Digital Commons Network^™

Selling St. Petersburg: John Lodwick And The Promotion Of A Florida Paradise, Nevin D. Sitler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For over a century Florida's Tampa Bay area has been extolled for its abundant seashores and moderate climate. The success of early twentieth-century St. Petersburg as a tourist destination was due to a consistent method of self-promotion highlighting the natural and physical features of peninsular Pinellas County. Warmed by balmy Tampa Bay breezes, St. Petersburg had been dubbed the "Health City." This tiny 1890 coastal town of less than three hundred inhabitants, now blessed with a slogan, new train tracks, and a railway pier, was an ideal setting for tourism. By 1902, boosters declared St. Petersburg a city second to …

A Novel Air Sampling And Analytical Method For Determination Of Airborne Bronopol, John Charles Smyth

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bronopol has been used as a preservative in drugs and cosmetics since 1964. Bronopol has low dermal irritancy at levels commonly used in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals but it is significantly irritating at higher concentrations. Laboratory testing of bronopol indicates a low potential for dermal sensitization; however, a number of case reports demonstrate human allergenic reactions. No reports were identified on the allergenic properties of bronopol for the inhalation route of exposure. In 1983 approximately 5,200 people in the United States were occupationally exposed to bronopol. Current novel uses of bronopol include mold remediation and the sanitizing of ventilation system components. …

Preservice Teachers’ Responses To An Interactive Constructivist Model For Web-Based Learning, Cherry O. Steffen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

College and university teacher education programs are not, and should not be, exempt from the growing demand for distance education opportunities. Science teacher education is no exception to this growing demand. While there are some distance-learning courses and even complete programs for teacher education, the majority of these are offered as continuing education or post-graduate education opportunities. The number of programs offered specifically in science teacher education (either undergraduate or post-graduate) is extremely limited. Those distance-learning classes that are available for teacher education rarely reflect the instruction expected from teachers by the National Science Education Standards when they enter the …

Icon, Representation And Virtuality In Reading The Graphic Narrative, David Steiling

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"Icon," "representation," and "virtuality," are key elements to consider when reading multi-modal narratives, including graphic narratives. By considering in detail how these elements are realized in various examples, the author shows how the study of the comics can lay groundwork for critical reading across the technological continuum of storytelling.The author looks at how icon, representation, and virtuality interact in a reading of William Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress. He then examines each term in more detail through readings of a variety of graphic narratives including Max Ernst's, Une Semaine de Bonte, Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of …

Perceptions Of Principals And Teachers Of Their Roles And Other Variables In School Culture In Improving Their School’S Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (Fcat) Letter Grade By Two Grade Levels, Tracey D. Tedder

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on perceptions of principals, assistant principals and teachers of their impact on student achievement scores in improving their school's Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test letter grade scores. This information is of importance because we do not have information on how school reference groups (principals, teachers) perceive the grading of schools as defined by the Florida A+ Plan. Specifically, this study investigated perceptions of school principals, assistant principals and teachers on their role in improving the school's FCAT letter grade by two grade levels in a 9-month school year. This qualitative case study analyzes perceptions of factors and behaviors …

Communicating Change: An Ethnography Of Women’S Sensemaking On Menopause, Hormone Replacement Therapies, And The Women’S Health Initiative, Linda Vangelis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As a result of the recent findings of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), many women who have been on hormone replacement therapies (HRT) have begun to renegotiate their understandings and strategies of this stage of their lives. The WHI findings suggested that the risks of HRT outweighed the benefits for healthy menopausal women. This study examined women's emerging sensemaking regarding HRT and menopause in light of the WHI findings. Seven women in the Tampa Bay area, who were in various stages of menopause, participated in three focus group sessions and two one-on-one interviews to discuss their lives in menopause. Based …

Local Lunches: Planning For Local Produce In Portland Schools, Lisa Anderson, Katherine Krajnak, Lisa Libby, Meghan Mackenzie, Sumi Malik, Katie Shriver

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

In the 1990s, school districts across the country began to integrate fresh food grown by local producers into school meals and snacks. School food authorities and farmers have broadly defined this new movement, called “Farm to School,” as connecting schools and local and regional farmers. Farm to School programs benefit a community’s economy, improve student nutrition, and strengthen education curricula. Local Lunches seeks to initiate Farm to School efforts in Portland, Oregon, by identifying specific strategies that Portland’s school districts can use to incorporate more local produce in their school meals. This project was conducted under the supervision of Sy …

Interview With Myo Demayo, Urbanstead Farm (Audio), Myo Demayo

All Sustainability History Project Oral Histories

Interview of Myo DeMayo by Tyler Anderson.

The interview index is available for download.

The year is estimated.

Commitment And Communication: The Aesthetics Of Receptivity And Historicity, Todd Mei

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

A general tension in contemporary aesthetics can be described as existing between objective truth claims and historical relativity. The former is generally represented by the Enlightenment approaches and its descendants that ground aesthetic judgment in rationality. The latter characterizes the postmodern appeal to historicity and the exposure of historical prejudice. Following mostly the hermeneutical philosophy of Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Dupré, this paper argues how aesthetic theory, defined by either pole, inadequately accounts for historicity. In response to this critique, this paper attempts to navigate between these two poles in returning to an analysis of the nature of history and …

Musical Experience As Aesthetic: What Cost The Label?, Wayne Bowman

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This brief essay draws upon a number of themes introduced in Carolyn Korsmeyer's recent book Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004; ISBN: 0415266599). It does not attempt a comprehensive or critical review of her book; instead it focuses selectively on certain of her points in order to raise concerns of some significance to the music education discipline and, perhaps, to philosophical aesthetics. [1]

The Rhetoric Of Disputes In The Courts, The Media, And The Legislature, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Horizontal Political Externalities The Supply And Demand Of Disaster Management, Ben Depoorter

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Constitutional Law Professors David L. Faigman And Ashutosh A. Bhagwat, Et Al., As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondents In Gonzales V. Carhart And Gonzales V. Planned Parenthood, Nos. 05€€Œ830, 05€€Œ1382 (Introduction And Published Brief To United States Supreme Court), Ashutosh Bhagwat, David L. Faigman, Kathryn M. Davis

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Safeguarding The Interests Of Children In Intercountry Adoption: Assessing The Gatekeepers, Marianne Blair

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Development And Characterization Of High Performance Transistors On Glass, Robert Saxer

Theses

Currently, the electrical drivers behind active-matrix flat-panel displays are polysilicon or amorphous silicon based thin-film transistors (TFTs). The ability to integrate transistors onto the glass substrate offers certain design and performance advantages over package-level integration with bulk silicon ICs; this is commonly referred to as system-on-glass (SOG) or system-on-panel (SOP). System on glass may also lower the manufacturing costs of the entire product. Cell phones, personal digital assistants, and entertainment systems are examples of applications that would benefit from system on glass integration. This project is a joint effort between the Microelectronic Engineering Department at RIT and Corning Incorporated. Thin- …

The Effectiveness Of Captive Release Conservation Methods For Spotted Turtles (Clemmys Guttata), Kate Cassim

Theses

The spotted turtle (Clemmys guttata) is categorized as protected and a species of special concern in New York State (Milam 2001). Understanding the habitat use, movement patterns, and life history characteristics of this species will be essential for any future efforts to provide the necessary habitat requirements for their successful recovery and management. Rochester Institute of Technology partnered with the Seneca Park Zoo and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to investigate the release of captive-bred spotted turtles. The goal of this study was to determine the movements, habitat use, survivorship, and growth of the captive-bred spotted turtles in …

Three's A Crowd, Paul Engin

Theses

Not included.

Media Distribution In The Printing Industry: A Study Of The Movement Of Printed Materials And Electronic Files, Bernice Adjoa Lemaire

Theses

Change, according to Phillip Ruggles (2005), can be advantageous to one's business. It can sometimes be exciting and economically rewarding. At other times, change can be challenging and risky, bringing about chaos and disruption. The printing industry is undergoing both structural and cyclical change. Meeting the challenge to remain competitive in today's printing industry relies heavily on providing value for customers. Thus, print service providers are offering a variety of value added services in an effort to meet customer demands and to remain competitive. One such additional service is distribution (both physical and electronic), which includes shipping/delivery, mailing, warehousing, and …

Corporate Culture Implications On Dam Implementation Success In The Greeting Card Industry, Philip G. Diamantis

Theses

Digital Asset Management (DAM) has become a necessary concern with the growing number of files used in the graphics industry. Organization, storage, filing, and dynamic distribution of electronic mediums is becoming increasingly more important. The ROI for DAM systems comes from time savings, expanding product offerings via the web, and organization. For testing purposes, the greeting card industry was chosen because of its need for various images across several platforms. The research started by selecting several companies in the greeting card industry to analyze their competence with DAM. From these companies, four were selected and categorized according to size and …

The Relationship Between Emotional Recognition And Personality Traits, Lyndon A. Mitchell

Theses

This study investigated the relationship between personality traits and the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions. A sample of undergraduate and graduate students (n = 52) were administered the 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire 5th Edition (16PF-5) (Cattell, 1993) and an abbreviated version of Ekman's Pictures of Facial Affect (Ekman & Friesen, 1976). Pearson product-moment correlations revealed that the personality trait, Apprehension, was associated with the accurate recognition of most of the emotions. Further, regression analyses revealed that the recognition of fear was best predicted by the 16PF factors Dominance, Self Reliance and Apprehension. Personality differences were also identified between …

Putting The Community Back Into Community Networks: A Content Analysis, Michael A. Horning

Theses

This study examines the role that community networks can take in fulfilling McQuail's call for a more democratic participant form of media. Community networks, which are grassroots organizations designed to promote local community initiatives, increased their presence on the Internet in the 1990s. However, in recent years their number has declined. Research suggests that community networks fail because they lack a unified identity, have not determined their specific purpose on the Web, and do not provide relevant information to network members. Findings suggest that community networks wishing to achieve sustainability should concentrate their efforts on developing social capital and fostering …

The Fit Between Task And Medium In Sending Equivocal And Unequivocal Messages: How Self-Reported Skill Creates Self-Reported Attitude In Using The Medium, Teresa Merritt

Theses

Communication channels selected by members of an organization can have an impact on the outcome of the messages sent. The media richness theory proposes that task performance can be optimized when task information is matched with the medium's ability to convey information richness. The current study surveyed 25 support staff within the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology to evaluate the best media fit between task and medium for sending equivocal (ambiguous) and unequivocal (clear and concise) messages. The findings supported the media richness theory, and employees report positive attitudes associated with media use.

Parameric Decomposition For Evaluating Metamerism, Zhaojian Li

Theses

In those industries in which materials are colored to close specifications, a means of evaluating the degree of metamerism of colored objects is of considerable importance. Based on Wyszecki's hypothesis and its application to quantifying metamerism as described by Fairman, parameric decomposition is a technique to adjust one spectrum of a parameric match in order to achieve a perfect (metameric) match under a specific illumination and observer condition. This method can be viewed as batch correction using three "colorants" where the color-mixing model is linear in reflectance.

The research in this thesis presented these methods using the basis functions from …

Simultaneous Visual Cryptography, Oliver Kikic

Theses

A visual cryptography scheme (VCS), as proposed by M. Naor and A. Shamir, encodes a secret image into n different shares. The scheme ensures that only certain designated combinations of shares can recover the original image, while other combinations yield, in probabilistic sense, no information about the secret image. In this thesis, we show that there exist simultaneous visual cryptography schemes (SVCS), i.e. cryptographic schemes that allow for multiple secret images to be encoded across a set of n shares. The essential part of this research is to derive a set of formal definitions used to construct a valid SVCS …

Nonverbal Vocal Interface, Michael J. Murdoch

Theses

Nonverbal vocal interface, meaning the use of non-speech vocal sounds such as "oooh" and "ahhh" as input to a computer, provides an interesting and useful input modality for a graphical user interface. Nonverbal vocal interface is a novel improvement over speech-based solutions because voiced sounds may be smoothly modulated, meaning they are well suited to control of continuous variables such as cursor position, while spoken commands are inherently discrete. A graphical user interface is an excellent environment for vocal input because instantaneous visual feedback is crucial to usability, enabling users to see the results of their vocalizations and learn the …

Suicide And Community Traumatic Events: Is There A Connection?, Regina T. Praetorius

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine if a relationship exists between community traumatic events (CTEs) such as the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the temporal distribution of suicide in a metropolitan Louisiana parish (county) in the Southern United States over the period of January 1, 1994 to December 31, 2004. The researcher used data on suicides (homicides and accidental deaths were used for comparison) in the selected parish to describe the distribution of suicides over the 11 year period. A procedure was developed for identifying and categorizing CTEs sustained by the selected parish (county). A spectral analysis …

Factors Influencing The Importance Of Incorporating Competencies Regarding Mass Casualty Incidents Into Baccalaureate-Degree Nursing Programs As Perceived By Currently Employed Faculty, Kristin Whitty

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Whether they are naturally occurring, caused by environmental forces, or generated by humans, disasters have placed extraordinary stresses on society. Following September 11, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security was created to protect the nation and coordinate responses to future emergencies at the federal, state, and local levels. However, Governmental agencies can’t handle all aspects of mass casualty events. Healthcare professionals, such as nurses, who are knowledgeable and trained in mass casualty incidents (MCIs) are needed to provide competent care to the victims. Although others expect a knowledgeable nursing response, the majority of nurse educators have not received mass casualty …

Minority Recruitment Efforts Aimed At Increasing Student Diversity At Historically Black Public Colleges And Universities And Predominantly White Public Institutions, Nia Francis Mason

LSU Master's Theses

Minority and other race recruitment have become a significant part of general recruitment efforts at many predominantly white institutions (PWIs) and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Despite increased efforts, some universities have not been successful at increasing diversity on campus. This study relies on the use of in-depth interviews to document, describe and understand the similar and differing characteristics of minority and other race recruitment tactics being used at PWIs and HBCUs. The researcher conducted interviews at four public institutions of higher education; two of which are HBCUs, and two of which are PWIs. The researcher also sought to …

Echinochloa Polystachya Management In Louisiana Rice, Roy Matthew Griffin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

E. polystachya introduced at stand densities (SD) of 10,000 through 70,000 stolon segments/ha produced 5.4 to 6 stolons/introduced segment; however, 130,000 through 520,000 SD produced 1.4 to 2.1 stolons per introduced segment indicating increased intra- and inter-specific competition. Stolon production was greater than 160,000 plants/ha with 30,000 through 520,000 SD. The 520,000 SD produced a total stolon length of 318 km/ha and no difference was observed for the 260,000 SD. Total node production was 290,000 nodes/ha with an average of 29 nodes/introduced segment in the 10,000 SD and 5.4 to 9.8 nodes/introduced segment with 70,000 or greater SD indicating greater …

Underground In The Confederate Capital: Punk Subculture In Richmond, Virginia, Christopher J. Dalbom

LSU Master's Theses

The intent of this thesis is to investigate the role of the punk subculture in Richmond, Virginia from an ethnographic perspective. Through participant observation and open-ended interviews, it seeks an understanding of the role of the subculture in the lives of those who embrace it and how it shapes their experiences in Richmond. In doing so, it hopes to fill a gap in music geography and in the study of the punk subculture. According to much of the literature, punk died decades ago, but for those who claim punk allegiance in Richmond today, it is very alive and real. This …