Digital Commons Network^™

Lgbtq+ Nondiscrimination Laws In Kentucky., Christopher M Wales

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the political and demographic obstacles facing the Fairness movement in Kentucky in regards to local employment protection ordinances for LGBTQ+ persons (Fairness Ordinances). Using case studies on recent Fairness debates in Berea and Bowling Green, this thesis explores the concern some Kentuckians have about LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination ordinances in their communities. From these cases studies, it can be concluded that many of the concerns espoused by opponents of Fairness are simple scare tactics with no evidence supporting their claims. This thesis then utilizes a logistical regression to uncover what demographic characteristics increase the odds of a municipality possessing …

The Relationship Between Positive Behavioral Interventions And Supports In Elementary Schools And Mathematics Achievement., Robert Larry Taylor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This causal-comparative study examined the relationship between Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and academic achievement in elementary school mathematics. Research has shown that PBIS may help establish a positive school climate, which supports the conditions for effective teaching and learning (Bradshaw, Koth, Bevans, Ialongo, & Leaf, 2008; Horner, Sugai, & Vincent, 2005; Hoy, Tarter, & Bliss, 1990). Accordingly, this study examined variables of particular interest, which were mathematical performance, including mathematical performance by male academic achievement, female academic achievement, and socioeconomic status, based on PBIS implementationThe data used were school-level, 5th grade mathematics achievement scores. Elementary schools, which participated …

Farmscapes : Picturing Land Transformation In Nineteenth-Century America., Eileen L Yanoviak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines American farmstead imagery of the nineteenth-century and how those images reflect the environmental history of the North. In this study, images of farms illustrate, through the landscape, the transition from subsistence farming to agribusiness that fundamentally changed American life and the land over the century. By comparing the actual ecological and economic conditions of the farm and farmer to the images depicted by artists, it is possible to see both representations of change and the persistence of the agrarian myth in spite of dramatically different realities. This study focuses on the process of change in the American …

Modeling Effective Work Groups And Teams : An Assessment Of The Inclusion Of Social Value Orientation., Gary Daniel Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine research on effective work groups in terms of measurable input characteristics and relevant collective outputs. Antecedents and consequences of group processes are explored; models of work groups and teams are examined and assessed in light of subsequent research. Additionally, social value orientation – a behavioral trait known to predictably influence interpersonal outcomes – is introduced as a concept that is also relevant to group work. A revised model that includes social value orientation as a predictive factor for group productivity is presented and tested. This empirical study is a correlative, quantitative investigation …

Mechanical And Electrical Characterization Of Carbon Fiber/Bucky Paper/Zinc Oxide Hybrid Composites, Suma Ayyagari

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The quest for multifunctional carbon fiber reinforced composites (CFRPs) expedited the use of several nano reinforcements such as zinc oxide nanorods (ZnO) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Zinc oxide is semi-conductor with good piezoelectric and pyroelectric properties. These properties could be transmitted to CFRPs when a nanophase of ZnO is embedded within CFRPs. In lieu of ZnO nanorods, Bucky paper comprising mat of multiwall-carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) could be sandwiched in-between laminae to construct a functionally graded composite with elevated electrical and thermal conductivities. In this study, a low temperature ( 90_C) hydrothermal synthesis method was utilized to grow ZnO nanorods on …

Development Of A Remotely-Piloted Vehicle Platform To Support Implementation, Verification, And Validation Of Pilot Control Systems, Sean O’Toole

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

This thesis presents the development of a research test bed and the use of a set of metrics for evaluating handling qualities with pilot in the loop configuration. The main objective of this study is to provide software and hardware tools to support performance evaluation of control systems designed to compensate for Pilot Induced Oscillations (PIOs). A remotely-piloted vehicle presented in this thesis consists of an RC aircraft modified to be flown from a ground station cockpit. The unmanned aerial system has a high-speed on-board processing system capable of simulating different conditions during flight such as injecting actuator failures and …

The Plays Of Kalidasa: Treading The Line Between Constraint And Freedom, Sukanya Chakrabarti

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

The world of Kalidasa is defined by transgression at many levels. The possibilities of his dramatic world are vast and each level interacts with the other only because of the transgressive power of love and memory, and sometimes,even of forgetfulness. I argue that Kalidasa’s plays transcend, rather than establish, the conflicts between love and duty. I establish that the diverse and, often disjunctive, worlds seem to be in conversation in Kalidasa’s unifying dramatic realm –in this realm, while everything seems possible, everything possible can be made impossible because of the disruptive power of memory or forgetfulness.

The Problem Of Illusion In The Phenomenology Of Claude Romano, Joseph Cutolo

Student Theses and Dissertations

The phenomenology of Claude Romano constructs a strict distinction between perceptions and illusions. This distinction is so strict that the former excludes the latter completely. Putting this distinction into play is not a local decision about our experiences and the structures of our experiences. This decision brings with it metaphysical, ontological, and phenomenological frameworks to ground it. In what follows I attempt to draw out the consequences of Romano’s decisions about our experience, and to study the philosophical frameworks that underlie his decisions. In doing so, I reconnect his phenomenology with a wider terminology of phenomenology, in order to study …

Better Fit: A Conceptual Solution For Seamless Exercise Experience, Hongwei Huang

Theses

The development of fitness technology has changed the way we exercise over time, and each technology has allowed people to exercise independently in various ways, such as wearable devices, fitness apps, game consoles, and even social media. The consequence is that more people get used to exercising solely with their digital device and get motivated from virtual communities rather than in a real environment. However, the research shows there can be even more benefit for people by exercising with others in a physical space.

The thesis utilizes UX design methodologies to develop a seamless-workout experience that enables a user to …

Deer: Creating A Realistic 3d Animal Using Photogrammetry, Karie Carita

Theses

Creating a 3D animal using the process of photogrammetry can bring more realism to a user’s game experience.

In the 3D world, there are various ways for creating animals in video games. Specifically, quadrupeds are known to be very challenging. Since technology is evolving every day, there are always newer ways of creating video game assets. It is challenging to have complex model details and also have smooth real-time rendering in a game engine.

Photogrammetry can capture exact details of a real world animal and incorporate them into a 3D asset. The purpose for using this process is to create …

Black Behind The Ear: Using Motion Graphics To Encourage Self-Awareness And Embrace Racial Heritage., Carolina Lopez

Theses

Black Behind the Ear is an animated visual representation of Elizabeth Acevedo’s poem “Hair”. This poem uses hair as a metaphorical element to represent the internalized racism and racial amnesia predominant in the Dominican Republic, a place that owes African slaves for much of the island’s racial, and cultural heritage.

This motion graphics piece intends to encourage self-awareness in a time when embracing one’s culture and race can break the ossified schemes passed through generations about personality standards based on physical attributes. Understanding where one comes from helps people see why certain ideas are worth standing for, and consequently results …

Renewable Energy-Aware Routing In The Internet, Ziyang Liu

Theses

The increasing power consumption of the Internet infrastructure has attracted a lot of world-wide attention because of the severe impact on the environment. Many research works have started to search for solutions of how to reduce the energy consumption in data networks. Other works have considered that generation of electricity from fossil-based fuel emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which leads to global warming. Consequently, another approach for sustainable networks is the utilization of renewable energy to power the infrastructure.

This thesis introduces a new backbone Internet routing protocol that performs routing considering the different renewable energy availability at various …

The Soul’S Speaker: Give Your Eyes Some Rest, Fuye Zhang

Theses

The students studying in colleges often fix their eyes on books, on computer screens and archives for a long time to gain knowledge. As a result of this, their eyeballs often turn red out of fatigue. Researches have shown that college students lack the awareness of the benefits of giving their eyes some rest. However, there are few of eye protection advertisements which suggest the need for students to give their eyes some rest. As a designer, I need to let people know the important roles that eyes play in the human body. I feel it is important for designers …

Dzone: An Interactive Platform For Designers Seeking And Sharing Ideas., Yidie Xue

Theses

The principle of design is to create something both beautiful and effective. However, not all designs are created equal. There are plenty of inefficient designs in existence. The reason is not because of bad designers, but because of the lacking platforms for designers to communicate and test their designs.

There are many tools available, both application and website, for designers to express their ideas. However, the majority of these resources are focused on sharing project on the social media and treat it like an element of personal portfolio. Platforms for designers to actually test their project, gathering critical product-developing feedback …

Discover Yixing: Using A Mobile Application To Promote Tourism And Marketing For A Small Chinese City, Hanxi Xie

Theses

Tourism is an indispensable domain for many cities’ successful economic development. For tourists who are exploring popular cities and major resorts, there are a variety of mobile applications and websites can provide detailed information and instructions. It is convenient for independent travelers to use these tools to visit large and well-known cities. However, travel agencies, tourist applications, or multi-lingual travel guides do not cover some lesser-known cities. Although such cities may be underdeveloped in terms of economic conditions, some of these cities have potential to become valuable tourist resorts.

Many lesser-known cities can’t provide professional travel agencies and/or multiple language …

Living In Place: A Study Of Vitality Through Sense Of Place, Susan M. Wylie

Theses

The built environment can respond to human needs and influence behaviors. An approach to design that grows from essential human conditions arguably is a preferable means of structuring the built world in a responsible and sustainable manner. Although new and innovative building technologies can achieve great strides in sustainability, underlying and fundamental human needs and behaviors may be an equally important source of inspiration and creativity in the built environment.

This thesis addresses social and psychological needs of the aging population in three communities in the vicinity of Rochester, New York. Through understandings of sense of place, the inquiry is …

Datasets Used In Fifteen Years Of Automated Requirements Traceability Research, Palak Sharma

Theses

Datasets are crucial to advance automated software traceability research. Acquiring such datasets come in a high cost and require expert knowledge to manually collect and validate them. Obtaining such software development datasets has been one of the most frequently reported barrier for researchers in the software engineering domain in general. This problem is even more acute in field of requirement traceability, which plays crucial role in safety critical and highly regulated systems. Therefore, the main motivation behind this work is to analyze the current state of art of datasets used in the field of software traceability.

This work presents a …

Audialtext: Improving Communication Accessibility For The Deaf Through Automatic Voice-Recognition And Wearable Smart-Technology., Ernest Roszkowski

Theses

Whether you are ordering food at a restaurant, asking for directions, or receiving a phone call from a family member, it is apparent that human communication is an important part of everyday life. Those who are deaf have limited communication accessibility compared to their hearing counterparts, and by default, obtain less public information and face more obstacles during social interactions.

This thesis project will attempt to bridge this communication gap through the exploration of human interactions with user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design. The goal is to design and develop an application concept for wearable smart-technology that will …

Abyss, Manojh Reddy

Theses

“When the human civilization continues to pursue its darker deeds, the wrong doings, the dark demons in every individual, the rage we show towards Mother Nature is the path to the end of the entire civilization. And, that end will not come with a bang, but with a whimper “ - Manojh Reddy

Automated Rf Over Fiber Signal Measurement System, Mageswaren Ravichandran

Theses

The demand for lossless data at a low cost has lead its way to use fiber optic in field of RADIO FREQUENCY. This research proposes the automation technique which can be used in RF-overfiber measurements. All other automation technique used visual basic or Labview as the source, this paper uses python an open-source language to create generic automation software. Python optimized the code to run faster and gave advantage of modularity and portability. The code was successfully developed and verified by the two-different test setup, which give an accuracy of 97%.

Image Down-Scaler Using The Box Filter Algorithm, Vaishnavi Parthipan

Theses

One of the indispensable aspects of digital image processing is the requirement of varied image resolutions. To achieve varied resolution, scaling comes into picture. Two important applications of scaling is good pictorial quality for human interpretation and processing of digital images for storage, transmission and for representation of autonomous machine perception. This paper focuses on the transmission application. The size of the image if reduced occupies less space in the communication medium thus reducing the bandwidth requirement. And also the server space and the processing power of the image is reduced greatly. The standard for digital television transmission over terrestrial, …

Design Of A Single Precision Floating Point Divider And Multiplier With Pipelined Architecture, Mayuresh Vijay Keni

Theses

High speed computation is the need of today’s generation of Processors. To accomplish this major task, many functions are implemented inside the hardware of the processor rather than having software computing the same task. Majority of the operations which the processor executes are Arithmetic operations which are widely used in many applications that require heavy mathematical operations such as scientific calculations, image and signal processing. Especially in the field of signal processing, multiplication division operation is widely used in many applications. The major issue with these operations in hardware is that many iteration’s are required which results in slow operation …

Automatic Protein Shake Freestyle Vending Machine, Balaji Salunkhe

Theses

This paper discusses the design and implementation of an automatic protein shake freestyle vending machine. This machine is capable of providing protein shakes as per the customer’s requirement. Customers are able to decide what kind of protein supplement they want according to their fitness needs, and they can give the appropriate instructions to the machine to prepare their protein drink by use of a touch system. Other customers, who are unable to decide or new to fitness supplements can choose a pre-designed drinks according to their personal fitness. As such, the machine gives the freedom of selection to the customer …

Systemverilog Verification Of Wishbone-Compliant Serial Peripheral Interface, Avinash Srinivasan

Theses

Synchronous serial interfaces provide economical on-board communication between the processor, digital to analog and analog to digital converters, memory, and other building blocks on the chip. A number of Integrated Circuit (IC) manufacturers develop and produce components that are compatible with serial interfaces. The common serial interfaces include Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C), Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART), and Universal Serial Bus (USB). SPI is widely used and advantageous over other serial interfaces due to its features of simplicity, low cost, clock synchronous, and non-interrupting high-speed data transfer rate. SPI is the core controller of the design. An …

An Uncommon Use For An Uncommon Press: Approaching Object-Based Stem Education In Cultural Institutions By Way Of A Reconstructed English Common Press, Daniel B. Krull

Theses

The Uncommon Press Project was a cross-departmental, multi-disciplinary capstone project by students from the Kate Gleason College of Engineering and the College of Liberal Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology which aimed to create a historically accurate reconstruction of a circa 1790 English common press for the Cary Graphic Arts Collection. As a member of the team undertaking this project, I was involved in the research, materials acquisition, construction, and social media engagement efforts. In addition to my role as part of this team, I desired, as an individual scholar, to learn how a reconstructed press can serve as an …

Barriers To Implementation Of Lean Techniques In Printing Firms And The Impact Of Implementation, Sandeep Yellinedi

Theses

Lean practices including 5S Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma DMAIC and Value Stream Mapping are gaining more and more importance in a wide range of industries. Firms in various industries have implemented one or more of the techniques that comprise Lean techniques and have realized reduced wastes that in turn has contributed to increased profits. The researcher, being associated with the field of printing, has observed the Lean techniques practicing trends in the printing industry. This report builds upon the previously published research that has examined the implementation of Lean Methodologies, including studies that have investigated the impact of the adoption …

The Impact Of White Space On User Experience For Tablet Editions Of Magazines, Fanyi Cheng

Theses

After declining for six years (Wang, 2016), printed magazines are facing the dilemma of a paperless era. As magazine publishing emerges into the digital world, it needs to achieve the degree of readers’ desire that is comparable to or surpassing print publications.

Limited research has been done regarding white space in digital magazines. This thesis aimed to investigate how user experience is affected by white space in the layout of digital editions of food magazines designed for the Apple iPad.

The study focused on the evaluation of white space as the factor influencing the quality of the user experience. White …

The Effect Of Interaction With Therapy Horses On University Students' Perceived Stress Level, Alexa Chapman

The Eleanor Mann School of Nursing Undergraduate Honors Theses

This research project investigates how university students are affected by interacting with therapy horses. Stress is the factor that will be evaluated in this particular study. The self-rated stress scores will be acquired from University of Arkansas students both before and after interacting with specially trained therapy horses during an Equine Assisted Activity and Therapy (EAAT) class offered at the University. Stress will be evaluated by students taking a survey inquiring about daily stressors including finances, school, work and relationships. The data collected will be compared by pre- and post- interactions with the horses. We expect that the pre- and …

Toward A Multiple Mentor Model In Music Education, Kristina R. Weimer

School of Music Faculty Publications

Literature supports the importance of mentoring relationships in making meaningful contributions to novice teacher induction, and that especially important in the relationship is matching mentor/mentee by subject and grade level and in close proximity. The physical location of mentors to mentees and their availability impacts the relationship. Proximity is necessary to view the mentor as accessible and provide opportunities for interactions during the school day.

In music education, matching mentor/mentee by subject and grade level and in close proximity can be challenging. Because of music's specialization, music teachers are often the only one in their building. I previously examined two …

Comparison Of Alveolar Ridge Splitting And Autogenous Onlay Bone Grafting To Enable Implant Placement In Patients With Atrophic Jaw Bones, Gokhan Gurler, Cagri Delilbasi, Hasan Garip, Sukran Tufekcioglu

Saudi Medical Journal

Objective: To compare alveolar ridge splitting (ARS) and autogenous onlay bone grafting (AOBG) in atrophic jaw bones. Methods: Forty patients were included in this retrospective, parallel-group study conducted at the Istanbul Medipol University School of Dentistry, Istanbul, Turkey, between 2012-2015. The initial bone thickness was measured by cone beam computed tomography (CBCT). Patients were allocated into ARS (n=17) and AOGB (n=23) groups on the basis of ridge thickness and shape. Follow-up CBCT measurements to assess horizontal bone were repeated 4 to 6 months post augmentation. The diameters of the implants were recorded. Implant bone resorption was measured at one year …