Digital Commons Network^™

Dynamic Optimization And Conformity In Health Behavior And Life Enjoyment Over The Life Cycle, Hernán D. Bejarano, Hillard Kaplan, Stephen Rassenti

ESI Publications

This article examines individual and social influences on investments in health and enjoyment from immediate consumption. Our lab experiment mimics the problem of health investment over a lifetime (Grossman, 1972a,b). Incentives to find the appropriate expenditures on life enjoyment and health are given by making in each period come period a function of previous health investments. In order to model social effects in the experiment, we randomly assigned individuals to chat/observation groups. Groups were permitted to freely chat between repeated lifetimes. Two treatments were employed: In the Independent-rewards treatment, an individual's rewards from investments in life enjoyment depend only on …

Nonverbal Learning Disabilities Explained Through Student’S Narratives, Brian Louis Wright

Theses and Dissertations

Nonverbal Learning Disabilities Explained Through Student’s Narratives. Brian Wright 2015: Applied Dissertation, Nova Southeastern University, Abraham S. Fischler School of Education. ERIC Descriptors: Learning Disabilities, Perception, Senior High School Students, Self-Efficacy, and Qualitative.

This applied dissertation will provide a deeper understanding of how high school students with nonverbal learning disabilities perceive themselves. Persons with nonverbal learning disabilities are defined primarily through performance measures with less qualitative information available. In this study, high school students identified with nonverbal learning disabilities will have the opportunity to voice their feelings about their disability.

The researcher developed open-ended questions about nonverbal learning disabilities and …

Wrestling With Angels: Postsecular Contemporary American Poetry, Paul T. Corrigan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the current “secular age,” more and more people find beliefs and behaviors associated with traditional religion intellectually and ethically untenable. At the same time, many “postsecular” writers, both believers and nonbelievers, continue to write with religious or religiously-inflected forms, themes, and purposes. In the United States, postsecular poets “wrestle with angels” by engaging constructively and deconstructively with matters traditionally considered the domain of religion and spirituality. While the recent work of Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, John McClure and others puts the concept of the postsecular at the cutting edge of various fields of study, including religion, sociology, and literature, …

Was It Something They Said? Stand-Up Comedy And Progressive Social Change, David M. Jenkins

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From our earliest origins in every civilization across the globe, comic performances have fulfilled an important social function. Yet stand-up comedy has not attracted the serious academic inquiry one might expect. This dissertation argues that in the absence of public intellectuals stand-up comics are important to how we talk about and negotiate complicated issues like gender and race. These comic texts are sites of cultural critique, public discourse, tools for articulation, a means of persuasion, and serve to galvanize communities.

This dissertation argues that stand-up comedy performances are a vital part of modern American intellectual and social life and are …

Facilitating A Transdisciplinary Approach In Teacher Education Through Multimodal Literacy And Cognitive Neuroscience, Margaret Billings Krause

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a compilation of research and theoretical papers based on the affordances of multimodal literacies for marginalized learners and for pre-service teachers’ developing conceptualizations of literacy. Through a transdisciplinary lens, the author considers complex issues presented in traditional, print-based learning environments that potentially marginalize learners in their developing abilities to become successful participants in the multiple literacies in the real world.

Three studies focus on pre-service teachers and their developing understanding of effective literacy-related classroom practices. Chapter Three explores potential affordances of a multimodal learning environment for pre-service teachers with self-identified reading difficulties. The phenomenological study highlights differing …

Half Empty/Half Full: Absence, Ethnicity, And The Question Of Identity In The United States, Ashley Josephine Martinez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study helps us understand the complexities of transnational abandonment, and transnational abandonment in the context of Saudi heritage in particular. Based on a textual analysis of narratives on a blog by individuals abandoned by their Saudi fathers, my findings suggest that they discursively construct their identity in three ways: a) by negotiating their illegitimate status as perceived by many Saudis, and the validity of their search; b) by making sense of the absence of father and the cultural knowledge of the paternal side, while negotiating the inevitable presence of the father in many other ways and their ethnic difference; …

Attentional Allocation In Language Processing In Adults Who Stutter: Erp Evidence, Wendy Lorraine Olsen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this study was to investigate how young adults who stutterer allocate attentional resources during two linguistic stages in picture naming, specifically lemma and lexeme retrieval. This study reports on behavioral and brain electrophysiological data collected during a simple auditory oddball task and a Dual Picture-Word Interference/Tone Monitoring Task.

Student Interactions During Study Abroad In Jordan, Dan P. Dewey, Jennifer Brown, R. Kirk Belnap

Faculty Publications

For many years, researchers have assumed that studying abroad produces “fluent” speakers of a given language. However, in the past several decades, researchers have recognized that learners do not always avail themselves of opportunities to interact in the target language, and even when they do, success is not guaranteed. Scholars have begun to recognize that the quality of learners’ interactions during study abroad may be more important for ultimate language gains than the quantity of language use. This qualitative study documents the interactions of 82 students of Arabic studying in Amman, Jordan, as well as the factors that influenced the …

Nebulized Isotonic Saline Improves Voice Production In Sjögren's Syndrome, Shawn L. Nissen, Kristine Tanner, Ray M. Merrill, Alison Miner, Ron W. Channell, Karla L. Miller, Mark Elstad, Katherine A. Kendall, Nelson Roy

Faculty Publications

Objective: This study examined the effects of a topical vocal fold hydration treatment on voice production over time. Study Design: Prospective, longitudinal, within-subjects A (baseline), B (treatment), A (withdrawal/reversal), B (treatment) experimental design. Methods: Eight individuals with primary Sjogren’s syndrome (SS), an autoimmune disease causing laryngeal dryness, € completed an 8-week A-B-A-B experiment. Participants performed twice-daily audio recordings of connected speech and sustained vowels and then rated vocal effort, mouth dryness, and throat dryness. Two-week treatment phases introduced twicedaily 9-mL doses of nebulized isotonic saline (0.9% Na1Cl2). Voice handicap and patient-based measures of SS disease severity were collected before and …

Torch Light In The City: Auto/Ethnographic Studies Of Urban Kampung Community In Depok City, West Java, Hestu Prahara

Antropologi Indonesia

No abstract provided.

No Lawyer For A Hundred Miles?: Mapping The New Geography Of Access Of Justice In Canada, Jamie Baxter, Albert Yoon

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Recent concerns about the geography of access to justice in Canada have focused on the dwindling number of lawyers in rural and remote areas, raising anxieties about the profession’s inability to meet current and future demands for localized legal services. These concerns have motivated a range of policy responses that aim to improve the education, training, recruitment and retention of practitioners in underserved areas. We surveyed lawyers across Ontario to better understand their physical proximity to clients and how, if at all, that proximity promotes access to justice. We find that lawyers’ scope of practice varies based on a number …

Department Of English Newsletter, Winter 2014-2015, Illinois State University, Department Of English

Department of English Newsletter

Newsletter of the Illinois State University Department of English

Law Historians’ Fallacies, Ilan Wurman

North Dakota Law Review

No abstract provided.

Young, Gifted, And Brown: Ricanstructing Through Autoethnopoetic Stories For Critical Diasporic Puerto Rican Pedagogy, Ángel Luis Martínez

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Young, Gifted and Brown is a journey of two directions converging. It is a study of Puerto Rican Diaspora in higher education, specifically, students making sense and meaning of their everyday. It is also a study of how I have related to them as a professor. Together, this is a story: research done creatively, toward the development of Critical Pedagogy for Puerto Rican Diaspora. The research question is: what has made the Puerto Rican Diaspora in the United States flourish and their lived experience meaningful? How can a diasporic people connect with and affirm their roots in an educational system …

Servicewomen’S Experiences Of Recovery In The Aftermath Of War: A Qualitative Analysis, Courtney P.R. Glover

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Military women’s involvement and contributions to the Global War on Terror (GWOT) are unprecedented and, as such, servicewomen are returning home in numbers that far exceed prior conflicts (Street, Vogt, & Dutra, 2009). Addressing and supporting servicewomen’s postdeployment recovery needs—as similar or distinct from their male counterparts—requires a richer understanding of their lives. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) methodology, this study addressed the paucity of in-depth qualitative research devoted to exploring the recovery experiences of servicewomen in the aftermath of combat deployment. Nine servicewomen with GWOT combat deployments were interviewed on this topic using a semi-structured protocol designed to elicit …

Utilization Of Placebo Response In Double-Blind Psychopharmacological Studies, Contextual Perspective, Margarita Olegovna Ashirova

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Placebo response has been an elusive phenomenon in the fields of medicine, medical research, and psychology. Even though it has been heavily utilized as a comparator treatment in double-blind psychopharmacological studies, the reliable definition and consistent understanding of placebo response are missing. In this contextual exploration, I outlined the state of current placebo response research and variable rates of placebo response reported in double-blind studies. I identified the gap in the literature—lack of consistent understanding of placebo response—that has led to a waste of resources by the psychopharmacological research industry. Further, I compared and contrasted the current inconsistent Western medical …

Maopewa Iati Bi: Takai Tonqyayun Monyton "To Abandon So Beautiful A Dwelling": Indians In The Kanawha-New River Valley, 1500-1755, Isaac J. Emrick

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Maopewa iati bi is a Tutelo translation of William Byrd's eighteenth century quote "To abandon so beautiful a Dwelling." The quotes sets the stage for this examination of the indigenous landscape history of the eastern half of the Middle Ohio River Valley. The region, or Okahok amai, was the homeland of Siouan speakers, but passed from Siouan control into Iroquoian and Algonquian hands around turn of the eighteenth century. Not long afterward Indians, pressured by British and French citizens and governments, were forced to again fight to maintain their hard won new homes. By the middle of the eighteenth century, …

Party Systems, Democratization And Governance In Africa: Aligning Theory And Praxis Using Sierra Leone As A Case Study, Mohamed Saffa Lamin

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

There has been an upsurge in the movement towards democracy in developing countries since the end of the Cold War, which has led former autocratic regimes to embrace values of good governance as they transition to democracy (Huntington, 1991: 21-26). Democratic triumphalism has even led some scholars to declare the "end of history" due to the absence of alternative political systems that rival Western democracy (Fukuyama, 2006). The so-called "third wave" of democratization has been aided by multilateral institutions, international aid agencies and Western democratic governments, which since the 1990s have used democratization and good governance as collateral for foreign …

The Pre-Positioning Of Warehouses At Regional And Local Levels For A Humanitarian Relief Organisation, Saeyeon Roh, Stephen Pettit, Irina Harris, Anthony Beresford

Plymouth Business School

No abstract provided.

A Multi-Agent Emotional Society Whose Melodies Represent Its Emergent Social Hierarchy And Are Generated By Agent Communications, Alexis Kirke, Eduardo Miranda

School of Art, Design and Architecture

No abstract provided.

Using The Ability To Host World Events As Incentive To Procure Voluntary Anti-Discrimination Legal Reform, Brett M. Crowell

San Diego International Law Journal

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) have the power to effect global change. Countries vie for the honor of hosting world events such as the Olympic Games and the World Cup because of the prestige and the economic and political gains those events provide. The IOC and FIFA can and should use the incentive of hosting one of these events to procure legal reform in myriad humanitarian equality issues such as sexual orientation, gender, and race. These organizations can prompt this change by requiring that host countries uphold a set of minimum legal standards …

Microbuses And Mobile Homemaking In Exile: Sudanese Visiting Strategies In Cairo, Anita Fábos

Sustainability and Social Justice

Paying home visits to mark social events and maintain networks is an established cultural pattern in Arab countries.Northern Sudanese displaced in Cairo in the 1990s made significant efforts to continue visiting each other in their temporary homes, despite having to travel long distances to members of their widely scattered networks.The deterioration of the legal and political status of Sudanese living in Egypt during the 1990s contributed to longer-term uncertainty for those who sought safety and security in Cairo.In this article, I argue that this long-term uncertainty constitutes a protracted refugee situation, and that Sudanese visiting practices constituted a mobile homemaking …

Performing Placeslessness: Early American Drama And The Liminal State, 1775-1859, James R. Holsinger

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In Performing Placeslessness, I argue that the lack of a consistent attachment to place--the geopathology that manifests in the problem of placelessness---contributed to the incoherence of American identity from the Revolutionary War through the mid-nineteenth century. In making this argument, I bridge the critical gap between Martin Brueckner's description of the geographic revolution (late-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century) and Una Chaudhuri's Staging Place, in which she characterizes place as a problem in modern realist drama. Examining dramatic publications and performances from 1775-1859, I treat drama as a key site of negotiating problematic conceptions of space and place in America. This period …

The Making Of Natal: Defensive Institutions And State Formation In Nineteenth Century Southern Africa, Jacob Mckinnon Ivey

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation establishes an understanding of how the defensive institutions of the colony of Natal were formed in the context of the emerging British Empire in Southern Africa during the mid-nineteenth century, the parameters of their organization, and their contributions and influences to the institutions which characterized Natal as a colonial state. Paying particular attention to the organization of colonial defence, including the complexities of African contributions to colonial rule and white solutions to questions of security and defence in the emerging colonial state of Natal, a clearer picture of the manner in which Natal defined itself and its place …

Stance Taking In Japanese Newspaper Discourse: The Use And Non-Use Of Copulas Da And Dearu, Michiko Kaneyasu

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

The present study aims to demonstrate how writers display their stances in information-oriented written discourse. In particular, the paper analyzes nominal sentences in three newspaper subgenres, and explicates how the Japanese copulas da and dearu , which are normally considered stylistic variants in written language, are used by journalists as important grammatical resources for expressing their epistemic and evaluative stances toward certain types of information conveyed in nominal sentences. Da in newspaper discourse is used as a marker of the writer’s commitment to the relevance of the information in the given discourse context. Dearu, on the other hand, marks …

Amo Framework And Psychological Empowerment: Conceptual Model Decoding The Black Box Between Hrm And Innovative Work Behavior, Wali Ur Rehman, Mansoor Ahmad

Business Review

Firms operate in an environment which is influenced by external forces like, government, professional associations, the competitors and other similar organizations operating in the organizational field (Dimaggio & Powell, 1983); knowledge intensive firms, are no exceptions. Purpose of this article is to devise comprehensive conceptual and statistical models for opening the black-box between high-involvement HR practices and innovative work behavior of employees working in knowledge intensive companies. The article explains the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity framework as the generating mechanism through which HR practices affect innovative work behavior through psychological empowerment and supportive work environment. Propositions are developed for future research endeavors, in …

Within & Without: Singapore In The World; The World In Singapore, Eng Fong Pang, Arnoud De Meyer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Contents: We, the Citizens of Singapore by Priscilla Chia, Trenton James Riggs; Birth of a Nation: Ways of Celebrating by Celine Alexandra Fogde, Diana Khanh Nguyen, Paul Antoine Victor, Shu Chong Chen, Teo Yi Heng; Building Cross-cultural Bridges by Vani Shriya, Timoteo Marra, Svenja Nicole Schulte, Seow Guan Wen, Niklas Miro Utrobicic; Faces and Facets of Singapore by Felix Brockerhoff, Elizabeth Fong Lin, Kevin Ng Boon Kiat, Racheal Wong Shu Yi, Tam Zhi Yang; Missing the Forest for the (Super) Trees by Nick Chiam Zhi Wen, Teo Yi Heng; Singapore: The Country Where You Cannot Chew Gum? by Felix Brockerhoff; …

Annotated Bibliography: Delivering Library Services To Distance Learners, Seth Allen

The Christian Librarian

No abstract provided.

Control Design And Performance Analysis For Autonomous Formation Flight Experimentss, Caleb Michael Rice

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Autonomous Formation Flight is a key approach for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and managing traffic in future high density airspace. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV's) have made it possible for the physical demonstration and validation of autonomous formation flight concepts inexpensively and eliminates the flight risk to human pilots. This thesis discusses the design, implementation, and flight testing of three different formation flight control methods, Proportional Integral and Derivative (PID); Fuzzy Logic (FL); and NonLinear Dynamic Inversion (NLDI), and their respective performance behavior. Experimental results show achievable autonomous formation flight and performance quality with a pair of low-cost unmanned research fixed …

Setting The Right Tone: Benefits Of Music-Based Instruction In The Esl Classroom, Mollie Talada

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Research has shown a definitive link between the cognitive processing of language and of musical sound. Music has also been shown to be an effective teaching tool in the ESL classroom. Despite the theoretical studies that draw connections between musical aptitude and linguistic ability, few studies have shown the efficacy of using music to improve student motivation and self-confidence, as well as students' perceptions of learning. The aim of this thesis was to bridge the gap between research and pedagogy and to provide student perceptions of the use of musical tasks in three aspects of their learning: (1) student self-confidence …