Digital Commons Network^™

Joint Stewardship Of The Barents Sea: Russian And Norwegian Policy Expectations For Preventing Offshore Oil Spills, Troy J. Bouffard

Arctic and Northern Studies

As Arctic environmental conditions fluctuate, ongoing economic-related agreements established for the Barents Region continue to support and attract Norwegian and Russian oil-producing expeditions within the shared maritime zone. Increased industrial activity throughout the Circumpolar North heightens the need to understand the factors that influence policies responsible for protecting the environment – in particular, preventive measures. Agency theory provides the framework for an analysis of various dynamics that influence the Norwegian and Russian governments (principals) as they develop and enforce rules that regulate petroleum industries (agents). The research question asks about differences between the prevention policies of the two nations even …

Exploring Masculinity For A Healthy Campus Culture, Jason M. Gant

Master's Projects and Capstones

1 in 5 female students is and will be sexually assaulted in college. This is a public health issue as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Sexual violence (SV) is a significant problem in the United States. SV refers to sexual activity when consent is not obtained or not given freely. Anyone can experience SV, but most victims are female. The person responsible for the violence is typically male and usually someone the victim is familiar with. The person can be, but is not limited to, a friend, coworker, neighbor, family member and even classmate. Boys …

Not Just Small Potatoes: A Comparison Of Four Agricultural Education Models In Alaska, Annie Silverman

Communication

Agricultural education is a means of increasing food security, increasing willingness to try new fruits and vegetables, improving test scores, and increasing community resiliency. School gardens, which are one form of agricultural education, are the primary focus of this thesis. In order to identify barriers to maintaining school garden programs, semi-structured interviews were conducted at four school sites in the Fairbanks area. In order to compare emerging themes from the interview data in the Fairbanks area to school sites throughout the state, a survey was also administered through Survey Monkey to schools that received the Alaska state Farm to School …

An Impact Assessment Of Current Rural Alaska Village Solid Waste Management Systems: A Case Study, William H. Wilkins

Natural Resources

The purpose of this study is to examine the impacts of current and alternative solid waste management practices of two rural Alaskan villages. The EASETECH life-cycle assessment modeling tool was used to compare the current solid waste management systems for the remote villages of Kalskag and Fort Yukon across eight alternative scenarios. Annual waste generation and composition data for these two villages and data specific to processes and functions for each waste system were collected and used to modify templates within the EASETECH program to provide a life-cycle assessment for current and proposed waste management practices. The results indicate that …

Partnerships For Change: A Collaboration For Global Wellbeing, Ravneet Gill

Master's Projects and Capstones

Partnerships For change (PFC) consists of a team of social impact strategists and practitioners. The organization is dedicated to promote sustainable development through direct humanitarian action and transforming social and economic conditions of underserved communities around the globe. With the commitment to elevate and empower individuals to reach their ultimate potential, PFC partnered with Jaipur foot, world's largest organization for prosthetic devices, to network Jaipur Foot to innovators and funders. They have also started the building of a health clinic in Johnsonville, Liberia due to inadequate medical support for individuals living in the community. There are several steps in building …

Alaskan Arctic Epibenthic Communities: Distribution Patterns, Links To The Environment, And Brittle Star Population Dynamics, Alexandra Mariela Ravelo

Marine Biology

The Arctic marine shelves are characterized by areas of high and low invertebrate standing stock and communities that vary spatially in patches. Large-scale environmental characteristics, such as the distribution of water masses, the fenology of sea ice cover, and variability of water depth define changes in epibenthic community structure throughout the Arctic shelves. The longevity and relatively low mobility of epibenthic invertebrates make them especially relevant as indicators of long-term environmental patterns. In terms of standing stock and biomass, the most representative group among Arctic epibenthic taxa are brittle stars. Large areas of the Arctic shelves have dense assemblages of …

Learning The Language Of Home: Using Place-Based Writing Practice To Help Rural Students Connect To Their Communities, Erin Donovan

The Rural Educator

The idea of "place" extends beyond the locations where people live. Place is a narrative which shapes identity and culture and provides an understanding of experience. By exploring place and the connections which evolve from place, an intriguing context begins to take a shape that inspires transformational ideas and actions. This article investigates how place-based writing practices affect rural middle school students’ connections with their home community as evidenced through their writing. This study follows the critical pedagogy of place theoretical framework and works to support best practices in rural education research. A qualitative case study design was used to …

Rural Education And The Every Student Succeeds Act, Devon Brenner

The Rural Educator

Rural education is becoming an increasing focus of federal education legislation. The Every Student Succeeds Act explicitly addresses rural education through the REAP program, by taking steps to ensure geographic distribution in competitive grants, by requiring states to consider rural LEAs in the development of state plans, and in many other ways. The mandated report on rural education is intended to provide data about whether these provisions are sufficient for ensuring that federal policy and funding address the needs of rural schools and students and its impact remains to be seen.

Measuring Offline Advertisement Conversion, Shanmugasundaram Ravikumar, Sreenivas Gollapudi, Alexander Fabrikant

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure describes techniques to measure the impact of exposure to an offline advertisement on subsequent online and offline actions. The system utilizes advertisement data, historical location data and user behavior data to estimate a test spatiotemporal region in which users are likely exposed to a particular offline advertisement and a control spatiotemporal region in which users are likely not exposed to the particular offline advertisement. The system uses statistical techniques to determine the impact of the particular advertisement by comparison of the behavior of the test population and the control population.

Making Ourselves Intelligible - A Nondescriptivist Approach To Propositional Attitudes, Sarah Beth Lesson

Open Access Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue for a function-first account of propositional attitude discourse that challenges a predominant assumption in philosophy of mind, that propositional attitude terms aim to refer – whether to brain states, functional states, dispositions, or entities posited to explain and predict. Using empirical evidence to support theoretical argumentation, I develop the Intelligibility View of propositional attitude discourse that highlights the distinctively normative role that the attribution of such states plays in social interaction. Building off the Intelligibility View, I argue that some of the most entrenched problems in this domain, including the problem of mental causation, problem …

Evidence Of The Excitation Of A Ring-Like Gravity Wave In The Mesosphere Over The Andes Lidar Observatory, F. Vargas, G. Swenson, A. Liu, Pierre-Dominique Pautet

All Physics Faculty Publications

On 23 March 2012, our all-sky imager recorded a concentric, ring-like gravity wave pattern. The wave arose within the area covered by images of both OH and O(1S) nightglow emissions taken at the Andes Lidar Observatory (ALO), Chile (30.3ÁS, 70.7ÁW). We have estimated the observed and intrinsic parameters of the event and located the wave source within the lower mesosphere altitude range using a reverse ray tracing method. By the analysis of GOES and LIS satellite images, we have not found evidence of neither convective nor lightning activity nearby ALO, indicating that the source of the ring-like wave was not …

Western's New Deal: The Shaping Of College Heights During The Great Depression, Sean Jacobson

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This thesis addresses the Great Depression's impact on public higher education by analyzing developments at Western Kentucky State Teachers College. It also seeks to understand factors leading to the enshrinement of Henry Hardin Cherry as a larger-than-life figure upon his death in 1937. An investigative study into primary materials found that the New Deal projects on campus provided a boost for Cherry's leadership and charisma in his community. The concurrence of his death with the construction of a classroom building funded by the Public Works Administration determined his memorialization for posterity. The building, Cherry Hall, emerged as an institutional symbol …

The Bureau Of Sociological Research At The University Of Nebraska–Lincoln: A Brief History 1964–2014, Michael R. Hill

Zea E-Books Collection

This volume is a provisional account of the origins and subsequent work of the Bureau of Sociological Research (BOSR) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL). This study was prepared at the request of Julia McQuillan, Chair of the UNL Department of Sociology and a past BOSR Director, for the 50th anniversary celebration of the Bureau in April 2014.

This study falls within the field known generally as “the sociology of sociology” and this accounts for the devising of a typology of sociologies that delineates the intellectual field of play historically occupied by the Bureau of Sociological Research at the University …

Building From The Hiv Response Toward Universal Health Coverage, Jonathon Jay, Kent Buse, Marielle Hart, Robert Marten, Scott Kellerman, Morolake Odetoyinbo, Jonathan D. Quick, Timothy Evans, Peter Piot, Mark Dybul, Agnes Binagwaho

Dartmouth Scholarship

Universal health coverage (UHC) has gained prominence as a global health priority. The UHC movement aims to increase access to quality, needed health services while reducing financial hardship from health spending, particularly in low- and middle- income countries.
As a policy agenda, UHC has been identified primarily with prepayment and risk-pool- ing programs. While financing policies provide important benefits, increasing access to health services will require broader reforms.
For lessons, the UHC movement should look to the global HIV response, which has confronted many of the same barriers to access in weak health systems. Considerable success on HIV has resulted …

Use Of Distance Weighted Metrics To Investigate Landscape-Stream Temperature Relationships Across Different Temporal Scales, Eric Craig Watson

Dissertations and Theses

Stream ecosystems have experienced significant negative impacts from land use, resource exploitation, and urban development. Statistical models allow researchers to explore the relationships between these landscape variables and stream conditions. Weighting the relevant landscape variables based on hydrologically defined distances offers a potential method of increasing the predictive capacity of statistical models. Using observations from three grouped watersheds in the Portland Metro Area (n=66), I have explored the use of three different weighting schemes against the standard method of taking an areal average. These four different model groups were applied to four stream temperature metrics: mean seven-day moving average maximum …

Meaning-Making In Early Adolescence: Practices And Perspectives Of School Counselors, Jill E. Schwarz

Journal of Counselor Preparation and Supervision

Adolescence is a crucial life stage involving aspects of identity development and decision-making that have potential life-long consequences. A sense of meaning is related to many beneficial factors during adolescence, including psychological health, academic engagement, and overall well-being. This qualitative interview study was designed to investigate middle school counselors’ perspectives and practices regarding exploring meaning with their early adolescent students. Analysis of ten individual interviews and a focus group revealed that the school counselor participants did engage in work with middle school students around meaning-making. They primarily helped students to find meaning through identity exploration, specifically focusing on navigating challenging …

Getting Back To The "Grassroots" Of Tax Administration: Because "We The People" Long For A Gathering Of American Eagles To Restore Trust In The Internal Revenue Service With A Rebuild Irs Initiative, Frank Wolpe

Akron Law Review

Like America, our Internal Revenue Service is a work in progress. Yet, for best results, it’s better to avoid thinking too much about what it is or is not! Instead, let’s think more about what the IRS ought to be! This Article thusly offers a realistic path forward with new choices for a local presence, which once again makes it taxpayer/customer-centric. For more effective tax administration, it also offers a return to something that inexcusably went missing in 1998: senior-executive “on-site oversight” of field operations.

If today’s Internal Revenue Service can be fairly described as an exploding volcano …

2016-2017, Collin College

Course Catalogs

Contains information on courses and class descriptions as well as campus resources at Collin College.

Gpu-Arraysort: A Parallel, In-Place Algorithm For Sorting Large Number Of Arrays, Muaaz Awan, Fahad Saeed

Parallel Computing and Data Science Lab Technical Reports

Modern day analytics deals with big datasets from diverse fields. For many application the data is in the form of an array which consists of large number of smaller arrays. Existing techniques focus on sorting a single large array and cannot be used for sorting large number of smaller arrays in an efficient manner. Currently no such algorithm is available which can sort such large number of arrays utilizing the massively parallel architecture of GPU devices. In this paper we present a highly scalable parallel algorithm, called GPU-ArraySort, for sorting large number of arrays using a GPU. Our algorithm performs …

Every Day You Are Improving: How College Students View The Educational Impact Of World Of Warcraft, Nariman Alawami, Heng-Yu Ku

The Qualitative Report

The purpose of the study was to explore college students’ experiences with playing World of Warcraft (WoW) and their views on the application of WoW in educational settings. A qualitative case study design was used to interview three participants who were selected purposively from a Midwestern university. Findings revealed that players thought that playing WoW was fun, relaxing, motivating, but sometimes almost to the point of addiction. The findings also support student perceptions of generalization of teamwork, cooperating, socializing, academic skills, and time management skills learned and practiced in playing WoW to academic settings. Playing WoW games can provide an …

Variability In Drift Ice Export From The Arctic Ocean To The North Icelandic Shelf Over The Last 8000 Years: A Multi-Proxy Evaluation, Patricia Cabedo-Sanz, Simon T. Belt, Anne E. Jennings, John T. Andrews, Áslaug Geirsdóttir

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

No abstract provided.

Shame In The Nineteenth-Century Village Tale In The German-Speaking Context, 1843-1897, Angineh Djavadghazaryans

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the genre of the German village tale, the so-called Dorfgeschichte. Looking at village tales published between 1843 and 1897 by Berthold Auerbach, Gottfried Keller, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and Clara Viebig, I investigate emotions of shame and examine reasons for the emergence of shameful feelings in village life and the ways in which these feelings are represented in village tales. Shame, as I will show, not only constitutes an important component of the Dorfgeschichte, but the genre itself offers a forum in which shame can be discussed. Research has shown that shame is not a modern category; I …

Response To Gottesfeld And Jacobs 2016, Andrew Turner, Emily R. Kearl, Kevin R. Solman

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

No abstract provided.

Farming Through The Auca Runa: Agricultural Strategies And Terraces During The Late Intermediate Period, Altiplano, Peru, Brieanna Sylvia Langlie

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines agricultural strategies farmers employed to cope with the consequences of war and drought in the southern Peruvian Andes during the Late Intermediate Period (A.D. 1100-1450) using paleoethnobotanical data from the fortified hilltop site Ayawiri and findings from excavations of a terrace complex flanking the site. During the Late Intermediate Period, lifeways dissolved into a period of endemic warfare after the collapse of Tiwanaku. At the same time a well-documented, century-long drought surely threatened food security. Interested in how farmers responded to this political and climatic disjuncture, I analyzed 108 flotation samples collected from the residential area of …

Lactating In St. Louis: Attachments, Technologies, And Disparities, Sarah Sobonya

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation uses the concept of attachments to explicate women’s breastfeeding practices and beliefs in the racially and economically segregated St. Louis, Missouri region. My analysis examines the interplay among attachments at three levels: women’s intrapersonal attachments to specific concepts of self; their attachments to the values and priorities of social groups; and attachments they form in response to larger structural and ideological forces in society. I argue that racial and socioeconomic disparities are manifested through breastfeeding praxis, so that breastfeeding serves as a lens through which these oppressions and disparities can be more fully viewed. To illuminate this, I …

An Epic Hydrography: Riverine Geography In The Argonautika Of Apollonios Rhodios, Joseph R. Morgan

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The literary record of the Ancient Mediterranean contains untapped potential for the study of the history of spatial representation, a new frontier in the history of geography. The articulation of spatial networks in written form is an integral element of several genres represented in the extant corpus of Greek literature. An analysis of the fabula space of an ancient narrative—the internal geography of the work itself—provides insights into the generic constraints, intertextuality, and contemporaneous geographical concepts that authors drew upon in constructing their particular literary geographies. The Argonautika of Apollonios Rhodios presents a particularly rich fabula space in epic form. …

The Lagging State Of Renewable Energy In Kentucky, John Evans

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

It is evident that Kentucky's energy landscape is characterized primarily by coal and, to a lesser degree, natural gas and oil. It seems there's almost no room for renewable energy sources in Kentucky’s energy sector despite plentiful evidence of global climate change caused largely by carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. Other states are paving the way in the renewable energy industry by investing in solar, wind and geothermal energy among other forms while Kentucky continues to sit back seemingly content with utilizing energy practices that are several decades old. In this project, I will be addressing reasons for the …

Too Many Humans, Dwindling Resources, And Not Enough Space, Jorge T. Martinez

Environmental and Earth Law Journal (EELJ)

This paper will address the often-overlooked subject of human overpopulation and examine the role it plays in the environmental health of our planet. Part I will define overpopulation and how it is determined, as well as briefly examine animal overpopulations and their effects on the environment. Part II will turn to human population trends, the carrying capacity of humans on earth, and the environmental consequences of human overpopulation. The environmental issues currently faced in China, India, Africa, and other densely populated areas will be explored. Part III will analyze some of the legal solutions that have been implemented to curb …

Review Of Aimée Boutin, City Of Noise: Sound And Nineteenth-Century Paris, Robin Walz

Faculty, Staff, and Students

No abstract provided.

The Extent Of Indigenous-Norse Contact And Trade Prior To Columbus, Donald E. Warden

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

Norse exploration during the medieval period was widespread and diverse in location. Of the many places visited by the Norse, North America has continued to be surrounded by mystery. The full extent of Norse exploration in North America is a growing field and the extent of their contact and trade with Indigenous Americans is becoming increasingly known. A thorough compilation of the evidence allows for significant, new conclusions to be made about Norse presence in the Americas.