Digital Commons Network^™

The Mediating Role Of Classroom Social Environment Between Teacher Self-Efficacy And Student Adjustment, Keri Stewart

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether students' perceptions of the classroom social environment mediate the relations between teacher self-efficacy and student adjustment.

Research suggests that early adolescents often experience decreases in engagement and motivation during the middle school years, which can put individuals at risk for academic failure and school dropout (Eccles, Lord, & Midgley, 1991). This occurs due to a mismatch between the individuals' developmental needs and the environment (Eccles et al., 1993). Whether early adolescents remain engaged in school is largely dependent on how they perceive the classroom environment promoted by their teacher (Erikson, 1950; …

Assessing Competing Demands And Charting A Course: A Phenomenological Study Of Advanced Placement U.S. History Teachers' Decision Making And Course Planning, Kerry Dean Poole

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Florida has experienced some of the greatest growth of Advanced Placement (AP) programs in recent years and student scores on the AP exams have evolved into a highly significant metric in evaluating student proficiency and teacher and school effectiveness. Despite this growth, it is not well known how AP teachers make decisions about the content they teach, what learning activities they select, how much the AP exam influences their decision making, how they modify learning opportunities for diverse learners, and how they prepare their students for the College Board AP exam. This interpretive, phenomenological study examines the lived experiences of …

Contrast Adaptation In The Lateral Eye Of Limulus Polyphemus, Tchoudomira Valtcheva

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Luminance and contrast adaptation are neuronal mechanisms that the retina applies for continuous adjustment to light sensitivity though a collection of cellular and synaptic mechanisms distributed across the retinal network, thus accommodating the wide input range of the visual system within the constricted output range of retinal ganglion cells. Luminance mean adaptation has been demonstrated in the output neurons of the invertebrate eye (eccentric cells), and the aim of the study was to investigate whether the homology in visual processing extends to luminance variance (contrast) adaptation as well. The spike trains of individual eccentric cells were recorded from live horseshoe …

Timely Doctoral Completion Rates In Five Fields: A Two-Part Study, Angela Miller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Roughly half of all doctoral students who begin a program do not continue through graduation, and many of them face significant financial losses and emotional burdens as a result. Although this completion rate has stayed fairly constant for the past few decades, it has recently gained attention on a national level. In 2011, the National Research Council published the Assessment of Research Doctorate Programs in the United States, and provided a wealth of data on over 5,000 programs in 212 universities. This study used that dataset to examine the relationship between timely doctoral completion rates and 22 Program, Faculty and …

Skeletal Muscle Contraction Simulation: A Comparison In Modeling, Jonathan M. Ford

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Computer generated three-dimensional (3-D) models are being used at increasing rates in the fields of entertainment, education, research, and engineering. One of the aspects of interest includes the behavior and function of the musculoskeletal system. One such tool used by engineers is the finite element method (FEM) to simulate the physics behind muscle mechanics. There are several ways to represent 3-D muscle geometry, namely a bulk, a central line of action and a spline model. The purpose of this study is to exmine how these three representations affect the overall outcome of muscle movement. This is examined in a series …

Theory, Synthesis, And Application Of Adiabatic And Reversible Logic Circuits For Security Applications, Matthew Arthur Morrison

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Programmable reversible logic is emerging as a prospective logic design style for implementation in modern nanotechnology and quantum computing with minimal impact on circuit heat generation. Adiabatic logic is a design methodology for reversible logic in CMOS where the current flow through the circuit is controlled such that the energy dissipation due to switching and capacitor dissipation is minimized. Recent advances in reversible logic using and quantum computer algorithms allow for improved computer architectures. Production of cost-effective Secure Integrated Chips, such as Smart Cards, requires hardware designers to consider tradeoffs in size, security, and power consumption. In order to design …

The Performance Of The Linear Logistic Test Model When The Q-Matrix Is Misspecified: A Simulation Study, George T. Macdonald

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A simulation study was conducted to explore the performance of the linear logistic test model (LLTM) when the relationships between items and cognitive components were misspecified. Factors manipulated included percent of misspecification (0%, 1%, 5%, 10%, and 15%), form of misspecification (under-specification, balanced misspecification, and over-specification), sample size (20, 40, 80, 160, 320, 640, and 1280), Q-matrix density (60% and 46%), number of items (20, 40, and 60 items), and skewness of person ability distribution (-0.5, 0, and 0.5). Statistical bias, root mean squared error, confidence interval coverage, confidence interval width, and pairwise cognitive components correlations were computed. The impact …

Future Engineering Professors' Conceptions Of Learning And Teaching Engineering, Ana Teresa Torres Ayala

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Conceptions of learning and teaching shape teaching practices and are, therefore, important to understanding how engineering professors learn to teach. There is abundant research about professors' conceptions of teaching; however, research on the conceptions of teaching of doctoral students, the future professors, is scarce. Furthermore, there is a need to understand not just future engineering professors' conceptions of teaching but also their conceptions of learning. The purpose of this study was to explore qualitative variations in future engineering professors' conceptions of learning and teaching as well as understanding how they came to these conceptions.

The research questions that guided this …

Hydraulic Evaluation Of A Community Managed Wastewater Stabilization Pond System In Bolivia, Louis Lizima

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work explores the hydraulic performance of a wastewater lagoon system located in San Antonio, Bolivia. The system consists of one facultative pond and two maturation ponds in series and is managed through a locally elected water committee. A tracer study was performed on the primary facultative pond and an analysis of the solids accumulation on the bottom of the facultative lagoon was also performed. The results were used to generate residence time distribution curves and provide an estimate of mean residence time in the system. The data was used to examine hydraulic efficiency as it relates to short-circuiting and …

Environmental And Energy Saving Technologies Of Vinyl Chloride Production, Mykola Kurta

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recently, because of the increase of environmental concerns in process design, the need to enhance conversion to product and prevent generation of wasteful byproducts in the reactor network has become urgent. This prevents high cost treatment and separation costs downstream in the process. Therefore, in this thesis I focus on making production of vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) more efficient and on possible ways of industrial organochlorine waste (OCW) recycling. In particular, in the first experiment, we investigate how catalyst and its structure can affect product output.

Infrared spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction analysis were utilized to investigate the structure of the …

Location And Capacity Modeling Of Network Interchanges, Aldo D. Fabregas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Network design decisions, especially those pertaining to urban infrastructure, are made by a central authority or network leader, and taking into consideration the network users or followers. These network decision problems are formulated as non-linear bi-level programming problems. In this work, a continuous network design problem (CNDP) and discrete network design problem (DNDP) bi-level optimization programs are proposed and solved in the context of transportation planning. The solution strategy involved reformulation and linearization as a single-level program by introducing the optimality conditions of the lower level problem into the upper level problem. For the CNDP, an alternative linearization algorithm (modified …

The Relationship Between Rating Scales Used To Evaluate Tasks From Task Inventories For Licensure And Certification Examinations, Adrienne W. Cadle

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The first step in developing or updating a licensure or certification examination is to conduct a job or task analysis. Following completion of the job analysis, a survey validation study is performed to validate the results of the job analysis and to obtain task ratings so that an examination blueprint may be created. Psychometricians and job analysts have spent years arguing over the choice of scales that should be used to evaluate job tasks, as well as how those scales should be combined to create an examination blueprint. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between individual …

Evaluating Check-In Check-Out With Peer Tutors For Children With Attention Maintained Problem Behaviors, Sindy Sanchez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

An educational framework known as School Wide Positive Behavior Support being implemented in school systems across the country provides the schools with three tiers of support to address both academic and behavior challenges. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the use of peer tutors when applied to a Tier 2 intervention known as Check-In Check-Out (CICO). Peer tutors performed the morning check-in with the tutees by setting the expectations for the day and giving the tutees their Daily Progress Report (DPR) form. Throughout the day, the tutees took the DPR form to each class where they received a …

A Novel Method For Watermarking Sequential Circuits, Matthew Lewandowski

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We present an Intellectual Property (IP) protection technique for sequential circuits driven by embedding a decomposed signature into a Finite State Machine (FSM) through the manipulation of the arbitrary state encoding of the unprotected FSM. This technique is composed of three steps: (a) transforming the signature into a watermark graph, (b) embedding watermark graphs into the original FSM's State Transition Graph (STG) and (c) generating models for verification and extraction. In the watermark construction process watermark graphs are generated from signatures. The proposed methods for watermark construction are: (1) BSD, (2) FSD, and (3) HSD. The HSD method is shown …

Algorithms And Data Structures For Efficient Timing Analysis Of Asynchronous Real-Time Systems, Yingying Zhang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a framework to verify asynchronous real-time systems based on model checking. These systems are modeled by using a common modeling formalism named Labeled Petri-nets(LPNs).

In order to verify the real-time systems algorithmically, the zone-based timing analysis method is used for LPNs. It searches the state space with timing information (represented by zones). When there is a high degree of concurrency in the model, firing concurrent enabled transitions in different order may result in different zones, and these zones may be combined without affecting the verification result. Since the zone-based method could not deal with this problem efficiently, …

Defining And Preventing Code-Injection Attacks, Donald Ray

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis shows that existing definitions of code-injection attacks (e.g., SQL-injection attacks) are flawed. The flaws make it possible for attackers to circumvent existing mechanisms, by supplying code-injecting inputs that are not recognized as such. The flaws also make it possible for benign inputs to be treated as attacks. After describing these flaws in conventional definitions of code-injection attacks, this thesis proposes a new definition, which is based on whether the symbols input to an application get used as (normal-form) values in the application's output. Because values are already fully evaluated, they cannot be considered ``code'' when injected. This simple …

Automatic Macro- And Micro-Facial Expression Spotting And Applications, Matthew Adam Shreve

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Automatically determining the temporal characteristics of facial expressions has extensive application domains such as human-machine interfaces for emotion recognition, face identification, as well as medical analysis. However, many papers in the literature have not addressed the step of determining when such expressions occur. This dissertation is focused on the problem of automatically segmenting macro- and micro-expressions frames (or retrieving the expression intervals) in video sequences, without the need for training a model on a specific subset of such expressions. The proposed method exploits the non-rigid facial motion that occurs during facial expressions by modeling the strain observed during the elastic …

Consumer Acceptance Of Mobile Payments In Restaurants, Anna Shatskikh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Regardless all the advantages of MPs, it has not reach the sizable customer base. In this paper, we examined the core drivers of using mobile payments (MPs) in restaurant industry from the consumers' perspective. Based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), we developed a six factor model to reveal the determinants of consumers' intention to use MPs in restaurant. Security, subjective norm, compatibility with lifestyle, and previous experience with MPs were added to the traditional two factor TAM model (usefulness and ease of use). 300 respondents were recruited from an online survey agency and 258 valid responses were included in …

An Application Developed For Simulation Of Electrical Excitation And Conduction In A 3d Human Heart, Di Yu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis first reviews the history of General Purpose computing Graphic Processing Unit (GPGPU) and then introduces the fundamental problems that are suitable for GPGPU algorithm. The architecture of GPGPU is compared against modern CPU architecture, and the fundamental difference is outlined. The programming challenges faced by GPGPU and the techniques utilized to overcome these issues are evaluated and discussed.

The second part of the thesis presents an application developed with GPGPU technology to simulate the electrical excitation and conduction in a 3D human heart model based on cellular automata model. The algorithm and implementation are discussed in detail and …

Novel Models And Algorithms For Uncertainty Management In Power Systems, Long Zhao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a collection of previously-published manuscript and conference papers. In this dissertation, we will deal with a stochastic unit commitment problem with cooling systems for gas generators, a robust unit commitment problem with demand response and uncertain wind generation, and a power grid vulnerability analysis with transmission line switching. The latter two problems correspond to our theoretical contributions in two-stage robust optimization, i.e., how to efficiently solve a two-stage robust optimization, and how to deal with mixed-integer recourse in robust optimization. Due to copyright issue, this dissertation does not include any methodology papers written by the author during …

Energy Efficient Context-Aware Framework In Mobile Sensing, Ozgur Yurur

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The ever-increasing technological advances in embedded systems engineering, together with the proliferation of small-size sensor design and deployment, have enabled mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) to recognize daily occurring human based actions, activities and interactions. Therefore, inferring a vast variety of mobile device user based activities from a very diverse context obtained by a series of sensory observations has drawn much interest in the research area of ubiquitous sensing. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users, and this allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently …

Towards Interference-Immune And Channel-Aware Multicarrier Schemes: Filters, Lattices, And Interference Issues, Alphan Sahin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, multicarrier schemes are reviewed within the framework of Gabor Systems. Their fundamental elements; what to transmit, i.e., symbols, how to transmit, i.e., filters or pulse shape, and where/when to transmit, i.e., lattices are investigated extensively. The relations between different types of multicarrier schemes are discussed.

Within the framework of Gabor systems, a new windowing approach, edge windowing, is developed to address the out-of-band (OOB) radiation problem of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based multicarrier schemes. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time, the diversity on the range of the users is exploited to suppress …

Robotic Swarming Without Inter-Agent Communication, Daniel Jonathan Standish

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many physical and algorithmic swarms utilize inter-agent communication to achieve advanced swarming behaviors. These swarms are inspired by biological swarms that can be seen throughout nature and include bee swarms, ant colonies, fish schools, and bird flocks. These biological swarms do not utilize inter-agent communication like their physical and algorithmic counterparts. Instead, organisms in nature rely on a local awareness of other swarm members that facilitates proper swarm motion and behavior. This research aims to pursue an effective swarm algorithm using only line-of-sight proximity information and no inter-agent communication. It is expected that the swarm performance will be lower than …

A Multi-Parameter Functional Side Channel Analysis Method For Hardware Trojan Detection In Untrusted Fpga Bitstreams, Christopher William Bell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Hardware Trojan Horses (HTHs or Trojans) are malicious design modifications intended to cause the design to function incorrectly. Globalization of the IC development industry has created new opportunities for rogue agents to compromise a design in such a way. Offshore foundries cannot always be trusted, and the use of trusted foundries is not always practical or economical. There is a pressing need for a method to reliably detect these Trojans, to prevent compromised designs from being put into production.

This thesis proposes a multi-parameter analysis method that is capable of reliably detecting function-altering and performance-degrading Trojans in FPGA bitstreams. It …

Packet Coalescing And Server Substitution For Energy-Proportional Operation Of Network Links And Data Servers, Mehrgan Mostowfi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Electricity generation for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) contributes over 2% of the human-generated CO2 to the atmosphere. Energy costs are rapidly becoming the major operational expense for ICT and may soon dwarf capital expenses as software and hardware continue to drop in price. In this dissertation, three new approaches to achieving energy-proportional operation of network links and data servers are explored.

Ethernet is the dominant wireline communications technology for Internet connectivity. IEEE 802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) describes a Low Power Idle (LPI) mechanism for allowing Ethernet links to sleep. A method of coalescing packets to consolidate link idle …

Automatic Identification Of Points Of Interest In Global Navigation Satellite System Data: A Spatial Temporal Approach, Khoa Anh Tran

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In addition to the emergence of smartphones and tablets in recent years, the rise of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) has allowed mobile tracking applications to become popular and be put into many uses. Analyzing tracking records to identify points of interest (POIs) is useful for both prediction applications and research such as human behavior analysis, transportation planning, and especially travel surveys. Past research in travel surveys has shown that a GPS mobile phone-based survey is a useful tool for collecting information about individuals. Moreover, a passive travel survey collection is preferred to an active travel survey method by the …

Synthesis, Characterization And Applications Of Barium Strontium Titanate Thin Film Structures, Supriya Ashok Ketkar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Barium Strontium Titanate (BST) based ferroelectric thin film devices have been popular over the last decade due to their versatile applications in tunable microwave devices such as delay lines, resonators, phase shifters, and varactors. BST thin films are promising candidates due to their high dielectric constant, tunability and low dielectric loss. Dielectric-tunable properties of BST films deposited by different deposition techniques have been reported which study the effects of factors, such as oxygen vacancies, film thickness, grain size, Ba/Sr ratio, etc. Researchers have also studied doping concentrations, high temperature annealing and multilayer structures to attain higher tunability and lower loss. …

Delta Encoding Based Methods To Reduce The Size Of Smartphone Application Updates, Nikolai Samteladze

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 2012 the two biggest smartphone application markets - the Google Play store and the Apple App Store - each had close to 700 thousand applications with approximately 2 billion downloads happening every month. The introduction of new features and correction of bugs and security vulnerabilities make it usual for mobile application developers to release new version of an application every month. Combined with the great smartphone popularity, it leads to approximately 400 PB annual traffic generated by app updates in the U.S. wireless networks alone. Being partially transmitted through cellular networks, mobile application updates traffic accounts to up to …

A Methodology For Scheduling Operating Rooms Under Uncertainty, Marbelly Paola Davila

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

An operating room (OR) is considered to be one of the most costly functional areas within hospitals as well as its major profit center. It is known that managing an OR department is a challenging task, which requires the integration of many actors (e.g., patients, surgeons, nurses, technicians) who may have conflicting interests and priorities.

Considering these aspects, this dissertation focuses on developing a simulation based methodology for scheduling operating rooms under uncertainty, which reflects the complexity, uncertainty and variability associated with surgery.

We split the process of scheduling ORs under uncertainty into two main components. First, we designed a …

Fpca Based Human-Like Trajectory Generating, Wei Dai

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a new human-like upper limb and hand motion generating method. The work is based on Functional Principal Component Analysis and Quadratic Programming. The human-like motion generating problem is formulated in a framework of minimizing the difference of the dynamic profile of the optimal trajectory and the known types of trajectory. Statistical analysis is applied to the pre-captured human motion records to work in a low dimensional space. A novel PCA FPCA hybrid motion recognition method is proposed. This method is implemented on human grasping data to demonstrate its advantage in human motion recognition. One human grasping hierarchy …