Digital Commons Network^™

Minority Middle And High School Students' Interest In Science: An Exploration Of Teachers' Perceptions, Caroline Makere

Dissertations

A high school teacher conducted a study about minority middle and high school students’ interest in science. The problem was to find out why African American and Hispanic students were showing very little interest in science. The researcher used four middle school science teachers and nine high school science teachers, all from inner city schools in a big city of the Midwest United States except for one middle school teacher from a nearby suburb. The participants answered a survey questionnaire followed with a face-to-face recorded interview. The findings of the study confirmed that students showed little interest in science due …

Teacher-Created Student Growth Assessments Used For Teacher Evaluation And The Effects On Teacher Efficacy, Perry A. Finch

Dissertations

The landscape surrounding teacher evaluation is changing as teacher accountability becomes more prevalent in this process. This study looks at how teacher-created student growth assessments (SGAs) for teacher evaluation affects teacher efficacy with respect to instructional practice. Survey data were collected from 110 kindergarten through eighth-grade teachers; additional data were gathered from three interviews. A majority of these teachers reported the work in creating SGAs benefitted their instructional practice. Teachers reported increased knowledge in learning standards, curriculum development, and assessment literacy as a result of creating their own SGAs. Qualitative findings suggest that when teachers are provided an opportunity to …

An Exploration Of Student Views On Grading And Learning In An Alternative School Setting, Lisa Heipp

Dissertations

Reducing barriers to learning is vital. High school teachers focus tirelessly on how best to engage students in learning; however, grading, which is a fundamental aspect of a teacher’s responsibilities, may be a significant barrier to learning. This dissertation examines students’ views on grading and learning in an alternative high school setting. The twelve students who are the focus of this research have experienced traditional school settings and an alternative charter school setting, thus they offer a perspective on grading and learning that is more widely informed than the majority of students in schools. This study is motivated by three …

School Libraries, Disabilities, And A Phenomenological Progression To Policy Change, Patrice Narret Foerster

Dissertations

Research has shown that school librarians are not well equipped to work with students who have disabilities. Applying a conceptual framework culled from the public policy process literature, this phenomenological study used interviews with Washington, DC, policy workers--some of whom advocate for students with disabilities--to explore the possible connection between library experiences and the placement of libraries within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The findings indicate that these workers are not framing libraries in the same way that library professionals do and are not viewing school libraries as a direct source of student instruction. This dichotomy suggests that …

The Development Of An Automated Testing Framework For Data-Driven Testing Utilizing The Uml Testing Profile, James Edward Hearn

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The development of increasingly-complex Web 2.0 applications, along with a rise in end-user expectations, have not only made the testing and quality assurance processes of web application development an increasingly-important part of the SDLC, but have also made these processes more complex and resource-intensive. One way to effectively test these applications is by implementing an automated testing solution along with manual testing, as automation solutions have been shown to increase the total amount of testing that can be performed, and help testing team achieve consistency in their testing efforts. The difficulty, though, lies in how to best go about developing …

Soteria: A Persuasive Esecurity Assistant, Punica Bhardwaj

Theses and Dissertations

“…security is only as good as the weakest link, and people are the weakest link in the chain.” – B Schneier, 2002 Humans are often referred to as the “weakest link” in the security chain because of the poor security decisions taken by them. There can be many reasons for these decisions, such as lack of understandability of the software, lack of education, and lack of relevant information required to do that particular action. In this Thesis, we focus on the lack of relevant information required at the time of performing the action. In order to provide the user with …

Montana Dragon Boat Festival 2016, Megan Schultz

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

This study was conducted for the Kalispell Conventions and Visitor Bureau, to provide insight into the characteristics of attendees of the 2016 Montana Dragon Boat Festival. Paper surveys on site and a post-event web survey were completed by 479 attendees and/or participants of the event. Results show that 58% of respondents were residents of Montana and of those Montana residents, 69% were from Flathead County. Out-of-county respondents spent an average of 3.72 nights away from home. Of those nights, an average of 2.42 of those nights were in the city of Kalispell and 2.89 nights in other Flathead Valley locations …

A System For Detecting Malicious Insider Data Theft In Iaas Cloud Environments, Jason Nikolai, Yong Wang

Research & Publications

The Cloud Security Alliance lists data theft and insider attacks as critical threats to cloud security. Our work puts forth an approach using a train, monitor, detect pattern which leverages a stateful rule based k-nearest neighbors anomaly detection technique and system state data to detect inside attacker data theft on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) nodes. We posit, instantiate, and demonstrate our approach using the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure where we observe a 100 percent detection rate for abnormal login events and data copies to outside systems.

An Examination Of How Ratings Of Airlines Are Effected By Different Types Of Information: A Mediation Analysis, Abdullah Selim Ozyurek

Theses and Dissertations

Many dynamics directly or indirectly influence the decision-making process. An individual’s demographic features, such as gender, country of origin, and emotions are some of the dynamics. In the aviation domain, air passengers purchase their air travel tickets under those dynamics. The purpose of this study was to determine if the airline type, gender of participants, and participants’ country of origin had an effect on ratings of an individual’s perception of safety and willingness to fly, and which emotions had a mediating effect on this relationship. The study included Lufthansa Airlines and Turkish Airlines from Europe. The affect was the participants’ …

Consumer Likelihood To Complain In The U.S. Commercial Airline Industry, Xinpei Lu

Theses and Dissertations

Consumer emotions play an important role in the marketplace nowadays, which can either directly or indirectly affect the marketing outcomes. Consumer complaints are believed to occur if consumers begin to generate negative emotions due to an unfavorable service experience. However, there are also existing controversies. Moreover, males and females tended to show different attitudes towards complaining in different situations. There is a great significance of doing the research of consumer complaints in commercial airline industry because a majority of the predominant research concentrates on the consumer complaint behaviors in market places such as restaurant, hospital, hotel, and shopping mall. The …

An Examination Of The 16pf Validity Scales As Predictors Of The Scale Of Accurate Personality Prediction (Sapp), Katherine E. Schmieder

Theses and Dissertations

The Scale of Accurate Personality Prediction (SAPP) was derived from the 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16-PF) as a measure of self-knowledge by comparing the degree of similarity of a participant’s predicted and obtained 16 PF results. The purpose of this study was to examine the utilization of the16PF validity scales as potential predictors of an individual’s score on the Scale of Accurate Personality Prediction (SAPP). A series of multiple regression analyses were performed on the current database of 641 respondents. Additionally, to provide additional validity, the database was split into two halves, and the multiple regression analyses were run on …

Digital Quorum Sensing For Self-Organizing Malware, Mark E. Fioravanti Ii

Theses and Dissertations

INTRODUCTION: Malware authors present an interesting problem for the security community as they evolve and adapt to overcome network and host defenses. The determined adversary is a special class of malware author who may attempt to disrupt national interests. These adversaries may seek potentially novel Command and Control (C2) channels to coordinate their activities. Isolated and air-gapped networks pose an interesting challenge that these adversaries must adapt to in order to maintain persistence on these networks. In this work we propose that a determined adversary may seek to implement a digital quorum sensing system inspired by the quorum sensing systems …

Specialized Distributed Hardware Design For Real-Time Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation Error Correction Calculation, Subhadra Subramanian

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis demonstrates an approach to solve execution challenges of Image processing of an Atmospheric turbulence mitigation technique in real-time. An atmospheric turbulence mitigation technique is used to eliminate the aberrations caused by turbulence in the images. The error calculation is a mathematically intensive process, that includes Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to convert the image from the spatial domain to the spatial frequency domain. The FPGA based hardware accelerator design and architectures are investigated in this work to perform Fast Fourier Transform and error calculations in real-time, defined as 30Hz. A scalable and parallel platform is designed to execute the …

Proactive Approach For The Prevention Of Ddos Attacks In Cloud Computing Environments, Brad Alshehry

Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary security systems attempt to provide protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks; however, they mostly use a variety of computing and hardware resources for load distribution and request delays. As a result, ordinary users and website visitors experience timeouts, captchas, and lowspeed connections. In this paper, we propose a new multilayer system for protection against DDoS in the cloud that utilizes Threat Intelligence techniques and a proactive approach to detect traffic behavior anomalies. The first layer of the model analyzes the source IP address in the header of incoming traffic packets and the second layer analyzes the speed of requests …

Looking Backward, Looking Forward: The Long, Torturous Struggle With Mosquitoes, Gordon M. Patterson

Arts and Communication Faculty Publications

The American anti-mosquito movement grew out of the discovery of the role of mosquitoes in transferring pathogens and public concern about pest and nuisance mosquitoes in the late 1800s. In the 20th century, organized mosquito control in the United States passed through three eras: mechanical, chemical, and integrated mosquito control. Mosquito control in the 21st century faces the challenge of emerging pathogens, invasive mosquito species, and balancing concerns about the environment with effective control strategies.

United States Department Of Homeland Security Response To The Office Of Science And Technology Policy Memo, 2013: Public Access Plan (December 2016)

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

DHS response to OSTP memo, 2013: Public Access Plan (December 2016)

The Effects Of Active Learning Technology On Instructors’ Practices And Students’ Engagement And Grades: A Mixed Methods Study, Jeremy C. Van Hof

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Theses and Other Student Research

Partly in response to university teachers’ changing pedagogies marked by flipping instruction, lecture capture technologies are evolving into active learning systems. Little published research exists on the effects of active learning technology on either teachers or students. This two-phase sequential explanatory mixed methods study details the effects that active learning systems have on instructor practices and on student grades and engagement. Phase one combined quantitative data collection with instructor interviews. Phase one findings show higher student engagement levels correlate with the use of the active learning system only in the presence of very specific, flipped classroom practices. Phase two, a …

Across The Great Divide: Findings And Possibilities For Action From The 2016 Summit Meeting Of Academic Libraries And University Presses With Administrative Relationships (P2l), Mary Rose Muccie, Joe Lucia, Elliott Shore, Clifford Lynch, Peter Berkery

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The library-press relationship explored in P2L allows for transformative approaches in support and dissemination of scholarship. Effective exploitation of these partnerships is in the early stages and there is an opportunity to influence the outcomes to ensure they are as broadly applicable and scalable as possible. As Cliff Lynch (CNI) noted in his summary of the day’s conversation, we must do more exploration of both intra-institutional (library and press) and cross-institutional collaborations. He provided several compelling suggestions for partnerships, including new ways to promote and leverage library special collections as well as ideas for increasing discoverability of press content. (See …

Variants Of Simple Correspondence Analysis, Rosaria Lombardo, Eric J. Beh

The R Journal

This paper presents the R package CAvariants (Lombardo and Beh, 2017). The package performs six variants of correspondence analysis on a two-way contingency table. The main function that shares the same name as the package– CAvariants– allows the user to choose (via a series of input parameters) from six different correspondence analysis procedures. These include the classical approach to (symmetrical) correspondence analysis, singly ordered correspondence analysis, doubly ordered correspondence analysis, non symmetrical correspondence analysis, singly ordered non symmetrical correspondence analysis and doubly ordered non symmetrical correspondence analysis. The code provides the flexibility for constructing either a classical correspondence plot or …

A Generic Benchmark For A Mini-Split Heat Pump System, Yuchen Wang

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) accounts for half of the building energy consumption in the U.S where Mini-Split Heat Pumps (MSHPs) are an emerging type of HVAC system. Their utilization has greatly increased by 34% from 2009 to 2013 and high potential EER is recognized for MSHPs. However, there is limited research involving MSHPs systems, and there is no generic benchmark for system testing and modeling. The available simulation tools such as VapCyc, GreatLab, and CYCLE_D are either too complicated, difficult to access, or not freely available. Therefore, an accurate and public share generic benchmark is essential and will …

What We Know: Planning, Implementing, And Assessing A Media Literacy Themed Summer Camp, Philina Richardson, Nancy Garmer, Erin Mahaney, Lisa Petrillo, Rebecca Weber

Evans Library Publications

Information and media literacy are essential for today’s children and teens as they navigate an increasingly saturated information environment. Educators at all levels must seek to communicate and teach the skills that students need to evaluate, understand, and use information in engaging and innovative ways. This paper highlights such an effort by librarians and staff at Florida Institute of Technology in the planning and implementation of a camp called “What We Know: Understanding Media and Its Influence.” The camp was administered by five library staff and attended by ten teens between the ages of 12 and 16. Throughout the camp, …

Carpenters Apprenticeship Internship: Student And Industry Perspectives, Chris Falco

Construction Management

The Carpenters Apprenticeship Internship program is designed to provide students the opportunity to work as a construction laborer and get hands-on work experience. The goal of this study is to address the perceived benefits of the Carpenters Apprenticeship Internship with respect to the students, the industry members, and the union. In looking at the benefits this opportunity presents, any value that is aligned among the parties involved will be highlighted to convey the mutual advantages. Lastly, the demand among students for experience such as this will be assessed to see what the perceived value of labor experience is among students …

Navigating Institutional Complexity In The Health Sector: Lessons From Tobacco Control In Kenya, Raphael Lencucha, Peter Magati, Jeffrey Drope

Political Science Faculty Research and Publications

Introduction  This research examines the institutional dynamics of tobacco control following the establishment of Kenya’s 2007 landmark tobacco control legislation. Our analysis focuses specifically on coordination challenges within the health sector.

Methods  We conducted semi-structured interviews with key informants ( n  = 17) involved in tobacco regulation and control in Kenya. We recruited participants from different offices and sectors of government and non-governmental organizations.

Results  We find that the main challenges toward successful implementation of tobacco control are a lack of coordination and clarity of mandate of the principal institutions involved in tobacco control efforts. In a related development, the …

Multivariate Calibration Of A Load Sensor For Dynamic And Static Freight Railcar Applications, Dylan Michael Blackwell

Theses and Dissertations

Determination of the load carried by each bearing in a railcar system is crucial to the integrity of the railroad industry. With accurate load measurement, the process of filling a railcar with its specified cargo can be optimized to provide the maximum amount of cargo without exceeding the upper weight limits imposed by the Associations of American Railroads (AAR). An accurate load measurement will additionally make it possible to identify any load imbalance that occurs during periods of travel which result in having a detrimental effect on the health of the bearing. Previous work conducted with a strain-gauge load sensor …

Characterization Of Molecular Communication Based On Cell Metabolism Through Mutual Information And Flux Balance Analysis, Zahmeeth Sayed Sakkaff

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Synthetic biology is providing novel tools to engineer cells and access the basis of their molecular information processing, including their communication channels based on chemical reactions and molecule exchange. Molecular communication is a discipline in communication engineering that studies these types of communications and ways to exploit them for novel purposes, such as the development of ubiquitous and heterogeneous communication networks to interconnect biological cells with nano and biotechnology-enabled devices, i.e., the Internet of Bio-Nano Things. One major problem in realizing these goals stands in the development of reliable techniques to control the engineered cells and their behavior from the …

Power Management In Heterogeneous Mapreduce Cluster, Rojee Sunuwar

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The growing expenses of power in data centers as compared to the operation costs has been a concern for the past several decades. It has been predicted that without an intervention, the energy cost will soon outgrow the infrastructure and operation cost. Therefore, it is of great importance to make data center clusters more energy efficient which is critical for avoiding system overheating and failures. In addition, energy inefficiency causes not only the loss of capital but also environmental pollution. Various Power Management(PM) strategies have been developed over the years to make system more energy efficient and to counteract the …

The Effect Of Frequency Resolution On Intelligibility Sentence And Its Relevance To Cochlear Implant Design, Seth H. Roy

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this study is to understand how electrical stimulation (as opposed to acoustical stimulation) of the auditory nerve is used in cochlear implants. Speech is a complex signal that changes rapidly in time and frequency domains. Since phonemes (the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes words) depend on nuanced differences in frequency patterns, it would be expected that a signal with drastically reduced frequency information would be of limited value for conveying speech. Such a frequency-poor signal is the object to be investigated in the present work. It is also the basis of the way speech is represented …

A Further Analysis Of Commission Errors During Discrete Trial Training, Tavy Alisa Matthews

Theses and Dissertations

Treatment integrity has been manipulated in various ways to evaluate its impact on intervention effectiveness. Studies have compared different types of integrity failures and levels of treatment integrity in various contexts and behavioral interventions. Evaluations include differential reinforcement of alternative behavior, child compliance, and discrete trial training. However, further research is needed to establish the point at which integrity becomes detrimental to intervention effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to conduct a parametric analysis (i.e., 100%, 75%, 50%, & 25%) of treatment integrity to examine the effects of commission errors during discrete trial training. Three participants, ages 35 - …

Development Of Fault Tolerant Adaptive Control Laws For Aerospace Systems, Andres E. Perez Rocha

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The main topic of this dissertation is the design, development and implementation of intelligent adaptive control techniques designed to maintain healthy performance of aerospace systems subjected to malfunctions, external parameter changes and/or unmodeled dynamics. The dissertation is focused on the development of novel adaptive control configurations that rely on non-linear functions that appear in the immune system of living organisms as main source of adaptation. One of the main goals of this dissertation is to demonstrate that these novel adaptive control architectures are able to improve overall performance and protect the system while reducing control effort and maintaining adequate operation …

Model Predictive Control Of A Nonlinear Aeroelastic System Using Volterra Series Representations, Wai Leuk Law

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential effectiveness of using a Volterra-based Model Predictive Control strategy to control a nonlinear aeroelastic system. Model Predictive Control (MPC), also known as Receding Horizon Control (RHC), entails computing optimal control inputs over a finite time horizon, applying a portion of the computed optimal control sequence, and then repeating the process over the next time horizon. The Volterra series provides input-output models of a dynamical system in terms of a series of integral operators of increasing order, where the first-order Volterra operator models the linear dynamics and the higher-order operators model …