Digital Commons Network^™

The Effect Of Doing Good: An Experimental Analysis Of The Influence Of Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives On Beliefs, Attitudes, And Behavioral Intentions, Cristina Marta Gonzalez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to further current theory-driven research in public relations by examining the influence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives on beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral intentions. Specifically, CSR initiatives identified by Kotler and Lee (2005) were tested using Fishbein and Ajzen’s (1975, 2005) theory of reasoned action to determine their influences on individual’s belief, attitudes, and behavioral intentions toward an organization and its products. This area of inquiry is particularly relevant for public relations scholars and practitioners since creating awareness of CSR practices among key stakeholders requires accurate and timely communication.

A controlled experiment utilizing a …

Learning On Complex Simulations, Robert E. Banfield

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores Machine Learning in the context of computationally intensive simulations. Complex simulations such as those performed at Sandia National Laboratories for the Advanced Strategic Computing program may contain multiple terabytes of data. The amount of data is so large that it is computationally infeasible to transfer between nodes on a supercomputer. In order to create the simulation, data is distributed spatially. For example, if this dissertation was to be broken apart spatially, the binding might be one partition, the first fifty pages another partition, the top three inches of every remaining page another partition, and the remainder confined …

Evanescent Field Absorption Sensing Using Sapphire Fibers, Michael Grossman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the application of coiled sapphire multimode optical fibers for evanescent wave chemical sensing in both the visible spectrum and the near infrared. As has been suggested in the literature pertaining to silica fibers, bending converts low-order modes to high order ones, which leads to more evanescent absorption and thus a more sensitive chemical detector. By coiling the fiber many times, it was expected that even greater sensitivity would be attained.

Experiments were performed to investigate the sensor response to different solutions and to characterize this response. In the first of three experiments, the large absorption peak of …

Natural Law Ethics: A Comparison Of The Theravāda And Thomistic Traditions, David Lantigua

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the topic of natural law in the Therav

āda and Thomistic traditions by utilizing the methodology of comparative religious ethics. Approaches to the method such as ethical formalism, ethical naturalism, and narrative ethics are assessed with the author opting for a multidimensional approach that is religious and ethical. This multidimensional approach, as defined by William Schweiker, conducts natural law inquiry from a hermeneutical standpoint of moral diversity and democratic pluralism.

The hermeneutical standpoint warrants a historicizing of natural law ethics that is compatible with modern secularity instead of a classicist metaphysical worldview. To achieve this task, the …

Sexy Sensationalism Case Study: The Fascination With Celebrity News And Why Usa Today Caters To The Obsession, Grant Edward Boxleitner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the digital age where newspapers compete with the Internet, cable TV and other publications for an audience, USA Today strives to stay relevant in the media with a daily dose of celebrity news. Newspapers continue to lose circulation during a time when the fascination with celebrities shows no signs of dwindling. This study explores how much celebrity news coverage USA Today gives readers, how much competition from other outlets plays a factor and whether the nation's largest newspaper is making a sacrifice of traditional forms of newspaper content in favor of celebrity coverage. The methodology for this qualitative case …

I'M Not Who I Was Then, Now: Performing Identity In Girl Cams And Blogs, Katherine Bzura

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The task of documenting the evolution of the self over time has been attempted by women artists throughout history. The practice of this documentation has been greatly enhanced in the last several years by the progression of new technologies for the capture of digital images, the advent of the internet as a common textual and visual communication device, and the availability of free resources to publish and disseminate the resulting constructions. Women artists now have the tools needed to document the life of the self, and to publish it immediately to an audience.

Most of the women documenting their lives …

Hurricane Forecasting, Warning And Response Systems: A Lake Wales Public Perception Study, April E. Raulerson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates the public perception of hurricane forecasting and warning systems with a view to improving response activities. The hazard literature shows that the effectiveness of such systems is contingent upon on the smooth operation of all components of the system and that warning recipients fully understand the implications of the warning message by taking appropriate action. It is argued that public perception of warning systems will vary depending on various socio-demographic factors, such as age, gender, level of education, socioeconomic status and area, factors that will ultimately influence overall effectiveness. To test this, a questionnaire survey was undertaken …

The Rise Of Clostridium Difficile In Florida, Owen Bendixsen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that causes diarrhea in hospitalized patients, is on the rise in the United States as well as in other countries. This study was done to determine the extent of the problem in Florida's acute care hospitals. The Agency for Healthcare Administration (AHCA) provided data for patients discharged from Florida's acute care hospitals for the years 1998 through 2004.

This study will focus on changes in the prevalence of Clostridium difficile associated disease (CDAD) over time. The mortality and morbidity of patients that have CDAD will also be examined to show if the disease is increasing …

Naming And Inhibition In Aphasia, Lori R. Bartels-Tobin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Lexical retrieval models illustrate both activation and inhibition between concepts, words, and phonemes. When semantic activation spreads from one concept to its related concepts, inhibition is recruited so that competition between related concepts can be overcome and a target production achieved. Persons with aphasia often exhibit difficulty with producing the desired response, which could be the result of inadequate inhibitory processes to overcome response competition.

Inhibitory processing is typically measured using a negative priming task. Twenty participants with aphasia, twenty-five young participants, and twenty age-matched aphasia group controls were recruited for this study. Participants with aphasia completed a picture-naming task, …

The Influence Of Dialect On The Perception Of Final Consonant Voicing, Stacy Nicole Kile

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Children at risk for reading problems also have difficulty perceiving critical

differences in speech sounds (Breier et al., 2004; Edwards, Fox, & Rogers, 2003; de-

Gelder & Vroomen, 1998). These children rely more heavily on context than the acoustic

qualities of sound to facilitate word reading. Dialect use, such as African American

English (AAE) may influence literacy development in similar ways. Dialect use has been

shown to affect speech sound processing and can even result in spelling errors (Kohler, et

al., in press). The purpose of this study is to determine if children who speak AAE

process cues indicative of …

Making Sense Of Complex System Failure: The Case Of 9/11, Sandra M. Cooper

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks attributed the September 11 attacks on the U.S. homeland to the terrorists' exploitation of "deep institutional failings." These findings are similar to the conclusions of the Presidential Commission investigating the 1986 Challenger accident and the Columbia Accident Investigative Board (2003). Generally Commissions aim to provide the fullest possible account of events contributing to the catastrophe under investigation and to identify lessons learned, but avoid specifying responsibility and accountability. For this reason, various commission reports have been criticized for being abstract and shallow. These criticisms make a valid point. How commissions make sense of failures …

Government Public Relations: A Quantitative Assessment Of Government Public Relations Practitioner Roles And Public Relations Model Usage, Joelle Wiley Castelli

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study attempts to identify how public relations are practiced in local governments. Traditional literature has stated that the public information model of public relations is the model of public relations practiced in local governments. This study also attempts to determine which roles are most common for lead communicators in municipal organizations governments. Based on Internet survey research methods, research findings indicated that while most practitioners stated they practiced a two-way communications model, they had the most expertise in the public information and press agentry models. The researcher also found that the role most often held by the highest ranking …

The Role Of Computer-Mediated Communication In Non-Native Speakers’ Acquisition Of Academic Literacy, Rui Cheng

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research shows that academic literacy is discipline specific. Students have to learning the ways of communication in order to gain access to the discourse community of the selected discipline through understanding and performing required genres and learning necessary disciplinary knowledge. Scaffolding is important in the process to help students internalize the disciplinary knowledge and improve students' performance on academic papers. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) provides good chances of scaffolding and mediation especially for non-native graduate students who may have lost many opportunities of class participation due to their limited language proficiency or other cultural issues.

In this dissertation, the researcher investigated …

An Unexplored Realm In The Heartland Of The Southern Gulf Olmec: Investigations At El Marquesillo, Veracruz, Mexico, Travis F. Doering

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines El Marquesillo, a settlement in an archaeologically unexplored region of the Southern Gulf Lowlands of Veracruz, Mexico. Evidence suggests the site has been consistently occupied from the Early Formative period (c. 1500 BC) to the present. Thus, this investigation presents an opportunity to re-examine the sociopolitical continuum encompassing the Olmec cultural phenomenon (c. 1150-300 BC), the emergence of which has been used repeatedly as an example of incipient social complexity.

Theorists have portrayed the development of sociopolitical complexity as a mosaic process in which environmental, social, political, economic, ideological, and demographic variables act independently or in combination …

Maximizing Manipulation Capabilities Of Persons With Disabilities Using A Smart 9-Degree-Of-Freedom Wheelchair-Mounted Robotic Arm System, Redwan M. Alqasemi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Physical and cognitive disabilities make it difficult or impossible to perform simple personal or job-related tasks. The primary objective of this research and development effort is to assist persons with physical disabilities to perform activities of daily living (ADL) using a smart 9-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) modular wheelchair-mounted robotic arm system (WMRA).

The combination of the wheelchair's 2-DoF mobility control and the robotic arm's 7-DoF manipulation control in a single control mechanism allows people with disabilities to do many activities of daily living (ADL) tasks that are otherwise hard or impossible to accomplish. Different optimization methods for redundancy resolution are explored and …

The Constructions Of Fay Weldon, Woman Of Letters, Harriet Blymiller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary British novelist Fay Weldon negotiates the postmodern "culture industry" as the self-conscious heir to a traditon of women writers dating back to the Middle Ages. Like her predecessors, Weldon defensively and offensively negotiates ideological constructions of womanhood, including injunctions to chastity, modesty, and silence; prohibitions against formal education for women; disdain for the literary production and commercial success of women writers; and the application of double standards in the critical reception of their works. Modernizing the strategies traditionally deployed by women writers, Weldon engages with the advertising industry and the mass-oriented literature of radio and television, using them to …

Academic Capitalism In The Social Sciences: Faculty Responses To The Entrepreneurial University, Deanna Barcelona Bullard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study explores how faculty in the social sciences experience and respond to academic capitalism. Academic capitalism is about market and market-like activity at the university and professorial efforts to secure external money. This research expands existing literature which has focused on the hard or natural sciences, and other areas more closely aligned with the market.

Thirty-seven qualitative research interviews were conducted between March and July of 2006 with professors of sociology, criminology, economics at the University of Florida, Florida State University, and the University of South Florida. Results reveal academic capitalism in the social sciences is mostly about grant …

Prevalence Of Language Disorders Among Children With Severe Behavioral Problems Referred For A Psychiatric Evaluation By A Large Urban School District, Brenda J. Curtwright

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the language skills and behavior characteristic of 63 students with severe behavior disorders who were referred by a large, mostly urban school district for a neuropsychiatric evaluation between 2001 and 2005. Archival data were retrieved by chart review for this study and was used to answer the following questions: 1) What is the prevalence of language disorders in children referred for a psychiatric evaluation? 2) Do behavioral symptoms vary among children with and without a language disorder? and 3) What is the initial area of concern identified by the parents of children with language and behavior disorders? …

Tunable Patch Antenna Using Semiconductor And Nano-Scale Barium Strontium Titanate Varactors, Samuel Andrew Baylis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Patch antennas are fundamental elements in many microwave communications systems. However, patch antennas receive/transmit signals over a very narrow bandwidth (typically a maximum of 3% bandwidth). Design modifications directed toward bandwidth expansion generally yield 10% to 40% bandwidth.

The series varactor tuned patch antenna configuration was the bandwidth enhancement method explored in this research; this configuration is implemented by dividing a patch antenna into multiple sections and placing varactors across the resultant gaps. In addition to yielding a large bandwidth, the configuration has a number of ancillary benefits, including straightforward integration and design flexibility. Through the research represented by this …

The Role Of Ethnic Compatibility In Attitude Formation: Marketing To America’S Diverse Consumers, Cynthia Rodriguez Cano

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the meaning of advertising through the eyes of the Hispanic consumer and how that meaning is apparent in attitudes and purchase intention. Specifically, the study investigates how ethnic minorities judge print advertisement that feature ethnically diverse models as communication cues. For the first time, data of how minorities evaluate the compatibility of models from different ethnic groups featured together in an advertisement was collected. Qualitative data was collected from Hispanics and typologies of cultural pointers for Hispanics and African-Americans developed. Experimental design, 3x2 within-group analysis, was conducted to test the 14 hypothesized relationships. Finding clearly support the …

Factors Associated With School-Based Mental Health Services Delivered By School Psychologists, Emily Luis Cimino

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine factors that relate to the delivery of mental health services by school psychologists using a national database. The relationship between school psychologists' demographic, preparation, and professional context factors (e.g., gender, ethnicity, educational level, percentage of minority students served, years of experience, and students to school psychologist ratio), and the types of mental health services delivered, amount of time invested in such services, and the desirability of school psychologists to provide or not to provide mental health services was addressed. In addition, the percentages of school psychologists who deliver mental health services and …

Improved Techniques For Nonlinear Electrothermal Fet Modeling And Measurement Validation, Charles Passant Baylis Ii

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Accurate transistor models are important in wireless and microwave circuit design. Large-signal field-effect transistor (FET) models are generally extracted from current-voltage (IV) characteristics, small-signal S-parameters, and large-signal measurements. This dissertation describes improved characterization and measurement validation techniques for FET models that correctly account for thermal and trapping effects.

Demonstration of a customized pulsed-bias, pulsed-RF S-parameter system constructed by the author using a traditional vector network analyzer is presented, along with the design of special bias tees to allow pulsing of the bias voltages. Pulsed IV and pulsed-bias S-parameter measurements can provide results that are electrodynamically accurate; that is, thermal and …

Falling In Love As A Heuristic For Mate Choice Decisions, Monica D. Burke

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Selecting a mate is one of the most important and complex decisions that we make in our lives. Research on human decision making has found that we often use simple rules of thumb or heuristics to facilitate complex decision-making tasks (e.g., Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999; Kahneman & Tversky, 1972, 1973; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, 1983). Recent research has focused on the use of affect or emotion as heuristics that have a strong influence on a variety of decision making contexts (Damasio, 1994; Finucane, Peters, & Slovic, 2003; Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001; Mellers, 2000). The emotion we most closely …

Simd Algorithms For Single Link And Complete Link Pattern Clustering, Shankar Arumugavelu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Clustering techniques play an important role in exploratory pattern analysis, unsupervised pattern recognition and image segmentation applications. Clustering algorithms are computationally intensive in nature. This thesis proposes new parallel algorithms for Single Link and Complete Link hierarchical clustering. The parallel algorithms have been mapped on a SIMD machine model with a linear interconnection network. The model consists of a linear array of N (number of patterns to be clustered) processing elements (PEs), interfaced to a host machine and the interconnection network provides inter-PE and PE-to-host/host-to-PE communication. For single link clustering, each PE maintains a sorted list of its first logN …

The Relationship Between Young Adults' Retrospective Perceptions Of Differential Parental Treatment, Quality Of The Childhood And Current Sibling Relationship And Current Psychological Adjustment, Tangela R. Clark Culpepper

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the relations among young adults' perceptions of differential parental treatment, temperamental style, attitudes toward their childhood and current sibling relationships, and psychological adjustment. Participants included 87 college students and their siblings between the ages of 18 and 25 years. Students completed measures in small groups, and siblings completed the surveys via mail. The data were analyzed using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM; Kashy & Kenny, 1999). Results revealed that participants' perceptions of their sibling relationship during childhood were related to their current attitudes toward the relationship. In addition, siblings were in agreement regarding their overall attitudes toward …

Expansion And Validation Of The Political Skill Inventory (Psi): An Examination Of The Link Between Charisma, Political Skill, And Performance, David R. Coole

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The present research was developed to reexamine the factor structure of the Political Skill Inventory (PSI), expand upon the political skill behavioral taxonomy to include charisma, and provide validity evidence for both the PSI and our new measure of charisma. In study one, using a large undergraduate student sample, confirmatory factor analysis provided evidence for a three factor structure of political skill. Charisma and networking ability were identified as unique factors of the political skill construct domain while PSI dimensions of social astuteness, interpersonal influence, and apparent sincerity collapsed to form a single dimension. Study One results also indicated a …

A Compositional Approach To Asynchronous Design Verification With Automated State Space Reduction, Jared Ahrens

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Model checking is the most effective means of verifying the correctness of asynchronous designs, and state space exploration is central to model checking. Although model checking can achieve very high verification coverage, the high degree of concurrency in asynchronous designs often leads to state explosion during state space exploration. To inhibit this explosion, our approach builds on the ideas of compositional verification. In our approach, a design modeled in a high level description is partitioned into a set of parallel components. Before state space exploration, each component is paired with an over-approximated environment to decouple it from the rest of …

An Investigation Of Community College Students’ Perceptions Of Elements Necessary For Success In Online Study, Jenette Flow

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Previous studies by professionals in education have investigated the elements that are typical of the successful online student. Studies of the elements required for academic success online from the students' point of view, however, are infrequent.

This study investigated student perceptions of those elements necessary for success in online study; whether students believed differences exist between those elements necessary for success in online study and those necessary for success in traditional classes; and what factors students identify as barriers to successful completion of online courses. A comparison was made of the viewpoints of students who had and who had not …

Channel, Spectrum, And Waveform Awareness In Ofdm-Based Cognitive Radio Systems, Tevfik Yücek

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The radio spectrum is becoming increasingly congested everyday with emerging technologies and with the increasing number of wireless devices. Considering the limited bandwidth availability, accommodating the demand for higher capacity and data rates is a challenging task, requiring innovative technologies that can offer new ways of exploiting the available radio spectrum. Cognitive radio arises to be a tempting solution to the spectral crowding problem by introducing the notion of opportunistic spectrum usage. Because of its attractive features, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been successfully used in numerous wireless standards and technologies. We believe that OFDM will play an important …

Highbrow: A Context Enabled Highlighting Browser, Ronald J. Zucker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the World Wide Web continues to grow, more and more information is retrieved online. A person visiting a Web site has a choice of whether to skip, skim, deep read, bookmark for later revisiting, print a document, or any combination of these options. Recently, several tools have been developed to allow users to digitally annotate Web documents. These tools allow users to highlight, make text notes, and scrape information (a form of copy and paste). This dissertation introduces a new form of annotating, called context highlighting. Context highlighting is the ability to mark the text that surrounds keywords or …