Digital Commons Network^™

Using Underground Radon To Detect Inactive Geological Faults, Germán Rodríguez Ortiz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Thesis presents the results of an investigation of the concentration of radon in soil around a fault in the East Franklin Mountains in the El Paso area in West Texas. The connection between underground radon exhalations near active faults has been known for decades, but possible similar increases of underground radon levels around inactive faults have not been studied as thoroughly. Arguing that the dilatancy-diffusion model used to explain the phenomenon near active faults does not apply to the case of inactive faults, a hypoThesis is formulated under which increased levels of underground radon must be present near inactive …

Towards A Unified Theory Of Engineering Education, Oscar Humberto Salcedo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

STEM education is an interdisciplinary approach to learning where rigorous academic concepts are coupled with real-world lessons and activities as students apply science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in contexts that make connections between school, community, work, and the global enterprise enabling STEM literacy (Tsupros, Kohler and Hallinen, 2009). The purpose of the Dissertation is to develop a unified theory of engineering education based on philosophies of mathematics, science, technology & engineering, and engineering education. Using purposive sampling methods, the Thesis constructs "representative" philosophy statements from the STEM fields based on the criteria of Constructivism, Progressivism, and/or Pragmatism. These statements are …

Active Learning Effect On The Public's Perception Of Anthropogenic Global Climate Change, Ivy Gisselle Trevizo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Anthropogenic, or human-caused global climate change has been debated for many years among the public despite the growing evidence that there is scientific consensus on this topic. A gap has been discovered between scientific evidence of increasing temperatures and the public's perception on climate change. This gap has been hypothesized to come from the method in which the scientific community represents scientific evidence. The goal of this study was to determine if active learning techniques around local and regional climate change and climate change impacts changes the awareness, perception, and behavioral intentions of different segments of the public. The study …

Alá Es Primero: Faith And Culture On The Mexican-American Border, Alan Ventura

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this Thesis is to show how El Paso Latino Muslims create a new cultural language when they harmonize their Mexican cultural practices with Islam.

Label-Free Raman Imaging To Monitor Breast Tumor Signatures, John Ciubuc

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Methods built on Raman spectroscopy have shown major potential in describing and discriminating between malignant and benign specimens. Accurate, real-time medical diagnosis benefits in substantial improvements through this vibrational optical method. Not only is acquisition of data possible in milliseconds and analysis in minutes, Raman allows concurrent detection and monitoring of all biological components. Besides validating a significant Raman signature distinction between non-tumorigenic (MCF-10A) and tumorigenic (MCF-7) breast epithelial cells, this study reveals a label-free method to assess overexpression of epidermal growth factor receptors (EGFR) in tumor cells. EGFR overexpression sires Raman features associated with phosphorylated threonine and serine, and …

Analysis Of Infectious Diseases Screening Systems For Transatlantic Air Passengers, Lukas Gold

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Since transportation systems, especially air transportation, have the potential to spread infectious diseases (e.g. Ebola, SARS) quickly across large geographical area through its users, passenger health screening systems installed at the airports can help to slow down the international spread.

This Thesis identifies and tests health screening system designs using discrete event simulation. The three objectives are: (1) to provide the necessary background regarding the diseases and screening technologies, (2) to create models of an air transportation network in a simulation software, and (3) to conduct simulation experiments, analyze and interpret the results including the formulation of recommendations for decision …

Perceptions On Collaborative Writing: Exploring Student And Instructor Perceptions Of Collaborative Writing Practices In Professional Communication, Levi Ray Martin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This research study focuses on the perceptions of collaborative writing held by undergraduate students enrolled in professional writing course at The University of Texas at El Paso. Working with current scholarship surrounding effective collaborative writing practices as well as Achievement Goal Theory (AGT), the author observed two different courses of professional writing. Three types of data were collected: 1. survey responses from participants at the beginning-of and end-of the course; 2. interviews with participants at the end of the semester; and 3. classroom observations. The range of data collected provided similar and different perceptions held by the student participants. The …

How The Other Half Continues To Live: A Rhetorical, Nuanced Redefining Of The Colonia Phenomenon, James Michael Nielsen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

â??Coloniasâ?? is a colloquial term used along the U.S.-Mexico border to simply mean informal housing practices. This Thesis uses critical discourse analysis theory to analyze the way the media, government, and law theorists perceive and legitimize the colonia phenomenon through discursive texts, leading to a discussion of hegemonic oppression and racism spelled out in a rhetoric of the colonias section. This Thesis also details the history of the colonias with a focus particularly on El Paso County, Texas, looking primarily at the law-based history of this phenomenon. The critical discourse analysis (CDA) conducted was influenced by rhetorical theory, particularly Bitzerâ??s …

Process-Structure-Property Relationship In Magnesium-Based Biodegradable Alloy For Biomedical Applications, Pramanshu Trivedi

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Magnesium alloys are considered to be the next generation of biomaterials because of their ability to degrade in the physiological environment. We elucidate here the impact of multiaxial forging of Mg-2Zn-2Gd alloy on grain refinement to sub-micron regime and relate the structure to mechanical properties and biological functionality. As-cast and annealed samples were multiaxial forged (MAF) for a total number of two passes with a true strain of ~2/pass. Considering that the microstructure governs the biological response of materials, we studied the constituents of the microstructure in conjunction with the mechanical behavior. The antimicrobial behavior in a Mg-2Zn-2Gd alloy with …

Production And Functionality Of Melanocytes For Use In 3d-Printed Pigment-Capable Skin Tissue, Corinne Nicole Wittmann

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Skin grafts are used in a variety of medical procedures including burn treatment, skin cancer removal, chronic wound/ulcer treatment, skin infections and diseases, large wound closure and in elective plastic surgeries. Ideally, skin grafts are harvested directly from the patient. However, in some cases, direct harvesting of skin grafts is not possible. In these situations, an equivalent skin substitute obtained through another source is utilized. There will always be a greater risk of rejection in such cases and therefore is only intended to be a temporary treatment. A possible solution to lessen the risks and issues associated with skin grafts …

The Contribution Of Alternative Splicing Toward The Global Control Of Sumo1 Sumoylation, Myriah Lorraine Acuna

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

SUMOylation, the attachment of the Small Ubiquitin-like Modifier (SUMO) to a target protein, is a post-translational modification similar to that of Ubiquitination in terms of the cascade of events required to produce the final modified target. However, instead of targeting proteins for degradation, as Ubiquitination usually does, SUMOylation appears to regulate many vital cellular processes including nucleocytoplasmic transport, transcription, apoptosis, protein stability, response to stress, and progression through the cell cycle (Hay, R.T, 2005). This versatility exhibited by the SUMOylation system makes it an optimal target for viral manipulation, as our laboratory has previously described for Influenza A virus (Pal, …

Self-Interaction Corrected Polarizabilities Of Small Molecules, Sharmin Akter

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Density Functional Theory (DFT) is one of the most successful and popular computational Quantum Mechanical approaches to understand materials. DFT allows the prediction of material properties from the electron density. Although in principle density functional theory is exact, it, however, relies on approximate functional for exchange-correlation energy. Due to the approximate nature of the exchange-correlation functional, the self-Coulomb energy of the electrons is not exactly canceled out by the self-exchange leading the spurious self-interaction error (SIE). This error is responsible for the unphysical orbital energies of DFT and delocalization of the orbitals. The orbital energies of the valence electrons are …

Monitoring And Blunting Coping Style Effects On College Student Processing Of Health Information Via Social Media, Katherine Marie Aguirre

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The dissemination of public health messages via social media is a growing phenomenon that is changing the health communication landscape (Chou, Hunt, Beckjord, Mojer, & Hesse, 2009). Few studies have investigated how individuals process health-threatening information. This study addressed this gap in knowledge. Specifically, the current study investigated the impact of coping style on an individual's attention to health-threatening and health-promoting words on an attention task. The current study also investigated the impact of coping style on the recall of health-threatening, health-promoting, and neutral words contained in a diabetes health message. In addition, the current study investigated if coping style …

Sonogram In Medias Res, Carla E. Arellano

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In her compelling memoir, Carla E. Arellano addresses issues surrounding abortion and the numerous influences that lead women in the Mexican-American culture to make this choice. Sonogram in Medias Res is a collection of creative nonfiction stories that are personal reflections. These stories come together to show the ebb and flow of memory, culture, and the personal narrative.

Babel Underground, Joyce Y. Butler

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Joyce Y. Butler, earned her Bachelor of Arts from Southeastern Oklahoma State University in English. Her short stories and poems have been published in Green Eggs and Hams, the literary and arts journal of Southeastern Oklahoma State University. She also writes inspirational essays which have been published on the online journal, Purpled Nail. She is currently in the process of compiling a book of inspirational essays. She has been employed as a Legal Assistant for 44 years.

This work is available at Amazon.

Acculturation Process Of Bhutanese Students In American Classroom, Jigme Choden

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

International students have to adapt to a new learning environment when they move to a foreign land for higher studies. During the transition the international students face various challenges in a new learning environment starting from classroom environment to class participation. The Bhutanese students in a Southwestern University in this study shows the challenges they face as international students and the strategies they develop to acculturate in a new learning environment. The study examines the acculturation process of the Bhutanese students through the framework of acculturation.

Evaluating The Impact Of A High School Garden In El Paso, Texas For Fruit And Vegetable Intake Using A Valid Biomarker, Patrick Vaughn Hopkins

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Background: School gardens are an educational tool used to increase children's exposure to, and intake of, fruits and vegetables (F/V). Diets rich in F/V reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke, some cancers, and type 2 diabetes, and can aid in weight management as a strategy to reduce obesity prevalence. Objective data of the impact of school gardens on F/V intake are lacking, as most studies have relied on dietary self-reporting to validate F/V intake. Self-reporting of dietary intake is inherently an unreliable method for assessing F/V intake. Carotenoids, a family of phytochemicals, are a reliable biomarker of dietary intake …

Contextual Representation Of Documents, Entities, And Faces Of People Using A News Corpus, Md Abdul Kader

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A massive amount of unstructured data, in this information age, is composed of document collections. Examples include news articles, blog posts, scholarly publications, and reports generated by organizations as well as people. Many data mining and machine learning algorithms have been developed in the past decade to support text mining in many applications. Text mining applications cover a wide range of tasks spanning from personal information management --- to organizational decision making, to disease control through epidemic prediction, and to intelligence analysis for national security. One bottleneck has been dominating data mining and machine learning theories for all these text …

The Geometry Of Loss: A Novel, Elidio La Torre La Torre

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In the year 2025, Orlando Aniello, nicknamed “Or,” a Puerto Rican poet with a broken life, becomes a “consciousness in virtual space.” Tricked by a couple of goons that devote most of their duties to bootleg memories for people who lead dull and meaningless lives, Orlando’s personality splits into fragments. As consequence, his actual experiences blend the host’s own recollections, which accidentally upload to Orlando’s brain. If bootleg mnemonic technologies glitch, Orlando does not know who he is anymore. Indeed, Orlando/ Gogo/ Alejandro suffers anterograde memory loss, and the narrator becomes merely a voice without a body. A geometry of …

Protein Phosphatase 2a Influences Cortical Microtubule Organization In Response To Salt Stress, Gabriella Angelini

Master's Theses and Capstones

As sessile organisms, plants must use molecular mechanisms to cope with stressors, such as NaCl stress. Protein Phosphatase 2A (PP2A) is a highly-conserved enzyme that regulates many processes including auxin transport, gravitropic responses, ABA responses, ionic stress responses, and microtubule organization. PP2A is a heterotrimer comprised of one scaffolding A subunit, one regulatory B subunit, and one catalytic C subunit. Roots of both the A subunit mutant a1rcn1 and the C subunit mutant c4 skewed when grown on vertically-oriented agar plates containing NaCl. Quantitation of cell file orientation in roots indicated that the root skewing phenotype was due to cell …

Calling On The Cfpb For Help: Telling Stories And Consumer Protection, Pamela Foohey

Scholarly Works

Since it began operating in 2011, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has handled more than a million complaints regarding consumer financial product and services. Beginning in June 2015, the CFPB began publishing consumers’ narratives submitted with their complaints. This Article analyses a random sample of 5,000 of these narratives to assess how people engage with the complaint mechanism in light of the CFPB’s role in processing complaints. I find that people predominately use the complaint function for two distinct purposes: to express their anger and frustration about companies’ practices, or to express sadness and fear about how companies’ practices …

'No Money Down' Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey, Robert M. Lawless, Katherine Porter, Deborah Thorne

Scholarly Works

This Article reports on a breakdown in access to justice in bankruptcy, a system from which one million Americans will seek help this year. A crucial decision for these consumers will be whether to file a chapter 7 or chapter 13 bankruptcy. Nearly every aspect of their bankruptcies — both the benefits and the burdens of debt relief — will be different in chapter 7 versus chapter 13. Almost all consumers will hire a bankruptcy attorney. Because they must pay their attorneys, many consumers will file chapter 13 to finance their access to the law, rather than because they prefer …

In Pursuit Of Good & Gold: Data Observations Of Employee Ownership & Impact Investment, Christopher Greczy, Jessica S. Jeffers, David K. Musto, Anne M. Tucker

Scholarly Works

A startup’s path to self-sustaining profitability is risky and hard, and most do not make it. Venture capital (VC) investors try to improve these odds with contractual terms that focus and sharpen employees’ incentives to pursue gold. If the employees and investors expect the startup to balance the goal of profitability with another goal—the goal of good—the risks are likely to both grow and multiply. They grow to the extent that profits are threatened, and they multiply to the extent that balancing competing goals adds a dimension to the incentive problem. In this Article, we explore contracting terms specific to …

Freedom Of Speech And The Criminal Law, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

Because the Free Speech Clause limits government power to enact penal statutes, it has a close relationship to American criminal law. This Article explores that relationship at a time when a fast-growing “decriminalization movement” has taken hold across the nation. At the heart of the Article is the idea that free speech law has developed in ways that have positioned the Supreme Court to use that law to impose significant new limits on the criminalization of speech. More particularly, this article claims that the Court has developed three distinct decision-making strategies for decriminalizing speech based on constitutional principles. The first …

Proportionality Lost? The Rise Of Enforcement-Based Equity In The Deportation System And Its Limitations, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

This article briefly explains and critiques the legal framework that has made enforcement discretion the primary means of injecting proportionality and fairness into the modern deportation system. The article provides an overview of shifting approaches to this enforcement discretion under the Obama and Trump administrations, and describes some of the key Supreme Court jurisprudence interpreting this framework.

Green Home Standards: Information And Incentives, James Smith

Scholarly Works

The “green building” movement began in the United States during the 1990s. In its early stages, reformers focused on minimizing adverse environmental impacts from major public, institutional, and commercial buildings. Private-sector organizations developed voluntary standards to promote green building practices, the most prominent being LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). More recently, widespread interest in residential green building has developed. Several organizations having developed voluntary green home standards. A standard promulgated by the federal government, the Energy Star Certified Home, has achieved substantial market success during the past decade. This article describes and assesses the Energy Star Home and …

The Downstream Consequences Of Misdemeanor Pretrial Detention, Paul Heaton, Sandra G. Mayson, Megan Stevenson

Scholarly Works

In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains limited. This Article uses detailed data on hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor cases resolved in Harris County, Texas—the thirdlargest county in the United States—to measure the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes and future crime. We find that detained defendants are 25% more likely than similarly …

Reforming The Tax Incentives For Higher Education, Camilla E. Watson

Scholarly Works

Federal spending on higher education has long been controversial, primarily because it has grown exponentially since the 1950s but it has produced a system which many regard as too expensive and grossly inefficient. The soaring costs are placing higher education beyond the reach of many Americans, and of those who enter college, less than half complete their degrees. Particular criticism has been directed toward the education tax incentives, enacted mostly in the late 1990s, which shifted federalfunding for higher education from direct benefits to students in the form of grants, loans and work-study programs to indirect benefits through the tax …

Writing Truth To Power: Remarks In Celebration Of Intlawgrrls’ Tenth Birthday, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

These remarks begin with a brief history of the founding and development of IntLawGrrls blog, in order both to open the blog's tenth-anniversary conference and to introduce other conference presentations, three of which appear in this same edition of the Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law. Noting the blog's tradition of honoring departed women as foremothers, the remarks nominates yet another: Sophie Scholl, a German student executed for her part in the White Rose movement that acted in resistance to the Nazi regime.

The “Sovereigns Of Cyberspace” And State Action: The First Amendment’S Application (Or Lack Thereof) To Third-Party Platforms, Jonathan Peters

Scholarly Works

Many scholars have commented that the state action doctrine forecloses use of the First Amendment to constrain the policies and practices of online service providers. But few have comprehensively studied this issue, and the seminal article exploring “[c]yberspace and the [s]tate [a]ction [d]ebate” is fifteen years old, published before the U.S. Supreme Court reformulated the federal approach to state action. It is important to give the state action doctrine regular scholarly attention, not least because it is increasingly clear that “the private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression.” It is critical to understand whether the First …