Digital Commons Network^™

Do People With Aphasia Interpret Road Signs Differently Than People Without Aphasia?, Caitlin Elise Brown

LSU Master's Theses

Purpose: This study increased our understanding of how aphasia may affect interpretation of road signs. Background: Despite aphasia’s theoretical effects on road sign comprehension and promising initial findings in studies that investigated driving and aphasia, the literature examining aphasia and road signs has been sparse. Research has shown that aphasia may have some effect on road sign interpretation. However, more study is needed regarding both accuracy and response time to road sign interpretation, which are equally important for safe driving. Methods: This was a prospective, between group study that used data collected from a larger study by Donovan, Savage, Varnado, …

A Study Of Resiliency In New Orleans Neighborhoods Ten Years After Hurricane Katrina, Paul Ramnauth Algu

LSU Master's Theses

Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005, flooding over eighty percent of the Greater New Orleans area and causing a mass exodus of the local population. Statistical analysis was used to quantify recovery at a neighborhood level and answer the following questions: What is the recovery rate of New Orleans neighborhoods ten years after Hurricane Katrina? What factors account for variation in recovery rates among neighborhoods? Six neighborhoods in Orleans Parish were selected for further study based on their unique geographical and recovery metrics. Recovery rates among the seventy-two neighborhoods were based on a comparison of United States Postal …

Factors Influencing Sustainable Cocoa Production In Northern Haiti, Wegbert Chery

LSU Master's Theses

Given the environmental concerns on the one hand, especially soil erosion and deforestation, and the hope that the global cocoa market offers on the other hand, cocoa production is a potential candidate to simultaneously guarantee a competitive return to investment for farmers in northern Haiti and mitigate the negative environmental impact of farming practices. It becomes crucial for policy makers and investors to know and understand the key elements of the decision to produce cocoa. Though there has been substantial effort to improve the cocoa sector in Haiti, cocoa production systems in Haiti lag behind in the area of sustainability. …

Going Off To The War In Hungary: French Nobles And Crusading Culture In The Sixteenth Century, Brian Sandberg

Faculty Articles, Papers, and Other Scholarship

Crusading culture played a significant role in the conceptions and practices of religious warfare in the Early Modern Period, as French authors and militant nobles redeployed Hungary as a crucial theater of crusading war. Examining crusading warfare in Hungary reveals new facets of warrior nobles’ military activities in early modern France and abroad, building on recent studies of French noble culture. The article concludes that French readers developed notions of crusading warfare in part through reports of the war in Hungary, contributing to a burgeoning literature on the production, diffusion, and reception of early modern news and information across Europe.

Writing Quality Predicts Chinese Learning, Connie Qun Guan, Lindsay N. Harris, Wanjin Meng, Charles A. Perfetti

Faculty Articles, Papers, and Other Scholarship

To examine the importance of manual character writing to reading in a new writing system, 48 adult Chinese-as-a-foreign-language students were taught characters in either a character writing-to-read or an alphabet typing-to-read condition, and engaged in corresponding handwriting or typing training for five consecutive days. Prior knowledge of orthography and phonology was assessed before training. At the end of each training day, improved orthographic quality was assessed via increased skill in producing Chinese characters at both the component and global levels. In addition, pretests and posttests were administered at each training day, and the proportional changes were used as the measure …

An Empirical Analysis Of Noncompetition Clauses And Other Restrictive Postemployment Covenants, Randall S. Thomas, Norman D. Bishara, Kenneth J. Martin

Vanderbilt Law Review

Employment contracts for most employees are not publicly available, leaving researchers to speculate about whether they contain postemployment restrictions on employee mobility, and if so, what those provisions look like. Using a large sample of publicly available CEO employment contracts, we are able to examine these noncompetition covenants, including postemployment covenants not to compete ("CNCs" or "noncompetes'), nonsolicitation agreements ("NSAs"), and nondisclosure agreements ("NDAs'). What we found confirms some long-held assumptions about restrictive covenants but also uncovers some surprises.

We begin by discussing why employers use restrictive covenants and examining how the courts have treated them. We then analyze an …

Towards A New Paradigm Of Judicial Education, Mary R. Russell

Journal of Dispute Resolution

When talking about judicial education, a central question emerges: What is the goal of judicial education for judges? A simple answer springs to mind: To make us better judges, of course. This of course is a deceptively simple question with a deceptively simple answer, until there is an attempt to specifically identify how to accomplish this worthy judicial education goal, and that is where simplicity disappears

Let Me In: The Right Of Access To Business Disputes Conducted In State Courts, David W. Brown

Journal of Dispute Resolution

After examining the history of the First Amendment right of access to civil proceedings, this note will analyze how the two-pronged historical test applies to arbitrations conducted in a state court. The prongs of the test — experience and logic — provide the framework for the analysis conducted in this note.6 This note argues the analysis conducted in Strine was the correct approach, and suggests the implementation of Sunshine Laws similar to those in other states as a constitutionally permissible alternative that would satisfy the holding in Strine.

Hydrological Influences On Catahoula Lake In An Altered Floodplain, Lincoln Dugue

LSU Master's Theses

Floodplain lakes in floodplains of large rivers undergoing intensive alterations are subject to hydrologic alteration. One example is in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley (LMAV) and pivotal habitat for wildlife. Catahoula Lake has experienced hydrologic regime alterations over the past ~150 years that may be contribute to changes in the habitat with expansion of woody plants. A Diversion Channel was constructed in 1972 to provide the natural, annual de-watering of the lake to maintain its ecological integrity, but ecologic changes are still occurring. Our general goal is to understand the hydrologic regime of the lake, particularly the historical hydrologic regime …

New Orleans, A City Of Layers Preventing Extinction, William Francis Reinhardt

LSU Master's Theses

Preventing the loss of New Orleans occupies the minds of many designers in Louisiana. Great efforts to preserve the city are targeting the slow return to naturalization of the engineered river to find a new balance determined by plan formulators of the Federal government. Throughout history, many experimental movements have been born from the landscape architecture practice, and may be key to the future of New Orleans. Separate chapters are devoted towards the movements created by William Kent, Fletcher Steele, and Jens Jensen to explore as inspiration to be applied to coastal living. Finally, the future of New Orleans is …

Stochastic Modeling Of Semantic Structures Of Online Movie Reviews, Limeng Pu

LSU Master's Theses

Facing the enormous volumes of data available nowadays, we try to extract useful information from the data by properly modeling and characterizing the data. In this thesis, we focus on one particular type of semantic data --- online movie reviews, which can be found on all major movie websites. Our objective is mining movie review data to seek quantifiable patterns between reviews on the same movie, or reviews from the same reviewer. A novel approach is presented in this thesis to achieve this goal. The key idea is converting a movie review text into a list of tuples, where each …

Social Anxiety And Cannabis-Related Impairment: The Roles Of Anxiety Sensitivity And Intolerance Of Uncertainty, Emily Robin Jeffries

LSU Master's Theses

Cannabis use is associated with many negative consequences. Identification of factors associated with cannabis could inform prevention and treatment efforts. Social anxiety appears to be one risk factor for cannabis-related problems. Thus, it is important to identify malleable cognitive vulnerability factors that may play a role in the social anxiety-cannabis problems relationship. Anxiety sensitivity (AS) is the fear of anxiety-related bodily sensations and is composed of three subfacets: physical, cognitive, and social concerns. AS is associated with greater social anxiety and may play a role in cannabis-related impairment. Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) refers to a tendency to respond negatively to …

Impact Of Reduced Rates Of Hormonal Herbicides Aon Sweetpotato (Ipomoea Batatas Lam.) Growth And Development, Thomas Michael Batts

LSU Master's Theses

Studies evaluated impact of dicamba, 2,4-D, and glyphosate at reduced rates to sweetpotato at root formation (RF) and development (RD) growth stages. For DGA salt of dicamba at RF, glyphosate plus dicamba at 1/10x reduced storage root number 42%, canner grade yield 33%, and total yield 36%. With choline salt of 2,4-D at RF, storage root number compared to the non-treated (6.5) was reduced with glyphosate alone at 1/100x (5.1), 2,4-D alone at 1/250x (5.1), and glyphosate plus 2,4-D applied at 1/10 (4.2) and 1/1000x (5). Canner yield was reduced 32% with glyphosate alone 1/10x, 26 and 27% with 2,4-D …

Disaggregating Student Outcomes By Race And Income: Educational Equity In Oregon, Anne Sinkey, Ann Curry-Stevens

Center to Advance Racial Equity Publications and Reports

This research seeks to answer an emerging question in public school debates: whether race is just a proxy for income when it comes to disparities in educational outcomes among Oregon’s K-12 students. This research set out to respond to this question, and draws from public school data records to answer the question. We investigated student test scores across three different environments: elementary schools, middle schools and high schools. We also investigated student graduation rates from high school. The pattern of findings is absolutely clear: regardless of the site or type of disparities, when we compare how low-income students fare, all …

Community Assessment Of African Maternal Health In The Portland Region: Drivers For Community, Health Services And Institutional Change, Marie-Elena Reyes, Ann Curry-Stevens

Center to Advance Racial Equity Publications and Reports

This community needs assessment surfaces a range of health priorities faced by the African community. While the scope of the study is limited by time and resources, and strategically focused on maternal health, there are a wider set of upstream and downstream health challenges that impede the community’s wellbeing. We encourage policy makers to remember these whenever health policies, and in fact all manner of policies and programs tied to the social determinants of health, are being considered.

The main body of this report contains the insights of the 56 African women who participated in six focus groups. Their voices …

Child And Maternal Health In The Slavic Community: Insights On Assets And Priorities, Marie-Elena Reyes, Ann Curry-Stevens

Center to Advance Racial Equity Publications and Reports

The Slavic community’s health is impacted by race and ethnicity, and also by issues that flow from being a newcomer community, and also from their status as refugees. They also bring to the U.S.A. cultural orientation that is collectivist, and shared experiences of persecution and deep distrust of the government. As is detailed in this report, these experiences have an impact on health and wellbeing, and simultaneously have a detrimental effect on the economic stature of the community.

This Community Needs Assessment on the Health of Slavic Children (ages 0-5 years) was conducted to produce a “needs assessment” report outlining …

Writing In The Geometry Classroom, Amy Lynn Rome

LSU Master's Theses

This study sought a time-efficient way to implement writing in ninth-grade Geometry. Students wrote responses to five expository writing prompts spread out over the spring semester of the 2014-2015 school year. Students’ first attempts were graded and returned to them along with feedback in the form of a teacher-written exemplar. Students rewrote assignments to improve their grades. All first and second attempts were collected and evaluated. We found that students were more successful after seeing the exemplar. Moreover, on assignments occurring later in the semester, more students were able to score in the top categories of the writing assignments on …

A Glorious Assemblage: The Rise Of The Know-Nothing Party In Louisiana, Ryan M. Hall

LSU Master's Theses

Between 1853 and 1856, the nativist and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party became a powerful political force in Louisiana despite the state’s unique religious and political makeup. This thesis studies the rise of the party in three regions of the state: New Orleans, the Sugar Parishes, and North Louisiana and the Florida Parishes to show that the party gained popularity in the state differently in different regions. In New Orleans, the party rejected anti-Catholicism and adopted a stance against political corruption. In the Sugar Parishes, the Know-Nothings were merely a continuation of the Whig Party under a new name. In North Louisiana …

Stress In Allied Healthcare Students, Amy Fitzsimmons

Undergraduate Theses and Senior Projects

No abstract provided.

Education, Oppression, And Democracy : A Philosophical Approach To Educational Inequity, Ben Davis

Undergraduate Theses and Senior Projects

No abstract provided.

A Vocal Autobiography : Pedagogical Considerations And Personal Review Of Beginning Through Advanced Voice Lessons, Jacy Walker

Undergraduate Theses and Senior Projects

No abstract provided.

Nationalization And Regionalism In 1920s College Football, Bennett Jeffery Koerber

LSU Master's Theses

By illuminating the complexities of 1920s American society, college football serves as a remarkably insightful cultural device. At the commencement of the decade, a national business community – one that had been developing since the late nineteenth century – appeared to have come to fruition. The more connected nature of the country served to homogenize the United States economically, politically, and even socially. Citizens who had once lived autonomously found themselves more interconnected with neighboring regions of the country, and thus increasingly defined by national characteristics. This served as an internal crisis of sorts because regional identity operated as a …

Paraguay As A Holy Land: From The Guarani Indians To Reverend Sun Myung Moon, Ronald J. Brown

New York School for Career and Applied Studies (NYSCAS) Publications and Research

The author details the history of the various groups that settled in Paraguay, including Jesuits, Mennonites, and European refugees. He also discusses the rule of President Francisco Solano Lopez.

Language Processing And The Artificial Mind: Teaching Code Literacy In The Humanities, Jerry Scott Weltman

LSU Master's Theses

Humanities majors often find themselves in jobs where they either manage programmers or work with them in close collaboration. These interactions often pose difficulties because specialists in literature, history, philosophy, and so on are not usually "code literate." They do not understand what tasks computers are best suited to, or how programmers solve problems. Learning code literacy would be a great benefit to humanities majors, but the traditional computer science curriculum is heavily math oriented, and students outside of science and technology majors are often math averse. Yet they are often interested in language, linguistics, and science fiction. This thesis …

Automated Conversion Of Text Instructions To Human Motion Animation, Ravikumar Vishwanath Chimmalgi

LSU Master's Theses

Text to animation is the conversion of textual instructions to animations following and depicting those instructions. Text to animation is important to fields such as crime scene investigation, military special operations and storytelling where text is utilized. It is also useful for physical therapy where a doctor can factor in disability parameters in the 3D models and determine the safest therapy exercises for patients. It can be used in robotics, where robot assistants can be instructed to perform tasks through text instructions. In this research, a system was created to generate 3D animation of workouts from their textual instructions. An …

A Test Of General Strain Theory: Suicidal Ideation And Attempt Among Adolescents In Istanbul, Turkey, Muhammed Yildiz

LSU Master's Theses

Previous suicidal ideation and attempt are the strongest predictors of subsequent completed suicide, which is the second leading cause of death among youth today. Research shows that the risk factors for adolescent suicidal behaviors can be grouped into demographic, social, and psychological categories, so a broad theoretical framework is needed to examine the range of these factors’ effects. In this study, Agnew’s general strain theory is tested to explain those suicidal behaviors among adolescents in Istanbul, Turkey. Agnew argued that specific strains were more likely to lead to deviance, therefore a corresponding set of strains are selected. He also argued …

Concerto For Violoncello And Orchestra, Xing Li

LSU Master's Theses

This piece is inspired by three different fable stories, which my parents told to me when I was a child. It has three different characteristic sections. The main tune throughout the piece has Chinese elements, including the use of pentatonic scales and intervals of the second. During each section, I employed the melodious melody of solo cello as the transition to bridge different sections. These transitions are all composed of Chinese folk tunes. The first section uses a story about perseverance. A pony wants to cross a river but it is indecisive and afraid. Some of animals tell the pony …

Investigation Of Potentially Hazardous Particulate Matter In Homes: Designing A Particle Filtration System, John Scott Young

LSU Master's Theses

This research documents the process of designing a technique, materials, and method to filter particulate matter (PM) deposited on surfaces in homes. PM collected from homes in a known industrial corridor, Baton Rouge, was tested for key pollutants sorbed to their surface in an investigation of household air depositions. This research successfully designed a collection method for bulk samples and a filtration apparatus and method for collecting sized laboratory testable samples using porous membrane filtration technology. This research found relatively high concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and the presence of some metals. This research also found the presence of …

A Test Of The Effectiveness Of The Active Learning Technique Think-Pair-Share In A High School Science Classroom, Michael Francis Lowe

LSU Master's Theses

In this study, the active learning technique think-pair-share was tested in an independent high school non-honors chemistry classroom to see if it was more effective than teaching techniques already being used in the chemistry classes. Two classes of tenth grade chemistry students were combined as a test group and a third class of tenth grade chemistry students acted as the control. Learning gains for pre and post-tests from three different chemistry units were analyzed and no significant difference was found between the results of the control and test groups, indicating that think-pair-share was as effective as teaching methods already in …

The Correlation Between Parental Involvement And Student Academic Achievement, Damien Ramon Antoine

LSU Master's Theses

This study investigates whether or not there is a correlation between parental involvement and student academic achievement. A sample of 103 students at Madison Preparatory Academy and CSAL Middle School (CSAL, Inc) were tested for correlations between the degree with which their parents are engaged in their academic lives and the success that they achieve as a result. Small correlations were found to exist between some of the variables tested. The test group consisted of a group of high school students from Madison Preparatory Academy (MPA) and their siblings who attended CSAL Middle which is the feeder school for MPA. …