Digital Commons Network^™

Pattern Extraction From Spatial Data - Statistical And Modeling Approches, Hu Wang

Theses and Dissertations

Exploratory and statistical spatial data analyses are commonly used in a wide range of research fields, such as epidemiology, disease surveillance and crime analysis. Spatial epidemiology, for example, needs to detect significant spatial clusters of disease incidents to help epidemiologists identify environmental factors and spreading patterns associated with certain diseases. Existing spatial analysis approaches mostly focus on the analysis of spatial lattice data, i.e., observations organized by locations such as county or census tract. With the wide spread of location-aware technologies such as GPS and smart phones, spatial interaction data have become increasingly available, e.g., human daily mobility, traveling and …

Saint Dominguan Refugees In Charleston, South Carolina, 1791-1822: Assimilation And Accommodation In A Slave Society, Margaret Wilson Gillikin

Theses and Dissertations

During the 1790s and the first decade of the nineteenth century, nearly 20,000 refugees fled the French colony of Saint Domingue for asylum in the United States. They found new homes in such American port cities as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans. This dissertation explores the experiences of the white planters, gens de couleur, and slaves who sought asylum in Charleston, South Carolina, and the effect their presence had on the city’s long time residents. It might seem from first glance that finding acceptance in Charleston would be easy for them, but this was not the case. …

Independence At Large: Contemporary China's Alternative Music Scenes And The Cultural Practices Of Post-Socialist Urban Youth, Shan Huang

Theses and Dissertations

Using contemporary Beijing’s alternative music scenes as a focal point, this ethnographic research seeks to enrich the understanding of China’s post-socialist urban youth by examining their cultural practices. First, this thesis offers an analytical account of the popularizing embrace of “independent cultures,” which is defined as a collection of experienceable objects and activities in musical, filmic, theatric, and other cultural forms that are well recognized yet believed by advocates as having aesthetic and participatory features that are different from those produced in the popular culture industry. While the vogue for independent cultures is substantially conditioned by the socioeconomic attributes of …

When Life Happens: Theatres Of Hiv And Complexity In South Africa, Jessica S. Ruthven

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines theatre as part of an artistic movement in South Africa to address the social, structural, and emotional repercussions of HIV, as well as a space in which knowledge about HIV/AIDS is actively created, mediated, reproduced, challenged, and presented for public consumption. Although applied theatre has a long history in the country, I focus on innovation in recent theatrical practices that have occurred as artists and members of broader civil society struggle to understand the trajectory of the country's AIDS epidemic and question the scope of popular national HIV intervention campaigns. I use emerging forms of cultural production …

Invest For Impact: An Exploration Of The Incongruities In Social Finance, Kelly Marie Thompson

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Within the impact investing industry, a definition for societal return and how to measure this concept is lacking. Although its potential has been proven, there is still very limited exposure to impact investing within the United States. The present study aims to survey the current status of the impact investment industry in the United States, assess the presence of gaps between investments and their outcomes, and formulate a framework for addressing such shortcomings. The current status of the impact investing industry was examined and evaluated in order to understand how the industry is defined, what is the outcomes social finance, …

Characterizing The Fitness Landscapes Of Gut Symbionts In Defined Community And Diet Contexts, Meng Wu

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

A species' niche is the description of all the environmental conditions required to permit a population of that species to persist, including the effects of the population on those conditions. This definition includes the species' resource requirements, as well as stress tolerances and interactions with other species acting as competitors, predators, parasites, and mutualists. The human gut microbiota serves as a microbial `metabolic organ' tasked in part with the biotransformation of many components of our diet. Relatively little is known about the factors that allow members of the human gut microbiota to persist in a habitat that experiences marked changes …

Gothic Literature And The Politics Of Indistinction, Nicholas Everett Miller

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

I recover the Gothic as a literature of political possibility. While scholars have long associated the Gothic tradition with political fear, I argue that Gothic novels challenge liberal ideas of the self to produce a sometimes radically egalitarian politics of freedom in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Edmund Burke made much of the fearfulness of an egalitarian politics in the 1790s, and literary historians have relied on his influence to argue that Gothic fiction is primarily an expression of the fear that comes with the collapse of familial, social, and political distinctions. But fear is not all that accompanies such …

Integrating The Arts And Sciences In The Museum Setting, Emily Clare Riggins

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The division between the arts and sciences appears to be deepening in America. As political leaders emphasize STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education in schools, arts education is diminished to make room for STEM courses. Concerned about this phenomenon, many art educators are working to integrate the arts into STEM education through a variety of arts integration efforts. Arts integration not only helps to preserve a place for the arts in the curriculum, it also has been shown to enhance STEM learning.

Arts integration is of special interest to art museum educators who feel that they can provide resources …

Situating Belonging Through Multi-Sited Identities: Community Building Among Middle Eastern Christians In Upstate South Carolina, Amelia Ayoob

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a Human Geography perspective on immigrant identity and integration. Using the case of a diverse, multigenerational Middle Eastern Christian population in the Upstate region of South Carolina, I explore how Middle Eastern immigrants and their descendants have negotiated belonging and identity in the United States by simultaneously building new social networks in the Upstate and maintaining ties to the Middle East. The focus on a single case allowed for an in-depth exploration of how geographic and historical contexts have shaped the present-day dynamics of the community (broadly defined) constructed around two Catholic churches, one Latin and one …

Land Surface Anomalies Preceding The 2010 Russian Heat Wave And A Link To The North Atlantic Oscillation, C. K. Wright, K. M. De Beurs, G. M. Henebry

Natural Resource Management Faculty Publications

The Eurasian wheat belt (EWB) spans a region across Eastern Ukraine, Southern Russia, and Northern Kazakhstan; accounting for nearly 15% of global wheat production. We assessed land surface conditions across the EWB during the early growing season (April–May–June; AMJ) leading up to the 2010 Russian heat wave, and over a longer-term period from 2000 to 2010. A substantial reduction in early season values of the normalized difference vegetation index occurred prior to the Russian heat wave, continuing a decadal decline in early season primary production in the region. In 2010, an anomalously cold winter followed by an abrupt shift to …

Sovereignty, Economic Development, And Human Security In Native American Nations, W. Gregory Guedel

American Indian Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Climate-Induced Changes In The Germination Phenology Of Boechera Stricta, Samuel Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Climate change is having demonstrable, worldwide impacts on ecological systems in ways that have modified aspects of organism behavior. Plant phenologies have responded to warmer temperatures in a variety of ways that may have implications for long-term species survival. How germination phenology changes in response to warmer climate is a largely unexplored question yet the ability of a plant to advance or delay germination in unfavorable conditions is critical for survival. Knowing the relative success and timing of germination under different climate regimes is important in understanding whether species can keep pace with the rate of climate change via migration …

Mitigating The Effects Of Climate Change With Wind Energy And Gis, Rachael Isphording, Richard Snow, Mary Snow

Publications

The climate is changing, and humans are heavily exacerbating these changes. As the effects of climate change are being felt across the planet, scientists and policy makers are uniting to increase mitigation efforts and are researching renewable, clean energy sources to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere during energy production. Of the different renewable energy technologies, wind energy is one of the most researched and implemented. Over the past twenty years, researchers have been applying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to their climate change studies. GIS allows the user to spatially view, manipulate, and analyze data …

Innovation Among Georgian Journalism Educators: A Network Analysis Perspective, Ana Keshelashvili

Theses and Dissertations

Rapid developments in technology in recent years have disrupted the media’s traditional role as a main informer for citizens. The changes have challenged journalism educators worldwide, pushing them to innovate and experiment. One purpose of this dissertation is to examine adoption of innovations by journalism educators in Georgia, a small post-Soviet country with partly free media and lack of professional outlets, that has been and still is a beneficiary of Western aid for media development. Employing innovation diffusion theory and the network analysis perspective, this dissertation uses a census of journalism educators and journalism program leaders in Georgia to understand …

Essays On Battle Clusters In Internal Armed Conflicts And Insurgencies: Concept, Causes And Consequences, Chifeng Liu

Theses and Dissertations

With the purpose to re-conceptualize the intensity of internal armed conflicts, I argue that the characteristics such as location, scale and duration of “major battlefields,” i.e. the spatio-temporal clusters of combat events are important in the evaluation of impact of modern civil wars and insurgencies. I start with elaborating and constructing a new concept of conflict magnitude with battle clusters using up-to-date geo-referenced data and spatial statistic methods. In the second article, I first explain the location and duration of major battlefields. The findings indicate that an area with multiple non-state armed groups (NSAGs) is more likely to become main …

Living On The Moon: Women, Home Making, And The House After World War Ii In Shirley Jackson’S We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Leslie Dennis

Theses and Dissertations

In my thesis, I concentrate on Shirley Jackson, her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and women’s place in post-World War II American society. To start, I introduce Jackson and her role in literary history, the housewife writer in the 1950s and 60s, and magazine culture. Then I move to a historical perspective of the 1950s and propaganda during the atomic war era. I focus my attention on how government literature worked to contain women in the home and control sexuality and gender roles. Following my discussion of domesticity, I concentrate on the history of the Gothic novel …

Perception Of Police In Public Housing Communities, Taylor Brickley

Theses and Dissertations

Research on the relationship between police and citizens consistently finds that attitudes toward police (ATP) are least positive among black citizens in areas of concentrated disadvantage. While much of the research in this area focuses specifically on ATP among young black males in low-income communities because they have the most contact with police, there has been relatively little research that has included older and/or female residents. Additionally, research has yet to examine ATP in racial and economic enclaves that may have different social and environmental characteristics than the surrounding community. This study utilizes in-depth interviews with 60 residents of two …

Southern Language, Ideology, And Identity In A High School Sorority, Sara Lide

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the language practices of high school sorority members in a mid-sized city in the U.S. South. Specifically, it describes how economically privileged, white, female youth in the Young Ladies’ Society of Midway (YLSM) used Southern language to position themselves and others in relation to widely and locally circulating ideologies of language, region, gender, and class. Drawing on sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological methods, this study addresses the issues of how Southern language practices and language ideologies relate and how indexical meanings and social identities emerge through linguistic interaction. As a study that examines the language of a group …

A Liberal State Of Mind: Formal Reconstructions Of Statehood In The Anglophone African Novel, Maya Ganapathy

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

While the idea of the nation and national identity is often taken as the starting point for examinations of the African state, this dissertation explores the transnational dimensions of the African novel and the way in which English-language writers from Africa imagine a state that more adequately captures their desire to freely inhabit a global literary marketplace. Although critics of the Anglophone African novel tend to understand the fictional state as an object of unremitting political critique (often simply as a reflection of its real-world counterpart), the African state, when viewed through the methodological lens of narrative form, becomes the …

Commencement Convocation Program, Sarasota - Manatee Campus, December 14, 2014, University Of South Florida

USF Graduation and Convocation Programs

Golden Bull Service & Outstanding Leadership Award - Mariana Barboza; Outstanding Graduate Award - Stephanie Boynton; Outstanding Professor - Fawn T. Ngo

Commencement Convocation Program, St. Petersburg Campus, December 14, 2014, University Of South Florida

USF Graduation and Convocation Programs

Regional Chancellor's Award for Civic Leadership - Mary Anne Reilly; Outstanding Graduate - Angela Wilson; King O'Neal Scholar Award - Jesse Stuart Daw and Heather Lee

Commencement Program 2014 December, Gcsu Special Collections

Commencement Programs

No abstract provided.

Fall Commencement Program, December 13, 2014, Coastal Carolina University

Commencement Programs

Program of Commencement Exercises at Coastal Carolina University.

Why Haven't Technologies Fixed Open Source Intelligence?, Timothy Sparks

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Abstract

The Intelligence Community (IC) reached consensus after 9/11/2001 on the importance of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) due to the changing nature of the global threat environment, the information explosion, and the changing intelligence requirements of the IC. Voluminous amounts of information, much of it with potential application for use in intelligence operations, continue to challenge IC intelligence analysts’ capabilities to harness, and effectively use in finished all-source intelligence production. Government reform commissions, senior IC officials, along with OSINT and technology advocates, have all espoused the growing importance of OSINT, and have outlined many ways in which the IC should …

Policy Context Of The Endemic Flora Of The Maltese Islands In A Changing Taxonomic Landscape, Clara Agius

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The degradation of the environment since the Industrial Revolution has been a turning point for legislation, leading to many countries, including EU states, to create legislations that conserve the environment. These legislations are based on scientific facts. This can create a divide between policy and science, as science and scientific methods are constantly changing, while policy has to keep up. Scientific facts of yesterday, may not necessarily be the same as today. This divide between science and policy may have implications on the designation of Protected Areas. One of the criteria of a Protected Area is the protection of an …

Ua45/6 Commencement Program, Wku Registrar

WKU Administration Documents

Commencement program listing graduates.

Commencement Convocation Program, Usf, Graduate, December 13, 2014, University Of South Florida

USF Graduation and Convocation Programs

Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters - Gilbert A. King

Upgrading In Local Linkages: Examining Fresh Fruits And Vegetables Value Chain From Smallholders To Tourist Hotels In Zanzibar, Winnie Nguni

Business Management Review

This study aimed at examining smallholders upgrading in local linkages using evidence from fresh fruits and vegetables value chain from small farmers to tourist hotels in Zanzibar. The study employed a case study strategy of inquiry where, in-depth interviews with the hotel managers, intermediaries and small farmers were engaged in data collection which was later subjected to qualitative analysis and interpretation. The findings show that formal contracts coupled with captive linkages between tourist hotels and small farmers provide greater upgrading opportunities for smallholders. Market and other linkages characterised by informal contracts do not offer any potential for smallholders upgrading as …

Commencement Convocation Exercises - December 2014, Prairie View A&M University

Commencement and Convocation Exercises

No abstract provided.

Developing, Implementing, And Evaluating A No-Child-Left-Inside Pilot Program, Claudia Radel, Jamie C. Brand, Roslynn Brain

Environment and Society Faculty Publications

We describe experience with a pilot week-long, No-Child-Left-Inside (NCLI), outdoor program implemented in Cache Valley, Utah, in 2012. Through response analysis of a “pre-then-post” children's survey and a parent-completed demographic survey, we assess program effectiveness in raising children's enthusiasm for nature-related behaviors and in reaching a target audience of all local families. The program reached many families with low participation in other conservation programs but failed to reach families from the growing Latino population. Participating children experienced increased excitement to spend more time outdoors exploring and learning, accomplishing NCLI goals of laying a groundwork for children's enhanced environmental literacy.