Digital Commons Network^™

How Are American Cities Planning For Climate Change? An Evaluation Of Climate Action Planning In Chicago, Il And Portland, Or, Nicolette Jones

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Contending with a changing climate presents a necessary push for planning. Although climate change is considered a global environmental problem requiring a global commitment and trans-national action, more and more, policymakers are recognizing the vital need for action at the local level. In the US, especially in the absence of national climate legislation, many local governments have begun developing strategic plans, or climate action plans (CAPs), to address adapting to impacts of climate change and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. This thesis involves case studies of Portland, OR and Chicago, IL, cities with recently adopted CAPs and with considerable recognition in …

Factors That Shape Environmental Perceptions: The Role Of Health And Place, Elizabeth Langlois

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Risk perception is the judgment people make about the characteristics and severity of a risk. Numerous theories and models exist which have identified the factors that influence risk perception. Among these factors, location, health status, and demographic characteristics are known to shape risk perception. To measure the influence of these factors on environmental perception, a series of surveys conducted in four Louisiana communities between 2004 and 2005 describe community perceptions about environmental issues and health status. The objective of the study was to characterize and compare environmental concerns relative to location, health status, and demographic characteristics. Results indicate that location …

Firing Point: Patrol Torpedo Boats During World War Ii, Joshua J. Schick

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

At the beginning of American involvement in the Second World War the United States Navy developed a new class of vessel that had a tremendous impact during World War II. This vessel was the Patrol Torpedo boat. Originally designed to conduct torpedo attacks on enemy surface vessels, the PT boat successfully adapted multiple roles in addition to being a torpedo attack craft. The versatility of the Patrol Torpedo boat during World War II serving in these various roles and as an element of the US Navy has not been recognized by recent scholarship. Using primary sources from the National Archives …

Examining The Bifactor Irt Model For Vertical Scaling In K-12 Assessment, James Koepfler

Dissertations, 2014-2019

Over the past decade, educational policy trends have shifted to a focus on examining students’ growth from kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12). One way states can track students’ growth is with a vertical scale. Presently, every state that uses a vertical scale bases the scale on a unidimensional IRT model. These models make a strong but implausible assumption that a single construct is measured, in the same way, across grades. Additionally, research has found that variations of psychometric methods within the same model can result in different vertical scales. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of …

The Effect Of Participation In A Community Gardening Program On Mood Of College Students, Alicia Fay Mau

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The purpose of this study was to find the effect of gardening in a community setting on mood and affect of college students. Participants of the study included sixteen students attending James Madison University. There were eight controls and eight gardening participants in the six-week experiment. All participants took a pre and posttest based on the Positive and Negative Affect Scale-X (PANAS-X). Gardening groups also took the Affect Balance Scale (ABS) after an hour-long gardening session each week. Statistical analysis showed significant changes in several of the items examined by the PANAS-X. Among gardeners, negative affect went down significantly (t=0.019) …

Methodology And Automated Metadata Extraction From Multiple Volume Shadow Copies, Henri Michael Van Goethem

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Modern day digital forensics investigations rely on timelines as a principal method for normalizing and chronologically categorizing artifacts recovered from computer systems. Timelines provide investigators with a chronological representation of digital evidence so they can depict altered and unaltered digital forensics data in-context to drive conclusions about system events and/or user activities. While investigators rely on many system artifacts such as file system time/date stamps, operating system artifacts, program artifacts, logs, and/or registry artifacts as input for deriving chronological representations, using only the available or most recent version of the artifacts may provide a limited picture of historical changes on …

Development Of A Best Practices Manual For The U.S. Department Of Energy's Wind For Schools Project, Jessica Coleman Fox

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The Development of a Best Practices Manual for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind for Schools Project is an effort to provide the necessary research and data to make the completion of a Best Practices Manual possible. The Best Practices Manual will be used to help with the future development of Wind for Schools Projects nationally. The Wind for Schools Project was developed in 2005; currently 11 states are actively participating. As the Wind for Schools Project developed, various approaches and techniques were used to meet the goals of the program. A Best Practices Manual will serve as a repository …

Sulfur Dioxide Trends In Malta: A Statistical Computing Approach, Nicholas Desira

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

A statistical investigation of data related to emissions and measurement of SO2 in the Maltese islands encompassing the period 2004 to 2012 was conducted. The purpose was to investigate whether SO2 levels were driven by the Marsa power station (MPS), which was considered to be the main source of SO2 on the island. In addition, the study sought to establish spatial and temporal trends in the SO2 concentrations measured throughout the islands. Data was obtained from the Malta Environment and Planning Authority (4 fixed monitoring stations and a diffusion tube network) and also from the Enemalta Corporation (emissions of MPS). …

The Influence Of Ubiquitin-Related Modifier Protein Urm1 On Prion Formation, Jacob Beaver

Honors Theses

Prions are infections proteins that are auto-catalyzing (form by altering a regular protein into the structurally different prion form), and are the cause of many common diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, and Bovine Spongiform encephalopathy (or Mad Cow disease). This experiment tested the effect of three different plasmids, pH317, pER62 and pmp46 on prion formation in both wild-type and Urm1 deletion mutants in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The proposed hypothesis was overexpression of the prion forming protein would increase the frequency of prion formation, as well as yield less sustainable prion amyloids (or prion aggregations) that are easier to …

Mergers And Acquisitions In Small And Medium Sized Enterprises In The Health Care Industry: The Effect Of Regulations On Merger And Acquisition Success, Jessica Bucci

Honors Theses

This study aims to address the lack of information present on small and medium sized enterprises in the merger and acquisition process. An analysis of M&As in the health care industry was conducted The regulations in the health care industry are also investigated in order to demonstrate their effect on SMEs wishing to participate in M&As. A qualitative analysis was conducted to analyze interviews of physicians who have participating in M&As. The results demonstrate the similarities and differences in large and SME M&As.

"Tengo Cara De Ladron?" "Do I Have The Face Of A Thief?": An Investigative Study Of Stereotypes And Racism In Ecuador, Caryn Cortez

Honors Theses

Racism and stereotypes are still very apparent in Ecuadorian society, yet time and time again, I have found people who claim racism does not exist in Ecuador. Fascinated by how such an obvious (for an outsider) part of Ecuadorian society could be systematically denied by so many people who were part of that society, I decided to explore the issue of racism further and sought to find out, through the use of in-depth qualitative interviews and ethnographic research, how students at La Universidad Estatal de Cuenca narratively construct racial identity and racism.

Challenging The Ideal: A Comparative Study Of Suzanne Valadon And William Bouguereau, Mary Sheehy

Honors Theses

The female nude has been represented in art for millennia. From the Paleolithic Woman of Willendorf fertility symbol (22,000 to 24,000 BCE, Fig. 1), to Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538 Fig. 2), women have frequently been depicted as sexualized creatures. Standard ideal body types have been established for each era through the thousands of pieces of art picturing nude women. Archaic women were expected to have large breasts and hips in order to show their fertility. Medieval representations of Mary Magdalene were usually nude and provocative. Women were supposed to see these images of Mary Magdalene and remember to keep …

One Art With Two Sides: Theatre And Performance Art, Jacob Watts

Honors Theses

Theatre is typically a scripted performance, performed by actors within a "Theatre space" and observed by an audience. When capitalized, "Theatre" refers to a field of art and study. It is produced to tell a story, or create meaning. Theatre contains elements of plot and characters, often using the characters to tell a story. Visual performance art is art that focuses on live human performance and defines itself in terms of "visual art" and not in terms of "Theatre performance." Performance art does not always occupy a specific place or use a specific kind of script. It often lacks character, …

Novel Algorithms For Cross-Ontology Multi-Level Data Mining, Prashanti Manda

Theses and Dissertations

The wide spread use of ontologies in many scientific areas creates a wealth of ontologyannotated data and necessitates the development of ontology-based data mining algorithms. We have developed generalization and mining algorithms for discovering cross-ontology relationships via ontology-based data mining. We present new interestingness measures to evaluate the discovered cross-ontology relationships. The methods presented in this dissertation employ generalization as an ontology traversal technique for the discovery of interesting and informative relationships at multiple levels of abstraction between concepts from different ontologies. The generalization algorithms combine ontological annotations with the structure and semantics of the ontologies themselves to discover interesting …

Incorporating Software Instruction Into A Civil Engineering Curriculum, Andrew Michael Torries

Theses and Dissertations

This paper contains the results of a survey of almost 43% of all the private civil engineering firms and government agencies in the state of Mississippi. The survey was focused primarily on the use of software and their thoughts on the software knowledge of new college graduates hired at each place of business. There were three key issues the survey focused on: computer programs used, software proficiencies of new college graduates, and the benefits of prior software knowledge. The paper presents the survey results and analyzes the trends in order to discover what civil engineering firms do and want. Also …

Software Requirements Elicitation, Verification, And Documentation: An Ontology Based Approach, Robert A. Elliott

Theses and Dissertations

Software intensive systems are developed to provide solutions in some problem domain and software engineering principles are employed to develop and implement that system. Software engineering principles should enhance the development and production of software artifacts and yet the artifacts often lack in quality. Crucial in the development process are requirements engineering activities and methods for software documentation. This research focused on requirements engineering activities, software requirements documentation and employed a new approach in these activities that incorporated ontology engineering principles. Ontology engineering refers to the set of activities concerned with the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, the …

Synchrophasor Data Mining For Situational Awareness In Power Systems, Nischal Dahal

Theses and Dissertations

Recently, there has been an increase in the deployment of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) which has enabled real time, wide area monitoring of power systems. PMUs can synchronously measure operating parameters across the grid at typically 30 samples per second, compared to 1 sample per 2-5 seconds of a conventional Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. Such an explosion of data in power systems has provided an opportunity to make electrical grids more reliable. Additionally, it has brought a challenge to extract information from the massive amount of data. In this research, several data mining algorithms are used to …

The Effects Of Gestalt Principles On Diagram Comprehension: An Empirical Approach, Krystle Dianne Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

In the software engineering process some tasks of software engineers are to design software documents, analyze the documents, and comprehend component relationships within software diagrams. Those diagrams represent the software architecture which models the structure, behavior, relationships, and constraints among system components while ignoring implementation detail. In the software lifecycle, the system is implemented from the software architecture and errors and mistakes caused from a lack of comprehension or incorrect comprehension could cause engineers to incorrectly design the system. These errors can be defined as lapses, slips, or lack of understanding and fall into three categories: skill, rule, and knowledge …

Quantification Of Carbon Emission Reduction By U-Transportation Service Effect: A Case Study Of Dongtan U-City, Tae-Woong Jung, Mu-Wook Pyeon, Jee-Hee Koo

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

With the emergence of the response to climate change as a global agenda, UNFCCC member countries must report their Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and absorptions. With conventional carbon emission estimation methods such as the IPCC Guideline, however, it is impossible to measure reduction of carbon emissions by U-City services. Therefore, this study proposed estimating carbon emission reductions by using U-transportation services as a model because this service appears to be the most effective among U-City services in terms of carbon emission reduction. This approach which is unique in Korea has also attempted to quantify the reduction of carbon emissions by …

Essays On The U. S. Biofuel Policies: Welfare Impacts And The Potential For Reduction Of Ghg Emission, Kassu Wamisho Hossiso

Department of Agricultural Economics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation study investigates the impact of the US biofuel policies related to greenhouse gas (GHG) emission regulation, tax credit and renewable fuel standard (RFS2) mandate over production and consumption of ethanol as well as technical and environmental performance of corn ethanol plants. The study develops analytical models and provides quantitative estimation of the impact of various biofuel policies in each of the three chapters.

Chapter 1 of this dissertation examines the tradeoff between achieving the environmental goal of minimizing life cycle GHG emissions and minimizing production costs in recently built dry-grind corn ethanol plants. The results indicate that the …

Strategies Used By Hospitals In A Southeastern State To Reduce Catheter Associated Urinary Tract Infections: Comparing The Outcomes By Hospital Structure And Processes, Furnell Rife

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections are considered a clinical indicator of quality of care. A descriptive research study was conducted to identify the strategies used by hospitals to reduce or eliminate CAUTIs. Infection Control Preventionists were surveyed. In a predominately rural southeastern state, this study demonstrated that about 40% of hospitals surveyed are implementing CAUTI prevention processes.

Jewish Cultural Aspirations, Ruth Weisberg

The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review

In the late nineteenth century in Europe and to some extent in the United States, the Jewish upper middle class—particularly the more affluent families—began to enter the cultural spheres of public life, especially in major cities such as Vienna, Berlin, Paris, New York, and London. While many aspects of society were closed to them, theater, the visual arts, music, and art publication were far more inviting, especially if they involved challenging aspects of modernity that might be less attractive to Gentile society. Jews had far less to lose in embracing new forms of expression, and they were very attracted to …

Effectiveness Of A Pilot Gerontological Nursing Certification Preparation Support Program For Registered Nurses Working In Long Term Care, Gail B. Sprigler

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Capstones

Between 2000 and 2025 there will be a 30% increase in the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in Indiana (Alzheimer’s Association, 2010). Many individuals with AD and related dementia are cared for in long term care communities. Adequate knowledge and expertise of nurses caring for older adults, particularly those with dementia, is important for the delivery of quality care and the promotion of quality of life for residents living in long term care. This pilot project examined the benefit of a resource support program to encourage Gerontological Nursing certification for registered nurses in the long term care setting.

Workplace Lactation Support: Project Development And Implementation, Peggy Rinehart

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Capstones

Objective: A pilot project establishing a lactation support program for staff, faculty, and students at Bluegrass Community and Technical College (BCTC) was introduced in September 2012. The lactation support program is intended to promote and support breastfeeding and decrease barriers to continued breastfeeding for mothers who are employed or attending classes. The purpose of this paper is to report on the: (1) development and implementation of a lactation support program in a regional multi-campus community college; and (2) plans for evaluation of the effectiveness of the new program. Setting: The program was implemented at a community college with campus sites …

Experiences Of Success By Minority Students Attending A Predominantly Caucasian Nursing Program, Staci M. Boruff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nursing educators have struggled for many years with the problem of student attrition in the minority population. Because there are so few minority students who choose nursing as a profession, educators strive to retain these students to graduation. Unfortunately, attrition rates of minority students continue to rise despite years of research into the problem. The majority of this research approaches the issue from the viewpoint of the failing student. What might happen if nursing research took a positive approach to the issue? The purpose of this study was to describe the influencing factors that led minority nursing students to be …

Connotational Subtyping And Runtime Class Mutability In Ruby, Ian S. Dillon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Connotational subtyping is an approach to typing that allows an object's type to change dynamically, following changes to the object's internal state. This allows for a more precise representation of a problem domain with logical objects that have variable behavior. Two approaches to supporting connotational subtyping in the Ruby programming language were implemented: a language-level implementation using pure Ruby and a modification to the Ruby 1.8.7 interpreter. While neither implementation was wholly successful the language level implementation created complications with reflective language features like self and super and, while Ruby 1.8.7 has been obsoleted by Ruby 1.9 (YARV), the results …

Support For Higher Education: Perceptions Of Selected University Administrators And Legislators In Tennessee, Deidre Lee Yowell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This quantitative study examined the perceptions of selected university administrators and legislators concerning levels of support for Tennessee public higher education. The purpose of the study was to gain a greater understanding among the various constituents as to the needs and restraints facing higher education funding. The population targeted for this study was comprised of 132 members of the Tennessee General Assembly, the Executive Director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC), the Chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR), the President of the University of Tennessee System, and 36 Chief Administrators at 9 state-supported universities. The principal investigator …

Teacher Morale In Rural Northeast Tennessee, Brenda Dishman Eggers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the factors that influence the morale levels of teachers in the public school systems of 3 contiguous counties in rural northeast Tennessee. The level of teacher morale was measured using the Purdue Teacher Opinionaire. Data associated with the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) teacher effect score, grade level taught, years of service, gender, and level of education were gathered. The morale score and the teacher effect score were then examined to ascertain if there was a relationship with the other factors. Data from this study were examined using the Statistical Process …

Uneasy Waters: The Night Riders At Reelfoot Lake, Tennessee, 1908, Jama Mcmurtery Grove

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

On October 19, 1908, night riders at Reelfoot Lake, Tennessee kidnapped and murdered Captain Quentin Rankin, an attorney and shareholder in the West Tennessee Land Company. The murder made national news, with coverage emphasizing the night riders' demand for fishing rights. In response, Governor Malcolm Patterson called out the militia to suppress the uprising and advocated for state acquisition of the lake as a means to prevent further violence. In the accepted historical narrative, the uprising at Reelfoot Lake represents an example of rural resistance to the threat that modernization posed to traditional access rights but ignores much of the …

The Frame Of Social Media In Academic And Industry, Weiwen Zhou

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the development of technology, the communication between people has changed rapidly. Social media is a type of digital network designed to share content with other internet users based on their preferences and associations. The purpose of this research was to understand how industry press and the professional market place frame social media today. Moreover, this research showed the explored current social media pedagogy in business and communication programs to see if it matches the need of industry expectations. This study was a content analysis of the text-based study that uses a qualitative software-Leximancer to analyze data. The result suggested …