Digital Commons Network^™

Two Text-Based Interventions On Rigid Problem Solving In The Water Jugs Test, Alexander Philip Wind

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The paper focuses on the Einstellung phenomenon (aka mental set), the adherence to a particular strategy when it is no longer the best or even correct course of action. I wanted to know if the provision of the definition of the Einstellung effect reduces susceptibility to mental set, if exposure to a reading passage in which the protagonist encounters an Einstellung situation affects susceptibility to mental set, and if the definition-provision and reading passage interventions differ in their effect on susceptibility to mental set. Mental Set was measured with a digitized version of Luchins (1943) classic Water Jugs routine. This …

The Design And Implementation Of An Online Professional Development Program For Future Online Educators : A Case Study, Joy Quah

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study examines the practices of an instructor who designed and instantiated an online professional development program to foster expertise in online instructional design. The main purpose of this study is to investigate how her application of technological affordances may inform a re-examination of Cognitive Apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). This theory was formulated to guide the design and research of a workshop-based learning environment that support students in thinking, problem-solving and accomplishing tasks like practitioners in the field. Since the theory was proposed prior to the advent of online teaching and learning, there is a need to reconsider …

Capital Punishment In The Lone Star State : A County-Level Analysis Of Contextual Effects On Sentencing, Jennifer Lynn Owens

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In its landmark decision, Furman v. Georgia (1972), the Supreme Court held all existing death penalty statutes unconstitutional, largely due to the arbitrary nature of the capital sentencing processes that resulted from them. In response to the Furman decision, several states revised their death penalty statutes to address the Court's concerns. Although the Court upheld the newly-drafted statutes in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) and its companion cases, subsequently reinstating the death penalty, intrastate variation in death sentencing suggests that the death penalty may continue to be applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner inconsistent with the Eighth Amendment. This dissertation …

Evaluating Drought In The United States Using The Emissivity Difference Vegetation Index, Hanisha Hirani

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

As monitoring vegetation and crops becomes increasingly important due to climate change, there arises the need for a monitoring scheme that places more weight on water availability as an indication of vegetation health and vitality. The Emissivity Difference Vegetation Index (EDVI) is the first step towards that type of monitoring scheme. With the potential for diurnal studies, there are applications towards agriculture monitoring, wildfire monitoring, and much more. EDVI is a synergetic product retrieved from microwave, visible, and infrared satellite measurements, as well as reanalysis. Since microwave measurements are more sensitive to vegetation water content, EDVI has the potential to …

The Most Interesting Place : The Eastern Mediterranean And American Cultural Knowledge, Gregory Wiedeman

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study addresses how nineteenth-century Americans perceived the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean. The project rests upon a detailed examination of American primary school geography textbooks that enjoyed widespread circulation during the century. The lack of an effective education apparatus in the period rendered American students incredibly reliant on their textbooks. These texts reflect the general common knowledge of the region shared by most educated Americans. Additionally, this study draws support from a thorough analysis of travel accounts that were extraordinarily popular during the period. These works offered Americans a chance to explore vicariously the most interesting lands of the …

American Terrorists As Perpetrators Of Communitarian Assaults, Amitai Etzioni

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Psci 227.01: Issues In Global Public Health, Peter Koehn

University of Montana Course Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Pubh 580.50: Rural Health Issues In Global Context, Peter Koehn

University of Montana Course Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Geo 106n.01: History Of Life, Amy E. Singer

University of Montana Course Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Spring Commencement, April 28, 2013, Eastern Michigan University

Commencement Programs and Materials

No abstract provided.

Modeling Bedrock Mining Hotspots Within The Ouachita National Forest, Arkansas, Stephanie H. Mehlhope

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This study, concentrating on the Ouachita Mountain Range in western-central Arkansas, extends prior work on treethrows and their influence on soil development in the region by supplying a method of determining hotspots of bedrock mining by treethrow. Binary logistic regression analysis was employed to determine the abiotic and biotic factors that are highly correlated with the rate of bedrock detachment found in uprooted rootwads from three study sites within the Ouachita National Forest. The produced logistic regression models suggest topographic factors, tree specific characteristics, as well as the local geology and soil characteristics all have a significant effect upon the …

Using Geospatial Technologies To Characterize Relationships Between Travel Behavior, Food Availability, And Health, Warren J. Christian

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Epidemic obesity in the U.S. has prompted exploration of causal factors related to the built environment. Recent research has noted statistical associations between the spatial accessibility of retail food sources, such as supermarkets, convenience stores, and restaurants, and individual characteristics such as weight, socioeconomic status, and race/ethnicity. These studies typically use residential proximity or neighborhood density to food sources as the measure of accessibility. Assessing food environments in this manner, however, is very limiting. Since most people travel outside of their neighborhood on a daily basis, the retail food sources available to individuals residing in the same area could vary …

Locative Media, Augmented Realities And The Ordinary American Landscape, Andrew Boulton

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation investigates the role of annotative locative media in mediating experiences of place. The overarching impetus motivating this research is the need to bring to bear the theoretical and substantive concerns of cultural landscape studies on the development of a methodological framework for interrogating the ways in which annotative locative media reconfigure experiences of urban landscapes. I take as my empirical cases i) Google Maps with its associated Street View and locational placemark interface, and ii) Layar, an augmented reality platform combining digital mapping and real-time locational augmentation. In the spirit of landscape studies’ longstanding and renewed interest in …

Re-Placing Sprawl: Mapping Place In An American Suburb, Ryan M. Cooper

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

In the post-World War II era land development in the United States has largely been focused on the expansion away from urban centers and out into the surrounding suburbs. While the development of suburbs began with utopian ideals of spiritual wholeness, their actual manifestation on the American landscape has been subject to harsh critiques about their long-term economic and environmental feasibility, fostering of social alienation, and general placelessness. In this thesis I address the criticism of suburbs as placeless, asking ―What are the particular practices of place-making in North American suburbs?‖ Examining interviews, cognitive map surveys, participant observation, archival materials, …

Neoliberalizing The Streets Of Urban India: Engagements Of A Free Market Think Tank In The Politics Of Street Hawking, Priyanka Jain

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation looks into the processes by which neoliberalism is mutating with various local and global discourses in order to transform urban space for marginalized street hawkers in the Global South, specifically Delhi, India. Following the current engagements in geographic literature on neoliberalism that focus on the contextually embedded character and the path-dependent process of the spread of free market ideas, I make free market advocacy think tanks--a rather unknown and under-investigated accomplice to this process--my main entry point. Corporate funded think tanks are often found advocating a neoliberal doctrine of free markets, minimal government intervention, and privatization. A self-professed …

The Devil Made Her Do It: Understanding Suicide, Demonic Discourse, And The Social Construction Of 'Health' In Yucatan, Mexico, Beatriz M. Reyes-Foster

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In the state of Yucatan, Mexico, the suicide rate more than doubles the Mexican national average. This article uses ethnographic data to argue that 1) local understandings of suicide in Yucatán reflect a logic of health among Yucatec Maya people hinging on the belief that spiritual, bodily, and spatial balance must be maintained in order to prevent “illness,” understood as bodily and spiritual suffering; and 2) that Yucatec Maya users of Mexico’s public health system readily adapt the biomedical model to existing paradigms that comingle spiritual, mental, and bodily health due in great part to the inherent contradictions in both …

Directory Of Open Access Journals: A Bibliometric Study Of Library And Information Science, Kotti Thavamani

Collaborative Librarianship

This paper presents a bibliometric study of library-focused journals represented in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). A total of 151 library and information science journals were examined related to a number of issues: subject-specific distribution of library journals, interdisciplinary aspects, country of origin, language-used and other language characteristics, numbers of titles first appearing in given years, publication fees, the existence of license agreements, and the types of organizations having journals in the Directory that focus on libraries or librarianship.

Preservice Teacher Perspectives On Field Experience, The Development Of Teacher Identity, And Professional Practice, Brian Kaelin

Doctor of Education (EdD)

This qualitative study examined the experiences of ten preservice teachers during the first semester of student teaching in Oregon public schools. The purpose of the research was to examine preservice teacher perspectives on how field service impacted professional identity development, instructional methods and the use of instructional technology. The results strongly suggest that field service contributed to the teachers' sense of professional identity. Field placement also largely determined the quality and nature student teaches' instructional practice, as well as the extent to which teachers were able to integrate technology. The study considered factors which influenced the nature and quality of …

2013 Annual Corporate Social Responsibility Report, Florida Blue Foundation

Florida Blue Archives Printed Materials

No abstract provided.

Invisible Histories & The Failure Of Protected Classes, Jill M. Fraley

Scholarly Articles

Our legal history suggests that the evolution of our discrimination law has been and likely should be the continuing enumeration of protected classes. There is, however, a counter-intuitive problem: protecting specific groups suggests to the public that everyone else is fair game, providing implicit legitimacy to other harmful stereotypes. To illustrate this problem this article constructs the legal history of stereotypes and prejudicial acts against Appalachians, a marginalized group that does not fit neatly in the protected categories. Considering then how our courts have treated the relationship between stereotypes and discrimination, along with recent sociological evidence, this article suggests that …

The Contracting World Of Girls At Puberty: Violence And Gender-Divergent Access To The Public Sphere Among Adolescents In South Africa, Kelly Hallman, Nora Kenworthy, Judith A. Diers, Nick Swan, Bashi Devnarain

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

This Population Council working paper describes a participatory mapping project undertaken with single-sex groups of grade 5 and grade 8–9 children in urban and rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. At grade 5, female self-defined community areas were equal to or larger in size than those of males in both sites. However, wide gender divergence in access to the public sphere was found among grade 8–9 children. Although curtailed spatial access, especially in urban areas, is intended to protect post-pubescent girls, grade 8–9 girls reported most spaces in their small navigable areas unsafe. Reducing girls’ access to the public sphere does not …

Producing Bodies, Knowledge, And Community In Everyday Civilian Struggle Over Surveillance, Michelle C. Billies

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a global context of rapidly expanding security practices, those cast as social threats are themselves often most risk of harm. In this dissertation, I develop the concept surveillance threat (ST) to describe the perception or experience of impending or actual harm faced by targeted civilians when they are stopped or screened by law enforcement. Singled out by race and other lines of sociocultural force, those stopped risk physical, legal, sexual, and spatial consequences. Yet focusing solely on the risk of harm limits the full meaning of this encounter. As I show in my research, civilians persistently struggle against these …

The Rise Of Disyllables In Old Chinese: The Role Of Lianmian Words, Jian Li

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The history of Chinese language is characterized by a clear shift from monosyllabic to disyllabic words (Wang 1980). This dissertation aims to provide a new diachronic explanation for the rise of disyllables in the history of Chinese and to demonstrate its significance for Modern Chinese prosody and lexicalization.

A corpus of 300 Lianmian words in Old Chinese was compiled, including 96 Shuāngshēng words, 172 Diéyùn words and 32 Splitting-sound words. This study builds on previous morphological and phonological research on disyllables in Chinese and looks closely at detailed aspects of Old Chinese sound patterns and their evolution. Based on the …

Revisiting The Genesis Of Red Mediterranean Soils, Nicolas Fedoroff, Marie-Agnes Courty

Turkish Journal of Earth Sciences

This work, aside from being a classical discussion on the processes of rubefaction and illuviation, is an attempt to cross the abundant literature on red Mediterranean soils (RMSs) written by pedologists, and also by paleopedologists and geologists, with the climatic frame established by paleoclimatologists for the Quaternary. Such an approach leads us to consider that the development of the RMSs was discontinuous, occurring during periods of environmental stability, i.e. interglacials, characterized by a humid climate (precipitations exceeding evapotranspiration) with dry and hot summers. The impact of glacial intervals on the RMS covers is presently only partially documented. Aeolian processes during …

Coastal Inundation Due To Sea Level Rise And Extreme Sea State And Its Potential Impacts: Çukurova Delta Case, Özlem Si̇mav, Dursun Zafer Şeker, Cem Gazi̇oğlu

Turkish Journal of Earth Sciences

With the rising sea level becoming a more pressing issue to coastal areas, a comprehensive analysis has been conducted to assess the vulnerability of the Çukurova Delta under the projected inundation by the end of the century. The level of inundation was estimated from a multimission satellite altimetry sea level anomaly and significant wave height data between September 1992 and February 2012. Superposed to the clear annual oscillation with 6.2 cm amplitude peaking around the beginning of October, the mean sea level signal exhibits a positive trend of 3.4 ± 0.1 mm/year over the altimetric data period. The extreme wave …

Floristic Diversity And Vegetation Analysis Of Wadi Al-Noman, Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Kadry Abdel Khalik, Mohamed El-Sheikh, Abeer El-Aidarous

Turkish Journal of Botany

Wadi Al-Noman in Mecca is one of the most important wadis. It was included among the most important water sources where the springs and wells of Zobida run and it provides drinking water for the holy places in Mecca and visitors to the Kaaba and Arafat regions. The present study provides an analysis of floristic composition, vegetation types, and structure and species distribution at 20 sites, emphasising the environmental factors that affect species distribution. A total of 126 species representing 39 families of vascular plants are recorded. Fabaceae, Poaceae, and Boraginaceae are the largest families, and therophytes and chamaephytes are …

Contributions To Lichen Diversity Of Turkey From The Sarısu Area (Kocaeli), Gülşah Çobanoğlu, Bi̇rkan Açikgöz, Laurentiu Baloniu

Turkish Journal of Botany

A total of 85 lichen taxa from the Sarısu area of the district of Kandıra in Kocaeli Province were listed. Three new records for the biota of Turkey, Coenogonium pineti (Ach.) Lücking & Lumbsch, Lecania cuprea (A.Massal.) Van den Boom & Coppins, and Opegrapha calcarea Turner ex Sm., have been identified within the context of this study along with 81 new taxa for the province of Kocaeli.

Dry Matter Accumulation And Forage Quality Characteristics Of Different Soybean Genotypes, Esvet Açikgöz, Mehmet Si̇nci̇k, Gary Wietgrefe, Mustafa Sürmen, Semi̇ha Çeçen, Tamer Yavuz, Cengi̇z Erdurmuş, Abdurrahi̇m Tanju Göksoy

Turkish Journal of Agriculture and Forestry

Three different soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] cultivars (A-3127, Derry, and Yemsoy) were evaluated for dry matter (DM) yield, plant components, and crop growth rate (CGR) at different row spacings and harvesting stages in 3 locations with Mediterranean-type climate in a split-split plot design with 3 replications in 2009 and 2010. In addition, crude protein (CP), crude protein yield (CPY), acid detergent fiber (ADF), neutral detergent fiber (NDF), total digestible nutrients (TDN), and relative feed value (RFV) of harvested forage soybeans were determined at the Bursa (Turkey) location. Increased row spacings significantly reduced DM yield at all locations. Combined over …

Changes In Stem Growth Rates And Root Wood Anatomy Of Oriental Beech After A Landslide Event In Hanyeri, Bartın, Turkey, Barbaros Yaman, Nesi̇be Köse, Ünal Akkemi̇k

Turkish Journal of Agriculture and Forestry

On 19 May 1998, a small-scale landslide occurred near Hanyeri, Bartın, in the western Black Sea region. The purpose of the study is to investigate the changes in stem growth rates and root wood anatomy of oriental beech (Fagus orientalis Lipsky). According to results from 8 years before and after the event year, growth variation in the affected trees is significantly high. In the control trees, growth increases after the event year, and the growth variation is 116.22%; this value is 69.59% in the affected trees. However, the growth variation values for ±11 years are 107.69% and 81.36% in control …

Review Of Distinctive Phonetic Features And The Arabic Share In Related Modern Research, Yousef Alotaibi, Ali Meftah

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Most research in the field of digital speech technology has traditionally been conducted in only a few languages, such as English, French, Spanish, or Chinese. Numerous studies using distinctive phonetic features (DPFs) with different techniques and algorithms have been carried out during the last 3 decades, mainly in English, Japanese, and other languages of industrialized countries. DPF elements are based on a technique used by linguists and digital speech and language experts to distinguish between different phones by considering the lowest level of actual features during phonation. These studies have investigated the best performances, outcomes, and theories, especially those regarding …