Digital Commons Network^™

The U.S. Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement: Towards A Justice-Based Paradigm Of Sustainability At Higher Education Institutions, Dylan John Gibson

Theses

In the last ten years, the fossil fuel divestment movement at higher education institutions has emerged as a key component of the global climate movement. It has also posed a challenge to the dominant paradigm of sustainability in higher education by calling on institutions to help incite outward systemic change to ensure justice for those most impacted by environmental problems, rather than simple efforts to green the campus. As the movement sees a resurgent escalation in the U.S., this study uses data from active and inactive campaigns across the country to assess the key characteristics of institutions and campaigns that …

Correlating Direct And Indirect Executive Functioning Measures And Language Skills Of Children With Autism, Emily Claire Wagner

Theses

Executive functioning usually refers to one’s ability to regulate one’s behavior, set goals, be mentally flexible, and understand the consequence of one’s actions. However, certain neurodevelopmental disabilities such as Autism, often can negatively impact executive function processes. Although applied behavior analytic (ABA) treatment is the most recommended intervention for autism treatment practitioners rarely assess or target executive functioning within their treatment planning. The present study assessed the relationship between direct and indirect executive functioning scores and a language assessment used by ABA providers. Thirty-nine children with autism spectrum disorder were administered a variety of scales including the Behavior Rating Inventory …

Presence Of Late 8 Phonemes Among Adolescents And Young Adults With Down Syndrome, Aidan Lee Osborne

Theses

The purpose of this study was to describe the phonetic repertoire of late 8 phonemes among adolescents and young adults with Down syndrome and then determine the relationship between age and presence of the latest developing phonemes as well as their impact on intelligibility. This study also described the stimulability profile for those late 8 phonemes that were produced in error. The Arizona Articulation and Phonology Scale was administered to individuals with Down syndrome between the ages of 12 – 21;11 to obtain a phonetic profile. Among those participants included in the study, on average, 87.5% of the late 8 …

Music Performance Anxiety In The Middle School Classroom, Allison Custer

Theses

This project analyzes Music Performance Anxiety, including who it affects, symptoms and techniques to reduce symptoms. The task is to focus on activities that can be used in the middle school ensemble classroom, to help students who suffer from Music Performance Anxiety.

Leveraging Non-Traditional Notation And Technology To Enhance A Fourth Grade Recorder Unit, Stephenie Mokriakow

Theses

This action research project analyzes the traditional methods of teaching recorder to fourth grade students to expand upon these traditional methods and create a unit that leverages technology and non-traditional notation as well as introducing students to traditional music notation. The unit includes lessons that are scaffolded to meet the desired end results. The learning objectives include understanding of basic rhythm patterns and beginning notes on the recorder. The culmination of the lessons will end with a series of songs that the teacher will use to assess students.

The Feminine Renaissance: Examining The Implications Of Disegno, Kim Pokorny

Theses

This paper analyzes the concept of disegno in its effect on the success of the female artist in the early modern era. Achieving disegno effectively meant that an artist had reached a renowned level of intelligence and artistic mastery. Formulating this principle in one's art was taught in studios and academies by use of gradual monitored practice and the study of the human figure. Disegno elevated the social status of the artist, as wealthy patrons understood the talent behind the work of an artist that could display it in their paintings. As women were not admitted into most academies and …

Bayesian Methods For Radiometric Calibration In Motion Picture Encoding Workflows, Ricardo R. Figueroa

Theses

A method for estimating the Camera Response Function (CRF) of an electronic motion picture camera is presented in this work. The accurate estimation of the CRF allows for proper encoding of camera exposures into motion picture post-production workflows, like the Academy Color Encoding Specification (ACES), this being a necessary step to correctly combine images from different capture sources into one cohesive final production and minimize non-creative manual adjustments.

Although there are well known standard CRFs implemented in typical video camera workflows, motion picture workflows and newer High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging workflows have introduced new standard CRFs as well as …

The Athlete’S Concussion Epidemic, Andrew James Marsh

Theses

The main goal of this project is to inform and educate you on the various threads concerning concussions in the world of sports. Athletes competing in contact sports at a high level are at risk of receiving a mild traumatic brain injury as well as suffering from post concussion syndrome. The reader can review the state of concussions and receive professional information from doctors and trainers. The audience can also get an inside look into the minds of players who have dealt with this injury themselves. One will find qualitative and quantitative data that presents information related to mental health …

User Experience – Lindenwood University Admissions Website, Dillon Edward Bittiker

Theses

This project focuses on how to improve Lindenwood University’s admissions web page experience. The primary focus is to study current admissions staff member’s roles within the organization, and work to create a better online experience for them and their students.

Experimental Investigation Of Corrosion Of Coated Cast Iron Rotors In The Automotive Industry, Prabin Parajuli

Theses

Electric and hybrid vehicles uses regenerative braking, where application of the brake triggers the electric motor to work as a generator to produce electricity, which in turn charges the battery. This results in much less use of the friction brake, changing the corrosion and wear behavior of the rotor surface. There is a need for research on this topic, since fully electric or hybrid vehicles are replacing combustion engines due to concerns about global warming and climate change. Here the corrosion behavior of coated cast iron vehicle rotors in 3.5wt% NaCl is studied. The corrosion study has been performed using …

Exploration Of The Process Of Building Brand Equity As A Digital Painter, Andrew Lim

Theses

The mainstream debut of the World Wide Web in the 20th century has increased the use of branding from its simple origins of being a visual marker into a multi-faceted entity. Branding has evolved to become a multi-faceted effort that creates rational and emotional attributes and can foster interactions and develop and deepen relationships with customers (Rubinstein, 2002).

The boom of the Internet brought forth new inventions and software that affected many industries, particularly the arts. A new emergent form of art known as digital painting emerged where a drawing tablet, stylus and digital image rendering software such as Adobe …

Have Objects, Will Travel: Object-Based Outreach To Solstice Independent Living At Fairport, New York, Taylor Carpenter

Theses

This thesis details my process in designing and delivering a program, “The Evolution of the Erie Canal,” to residents of the Solstice Senior Living at Fairport, New York, utilizing objects from the Rochester Museum & Science Center’s teaching collection. Given the ever-increasing population of American adults aged 55 and older, it is more important than ever for museums to create engaging programs aimed at this sector of the population. The goal of this project was to create a meaningful object-based experience for participants through discussion and reminiscence. My sources include findings from similar projects, literature on working with adult audiences, …

Conceptions Of Refactoring: An Investigation Of Stack Overflow Posts, Steven David Simmons

Theses

Refactoring is a common activity in software development. Developers make changes in the code in order to achieve a desired effect such as better performance, conformance to new business rules, or the removal of code anti-patterns such as code smells. However, refactoring operations often fail to achieve the results that are expected of them. There have been many studies conducted to assess their impact and effectiveness in different scenarios, but they have not returned consistent results. At times, studies have even shown decreasing and increasing in code quality from the same operation.

This study investigated whether a common set of …

Implementation Of A Digital Asset Management System Using Human-Centered Design, Lynne Tseng

Theses

With all the people and activities involved, modern marketing and strategic communications departments are complex organizations. This complexity can lead to longer lead times to complete projects within specific and deadline-driven timeframes. Therefore, companies are turning to digital asset management (DAM) systems to streamline their workflows and become more efficient. However, without a comprehensive and strategic implementation plan, DAM systems are significantly less likely to be adopted by their end-users. This paper describes how a DAM system was selected and implemented in the marketing and strategic communications department of a large health system. By using a human-centered design methodology to …

An Assessment Of Media Consumers’ Ability To Distinguish The Level Of Post-Processing In Journalistic Images, Emily Shriver

Theses

Photojournalists are held to a high degree of ethics because of the importance and impact of their work. To address this, several professional photojournalist organizations and publishers have created guidelines on how to appropriately post-process an image. Today the average media consumer is exposed to a diverse news landscape, and there is a tendency for consumers to trust photojournalistic images as being representative of the truth (Farid, 2006). This research considers to what extent can the average media consumer distinguish between ethically and unethically post-processed images.

This study aimed to discover how well people can distinguish between three categories of …

Breathing Pacer Device For Stress And Anxiety Relief, Maria Grazia Guerrero Bejarano

Theses

Stress and stress-related physical and mental diseases are increasing and affecting more people every day. There have been many approaches to try to solve this issue. Many of them are based on the idea that meditation and mindfulness breathing could improve these conditions. The problem is that not everyone can achieve those levels of meditation for that to work. Another issue is that those solutions are relying on a particular way of breathing to help all.

In contrast, this project developed under research that shows that the amount of CO₂ in a person's exhaled breath could be an indicator of …

Radar-Aware Transmission And Scheduling For Cognitive Radio Dynamic Spectrum Access In The Cbrs Radio Band, Dennis P. Bleier

Theses

Use of the wireless spectrum is increasing. In order to meet the throughput requirements, Dynamic Spectrum Access is a popular technique to maximize spectrum usage. This can be applied to the Citizen Broadband Radio Service (3550-3700MHz), a band recently opened by the Federal Communications Commission for opportunistic access. This radio band can be accessed as long as no higher priority users are interfered with. The top priority users are called incumbents, which are commonly naval radar. Naval radars transmit a focused beam that can be modelled as a periodic function. Lower tier users are prohibited from transmitting when their transmissions …

Design Of Hardware Cnn Accelerators For Audio And Image Classification, Rohini Jayachandre Gillela

Theses

Ever wondered how the world was before the internet was invented? You might soon wonder how the world would survive without self-driving cars and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). The extensive research taking place in this rapidly evolving field is making self-driving cars futuristic and more reliable. The goal of this research is to design and develop hardware Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) accelerators for self-driving cars, that can process audio and visual sensory information. The idea is to imitate a human brain that takes audio and visual data as input while driving. To achieve a single die that can process …

Elucidating The Effect Of Temperature And Concentration On The Rotational Diffusion Of Yb– Crystallin To Elucidate Inter-Protein Interactions, Olivia Fraser

Theses

γB – crystallin is a 21 kDa protein found in the lens of the bovine eye, existing without turnover. It shares 76% sequence identity with a human lens protein, γD – crystallin, with a structural RMSD of 0.8 Å by Dali (174 residues, Cα atoms only). Damages to and abnormalities on crystallin proteins can lead to phase separation and aggregation in the lens, resulting from aberrant inter-protein interactions, which can lead to partial or total blindness by cataract. The purpose of this work is to elucidate global inter-protein interactions of wild-type γB – crystallin by T1 and T2 relaxation NMR …

Detecting Performance Regression Inducing Code Changes Using Static And Dynamic Metrics, Hiten Gupta

Theses

Performance regression testing is a cost-intensive task as it delays the system development. The process, if performed in Iterations, significantly slows down the developer’s pace. Hence, it is essential to execute the performance tests only on the new commit and not the whole system, as regression is induced by a newly made change to the system. This work presents a novel contribution to the detection of performance regression inducing code changes to solve the optimization problem. In this study, we combine the static and dynamic metrics as features to train classifiers to predict the performance regression if introduced by the …

Design And Production Of 3d Animation Short Film “Memories Of The Post-80s”, Hui Shen

Theses

“The memories of the post-80s” is a 2minutes and 8 seconds 3D animated short film which tells a story of a young man named Kai who born in the post-80s in China, living in a modern, high-tech environment, but falling into a fantasy dream and reminiscing about his simple and happy life as a child. The most important question expressed in this short film is whether a more convenient, high-tech, fast-paced modern life is proportional to people's happiness index. The main reasons for this problem are multiple, such as working pressure, stressful life, repayment of loans, health, and so on. …

High-Capacity Directional Graph Networks, Miguel Dominguez

Theses

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have proven themselves to be a useful tool in many computer vision problems. One of the most popular forms of the DNN is the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The CNN effectively learns features on images by learning a weighted sum of local neighborhoods of pixels, creating filtered versions of the image. Point cloud analysis seems like it would benefit from this useful model. However, point clouds are much less structured than images. Many analogues to CNNs for point clouds have been proposed in the literature, but they are often much more constrained networks than the typical …

Audience Preference For Engagement With Online Museums, Xiang Chen

Theses

With the rapid development of science and technology, “digitization” as a new structure carrier of information codes has been widely used by more and more people. Contemporary museums are no longer confined to the traditional mode of exhibition, but now are able to employ a high degree of integration of conventional physical displays and digital technology. Through various channels, such as social media, website platforms, documentaries and movies, and related apps, museums enhance the interaction and experience of the audience. This research project surveyed Chinese and American college students about their engagement with museums and the effectiveness of digital technology …

Sustainable Hope: An Analysis Of The Rhetorical Process Of The Forward Through Ferguson Commission Report, Nicole Ramer

Theses

This project focuses on the Forward through Ferguson Report, a commission report written by appointed commissioners after the protests of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. While the first chapter of my thesis focuses on the report itself and commission reports as a genre, the second chapter analyzes the most recent report, the State of Police Reform, from an ecological lens. Throughout the project, I kept returning to the question Susan Wells posed in a recent interview with Composition Forum, revisiting one she first asked in her oft-cited 1996 essay: what do we want from public rhetoric …

An Analysis Of Happiness Meter Data Through Data Mining Tools And Sentiment Classification, Maitha Ahmed Hussain Alblooshi

Theses

Customer satisfaction in the organization's services can play a crucial role in reforming their business strategy for better productivity. Some organizations measure their customer satisfaction through the percentage of happiness rate, some through non-systematic surveys, and some through direct interviews with their customers. Customers’ feedbacks can be gathered in two formats; structured data (numeric ratings) and unstructured data (comments). Being able to have a comprehensive measure of the quality of government services by considering those two formats makes it a big challenge to make useful insights from data for customers and decision-makers. The work in this paper analyzes customers' votes …

The Fourth Wall, Serenity Dougherty

Theses

“The Fourth Wall” is the beginning of a fiction novel set in the comedy scene in Lincoln, NE during the #MeToo movement. The story follows a young female comedian in the scene, Kara, from the perspectives of several significant people in her life. Though the novel never inhabits Kara’s perspective directly, it seeks to give readers an intimate look at the difficulty she faces as she tries to navigate the male-dominated world of stand-up comedy during a time when the community is being forced to confront its troubling history of sweeping reports of sexual violence under the rug.

The Effectiveness Of Covert Vs. Overt Brand Visibility In Video Advertising, Mingyue Zhang

Theses

This research is a mixed-methods (qualitative and quantitative) and semi-structured (survey and interview) study on the effectiveness of covert vs. overt commercials towards the influence of the brand attitude and purchase intention of consumers. Covert commercials are video advertisements that present the promoted brand and sponsor unclearly, and make its marketing nature hard to recognize at first sight. Overt commercials are video advertisements that present the promoted brand and sponsor clearly, and disclose its sponsor and marketing nature expressively. The survey and interview are designed to measure participants’ responses to four commercials, either covert or overt, with regards to the …

Race Differences In Youths’ Attitudes Towards Arming Teachers: Investigating The Role Of Procedural Justice, Faraneh Shamserad

Theses

Over the course of the last two decades, anxiety over school shootings has continued to influence school safety reform. Due to prominent news coverage and growing fear over school shootings, school securitization in American public schools has expanded to include the arming of schoolteachers. While supporters advocate for the need to arm schoolteachers, little is known about the level of support the policy receives from the very people it is intended to protect - students. Although research examining students’ perceptions of school security is scant, existing research suggests that target-hardening measures may be counterproductive and that there are racial differences …

Toy Design For Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Based On Existing Therapeutic Training Methods, Ye Wang

Theses

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) behave in different ways from other children as well as face enormous problems in their daily life. Previous research has found that physical treatment not only improves their body functions, but also benefits their mental development. Play therapy is a very effective way to help children with ASD since playing is the way children express themselves. However, after field research and benchmarking, I found that there are few toys helping them with their developmental coordination, which is necessary especially for children with ASD. In this paper, I have designed a series of devices for …

You Know That Feeling You Get Right After You Vomit? Yeah, I Want To Feel That., Jin Chan

Theses

You Know that Feeling You Get Right After You Vomit? Yeah, I Want to Feel That is an ongoing collection of photographic and sculptural components existing as found object mixedmedia such as oranges, wood, flowers, and inkjet prints held by T-pins. Through a surrealistic indulgence of abjection and uncanniness, with an implied bodily violence, this series of work comes to an understanding of time, identity, and existing between social boundaries creating a push and pull to define “in-betweenness”. This contradiction causes a psychic dissonance, or a mental contradiction of belonging; to exist in-between is to exist uncannily. “In-betweenness” is represented …