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Spartan Daily, December 1, 2016, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2016

Volume 147, Issue 38

Senior Grateful For Generous Aid At Illinois Wesleyan, University Communications

News and Events (Discontinued Series)

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Spirituality And Religiosity In Persons Living With Sickle Cell Disease, Dora L. Clayton-Jones, Kristin Haglund

College of Nursing Faculty Research and Publications

Purpose: Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a serious debilitating chronic illness, affecting approximately 90,000 Americans and millions globally. Spirituality and religiosity (S/R) may ease the burden faced by persons living with SCD. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of S/R in adolescents and adults living with SCD in the research literature.

Method: The electronic databases Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Health Source Nursing/Academic, ProQuest Health Module, PsycINFO, Medline, PubMed, and the American Theological Library Association were searched from January 1995 to December 2014.

Findings: Of the 89 studies retrieved, 11 articles between 2001 …

The Effects Of Rootstock, Scion, Grafting Method And Plant Growth Regulators On Flexural Strength And Hydraulic Resistance Of Apple, Stuart W. Adams

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The apple rootstock ‘Geneva^® 41’ (‘G.41’), is desirable for its resistance to fire blight, Erwinia amylovora, while producing high yields. However, ‘G.41’ and other Geneva^® selections tend to form weak graft unions in the nursery that are susceptible to breaking in the wind, at harvest, or during shipment. In order to understand and remedy this graft union weakness, six scions (‘Fuji’, ‘Gala’, ‘Honeycrisp’, ‘McIntosh’, ‘Pink Lady’, and ‘Scilate’) by seven rootstocks (‘G.41’, ‘G.935’, ‘G.214’, ‘G.11’, ‘M.9-NIC 29’, ‘B.9’ and ‘EMLA 26’), by two grafting methods (chip bud and saddle graft) in a factorial design were tested for graft …

Laboratory Experiences In Mathematical Biology For Post-Secondary Mathematics Students, Matthew Lewis

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In addition to the memorization, algorithmic skills and vocabulary which is the default focus in many mathematics classrooms, professional mathematicians are expected to creatively apply known techniques, construct new mathematical approaches and communicate with and about mathematics. We propose that students can learn these professional, higher level skills through Laboratory Experiences in Mathematical Biology (LEMBs) which put students in the role of mathematics researcher creating mathematics to describe and understand biological data. LEMBs are constructed so they require no specialized equipment and can easily be run in the context of a college math class. Students collect data and develop mathematical …

Parenting Styles And Child Outcomes In Puerto Rican Families, Jeisianne Rosario Colón

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The purpose of this study was to evaluate observed parenting dimensions and styles among Puerto Rican parents living in Puerto Rico and its relationship to internalizing and externalizing child problems. Participants included 51 families with a child between the ages of 6 and 11. Families engaged in different behavioral observational tasks such as: making puzzles, recess, or solving a problem. The Parenting Styles Observation Rating Scale was used to code the observations and the Child Behavior Checklist was used to assess for behavioral problems. Overall, parents received high ratings on warmth, demandingness, and autonomy granting. Supportive demandingness was negatively associated …

The Effect Of Prosody On Preschool Children’S Emotional, Cognitive, And Behavioral-Eye And Behavioral-Body Engagement During Story Time, Trevor Rowe

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Many children have insufficient early literacy experiences and fail to obtain proficient emergent literacy before they enter kindergarten. Reading to young children has been positively linked to improving their emergent literacy. Numerous factors influence how engaged children are while being read to including the adult’s prosody, receptive vocabulary, and the home literacy environment. Using a quantitative quasi-experimental design, this study sought to understand the association among prosody, child engagement (emotional, cognitive, behavioral-eye, and behavioral-body), receptive vocabulary, and the home literacy environment. The sample included 76 3- to 5-year-old children from local child care centers and their parents. To understand the …

Statistical Techniques To Model And Optimize Performance Of Scientific, Numerically Intensive Workloads, Steena Dominica Steven Monteiro

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Projecting performance of applications and hardware is important to several market segments—hardware designers, software developers, supercomputing centers, and end users. Hardware designers estimate performance of current applications on future systems when designing new hardware. Software developers make performance estimates to evaluate performance of their code on different architectures and input datasets. Supercomputing centers try to optimize the process of matching computing resources to computing needs. End users requesting time on supercomputers must provide estimates of their application’s run time, and incorrect estimates can lead to wasted supercomputing resources and time. However, application performance is challenging to predict because it is …

Oocyte Quality: Molecular Constituents Altered In The Oocyte Due To Various Environmental Factors, Lindsay Cox

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

An estimated 1.6 million American couples struggle with infertility. Some causes for poor fertility can be clearly defined but in many instances, subfertility is unexplained. Poor oocyte quality is now considered to be a main contributing factor for many causes of infertility. Good oocyte quality is crucial for many processes including embryo development and maintaining pregnancy. There is a possibility that any alterations to the oocyte can have long lasting effects on embryo development and the health of the offspring. The oocyte is very sensitive to any perturbations to its surrounding environment. Transcripts for apoptosis inhibitors and epigenetic modifiers were …

Effect Of Exotic Invasive Old World Climbing Fern (Lygodium Microphyllum) On Soil Properties, Pushpa G. Soti, Krish Jayachandran

School of Integrative Biological & Chemical Sciences (Formerly Dept. of Biology)

Old World climbing fern (Lygodium microphyllum) has become one of the most serious ecological threats to the integrity of the greater Everglades ecosystem of south Florida. In this study, we analyzed the effects of Old World climbing fern on surfacesoil characteristics at invaded sites in Florida. We compared soil characteristics of six invaded and adjacent uninvaded plots at three different locations. Our results show that the fern can grow and thrive in a wide range of soil types and the impact on the soil was site specific with effects being more prominent in sites with low nutrient status. Additionally, there …

Ceo Overconfidence And Stock Price Crash Risk, Jeong-Bon Kim, Zhang Wen, Liandong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study examines the association between chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence and future stock price crash risk. Overconfident managers overestimate the returns to their investment projects and misperceive negative net present value (NPV) projects as value creating. They also tend to ignore or explain away privately observed negative feedback. As a result, negative NPV projects are kept for too long and their bad performance accumulates, which can lead to stock price crashes. Using a large sample of firms for the period 1993–2010, we find that firms with overconfident CEOs have higher stock price crash risk than firms with nonoverconfident CEOs. …

Using A Mobile Gaming App To Enhance Accounting Education, Poh Sun Seow, Suay Peng Wong

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper describes the first mobile-gaming app for learning accounting, Accounting Challenge (ACE). As at June 30th 2016, ACE was downloaded 21,800 times, spanning 90 countries and has won three international teaching awards. The app was motivated by the aim to empower students to learn accounting in a fun way, outside the classroom. ACE combines mobile learning and game-based learning to generate interest and motivation for the digital-native students and is freely available in iPhone/iPad and Android version. Based on a voluntary students’ survey, majority rated ACE favorably, indicating that they were satisfied with the app. ACE was presented at …

Towards Structuring Smart Grid: Energy Scheduling, Parking Lot Allocation, And Charging Management, Mehdi Rahmani-Andebili

All Dissertations

Nowadays, the conventional power systems are being restructured and changed into smart grids to improve their reliability and efficiency, which brings about better social, economic, and environmental benefits. To build a smart grid, energy scheduling, energy management, parking lot allocation, and charging management of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are important subjects that must be considered. Accordingly, in this dissertation, three problems in structuring a smart grid are investigated.

The first problem investigates energy scheduling of smart homes (SHs) to minimize daily energy consumption cost. The challenges of the problem include modeling the technical and economic constraints of the sources and …

Complex Network Analysis And The Applications In Vehicle Delay-Tolerant Networks, Bo Wu

All Dissertations

Vehicle Delay Tolerant Networks (VDTNs) is a particular kind of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), where vehicles equipped with transmission capabilities are interconnected to form Vehicle NETworks (VNETs). Some applications and services on the top of VDTNs have raised a lot of attention, especially by providing information about weather conditions, road safety, traffic jams, speed limit, and even video streamings without the need of infrastructures. However, due to features such as high vehicle mobility, dynamic scenarios, sparsity of vehicles, short contact durations, disruption and intermittent connectivity and strict requirements for latency, many VDTNs do not present satisfactory performance, because no path …

A Multi-Model Approach To Design A Robust Fixed-Order Controller To Improve Power System Stability, Abdlmnam Abdlrahem Abdlrahem

All Dissertations

The rapid increase in power system grid has resulted in additional challenges to reliable power transfer between interconnected systems of a large power network. Large-scale penetration of intermittent renewable energy increases uncertainty and variability in power systems operation. For secure operation of power systems under conditions of variability, it is imperative that power system damping controllers are robust. Electromechanical oscillations in the range of 0.2 Hz to 1 Hz are categorized as inter-area modes. These modes arise due primarily to the weak interconnections characterized by long transmission lines between different operating areas of an interconnected power system. One of the …

Traffic Surveillance And Automated Data Extraction From Aerial Video Using Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, And Probabilistic Approaches, Xi Zhao

All Dissertations

In transportation engineering, sufficient, reliable, and diverse traffic data is necessary for effective planning, operations, research, and professional practice. Using aerial imagery to achieve traffic surveillance and collect traffic data is one of the feasible ways that is facilitated by the advances of technologies in many related areas. A great deal of aerial imagery datasets are currently available and more datasets are collected every day for various applications. It will be beneficial to make full and efficient use of the attribute rich imagery as a resource for valid and useful traffic data for many applications in transportation research and practice. …

Instructional Coaches And The Development Of Relational Trust, Kristin Adams Schulze

All Dissertations

The position of instructional coach has become common in elementary schools, arising from calls for increased student achievement that originate from education policy and changing curriculum standards. Research in regards to the effectiveness of instructional coaches positively impacting classroom teaching is abundant. A key factor in the coach's ability to positively impact classroom instruction is the coach's interpersonal skills and ability to establish relational trust with classroom teachers. This trust is necessary to make changes in teachers' practice, yet little is known about how coaches establish this trust with teachers. Therefore, this study will extend the literature by filling in …

Formulation Of An Interactive Ruled-Based Design Envelope For Ensuring Aftermarket Vehicle Dynamics Compliance, Xianjie Zhou

All Dissertations

The objective of this research is to develop an integrated system engineering methodology for the customization design to maximize vehicle performance upgrade freedom while ensuring vehicle dynamics compliance. A post-delivery modification framework, which is led by an aftermarket umbrella organization and involve various stakeholders has been established. The umbrella organization will be in charge of developing the design envelope and distribute to various aftermarket kit suppliers to generate specific products according to their brand essence. A generic mathematical representation of a (proprietary) ESC system has been developed for virtual certification purposes. This approach is a cost-effective alternative to physical on-road …

Conjugated Polymers Under Confinement: Molecular Dynamics Simulations Study, Sabina Maskey

All Dissertations

The conformations and dynamics of luminescent polymers, polymeric nanoparticles or polydots and polymers grafted onto inorganic nanoparticles using molecular dynamics (MD) simulation have been studied. Rigidity of the backbones of polymers effects their properties. Model polymer, dialkyl poly para phenylene ethynylene (PPE), comprises rigid backbones substituted by flexible side chains. The degree of conjugation of these polymers depends on the conformation of their backbones, which in turn affects their electronic and luminescence characteristics. The results of single chain of PPEs followed by polydots and polymers grafted onto inorganic nanoparticles. PPEs as a function of molecular weight and the nature of …

Tunable Copper Microstructures In Blanket Films And Trenches Using Pulsed Electrodeposition, James Marro

All Dissertations

Copper interconnects in microelectronics have long been plagued with thermo-mechanical reliability issues. Control over the copper deposition process and resulting microstructure can dictate its material properties and reduce stresses as well as defects that form in the copper. In this thesis, pulse electrodeposition processing parameters were evaluated for their impact on the copper microstructure (grain size, texture, and twin density and stress state) through electron backscattering diffraction and wafer curvature measurements. Varying levels of constraint were also investigated for their effect on the copper microstructure to better understand the microstructures of more complex three-dimensional interconnects. Highly texture blanket copper films …

The Intentionality Of Coaching Responses: Connecting Stances To Practices, Leigh Martin

All Dissertations

Limited research exists that highlights instructional coaching practices associated with teacher learning, practice, and student learning (McGatha, Davis, & Stokes, 2015; Gibbons & Cobb, 2011). This study investigates coaching as a high-leverage strategy for mathematics teacher learning as a way to contribute to this research base. My study examines one coach's practices with two different teachers in order to respond to questions in the field about the decision-making processes of coaches. More specifically, this study examines how one coach determined which practices to use and the ways in which one coach adapted her practices with teachers. This dissertation seeks to …

Solutions To Spatial And Computational Challenges For Large-Landscape Conservation Planning, Paul Leonard

All Dissertations

Systematic conservation planning is a fertile scientific discipline capable of examining global natural resource threats including land cover conversion, habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Many of these threats are acting in concert to accelerate the rate of change which increases the urgency of action. The scale of these changes creates unique spatial analysis and computational challenges. This study was designed to address several of these challenges pertaining to the analyses of publically protected areas, habitat connectivity, and private lands conservation. I examine how using high-throughput and high-performance computing helps conservation practitioners ask and solve larger ecological questions. I …

Where Cultures Collide: Hispanic Family Involvement In Education Among Different Socioeconomic Groups, Holly M. Grover

All Dissertations

This dissertation explores from a cultural perspective how socioeconomic status influences Hispanic family involvement in a student's education. Specifically, the study examined types of family involvement practices common to Hispanic families in high and low socioeconomic groups, how much these practices influence student outcomes, and the mechanisms through which involvement is related to student outcomes. Information for a nationally representative stratified probability sample of more than 1600 Hispanic students and their families was obtained from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, utilizing information from waves in 2002, 2004, and 2006. A Structural Equation Model evaluated the relationship between family involvement …

Essays On Export Sophistication, Abdulbasit Aydin

All Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters. These chapters use the export sophistication index introduced by Hausmann, Hwang, & Rodrik, (2007) that the sophistication of a country's export bundle could have significant implications for economic growth. The first chapter investigates if countries that acquire the capability of exporting more sophisticated products achieve higher growth rates. By examining 69, the results show that export sophistication is positively correlated with GDP per worker. While export sophistication is highly correlated with income per worker, some countries stand out as having relatively higher sophisticated scores than predicted by their development levels. Those countries have succeeded …

Examining The Effects Of Interaction Fidelity On Task Performance And Learning In Virtual Reality, Jeffrey Wayne Bertrand

All Dissertations

Virtual reality training applications are becoming more widespread as hardware costs for head-mounted displays (HMDs) and tracking technology decrease, enabling a wide variety of interaction techniques beyond the mouse and keyboard. Advancements in VR hardware yield higher levels of interaction fidelity or the objective degree of exactness with which real-world interactions can be reproduced in an interactive system. Despite the growing use of virtual reality simulations for training, few prior investigations have examined the constituent components of fidelity and how they affect performance and learning in the context of a real-world skills training applications. With tracking and HMD technology reaching …

Engaging Educational Professionals Towards Training The Next Generation Within The Food, Agricultural, And Natural Resources Career Areas, Tyson Sorensen

Funded Research Records

No abstract provided.

A Word From The Writing Center (December 2016), Jennifer Wilson, Ms, Els

A Word From the Writing Team (Newsletter)

This issue includes:

• Writing tip
• Books on writing
• Writing Café

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Aiming High: Foundation Support For State Advocates Brings Universal Children’S Health Coverage Within Reach, Sheila Dunleavy Hoag, Debra J. Lipson, Victoria Peebles

The Foundation Review

To help close the children’s health insurance coverage gap in the United States, in 2011 the Atlantic Philanthropies created the Kids- Well Campaign. KidsWell’s theory of change posits that if advocates could leverage new funding and coverage opportunities created by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, they could expand the number of children with health insurance coverage.

This article presents the major results of the KidsWell evaluation, which found substantial progress in achieving KidsWell interim policy changes and coverage outcomes. But advocates still have a full agenda, which means grantees and funders need to redouble efforts to educate the …

Smart Traffic Light Controller Based On Microcontroller, Mohammed Ehsan

Iraqi Journal of Computers, Communications, Control and Systems Engineering

The increase of population produces an increase of the number of automobiles on the road, which generates heavy traffic in the streets and that causes many problems for the Citizens and traffic policemen an additional two emergency cases therefore it’s important with development technology of embedded systems to solve this problem. In this paper new traffic light controller was built to optimization using the Arduino UNO microcontroller board. The system tries to reduce traffic jams, caused by traffic lights, as possible. The system is based on microcontroller, which represent the brain of the system. The system contains ultrasonic sensors on …