Digital Commons Network^™

#Dearcongress: A Public Letter, Elisabeth A. Montemurro, David Kamerer

School of Communication: Faculty Publications and Other Works

#DearCongress was prevalent within Twitter discourse during the 2013 U.S. government shutdown. The hashtag allowed a community to form by assembling around a common topic. What a group communicates through social networks cannot be separated from its context. This micro-analysis of #DearCongress utilizes discourse tracing through word clouds, guided by Bruns & Burgess’ concept of an ad hoc public. By looking at the commentary during a political and time stamped event, we can better understand the role discourse plays in group formation, evolution, and impact.

A Model Of Children's Acquisition Of Grammatical Word Categories From Adult Language Input Using An Adaption And Selection Algorithm, Emily Marie Berardi

Theses and Dissertations

Previous models of language acquisition have had partial success describing the processes that children use to acquire knowledge of the grammatical categories of their native language. The present study used a computer model based on the evolutionary principles of adaptation and selection to gain further insight into children's acquisition of grammatical categories. Transcribed language samples of eight parents or caregivers each conversing with their own child served as the input corpora for the model. The model was tested on each child's language corpus three times: two fixed mutation rates as well as a progressively decreasing mutation rate, which allowed less …

President’S Newsletter, Jean E. Bartels

President's Newsletter

No abstract provided.

University Honors Program Newsletter, Honors College, Georgia Southern University

Honors College: News & Publications (2008-2020)

• Math, Measles, and a Computer Simulation
• Winning an Award, Earning a Job
• Cassie Beasley returns to Georgia Southern to read from her book, Circus Mirandus
• Alumni Update: Andres Montes
• Focused on the Target
• Adventures in Independent Journal Publishing

The Moving Image In Public Art: U.S. And U.K., 1980–Present, Annie Dell'aria

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the work of artists who use moving images in contemporary public art. Specifically, these works are understood through their interactions with spectators and the practices of media consumption and public interaction these passersby negotiate when they encounter a work of moving image-based public art. To this end, I argue, through an analysis of public art, that screen spectatorship is an inherently situated experience.

The project of this dissertation is two-fold. First, I outline a typology of moving image-based public art by dividing significant practices into three categories—the enchanting spectacle, the ludic interface, and the illumination of place. …

The Lived Experience Of Aging Black Women With Diabetes Nurse-Person Relationships, Deidra G. Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The lived experience of the nurse-person relationship may have meaning for Black women with diabetes as they grow older. However, insufficient nursing research has been conducted in this area. This hermeneutic phenomenological study was designed to provide insight into the experiences of older Black women with diabetes as they transition through the aging process and to elucidate their perceptions of the nurse-person relationship. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore the lived experience and perceptions of these women, and data was collected for developing a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. The method used to conduct this research was Max van …

Ways Of Thinking About Illness Representations Of Cancer, Ian Zachary Pervil

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For people who have illnesses with vague or diffuse symptoms, such as systemic cancers that lack solid masses or tumors (e.g. leukemia), the process of adjustment appears more difficult than for those with clearly-defined symptoms. Dual systems theory attempts to understand this phenomenon by contending that individuals rely upon two modes of cognitive processing when conceptualizing illnesses: implicit, System 1 processes and explicit, System 2 processes. Those with illnesses whose symptoms lack specificity may rely more heavily on System 1 processing and have greater difficulty adjusting.

This study tested whether illness representations mediate the relationship between cancer patients' tumor status …

Identification Of Aphid (Hemiptera: Aphididae) Species Of Economic Importance In Kenya Using Dna Barcodes And Pcr-Rflp-Based Approach, G. Kinyanjui, F. M. Khamis, S. Mohamed, L. O. Ombura, M. Warigia, S. Ekesi

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Aphids are among pests of economic importance throughout the world. Together with transmitting plant viruses, aphids are capable of inflicting severe crop production losses. They also excrete honeydew that favours the growth of sooty mold which reduces the quality of vegetables and fruits and hence their market values. Rapid and accurate identification of aphids to the species level is a critical component in effective pest management and plant quarantine systems. Even though morphological taxonomy has made a tremendous impact on species-level identifications, polymorphism, morphological plasticity and immature stages are among the many challenges to accurate identification. In addition, their small …

Talking About Persons – Thinking About Patients: An Ethnographic Study In Critical Care, C Mclean, M Coombs, M Gobbi

School of Nursing and Midwifery

BACKGROUND: Nursing involves caring for the 'whole person' and it is considered inappropriate for nurses to think or talk about patients in objectifying or dehumanising ways. Objectifying discourses can dominate within the arena of critical care, and critical care nurses can experience moral distress as they struggle to think about patients as persons. No previous study has examined the role played by 'impersonal' talk in the delivery of nursing care. This paper reports a study which examined the relationship between nursing practice and the way(s) in which critical care nurses think and talk about patients. OBJECTIVES: The study objectives were …

Obesity Regulation Under Home Rule: An Argument That Regulation By Local Governments Is Superior To Administrative Agencies, Patrick M. Steel

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Language Concordance And Interpreter Use On Therapeutic Alliance In Spanish-Speaking Integrated Behavioral Health Care Patients, Bianca T. Villalobos, Ana J. Bridges, Elizabeth A. Anastasia, Carlos A. Ojeda, Juventino Hernandez Rodriguez, Debbie Gomez

Psychological Science Faculty Publications

The discrepancy between the growing number of Spanish speakers in the U.S. and the availability of bilingual providers creates a barrier to accessing quality mental health care. Use of interpreters provides one strategy for overcoming this linguistic barrier; however, concerns about whether sessions with interpreters, versus bilingual providers, impede therapeutic alliance remain. The current study explored associations between the use of interpreters and therapeutic alliance in a sample of 458 Spanish-speaking patients seen for integrated behavioral health visits at primary care clinics. Patients completed a brief (4 item) therapeutic alliance scale at their behavioral health appointment. In addition, to supplement …

My News

My News (2014-2020)

• Pulitzer Prize winner Jose Antonio Vargas to discuss immigration
• Learn about the newest Eagles at the National Signing Day Event Feb. 3
• Research Symposium 2016 now accepting submissions
• Sankofa African­American Museum visits the Union
• Award­winning journalists discuss 'Voting as an Informed Citizen' at Georgia Southern

Pedagogical Voyeurism: Dialogic Critique Of Documentation And Assessment Of Learning, Eugene Matusov, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Sohyun Meacham

Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications

We challenge a common emphasis on documentation and assessment of learning for providing good education: from the mainstream of neoliberal accountability movement to the progressive Reggio Emilia schools. We develop these arguments through discussing: 1) immeasurableness of education and learning, 2) students’ ownership/authorship of education and learning. We ground our conceptualization of educational assessment in critical dialogue, in a case of a student who requested assessment of her research project, and guided her peers and the teacher in providing different aspects of this assessment. We argue that documentation of learning on teacher’s demand leads to surveillance, discipline, distraction, teacher-student distrust, …

Toward A Kripkean Concept Of Number, Oliver R. Marshall

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Saul Kripke once remarked to me that natural numbers cannot be posits inferred from their indispensability to science, since we’ve always had them. This left me wondering whether numbers are objects of Russellian acquaintance, or accessible by analysis, being implied by known general principles about how to reason correctly, or both. To answer this question, I discuss some recent (and not so recent) work on our concepts of number and of particular numbers, by leading psychologists and philosophers. Special attention is paid to Kripke’s theory that numbers possess structural features of the numerical systems that stand for them, and to …

Perceptions Of Saudi Dental Students On Cultural Competency, Huda A. Al-Shehri, Sara M. Al-Taweel, Chris S. Ivanoff

Saudi Medical Journal

Objectives: To probe dental students’ perceptions on their cultural competency and international student exchange programs as a way of improving cultural competency training. Methods: A cross-sectional survey (n=460) was distributed to predoctoral students at the College of Dentistry, King Saud University, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in May 2014 at the male and female university campuses. Descriptive statistics were carried out using Statistical Package for Social Sciences ( p =0.05). Results: It was found that 79.6% of students think that teaching them regarding cultural diversity is important. Only 41% of students thought their dental education teaches them on the importance …

Parental Involvement In Early Childhood Literacy: International Programs & Egyptian Experiences, Lojain Tamer Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

Research has demonstrated the importance of the early years in children’s literacy skills development and shown how children who acquire some literacy skills before school entry are at more advantage in later conventional literacy acquisition than their peers who haven’t. Moreover, several studies have examined the role parents have in their children’s early literacy development and found the parental involvement factor to be of great significance. In response to such findings and to problems such as scarcity of data about early childhood education and parental involvement in children’s early literacy development in the MENA region and Egypt in particular, this …

Imitation And Originality In Four Poems By Al-Hạ̄JjʿUmar Ibn AbīBakr Ibn ʿUthmāN Krachi (Ca 1856–1934), Jibril Abubakr Gabid

Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this thesis is to look at the concepts of imitation and originality in the works of al-Ḥājj ʿUmar ibn Abī Bakr ibn ʿUthmān Krachi (ca 1856–1934) through the analysis of his four poems. These poems are based on the three main genres of Arabic poetry: panegyric (madīḥ), satire (hijāʾ), and eulogy (rithāʾ). My analysis of these poems is limited to structure, theme and content in order to explore the various ways in which our author imitates the classical mode of poetic composition and at the same time provides his readers with a picture of a different cultural …

An Exploratory Study Of Teachers’ Beliefs And Practices Regarding The Class Opening By Teachers Of Arabic To Speakers Of Other Languages (Tasol), Ghada Abdalla Ibrahim Abdelrehim

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the beliefs of teachers of Arabic to speakers of other languages (TASOL) about class openings and the interplay between such beliefs and teacher’s in-class practices regarding class opening as the first introductory part of a lesson. A questionnaire of three parts was given to two groups of TASOL: the first group comprised 63 randomly selected teachers, to provide their beliefs in general about class opening. Observations and interviews were administered to the second group of teachers (30 observations and 10 interviews were conducted) to highlight the mentioned interplay. The investigated beliefs were inspired by similar studies and …

Let Fall: Hysteria And The Psychoanalytic Act, Matthew W. Oyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This text proposes to examine the contemporary crisis of psychoanalysis by taking seriously feminist critiques of the theory’s phallocentrism, but arguing that the phallus cannot be metaphorically or metonymically replaced by any substitutive term, as most revisionist theories of psychoanalysis have sought to do. Castration is the central psychoanalytic concept, though the theory always seeks to cover it over. In order to develop a psychoanalysis that can confront this castration that is always repressed and yet, in its persistent return, continuously disrupts the continuity of psychoanalytic theory, a detour is proposed, returning to the origins of psychoanalysis and taking hysteria …

Unidentified Verbal Objects: Contemporary French Poetry, Intermedia, And Narrative, Eric Lynch

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the vital experimental French poetry of the 1980s to the present. Whereas earlier twentieth century poets often shunned common speech, poets today seek instead to appropriate, adapt, and reorganize a wide variety of contemporary discourses. Narrative also reemerges both in hybridized writing fusing prose and verse and in sequences of digressions and anecdotes. Poetic form becomes specific to a given text as poets adapt techniques from other fields, such as the visual arts, and integrate a wide array of media into literary works. In recent pieces, poets such as Emmanuel Hocquard and Olivier Cadiot incorporate new media …

Epistemic Considerations On Extensive-Form Games, Cagil Tasdemir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, we study several topics in extensive-form games. First, we consider perfect information games with belief revision with players who are tolerant of each other’s hypothetical errors. We bound the number of hypothetical non-rational moves of a player that will be tolerated by other players without revising the belief on that player’s rationality on future moves, and investigate which games yield the backward induction solution.

Second, we consider players who have no way of assigning probabilities to various possible outcomes, and define players as conservative, moderate and aggressive depending on the way they choose, and show that all …

Neurophysiological Correlates Of English Vowels /I/ And /E/ In Monolingual And Bilingual 4 And 5-Year-Old Children, Nancy Vidal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Second language (L2) input in the infant and toddler years clearly affects speech processing, particularly for L2 vowels (Cheour, Shestakovab, Ceponieneb, Näätänen 2002), Moreno, Rodriguez-Fornells, Matti, 2008); Rinker, Paavo, Brosch, Kiefer 2010). However, few studies have closely examined how amount of L1 versus L2 input impacts automaticity of speech processing in young children. Greater language use of one than the other language promotes improved speech perception and production in the language of greater use (Flege & Munro 1994; Flege & MacKay 2004). Investigations have used a variety of custom-designed questionnaires to quantify amount of language use, but most have not …

Dying To Learn, Learning To Die, The Craft Of Dying In Early Modern English Drama And The Cultivation Of Dying-Voice Literacy, Simon Gaston Fortin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

DYING TO LEARN, LEARNING TO DIE

THE CRAFT OF DYING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DRAMA

AND THE CULTIVATION OF DYING-VOICE LITERACY

by

SIMON G. FORTIN

Adviser: Professor Mario DiGangi

This dissertation contends that, through their relentless dramatization of agonies, the early modern English dramatists taught their audiences how to die. Attending a play where characters devised, discussed, prepared for, plotted, inflicted, endured and witnessed death, constituted an apprenticeship I demonstrate, akin to going to school, though informal it may have been, where audiences learned about mortality, death as an event, and dying as a process. Thus, this study points to …

A Meaning Hypothesis To Explain Speaker's Choice Of The Sign Look, Nadav Ayal Sabar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A meaning hypothesis to explain speakers' choice of the sign look

by

Nadav Sabar

Adviser: Professor Ricardo Otheguy

The purpose of the meaning hypotheses advanced in this dissertation is to explain why speakers and writers choose the forms that they do in the course of documented acts of speaking or writing. The choice of interest is the decision to use look (or /lÊ?k/), particularly in situations where see, seem, and appear would at first glance seem to be just as appropriate. The answer to the question of why language users make the choices they do is cast in theoretical terms …

Connectivity: An Ecological Paradigm For The Study Of Bronze Age, Slobodan Mitrović

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Connectivity: an ecological paradigm for the study of Bronze Age” addresses the relationship between historic and prehistoric people, and the landscapes they inhabited, moved about, and continue to inhabit. It suggests alternative methodological approaches that have broader ramifications for the discipline of (Bronze Age) archaeology. By engaging the code and innovations stemming from ecology and digital technology, the research questions concern the interface – referred to as connectivity – between the archaeological sites, resources, networks of communication, and the conditions of archaeological knowledge acquisition. Drawing on published and new data, the aim of the project is to put forward a …

Yellow Dust Abode: The Hawley-Suski Letters, 1942-1945, Roxanne Shirazi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

On May 6, 1942, Dr. Peter Marie Suski assigned my great-grandfather, Willis M. Hawley, power of attorney to manage his personal affairs when he and his family, along with 120,000 Japanese Americans, were forcibly removed from the Pacific Coast to one of ten U.S. government internment camps. The two men began a regular and frequent correspondence that would continue throughout the war and beyond, producing at least 566 pages of letters between 1942-1960. Dr. Suski and Mr. Hawley wrote as friends, book collectors, and scholars of the Japanese and Chinese languages, and their letters comprise a richly detailed source for …

Voicing The Other: Mock Aave On Social Media, Hanna L. Smokoski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project looks at the use on social media sites of features of African American Vernacular English by nonspeakers of it. This outgroup use of AAVE does not require nor reflect any true proficiency with the variety, but instead is often used to exaggerate the social distance between the stylizers using it on social media and the marginalized people for whom AAVE is a genuine mode of communication. Through double indexicality, nonspeakers of AAVE use features of it to annex certain positive qualities associated with Black or hip hop culture—toughness, coolness, an anti-establishment stance—for themselves, while reproducing negative stereotypes of …

Millets From The Margins: Value, Knowledge And The Subaltern Practice Of Biodiversity In Uttarakhand, India, Priya R. Chandrasekaran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Millets from the Margins: Value, Knowledge and the Subaltern Practice of Biodiversity in Uttarakhand, India analyzes what is at stake for small-scale, predominantly women, farmers as local varieties of rainfed food grains such as finger millet are being newly commodified and valued as a biodiversity resource. With support from a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation, I conducted seventeen months of ethnographic research with farmers, activists, scientists, NGO leaders, government officials, transnational functionaries and agribusiness representatives in segregated yet interconnected realms ranging from a village in the Himalayan foothills to transnational institutions in Rome.

This work demonstrates …

A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …

The Hermeneutics Of International Trade Conflicts: U.S. Punitive Trade Policy Towards China And Japan, Barry F. Murdaco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes punitive trade conflicts between the U.S. and two trading partners: China and Japan. Punitive trade conflicts can be defined as trade wars between two states, retaliatory tariffs, or other forms of conflict, e.g. preventing the acquisition of foreign assets or sanctions for an undervalued exchange rate. I will examine several trade conflicts between the U.S. and Japan in the 1980s and several trade conflicts between the U.S. and China from 2001 to the present. This study is situated within a larger debate concerning the resolution of four theoretical "puzzles" in political science. The first concerns the dispute …