Digital Commons Network^™

Razing Awareness: The Bethlehem Steel Administration Building, Steve Bukowski

Museum Studies Projects

Razing Awareness: The Bethlehem Steel Administration Building is a practice in the process of coordinating and opening a professional-grade museum exhibit. Hosted by the Steel Plant Museum of Western New York, "Razing Awareness" explored the history and controversial demolition of the Bethlehem Steel Administration Building in Lackawanna, New York. The exhibit featured artwork, photography, and artifacts from the building itself, weaving art and history together to construct a narrative about historic preservation and the establishment of a sense of place.

The Art Of Steel: As Seen Through The Eyes Of Norman Rockwell, Megan S. Hahin

Museum Studies Projects

For this project the author partnered with the Steel Plant Museum of Western New York (SPM) in South Buffalo to create a special exhibition focused on their 14 prints of Norman Rockwell paintings in the museum’s collection. The exhibition used supplementary artifacts to add personal narratives to Rockwell’s paintings. The exhibit diversified the audience of the SPM and created a potential new audience the museum could target, while still appealing to their current audience through the use of personal narrative. The museum had not curated an art exhibition before and this project proved to be beneficial by exploring new themes …

Econtent Quarterly - Volume 1, Issue 2, Sue Polanka, Mirela Roncevic

University Libraries' Staff Publications

Welcome to the second, Winter 2014 issue of eContent Quarterly. Since launching the journal at 2013 ALA in Chicago, our goal has stayed the same: while the library and publishing industries remain in a state of flux, we want to tackle e-content from every angle and through the voices of a variety of information professionals shaping it. This includes public, academic, and school librarians as well as publishers, aggregators, book distributors, and all others in the business of selling e-content to libraries.

Lawyering Outside The Box: Confronting The Creativity Crisis, Samantha A. Moppett

Southern Illinois University Law Journal

The Great Recession was not only a defining moment in world history and for the United States economy; it was also a turning point for the legal profession.  The economic downturn resulted in a long-term structural adjustment in the legal services market that will adversely impact the legal profession permanently.  Accordingly, lawyers need to be creative in adapting to the changing realities of law practice.

Yet, despite the need for creative approaches to address the changing legal landscape, a disturbing phenomenon was recently identified: creativity in the United States is declining.  Moreover, legal education and the legal practice impose barriers …

Revisiting Colorado V. Connelly: The Problem Of False Confessions In The Twenty-First Century, Daniel Harkins

Southern Illinois University Law Journal

This Article analyzes how the current constitutional test formatted in Colorado v. Connelly no longer sufficiently excludes unreliable confessions from being admitted into evidence at trial.  In the last twenty years, a multitude of psychological studies have demonstrated that people confess to crimes they did not commit for a range of reasons wider than what is recognized by the Connelly inquiry.  This Article analyzes this phenomenon and examines potential methods (both inside and outside the constitutional standard) for preventing these confessions from reaching juries at trial.

The Second Amendment’S Fixed Meaning And Multiple Purposes, Thiago Luiz Blundi Sturzenegger

Southern Illinois University Law Journal

Being faithful to the Constitution’s textual meaning may provide the interpreter with the ability to perceive the adaptability of a constitutional provision to different social and political contexts.  The text of the Constitution refers to principles of law, principles that are indispensable in different ways throughout time.  Textualism as a constitutional interpretation model may offer the path to a more versatile Constitution.

To support this statement, this Article examines the cases in which the Supreme Court interpreted the Second Amendment to the Constitution.  The focal point is the use of history and historic research in constitutional adjudication.  The main argument …

The Seedy Underbelly Of Joinder And Reverse Class Actions: The Porn Industry’S Crusade Against Digital Piracy And Its Interplay With Rule 11 Sanctions, Eric D. Block

Southern Illinois University Law Journal

Since the fall of Napster, litigation involving the illegal downloading of copyrighted materials has become common.  More recently, the adult film industry has joined the fight against illegal downloads.  Unlike the music and film industries that came before it, the adult film industry’s pursuit of litigation presents a number of difficult problems that involve the balancing of the industry’s interest in protecting their copyrighted materials with the possibility of innocent defendants being shamed into settlements due to the embarrassing nature of the suits. This Comment looks to strike this balance through the use of Rule 11 sanctions as a catalyst …

God Save The United States And This Honorable Court: Navigating Through The Marsh After Joyner V. Forsyth County, North Carolina, 653 F.3d 341 (4th Cir. 2011), Brian D. Lee

Southern Illinois University Law Journal

In Marsh v. Chambers, the Supreme Court held that legislative prayer was not unconstitutional per se, due mostly to the fact that prayer during legislative sessions was commonplace when the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution was adopted and ratified.  However, the Marsh Court realized that not all forms of legislative prayer were constitutional and held that such prayers violated the Establishment Clause if they advanced, disparaged, or proselytized a particular religion. Although the prayers at issue in Marsh did not contain sectarian references—references to tenets of a particular religion—the Court did not rely solely on that fact …

Portable Nano-Hydro Power Generator For The Dc House Project, Andrew Aw, James Biggs

Electrical Engineering

This senior project report explains the construction and design of a small, portable water generator that converts kinetic energy flowing in small creeks to electrical energy as a renewable source of energy for the DC House. The DC House, in short, is a project to build a self-sustainable house for Third World countries that utilizes only DC electricity. The system consists of two converters and a charge controller for a 12V lead-acid battery. The first converter converts the hydro generator voltage output to 15 Volts for safe and proper charging of the lead-acid battery by the charge controller. The second …

Looking Forward Transdisciplinary Modeling, Environmental Forecasting, And Management, D. B. Haidvogel, E. Turner, E. N. Curchitser, E. E. Hofmann

CCPO Publications

No abstract provided.

Contextual Expectations Of Privacy, Andrew D. Selbst

Cardozo Law Review

Fourth Amendment search jurisprudence is nominally based on a "reasonable expectation of privacy," but actual doctrine is disconnected from society's conception of privacy. Courts rely on various binary distinctions: Is a piece of information secret or not? Was the observed conduct inside or outside? While often convenient, none of these binary distinctions can adequately capture the complicated range of ideas encompassed by "privacy." Privacy theorists have begun to understand that a consideration of social context is essential to a full understanding of privacy. Helen Nissenbaum's theory of contextual integrity, which characterizes a right to privacy as the preservation of expected …

Scrap Dissolution In Molten Iron Containing Carbon For The Case Of Coupled Heat And Mass Transfer Control, Ajay Kumar Shukla, Brahma Deo, D. G.C. Robertson

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The scrap dissolution in an actual process like the BOF is affected both by mass transfer and heat transfer. In this paper, the mass transfer of carbon in liquid melt is considered along with heat transfer. The approaches used in this paper to model the scrap dissolution phenomenon include the application of Green's function, quasi-static, integral profile, and the finite difference approach for different Biot numbers. Mass transfer coefficients are calculated using the Chilton-Colburn's analogy for the case of forced convection. Since the quasi-static approach requires the least computational time, it is used for a detailed parametric study, including the …

Patient Hand Offs: Facilitating Safe And Effective Transitions Of Care, Amanda Kaye Vandenberg

Master's Projects

Problem: The hand off at the change of shift is a critical time for information exchange which can have significant impact on quality of care and patient safety. The end of shift hand off was identified as an area for improvement on a medical-surgical-acuity adaptable hospital unit. Literature review: Literature suggests that hand offs conducted at the patient’s bedside can help to decrease overtime, improve patient satisfaction scores, and address patient safety/quality issues. Evidence also supports the use of a standardized format for report. Protocol/Intervention: The first step is to provide better education to patients and families on admission regarding …

Effects Of Nonylphenol On Orientation By The Crayfish Orconectes Propinquus, Kathryn J. Page

Masters Theses

Nonylphenol is a widely used surfactant subject to ethoxylation and subsists in the environment for significant amounts of time. It has industrial, agricultural, and domestic uses, and makes its way into the aquatic ecosystem despite treatment of wastewater. Detrimental effects of nonylphenol are varied, but most notably endocrine disruption has been examined. Crayfish are a crucial invertebrate in freshwater ecosystems. They are omnivorous, and occupy a key position in the trophic web as both predator and prey. To determine if nonylphenol exposure has any effect on the orientation abilities of crayfish, I acutely (1 day) and chronically (4 days) exposed …

Native Plant Establishment Success Influenced By Centaurea Stoebe Control Method, Laurelin Marie Martin

Masters Theses

Invasive species frequently hinder restoration efforts. While the effectiveness of differing control methods are often reported, the impacts these methods have on the establishment of a native plant community are often unknown. To determine methods that effectively reduce spotted knapweed (Centaurea stoebe) while enhancing native species establishment, we tested 12 treatment combinations consisting of an initial site preparation (mowing, mowing + clopyralid, or mowing + glyphosate), with combinations of annual adult knapweed hand pulling, and/or burning. We established 48 plots and applied site preparation treatments during summer 2008, seeded 23 native forbs and grasses during spring 2009, pulled …

Phenotypic Correlates Of The Lianescent Growth Form: A Review, Tomasz P. Wyka, Jacek Oleksyn, Piotr Karolewski, Stefan A. Schnitzer

Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

Background

As proposed by Darwin, climbers have been assumed to allocate a smaller fraction of biomass to support organs in comparison with self-supporting plants. They have also been hypothesized to possess a set of traits associated with fast growth, resource uptake and high productivity.

Scope

In this review, these hypotheses are evaluated by assembling and synthesizing published and unpublished data sets from across the globe concerning resource allocation, growth rates and traits of leaves, stems and roots of climbers and self-supporting species.

Conclusions

The majority of studies offer little support for the smaller allocation of biomass to stems or greater …

Conceptual, Impact-Based Publications Recommendations, Ann Smittu Joseph

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

CiteSeerx is a digital library for scientific publications by computer science researchers. It also functions as a search engine with several features including autonomous citation indexing, automatic metadata extraction, full-text indexing and reference linking. Users are able to retrieve relevant documents from the CiteSeer^x database directly using search queries and will further benefit if the system suggests document recommendations to the user based on their preferences and search history. Therefore, recommender systems were initially developed and continue to evolve to recommend more relevant documents to the CiteSeer^x users. In this thesis, we introduce the Conceptual, Impact-Based Recommender (CIBR), …

Patient Risk And Data Standards In Healthcare Supply Chain, Paiman Farrokhvar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Patient safety is one of the most important health care challenges. It is a big concern since 1 in every 10 patients around the world is affected by healthcare errors. The focus of this study is given to preventable adverse events that caused by the errors or system flaw that could have been avoided. In this study, simulation models are developed using Arena to evaluate the impact of GS1 data standards on patient risk in healthcare supply chain. The focus was given to the provider hospital supply chain operations where inventory discrepancy and performance deficiencies in recall, return, and outdate …

A Bandwidth-Conserving Architecture For Crawling Virtual Worlds, Dipesh Gautam

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A virtual world is a computer-based simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit via avatars. Content in virtual worlds such as Second Life or OpenSimulator is increasingly presented using three-dimensional (3D) dynamic presentation technologies that challenge traditional search technologies. As 3D environments become both more prevalent and more fragmented, the need for a data crawler and distributed search service will continue to grow. By increasing the visibility of content across virtual world servers in order to better collect and integrate the 3D data we can also improve the crawling and searching efficiency and accuracy by avoiding crawling unchanged regions …

Hydrogeology And Chemical Characterization Of Hydrocarbon In Domestic Water Wells, Rancho Villa Subdivision, Rogers, Arkansas, Janelle Renee Sherman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project is centered on the Rancho Villa community in Rogers, Arkansas where several residents have had hydrocarbon contamination in their domestic water wells. The goal of this project was to understand the hydrogeology in the study area, characterize the contaminant chemically, and determine the source of the contaminant. The hydrogeology of the area was determined from previous theses. Seventeen samples were taken from the wells in the Rancho Villa community; each sample was analyzed for geochemical parameters and by Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry (GC/MS) for organic compounds analysis. Four of the 17 samples had a visible non-aqueous layer of hydrocarbon …

A Tangled Hope: America, China, And Human Rights At The End Of The Cold War, 1976-2000, Jared Michael Phillips

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A Tangled Hope: America, China, and Human Rights at the End of the Cold War, 1976-2000, discusses the evolution of both the international and American understanding of human rights. Beginning with a discussion of the philosophical and cultural frameworks concerning "rights" that developed in Europe and the Americas throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, this work moves into the post-World War II climate that shaped Jimmy Carter and his unique understanding of human rights and America's role in the Cold War world. In particular, I argue that the existing narrative concerning Carter's foreign policy is lacking in a nuanced understanding …

Successful Marketing Strategies For Promoting Event Destinations, Evease Iniece Tucker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Travel and tourism has been recognized as being an important driver of jobs, growth and economic recovery in the United States. Meetings, events and incentive travel contribute $98.7 billion of the direct spending, $15.0 billion in taxes and 859,000 jobs. As a result, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) in the United States are taking advantage of this impact for growth in their destinations. As a destination marketing organization's main job responsibility is to promote their destination to attract visitors, which requires superior marketing strategies to achieve these goals.

This research investigates the marketing strategies of DMOs in the United States. The …

Understanding Faculty And Non-Traditional Student Perceptions Of Self-Directed Learning In A Practical Nursing Program, Carmen Marie Rogers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study was designed to identify and investigate nursing faculty and student perspectives of self-directed learning in a practical nursing program. It also explored the degree to which student's perceptions of self-directed learning exhibited factors consistent with that of critical thinking. This study is important because self-directed learning and its critical thinking elements are essential in providing safe, competent, effective, and efficient nursing care within practice and education. Using an explanatory case study design the practice of self-directed learning within a practical nursing program was examined through the use of: classroom observations, interviews with nursing faculty, nursing students, and document …

Environmental Literacy Of Sixth Grade Students In Arkansas: Implications For Environmental Education Reform, Lisa Suzanne Wood

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Environmental education must be better integrated into K-12 curriculum to advance environmental literacy. Producing a citizenry that can understand and address the complex environmental issues facing the world today and in the future is essential to sustainable life on this planet.

Using the Middle School Environmental Literacy Survey, 6th grade students across Arkansas were surveyed to obtain a baseline measure of environmental literacy based on the four domains of environmental literacy included in the survey; ecological knowledge, environmental affect, cognitive skills, and behavior. Individual domain scores were combined into a composite environmental literacy score. Results were then compared to the …

Microfluidics Guided By Redox-Magnetohydrodynamics (Mhd) For Lab-On-A-Chip Applications, Vishal Sahore

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Unique microfluidic control actuated by simply turning off and on microfabricated electrodes in a small-volume system was investigated for lab-on-a-chip applications. This was accomplished using a relatively new pumping technique of redox-magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), which as shown in this dissertation generated the important microfluidic features of flat flow profile and fluid circulation. MHD is driven by the body force, FB = j × B, which is the magnetic part of the Lorentz force equation, and its direction is given by the right hand rule. The ionic current density, j, was generated in an equimolar solution of potassium ferri/ferro cyanide by applying …

Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus Urophasianus) Habitat Selection In Northwestern Wyoming And Stable Isotope Analysis Of Fecal Material, Andrea Renee Green

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dramatic range-wide declines in Greater Sage-Grouse populations have prompted efforts to determine habitat characteristics that are selected by sage-grouse for foraging, nesting and brood-rearing areas in an effort to conserve this species. Managers at Heart Mountain and Y U Bench in northwestern Wyoming expressed the need to quantify various habitat characteristics and to determine key use areas at both study sites. Data were collected on a variety of habitat variables in spots selected by grouse for foraging, nesting, and brood-rearing activities. These variables were compared to the same variables measured at random points at both study sites. Significant differences existed …

Criteria For Initial Appointment In Rank And Subsequent Promotion For Faculty In Two-Year Public Colleges, Michael Aaron Orf

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The growth of community colleges over the last five decades has not been met with a commensurate expansion of knowledge about policy development. In order to address this gap in knowledge, this study aimed to determine the prevalence of rank among two-year colleges in the United States; to identify the criteria used to determine rank upon hire for transfer and vocational faculty; to identify the criteria used to determine promotion for transfer and vocational faculty; and to determine if there are differences in criteria between transfer faculty and vocational faculty at initial appointment and subsequent promotion. Additionally, the study sought …

The Impact Of Cognitive Behavior Techniques On The Vocational Identity Of Persons With Disabilities Receiving Ssi/Ssdi Benefits, James Joseph Quinn

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the effects of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) on the vocational identity, self-efficacy, and vocational satisfaction of persons with disabilities receiving SSI/SSDI. This study was carefully planned to help persons with disabilities obtain employment. A review of the relevant literature was used to determine the need for the study and to support the study. Forty participants, all were enrolled into a vocational rehabilitation program were selected for the study. Threats to internal and external validity were taken into consideration and controlled for. They received CBT as a treatment intervention to change their beliefs and irrational thoughts about the …

Examining The Predictors Of Fbs Football Revenue, Hayden Redd

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

College football, specifically the Football Bowl Subdivision, is an ever growing industry. As revenues continue to rise, it is important to be able to predict these revenues. A series of correlations and least square analysis were run on data from 2007-2011 to test their significance to football revenue. The analysis found strong correlations between all-time wins and all-time bowl appearances, average attendance, and historical grade. Strong correlations are seen between all-time bowl appearances and average attendance, historical grade, and recent grade. Strong correlations are seen between wins from 2007-2011 and recent grade. Strong correlations are seen between average attendance and …

The Managerial Activities And Leadership Roles Of Five Achieving The Dream Leader College Presidents, Teresa Marie Mace

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A significant increase in community colleges' (CC) presidential retirements is resulting in a huge loss of critical knowledge and experience. Recognition of this has led to numerous efforts and initiatives to prepare future community college leaders. These efforts have included numerous attempts to identify the competencies, skills, and leadership traits considered essential to performing the president's job. Unfortunately, most of the topics identified in self-reported assessments and personal interviews were not based on actual observations of what successful presidents do.

Unlike studies about community college presidents over the last 30 years, this study utilized Henry Mintzberg's (1968) structured observation methodology …