult males, and neonates are rarely seen. Consequently, important issues like where whale sharks mate and give birth are unknown. Similarly, what geographic and vertical habitats whale sharks use to forage in are similarly poorly known. Seventeen juvenile whale sharks (10 female, 7 male) were outfitted with satellite tags off Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia between 2003 and 2009, and subsequently monitored for 1920 …

Groundless, Niara Jackson

Theses

Groundless is a collection of realist short stories that follow original characters as they move into a new understanding of themselves. They may think they are grounded in who they are, but each character learns new things that often contradict what they think they know about themselves. As with anyone, it is important that these characters re-examine who they think they are and look outward – what has made them that way? Is their perception accurate? Are they being fair to themselves and those around them? New understandings of what they believe about themselves and about their world are always …

New Possibilities For Stilt Building, Zhuming Liu

Theses

The purpose of the thesis lies in exploring the new possibilities of the stilt building in dealing with two sustainability problems caused by urban development: the Lack of Public Greening in Prosperous, High-density Areas, and the Continuous Sprawl of Private Housing in Suburbs.

As a functional building method with a long history, stilt building, or known as building with “The Pilotis,” regained its vitality in the 20th century with Le Corbusier. However, the common application mode of today’s stilt building has deviated from Corbusier's original intention, which was to provide sheltered outdoor green space for residents in the city. This …

The Dishwasher, Kaiyuan Deng

Theses

The Dishwasher is a 2D animated thesis film that lasts 5 minutes and 27 seconds. This animated short film shows a story of a young man, Kai, who dreams of becoming an artist in the US; however, he has to wash dishes for his living. One day, the dish machine is out of control because of Kai’s careless mistake. The manager sees the situation and begins to blame Kai. While the manager yells at him, Kai notices a funny animation loop appearing on the spinning dishes, which makes him laugh. After the manager leaves, Kai looks at his face reflected …

Oblivion, Deema Ali

Theses

Oblivion tells a story of a plain-looking individual named Miech at a gritty, damp subway station en route to catch a movie. As he waits for a train, he faces a troubling memory of a past relationship and is confronted by a projection of his inner emotions that takes the form of a creature. In a desperate attempt to escape from this manifestation, he shifts his attention to his external surroundings only to find that his fellow commuters also have similar creatures. In Oblivion, I address a very human experience through the spectacle of an animated lens. This film is …

Moral Outrage Is Elicited By Others’ Beliefs Just As Much As Their Actions: Implications For Workplace Ideological Discrimination, Emily Rose Galeza

Theses

Moral outrage is an emotional, cognitive, and behavioral response to moral violations, resulting in a desire to punish the transgressor. Previous research has examined moral outrage toward transgressive behaviors, but no studies have examined the potential for moral outrage to be roused by another’s beliefs alone. Do people experience moral outrage at one another’s thoughts? If so, how do they punish someone who has roused their outrage but has “done nothing wrong”? In Study 1 (n = 209), I examined moral outrage reactions at people’s unacceptable beliefs on three topics (pedophilia, sexual assault, fraud) by comparing moral outrage elicited by …

Social Discounting Of Clean Water And Environmental Sustainability, Ashley Katz

Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine choice-making as it relates to providing a source of clean water to those at varying social distances. A discounting survey was completed by 65 participants asking them to choose between spending a specified about of money on plastic water bottles that have a 100% chance of harming the environment or spending $1000 on a water filtration system that has a 0% chance of harming the environment. Results indicated that as social distance increased, responding became more impulsive as evident by a steeper amount of discounting. For “Person #1”, 27.69% of participants chose …

Releve´, Lauren Afton Stoelzle

Theses

Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Purged, Veenal Ronald D'Silva

Theses

This paper describes the entire thought process, the work and journey behind the completion of my Thesis Film titled “PURGED”. This film was animated in 3D and created over the course of four semesters. Purged is a thrilling short animated film about a couple’s escape from death. The film mainly revolves around a couple; namely the white king and queen, and how death; the black pieces of a chessboard enact out the game as if it’s happening in real life until the big reveal at the end of it merely being a game of chess.

The film is centered around …

Modeling Interacting Time-Series Signals, Kantha Girish Gangadhara

Theses

Many real-life systems consist of multiple information signals which might be potentially interacting with each other over time. These interactions can be estimated/modeled using techniques like Pearson Correlation (PC), Time lagged Cross Correlation (TLCC) and windowed TLCC, Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), and coupled Hidden Markov Model (cHMM). These techniques, excluding cHMM, cannot capture non-linear interactions and does not work well with multi-variate data. Although cHMM can capture the interactions effectively, it is bound by Markov property and other assumptions like latent variables, prior distributions, etc. These influence the performance of the model significantly. Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is a variant …

An Ar Enhancement Of Printed Educational Resources: Keeping Printed Educational Materials Competitive In A Digital Age, Dax Simitch Warke

Theses

Digital resources have begun to take over our educational system and overshadow traditional printed resources. While these digital resources are becoming increasingly popular research has shown that printed resources have notable benefits that should not be dismissed. Enhancing these printed resources with augmented reality (AR) technology will allow them to be competitive with digital resources while preserving their academic benefits. The readily available smart devices carried in the pockets of most students have already prepared many classrooms for the use of AR. The interactive and visual potential of AR makes it an appealing educational tool that can dramatically improve the …

What A Night, Jose Hidalgo Thormann

Theses

Producing an audiovisual work is the ability to transform an idea, a story, a script into a tangible product, to bring it closer to the screen. After the production of any project, it is ready to be filmed. In this project, you can find the memories to carry out the production of a fiction short film entitled What A Night. This paper discusses the making of the short film by Jose Hidalgo Thormann to fulfill his thesis requirement to receive his MFA in Film and Animation from the Rochester Institute of Technology

Did I Tell You About My Date Last Night?, Palwasha Azimi

Theses

did i tell you about my date last night? is an animated short that illustrates a transformation in two characters who are experiencing their date together in different ways.

This film gives a small taste of a larger story that all women go through, whether or not they know it’s happening.

It is a tale of toxic masculinity, gaslighting, consent and entitlement. These things have been ever-present in history but never contested and brought to light on a scale like this. Recently, these issues have risen to the forefront of social change. Now, because of the internet, the support of …

The Effects Of Seasonal Variations, El Niño-Southern Oscillation, And Climate Change On The Tuna-Dolphin Association, Caitlynn Birch, Michael D. Scott, Zhi-Yong Yin, Lisa T. Ballance

Theses

Tuna and dolphins swim together in the waters of the eastern tropical Pacific, and this association has long benefitted tuna fishermen and intrigued scientists. Although the tuna-dolphin association is often referred to as a “mystery,” much is known about the association. Yellowfin tuna are primarily caught with spotted dolphins and, to a lesser extent, spinner dolphins; historically the spotted dolphin has borne the brunt of the bycatch mortality. The tuna-dolphin association is thought to be a product of the distinct oceanography of the ETP: a shallow mixed layer, a thick oxygen minimum zone, and warm surface waters. As the mixed …

A Systematic Analysis Of Accessibility Education Within Computing Disciplines, Paula Conn

Theses

Accessible technologies improve the usability for all users, including 1 billion people in the world who have a disability. Although there is a demand for accessible technologies, there is currently no requirement for universities to integrate this content within the computing curriculum. A systematic comparison of teaching efficacy is important to effectively prepare future computing professionals with the skills to create accessible technologies.

This dissertation contains a mixed-methods cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of undergraduate Software Engineering and Information Technology students’ learning of accessibility. Four teaching conditions were assessed at Rochester Institute of Technology: content lectures, projects, exposure to stakeholders with …

Smart Tracking For Healthier Lifestyle, Shiwen Ding

Theses

Smart Tracking for healthier lifestyle is an interactive prototyping application to monitor sugar intake. For most individuals, their amount of sugar intake is much higher than the amount they need per day. Many people like sweet food as they find that it makes them satisfied and relaxed. People tend to consume sugar unconsciously eating cakes, candies, drinking soft-drinks, juice, and even coffee. Regular consumption of these foods substantially increases the amount of sugar people consume. It has been found that people are less conscious of their sugar intake in regard to drinking liquids than eating solid foods. Parents are very …

Hypervirulent Klebsiella Pneumoniae Bloodstream Isolates In The United Arab Emirates, Shaikha Awad Mohammed Al Kaabi

Theses

As the presence of hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae (hvKP) has not been studied in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the aim was to determine its rate among bloodstream isolates collected in a tertiary care hospital during two years. K. pneumoniae blood isolates of 125 individual patients from Tawam Hospital, Al Ain in 2014-2015 were investigated. Clinical data on patients’ demographics and underlying medical conditions were collected. Speciation was carried out by VITEK 2, antimicrobial susceptibility was determined by disc diffusion, and for colistin by microdilution. Hypermucoviscosity was assessed by string test. Genetic markers of hypervirulence (iucA, rmpA, rmpA2), …

Assessment Of Conventional Wastewater Treatment Plants In Removing Pharmaceutical Compounds: A Case Study Of Al Ain City, Uae, Ahmad Mohammad I Hassan Alhalab

Theses

This thesis is concerned with the assessment of conventional wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in removing pharmaceutical compounds (PCs). PCs have classes like analgesics, antibiotics, antiseptics, hormones, cosmetic products, personal care products. They are used extensively by humans and they don’t have actual guidelines describing their concentration in domestic wastewater discharge. Thus, they may still be present in treated sewage effluent (TSE) or sludge and could consequently pose adverse environmental effects. Limited work has been done to assess the removal of PCs at WWTPs in arid and semi-arid countries including the United Arab Emirates (UAE). As such, this study aimed at …

Development Of Novel Peroxidase-Tio2/Zno Hybrid Catalysts For The Degradation Of Emerging Pollutants, Rana Fawzi Mohamed

Theses

Water pollution by different organic compounds is one of the most important environmental issues that is attracting the attention of many scientists due to its direct potential bad effect on human health. These organic pollutants include pesticides, pharmaceuticals, industrial wastes, and personal care products that are released in water bodies from domestic and industrial discharge. Various chemical, physical and biological approaches have been proposed to degrade these contaminants from the polluted water. In the present study, we immobilized versatile thermostable enzymes, Soybean peroxidase (SBP) and Horseradish peroxidase on functionalized photocatalysts—TiO₂ and ZnO to create novel bio-composite catalysts (SBP-TiO₂, SBP-ZnO, HRP-TiO₂, …

The Impact Of Biotic Characteristics Of Uae Coastal Area On Movements Of Socotra Cormorant, Nouf Sameer Abdullah Saeed Al Qadi

Theses

Monitoring Socotra Cormorant population and conducting research on their breeding biology and feeding habits are considered the top priorities for ensuring the long-term protection of their breeding colonies and feeding grounds. The research was conducted by using ArcMap Software (10.5) to map Socotra cormorant migratory movements in the Arabian Gulf Region during the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 breeding seasons.; and to determine environmental variables that affect migratory movements using a GIS approach, which helps to identify areas of conservation value. The study provided needed information on the current distribution of Socotra Cormorant along with the distribution of marine ecosystems (mangroves and …

Encouraging Children To Actively Recycle: A Mobile Application To Promote Recycling In The Dominican Republic, Noelia A. Rivera Pagan

Theses

The Dominican Republic generates 14,000 tons of solid waste daily, 49% of this is recyclable, but only 5% is. This waste is causing health problems, affecting the tourism industry, and the quality of life of its residents. Problems of confusion, lack of motivation, and lack of prioritization of the activity, affect the decision-making process when recycling.

What if there was a way to motivate the Dominican population to recycle, and change the behavior towards this activity? Children learn new behaviors faster than adults. Why not use this opportunity to incorporate the engaging factor of design and technology to help improve …

Another You, Yiran Qiao

Theses

Another You is an animated 2D graduate thesis film. The entire film, including the credits, is 4 minutes 45 seconds long. The production phase went from September 2018 to May 2019.

This story is about a housewife who tries to escape from her daily life. Her escape takes place at the dinner table. The housewife has been busy with cooking and serving her family, but no one really cares about her, which makes her very angry and she abruptly leaves the table and everyone is shocked. She runs upstairs and to a hallway with many doors and moves from one …

Mother’S Way, Chaofan Li

Theses

Mother’s way is my 2D graduate thesis film. The production phase of this film was between September 2018 to August 2019.

This is a film about the sincere feelings between mother and son. The protagonist of this film is an old man who has been estranged from his family for decades. He decides to visit his mother after getting the news that she is seriously ill. During his journey, his misunderstandings between them are eradicated through his mother's diary.

Mother’s way is mainly made using the 2D animation software TVPaint. At different stages of production, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, …

Behind The Lens, Guoxiang Zhao

Theses

Time flies. I arrived at my thesis year after two years of study at RIT, and began working on my film “Behind the Lens.” The film runs for five minutes and 56 seconds, and includes hand-drawn animation, music and sound created by me. After some personal changes, I re-pitched a whole new thesis proposal in the fall semester of my thesis year because I felt passionate and committed to the important message of the film. In truth, this story didn’t have a clear outline until April in my last semester. The story is about a camera character going through his …

Evaluation Of Phytochemical Composition And Anti-Cancer Potential In Root Extracts Of Moringa Peregrina (Forssk.) Fiori, Salama Khamis Sultan Saeed Al Kaabi

Theses

Natural products provide many bioactive lead molecules for the discovery of new medicines. Naturally, derived phytochemicals have exhibited tremendous biological activities including anticancer activity. More than 60% of antitumor medicines are closely associated with natural products. In the present study, hexane, chloroform, acetone and, methanol extracts from roots of Moringa peregrina were screened for phytochemical analysis and anticancer activity. Phytochemical analysis was performed by Gas Chromatography and Mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The anticancer potential of the extracts was done on the human breast cancer cell line (MCF-7) and cell viability was measured using WST-1 Cell Proliferation Assay Kit. The cell line …