Digital Commons Network^™

What Personality Factors Influence Performance In A Multi-Line Insurance Agency?, Timothy R. Greer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this dissertation is exploring personality factors that impact performance within a small insurance agency. The primary research question is, what is (or are) the best personality factor(s), sub-facets, or constructs, that contribute to increased performance within an insurance agency. Three of the Five-Factor Model dimensions, extroversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experience along with grit and hardiness were examined, as well as their sub-facets. Grit and hardiness were not found to add additional explanation of the variance while five of the sub-facets were found to better explain the variance over the composite dimensions.

Improving Strategic It Investment Decisions By Reducing Information Asymmetry, Thomas P. Stablein

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The unprecedented ubiquity with which technological advancements, such as blockchain, the Internet of things (IoT), big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI), are impacting the world has forced large organizations to rethink their information technology roadmaps. Their decisions about how they invest in technology have become more important. It is against this backdrop that companies must decide how much to invest in their aging technologies versus these new potentially transformational ones. A decision is only as good as the information available to the decision-makers when they make it. This research project seeks to understand the effects that information asymmetry …

Human Body Motions Optimization For Able-Bodied Individuals And Prosthesis Users During Activities Of Daily Living Using A Personalized Robot-Human Model, Dimitrios Menychtas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Current clinical practice regarding upper body prosthesis prescription and training is lacking a standarized, quantitative method to evaluate the impact of the prosthetic device. The amputee care team typically uses prior experiences to provide prescription and training customized for each individual. As a result, it is quite challenging to determine the right type and fit of a prosthesis and provide appropriate training to properly utilize it early in the process. It is also very difficult to anticipate expected and undesired compensatory motions due to reduced degrees of freedom of a prosthesis user. In an effort to address this, a tool …

Organizational Innovations That Stick: Best Practices In Sustainable Organizational Change, Abdoulie Jammeh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Organizational change is an essential ingredient of organizational growth/life and can be difficult to accomplish. Many researchers and practitioners have studied the challenges and opportunities surrounding effectuating change and innovation in organizations. However, there has been little practical analysis of the theoretical relationships among the key apparatuses that make change stick, institutionalizing innovation in big bureaucratic organizations. In order to develop practical insights that can inform best practices, this paper aims to provide a collection of successful organizational innovation examples based on responses to a critical incident analysis survey of 12 participants from a 2018 World Bank – USC Annenberg …

Learning In The Margins: The Educational Experiences Of An African American Male With Disabilities, Aisha Holmes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

African American males with disabilities meet challenges in K-12 public education and higher education. Educational practices often focus on a deficit interpretation of the abilities of African American males with disabilities. Educational stakeholders who do not reflect their layered identities of race, gender, ability, and socioeconomic status often make educational decisions for this student population. The purpose of this study is to include in the educational conversations the voice of an African American male with disabilities who experienced K-12 public education and higher education. Using narrative inquiry and analyzed through the lens of DisCrit, findings from the study revealed two …

The Relationship Between Ambient Lighting Color And Hotel Bar Customer Purchase Behavior And Satisfaction, Kunal Shah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Increasingly competitive markets lead brand managers to search for new methods to improve customer satisfaction, increase revenue, and promote customer loyalty. Sensory marketing has the potential to meet those objectives. Sensory marketing programs are designed to engage consumers’ senses and affect perceptions, judgments, and behaviors. Ambient light color is an environmental variable with the potential to influence the customer experience in lodging industry sensory marketing programs. Contrast theory and disconfirmation of expectations served as the theoretical framework for this study. The purpose of this quantitative comparative study was to examine the relationships between ambient light color, consumer spending, and perceptions …

Vulnerability And Power: Exploring The Confluence Of Politics And Climate Change In Cortez, Florida, Justin P. Winn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes how politics shape vulnerability to climate change at the local level, based on an ethnography in Cortez, Florida. Focusing on a “traditional” commercial fishing village on the Florida Gulf Coast, my research indicates that such vulnerabilities are created at multiple scales of the nexus between governance and commerce. Moreover, a key finding is that, as a community closely linked to the health of local environments, the village in Cortez is largely organized to protect their commercial industry from regional economic overdevelopment; not in recognition of its role in contributing to global climate change, but because such overdevelopment …

Price Transparency In The United States Healthcare System, Gurlivleen (Minnie) Ahuja

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The study explores price transparency in the healthcare system. With the increase in healthcare spending resulting in the advent of high deductible plans, consumers have been exposed to high healthcare cost. Despite being burdened with outrageous and extravagant bills, studies have shown that the consumers are not using price transparency tools to their benefit.

The literature review reveals that the major stakeholders in the healthcare industry have never been studied together to understand the research question on ‘Why is there lack of price transparency in the healthcare system?’ moreover, there is no theory to explains this phenomenon.

This study undertakes …

Fatty Acid Amides And Their Biosynthetic Enzymes Found In Insect Model Systems, Ryan L. Anderson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A fatty acid amide is precisely as the name suggests: A fatty acid (CHn-COOH), in which the hydroxyl group of the carboxylic acid is displaced by an amine functional group from a biogenic amine (R-NH2), ultimately forming an amide bond. Furthermore, these fatty acid amides can be composed of a variety of different acyl chain lengths donated by the fatty acid and a myriad of different biogenic amines. Thus, these molecules can be subdivided in a number of different ways including the separation of short chain (acetyl to heptanoyl) and long chain (palmitoyl to arachidonoyl) and also based off the …

Pursuing Resilience Of Coastal Communities Through Sustainable And Integrated Urban Water Management, Pacia Díaz

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Reliability of water supply in the urban setting has become essential for communities to function and thrive. It is needed for more than mere human consumption and well-being. Although modern cities have water treatment and distribution systems, pressures from urbanization, population growth and the anticipated pressures of climate change are affecting the quality of water supply and the reliability of treatment and distribution systems. There is therefore an urgent need to take appropriate measures to improve the resilience of water supply systems before the impacts are irreversible.

Improving the resilience of water supply systems can be a challenge. In the …

Cyclophilin 40 As A Novel Disaggregase, Jeremy Dustin Baker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The negative health and economic impacts of neurodegenerative diseases on Americans is astounding and accelerating with an aging population. The Alzheimer’s Association reports that 5.7 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a number which is expected to increase to 14 million by 2050. In economic terms, AD and other neurodegenerative disorders will cost the US over $275 billion in 2018, rising to over $1 trillion annually by 2050. AD causes gross brain atrophy and is most damaging throughout the cortex and the hippocampus, regions required for higher cognitive function and memory. AD presents as tangles within neurons composed of …

Actinomycin D And Telmisartan Combination Therapy Targets Lung Cancer Stem Cells, Ryan Green

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The failure of lung cancer treatments has been attributed partly to the development of drug resistance, however the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms are poorly understood. It has been suggested that a very small group of specific cells within the heterogeneous tumors, cancer initiating stem cells (CSC), develop resistance to treatment, survive and later initiate the growth of new tumors. Due to their pivotal role in maintenance and relapse of tumors following the acquisition of drug resistance, we reasoned that novel drugs targeting cancer cells and CSC might provide the most effective treatments, if not a cure. To this end, …

Improving Elementary Students’ Complete Mental Health: Examining The Added Impact Of A Teacher-Focused Strengths-Based Intervention, Mollie Mccullough Headley

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Teaching is considered one of the most challenging professions, often associated with high levels of occupational stress and job turnover that perpetuates additional negative outcomes including depleted funding for school districts, poor education quality, and reduced student academic performance. Research shows that teachers are an integral part of the classroom with the power to positively influence students’ perceived classroom support and emotional competence (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). Positive psychology has facilitated school-based initiatives that foster feelings of subjective well-being (happiness) through the implementation of brief, scripted activities (i.e., Positive Psychology Interventions; PPIs) that reflect the thoughts and behaviors of happy …

Beauty And The Beasts: Making Places With Literary Animals Of Florida, Haili A. Alcorn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Place theory examines the relationship between human identity and physical locations, asking how meaningful attachments are formed between people and the spots they visit or in which they live. Literature of place exhibits this relationship and the myriad ways humans connect to their environment through storytelling, both fictional and nonfictional. Florida literature, an emerging and dynamic genre, features characters, cultures, and histories heavily embedded in place. Florida’s places also abound with animal presences, and literature about Florida almost always illustrates significant human-animal interactions that drive plots and character development. Therefore, Florida literature invites consideration of how animals influence human attachment …

The Effects Of Using Textual Enhancement On Processing And Learning Multiword Expressions, Adel Zain Alshaikhi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Multiword Expressions (MWEs) are crucial aspects of language use. Second language (L2) learners need to master these MWEs to be able to communicate effectively. In addition, mastering these MWEs helps L2 learners improve their cognitive processing of language input. In this study, my primary objectives were to explore the effectiveness of using Textual Enhancement (TE) to assist L2 speakers’ comprehension of MWEs, to explore whether there is a difference in comprehension between collocations and idioms, and finally, to explore how L2 speakers transact the MWEs’ meanings as presented in texts.

While several researchers have explored how input enhancement in general …

One University’S Response To Sections 504 And 508 Of The Rehabilitation Act: A Descriptive Case Study Of Policy Design, Kimberly F. Carter

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Pioneering legislation such as Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1997, and the Assistive Technology Act of 1998 have increased attention to the needs of individuals with disabilities. These regulations require that public programs and services are accessible to people with disabilities (Griffin, 2004).

This descriptive case study examines policy design to conform with Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 at a public research university through the lens of Bolman and Deal’s four frames of organizational analysis. These …

Proteolysis Of Cx3cl1 Impacts Cx3cr1 Signaling And Therapeutic Benefits In A Tauopathy Model, Dylan John Finneran

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive, neurodegenerative disorder and the most common form of dementia. The hallmark pathologies of AD are extracellular aggregates of amyloid-beta, intracellular aggregates of microtubule associated protein tau and increased neuroinflammation. Current therapeutics offer only symptomatic relief and clinical trials investigating therapeutic benefits of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs have yielded no positive results. Therefore, recent work has focused on immunomodulators, such as CD200 and fractalkine, as potential therapeutic targets for AD.

Fractalkine (CX3CL1; FKN) is expressed as a transmembrane protein with an N-terminal chemokine domain followed by a long, mucin-like stalk. FKN can signal as a membrane-bound …

Assessing The Cooling Effects Of Urban Vegetation On Urban Heat Mitigation In Selected U.S. Cities, Qiuyan Yu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Urban Heat Island (UHI) is a growing problem worldwide. Mitigation of UHI is necessary for cities to adapt to climate change and enhance sustainable development at a city scale. Cooling cities with urban vegetation management is a sustainable solution for urban heat mitigation. Urban vegetation influences urban microclimate through the shading effect, surface roughness, and evapotranspiration. The differences in horizontal and vertical structures of urban vegetation determine the shading effect, surface roughness, and evapotranspiration. Enhancing the cooling effect of urban vegetation requires a comprehensive understanding of how vegetation structure affects UHI. The effects of horizontal structure on land surface temperature …

A Study On The Adaptability Of Immune System Principles To Wireless Sensor Network And Iot Security, Vishwa Alaparthy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Network security has always been an area of priority and extensive research. Recent years have seen a considerable growth in experimentation with biologically inspired techniques. This is a consequence of our increased understanding of living systems and the application of that understanding to machines and software. The mounting complexity of telecommunications networks and the need for increasing levels of security have been the driving factor. The human body can act as a great role model for its unique abilities in protecting itself from external, foreign entities. Many abnormalities in the human body are similar to that of the attacks in …

Early Identification Of Students In Accelerated Curricula With Signs Of Academic And Emotional Risk: Working With Teachers To Identify At-Risk Students, Elizabeth D. Storey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As part of a comprehensive, multi-tiered system of support for students’ emotional, academic, and behavioral success, effective universal screenings are essential to identify students who may benefit from early intervention and targeted prevention services (Strein, Kuhn-McKearin, & Finney, 2014). Although many screening procedures and methods have been developed and evaluated for general education populations, more research is needed on screening procedures designed for one traditionally underserved population in school-based mental health services—students in accelerated curricula (namely, students in Advanced Placement classes or in the International Baccalaureate program; AP/IB). When teachers are involved in universal screening procedures, regardless of student population …

Moffitt Cancer Center: Leadership, Culture And Transformation, W. James Wilson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Purpose – The purpose of this project was to extrapolate knowledge of successful leadership practices, determine what led to and nurtured what became an integrated organizational culture and identify any decisions and/or transformational events that re-defined Moffitt Cancer Center’s (MCC) course or helped propel it to levels far beyond what was originally imagined. The aims of this study were discovery of the foundational factors and events that significantly impacted the creation, growth and evolution of the center, making MCC an institution of transformational change that had achieved state and national prominence.

Design – This was an exploratory study guided by …

Exploring The ‘Spaces Between’: Teachers’ Perceptions Of Teacher Leadership Within Professional Networks, Cynthia B. Bauman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The enactment of teacher leadership can be challenged by both policy initiatives and school contexts (Anderson & Cohen, 2015; Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). However, teachers can have a positive influence on each other and their broader school community by building capacity for leadership, innovation, and student achievement through the relationships, or networks, they develop and maintain (Baker-Doyle, 2015; Hovardas, 2016; Hunzicker, 2012; Moolenaar, Sleegers, & Daly, 2012). This single exploratory case study takes place in a Title I elementary school and uses a combination of Social Network Analysis and content analysis to uncover patterns in teacher professional networks, the context …

Flowgraph Models For Clustered Multistate Time To Event Data, Kristin Hall

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Healthcare systems have multistate processes. Such processes may be modeled using flowgraphs, which are directed graphs. Flowgraph models support a variety of transition time distributions, easily handle reversibility between states and allow alternate paths to the event or state of interest to be taken. However, estimation of flowgraph and first passage time distribution parameters can lead to incorrect inferences when interdependent data are treated as independent.

In this dissertation, we expand the flowgraph model to accommodate nested and correlated data structures. We develop a framework to incorporate random effects into transition probability and transition time components of a flowgraph model. …

Behavioral Thermoregulation And Thermal Mismatches Influence Disease Dynamics In Amphibians, Erin Louise Sauer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Amphibians are currently the most threatened vertebra taxa on the planet. Hundreds of species are thought to have gone extinct while thousands more have been listed as threatened or endangered over the past few decades. Habitat loss, invasive species, climate change, and disease are all thought to have partially contributed to these declines. Two pathogens in particular, infectious viruses in the genus Ranavirus (simply referred to as ranavirus) and the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), have been associated with global mass mortality events of amphibians. Virulent pathogens such as these tend to impose strong selective pressures on their hosts driving the …

Optical Remote Sensing Of Oil Spills In The Gulf Of Mexico, Shaojie Sun

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Assessment of oil spills in the ocean using passive remote sensing (i.e., reflected sun light) faces two challenges: detect oil presence/absence and quantify oil volume. While the optical properties of oil allow it to be differentiated from the surrounding marine environment, sun glint can facilitate oil presence/absence detection because the oil-water spatial contrast is enhanced due to wave dampening. However, sun glint also modulates the magnitude and shape of the spectral reflectance of surface oil. In addition to this difficulty, the most critical challenge is how to quantify oil volume (or thickness) through remote sensing. To date, such quantifications have …

Wastewater In Context: Systems-Based Approaches To Improving Wastewater Infrastructure Transitions, Christine Prouty

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Coastal communities and ecosystems around the world are some of those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. In particular, the wastewater treatment systems in these areas are on the forefront of the effects of increasing frequency, duration, and intensity associated with extreme weather events. As such, decision making about adopting new wastewater technologies or transitioning to an improved treatment portfolio is an important area of research for coastal communities because they are critically linked to the health of the nearby aquatic ecosystems (i.e. tourism, fishing, cultural heritage, climate protection).

The decision making process about technology adoption and transitions …

Aqueous Humor Dynamics And The Constant-Pressure Perfusion Model Of Experimental Glaucoma In Brown-Norway Rats, Kayla R. Ficarrotta

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Glaucoma affects tens of millions of people and is the leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide. Virtually all current glaucoma therapies target elevated intraocular pressure (IOP); however, the contribution of intracranial pressure (ICP) to glaucoma has recently garnered interest. Strain at the optic nerve head is now known to depend on the translaminar pressure difference (TLPD), which is the difference between IOP and ICP, rather than IOP alone. A better understanding of how IOP and ICP relate to glaucoma development and progression is essential for developing improved therapies and diagnostic tests. Glaucoma is commonly modeled in rats, yet aqueous humor …

Effects Of Interspersing Recall Versus Recognition Questions With Response Cards During Lectures On Students' Academic And Participation Behaviors In A College Classroom, Leslie S. Singer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Instructional design and delivery may be one tool available to teachers to increase the academic and social behaviors of all students in the classroom. Effective instruction is an evidence-based teaching strategy that can be used to efficiently educate our youth across all learning environments. One effective instructional strategy includes increasing students’ opportunities to respond to instructor-posed questions during lectures. Students may respond to questions using a response card system as a way to promote active engagement. This study examined the most common form of instructor-posed questions presented during lecture, recall and recognition questions, to determine the differential effects on students’ …

Analysis Of Printed Electronic Adhesion, Electrical, Mechanical, And Thermal Performance For Resilient Hybrid Electronics, Clayton Neff

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Today’s state of the art additive manufacturing (AM) systems have the ability to fabricate multi-material devices with novel capabilities that were previously constrained by traditional manufacturing. AM machines fuse or deposit material in an additive fashion only where necessary, thus unlocking advantages of mass customization, no part-specific tooling, near arbitrary geometric complexity, and reduced lead times and cost. The combination of conductive ink micro-dispensing AM process with hybrid manufacturing processes including: laser machining, CNC machining, and pick & place enables the fabrication of printed electronics. Printed electronics exploit the integration of AM with hybrid processes and allow embedded and/or conformal …

Investigating The Role Of The Rna Binding Protein Lin28 In The Human Placenta: Implications For Preeclampsia, John Canfield

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

An essential event during early pregnancy is the invasion of trophoblasts into the maternal decidua, which is necessary for proper implantation and establishment of maternal-fetal interface and ultimately allows for proper nutrient exchange and immunological tolerance of the growing fetus. For this invasion to occur, cells originating from the trophectoderm undergo an epithelial to mesenchymal transition to become invasive extravillous trophoblasts and begin invading the uterine decidual tissue. Through the secretion of matrix metalloproteinases and through interactions with many cytokines and cell-adhesion molecules, this well-orchestrated process of trophoblast invasion results in extensive remodeling of the maternal spiral vasculature by the …