Digital Commons Network^™

Strain, Personality Traits, And Deviance Among Adolescents: Moderating Factors, Jennifer J. Wareham

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

General strain theory has received a fair amount of empirical support and theoretical elaboration over the past several years. Since the introduction of general strain theory, Agnew and others have attempted to increase the comprehensiveness of the processes involved in strain theory. Until recently, the general strain theory literature has ignored what Agnew and associates (Agnew, Brezina, Wright, & Cullen, 2002) argue may be one of the most important conditioning effects of the strain-crime relationship, namely the dispositions or personality traits of the individual experiencing strain. Recently, Agnew and associates (2002) published results from a study examining the conditioning effects …

Assessment Of Resource Selection Using Remote Sensing And Geographic Information Systems (Gis) For Two Vertebrates In Disparate Habitats: The Gopher Tortoise (Gopherus Polyphemus) And The North Atlantic Right Whale (Eubalaena Glacialis), Cherie A. Keller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a treatise on spatially-explicit resource selection on two very different vertebrate species. The North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) is the most endangered large whales in the world. Ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement are impediments to recovery. The gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) is an imperiled species whose upland habitats are shrinking from urban and agricultural development. Determining spatial distribution of important resources is important for conservation strategies. Historical and modern thinking of habitat selection theory and analytical techniques are reviewed and applied to these species. Fine-scale resource selection of sea surface temperature …

Organic Vapor Sensing Using High Frequency Thickness Shear Mode Resonators, Randolph Williams

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Thickness shear mode (TSM) sensors, also known as quartz crystal micro-balances (QCM) are a class of acoustic wave sensors that have been used for gas/vapor sensing. Fast and sensitive chemical vapor sensing, specifically of hydrocarbon vapors is an important application for these vapor sensors. The TSM sensors typically used have a lower sensitivity compared with other acoustic wave sensors. This thesis describes the development of high sensitivity organic vapor sensors using thin polymer film coatings on TSM devices. Commercially available AT-quartz TSM devices were milled leaving a thin quartz membrane surrounded by a thicker outer ring. This resulted in an …

A Web100-Dummynet Testbed For Education And Research In Transport Layer Protocols, Steven Bassi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With recent developments in technology broadening the complexity and performance issues of computer networks, more work is being put into studying the behavior of network protocols under various new environments. As it stands today, TCP is the dominant protocol for communicating over the Internet. It has been shown to be reliable and efficient in the relatively low-bandwidth networks it was designed for. With the increasing availability of high-speed optical, wireless, and ad hoc networks, more research is being done to study new TCP variants that will perform well under these new environments. In order to perform such work, researchers require …

One More River To Cross: The Therapeutic Rhetoric Of Race In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Nigel I. Malcolm

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The rhetoric of W.E.B. Du Bois contributed both to a sense of group failure among blacks and a sense of individual failure. Du Bois also created a need to explain the reasons for the failure of the group, as well as that of individuals within the group, specifically those within a segment of the black population deemed the talented tenth. Today the talented tenth is more generally spoken of as those occupying positions within the black middle class. Explanations for failure among blacks as a group are generally of two kinds. The first posits that the failure blacks experience as …

A Theoretical Description Of The Vibrational Sum Frequency Generation Spectroscopy Of Interfaces, Angela S. Perry

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Our work investigates theoretical approximations to the interface specific sum frequency generation (SFG) spectra at aqueous interfaces constructed using time correlation function (TCF) and instantaneous normal mode (INM) methods. Both approaches lead to signals in excellent agreement with experimental measurements. This work demonstrates how TCF and INM methods can be used in a complementary fashion to describe interfacial vibrational spectroscopy.

Our approach is to compare TCF spectra with experiment to establish that our molecular dynamics (MD) methods can reliably describe the system of interest. We then employ INM methods to analyze the molecular and dynamical basis for the observed spectroscopy. …

A Fuzzy Logic Based Controller To Provide End-To-End Congestion Control For Streaming Media Applications, Bay Pavlick

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The stability of the Internet is at risk if the amount of voice and video traffic continues to increase at the current pace. While current transport layer protocols do work well for most applications, they still present some problems. TCP is reliable, tracks the state of some network conditions and reacts drastically to an indication of congestion. TCP serves data-oriented applications very well but it can lead to unacceptably low quality for streaming applications by multiplicatively reducing the congestion window upon a sign of congestion. The other main transport layer protocol, UDP, provides good service for streaming applications but is …

Cervical Cancer Screening Disparities In An Ethnically Diverse Population Of Women Residing In The United States In 1999: A Secondary Analysis Of Data From The 1999 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, Chodaesessie Wellesley-Cole Morgan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Black American women have the highest screening rates for cervical cancer among all the ethnic groups in the United States. Even though evidence from the literature suggests that the number of deaths from cervical cancer in the United States could be reduced by preventive screening, this particular minority population still suffers disproportionately higher mortality from the disease than the other minority and majority populations in the United States. This study was proposed to investigate cancer screening disparities among different subpopulations of women residing in the United States during 1999, and to recommend public health interventions that could potentially increase cervical …

Analysis Of Statnamic Load Test Data Using A Load Shed Distribution Model, Sonia L. Lowry

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the field of civil engineering, particularly structural foundations, low-cost options and time saving construction methods are important because both can be a burden on the public. Drilled shafts have proven to both lower cost and shorten construction time for large-scale projects. However, their integrity as load-carrying foundations has been questioned. The statnamic load test was conceived in the 1980s as an alternative method of testing these larger, deeper foundation elements. Performing a load test verifies that the load carrying capacity of a foundation is agreeable with the estimated capacity during the design phase and that no significant anomalies occurred …

Effects Of Using Graphing Calculators With A Numerical Approach On Students’ Learning Of Limits And Derivatives In An Applied Calculus Course At A Community College, Arumugam Muhundan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the effects of using graphing calculators with a numerical approach designed by the researcher on students learning of limits and derivatives in an Applied Calculus course at a community college. The purposes of this study were to investigate the following: (1) students achievement in solving limit problems (Skills, Concepts, and Applications) with a numerical approach compared to that of students who solved limit problems with a traditional approach (primarily an algebraic approach); and (2) students achievement in solving derivative problems (Skills, Concepts, and Applications) with a numerical approach compared to that of students who solved derivative problems …

Topology, Morphisms, And Randomness In The Space Of Formal Languages, David E. Kephart

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper outlines and implements a systematic approach to the establishment, investigation, and testing of distances and topologies on language spaces. The collection of all languages over a given number of symbols forms a semiring, appropriately termed a language space. Families of languages are defined by interrelations among words. The traditional classification begins with the syntax rules or grammar of the language, that is, the word-transformations by which the entire language can be produced from a single axiom, or starting word. The study of distances between languages as objects and of the topologies induced by language distances upon spaces of …

Virtual Cadaver Navigation System: Using Virtual Reality For Learning Human Anatomy, Abhijit V. Lothe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The use of virtual reality (VR) for visualization can revolutionize medical training by simulating real world medical training procedures through intuitive and engaging user interface. Existing virtual reality based visualization systems for human anatomy are based on 3D surface and volumetric models and simulative systems based on model libraries. The visual impact as well as facilitation for learning are inadequate in such systems. This thesis research is aimed at eliminating such inadequacies by developing a non-immersive virtual reality system framework for storage, access and navigation of real human cadaveric data. Based on this framework, a real time software system called …

Negotiating Curricular Boundaries And Sexual Orientation: The Lived Experiences Of Gay Secondary Teachers In West Central Florida, Jr., James B Mayo Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is little known about the daily lives of gay teachers at school. Studies have been conducted in this area, but the wide range of individual life experiences makes it difficult to define the gay teacher experience. Gay teachers geographic location, gender, age,and race, are a few of those factors that will have a direct influence upon their lives.Therefore, I believe more focused, regional or case studies will yield better understandings of the lives that gay teachers lead at school.

Until now, no other study had investigated the lives of gay teachers in West Central Florida. I decided to focus …

Multi-Agent Workload Control And Flexible Job Shop Scheduling, Zuobao Wu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the make-to-order (MTO) industry, offering competitive due dates and on-time delivery for customer orders is important to the survival of MTO companies. Workload control is a production planning and control approach designed to meet the need of the MTO companies. In this dissertation, a multi-agent workload control methodology that simultaneously deals with due date setting, job release and scheduling is proposed to discourage job early or tardy completions. The earliness and tardiness objectives are consistent with the just-in-time production philosophy which has attracted significant attention in both industry and academic community. This methodology consists of the order entry agent, …

Measuring Transactional Distance In Online Courses: The Structure Component, Cheryl Sandoe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Online or web-based courses have become prolific in our educational environment over the past several years. The development of these courses can be guided by systematic design models to ensure quality instructional design. Transactional distance, the theory that claims the distance an online student feels is more of a pedagogical distance than a geographic one, consists of three factors: structure, dialogue, and learner autonomy. Accurate measurement of these three factors is needed in order to substantiate its claims and to best determine the delivery implications. This study produced an instrument that measures the structure component of the transactional distance theory …

Dissertations: Past, Present, And Future, Matthew D. Barton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Current policies and traditions regulating the dissertation process are responsible for a devaluation of dissertations and fail to recognize the economic and technological developments wrought by the emerging Internet. Some of the problems with the current process involve ideology, such as the insistence that dissertations be single-authored, original, and owned by someone. Others involve adherence to traditions that no longer serve a useful purpose, such as forcing authors to conform to a format better suited to a printed book than an online project. Finally, economical considerations such as the costs involved with purchasing and training authors to use advanced technology …

In Poland World War I Ended In 1923, Kazimierz Robak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Poland was erased from European political maps in 1795 and fought in vain for freedom for the next century, until World War I provided another chance for independence. On November 11, 1918, the creation of the Polish Republic was proclaimed, but in an atmosphere of uncertainty, particularly relative to frontiers.

The border with Germany was established in 1920-21 after plebiscites. While peaceful in Masuria, Ermland and Pomerania, there were three violent uprisings of the ethnic Poles in Upper Silesia. The status of Gdansk as a Free City was confirmed at Versailles in 1919. The Southern border with Czechoslovakia was settled …

Postmodern Narrativity In Absalom, Absalom! And Memento: Examining Telling Similarities In The Techniques Of William Faulkner And Christopher Nolan, Jessica Jain Williams

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper argues that narrative techniques in Absalom, Absalom! demonstrate Faulkners anticipation of postmodern thought and style. Similar techniques in Christopher Nolans film Memento serve to highlight how both writer and director confound the notion of master narrative by disrupting chronology and raising questions about the reliability of the narrators in each work. Nolan orders all events of the film in reverse while threading chronologically ordered events throughout to tell the story of Lennys murder investigation. Faulkner likewise uses "dischronology," such as flashbacks to tell the story of Thomas Sutpen. Both Faulkner and Nolan provide key information through questionable narrators …

Metallic To Insulating Transition In Disordered Pulsed Laser Deposited Silicide Thin Films, Houssam Abou Mourad

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A metal-to-insulating transition has been observed in iron, iron oxide, iron silicide and cobalt silicide thin films when deposited on Si substrate with a native SiOx layer. This transition produced a change in resistance of 5 orders of magnitude at a temperature of 250 K. To the best of the author's knowledge, this effect has not been reported in the literature prior to this study. This work reports a systematic experimental investigation carried out to understand the fundamental mechanism involved in the manifestation of this metal-to-insulator transition. The films were deposited using the pulsed laser deposition technique (PLD) in a …

Exhaled Breath Nitric Oxide: Is There A Baseline Difference Due To Ethnicity?, Sunita I. Patel M.D.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The air that humans exhale contains various chemical markers whose levels have been associated with various respiratory disorders. Therefore, measurement of these markers offers a potential method of examining airway disease status. Furthermore, exhaled breath offers the advantage of being easy to collect and non-invasive. Hence, these exhaled breath markers are potentially of significant clinical use in examining airways. Therefore, examination of exhaled breath has become the subject of intense study. Current research is targeting the development of methods and parameters for looking at these markers.

The goal of this cross-sectional pilot study was to consider the variability in the …

Ocean-Atmosphere Interactions On The West Florida Shelf, Jyotika I. Virmani

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ocean-atmosphere fluxes on the West Florida Shelf (WFS) coastal ocean region are investigated using observations and derived surface fluxes from an array of buoys deployed between 1998 and 2003. The observed annual cycle shows that water column temperatures increase and are stratified when heat flux is positive, and they decrease and are well mixed when it is negative. Water temperature is minimum (maximum) when heat flux switches sign from negative (positive) to positive (negative) in early spring (autumn). Tropical and extra-tropical events help define the seasonal characteristics of the water temperature. Despite considerable daily and synoptic variability in relative humidity, …

Incorporating Surficial Aquifer Ground-Water Fluxes Into Surface-Water Resource Management Studies, John Mccary

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For surface-water resource management studies, it is important to quantify all of the mechanisms that contribute to water quantity and influence water quality. In this regard, various methods have been used to ground-water fluxes in lake systems. These have included physical measurements (e.g., seepage meters), flow-net analyses, water budgets, chemical tracers, ground-water flow models, and statistical analyses. The method developed for this study for calculating ground-water inflow uses a simplified, 1-layer (surficial aquifer) ground-water flow model. The test area was on a set of lakes known as the Winter Haven Chain of Lakes in Polk County, Florida. The technique combines …

Effect Of Age On 11- To 18-Year-Olds’ Discrimination Of Nuances In Instrumental And Speech Phrase Interpretations, Andrew Sioberg

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation was a continuation of study on a theory of a learning window for the perception of expressive qualities in music and speech. The proposed theory suggested that a practice window must overlap a learning window before it closes around the age of 10. This dissertation sought to determine whether children older than the proposed learning window continued to improve in speech and musical discrimination skill, or leveled off in this ability. It also examined the impact of gender and private lesson experience on discrimination ability.

Instrumental music students (n = 292) attending a public magnet school for visual …

Detection Of Residual Stress In Multi-Crystalline Silicon Wafers Using Swept-Sine Frequency Response Data, Shawn R. Best

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents audible vibratory mode data obtained by mechanically exciting acoustic modes in mc-Si wafers grown by EFG technique with various levels and distributions of residual stress. Stress maps obtained using scanning infrared polariscopy are presented, illustrating the variation of residual stress.

Modal analyses of the wafers are performed using the finite element method and are in remarkably good agreement with the measured frequency response data. The calculated mode shapes were further validated through classic Chladni type patterns.

The vibratory data is found to correlate with the residual stress measurements. The data is fit with both linear and quadratic …

Sedimentation Patterns And Hydrodynamics Of A Wave-Dominated Tidal Inlet: Blind Pass, Florida, David K. Tidwell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Blind Pass, a heavily structured wave-dominated tidal inlet on the west central coast of Florida, has undergone substantial morphologic changes in the past 150 years. Initially Blind Pass was a mixed-energy inlet. In 1848 a hurricane opened a new inlet to the north called Johns Pass, which captured a large portion of the tidal prism of Blind Pass. Since then Blind Pass migrated southward until it was structurally stabilized in 1937. The decreasing tidal prism resulted in significant inlet channel filling. The channel has been dredged 12 times since 1937. The present inlet is stabilized by two jetties and a …

From Courtly Curiosity To Revolutionary Refreshment: Turkish Coffee And English Politics In The Seventeenth Century, Alexander Mirkovic

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Why was coffee so fashionable yet so divisive a political symbol during the latter half of the seventeenth century? Historians have offered several answers, including the suggestion that the nascent Orientalism generated its popularity. Undeniably seventeenth century England imported exotic commodities, including coffee and tea, and began to appropriate them for the English culture. Did that also imply maintaining the cultural superiority over the natives? I argue that coffee was symbolically transformed during the political and revolutionary turmoil of the seventeenth century. Coffee was first introduced in the early part of the century to the Stuart court where it was …

Biomechanical Evaluation Of Injury Severity Associated With Patient Falls From Bed, Bonnie E. Bowers

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The incidence of falls in the elderly population is a growing concern in the healthcare industry as associated morbidity is high, particularly morbidity associated with falls from bed. Bedrails were implemented as a device intended to reduce the incidence of falls from bed; however, recent evidence may indicate that bedrails contribute to adverse events including entrapment and entanglement. As such, efforts have been made to reduce the use of bedrails and implement alternatives including height adjustable beds and floor mats. An instrumented anthropomorphic test dummy was used in the current study to measure the deceleration profiles of the head, thorax, …

Experience And Inquiry In John Dewey’S Contextualism, Christopher C. Kirby

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper will focus on two elements, viz. experience and inquiry, which are central to John Deweys philosophy and their relation to the movement known as pragmatism. Although each of these concepts has received extensive treatment by other schools of thought, the pragmatists, and particularly Dewey, did much to redefine each in hopes of alleviating the tension between conflicting philosophical viewpoints. An explication of Deweys view on experience is the first step in understanding his application of the pragmatic method towards reconstructing philosophical thinking. Therefore, this paper will explore the meaning that Dewey gave to each and how that meaning …

Pervasive Sensing And Computing For Natural Disaster Mitigation, Daniel H. Quintela

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research proposed the use of state-of-the-art wireless communications and networked embedded systems technologies to provide environmental sensing for the early detection of natural disasters. The data is acquired, processed and transmitted, from the location where the disaster originates, to potentially threatened conurbations in order to promptly notify the population. The acquired data is transformed from its raw form into information that can be utilized by local authorities to rapidly assess emergency situations and then to apply disaster management procedures. Alternatively, the system can generate alerting signals without human intervention. Furthermore, recorded historical data can be made available for scientists …

More Than Man’S Best Friend: A Look At Attachment Between Humans And Their Canine Companions, Samantha E. Kennedy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, there are currently more than 60 million pet dogs in the United States. This is an increase of nearly eighteen percent since 1991, coinciding with a growing area of research on human’s relationships with companion animals and companion animals’ place in society.

For years dogs have been thought of as “man’s best friend” because of their loyalty and faithfulness. The increasing popularity of activities such as canine daycare and puppy school suggests that dogs have become more than a best friend to some and even an integral part of the American family unit. …