Digital Commons Network^™

Sleep Following Traumatic Brain Injury: A Qualitative Descriptive Study, Rachael Marie Mumbower

All ETDs from UAB

Introduction: Recent estimates suggest that as many as half of all survivors of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) may be experience sleep disturbances or disorders. Although quantitative research has resulted in a greater understanding of the prevalence, symptomology, and conditions associated with sleep, little is known regarding the sleep experiences of survivors of moderate-severe TBI, after their discharge from inpatient rehabilitation. The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to describe the sleep experiences of adults with moderate-severe TBI after rehabilitation. Methods: Qualitative descriptive inquiry was used to explore and describe sleep experiences of survivors of moderate-severe traumatic brain injury TBI …

“Church Trailblazer Rev Pat Storey On Weight Watchers, Caffeine And How She Named Her Dog After Former New York Mayor”: News Representations Of The First Female Anglican Bishop In The Uk And Ireland, Kate Power

Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies

The first female bishop in the Anglican Church of the UK and Ireland was consecrated on November 30, 2013. For many within the Anglican Communion, the appointment of Reverend Pat Storey as Bishop of Meath and Kildare represented the opening of a longawaited new chapter in the history of Anglicanism. It is also potentially an occasion of considerable interest for both Irish historians and discourse analysts. For, although questions of gender and language have been widely considered in recent years, relatively few studies address the intersections of gender, language and religion – and fewer still examine the nexus of gender, …

Exploring Psychosocial And Situational Factors That Influence Female College Students' Participation In Oral Sex, Margaret Bergeron

All ETDs from UAB

Although sexually transmitted infections (STI) are not officially reported via the route of transmission, the CDC (2016) reports that individuals who provide fellatio have the highest risk of oral transmission of a STI. Therefore, females who engage in fellatio are at risk for acquiring a STI. The majority of research studies on young adult heterosexual female sexual activities primarily focus on vaginal sex and the associated risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Limited research exists on the oral sex behaviors of female college students and their understanding of the risk for contracting an STI through fellatio. The purpose of …

A Comparison Between Number And Letter Acuities Among Patients, Sarah Berry

All ETDs from UAB

ABSTRACT Purpose: Previous studies have shown that there is an association between visual acuity and Alzheimers’ disease. Untreated visual problems may contribute to cognitive impairment and more progressive cognitive decline. This study investigates the association of chart design, specifically comparing charts using letters versus numbers, to accuracy and repeatability among patients with dementia. Methods: 23 English-speaking subjects diagnosed with moderate to advanced levels of dementia were recruited from two local Birmingham nursing homes. Visual acuities were measured in a randomly selected eye and timed from six different charts: Back-illuminated ETDRS chart with letters, Back-illuminated ETDRS chart with numbers, HOTV cards …

A Comparison Of Novice And Experienced Drivers With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Haley Johnson Bishop

All ETDs from UAB

According to recent estimates, only 33% of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) successfully achieve licensure compared to nearly 84% of the general population. Despite this decreased number of individuals driving in the ASD population and the importance of driving in increasing independence and quality of life, research in transportation safety among drivers with ASD is limited. Many of the impairments associated with ASD such as anxiety, processing speed and executive function may negatively impact driving performance. This study is among the first to objectively assess possible demographic, cognitive and simulated driving performance differences in individuals with ASD who are …

Autism Spectrum Disorders And Social-Ecological Models: Understanding How Context Drives Prevalence, Anne Elizabeth Brisendine

All ETDs from UAB

Background: While there has been significant work done to explore disparities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses with respect to individual characteristics, little work has been done to examine the overall system and structure of the environment in which ASD identification is made and how it is related to diagnosis and services. The purpose of this study is to better understand the social-ecological factors that impact ASD diagnoses at the population level. Methods: In the first aim of this dissertation, a tailored social ecological model was developed and examined across variables in the 2011/12 National Survey of Children’s Health. In …

Front Matter For Volume 106, Kentucky Law Journal

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

From Despised Temporary Governor To First Elected Governor Of Louisiana: The Vindication Of William Charles Cole Claiborne, Stephanie Keller Womack

All ETDs from UAB

ABSTRACT In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson commissioned William Charles Cole Claiborne as a representative of the United States to accept the cession of the Louisiana Territory from France. After the United States took control of Louisiana on December 20, 1803, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Claiborne as the temporary governor of the territory while Congress devised a governmental structure of the new territory and the president sought more qualified candidates for the position of governor. The inhabitants of Louisiana protested the choice of Claiborne as temporary governor, pointing to his inability to speak their language (French and Spanish), his youth (he …

Religious/Spiritual Coping And Attributional Styles Among Adolescents With Chronic Health Conditions And Their Parents: Reciprocal Relationships Over Time, Christina Marie D'Angelo

All ETDs from UAB

Adolescents with chronic health conditions and their parents typically utilize various coping strategies, including religious/spiritual coping, to manage the stress associated with a chronic health condition, yet few studies have examined how parent and adolescent religious/spiritual coping relate to other cognitive factors, such as attributional styles. Additionally, it is important to investigate how parent and adolescent coping and attributional styles influence each other. Better understanding of the temporal dynamics between adolescents’ and parents’ attributions and religious/spiritual coping has important implications for whom and what to target in interventions to help families cope with the challenges of a chronic health condition. …

Effects Of Maternal And Child Depressive Symptoms And Child’S Perceived Stress On Glycemic Control As Mediated By Cortisol In Prepubertal Children With Type 1 Diabetes, Sara Laubinger Davis

All ETDs from UAB

Introduction: Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is one of the most common diseases of childhood affecting over 167,000 children under the age of 20. Despite adequate insulin regimens and concurrent treatments, many children still have trouble achieving glycemic control as evidenced by elevated HbA1c levels. Previous research indicates that parent-child interactions and parental involvement in diabetic care influence glycemic control. However, these relationships may be impaired in mothers with depressive symptoms or in children who have high levels of depressive symptoms or perceived stress. Moreover, cortisol, a stress hormone, may mediate the proposed relationships. Therefore, the purpose of this study was …

Individual And Institutional Level Factors That Influence Hiv Testing And Counseling Utilization During Antenatal Care In Nigeria, Modupeoluwa O. Durojaiye

All ETDs from UAB

Of the estimated 150,000 new HIV infections in children in 2015, 122,000 occurred in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), with Nigeria accounting for a third of all cases. Most of these infections were acquired via mother-to-child transmission (MTCT). HIV testing and counseling, a critical first step in the prevention of MTCT (PMTCT), can ensure that HIV-positive women access services that can reduce HIV transmission risk. Incorporating HIV testing and counseling into antenatal care (ANC) is an integral component of the World Health Organization (WHO) strategies. This dissertation aims to understand factors that influence HIV testing and counseling during ANC. It is comprised …

Playing God: Sub-Creation, Rules, And Role-Playing Games, George Simeon Evans

All ETDs from UAB

Role-playing games can allow for extreme creative freedom where world building is concerned. In this sense, they inherit much of their structure from Tolkien’s idea of sub-creation. However, along with this creative freedom, RPGs contain rote rules and restrictions that must be followed. This paradox creates an intrinsic tension that players are forced to deal with. Rather than casting off restrictions, or punishing players that do not submit, gamers need to understand the purpose and necessity of rules, and be empathetic towards other players when they have difficulty following the dictates of a gaming manual. If these principles are followed, …

A Black Girl's Song, Marie A. Sutton

All ETDs from UAB

A Black Girl’s Song tells of the journey of the late Jimmie Lee Elliott, a Birmingham woman who experiences a series of nearly debilitating relational, emotional and racial experiences, but goes on to become the first woman to reach the level of EAS-22 Postmaster in Alabama’s postal system. Jimmie’s is a life of interruptions, precipitated and agitated by money issues, mental breakdowns and men. But for her cast-iron will, she would have abandoned her thorny path to greatness as it had more dry patches than grassy places.

The Military Nursing Practice Environment's Association With Patient Outcomes, Pauline Arminda Swiger

All ETDs from UAB

In the United States, preventable medical errors account for many avoidable patient deaths per year. A favorable nursing practice environment, characterized by factors that improve or enhance a nurse’s ability to practice professional nursing, is a potential mechanism for promoting a culture of safety and enhancing the quality of care in hospitals. The Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index (PES-NWI) is the national standard for measuring the nursing practice environment, and its importance has been validated repeatedly in civilian nurse populations around the world. For the last several years, the scores on the PES-NWI in military facilities have …

Antiseptic, Elizabeth Ann Tompkins

All ETDs from UAB

“Antiseptic” is a collection of five stories that explore the ways family dynamics shift under hardships. The collection navigates how shifts affect both children and adults. Why do some family members wither, some simply survive, while others flourish under the pressure of a difficult experience? But these stories are not looking for specific answers. Instead, the questions are starting places for developing the internal struggles of the main characters. Where those struggles take the main characters is something that the collection explores. The collection is connected not only by the thread of family, but also by the range of emotions …

Delivery Of Deoxyribonucleic Acids As Drugs: A Structural Study, Encapsulation, And Controlled Release Of G-Quadruplex Forming Deoxyoligonucleotides Of The Human Telomeric Sequence, Brenna Alyssa Tucker

All ETDs from UAB

Nucleic acids are known to play numerous important roles in the cell. Recently, interest in the delivery of DNA to treat disease, also known as gene therapy, has increased with new non-viral encapsulation strategies becoming available. Unfortunately, challenges with sufficient delivery of the DNA still plague these systems causing the need for improved DNA delivery vehicles. To overcome DNA delivery barriers, two-component poly(methacrylic acid) (PMAA)/ poly(N-vinylpyrrolidone) (PVPON) microcapsules were developed using Layer-by-Layer (LbL) technology. G-quadruplex forming deoxyoligonucleotides of the human telomeric sequence were used to model the delivery of the thrombin binding aptamer (TBA), a DNA therapeutic that folds into …

Familial Support And Mental Health Service Use: Differences Among First- And Second-Generation Asian American And Latino Older Adults, Jessica Lynn Valles

All ETDs from UAB

While several studies have shown that US-born Asian Americans and Latinos are more likely to use mental health services than their foreign-born counterparts, the effects of generation status and familial support is unclear. Furthermore, little is known about these associations and how they affect older adults. According to the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST), as adults begin transition into advanced age, they begin to withdraw from broader social networks to focus on more intimate relations, such as those with children. In applying modernization theory to the family and aging, this theory would suggest that the status of older adults in families …

Blackbird In Flight, Holly Watson

All ETDs from UAB

Set in the fictional town of Raynham, Alabama in the Tennessee Valley region, Blackbird in Flight opens with the voice of Fenton Knox as he reminisces about the day four-year-old Molly Sutherland drowned at the drip hole where he and his family were picnicking with the Sutherlands. Fenton, who was fifteen at the time, sees a snake in the water and inaccurately assumes it is a cottonmouth. In an attempt to catch and kill the snake, Fenton is bitten. As the remaining adults attend to Fenton’s wound and successfully eliminate the snake, Molly wanders out into the water unsupervised and …

Representations Of Idioms For Natural Language Processing: Idiom Type And Token Identification, Language Modelling And Neural Machine Translation, Giancarlo Salton

Doctoral

An idiom is a multiword expression (MWE) whose meaning is non- compositional, i.e., the meaning of the expression is different from the meaning of its individual components. Idioms are complex construc- tions of language used creatively across almost all text genres. Idioms pose problems to natural language processing (NLP) systems due to their non-compositional nature, and the correct processing of idioms can improve a wide range of NLP systems. Current approaches to idiom processing vary in terms of the amount of discourse history required to extract the features necessary to build representations for the expressions. These features are, in general, …

On The Battlefield Of Merit: Harvard Law School, The First Century [Book Review], William P. Lapiana

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

"Then To Death Walked, Softly Smiling": Violence And Martyrdom In Modern Irish Republican Ballads, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

This article critically considers the representation of death within the song tradition of modern Irish Republicanism. I explore how such representations have changed in parallel with the various ideological metamorphoses that Irish Republicanism has undergone, specifically in the twentieth century. I argue that the centrality of self-sacrifice has resulted in the development of ballad narratives that deliberately obfuscate on the issue of Republican violence, resulting in the deaths of all Republican militants (regardless of cause or context), ultimately portrayed as a form of heroic self-martyrdom.

San alt seo, déantar anailís chriticiúil ar léiriú an bháis i dtraidisiún amhránaíocht Phoblachtach na …

“Young Men Of Erin, Our Dead Are Calling”: Death, Immortality And The Otherworld In Modern Irish Republican Ballads, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

Irish physical-force Republicanism has long been noted for its tendency to promote the tropes of martyrdom and immortality as core tenets of its ideological belief system. This essay sets out to examine the genre of Republican death ballads so as to identify how such essentialist concepts are represented and promoted within the attendant song tradition. Particular attention will be paid to works that deploy overtly supernatural tropes in order to articulate the key Republican concept of heroic immortality. The present research will demonstrate the consistency with which such narrative devices have been retained within the Republican song tradition into the …

School-Level Correlates Of Perceptions Of Violence And Safety In Middle And High Schools, Jonathan Adams

All ETDs from UAB

Witnessing school violence predicts poorer academic performance and psychological well-being among adolescents. Violence rates and students’ feelings of safety vary across schools, and some variance can be attributed to school-level variables. The present study examined relationships among school-level variables and perceptions of violence and safety. Middle (grades 6-8) and high (grades 9-12) school students (N = 26,313; 52.9% middle school, 47.2% female; mean age 14.44 years; 50.1% African American, 38.0% Caucasian, 11.9% other or undisclosed) from two large urban and suburban school districts self-reported how often they perpetrated violence with and without weapons, were victims of violence, or felt unsafe …

Exploring Factors That Predict Kuwaiti Preservice Kindergarten Teachers' Intentions To Use Web 2.0 Technologies In Their Future Kindergarten Classrooms Using The Decomposed Theory Of Planned Behavior, Laila Alazemi Alazemi

All ETDs from UAB

The purpose of this research was to explore factors influencing Kuwaiti kindergarten preservice teachers’ intentions to use Web 2.0 technologies in their future Kuwaiti kindergarten classrooms and their perceptions of using Web 2.0 technologies to enhance kindergarten student learning. This mixed methods study employed parallel collection of qualitative and quantitative data, separate analyses of the data, and then a merging of the findings. Gathered data were evaluated using the decomposed theory of planned behavior (DTPB) to predict the factors that influence Kuwaiti preservice teachers’ intentions to use Web 2.0 technologies in their future kindergarten classrooms. The central research questions of …

The Authenticity Debacle: Why Art Authentication And Litigation Don't Mix, Andrea Sobolewski

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property Rights For "Hubots": On The Legal Implications Of Human-Like Robots As Innovators And Creators, Amir Khoury

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

White-Beam X-Ray Diffraction And Radiography Studies On High-Boron-Containing Borosilicate Glass At High Pressures, Kathryn Jinae Ham

All ETDs from UAB

Multi-angle energy-dispersive X-ray diffraction and white-beam radiography studies were conducted on a borosilicate glass sample (17.6% B2O3) to 13.7 GPa in a Paris-Edinburgh (PE) press at Beamline 16-BM-B, HPCAT, The Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory. The measured structure factor S(q) to q = 19 Å-1 was used to determine internuclear bond distances between various species of atoms contained in the glass sample. Gold foil was used as the pressure standard. Bond distances for Si-O, O-O, and Si-Si were determined from the reduced pair distribution function G(r) and were measured as a function of pressure. The sample height, as …

Marine, Jennifer Danielle Glassford

All ETDs from UAB

Marine is a nonfiction work written as memoir. Major themes coursing through this body of work include family, fear of failure, self-awareness, self-reliance and female empowerment.

Effect Of Parents’ Adhd Status, Parents’ Sleep Hygiene, And Child Sleep Hygiene On Sleep Of School-Aged Children With Adhd, Laura Gray

All ETDs from UAB

EFFECT OF PARENTS’ ADHD STATUS, PARENTS’ SLEEP HYGIENE, AND CHILD SLEEP HYGIENE ON SLEEP OF SCHOOL-AGED CHILDREN WITH ADHD LAURA GRAY NURSING ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to determine effect sizes for the relationships between parents’ attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, parents’ sleep hygiene, and child sleep hygiene, and to determine effect sizes for the amount of variance in ADHD child sleep explained by parent ADHD symptoms, parent sleep hygiene, and child sleep hygiene. Children who have ADHD are more likely to have sleep problems than peers without ADHD. Sleep problems can exacerbate or even mimic ADHD symptoms. Consistent …

Evaluating The Genotype Phenotype Correlations In Cleidocranial Dysplasia, Stephen Lamar Greene

All ETDs from UAB

Cleidocranial dysplasia (CCD, OMIM 119600) is a rare (1 in 1,000,000) human autosomal dominant skeletal disorder with unique craniofacial and dental features caused by mutations the gene coding for transcription factor RUNX2. RUNX2 is a key master regulator of osteoblast differentiation, chondrocyte maturation and tooth formation. CCD is commonly diagnosed based on bone defects with ~90% of cases presenting with supernumerary teeth or a “third dentition”. Mouse Runx2 null models (Runx2+/-), although having similar CCD skeletal defects, do not mimic the human dental phenotype of supernumerary teeth. Instead, Runx2-/- mouse have arrested tooth formation at the cap stage. Furthermore, based …