Digital Commons Network^™

Happiness Index Methodology, Laura Musikanski, Scott Cloutier, Erica Bejarano, Davi Briggs, Julia Colbert, Gracie Strasser, Steven Russell

Journal of Sustainable Social Impact

The Happiness Index is a comprehensive survey instrument that assesses happiness, well-being, and aspects of sustainability and resilience. The Happiness Alliance developed the Happiness Index to provide a survey instrument to community organizers, researchers, and others seeking to use a subjective well-being index and data. It is the only instrument of its kind freely available worldwide and translated into over ten languages. This instrument can be used to measure satisfaction with life and the conditions of life. It can also be used to define income inequality, trust in government, sense of community and other aspects of well-being within specific demographics …

The Ethical Implications Of Plagiarism And Ghostwriting In An Open Society, Patricia I. Fusch, Lawrence R. Ness, Janet M. Booker, Gene E. Fusch

Journal of Sustainable Social Impact

Plagiarism is the theft of intellectual property. Plagiarism has been a problem in academic settings and appears to be on the increase, now moving into areas including the medical and scientific fields as well as industry, manufacturing, military, and legal briefs. The ethical implications can have serious consequences for organizations, individuals, and society, resulting in harm being done to others in favor of expediency. In this scholarly essay, the authors explore and discuss the ethical implications of plagiarism and the increase of ghostwriting in a free society through the writings of Kant, Popper, Kostenbaum, Plato, Whedbee, and others. The conclusion …

Book Review: Social Policy And Social Change: Toward The Creation Of Social And Economic Justice, Jan Vinita White

Journal of Sustainable Social Impact

Although the book title, Social Policy and Social Change: Toward the Creation of Social and Economic Justice, suggests social change, the focus of the book is social justice, particularly in social work policy and practice. In this second edition of Jimenez, Mayers Pasztor, Chambers, and Pearlman Fujii's seminal exploration, issues of inequality and the widening gap between the wealthy and poor, health care disparities, discrimination, and developing issues are investigated and analyzed in a reader-friendly format.

Informal Partnerships Between Nonprofits And Local Governments And The Role Of Trust, Scott Pozil, Anne Hacker

Journal of Sustainable Social Impact

Informal partnerships between nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and local governments represent a winning combination for affective positive social change in communities. These partnerships thrive on the development and sustainment of trust as a guiding force between NPO executives and their local government counterparts. Qualitative case study research reveals such an assertion to be true, based on interviews and document reviews of informal partnerships in a metropolitan area in the Northwest United States. The implications for social change include establishing successful models of informal partnerships between NPOs and local governments that impact the social and economic well-being of communities.

A Chronicle Of Economic Botany, James P. Smith Jr

Botanical Studies

No abstract provided.

Why Some Religious Accommodations For Mandatory Vaccinations Violate The Establishment Clause, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

All states require parents to inoculate their children against deadly diseases prior to enrolling them in public schools, but the vast majority of states also allow parents to opt out on religious grounds. This religious accommodation imposes potentially grave costs on the children of non-vaccinating parents and on those who cannot be immunized. The Establishment Clause prohibits religious accommodations that impose such costs on third parties in some cases, but not in all. This presents a difficult line-drawing problem. The Supreme Court has offered little guidance, and scholars are divided.

This Article addresses the problem of religious accommodations that impose …

Smart Fog: Fog Computing Framework For Unsupervised Clustering Analytics In Wearable Internet Of Things, Debanjan Borthakur, Harishchandra Dubey, Nicholas Constant, Leslie Mahler, Kunal Mankodiya

Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications

The increasing use of wearables in smart telehealth system led to the generation of large medical big data. Cloud and fog services leverage these data for assisting clinical procedures. IoT Healthcare has been benefited from this large pool of generated data. This paper suggests the use of low-resource machine learning on Fog devices kept close to wearables for smart telehealth. For traditional telecare systems, the signal processing and machine learning modules are deployed in the cloud that processes physiological data. This paper presents a Fog architecture that relied on unsupervised machine learning big data analysis for discovering patterns in physiological …

Towards Fog-Driven Iot Ehealth: Promises And Challenges Of Iot In Medicine And Healthcare, Bahar Farahani, Farshad Firouzi, Victor Chang, Mustafa Badaroglu, Nicholas Constant, Kunal Mankodiya

Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications

Internet of Things (IoT) offers a seamless platform to connect people and objects to one another for enriching and making our lives easier. This vision carries us from compute-based centralized schemes to a more distributed environment offering a vast amount of applications such as smart wearables, smart home, smart mobility, and smart cities. In this paper we discuss applicability of IoT in healthcare and medicine by presenting a holistic architecture of IoT eHealth ecosystem. Healthcare is becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to insufficient and less effective healthcare services to meet the increasing demands of rising aging population with chronic …

Magicsox: An E-Textile Iot System To Quantify Gait Abnormalities, Mohammadreza Abtahi, Joshua V. Gyllinsky, Brandon Paesang, Scott Barlow, Matthew Constant, Nicholas Gomes, Oliver Tully, Susan E. D'Andrea, Kunal Mankodiya

Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications

The global society is increasingly facing the challenges that reduce mobility, quality of life, and independence. Gait disorders are often both a result of, and predictor of further issues, tied to the 15 million stroke patients annually worldwide. These individuals face a number of gait abnormalities including drop foot that is a pathological condition, limiting patients' ability to lift the foot from the ground during the swing phase of walking. In this research work, we introduce a novel smart textile system, MagicSox that is woven with multiple sensors distributed over the surface of the foot. The overarching goal of MagicSox …

Veteran Homelessness In Northwest Arkansas (Point-In-Time Census 2017), Kevin Fitzpatrick, Jill Niemeier

Homelessness

Veteran homelessness in Northwest Arkansas based on the 2017 Point-in-Time census.

Substance Abuse Among Northwest Arkansas' Homeless (Point-In-Time Census 2017), Kevin Fitzpatrick, Jill Niemeier

Homelessness

Substance abuse among Northwest Arkansas' homeless based on the 2017 Point-in-Time census.

The Relationship Between Transmission Of Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Attitude, And Culture, Esther M. Hooley

Dissertations

Purpose

Sexual knowledge is important for healthy development of adolescents and adults. Currently, there is no consistent mode of introducing the topic of sex to an individual who has not previously learned about the topic. If a shift were to occur in transmission of sexual knowledge, whether by creating a consistent mode, a culture-specific mode, or focusing on sexual attitude rather than behavior, future populations would be positively influenced. If the educational system, religious organizations, and families could be informed of an appropriate and meaningful way to communicate sexual knowledge to adolescents, negative sexual outcomes have the potential to decrease …

An Investigation Of The Attitudes Held By General Education Teachers Toward Students With Disabilities In A Pilot Inclusive Education Program In Cameroon, Agnes Y. Mngo

Dissertations

Problem Statement

The literature from Cameroon depicts that the implementation of inclusive education is not only in its embryonic stage but faces resistance from educators who are still not accepting of the presence of students with disabilities in general education classrooms. This resistance has been attributed to several factors ranging from attachment to customs and traditions that encourage the isolation of persons with disabilities, to the lack of resources and professionals needed for the successful implementation of inclusive education programs. These unfavorable attitudes have been a cause for concern among parents, educators, and especially government leaders who do not want …

Development And Application Of Self-Awareness In Project Leadership: A Multiple Case Study Of Department Of Defense Project Managers, Jeffrey Brian Hart

Dissertations

Problem

This study explored how Project Managers (PMs) in the Department of Defense (DoD) come to understand, develop, and apply self-awareness in leading their projects. The DoD invests heavily in developing their project leaders by providing training, experiences, developmental assignments, and other tools such as self-assessments presumably to help them lead more authentically and become more self-aware as a way to improve project management. Despite this investment, it is unclear how self-awareness is actually developed in PMs and integrated into their leadership practice. In view of the importance of self-awareness in leadership, more understanding is needed on how self-awareness is …

Cultural, Linguistic, Curricular And Financial Stories Of Andrews University International Undergraduate Students And Their Experiences Of Coping During The Academic Year 2014-2015: A Narrative Study, Renaude Etienne Saint-Phard

Dissertations

Problem

The internationalization trends indicate that global growth of international students moving from one country to another is predicted to exceed 7.2 billion in 2025 (IIE, 2011)). This crossing of borders inevitably evokes that international students confront multifaceted challenges in their host country. Although many facets of research have addressed their multilayered challenges, most of these studies do not give a voice to international undergraduate students nor do they seek to understand their cultural, linguistic, curricular, and financial narratives. Most importantly, these studies do not explore how international undergraduate students cope with their challenges. It is essential to understand how …

Visualization Of Multidimensional Clinical Data From Wearables On The Web And On Apps, Travis M. Frink, Joshua V. Gyllinsky, Kunal Mankodiya

Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications

Health related IoT is an important field and is changing health care by recording the critical amount of patient data necessary to identify patterns in patient data. This big data requires big data visualization to be useful to clinicians. We present the design architecture of a new visualization tool based on web and mobile platforms for use in the clinical setting. Implementation information of four diagram views of chronological patient data are discussed, representing both continuous calendars and days as pie charts.

Soa-Fog: Secure Service-Oriented Edge Computing Architecture For Smart Health Big Data Analytics, Rabindra K. Barik, Harshchandra Dubey, Kunal Mankodiya

Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications

The smart health paradigms employ Internet-connected wearables for telemonitoring, diagnosis for providing inexpensive healthcare solutions. Fog computing reduces latency and increases throughput by processing data near the body sensor network. In this paper, we proposed a secure service-orientated edge computing architecture that is validated on recently released public dataset. Results and discussions support the applicability of proposed architecture for smart health applications. We proposed SoA-Fog i.e. a three-tier secure framework for efficient management of health data using fog devices. It discuss the security aspects in client layer, fog layer and the cloud layer. We design the prototype by using win-win …

Just Planning: What Has Kept The Arts And Urban Planning Apart?, Tom Borrup

Student Articles, Chapters, Presentations, Learning Objects

The creative and cultural sector, including artists, creative entrepreneurs, cultural practitioners, and most nonprofit arts and cultural organizations, remain on the fringes of the larger enterprise of urban planning and city building. Only recently have limited forays demonstrated potentials that theorists and cultural planners called for 40 years ago. This article examines early ideas to bridge arts and culture with urban planning and explores why these two complementary practices have kept their distance. It surveys the history, theory, and practice of cultural planning and its relationship to urban planning. Meanwhile, increasing complexity and diversity of populations of cities creates greater …

Collaboration Challenges In Systematic Reviews: A Survey Of Health Sciences Librarians, Joey Nicholson, Aileen Mccrillis, Jeff D. Williams

Student Articles, Chapters, Presentations, Learning Objects

Objective: While many librarians have been asked to participate in systematic reviews with researchers, often these researchers are not familiar with the systematic review process or the appropriate role for librarians. The purpose of this study was to identify the challenges and barriers that librarians face when collaborating on systematic reviews. To take a wider view of the whole process of collaborating on systematic reviews, the authors deliberately focused on interpersonal and methodological issues other than searching itself. Methods: To characterize the biggest challenges that librarians face while collaborating on systematic review projects, we used a web-based survey. The thirteen-item …

Preparing Family Caregivers To Recognize Delirium Symptoms In Older Adults After Elective Hip Or Knee Arthroplasty, Margaret J. Bull, Lesley Boaz, Mehdi Maadooliat, Mary E. Hagle, Lynn Gettrust, Maureen T. Greene, Sue Baird Holmes, Jane S. Saczynski

College of Nursing Faculty Research and Publications

Objectives

To test the feasibility of a telephone-based intervention that prepares family caregivers to recognize delirium symptoms and how to communicate their observations to healthcare providers.

Design

Mixed-method, pre–post quasi-experimental design.

Setting

A Midwest Veterans Affairs Medical Center and a nonprofit health system.

Participants

Forty-one family caregiver-older adult dyads provided consent; 34 completed the intervention.

Intervention

Four telephone-based education modules using vignettes were completed during the 3 weeks before the older adult's hospital admission for elective hip or knee replacement. Each module required 20 to 30 minutes.

Measurements

Interviews were conducted before the intervention and 2 weeks and 2 months …

Marlowe’S Radical Reformation: Christopher Marlowe And The Radical Christianity Of The Polish Brethren, Kristin M.S. Bezio

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Although scholars of both literature and history have made arguments for Christopher Marlowe’s religious belief in Catholicism, the Church of England, and even atheism (which could have been conflated with both by different parties during his lifetime), few consider the belief system of the Polish Brethren, a precursor to Unitarianism established by one Faustus Socinus. This essay uses historical and social network analyses to suggest a close tie between Marlowe’s acquaintances and believers in Socinianism. Clues in Doctor Faustus and Massacre at Paris suggest Marlowe’s skepticism concerning the doctrines of Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism. Furthermore, repeated references to Poland and …

Racism Didn't Stop At Jim Crow, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Reviews

Nearly 50 years ago, the Kerner Commission famously declared that “[o]ur nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The picture has changed distressingly little since then. In the 1950 Census, the average African American in a metropolitan area lived in a neighborhood that was 35 percent white—the same figure as in the 2010 Census. In 2010, the average white American still lived in a neighborhood that was more than 75 percent white. America’s largest metropolitan areas—particularly, but not exclusively, in the North—continue to score high on many common measures of racial segregation. And racial segregation …

A Quantitative Examination Of The Relationship Between Age, Gender, And Burnout In Public Accounting Professionals In A United States National Firm, Jamie Stowe

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Scholars and practitioners agree burnout is a significant problem plaguing the public accounting industry. Burnout is a condition that results from long periods of excessive strain on personal resources, and is often found in public accounting professionals due to the high stress and deadline-driven environment. As the causes for burnout are better understood, the focus has turned to why some individuals are more likely to burnout than others. Identifying who has a tendency to burnout can only help in the quest for solutions. The purpose of this correlational quantitative study was to test the theoretical framework of Maslach and Jackson …

Predictors Of Attitudes Of Private School Teachers Toward Inclusion Of Students With Special Needs In New Mexico, Debbra O'Hara

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Teachers’ attitudes toward inclusion of students with special needs affect communication with students, curricular decisions, selection and implementation of teaching strategies, and professional development needs. Most research in the United States has focused on the attitudes of public school teachers who must follow federal special education law and regulations, though international research on inclusion has included studies of both public and private school teachers’ attitudes. Private school teachers experience differing conditions (legal, economic, organizational, philosophical, etc.) and may hold differing attitudes toward inclusion from those of their public school peers. Determining these attitudes will help private school personnel to address …

The Role Of The Short-Term Mission Trip Process In The Development Of Cultural Intelligence In University Students: A Collective Case Study, Ashley Haygood

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this collective case study was to determine how, if at all, Cultural Intelligence (CQ) develops in undergraduate students through a three-stage mission trip process for students at a large Christian university in the southeast participating in three separate short-term mission trips (Africa, Asia, and Europe). This study found that across the entire short-term mission (STM) trip process, religious faith was a consistent theme impacting CQ development. Three spring break short-term mission trip teams were used as three separate cases, from which several participants, or embedded units, provided their individual experiences within the case. Data collection methods occurred …

Spanish Speaking Institutions And Language Assimilation In The Rio Grande Valley, Alexandre Couture Gagnon, Carlos Gutierrez-Mannix

Political Science Faculty Publications

The Rio Grande Valley in Texas, situated on the US-Mexico border, has a population of more than one million, of which more than 90% is of Latino descent.1 However, no public institutions formally function in Spanish, thus inhibiting institutional completeness2 and challenging long-term preservation of the language. Why does this population of Latino descent not demand Spanish-language service? Contrary to traditional research on institutional completeness, we consider institutions as the dependent variable and argue that the absence of institutions reflects the perception, within the population, of inferior status ascribed to Spanish when compared to English.

The Thin Body, The Able Body, And The Student Of Color Athlete: Physical Capital In University Viewbooks, Grace Lavin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

University and college brochures and pamphlets provide high school students with the first images and insights into a prospective college. The images of the campus and the students portrayed within them help college-bound students decide whether the institution is a fit and if they can picture themselves on campus. In order to meet the current demand for diversity representation, institutions have capitalized on campus diversity as a marketing strategy to pull in both white students and students of color to their institutions. Previous literature has shown that there exists an overrepresentation of Black and Asian students, but studies have yet …

Deep Learning Method Vs. Hand-Crafted Features For Lung Cancer Diagnosis And Breast Cancer Risk Analysis, Wenqing Sun

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Breast cancer and lung cancer are two major leading causes of cancer deaths, and researchers have been developing computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system to automatically diagnose them for decades. In recent studies, we found that the techniques in CAD system can also be used for breast cancer risk analysis, like feature design and machine learning. Also we noticed that with the development of deep learning methods, the performance of CAD system can be improved by using computer automatically generated features. To explore these possibilities, we conducted a series of studies: the first two studies focused on transferring the original CAD …

Acculturation And Filial Piety As Mediators Of The Relationship Between Caregiver Burden And Gender-Role Expectations In Hispanic-American Rehabilitation Services Students, Roy K. Chen, Bryan Austin, Chien-Chun Lin

School of Rehabilitation Services & Counseling Faculty Publications

Purpose: Hispanic-Americans are the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. The need to care for older Hispanics has become an important issue as they now enjoy longer life expectancies due to better access to healthcare and less labor participation in hazardous occupations. The present study examined whether the association between caregiver burden and gender-role expectations is mediated by acculturation and filial piety.

Method: The sample consisted of 93 Mexican-American rehabilitation services students enrolled at a large public university in Texas. The four instruments used in the study were the Zarit Burden Interview, the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, the Acculturation …

Life Care Planning In A Country With For-Profit Medicine, Rigel Macarena Pinon, Irmo Marini

School of Rehabilitation Services & Counseling Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.