Digital Commons Network^™

The Effect Of Psychological Skills Training On Elite Youth Baseball Hitting Performance, Andrew Hammerlinck

Theses

Psychological skills training continues to grow in popularity amongst athletes and coaches of various levels. However, there is still a lack of research in different populations on the benefits of psychological skills training. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a psychological skills training program on the hitting performance and Athletic Coping Skills Inventory-28 of elite youth baseball players.

A total of 27 participants completed a baseline, pre-test, and post-test hitting test along with pre-test and post-test ACS[-28 measures. A 6-month follow up ACSI-28 and focus group was conducted with 17 of the original participants. The …

Re-Envisioning Kindergarten Learning Spaces In The U.S Education System, Suhina Agarwal

Theses

The thesis work aims at improving the learning environments of the Kindergarten classrooms in the United States by taking inspiration from a very simple and popular play element namely the ‘blocks’. The classroom environments and learning methods have not seen a significant change since the time of the Industrial Revolution. The essence of school education remains the same, which is expected to be a closed classroom, conventional furniture and the teacher determining the learning activities. With the changing times, as new studies on multiple styles of learning and brain functions emerge, there is a need to customize education and cater …

Spatial And Temporal Deformation Pattern Of The Brain From Blunt Trauma, Abdus Ali

Theses

It is widely accepted that under extreme loadings the soft tissue of the brain will deform inside the skull, creating large amounts of both stress and strain on the tissue. This can result in a focal injury, or in the case of acceleration and deceleration, diffuse injuries. Any attempt at understanding the underlying mechanisms and effects of TBI, have to start by focusing on what is actually occurring within the brain. The objective of this experiment is to record differences in the spatial and temporal patterns of deformation within the brain during blunt trauma when changing impact parameters. A linear …

Interaction Of Voluntary Activity And Functional Electrical Stimulation In The Upper Extremity As A Method For Short-Term Alteration Of Corticospinal Excitability And Force Control, Katherine Maia Gerton

Theses

Repetitive movement training (RMT) is a well-established method for rehabilitating functional movement. However, many stroke survivors are not able to participate in RMT for the necessary duration to produce results due to rapid muscle fatigue or inability to perform the desired movement at all. Often, functional electrical stimulation (FES) is applied passively, as a rehabilitative therapy, to stroke subjects who are unable to participate in RMT. The effects of voluntary contraction and FES are not well understood for the upper extremity following a stroke. This experiment was designed to elucidate the mechanisms of functional and neurophysiological changes associated with combining …

Understanding And Optimizing Growth And Development Of California Yellowtail (Seriola Dorsalis) In Aquaculture Using Physiological Tools, Laura Schwebel

Theses

Physical fitness metrics were used to assess the health and development of California Yellowtail, Seriola dorsalis, in an aquaculture environment during two grow-out experiments. The first experiment sought to evaluate the effects of a common aquaculture deformity (an improperly inflated swim bladder) that has been hypothesized to impact energy allocation, growth, and development. Metrics including metabolic rate, critical swimming speed, feed conversion ratio, and growth rate, were monitored over a 32-week period in three groups of California Yellowtail: wild-caught (“wild”), healthy hatchery-reared (“inflated”), and hatchery-reared with uninflated swim bladders (“uninflated”). At the start of the grow-out period, wild fish …

A Hoard Of Unpaid Invoices: Dissecting Economies & Private Market Forces To Solve B2b Late Payments, Adam Walker

Theses

The average small-to-medium-size business in the United States keeps just enough of a cash buffer to last 27 days worth of normal operational costs, but in 2016 81% of all B2B invoices were delayed at least 30 days or more past the due date of payment.

Furthermore, in 2016, the average SMB held roughly $84,000 in unpaid accounts receivables, with that number also varying across industries. As an example, the average IT SMB held roughly $163k in unpaid accounts receivables, while the average transportation company held roughly $102k in the same. Yet we wonder why 50% of all SMBs close …

Designing Simplicity To Achieve Technological Improvement: The General Electric J79 Turbojet Engine; Innovations, Achievements And Effects, Matt C. Brimer

Theses

With the beginning of powered, manned flight, the piston engine drove a propeller or multiple propellers to provide the thrust for lift required to overcome the forces of drag and gravity for flight. As aircraft speeds gradually increased over time, the power needed to overcome the aerodynamic inefficiencies of the propeller to greater speeds and altitudes were quickly realized as a hindrance to the potential of aircraft. With the turbojet engine, this new mechanism and subsequent aerodynamic changes revolutionized aircraft to increased speeds and altitude never before achievable with a piston engine. The United States, after acquiring further and more …

Allrecovery – Mobile App For Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Education, Yao Jia Zhang

Theses

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a cancer of the bone marrow. Lymphoblasts are unable to mature due to errors in signaling leading to an accumulation of non-functioning lymphoblasts. ALL is one of the most common cancers found in children; with an estimated 6590 new cases in the United States in 2016 (seer.cancer.gov, 2016). When a family finds out that their child has been diagnosed with cancer, it could be a shocking and terrifying experience. Understanding and learning about the nature of the disease can be a helpful method to cope with the fear and anxiety. ALLRecovery is created to present …

Avant L’Appétit: An Augmented Reality Interactive Menu That Elevates The Gourmet Food Experience, Emili Koui

Theses

Restaurant businesses try to come up with ways to increase and maintain their clientele. In many restaurants, images of food often misrepresent the quality and quantity of the menu item. The results are a disappointment on the customer side, and a loss of clientele on the business side. Gourmet restaurants have the ability to provide consistency, which helps in maintaining their client numbers. However, new customers are hesitant in trying this experience due to reasons of portion size accuracy, ingredient identification, language barrier and dietary preferences.

This thesis investigated how the digitization of a traditional printed menu, can better enhance …

What Is The Relationship Between Conflict Management And Employee Empowerment? A Message Design Logic Perspective And Its Importance For Managers And Supervisors, Michelle Maura Fernandez

Theses

This study focused on how conflict management between employees affects employee empowerment. Conflict naturally occurs between individuals, and its management in organizations can result in positive or negative consequences. Employee empowerment influences greater job satisfaction and commitment to organizations. Based on the theory of message design logic, it was hypothesized that employees who employ rhetorical design while managing conflict will experience greater levels of empowerment. The sample consisted of 196 employees at an educational institution who completed a short, online survey. Results showed no relationship between levels of perception of empowerment and message design logic, thus not supporting the hypothesis.

The Omnichannel Marketplace: A Look At Modern Consumers, Rosa Arnone

Theses

Since the advent of the digital marketplace, marketing techniques to reach consumers have shifted. Traditional media and demographic analysis are no longer the only means for brands reaching consumers. Marketing has now taken an omnichannel approach. This study examined the relationship between the omnichannel consumer, the consumer benefits sought online versus in brick and mortar, and the modern marketer’s approach to omnichannel marketing. It outlines a psychographic and demographic profile of today’s omnichannel consumer, which will ultimately create a more detailed profile for businesses to market across integrated channels ultimately delivering a hybrid consumer experience (HCE). Findings in this study …

So We Depart, Fraaz Khan

Theses

So We Depart is about a broken family that is abruptly reunited through a death in the family. The story is seen through the eyes of Furqan, a young Pakistani-American boy, who arrives with his mother Farida at the hospital after his grandmother’s stroke. They meet with Farida’s brother Akthar, whom she hasn’t seen in a long time. At the bedside of their dying mother, the two estranged siblings struggle to find peace with one another as they blame each other for not taking better care of their mother. Furqan observes their relationship and contemplates how he will inevitably be …

Implications Of Consumer Lifestyle Changes And Behavioral Heterogeneity On U.S. Energy Consumption And Policy, Ashok Sekar

Theses

Understanding the relationship between consumer lifestyle and energy use is essential to solving many of the energy and sustainability challenges. By studying shifts in consumer lifestyle over time and behavior heterogeneity, this dissertation provides valuable insights into understanding energy consumption trends and improving energy efficiency programs.

Technologies continue to change our daily lifestyles, influencing energy demand. In the first part of the dissertation, changes in how people spend their time (time-use) patterns are used as an indicator of lifestyle shifts. Using decomposition analysis changes in energy use due to these lifestyle shifts are measured. The results show that for an …

Searching For Gravitational Waves From Scorpius X-1 With A Cross-Correlation Method: From Mock Data To Advanced Ligo, Yuanhao Zhang

Theses

Gravitational waves (GWs) are propagating ripples of space-time predicted by general relativity. 100 years after Albert Einstein published his theory of GR, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) found the first direct detection of GW in the first Advanced LIGO observing run. The GW signal known as GW150914 (Abbott et al., 2016), was the first of a series of binary black hole mergers observed by LIGO. These detections marked the beginning of gravitational-wave astronomy.

The continuous wave (CW) signal emitted by fast spinning neutron stars (NSs) is an another interesting source for a detector like LIGO. The low-mass X-ray binary …

Finding Practical Way To Minimize The Time And Space Needed At The Temporary Donation Places, Reema Aldossari

Theses

This study exploits and describes how to manage donations and send them to the affected people when natural disaster occurs. Throughout my experience in working with some organizations for collecting donations, I found out that there are many problems that harden the goods. Since affected people need the help and the goods immediately, it will take time to reach and be delivered to the people who need them. The process takes a long period of time due to the following reasons: first, the donor ships unsolicited donations and that will consequently waist time and money because no one need them. …

Children’S Hospice: A Place To Stay, A Place To Play, Madalyn Faye Lillie

Theses

Children diagnosed with terminal illness most often receive end-of-life care in a traditional hospital setting or at home due to the dearth of children’s hospices in the United States. Children hospices provide an environment that not only is aesthetically designed for children, but also is attentive to the specific physical and emotional needs of their special patients and their families. The purpose of this thesis is to define a model of children’s hospice that integrates the successful features of similar hospitals throughout the United States and adapts them to the writer’s home region in upstate New York. To accomplish this …

Multi-Objective Optimization Of Hospital Inpatient Bed Assignment, Brenden Hoff

Theses

Choosing which bed to assign an admitted patient to in a hospital is a complex problem. There are numerous factors to consider including the patient’s gender and isolation requirements, current bed availability, and unit configurations. This problem must be solved each time a new patient seeks admission resulting in rearrangement of already admitted patients. Each movement of an already admitted patient increases the workload for hospital staff and also increases the risk of nosocomial infections for the patient. In order to alleviate these problems we propose optimizing the patient admission process through a multi-objective model which first maximizes the overall …

Exploring Gria2 Sequence Variations Using Virtual Reality, Jimmy Fan Zhang

Theses

The effective visualization and presentation of biological data is of critical importance to research scientists. The increasing rate at which experiments generate data has only exacerbated the problem. While bioinformatics datasets continue to increase in size and complexity, the shift to adopt new user interface (UI) paradigms has historically lagged. Consequently, a major bottleneck for analysis of next-generation sequencing data is the continued use of UIs primarily inspired from the 1990’s through the early 2000’s. This paper presents the novel use of virtual reality (VR) as a medium for visualizing genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic data. Using the Gria2 (GluR2 or …

Discovering A Domain Knowledge Representation For Image Grouping: Multimodal Data Modeling, Fusion, And Interactive Learning, Xuan Guo

Theses

In visually-oriented specialized medical domains such as dermatology and radiology, physicians explore interesting image cases from medical image repositories for comparative case studies to aid clinical diagnoses, educate medical trainees, and support medical research. However, general image classification and retrieval approaches fail in grouping medical images from the physicians' viewpoint. This is because fully-automated learning techniques cannot yet bridge the gap between image features and domain-specific content for the absence of expert knowledge. Understanding how experts get information from medical images is therefore an important research topic.

As a prior study, we conducted data elicitation experiments, where physicians were instructed …

Displays Of Jealousy In Dogs, Cassandra D. Beck

Theses

Wolves (Canis Lupis) were domesticated into the common dog (Canis Familiaris) at least 15 thousand years ago. The domestication process changed wolves both physically and neurologically. Dogs now have a unique connection with humans, and display many of the same personality traits and cognitive deficits as humans do. Research by Harris and Prouvost (2014) has suggested that dogs can display jealous reactions. In this thesis, dogs were exposed to either a plastic Jack-O-Lantern stimulus or a plush dog stimulus and recorded their behavioral and physiological reactions to such stimuli. The results show that the majority of the differences in the …

The Effects Of Verbal Operant Training And Response Interruption And Redirection On Vocal Stereotypy, Casey Kaye Trasatti

Theses

Verbal operant training is a typical intervention for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Response Interruption and Redirection (RIRD) is a highly effective intervention for problem behavior and various forms of stereotypy. In this study verbal operant training was combined with RIRD to see if there was a bigger impact in decreasing vocal stereotypy. The participant was a 9-year old male, and the intervention was done across settings. The results showed that combined with intraverbal training and RIRD, vocal stereotypy decreased significantly in all settings. The results also indicate this is a highly effective treatment for vocal stereotypy when the function …

Hyperspectral Spectroscopy For Detection Of Charcoal Rot (Macrophomina Phaseolina) Toxin Effect On Soybean (Glycine Max) Seedlings, Ameer H.A. Al-Ahmadi

Theses

The objective of this study was to test the potential of using hyperspectral spectroscopy to detect the effect of the charcoal rot (Macrophomina phaseolina) toxin in soybean (Glycine max) seedlings and to discover the most sensitive spectral range to that effect. This study consists of two experiments. The first experiment used one cultivar of soybeans called “Pharaoh” with two levels of treatment (control and toxin-treated). Hyperspectral data were collected during five measurement events. Four analytical methods were used including one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), Jeffries Matusita distance (JM distance), principal component analysis (PCA), and spectral angle mapper (SAM). The ANOVA …

Effects Of Olfactory Enrichments On African Cheetahs (Acinonyx Jubatus), Marcus Chas Abston

Theses

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF MARCUS C. ABSTON, for the Master of Science degree in ZOOLOGY, presented on 18 April 2017, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: EFFECTS OF OLFACTORY ENRICHMENT ON AFRICAN CHEETAHS (ACINONYX JUBATUS) MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Carey Krajewski Environmental enrichment has been an essential part of felid husbandry in zoos, serving to reduce both physiological and psychological stress. Olfactory enrichment is one of many interventions used to prevent stereotypic behavior caused by stress in felids. However, little research has been done on this practice. The purpose of this study was to compare behavioral responses of four …

The Assessment And Etiology Of Novelty Seeking And Rule-Breaking In Young Children, Emma Brittany Diaz

Theses

This study explored the stability and heritability of novelty seeking, defiance, and rule-breaking in early childhood using a twin sample. Parent reports of novelty seeking were assessed at ages 3 and 4, parent reports of rule-breaking were assessed at ages 5 and follow-up (6-16), and observer reports of defiance were assessed at age 5. Results showed that novelty seeking increased between ages 3 and 4, and rule-breaking remained stable from age 5 to follow-up (6-16). All constructs demonstrated significant heritability. Finally, neither novelty seeking nor defiance predicted 5-year-old rule-breaking. Defiance was the only construct that significantly predicted follow-up rule-breaking. Defiance …

Comparative Phytochemical Screening And Antioxidant Activities Of Calligonum Comosum And Calligonum Crjnitum, Khalfan Mohamed Abdulla Ai Naqbi

Theses

Medicinal plants are vital source of present day prescription and the majority of the recommended modern medications contain their subsidiaries. Calligonum comosum and Calligonum crinitum are perennial shrub plants growing in the United Arab Emirates, and are being utilized as a part of traditional medicinal system of UAE. The aims of proposed study were to evaluate and compare the phytochemical and antioxidant properties of these two plants. The extraction and fractionation were conducted by using petroleum ether, chloroform, ethyl acetate, acetone and methanol. The extracts were tested for their antioxidant activity. Phytochemical studies with total phenolics and flavonoid contents were …

The Effects Of Frondoside A In Acute Leukemia, Fatma Hussain Sajwani

Theses

Among hematological malignancies, acute leukemia is the major cause of mortality. Despite improvement of survival with current chemotherapies, some patients still diefrom the disease or the treatment side effects. Thus, new therapeutic agents are needed. Anti-cancer drugs derived from natural products are of interest. Frondoside A is a triterpenoid glycoside form the sea cucumber, Cucumaria frondosa that has shown potent antitumor effects in various cancers. Previous studies in acute leukemia are limited. The current study investigated the effects of frondoside a in acute leukemia cell lines alone and in combination with drugs currently used for this malignancy. This study is …

Her Eyes, Stephanie Clark

Theses

Her Eyes is an animated graduate thesis film that is 13 minutes and 25 seconds in length. Through the course of the film, the audience witnesses several years of the main character, Sam Peterson’s, daily life as he suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. As Sam continues to try and live his life unaffected by the disease, he comes to the realization that his sole dependent, Helen, his granddaughter, has changed roles from being under his care, to his sole caretaker. From this realization, Sam comes to the harsh decision to protect his granddaughter’s future, valuing the time in which he can …

An Exploration Of Commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Uavs) Through Life Cycle Assessments, Briana Neuberger

Theses

The objective of this study is to analyze the potential for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to displace current technology and look at how they impact the environment through a delivery transportation model. It is meant to encompass an ecological perspective of producing and using UAVs as well as understand the environmental consequences that accompany it. This paper presents a new way of looking at the uses of UAVs and attempts to apply typical life cycle assessment (LCA) methods to this technology. This research is intended to be used as an initial environmental baseline of drone technology and as a comparative …

Manner Of Death And Willingness To Nullify In A Euthanasia Case, Daniel Bell

Theses

Jurors are subject to many biases that hinder their ability to make objective decisions and nullification may occur when the jury believes the law is unfair or immoral. In a case involving euthanasia, a defendant may not be viewed as having committed a crime if it was done out of mercy and a jury may be more likely to choose to nullify as a result. However, nullification can encourage jurors to make decisions based on their attitudes and subjective interpretations of events. One unexplored potential influence on euthanasia attitudes and the decision to nullify may be the manner of death. …

Degradation Of Cyclic Ethers By Microorganisms Isolated From Contaminated Groundwater, Rowan Thompson

Theses

Groundwater contamination is an extremely important topic in environmental science. Ex-situ removal of contaminants is costly and largely ineffective on contaminants that have high vapor pressures and readily mix with water. Bioremediation or bio-augmentation are attractive alternative ways to remediate a site, as they may require less work and be more cost-effective.

Groundwater samples from a superfund site contaminated with chlorinated compounds and other volatile organic compounds. Samples were enriched to select for organisms capable of degrading cyclic ethers, specifically tetrahydrofuran and 1,4-dioxane. The isolates were tested for their degradation capacity and to determine if they were impacted by the …