Digital Commons Network^™

Keyless Anti-Jamming Communication Via Randomized Dsss, Ahmad Alagil

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays, wireless networking is ubiquitous. In wireless communication systems, multiple nodes exchange data during the transmission time. Due to the natural use of the communication channel, it is crucial to protect the physical layer to make wireless channels between nodes more reliable. Jamming attacks consider one of the most significant threats on wireless communication. Spread spectrum techniques have been widely used to mitigate the effects of the jammer. Traditional anti-jamming approaches like Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) require a sender and a receiver to share a secret key prior to their communication. If this …

Artificial Intelligence Towards The Wireless Channel Modeling Communications In 5g, Saud Mobark Aldossari

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Channel prediction is a mathematical predicting of the natural propagation of the signal that helps the receiver to approximate the affected signal, which plays an important role in highly mobile or dynamic channels. The standard wireless communication channel modeling can be facilitated by either deterministic or stochastic channel methodologies. The deterministic approach is based on the electromagnetic theories and every single object in that environment has to be known in that propagation space and an example of this method is ray tracing. While the stochastic modeling method is based on measurements that involve statistical distributions of the channel parameters and …

Managing At The Intersection: The Negotiations Of Racialized Role Strain Of Black Mid-Level Student Affairs Administrators At Predominantly White Institutions, David Frank Hibbler Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative interview study was to identify the unique stressors Black mid-level student affairs administrators encounter, how they cope with such stressors, and the perceived consequences of these encounters and coping mechanisms. Data for this qualitative interview study was collected from face-to-face interviews with eight Black mid-level student affairs administrators at predominantly White institutions in the U.S, and from and an optional diary entry. Findings revealed that participants experienced racialized role strain as a result of interactions with White peers and supervisors, same-race peers, and navigating campus climate. Specifically, the Black mid-level participants experienced strain in their …

The Evolution Of Esea: A Language And Four-Dimension Analysis, Ann M. Meggs

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Title I of ESEA was and continues to be the largest single funding source to support our nation’s most struggling students (Davis, 1999). The purpose of this study was to draw on policy and language analysis perspectives to examine changes in ESEA, specifically in Title I Part A, through its reauthorizations as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). A language analysis of the texts of these acts found changes in key specific language between each reauthorization, affecting the intent and scope of the original ESEA (1965) legislation. Four dimensions of a conceptual …

Post-Overlay Flexible Pavement Performance Modeling And Its Application In Sustainable Asphalt Overlay Policy Making, Chunfu Xin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Highway pavement is a critical component of the highway transportation infrastructure. After the construction of a pavement system, pavement condition will deteriorate over time due to a combination effect of material aging, traffic loading, and environmental impact. To restore the pavement performance and to reduce its adverse effects on public users and environment, asphalt overlay activities are conducted frequently during the service life of a pavement. As a key component that bridges the overlay policies with future pavement performance, economic cost and environmental impact, the forecast accuracy of post-overlay pavement performance model is extremely important. However, most of previous studies …

When The Beat Drops: Exploring Hip Hop, Home And Black Masculinity, Marquese Lamont Mcferguson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this autoethnographic dissertation, I take readers on a narrative journey to three of my storied homeplaces and explore my lived experiences within each site. In the process of exploring my homeplaces, I analyze how I perform my black masculine self within the context of each location, how my cultural body supports and challenges hegemonic black masculinity, and how each location constrains and frees up my performance of self. With this dissertation, I will contribute to the field of communication studies by extending the method and writing practice of autoethnography, the theorization of the black masculine, and the exploration of …

“They Will Think We Are The Cancer Family”: Studying Patterns Of Cancer Disclosure And Communication Among Indian Immigrants In The United States, Kanan Mehta

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Studies of Indian immigrants in Western countries show that the rates of cancer increase significantly within a generation in the host country. The negative social perceptions associated with health outcomes of cancer often perpetuate limited disclosure regarding the diagnosis of cancer among patients and families. This can result in disrupted communication in clinical settings, while causing increased stress among patients and caregivers. These findings demonstrate the need for studying lived experiences of cancer-related illness and its impacts on social relationships in the domestic and public sphere.

This study explored cancer disclosure and communication among Indian immigrants in the United States …

Communication Skills In Medical Education: A Discourse Analysis Of Simulated Patient Practices, Grace Ellen Peters

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Communication is regarded as one of the most important skills physicians develop. The most common approach for training medical students to be skilled communicators is by way of simulated patients, who are persons hired by a medical school to perform the role of patient for medical students in simulated consultations and assess those students on their communication skills. In this project, I examine how communication skills are conceptualized by looking at how they occur as a practice. My analysis focuses on the Communication Skills Learning Center, an organization designed to train medical students to be skilled communicators through consultations with …

Hybrid Electro-Plasmonic Stimulation Of Primary Neurons, Ratka Damnjanovic

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Biomedical prosthetics utilizing electrical stimulation have limited, effective spatial resolution due to spread of electrical currents to surrounding tissue, causing nonselective stimulation. So, precise spatial resolution is not possible for traditional neural prosthetic devices, such as cochlear implants. More recently, alternative methods utilize optical stimulation, mainly infrared, sometimes paired with nanotechnology for stimulating action potentials, which has its own drawbacks, as it may heat surrounding tissue. Recently, we employed plasmonic stimulation methods utilizing gold nanoparticle-coated nanoelectrodes to convert visible light pulses into localized surface plasmon resonance transduction for stimulation of electrically excitable cells, which had limited success. Here, we report …

Models Of Secure Software Enforcement And Development, Hernan M. Palombo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Computer Security has been a pressing issue that affects our society in multiple ways. Although a plethora of security solutions have been proposed and implemented throughout the years, security continues to be a problem for at least two important reasons, (1) implementations of runtime enforcement mechanisms have not been modeled rigorously and thus may not be enforcing the policies that are expected to enforce, and (2) there are conflicting tensions in the software development process that hinder the implementation and maintenance of secure software. To investigate these issues, this dissertation is divided into two parts.

The first part of this …

Parent Perceptions Of The Acceptability, Effectiveness, And Experience Of Engaging In The Group Stepping Stones Triple P Intervention For Parents Of Children With Disabilities, Tara B. Delach

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The challenges associated with parenting are often compounded for parents of children with developmental disabilities. Children with developmental disabilities are at increased risk for exhibiting mental health concerns and challenging behavior compared to their typically developing peers. Parents who are raising a child with a disability tend to experience increased demands, higher levels of stress, and greater challenges associated with the physical, emotional, and behavioral needs of their children than do parents of typically developing children. Parent training interventions grounded in social learning theory and behavioral principles have proven to be effective in improving both child and parent outcomes in …

Differences In Knowledge Acquisition, Perceived Engagement And Self-Efficacy In Latino Promotores Delivering The Heart Disease Prevention Program Su Corazόn, Su Vida, Samuel Matos-Bastidas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Su Corazόn, Su Vida (Your Heart, Your Life) is a community-based, small-group health intervention designed to empower Latinos to enhance cardiovascular disease awareness and initiate enduring lifestyle changes to improve health outcomes and quality of life. Originally developed to be delivered in weekly sessions in Spanish or English language, it addresses several heart disease risk factors including unhealthy eating habits, poor physical activity, high cholesterol, overweight, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and tobacco smoking, among others. Instructors use diverse learning and support strategies such as group discussion, role modeling, problem-solving, health action planning, and self-monitoring. Participants help each other to stay on …

Allosteric Control Of Proteins: New Methods And Mechanisms, Nalvi Duro

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Allostery describes the phenomenon where perturbations in one region of a protein affect protein behavior in another non-overlapping region. Considerable efforts made over decades to understand the molecular basis of allostery, yet an overarching theory that can predict signaling pathways and contributions from chemical components is still lacking. In fact, molecular details in even the most well-studied of model systems, PDZ domains and GPCRs, remain unclear. In this dissertation I use molecular simulation methods to understand the role of allostery in the regulated entry of paramyxovirus into host cells, and also develop a new method to determine time-dependent signaling pathways …

The Effects Of Product Recalls On Competitors’ Market Value And Recalling Firm’S Reputation, Dong Liu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have paid intensive attention to product recalls over the past two decades. Prior studies show that product recalls negatively affect the recalling firm’s sales, consumer-based brand equity, and firm value. However, less attention has been paid to the spillover effect of product recalls on the market value of the recalling firm’s competitors in the same industry, and the long-term effect of product recalls on firm reputation. The objective of this dissertation is to fill up these research gaps through two essays.

In Essay 1, I investigate factors affecting the spillover effect of a product recall on the firm value …

The Threat Of Virality: Digital Outrage Combats The Spread Of Opposing Ideas, Curtis Puryear

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The prevailing stage for conversations about politics and morality has shifted from private and face-to-face to public and digital. Moreover, the digital landscape itself changed considerably in the past decade. The era of static webpages has been replaced by dynamic social networks where ideas and reactions to events spread rapidly. With every comment we, or a political adversary makes, numbers quantifying social approval tick up or down. Instead of holding digitized versions of one-on-one conversations, we argue in front of audiences who throw digital “points” at and accelerate the spread of the winning side’s ideas. I argue this subjectively raises …

Auditory Perception And Neural Encoding Of Spectral Modulation, Sittiprapa Isarangura

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Most natural acoustic sounds consist of multiple frequencies. An important auditory perceptual ability to resolve such acoustic properties is referred to as spectral processing and includes frequency resolution, frequency selectivity and spectral envelope perception. Frequency resolution, as demonstrated by masking techniques, indicates that our auditory system functions as an auditory filter bank with overlapping bandpass filters. These filters allow for the effective separation of sounds into different frequency bands or channels. Acoustic components that fall within a given filter or passband are considered to be processed “within channel” and are perceptually resolved using “local” spectral cues, whereas components in different …

Explore L2 Chinese Learners' Motivation Through L2mss: Selves, Mental Imagery, And Pedagogical Implications, Yao Liu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Motivation is understood as the original drive of a person to make specific choices, engage himself or herself to make efforts, and to be persistent for the pursuit of the goals. Over the decades, numerous studies have been dedicated to studying this complex and significant construct, in both the fields of Second Language Acquisition and Social Psychology. Since the beginning of the last decade, the findings and theories of motivation research of the two fields mentioned above have been merged and integrated by Dörnyei (2005, 2009) to explain the second language learners’ motivation. This vigorous Second Language Motivational Self System …

Making Meaning Of A Whole School Transformation Model: A Policy Ethnography Of A Schools Of Hope Legislation Implementation, Adam Charles Rea

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cheryl High School (CHS) is a geographically large county in Florida that received funding through the state of Florida's "Schools of Hope” grant. The grant’s parameters called on Carter County Schools (CCS) to partner with an external consultant and a research university to help improve teacher and school administrative capacity. The district chose Scientific Pedagogy Services (SPS) and to continue their existing relationship with Tampa Bay State University (TBS). The consultant’s mission was to improve school performance through a unique form of professional development. TBS was charged with developing an on-site program that funded staff efforts to obtain advanced degrees …

Functional Object-Oriented Network: A Knowledge Representation For Service Robotics, David Andrés Paulius Ramos

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we discuss our work behind the development of the functional object-oriented network (abbreviated as FOON), a graphical knowledge representation for robotic manipulation and understanding of its own actions and (potentially) the intentions of humans in the household. Based on the theory of affordance, this representation captures manipulations and their effects on actions through the coupling of object and motion nodes as fundamental learning units known as functional units. The activities currently represented in FOON are cooking related, but this representation can be extended to other activities that involve manipulation of objects which result in observable changes of …

Nostalgia And (In)Authentic Community: A Bataillean Answer To The Heidegger Controversy, Patrick Miller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Heidegger’s relationship with Nazism has been debated since the 1930s. In the late 1930s, Georges Bataille wrote an incomplete text that would have added to these debates, “Critique of Heidegger: Critique of a philosophy of fascism.” I draw on this fragment and Bataille’s writings from this era in order to develop a fuller critique of Heidegger and his relationship to fascism. This expanded critique completes the promise of Bataille’s original fragment, offering a full Bataillean criticism of Heidegger and displaying the connections between his philosophy and Bataille’s understanding of fascism. This critique hinges on Heidegger’s concept of authenticity and community, …

Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Exposure, Hepatic Accumulation, And Associated Health Impacts In Gulf Of Mexico Tilefish (Lopholatilus Chamaeleonticeps), Susan M. Snyder

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, systematic demersal longline surveys were conducted throughout the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) continental shelf to evaluate polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) exposure, hepatic accumulation, and health indices in demersal fishes. Tilefish (Lopholatilus chamaeleonticeps) were chosen as a target species due to high vulnerability to environmental disturbance, commercial importance, Gulf-wide distribution, and documented high exposure to PAHs post-Deepwater Horizon. Over 200 Tilefish were sampled in the north central GoM at repeat stations from 2012 to 2017, and from the northwest GoM, southwest GoM, Bay of Campeche, and Yucatán Shelf over years 2015 and 2016. Tilefish …

Governmentality, Biopower, And Sexual Citizenship: A Feminist Examination Of Sexual And Reproductive Healthcare Experiences Of 18-24 Year-Olds In The U.S. Southeast, Melina K. Taylor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sexual and reproductive healthcare in the U.S. is a contentious and often stigmatized topic. Conservative politics and Christian religious ideology guide laws and policies that inform narratives of sexual citizenship that promote white, heterosexual, procreative, cis-gendered relationships as the ideal. For young people, exposure to sexuality education greatly influences their self-identity as sexual citizens and guides how they form intimate relationships. While sexual and reproductive healthcare has been included marginally in the discipline of anthropology, almost no research has focused on young people’s sexual and reproductive healthcare within the U.S.

This dissertation examines the viewpoints and experiences of 18-24 year-old …

A Novel Intramolecular Interaction In P53, Fan He

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The p53 tumor suppressor is a sequence-specific DNA binding protein that activates gene transcription to regulate cell survival and proliferation. The activation process involves post-translational modifications that suppress p53 degradation by MDM2 and increase p53 DNA binding affinity. p53 is mutated in ~50% of human tumors, with higher frequency in specific tumor types and after relapse. Mutated p53 loses transcriptional activity and gains new functions that drive tumor progression. Both N-terminus (NT) and C-terminus (CT) of p53 contain intrinsically disordered regions. The p53 CT has well-documented effects in regulating DNA binding. CT truncated p53 mutants showed defective DNA binding and …

Fields Brook Superfund Site: Race, Class, And Environmental Justice In A Blasted Landscape, Richard C. Bargielski

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1980, the United States Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). This federal law provided the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with the legal tools necessary to pursue polluters who had improperly stored or disposed hazardous wastes. Since its passage, more than a thousand sites have been added to the National Priorities List (NPL), but only a fraction have been cleaned up. Proponents of neoliberalism argue that aggressive environmental policies such as CERCLA harm workers by making it impossible for businesses to operate profitably. This coincides with a drop of nearly 50% in the U.S. …

Development Of A Monolithic Implantable Neural Interface From Cubic Silicon Carbide And Evaluation Of Its Mri Compatibility, Mohammad Beygi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

One of the main issues with micron-sized intracortical neural interfaces (INIs) is their long-term reliability, with one major factor stemming from device material failure caused by the heterogeneous integration of multiple materials used to realize the implant. Single crystalline cubic silicon carbide (3C-SiC) is a semiconductor material that has been long recognized for its mechanical robustness and chemical inertness. It has the benefit of demonstrated biocompatibility, which makes it a promising candidate for chronically-stable, implantable INIs. In the first section of this dissertation, the fabrication and initial electrochemical characterization of a monolithic, Michigan-style 3C-SiC microelectrode array (MEA) probe is reported. …

Design Of Delro Autonomous Delivery Robot And Ai Based Localization, Tolga Karakurt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Autonomous robots are employed in numerous areas. In this thesis, it is proposed to design and build a self-controlled wheeled vehicle to deliver food.

As there are many applications of an autonomous agent for indoor and outdoor environments, this study is conducted on indoor settings whereas all the requirements and design processes are achieved for both operational boundaries.

The fundamental approach is to design and implement a Wheeled Mobile Robot (WMR), and to test skid-steering performance on proposed trajectories using a System Engineering approach. From this point of view, system requirements in mechanical, electrical, and software are evaluated, and overall …

Novel Bit-Sliced In-Memory Computing Based Vlsi Architecture For Fast Sobel Edge Detection In Iot Edge Devices, Rajeev Joshi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For today’s Internet-of-Things (IoT) edge devices, there is an acute need for fast and power-efficient hardware for an image processing task. Traditional hardware solutions with sequential and/or pipelined architectures incur high latency and power. This motivates us to propose a novel in-memory computing architecture for rapid image processing. We propose a bit-sliced in-memory computing architecture for CMOS VLSI implementation for fast Sobel edge detection. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose in-memory computing based VLSI architecture foredge detection. The novelty of the proposed work is that one image can be processed in constant time …

Mass Spectrometry Discovery-Based Proteomics To Examine Anti-Aging Effects Of The Nutraceutical Nt-020 In Rat Serum, Samantha M. Portis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Aging is a complex physiological process that leads to the deterioration of all cells and tissues throughout the body. Aging is a major risk factor for the onset of many degenerative diseases in both the central nervous system (CNS) and the periphery, but even nonpathological aging (“normal” aging) is associated with chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, and decreased stem cell proliferation and regenerative capacity. This decreased regenerative capacity in stem cell niches is thought to be a key component underlying the aging process and many disease states associated with aging.

While the exact biological mechanisms underlying impaired stem cell proliferation and …

Academic Digital Badges: Industry, Employment, And Prospects, Terry M. Mcgovern

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Digital badges are becoming more prevalent in the credentialing sector yet there is limited understanding of how the industry is developing or how digital badges influence the hiring process. This study employed an exploratory case method to make known the development of the badging industry. This dynamic new educational technology has a wide range of stakeholders working at establishing standards to ensure consistent and effective application across the badging ecosphere. To understand academic badging further, the researcher conducted a type of field experiment called a résumé audit study. In the late Spring of 2019, the investigator applied to 1,848 unique …

The Gentle Artist: Empowering Warrior-Scholars Through The Physical Feminism Of Jiu-Jitsu, E. Emily Mahoney

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an autoethnography about the socialization of people in various cultural contexts, in particular, women in the embodied role of the academic researcher. Being a researcher and enduring an experience of sexual assault right in the middle of my first research interview left me in a state of shock and survival. One out of every six American women will survive attempted or completed rape during her lifetime, with college-aged women being three to four times at increased risk compared to all women, yet the odds that this would take place during a project which had major implications for …