Digital Commons Network^™

Ambient Intelligence With Wireless Grid Enabled Applications: A Case Study Of The Launch And First Use Experience Of Wejay Social Radio In Education, Helen Patricia Mckenna

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

Wireless grid and ambient intelligent (AmI) environments are characterized as supportive of collaboration, interaction, and sharing. The conceptual framework advanced for this study incorporated the constructs of innovation, creativity and context awareness while offering emergence theory -- emergent properties, structures, patterns and behaviors -- to frame and investigate a wireless grid enabled social radio application which was theorized to be potentially transformative and disruptive. The unintended consequences and unexpected possibilities of wireless grid and smart environments were also addressed.

Using a single case study, drawing upon multiple data collection methods, this research investigated the deployment and use experience of …

The Convergence Of Conventional Media And New Technology In The Cases Of The New York Times And National Broadcasting Company (Nbc), Sheng Zhang

Research Papers

During the last decade, the fast development of new technologies: the Internet, personal computer, portable electronic device, etc., have powerful influences on people’s life especially their consuming behavior. By making consumer’s lives easier, technologies also empower them through more choices on merchandise. Meanwhile, new technologies also drive enterprises, particular media companies, to operate with state-of-the-art techniques, physically as well as structurally. This research project studies the convergence of conventional media with new technologies by focusing on the managerial issues with convergence and business strategies that conventional media companies are using. In this project, it will concentrate on the newspaper and …

A Paradigm For Surviving Severe Macro Economic Disruption: The Promethean Life Engagement Practices Framework, Larry G. Straub

Student Scholarship

Unemployment is rapidly becoming an American epidemic of social, political and economic crisis, even more so for “at risk” groups such as older workers. This study focuses on issues and factors surrounding chronic under-employment, unemployment and even un- employability of our older workforce in America. As the American “social contract” i.e. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are under enormous strain; much will be at stake as America deals with how social, societal, political, educational, legal and economic institutions handle this very complicated and multi-facetted issue... answering the question... “Will Americans over 50 be our next lost generation?” This study analyzed …

Developing Leadership Talent In Family Businesses: Embracing Risk Or Playing It Safe, Stephen P. Miller

Student Scholarship

On-the-job experiences are emphasized as powerful developers of leadership talent in leadership and family business literature. Our qualitative study of 37 family business leaders from mid-market privately held family firms found that it is not just having experiences but the nature of those experiences that determines whether or not authentic leadership talent is actually developed, particularly in next-generation family enterprise leaders. The "family effect," the extent to which actors in a family firm embrace risk in the development of nextgeneration leaders, is identified as central to the development of leadership competencies. We propose a conceptual framework with four factors that …

The Power Of Systemic Fraud: Implications For The Fraud Triangle From The Professional Investing Community, Joseph Wall

Student Scholarship

Fraud is a powerful tool for profit in organizations and for individuals. Professional investors control more than half the world's GDP and continue to commit fraud at an increasing scale which threatens entire countries and regions. Auditors utilize the framework of the fraud triangle for detection and deterrence. However, when fraud is systematic, both become challenging. Literature is silent concerning the lived experiences of the professional trading community, and there is a paucity of knowledge regarding fraud within it. Semi-structured interviews with 31 professional investors yielded insights into how fraud functions. Our analysis suggests that while opportunity and capability hold …

Adversary To Ally: A Relational Approach To Shifting Buyer Paradigms, Donald P. Addison Ii

Student Scholarship

Scholarly literature supports the notion that businesses benefit from long term collaborative relationships with trading partners, yet arm's length, adversarial relationships between buyers and sellers persist. Although scholarly research provides insights regarding conceptual and operational aspects of buyer-seller collaborations, very little has been published concerning the preparation or activities that lead into collaborative relationships. To address this gap this study conducted research involving semi structured interviews with buyers and sellers to understand how collaboration evolves in buyer seller relationships. Of specific interest is how buyer seller relationships, characterized by fear of opportunism and guarded behavior, transition to collaboration characterized by …

What Are The Experiences Of Successful Minority Entrepreneurs In Building Effective Trust-Based Relationships, Robert T. Watt

Student Scholarship

Not a lot of attention has been paid to the networking behavior of minority entrepreneurs. Research on the minority entrepreneur population has typically taken a deficiency and academic approach in focusing on the high failure rate of minority owned businesses in the United States. This has created a gap in the literature on successful behavior of minority business owners. Networking theory suggests that entrepreneurs can use relationships as an asset to increase the success of their business opportunities. Successful minority and non-minority entrepreneurs have engaged in qualitative interviews to share their views and techniques in expanding their business opportunities and …

Cross Practitioner Inter-Rater Variability: Grading Of Adverse Skin Reactions After Radiation Therapy, Carleen A. Evans

Education Doctoral

This study estimated the inter-rater variability for adverse event grades for skin reactions related to radiation therapy among nurses and physicians. Currently, there appears to be a gap in literature on the reliability of severity grades across grading systems. Physicians and nurses conducted a retrospective review of photographs of skin reactions of patients with a diagnosis of breast cancer who received cancer therapy. Rater participants rated the condition(s) seen in each photograph on a scale of Grade 0 to Grade 5. This inter-rater reliability study used quantitative methods to estimate initer-rater agreement and inter-rater reliability of severity grades by comparing …

The Critical Elements In The Development, Implementation, And Evaluation Of An Anti-Bullying Policy For School Districts, Dwight Bonk

Education Doctoral

The issue of bullying has become prominent in public schools and leads to an unsafe environment for learning. Due to the increased public concern regarding bullying and its impact on student safety and learning, states have been forced to develop legislation to address bullying behaviors. This study determined the necessary components in the development, implementation, and evaluation of anti-bullying policies in schools based on input from key stakeholders. Surveys were distributed to school superintendents and elementary and secondary principals in Dutchess County, New York to determine their rankings of the most important components or processes for inclusion in an effective …

Self-Perceptions Of Senior African Americans Who Participate In Formal Volunteering, Monique C. Adams

Education Doctoral

An ever-growing resource in America today is our aging population. One out of every five adults will be age 65 or older by 2030. Indeed, Americans are living longer now than at any other time in history, and they have better health, education and a lifetime of experience to offer when volunteering. This study used the Integrated Theory of Volunteer Work as a theoretical framework. The Integrated Theory of Volunteer Work includes three types of resources: human capital, social capital and cultural capital. Although a large body of literature has documented that those factors are present in the general population, …

Strategies And Actions Used By Stem Degree Seeking Adult, Full-Time, Undergraduates: A Grounded Theory Study, Adwoa Boateng

Education Doctoral

Higher education research focuses on traditional undergraduates under the age of 25 years. The focus of the researcher’s study was on the academic experiences of adult, full-time, STEM undergraduates 25 years of age and older. The purpose of the study was to identify strategies and actions adult students use towards their academic success while enrolled in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs. The Grounded Theory Method was utilized as the qualitative approach to iteratively generate a theory based on the experiences of adult, full-time undergraduates in STEM programs. The significance of the proposed study was an opportunity to provide …

The Impact Of Superintendent Turnover On Student Achievement In Rural Districts, Rebekah Parker-Chenaille

Education Doctoral

The field has gained knowledge in the area of superintendent influence on student achievement; however, more research on superintendent turnover and its impact on organizational performance in a rural context is needed. Student achievement measures have become the primary indicator of school, principal, teacher, and student success (New York: Race to the Top State Scope of Work, 2011) and has become a measure of the superintendent’s performance. Using time series data analysis with twelve years of district data across the 21 schools studied, results indicated that superintendent turnover did impact student achievement. The motive of the superintendent, examined in this …

Development Of A Vibration And Temperature Measurement Device For Railroad Bearings, Andrea P. Arguelles

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Bearing related derailments cause very high cost and inconvenience to the railroad industry. Various wayside detection systems have been implemented to assess bearing condition and prevent premature failure. However, current devices fail to determine the internal condition of bearings or provide insight regarding the danger and severity of defects and abnormalities that may be present. To this end, a device combining both temperature and vibration detection was designed to be embedded in railroad bearing adapters. In order to efficiently design a railroad bearing condition-monitoring system, two factors that must be considered are the capabilities available to operate the different sensors …

Selected Factors Related To The Mathematics Academic Achievement Of Eighth Grade English Language Learners, Anthony Garza

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The purpose of this study was to examine selected factors related to the 8th grade mathematics achievement levels of English Language Learner (ELL) students in selected South Texas middle schools. The dependent variable, ELL mathematics achievement, was measured by the ELL student’s raw score on the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) or the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness linguistically accommodated test (STAAR L). The factors examined in this study were 1) parent’s educational background, 2) socioeconomic status, 3) parental involvement status at school, 4) number of people in the household, 5) family structure, 6) primary …

Zumba® Fitness As A Cultural Mediator, Cole E. Durain

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This ethnography describes local experience as it pertains to aspects of music, dance, and fitness which are compiled into Zumba® Fitness classes of the Rio Grande Valley. While Zumba is not unique to this region, it is locally interpreted based on geo-cultural factors of the Texas-Mexico border region. A large part of Zumba’s success in the Valley can be attributed to the way music is used to identify with regional popular culture and becomes a catalyst for changing the way locals think about health. Research gathered through participant-observation shows that Zumba has become a cultural expression where participants perform both …

Development Of Algorithms And Criteria For Continuous Condition Monitoring Of Railroad Bearings, Sean Michael Woods

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This thesis summarizes research conducted at the University of Texas-Pan American to investigate the implementation of condition monitoring algorithms for use with railway roller bearings equipped with wireless temperature sensor nodes. Current temperature based condition monitoring techniques utilize wayside detection equipment intermittently located along the track to garner sporadic bearing cup temperatures. Such devices are not capable of detecting brief transient temperature trending events. The developed algorithms were tested using a fleet of ten railway freight cars instrumented with wireless sensor nodes and operated by an Australian freight transportation company. Eighteen months of continuous monitoring combined with the inspection of …

Evaluation Of Security Availability Of Data Components For A Renewable Energy Micro Smart Grid System, Leonel Aguilera Zambrano

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

In this thesis, we study the development and security testing of photovoltaic data collection system. With the introduction of the smart grid concept, a lot of research has been done on the communication aspect of energy production and distribution throughout the power network. For Smart Grid, Internet is used as the communication medium for specific required services and for data collection. Despite all the advantages of the Smart Grid infrastructure, there is also some security concern regarding the vulnerabilities associated with internet access. In this thesis, we consider security testing of the two most popular and globally deployed web server …

A Mechanistic Model Of Early Fcεri Signaling: Lipid Rafts And The Question Of Protection From Dephosphorylation, Dipak Barua, Byron Goldstein

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

We present a model of the early events in mast cell signaling mediated by FcεRI where the plasma membrane is composed of many small ordered lipid domains (rafts), surrounded by a non-order region of lipids consisting of the remaining plasma membrane. The model treats the rafts as transient structures that constantly form and breakup, but that maintain a fixed average number per cell. The rafts have a high propensity for harboring Lyn kinase, aggregated, but not unaggregated receptors, and the linker for the activation of T cells (LAT). Phosphatase activity in the rafts is substantially reduced compared to the nonraft …

Expression And Functional Significance Of Maguks On Cortical Interneurons, Gulcan Akgul

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

GABAergic inhibitory interneurons, which constitute twenty percent of the entire neuron population, are crucial to the function of brain. They have several subgroups with distinct morphological, biochemical and most importantly physiological properties. Parvalbumin (PV) and Somatostatin (SOM) expressing inhibitory interneurons represent two major subgroups of interneurons in the cortex as well as most other brain regions. Their activity is driven by the excitatory input they receive from pyramidal neurons. SAP97 is a scaffolding protein at the postsynaptic density of the excitatory synapses. It has important functional roles in trafficking and clustering of various types of ion channels and therefore is …

Feature-Based Binding And Phase Theory, Andrei Antonenko

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Current theories of binding cannot provide a uniform account for many facts associated with the distribution of anaphors, such as long-distance binding effects and the subject-orientation of monomorphemic anaphors. Further, traditional binding theory is incompatible with minimalist assumptions. In this dissertation I propose an analysis of anaphoric binding based on a feature-checking mechanism (Pesetsky & Torrego 2007), by introducing the feature rho, a formalization of the reflexivity proposal of Reinhart and Reuland 1993. I argue that the rho feature is responsible for establishing coreference between an anaphor and its antecedent, by being present and valued on reflexives while being unvalued …

Optimization Techniques For Memory Virtualization-Based Resource Management, Jui-Hao Chiang

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Memory virtualization abstracts the physical memory resources in a virtualized server in such a way that offers many resource management advantages, such as consolidation, sharing, compression and migration. The main goal of this dissertation project is to develop optimization techniques to resource management schemes based on memory virtualization. Although migration of virtual machine (VM) memory state is a standard feature of most modern hypervisors, migration of physical machine memory state is largely non-existent. We applied the standard VM migration technique to building the first known physical machine state migration system for Linux servers, which significantly increases the system management flexibility …

Mercury, Polychlorinated Biphenyls, And Immune Response Indicators In The National Health And Nutrition Examination Survey (Nhanes), Carolyn Michele Gallagher

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Autoimmune diseases are among the leading causes of death among young and middle-aged women, and prevalence is increasing; however, autoimmune etiology is poorly understood. The need to investigate relationships between environmental factors and human autoimmune responses has been prioritized by the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), yet epidemiologic research is sparse. Mercury (Hg) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are ubiquitous and persistent environmental contaminants with early evidence of immunotoxic associations. Immunotoxic responses fall on a continuum, with the normal range of immune responses at the center, immunostimulation and autoimmunity at one end, and immunosuppression and infection …

Synthesis Of A Potential Fret-Based Continuous Glucose Sensor Molecule, Steven Qizhi Gao

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

For decades, millions of people have been suffering from diabetes. Common methods to monitor blood glucose levels include the use of finger stick glucose meters and test strips. Finger prick to draw blood sample is required regularly and can be painful and annoying. Continuous blood glucose monitors (CGM) are commercially available however they still require calibration with a traditional blood glucose measurement and test results lag behind actual blood glucose values. The objective of this project is to develop an indicator molecule that can be potentially used for fluorescence-based continuous glucose sensors once inserted under skin. A scaffold structure was …

Mid Infrared Iii-V Semiconductor Emitters And Detectors, Seungyong Jung

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

A variety of new mid wave infrared (MWIR: 3~5 Μm) and long wave infrared (LWIR: 5~10 Μm) optoelectronic devices have been designed, fabricated, and characterized. Application of the strain engineering and new quinternary material into the active region of light emitting diodes (LEDs) allowed for increasing the internal quantum efficiency more than twofold. InAs/GaSb type II superlattice (SL) active region was used for the LWIR LEDs. It was experimentally demonstrated that only a few periods in the SL contribute to the radiative recombination process, which concludes that active region cascading with fewer periods will be more effective in the LWIR …

Native American Theatre, Playwrights & Spirit Of Place, Sonia Elizabeth Kircher

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

My thesis and research focuses on Native American Theatre, playwrights and performance in the Americas. I am interested in the history of Indigenous performance as it pertains to spirit of place, colonization, Native American philosophy and critical race theory. | 88 pages

Searches For Beyond The Standard Model Tau Jet At The Proposed Eic Detector, Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

One of the measurements proposed at the Electron Ion Collider (EIC) detector is the search for lepton flavor violation. This is a Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) process in which the electron and the quark from the proton form an intermediate boson called the Leptoquark (LQ) which in turn decays into another lepton and quark. In the case of the final lepton being a τ, we are faced with a situation in which we have an electron transforming into a τ, violating lepton flavor conservation in the process.The EIC Detector, if designed appropriately, could have the ability to check if …

Traffic Driven Analysis Of Cellular And Wifi Networks, Utpal Kumar Paul

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Since the days Internet traffic proliferated, measurement, monitoring and analysis of network traffic have been critical to not only the basic understanding of large networks, but also to seek improvements in resource management, traffic engineering and security. At the current times traffic in wireless local and wide area networks are facing similar upsurge. This calls for a similar vigor in traffic analysis studies. This thesis focuses on several traffic analysis studies in both cellular data networks and WiFi LANs. The broad goal is (i) to improve the understanding of the traffic dynamics, to explore structures in the traffic to help …

The Rhetoric Of Revolution, Christopher Reimels

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This paper examines the external and internal changes that occurred in the French language as a result of the French Revolution. In terms of external changes, it examines the perception and overall regulation of the language that resulted directly from the social and political upheaval of French society in the late eighteenth century. While most external changes that were attempted did not come to fruition during the Revolution itself, many aspects of the French language of the early twenty-first century can trace their heritage back to the ideals of the movement. Internally, changes were manifested primarily in the French lexicon, …

Design And Analysis Of Structured Graph Based Wireless Sensor Networks, Jung Hun Ryu

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

In dense wireless sensor networks, a sensor node may have several neighbor nodes within radio range. In this case, efficient network design is more challenging than with sparse networks. Researches on efficient network design for dense networks are often based on random networks and include comprehensive network performance analysis. Random networks have many advantages for wireless sensor networks, such as short-distance radio range, flexibility for nodes to join or leave the network, and self-organization. However, there are also disadvantages inherent to random networks such as difficulty to guarantee global properties such as diameter and connectivity. On the other hand, there …

Smart Ladies Sit Still: Women, Modernism And Photography, Lauren M. Rosenblum

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This dissertation examines the relationship between modern women writers and photography. Modernism was long understood as being opposed to mass culture and mediums of mass production, but this project argues that the movement was in fact dependent upon women's engagement with mass cultural forms, like photographs and the magazines that presented the images. I argue that modern women writers thematically and stylistically integrated photography to critique a complicated and evolving visual culture, one in which a woman's mechanically copied appearance became an increasingly vital means for her to express her subjectivity. Jean Rhys, Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein and Susan Sontag …