Digital Commons Network^™

Understanding Rural Appalachian Ohio Educators' Perceptions Of Students Of Poverty, Angela Dawn Hicks

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In a rural elementary school, characterized by high poverty levels in Appalachian Ohio, school personnel were concerned that student literacy and math proficiency levels remained low during 2005-2015 and teachers had not been able to close the achievement gap between economically disadvantaged students and non-economically disadvantaged students despite a focus on literacy and math professional development (PD) provided by the district. Administrators were concerned that teachers' perceptions, and beliefs about students of poverty might contribute to students' underachievement. The purpose of this study was to understand teachers' perceptions of students living in poverty. Guided by Gorski's equity literacy theory, research …

Elementary Teacher Knowledge Of And Practices For Teaching Reading To African American Students, Camille Jacqueline Little

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

State standardized tests results indicated that between 2012 and 2016, fewer African American students at a rural, Title I elementary school met state standards in reading compared with other racial/ethnic groups of students. A gap in practice existed because the school and district had not conducted studies to understand teacher knowledge and practice as they related to teaching reading to African American students. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to address the problem and gap in practice by exploring elementary teacher knowledge and understanding of the learning needs in reading among African American students. Tomlinson's theory of differentiated …

Sleep Among Young Adults Living In Rural Poverty, Susan Barber Skinner

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Lack of restorative sleep is implicated in threats to public health and safety as well as negative individual health outcomes, which are more pronounced among those living in rural poverty. This study addressed the need for an approach to these problems that is sensitive to culture and community. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the lived experience of sleep among young adults living in rural poverty to inform development of strategies to improve sleep behavior in this population. Research questions explored the lived experience of sleep, constructs of the theory of planned behavior which was used as …

Property Law For The Anthropocene Era, John G. Sprankling

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

Human activity has replaced nature as the principal force shaping our planet. As a result, we stand at the dawn of a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Fundamental changes in American law will be required to mitigate and adapt to the negative environmental impacts produced in this new era. These changes will go far beyond the traditional scope of environmental law to encompass property law and other subjects.This Article analyzes how American property law should respond to the Anthropocene challenge. It demonstrates the need to transition from a property law system based on stability to a more dynamic system that …

Assessing The Conditions For Post-Cold War Conflict Interventions, Daniel Wesley Clark

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This research seeks to understand the reasons regarding why states intervene in conflicts? This study utilizes all European states who are a member of NATO and seeks to understand their reason for intervening in 14 post-cold war conflicts. Specifically, this study seeks to address whether the involvement of the United States, their NATO membership, and the humanitarian extent of the crisis play a role in their intervention decision. To answer these questions, this study uses an ordered probit statistical study to tests the hypothesis. The results show that the United States involvement in a conflict, and the European states membership …

Semantic Web Foundations For Representing, Reasoning, And Traversing Contextualized Knowledge Graphs, Vinh Thi Kim Nguyen

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and OWL have become World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for knowledge representation and reasoning. RDF triples about triples, or meta triples, form the basis for a contextualized knowledge graph. They represent the contextual information about individual triples such as the source, the occurring time or place, or the certainty. However, an efficient RDF representation for such meta-knowledge of triples remains a major limitation of the RDF data model. The existing reification approach allows such meta-knowledge of RDF triples to be expressed in RDF by using four triples per reified triple. While reification is …

Learning Race And Racism While Learning: Experiences Of International Students Pursuing Higher Education In The Midwestern United States, Donald Mitchell Jr. Et Al.

Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

Researchers have documented how race and racism influence the college experiences of U.S. citizens. However, research on the ways that race and racism affect international students warrants similar attention. This qualitative study explored how international students learned about U.S. concepts of race and racism and how such concepts shaped their college experiences. The participating international college students learned about U.S. concepts of race and racism through media, relationships, formal education, and lived experiences. They defined these concepts in varying ways and had varying racial ideologies.

Developments In Preparation, Compilation, And Review Engagements, 2017/18; Alert, American Institute Of Certified Public Accountants (Aicpa)

Industry Guides (AAGs), Risk Alerts, and Checklists

No abstract provided.

Surface Enabled Lab-On-A-Chip (Loc) Device For Protein Detection And Separation, Zhichao Wang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Sensitive and selective chemical/biological detection/analysis for proteins is essential for applications such as disease diagnosis, species phenotype identification, product quality control, and sample examination. Lab-on-a-chip (LOC) device provides advantages of fast analysis, reduced amount of sample requirements, and low cost, to magnificently facilitate protein detection research. Isoelectric focusing (IEF) is a strong and reliable electrophoretic technique capable of discerning proteins from complex mixtures based on the isoelectric point (pI) differences. It has experienced plenty of fruitful developments during previous decades which has given it the capability of performing with highly robust and reproducible analysis. This progress has made IEF devices …

Amending The Corporate Crisis Renewal Model: Lessons From Oil And Palm Crises In West Africa, Vincent Manzie

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This dissertation amends the Crisis Renewal Model of corporate rhetoric based on analyses of two multinational organizational crises in Nigeria and Cameroon. The Renewal model revises the dominant apologia model of corporate crisis rhetoric to focus on strengthening relationships with stakeholders following a crisis rather than solely on repairing or restoring reputation. Yet while the renewal model redresses the classic Aristotelian premises of apologia, the Nigerian and Cameroonian situations call for a significant reframing of rhetorical strategies in response to the colonialist legacies, cultural traditions, political volatilities, and socioeconomic particularities of these contexts. The research questions driving the dissertation are: …

Public Restrooms And The Distorting Of Transgender Identity, Terry S. Kogan

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The sex-separated public restroom, a ubiquitous feature of our built environment, has been at the vortex of litigation filed by state officials across the country challenging the Obama administration’s attempt to assure that transgender people have access to safe restrooms. Tracing the ongoing federal litigation in North Carolina surrounding the passage of House Bill 2, this Article argues that this seemingly mundane architectural space has in fact driven the litigation strategies of all parties to these cases. In insisting that access to public restrooms be based on biological sex, state officials rely on an outmoded nineteenth century cultural vision of …

E. Bement & Sons V. National Harrow Company: The First Skirmish Between Patent Law And The Sherman Act, Amelia Rinehart

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

In the 1890s, the Sherman Act presented a host of unknowns for patent owners and lax enforcement enabled the proliferation of trusts like the Harrow Trust embodied in the practices of National Harrow. Bement, a profligate license violator, ended up fighting the trust all the way to the Supreme Court, but the surprising outcome left an enduring impression on the interplay between antitrust and patent law. In this way, the case has been both important and forgotten over time. Given the outcome in Actavis, and the possibility for a change of personnel on the Court that may shift it further …

Strategic Communication In Public Schools: A Communication Audit Of A Midwestern School District, Jacqueline Dawn Pleggenkuhle

Communication

School districts are complex organizations which require the use of strategic communication. Measuring the communication from school leaders to their various audiences for message content and alignment has the potential to illuminate the current reality of school communication practices as well as point to areas of needed improvement. The current study measures strategic communication by conducting a communication audit of the fastest growing school district in Iowa, by interviewing 10 school leaders and analyzing essential communication products including 26 web pages and 10 district newsletters. Guided by current research on school communication and branding by universities, the communication audit measures …

Finding The Great Plains People In The “Buffalo Commons” Proposal, Bryce Duane Tellmann

Communication

This thesis argues that Frank and Deborah Popper’s 1987 “Buffalo Commons” proposal urged an exchange of the “plow” for the “buffalo” as the dominant metaphor of Great Plains life. A close textual analysis of the proposal reveals that it constituted the Great Plains “people” through use of Wander’s third persona, and ultimately attempted to promote a collective identity that was starkly opposed to how the current residents viewed themselves, effectively seeking to deconstitute their identity. This mismatch is posited as part of the reason the proposal was received so negatively and continues to be a controversial subject today.

Disseminating Agriculture Information Using The Bbq Boot Camp Model, Austen John Germolus

Animal Sciences

The BBQ Boot Camp program was designed to educate consumers about agriculture production and sustainability, while teaching outdoor cooking methods with meat as the focus. Through the BBQ Boot Camp model, consumer impact was analyzed using a pre- and post-program test. The test questions focused on outdoor cooking, agriculture practices, and food safety issues. Data were collected from 3,112 attendees from 31 BBQ Boot Camps in 2009–2013. Data were analyzed using the MIXED procedure in SAS with fixed effects of year, time, age, sex, and city size (1=population>15k; 2=population between 2.5k-15k; and 3=population<2.5k) and all two-way interactions were tested and removed from the model if P>0.1. Consumer demographics included men and …

The Database Of The Predicts (Projecting Responses Of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) Project, Lawrence N. Hudson, Tim Newbold, Sara Contu, Samantha L.L. Hill, Igor Lysenko, Adriana De Palma, David J. Flaspohler, Et. Al.

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used this evidence base to develop global and regional statistical models of how local biodiversity responds to these measures. We describe and make freely available this 2016 release of the database, containing more than 3.2 million records sampled at over 26,000 locations and representing over 47,000 species. We outline how the database can help in …

An Alternative Way For Kosovar Adults To Earn A High School Equivalency Diploma: A Case Study, Gjylbehare Llapi

Education

For many years, at the end of the last century, Kosovo was a country plagued with political, social, and economic strife that forced an entire generation of children and young adults to go virtually uneducated. Kosovo is paying a price for that today, with many of its adults finding themselves unskilled, under-educated and unemployed. The central topic and the purpose of the study was to identify possible programming options available to Kosovo’s authorities to increase the number of adults who possess an upper secondary school diploma. After conducting extensive research of possible alternatives offered in a number of countries, this …

Nationalization Of Antiquities: Threats To Human Heritage Posed By Equating Modern Nations With Ancient Counterparts, Jack W. Vachon

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Overreach And Innovation In Equality Regulation, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

At a time of heightened concern about agency overreach, this Article highlights a less appreciated development in agency equality regulation. Moving beyond traditional bureaucratic forms of regulation, civil rights agencies in recent years have experimented with new forms of regulation to advance inclusion. This new "inclusive regulation" can be described as more open ended, less coercive, and more reliant on rewards, collaboration, flexibility, and interactive assessment than traditional modes of civil rights regulation. This Article examines the power and limits of this new inclusive regulation and suggests a framework for increasing the efficacy of these new modes of regulation.

The Civic And Political Engagement Of Latinos In Omaha, Nebraska, Christian Israel Espinosa Torres

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Prior to 2006, Latinos in this country were virtually disregarded as an active political group. However, on May 1, 2006, thousands of immigrants and advocates across the United States marched in major cities to protest proposed immigration laws. In Omaha, Nebraska, alone, it was estimated that community groups energized 15,000 people to march in protest that day. Since the marches, both the number of Latinos and public participation of that group has grown dramatically. But, that growth has not been without its setbacks. While that first display of unity was striking in 2006, many factors have combined to prove that …

Constructing Identities In The West Branch Landscape: Herbert Hoover's Life And Legacy As A Common Man, 1935-1992, Ryan Lucas Wurtz

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This thesis examines the development of the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, and the town of West Branch's memorialization of Herbert Hoover. The memorialization process of Herbert Hoover's life began with the purchase of his childhood home by his wife, Lou Henry, and son, Allan Hoover in 1935. Backed by the town of West Branch, where the birth site was located, the memorial consisted of the home that Hoover lived in as a child. The Birthplace Society, comprised of leading West Branch community members, expanded the grounds and restored Hoover's father's blacksmith shop in …

The New North: Patents And Knowledge Economy Analysis In Alaska, Salma Zbeed

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

In the last few years, Alaska's economy suffered as world oil prices plunged to very low levels, and the analysts predicting that Alaska output will continue to dwindle in the years to come. As a result of Alaska's dependence on oil economy, the state now faces a budget deficit. Modern economic development theories suggest searching for ways to manage northern frontiers. Investment in a knowledge –based economy seems to be new one of the appealing alternatives, and investing the human capacities is necessary. There is enough evidence from both central and peripheral regions that geographic proximity between the people and …

Spatial Competition In Airport Markets: An Application Of The Huff Model, Joel Heilman

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Airports typically attract travelers from the immediate vicinity, but travelers may be willing to travel farther for better fares and more frequent flights. This study attempts to map the spatial variation of airport catchment areas using the Huff model. This model, originally designed to analyze retail store competition, can be applied to many forms of spatial competition, but it is a relatively unexplored approach in the context of airports. Unlike other air transportation travel choice models, it emphasizes spatial variation in market share and provides spatial representation in the form of a map. It is used in this study to …

What If They're All Terrorists?: The Securitization Of Muslims In Post-9/11 Immigration Policy, Kian Vesteinsson

Pomona Senior Theses

This thesis examines U.S. immigrant and refugee policy and policy discourse to understand the formation of Muslims as particular sites of risk as immigrants in the War on Terror. Theorists of international relations theorize securitization as a process in which state actors begin to use the language of security in considering the regulation and governance of a certain policy issue area. I argue that the securitization of various figures who are Muslim or are linked to Muslim-majority countries in post-9/11 immigrant and refugee policy and political discourse contributes to political conditions under which Islam is understood as the only trusted …

Bumper V1.0: A Bayesian User-Friendly Model For Palaeo-Environmental Reconstruction, Philip B. Holden, H. John B. Birks, Stephen J. Brooks, Mark B. Bush, Grace M. Hwang, Frazer Matthews-Bird, Bryan G. Valencia, Robert Van Woeslk

Ocean Engineering and Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

We describe the Bayesian user-friendly model for palaeo-environmental reconstruction (BUMPER), a Bayesian transfer function for inferring past climate and other environmental variables from microfossil assemblages. BUMPER is fully self-calibrating, straightforward to apply, and computationally fast, requiring ~2 s to build a 100- taxon model from a 100-site training set on a standard personal computer. We apply the model’s probabilistic framework to generate thousands of artificial training sets under ideal assumptions. We then use these to demonstrate the sensitivity of reconstructions to the characteristics of the training set, considering assemblage richness, taxon tolerances, and the number of training sites. We find …

Genetic Perspectives On Biodiversity In Rocky Mountain Alpine Streams, Scott Hotaling

Theses and Dissertations--Biology

In alpine regions worldwide, climate change is dramatically altering ecosystems, affecting biodiversity across habitats and taxonomic scales. For streams, the associated recession of mountain glaciers and snowfields, paired with altered precipitation regimes, are driving shifts in hydrology, species distributions, and basal resources – often threatening the very existence of some habitats and biota. Globally, alpine streams harbor particularly substantial species and genetic diversity due to significant habitat insularity and environmental heterogeneity: however, anthropogenic warming threatens to homogenize habitats through the reduction of the cryosphere, thereby reducing biodiversity from micro- to macroscopic organisms and genes to communities. Still, alpine stream biodiversity, …

Science In Fiction: Ethnobotany And The Yearling, Bradley C. Bennett

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature

No abstract provided.

Chicago's Carceral Geographies: Public Housing And Prisoner Reentry In The City, Madeleine Rose Hamlin

Theses - ALL

The Chicago Housing Authority’s recently announced Reentry Pilot allows limited numbers and limited types of ex-offenders to live in Chicago’s public housing for the first time (officially). Through interviews with policymakers, advocates, resident leadership, and service providers, as well as ex-offenders enrolled in or waitlisted for the Pilot, this thesis explores how the various stakeholders envision the goals of this Pilot and what factors they identify that may limit its success. By reshaping housing policy not only for the limited number of ex-offenders included in the Pilot but indeed, by pushing for broader sets of reforms, the Pilot attempts to …

Circling The Reality Of Public Institutions Anchoring Gentrification: An E-Delphi Study Of Information, Culture, And Community Stakeholders Voicing The Way Forward In Detroit, Michigan, Celeste L. Welch

Theses and Dissertations

Information, culture, and memory centers increasingly anchor urban redevelopment projects in historically marginalized communities challenged with contemporary social and economic disparities. This dissertation situated libraries, archives, and museums within a socio-cultural context and examined the role of cultural heritage institutions in gentrification. Librarians, archivists, curators, and community advocates in Detroit, Michigan shared their viewpoints and experiences of gentrification in a legacy city. Using a modified Delphi process, the e-Delphi panel explored the need for assessing policy, service delivery, and programming in a city of color at-risk to gentrification-induced displacement.

This mixed research study used a concurrent triangulation design. A panel …

Climate Change (Mal)Adaptation As Governmentality: The Case Of The Ada Sea Defense System In The Volta River Delta Of Ghana, Kwame Ntiri Owusu-Daaku

Theses and Dissertations

River deltas are complex natural environments that represent a confluence of many physical, biological and human processes vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The likely biophysical impacts of climate change on deltas have received substantial attention. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which the different stakeholders of deltaic environments frame the vulnerability of residents of deltas to climate change. The Volta River Delta (VRD) of Ghana is a compelling site in which to conduct such an examination because of the clear climaterelated changes taking place in the Delta, and the fact that like many …