Digital Commons Network^™

Light Element And Lithium Isotope Signatures Of The Emii Reservoir - The Society Islands, French Polynesia: Geochemical Results And An Educational Application, Judy Ann Harden

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the abundance systematics of Li, Be and B, and Li isotopic systematics in lavas from the Society Islands, an enriched mantle (EMII) intraplate site, to further characterize the chemical signatures in the sources for ocean island basalts that may result from subduction-related processes and mantle entrainment. The goal is to see how light-element and Li-isotope systematics vary during ocean-island volcanic evolution and during tropical weathering.

B/K, B/Be and Li/V ratios in basaltic Moorea lavas are 0.0001-.0002, 0.6-2.0 and 0.01-0.05 respectively, and the more evolved samples are somewhat higher. These ratios are similar …

Multiculturalism, Public Policy, And The High School United States And American Literature Canon: A Content Analysis Of Textbooks Adopted In The State Of Florida In 1991 And 2003, Angela L. Hansen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study compared the content of United States and American Literature textbooks adopted in Florida in 1991 and 2003 to determine any change in the inclusion of multiculturalism, as a response to public policy. Since Florida is a key adoption state, textbooks adopted would probably be reflective of national developments. To determine effects of public policy on literary selections appearing in high school United States and American literature textbooks, a variety of strategies was employed. Literary selections for each textbook and each adoption year were categorized by race and/or ethnicity and gender of the author, and genre of selections. In …

An Examination Of The Relationship Between Urbanicity And Children With Emotional Disturbances Served In Restructuring Public Schools, Karen Monk Harris

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Efforts to affect changes in student achievement through altering the manner in which schools operate have been countless. However, there are few empirical studies on the relationship between these reform activities and student outcomes, especially outcomes for students with emotional disturbances from geographically diverse locations.

The current study was a secondary analysis of data collected as part of the School and Community Study and the Urban School and Community Study conducted by the Research and Training Center for the Childrenís Mental Health at the Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute at the University of South Florida. Both studies …

A Discourse Concerning Two New Compositions, Stanley D. Harrison

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project addresses problems for theorists of writing and composition that arose in the 1990s when capital privatizes the production of internetworked writing and starts operating in the manner of a practicing compositionist. I begin by noting that capital in the 1990s converted internetworked writing machines into fixed capital and started composing its version of the cultural form of the "social" we call the Internet. Thereafter, I argue that composition theorists can best understand the Internet, internetworked writing, and internetworked subjectivities if they regard capital as a formidable compositionist, one capable of making the machinofactured internetworked composition into a privately …

Spatial Analysis Of Pedestrian Accidents, Tomoyuki Hashimoto

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Improving traffic safety for pedestrians is an urgent task for the Hillsborough County. The objective of this research is to understand the contributing factors that cause pedestrian accidents in Hillsborough County in the State of Florida. Specifically, this research attempts to determine the effects of demographic, land use, roadway and traffic volume factors on the number of pedestrian accidents. Five hypotheses were proposed to examine these factors. GIS was used to perform spatial analysis. Based on pedestrian accident records from 1999 to 2001, accident density map was created using Kernel density method. The value of the accident density was assigned …

Service-Learning Literacies: Lessons Learned From Middle School Youth, Steven Michael Hart

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The dominant ideology driving the current educational reform movement positions adolescents as deficient in basic literacy skills. To address this deficiency, the trend has been to implement high-stakes standardized literacy tests and increase accountability to schools for developing basic literacy skills. Opposing this Discourse of “deficient youth,” literacy researchers have moved to adolescents’ cultural spheres of life beyond school to discover that traditional structures for teaching literacy appear to have resulted in a growing dissonance between literacies that take place within schools and those employed by youth in their personal worlds.

This research was conducted to explore how adolescents constructed …

Standardizing The Auditory Evoked Potential Technique: Ground-Truthing Against Behavioral Conditioning In The Goldfish, Carassius Auratus, Randy J. Hill

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) have become commonly used to measure hearing thresholds in fish. However, it is uncertain how well AEP thresholds match behavioral hearing thresholds and what effect variability in electrode placement and tank composition has on AEPs. In the first experiment, the effect of testing tank composition and electrode placement on AEPs was determined by recording AEPs in the same individual fish in a steel and PVC cylindrical testing tank, and simultaneously recording AEPs from four locations and two different depths on each of 12 goldfish, Carassius auratus. Results from these studies show that tank composition has …

The Effects Of A Comprehensive Post-Treatment Recovery Program For Breast Cancer Survivors, Keri Ann Hockett

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Background: Breast cancer and its treatment often result in side effects that persist long after treatment has ended. The increased survival rate for breast cancer has allowed for the study of the physical and psychosocial symptoms that persist into the post-treatment period. Although research has tested various interventions and demonstrated improvement in some symptoms, no standard of care exists for management of symptoms in the post- treatment period as part of the continuum of care. Objective: The aim of this research was to examine the effects of a comprehensive recovery program of education, exercise, and support for breast cancer survivors …

Lessons Learned About Boys’ And Girls’ Mathematical Problem Solving: The Solution Processes, Performance, Linguistic Explanations, Self-Efficacy, And Self-Assessment Of Fifth-Grade Students Of Varying Reading And Mathematics Abilities, Patricia D. Hunsader

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this non-experimental, causal-comparative study was to examine how gender, reading ability, and mathematics ability differentially moderated students’ mathematical problem-solving processes, linguistic explanations of those solution processes, achievement on a mathematical problem-solving test, self-efficacy on a self-reported rating scale, and selfassessment on a self-reported rating scale. The investigation addressed five research questions. First, to what extent are students’ mathematical problemsolving processes related to gender? Second, to what extent is children’s performance in mathematical problem solving related to gender, reading ability, and mathematics ability? Third, to what extent is the quality of students’ linguistic explanations of their problem-solving processes …

All The News That’S Fit To Print? Media Reporting Of Environmental Protection Agency Penalties Assessed Against The Petroleum Refining Industry, 1997-2003, Melissa L. Jarrell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although examination of the relationship between the media and crime has received considerable attention in the academic literature, only a few studies have examined news media coverage of environmental crimes. The present study examines print news media coverage of federal penalties assessed against the petroleum refining industry from 1997 to 2003. The Environmental Protection Agency initiated and/or settled 162 cases involving seventy-eight petroleum refining companies from 1997 to 2003. While a news search of the nation’s twenty-five largest newspapers produced seventy-four articles related to petroleum refining industry violations, only seventeen articles matched the EPA cases analyzed in the present study. …

A Comparison Of Traditional Physical Laboratory And Computer Simulated Laboratory Experiences In Relation To Engineering Undergraduate Students’ Conceptual Understandings Of A Communication Systems Topic, Giti Javidi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study was designed to investigate an alternative to the use of traditional physical laboratory activities in a communication systems course. Specifically, this study examined whether as an alternative, computer simulation is as effective as physical laboratory activities in teaching college-level electronics engineering education students about the concepts of signal transmission, modulation and demodulation. Eighty undergraduate engineering students participated in the study, which was conducted at a southeastern four-year university.

The students were randomly assigned to two groups. The groups were compared on understanding the concepts, remembering the concepts, completion time of the lab experiments and perception toward the laboratory …

Occupational Role Portrayals Of African-American Women On Prime-Time Television, Shani Tyhirah Jefferson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examined portrayals of African-American women shown in professional careers on prime-time network television during the May 2005 sweeps month. Specifically, the study compares these portrayals to actual U.S. Department of Labor workforce statistics to observe a possible similarity. Additionally, the study identifies any behavioral and conversational stereotyped attributes ascribed to AfricanAmerican female characters shown in the workplace. A quantitative content analysis of four broadcast networks (FOX, ABC, UPN, and WB) ranked by Nielsen Media as having the highest rated prime-time television programming among minority households for 2003-2004 revealed that African-American female characters on network television are over-represented in …

The Effects Of An Education/Behavioral Intervention On Knowledge, Perceived Risk And Self-Efficacy For Sexually Transmitted Infections In Women., Versie Johnson-Mallard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research study was to test the effects of an education/behavioral intervention on knowledge, perceived risk, and self-efficacy for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) prevention in women. Additionally, the instruments that measured knowledge of sexually transmitted infections and perceived risk were tested for reliability. Instruments used to test the effects of the intervention at pretest and following the intervention included the Sexually Transmitted Infection Knowledge Survey (Johnson-Mallard, 2002); the Perceived Risk for Sexually Transmitted Infection Survey (Johnson-Mallard, 2002); and the Sexual Self-Efficacy Survey (Heather & Pinkerton, 1998). Participants included 89-women seeking family planning services, sexually transmitted infection services …

The Role Of Sensation Seeking In Children’S Ability To Learn Alcohol Expectancy Associations, Nicole M. Bekman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sensation seeking is a personality characteristic associated with problematic alcohol use and positive alcohol expectancies, but little research has examined the relationship between sensation seeking and the acquisition of alcohol expectancy information. In a recent study (Steinberg, 2003), sensation seeking was associated with how quickly and accurately college-aged students were able to learn alcohol-expectancy word pairs in a paired associate learning task. In this age group, however, the individuals had fully developed alcohol expectancies that may have influenced their rates of learning.

The current study sought to minimize the influence of previously held alcohol expectancies by exploring this relationship in …

Stable Motions Of Vehicle Formations, Anca Williams, Gerardo Lafferriere, J. J. P. Veerman

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We investigate stable maneuvers for a group of autonomous vehicles while moving in formation. The allowed decentralized feeback laws are factored through the Laplacian matrix of the communication graph. We show that such laws allow for stable circular or elliptical motions for certain vehicle dynamics. We find necessary and sufficient conditions on the feedback gains and the dynamic parameters for convergence to formation. In particular, we prove that for undirected graphs there exist feedback gains that stabilize rotational (or elliptical) motions of arbitrary radius (or eceentricity). In the directed graph case we provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the curvature …

Flocks And Formations, J. J. P. Veerman, Gerardo Lafferriere, John S. Caughman Iv, A. Williams

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Given a large number (the “flock”) of moving physical objects, we investigate physically reasonable mechanisms of influencing their orbits in such a way that they move along a prescribed course and in a prescribed and fixed configuration (or “in formation”). Each agent is programmed to see the position and velocity of a certain number of others. This flow of information from one agent to another defines a fixed directed (loopless) graph in which the agents are represented by the vertices. This graph is called the communication graph. To be able to fly in formation, an agent tries to match the …

Leveling The Field: Using Rubrics To Achieve Greater Equity In Teaching And Grading, Dannelle D. Stevens, Antonia Levi

Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

Rubrics can be used to assure greater consistency in grading and as a teaching tool to promote greater equity, especially with students who are first generation and /or non-native speakers of English.

Grounding Nike: Exposing Nike's Quest For A Constitutional Right To Lie, Tamara Piety

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Can The Sauvegarde Reform Save French Bankruptcy Law?: A Comparative Look At Chapter 11 And French Bankruptcy Law From An Agency Cost Perspective, Robert Weber

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Time And Punishment, Russell Christopher

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

A Cosmopolitan View Of Transnational Bottom-Up Lawmaking: The Case Of Export Credit Insurance, Janet K. Levit

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Biotic Resistance To Invasion: Native Predator Limits Abundance And Distribution Of An Introduced Crab, Catherine E. De Rivera, Greg M. Ruiz, Anson Hines, Paul Jivoff

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Introduced species frequently escape the natural enemies (predators, competitors, and parasites) that limit their distribution and abundance in the native range. This reduction in native predators, competitors, and parasites may result in ecological release in the introduced range. However, biological interactions also can limit the establishment and spread of nonnative populations. The extent to which such biotic resistance occurs is poorly resolved, especially for marine ecosystems. Here we test whether a native predator, the blue crab Callinectes sapidus, affects the abundance and geographic range of the introduced European green crab Carcinus maenas in eastern North America. Both crab species …

Attacking The Ncaa's Anti-Transfer Rules As Covenants Not To Compete, Ray Yasser, Clay Fees

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Energy Aware Topology Control Protocols For Wireless Sensor Networks, Shilpa Dhar

LSU Master's Theses

Wireless Sensor Network has emerged as an important technology of the future due to its potential for application across a wide array of domains. The collaborative power of numerous autonomousremote sensing nodes self configured into a multi hop network permits in-depth accurate observation of any physical phenomenon. A stringent set of computational and resource constraints make the design and implementation of sensor networks an arduous task. The issue of optimizing the limited and often non-renewable energy of sensor nodes due to its direct impact on network lifetime dominates every aspect of wireless sensor networks. Existing techniques for optimizing energy consumption …

The Quest For Novel Computational Paradigms And Machines, Christof Teuscher

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The quest for novel and unconventional computing machines is mainly motivated by the man-machine dichotomy and by the belief that meeting tomorrow's complex real world challenges will require new paradigms and new engineering methods to organize, train, and program such machines and to interact with them.

Homosexuality : A Study Of Communication Between Professional Sports And The Media, Laurie Shantz

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Evaluation Of Sales, Vidyanidhi D. Rege

Theses

Not Included

E.C. Allen And The Emergence Of The Modern Magazine, Peter Hutchinson

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Applying Persuasive Communication To Realistic Job Previews, Chun-Ling Chen

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Television Advertising's Portrayal Of Women, Ruth J. Mapgaonkar

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.