Digital Commons Network^™

Risky Predictions, Damn Strange Coincidences, And Theory Appraisal: A Multivariate Corroboration Index For Path Analytic Models, Kristine Y. Hogarty

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The empirical testing of theories is an important component of research in any field. Yet despite the long history of science, the extent to which theories are supported or contradicted by the results of empirical research remains ill defined. Quite commonly, support or contradiction is based solely on the "reject" or "fail to reject" decisions that result from tests of null hypotheses that are derived from aspects of theory. Decisions and recommendations based on this forced and often artificial dichotomy have been scrutinized in the past.

In recent years, such an overly simplified approach to theory testing has been vigorously …

An Archaeological Study Of Architectural Form And Function At Indian Key, Florida, Kelly A. Driscoll

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Indian Key Historic State Park is a small island located on the Atlantic Ocean side of the Florida Keys, near Islamorada. Before it was bought by the state of Florida in 1970, Indian Key had been the setting for a number of historically significant activities. The most well known of these is the 1840 raid on the people and buildings that made up a small wrecking village, established on the island by Jacob Housman in the early 1830s. The limestone foundations of these structures are the main attraction to today's visitor to the park.

There is more to the story …

Small And Large Signal Modeling Of Mm-Wave Mhemt Devices, William, Clausen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research effort advances millimeter-wave transistor modeling in a current RF/Microwave circuit simulator (Agilent's Advanced Design System-ADS) for small-signal noise and large signal simulations. The device modeled is a metamorphic High Electron Mobility Transistor (mHEMT) supplied by Raytheon RF components. Because of their structure, these new low noise devices are used in this work to test the abilities to accurately model in the sub 0.5dB noise figure territory and to study model prediction into W-band (75-110 GHz).

New modeling issues discussed in this thesis involve the effects of noise modeling in relation to the small-signal model parameters. The noise modeling …

Effect Sizes, Significance Tests, And Confidence Intervals: Assessing The Influence And Impact Of Research Reporting Protocol And Practice, Melinda Rae Hess

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study addresses research reporting practices and protocols by bridging the gap from the theoretical and conceptual debates typically found in the literature with more realistic applications using data from published research. Specifically, the practice of using findings of statistical analysis as the primary, and often only, basis for results and conclusions of research is investigated through computing effect size and confidence intervals and considering how their use might impact the strength of inferences and conclusions reported.

Using a sample of published manuscripts from three peer-rviewed journals, central quantitative findings were expressed as dichotomous hypothesis test results, point estimates of …

Fpga-Based Implementation Of Concatenative Speech Synthesis Algorithm, Praveen Kumar Bamini

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The main aim of a text-to-speech synthesis system is to convert ordinary text into an acoustic signal that is indistinguishable from human speech. This thesis presents an architecture to implement a concatenative speech synthesis algorithm targeted to FPGAs. Many current text-to-speech systems are based on the concatenation of acoustic units of recorded speech. Current concatenative speech synthesizers are capable of producing highly intelligible speech. However, the quality of speech often suffers from discontinuities between the acoustic units, due to contextual differences. This is the easiest method to produce synthetic speech. It concatenates prerecorded acoustic elements and forms a continuous speech …

Crystal Engineering Of Binary Compounds Containing Pharmaceutical Molecules, Leslie Ann Morales

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The synthesis or the interaction between two or more molecules is known as supramolecular chemistry. The concept of supramolecular chemistry can be applied to the design of new pharmaceutical materials affording new compositions of matter with desirable composition, structure and properties.

The design of a two-molecule, or binary, compound using complementary molecules represents an example of an application of crystal engineering. Crystal engineering is the understanding of intermolecular interactions, in the context of crystal packing, in the design of new solid materials. By identifying reliable connectors through molecular recognition or self-assembly, one can build predictable architectures.

The study of supramolecular …

Cvd Growth Of Sic On Novel Si Substrates, Rachael L. Myers

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Silicon Carbide has been a semiconductor material of interest as a high power and temperature replacement for Silicon (Si) in harsh environments due to the higher thermal conductivity and chemical stability of SiC. The cost, however, to produce this material is quite high. There are also defects in the substrate material (SiC) that penetrate into the active devices layers which are known device killers. Silicon is a material that provides a low cost substrate material for epitaxial growth and does not contain the defects that SiC substrates have. However, the large (~22%) lattice mismatch between Si and SiC creates dislocations …

Bullying And Victimization In Middle School: The Role Of Individual Characteristics, Family Functioning, And School Contexts, Christine Marie Wienke Totura

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The present study examined the relationship between individual, family, and school variables and both bullying and victimization. Approximately equal numbers of males and females (N = 1185 and 1174, respectively) were randomly selected from classrooms in 11 middle schools across 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. Students completed questionnaires including items from each domain. Questionnaires assessed bullying and victimization, internalizing and externalizing behaviors, family factors, and school variables. In addition, teachers of the selected classrooms completed a brief rating scale on each of the students, which assessed student moodiness, behavioral difficulties, and learning problems. Achievement and discipline records data were obtained. …

Congruence Among Mathematics Skills Used On The Job By Practical Nurses Vs. The Prerequisite Skills Required For Admission Into The Practical Nursing Program, G H. Clary

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The standard for evaluating a student's mathematic ability (grade level) for admission to many vocational-technical programs is through the administration of the Tests of Adult Basic Education (TABE). There has come forth a concern from vocational educators, that students entering programs may not be prepared for the mathematics required by the curriculum, even though the student has met the criteria for entry as established by the state curriculum frameworks as evidenced by their scores on a TABE which had recently been administered. Furthermore, questions raised among instructional, administrative and guidance personnel about the congruence of math skills required on the …

Force-Directed Instruction Scheduling For Low Power, Prashant Dongale

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The increasing need for low-power computing devices has led to the efforts to optimize power in all the components of a system. It is possible to achieve significant power optimization at the software level through instruction reordering during the compilation phase. In this thesis, we have designed and implemented a novel instruction scheduling technique, called FD-ISLP, aimed at reducing the software power consumption. In the proposed approach for instruction scheduling, we modify the force-directed scheduling technique used in high-level synthesis of VLSI circuits to derive a latency-constrained algorithm that reorders the instructions in a basic block of assembly code in …

The Effects Of Citizenship Performance, Task Performance, And Rating Format On Performance Judgments, David R. Coole

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current study examined the effects of citizenship performance, task performance, and rating format on overall and task performance ratings. Levels of citizenship performance (high, medium, low), task performance (high, medium, low), and rating format (inclusion or exclusion of citizenship performance) were experimentally manipulated in a 3x3x2 between-subjects full factorial design. Ratings were provided by 360 undergraduate psychology students evaluating experimentally developed supervisory logs of first line financial managers. Targets' levels of citizenship and task performance were positively related to raters' judgments of overall and task performance. The prediction that this relationship would be moderated by task performance level was …

Signs Of Life: Rediscovering Nineteenth Century Indian Key Through Glass Analysis, Alexis Broadbent Sykes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Archaeological investigations of Indian Key Historic State Park in the Florida Keys have uncovered a wide range of historical artifacts from throughout the nineteenth century that reveal how the site was reused and reoccupied through time. This thesis focuses on the glass component recovered from a house cistern complex (Feature F) and a warehouse (Features A and C) during the 1998 to 2002 field seasons. Glass artifacts range from a variety of bottle glass including alcohol bottles and proprietary medicines, to cut glass such as tumblers and decanters, to window glass.

Feature F's analysis has shown that it maintained a …

Coge1.5Se1.5 : Structural And Transport Properties Characterization, Randolph Ertenberg

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Skutterudites have been of great interest for thermoelectric applications over the last ten years. Scientific interest has focused on the unique transport properties Skutterudites possess due to the unique crystal structure. Technical interest has grown since it was discovered that some compounds rival the current best thermoelectric materials. To further the understanding of this material system, and optimize its thermoelectric properties, the synthesis and characterization of polycrystalline n- and ptype CoGe1.5Se1.5 was undertaken. Structural, morphological, chemical, electrical, thermal and magnetic properties were studied. These data are compared to those of the binary Skutterudite CoSb3. The results of this study show …

Energy And Transient Power Minimization During Behavioral Synthesis, Saraju P. Mohanty

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The proliferation of portable systems and mobile computing platforms has increased the need for the design of low power consuming integrated circuits. The increase in chip density and clock frequencies due to technology advances has made low power design a critical issue. Low power design is further driven by several other factors such as thermal considerations and environmental concerns. In low-power design for battery driven portable applications, the reduction of peak power, peak power differential, average power and energy are equally important. In this dissertation, we propose a framework for the reduction of these parameters through datapath scheduling at behavioral …

Vector Flow Model In Video Estimation And Effects Of Network Congestion In Low Bit-Rate Compression Standards, Balaji Ramadoss

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The use of digitized information is rapidly gaining acceptance in bio-medical applications. Video compression plays an important role in the archiving and transmission of different digital diagnostic modalities. The present scheme of video compression for low bit-rate networks is not suitable for medical video sequences. The instability is the result of block artifacts resulting from the block based DCT coefficient quantization. The possibility of applying deformable motion estimation techniques to make the video compression standard (H.263) more adaptable for bio-medial applications was studied in detail. The study on the network characteristics and the behavior of various congestion control mechanisms was …

Historical Archaeology Of The Indian Key (8mo15) Warehouse: An Analysis Of Nineteenth-Century Ceramics, Lisa Nicole Lamb

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes the archaeological investigation of the Warehouse Complex on Indian Key (8MO15), Monroe County, Florida, through the study of the ceramics recovered from excavations conducted there by the State of Florida from 1972 to 1973 and by the University of South Florida from 1998 to 2002. The Warehouse Complex is composed of two distinct architectural areas, referred to as Feature A and Feature C. This complex lies on the north shore of Indian Key, located in the Atlantic Ocean in the Middle Keys near Islamorada, Florida. The town of Indian Key was founded in the early 1820s, and …

Matlab Implementation Of Gsm Traffic Channel, Nikhil Deshpande

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The GSM platform is a extremely successful wireless technology and an unprecedented story of global achievement. The GSM platform is growing and evolving and offers an expanded and feature-rich voice and data enabling services. General Packet Radio Service, (GPRS), will have a tremendous transmission rate, which will make a significant impact on most of the existing services. Additionally, GPRS stands ready for the introduction of new services as operators and users, both business and private, appreciate the capabilities and potential that GPRS provides. Services such as the Internet, videoconferencing and on-line shopping will be as smooth as talking on the …

Implementation Of An Acoustic Echo Canceller Using Matlab, Srinivasaprasath Raghavendran

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The rapid growth of technology in recent decades has changed the whole dimension of communications. Today people are more interested in hands-free communication. In such a situation, the use a regular loudspeaker and a high-gain microphone, in place of a telephone receiver, might seem more appropriate. This would allow more than one person to participate in a conversation at the same time such as a teleconference environment. Another advantage is that it would allow the person to have both hands free and to move freely in the room. However, the presence of a large acoustic coupling between the loudspeaker and …

University Copyright Policies For Online Coures: An Evaluative Resource Tool For Unbundling Rights Of Use, Control, And Revenue, Tamara A. Patzer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Who cares about who owns online courses? Nobody, because that is not what the issue is really about. Ownership is an emotional issue, but controlling the rights of a copyrightable work is tangible and logical. The important question to answer is not who owns online courses, but who controls the rights of any copyrightable work. For universities and faculty members, getting over the emotional issues and down to the foundation of what is truly at stake is of major concern. While it is nearly impossible to create qualitative guidelines for copyright policies and/or contracts, it is eminently possible to examine …

Gender Differences In Alcohol Expectancies: Influence Of Context And Specificity Of Items, Andrea Hope Weinberger

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Studies of alcohol expectancies have been equivocal regarding the existence of gender differences. A review of past studies suggested variables that could be useful for future studies such as investigating context-specific expectancies. The current study was designed to investigate the influence of context and item content on gender differences in expectancies. Undergraduate students who reported going to bars once a month or more (N = 321) completed an expectancy measure either while imagining themselves in a bar situation (Context condition) or with no contextual instructions (No Context condition). The expectancy measure consisted of expectancies that were "general" (Social and Tension …

High Level Techniques For Leakage Power Estimation Andoptimization In Vlsi Asics, Chandramouli Gopalakrishnan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As technology scales down and CMOS circuits are powered by lower supply voltages, standby leakage current becomes significant. A behavioral level framework for the synthesis of data-paths with low leakage power is presented. There has been minimal work done on the behavioral synthesis of low leakage datapaths. We present a fast architectural simulator for leakage (FASL) to estimate the leakage power dissipated by a system described hierarchically in VHDL. FASL uses a leakage power model embedded into VHDL leafcells. These leafcells are characterized for leakage accurately using HSPICE. We present results which show that FASL measures leakage power significantly faster …

Dry Sliding Tribological Characteristics Of Hard, Flat Materials With Low Surface Roughness, Subrahmanya Mudhivarthi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on identifying hard material pairs with low roughness, high coefficient of static friction, high wear resistance and high modulus of elasticity, suitable for sliding in dry friction conditions under a normal load. A wide range of materials including various steels, various coatings on tool steels deposited by various deposition techniques and different ceramics were examined and considered for tribological testing. Procedures and sequences were developed for conducting tribology tests on the material pairs. High endurance - low cycle tests were conducted and based on the performance of material pairs with respect to friction, wear and surface roughness …

Diversity And Production Of Phytoplankton In The Offshore Mississippi River Plume And Coastal Environments, Boris Wawrik

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

River discharge leads to extensive phytoplankton blooms often observed in ocean color satellite images to extend far into the open ocean as high chlorophyll plumes. We investigated diversity, distribution and ecology of phytoplankton populations in the Mississippi River plume, both spatially and in the water column using molecular tools. A method was developed for the quantification of diatom/pelagophyte rbcL (large subunit of Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate Carboxylase/Oxygenase) mRNA using quantitative PCR and applied to cultures and in the plume. The vertical structure of phytoplankton species in the Mississippi River plume was described by flow cytometry, pigments, rbcL mRNA and rbcL cDNA libraries. High …

Design And Performance Evaluation Of A New Spatial Reuse Firewire Protocol, Vijay Chandramohan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

New generations of video surveillance systems are expected to possess a large-scale network of intelligent video cameras with built-in image processing capabilities. These systems need to be tethered for reasons of bandwidth and power requirements. To support economical installation of video cameras and to manage the huge volume of information flow in these networks, there is a need for new shared-medium daisy-chained physical and medium access control (bus arbitration) layer communication protocols.

This thesis describes the design principles of Spatial reuse FireWire Protocol (SFP), a novel request/grant bus arbitration protocol, architected for an acyclic daisy-chained network topology. SFP is a …

Cross-Cultural Measurement Invariance Of Work/Family Conflict Scales Across English-Speaking Samples, David Evan Loran Herst

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The factor structure of the work/family conflict scale developed by Carlson, Kacmar, & Williams (2000) was analyzed for measurement invariance between a US and an Australian/New Zealand (ANZ) sample using a multisample confirmatory factor analysis procedure. Results indicated that factor pattern fit between the female samples on the common model was good-to-mediocre, and factor pattern fit between the male samples and the common model was mediocre-to-poor. Both samples exhibited significant changes in chi square when testing for the more restrictive factor loading equivalence. Partial measurement invariance revealed a better fit between the male samples when three of the items were …

Graph-Theoretic Techniques For Web Content Mining, Adam Schenker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation we introduce several novel techniques for performing data mining on web documents which utilize graph representations of document content. Graphs are more robust than typical vector representations as they can model structural information that is usually lost when converting the original web document content to a vector representation. For example, we can capture information such as the location, order and proximity of term occurrence, which is discarded under the standard document vector representation models. Many machine learning methods rely on distance computations, centroid calculations, and other numerical techniques. Thus many of these methods have not been applied …

Characterization And Modeling Of Planar Spiral Inductors And Pad Stack Parasitic Effects, John Capwell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis concentrates on RF/microwave characterization and modeling of planar spiral inductors and pad stack parasitics. The inductors varied in size from 1.9 to 15.3 nH. Several approaches were examined for modeling the planar spiral inductors. The approach developed herein is built around an existing composite model (available in commercial computer-aided design software), with added series and shunt impedances at both the input and output of the existing composite model. Artificial neural network (ANN) software was used to determine the correction impedance values. Another approach investigated was to model the S-parameters of the inductor using a space- mapping model of …

P-X Measurements For 2-Ethoxyethanol And Four Chlorinated Hydrocarbons At 303.15 K, Salil Milan Pathare

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Total pressure measurements at 303.15 K are reported for the binary systems of 2-ethoxyethanol with carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, 1,2-dichloroethane and dichloromethane. Total pressure measurements for the system of hexane and 2-ethoxyethanol were also made to check the validity of the experimental apparatus and procedure. These measurements were taken according to the static method proposed by Van Ness (1975). Data reduction was accomplished using Barker's Method. The modified Margules equation was used as a model for the excess Gibbs free energy (G^E) and parameter values were obtained by regression of the experimental data.

The obtained data were used to …

The Bases Of Opposition To Affirmative Action: An Attitude Change Effort, Meisha-Ann Martin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The present study examined the effects of perceptions of fairness, prejudice and collective self-interest on the affirmative action attitudes of 85 White undergraduate students. Participants were classified as non-racists, modern racists or old-fashioned racists based on their scores on the Implicit Association Test and Attitudes Toward Blacks scale. In the first phase of the study, participants read affirmative action information preceded by either high or low attention instructions. In the second phase, fairness, status of position and race of the target of an affirmative action plan were manipulated using vignettes. No significant differences were found in the first phase of …

Exchanges For Complex Commodities: Toward A General-Purpose System For On-Line Trading, John Hershberger

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The modern economy includes a variety of markets, and the Internet has opened opportunities for efficient on-line trading. Researchers have developed algorithms for various auctions, which have become a popular means for on-line sales. They have also designed algorithms for exchange-based markets, similar to the traditional stock exchange, which support fast-paced trading of rigidly standardized securities. In contrast, there has been little work on exchanges for complex nonstandard commodities, such as used cars or collectible stamps.

We propose a formal model for trading of complex goods, and present an automated exchange for a limited version of this model. The exchange …