Digital Commons Network^™

Chagas Disease Awareness Amongst Texas Physicians, Gerardo J. Pacheco

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

An estimated 300,000 people in the U.S. are living with Chagas Disease (CD), many of whom may not yet know they are infected. Approximately 20% to 30% of individuals with CD are expected to develop clinical symptoms that may manifest as heart disease and result in death if left untreated. The prevalence of CD in humans is not well understood. Given its asymptomatic manifestation and the rarity in cases seen by physicians in general, CD may be under-recognized by physicians.

The purpose of this research was to explore the understanding and knowledge of CD in Texas HCP populations (cardiologists, infectious …

Does Space Matter? An Investigation Of The Spatial Variation In Gestational Weight Gain Associations With Country Of Birth Among Hispanic Women And Access To Care In Texas, Christopher R. Webb

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Inadequate and excess gestational weight gain (GWG) are serious, but potentially preventable adverse pregnancy outcomes which affect as many as two-thirds of pregnant women in the United States. While location and space are associated with a variety of pregnancy outcomes, limited research has investigated potential spatial variation in GWG. The goal of this research is to improve the knowledge of how spatial geography is associated with GWG through secondary analyses of 70,000 to 160,000 birth certificate registry records for Texas mothers with a live birth delivery in 2014. Specifically, this research attempts to assess whether access to obstetrics and gynecologist …

Hours Of Gaming Or Non-Academic Computer Use, Substance Use, Mental Health Status And School Performance Among Texas Adolescence: Findings From The 2017 Yrbs In Texas, Shanxiazi Gao

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Online gaming activities among adolescents and adults has increased exponentially in the last decade, and mental health issues associated with excessive gaming have drawn attention from health care professionals worldwide (Griffith, 2016). Recognizing this trend, American Psychiatric Association (APA) categorized gaming disorder/addiction as a mental health condition in 2013 in an effort to prevent the expansion of relevant mental health issues (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Additionally, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared gaming disorder/addiction as a mental health disease, (World Health Organization, 2018). As a result of this declaration, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) has established nine …

Quantifying The Impact Of Laboratory And Care Systems On Relinkage To Hiv Care In A Southern, Urban Environment, Kellie L. Watkins

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Background: HIV viral suppression reduces the likelihood of transmission to just 5%,1 demonstrating the critical link between care and prevention, yet only 51% of people living with HIV (PLWH) were retained in care and 46% achieved viral suppression in the Houston area (2012), with the out-of-care (OOC) population increasing between 2008-2011.2,3

Methods: Record-search investigations across HIV surveillance and care data systems determined if potentially OOC persons referred to the Houston Health Department (HHD) from 2013-2015 (N=1287) qualified for public health follow up. A portion were randomized to a non-intervention group (n=200) to assess the program effectiveness. Participants without a disposition …

Regression And Progression: Using Econometrics To Analyze Shifts In Uno’S Enrollment Over Time, Alexander Swenson

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

From the construction of innovative academic buildings to the addition of new athletic teams, the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) has experienced abundant changes over the past 25 years. Of particular interest, fluctuations in enrollment as well as changes in the average profile of UNO have occurred. What relationships, if any, exist between these shifts and the notable events in UNO’s past? An answer to this question would be significant for UNO and affect its future decisions. In general, understanding what has affected UNO’s enrollment would be important for all mid-size, metropolitan universities as they make decisions to maximize …

Drug Overdose Prevention: Promising Practices, Dawne Frain, Rachel Lubischer, Jessica Groeneweg, Lynn Castrianno, Jeanette Harder, Gaylene Armstrong

Reports

This report on best practices informs a needs assessment on the capacity of Nebraska systems to respond to surges or clusters of intentional, unintentional, and unknown drug overdoses, especially in high burden areas and with a focus on opioids.

Are Accounting Firms Breaching The Age Discrimination Act With The Inclusion Of Mandatory Retirement Provisions, Emily Haggard

Marketing Undergraduate Honors Theses

Age is just a number. This phrase has been murmured time after time in history. From famous movie scenes, song lyrics, pages in books, and wisdom from mothers, everyone has heard this at least once in their lives. Some joke that age only matters in wine and cheese. Some argue that age is all a limitation that the mind gives you. People are taught to never ask a woman how old she is, and as a society we celebrate certain ages such as twenty-one and sixteen, yet shun and deny those such as thirty and fifty. There are rules for …

Full Issue, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Castor Canadensis Winter 2018-2019, Jedediah Smith Society

Castor Canadensis - Jedediah Smith Society

Newsletter of the Jedediah Smith Society

Nanosatellite Launch Data-Logger (Sync), Christopher Martin Gerdom

Master's Theses

CubeSat designers are increasingly looking to incorporate delicate structures and optics into their payloads. These delicate payloads, however, may not survive the required absolute-worst-case launch vibration testing needed for flight certification. To help address this problem, and to better match testing conditions to real-world launch environments, this thesis introduces Sync, a compact 1/4U CubeSat payload designed to collect data on the vibrations and thermal environments CubeSats experience inside a deployer on the way to orbit. This data can be used to better understand the launch environment for different vehicles, and help develop new, more realistic testing guidelines that could enable …

Grid-Tied Solar System, Virginia Yan

Electrical Engineering

Distribution level solar energy generation has gained importance and popularity, because it helps create a sustainable electricity system while reducing the harmful environmental impacts our current power systems have. This project proposes an alternative energy source, a laboratory-scale grid-connected photovoltaic system. A KC120-1 solar panel produces 120 Watts maximum. A grid-tied solar power inverter does DC-to-AC conversion and minimizes energy transfer losses. The inverter also has an anti-islanding feature, which senses a power outage and prevents back-feeding through isolating the circuit. The circuit breakers isolate electrical components and protect the circuit. Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories SEL-751 feeder protection relay and SEL-735 …

Women As Ritualistic Agents In The Roman Catholic Church: A Comparative Theological Dialogue, Simonmary Asese Aihiokhai

Journal of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium

In sub-Saharan African religious worldview, a woman inhabits the interstitial space of connectedness. She serves as the medium for the birthing of physical and spiritual life. Today, many in the continent have embraced Christianity and many profess the Roman Catholic faith. African Catholics can contribute to the ongoing discourse on the role of women as ministerial agents in the Catholic Church. To do this, they can articulate a theology of ministry that is grounded in the religious worldview of African indigenous religions.

Review — Jeannine Hill Fletcher, The Sin Of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, & Religious Diversity In America, Karen Teel

Journal of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium

No abstract provided.

Qed: The Research Annual Of The Uta Honors College (2018), Misbah Ahmed, Jeremy Dubhrós, Genichiro Fujioka, Gregory Luke, Samantha Oliphint, Valerie Rose Bilton, Alyssa Bragg, Darshan Chalise, Divya Chalise, Sanjari Chelawat, Lauren Crane, Iretomiwa Esho, Islam Hammad, Phyllis Mae Helms, Alyssa Hernandez, Mostofa Hisham, Valery Lofton, Virginia Morris, Jonathan Nufable, Cristian Almendariz, Nicholas Byrnes, Daniela Chavez Garcia, Sanjari Chelawat, Stephanie Dolenz, Arnav Garg, Prasoon Gautam, Wade Girton, Kalen Goss Manshack, Jared Hanes, Ian Harris, Nawal Joulani, Alexandra E. Kessler, Hrishabh Khakurel, Tiffany Kim, Nicholas Lira, Marissa Lopez, Vaishanavi Mirapurkar, Chidalu Mozie, Murtaza Mucklai, Ariel O’Brien, Leonee Onyekwere, Ashley Quimod, Mohammad Rashik, Raegan P. Rust, Tanmay Sardesai, Chanel Sassoon, Swangya Saurav, Romeeka Arfeen Siddiqui, Trevor Stull, Jaycee Weber

2018 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

The Honors College of the University of Texas at Arlington is a purposefully diverse community of student scholars in all majors dedicated to student success. The mission of the College is simple: to offer high achieving students an extraordinary undergraduate education through special academic programs and opportunities for research, study abroad, and leadership. The Honors curriculum fits with all majors, and complements and advances the goals of student's academic disciplines.

Three Essays On The Impacts Of China’S Monetary Policy, Shen Chen

Dissertations

China has experienced high speed of economic growth, trying to catch up with the developed countries. Monetary policy has played a more and more important role in China. This dissertation studies the impacts of China's monetary policy on China's housing market, stock market, and China's economic growth.

The first essay examines macroeconomic determinants of China's housing price by constructing a VAR model. Granger Causality tests, impulse response functions and variance decompositions are used to analyze the impacts of macroeconomic factors on the housing price. By using the monthly data from 2005 to 2015, the results show that a contractionary monetary …

Looking Inward: Higher Education Public Relations And Internal Communication, Kelly A. Campbell

Dissertations

There has been a decline in public good will toward institutions of higher education for nearly four decades. Resultantly, the public, media, and politicians call for greater transparency. It would be beneficial for institutions of higher education to utilize strategic means to communicate their stories, successes and brand directly to various publics. A critical, albeit often an overlooked public, are the employees of the university. They can serve as ambassadors for the university interacting with outside publics. In this capacity, not only do employees need to know information about their organization to function well at their positions, they also need …

Photoreception And Eye Regeneration Mechanisms In Planarians, Taylor R. Birkholz

Dissertations

Although humans lack the ability to regenerate complete organs and limbs following amputation or injury, there are many other species (both vertebrates and invertebrates) that can. Significant advances have been made in understanding the genetic mechanisms that regulate organ regeneration in these species, including regeneration of eye tissues such as the lens and retina. Planarians are an established historical model used to study regeneration due to their ability to regenerate any organ, including the eye. With recent advances in molecular genetic analyses, planarians are now an emerging model for the specific study of eye regeneration mechanisms. Furthermore, regeneration of the …

Concussion In Student Athletes: Prevention, Assessment, And Recovery, Miriam A. Carroll-Alfano

Dissertations

The research presented in this study examines concussion among athletes from the perspectives of prevention, assessment, and recovery. The first study examines concussion education for high school athletes by surveying 157 collegiate athletes, who primarily attended high school in Illinois and Indiana, about the previous concussion education, including whether they received mandated education, the methods and providers of education, and their ability to name a variety of concussion symptoms. This study finds that despite legislative mandates in these states, 20% of student-athletes continue to report not receiving concussion education in high school, with females more likely to report not receiving …

Towards Automated Domain-Oriented Lexicon Construction And Dimension Reduction For Arabic Sentiment Analysis, Hasan A. Alshahrani

Dissertations

Sentiment analysis is a type of text mining that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to identify and label opinionated text. There are two main approaches of sentiment analysis: lexicon-based, and statistical approach. In our research, we use the lexicon-based approach because the lexicon contains sentiment words and phrases which are the main linguistic units to express sentiments. More specifically, we work with domain-oriented lexicons as they are more efficient than general ones because the polarity is heavily driven by domains.

Arabic language has a degree of uniqueness that makes it hard to be processed with the available cross-language tools …

Evaluating Recommendations Versus Utilization Of Essential Components Of A Functional Analysis Procedure, Alissa Conway

Dissertations

Functional behavior assessment (FBA) has been identified as an essential process for behavior analytic practitioners to identify the variables maintaining challenging behaviors (BACB Professional and Ethical Compliance Code for Behavior Analysts (PECC), 3.01ab, 2014). FBAs include a range of strategies, including indirect measures (e.g., interviews and questionnaires) and direct measures of behavior (descriptive and experimental strategies). Functional analysis (FA) is typically considered the most sophisticated of the options subsumed under FBAs in that it involves both direct measures of behavior and experimental manipulation of hypothesized controlling variables to identify controlling variables for challenging behaviors. The results of FAs allow practitioners …

Integrated Compressive Sensing And Feature Descriptors- A Framework For Facial Recognition Systems, Ali Kadhem Jaber

Dissertations

Facial recognition is still a challenge in many applications, particularly in surveillance, security systems, and human-computer interactive (HCI) tools. The impact of real-world environmental variations on the performance of any facial recognition system can be significant. These variations may include illumination, facial expressions, poses, disguises (facial hair, glasses or cosmetics) and partial face occlusion. Furthermore, the number of images (samples) needed for facial recognition systems can be very large, much larger than what is typically required by an algorithm, and this is often made worse with expansion of the feature space dimensionality. Truly, the “curse of dimensionality” haunts any real-time …

Assessing Land Deformation And Sea Encroachment In The Nile Delta: A Radar Interferometric And Modeling Approach, Esayas Gebrekidan Gebremichael

Dissertations

Many of the deltas of the world are experiencing land deformation, subsidence or uplift of landmass, due to natural or anthropogenic causes, or a combination of both processes and causes. These deltaic settings are densely populated and border some of our world’s largest water bodies (oceans and seas). The land deformation, especially the subsidence component, when combined with the climate change-induced sea level rise, coastal erosion, and other anthropogenic drivers, will undoubtedly impact the population and economy of coastal areas of deltas. For the Nile Delta of Egypt, the land deformation processes and the factors that control the deformation processes …

Efficacy Of Deep Learning In Support Of Smart Services, Basheer Mohammed Basheer Qolomany

Dissertations

The massive amount of streaming data generated and captured by smart service appliances, sensors and devices needs to be analyzed by algorithms, transformed into information, and minted to extract knowledge to facilitate timely actions and better decision making. This can lead to new products and services that can dramatically transform our lives. Machine learning and data analytics will undoubtedly play a critical role in enabling the delivery of smart services. Within the machine-learning domain, Deep Learning (DL) is emerging as a superior new approach that is much more effective than any rule or formula used by traditional machine learning. Furthermore, …

Students' Perspective On The Key Elements And Effectiveness Of Problem-Based Learning Group Discussion, Chia-Hsuin Chang, Chiun Hsu, Chao-Chi Ho, Hsiu-Ying Wu, Ai-Tzu Li, Fen-Yu Tseng

Journal of Medical Education

Objective: To study students’ perspective on the key factors and effectiveness of problem-based learning (PBL) small-group discussions Methods: A qualitative study was conducted using participant observation and semi-structured interviews for data collection. The 4^(th)-year medical students from a Pathology and Pharmacology PBL Group Discussion course in 2016 were invited to join this study. The participants were chosen by purposive sampling and were interviewed after each class session. Results: A total of 17 medical students (eight men and nine women) were interviewed and included in the final analysis. The students considered that the key elements of PBL were motivation triggering, lesson …

A Novel School-Based Suicide Prevention Course For Undergraduate Students, Yi-Yin Lin, Chia-Yi Wu, Ming-Been Lee

Journal of Medical Education

Objective: Mental health problems impact nearly one in four to five college students in Taiwan. Those who developed suicide risks may not have enough educational sources to facilitate help-seeking on campus. Education is an important primary strategy in suicide prevention at schools. The study aimed to examine the effectiveness of a course in the general education field that designed to promote suicide and mental health literacy among college students, and to explore the students' motivations to take this course. Methods: The course contains weekly thematic lectures and group discussions, assignments, and term reports in a semester of eighteen weeks. The …

The Relationship Between Fall Rates And Fall Risk Inducing Drugs In Older Adult Patients In The Hospital Setting, Kristen Eldridge, Susan Kane Patton

The Eleanor Mann School of Nursing Undergraduate Honors Theses

The aim of this study was to analyze the risk of falls relative to the use of fall risk inducing drugs (FRIDs) among older adult patients admitted to the hospital setting. Quality improvement of nursing fall risk assessment was of special interest. To analyze this a retroactive review of fall incident reports was conducted in collaboration with the study hospital’s risk manager. Medications were correlated with injuries sustained to identify high risk FRIDs. The selected study population consisted of 166 patients over the age of 65 who fell on the acute care campus of a hospital in the mid-south region …

Phylogenetic Focusing Reveals The Evolution Of Eumetazoan Opsins, Curtis Provencher

Master's Theses and Capstones

Phylogenetic analyses of gene trees commonly begin by searching large molecular datasets from the taxa of interest using some known query sequence. Resulting sequences that exceed some threshold are then concatenated, aligned, and analyzed phylogenetically. This approach has revealed much about the evolutionary history of gene families, but several problems are apparent. Here we apply a new approach that we call Phylogenetic Focusing that circumvents some issues related to global search strategies. Our approach first circumscribes the largest possible orthogroup containing the gene family of interest and then proceeds to focus in on the gene family of interest based on …

Occupancy Detection Using Wireless Sensor Network In Indoor Environment, Farah Ferdaus

Master's Theses and Capstones

Occupancy detection plays an important role in many smart buildings such as reducing building energy usage by controlling heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, monitoring systems and managing lighting systems, tracking people in hospitals for medical issues, advertising to people in malls, and to search and rescue missions. The global positioning system (GPS) is used most widely as a localization system but highly inaccurate for indoor applications. The indoor environment is difficult to handle because along with the loss of signals, privacy is a major concern. Indoor tracking has many aspects in common with sensor localization in Wireless Sensor …

Classification Of Arbitrary Motion Into A Canonical Basis, Michael Moger

Master's Theses and Capstones

The Empatica E4 wristwatch utilizes four sensors to capture medical data from its user - an accelerometer, a plethysmograph, an electro-dermal activity sensor, and an infrared thermophile. Utilizing these sensors, the device can provide detection-based feedback for patients suffering from various ailments. However, each sensor is coupled with the other readings, so any raw data will have a degree of noise accompanying the actual signal. After detailing a conceptual and programming knowledge of various industry-standard data processing techniques, we follow the appropriate steps to take in order to clean up a noisy E4 data signal, starting with supervised basis signals …

Tracking Predators: Microchip Implants, A Constitutional Alternative To Gps Tracking For North Carolina?, Alex Rutgers

North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology

The North Carolina Court of Appeals’ recent decision in State v. Grady held that the State of North Carolina failed to prove the reasonableness of continuing Satellite Based Monitoring (SBM) for the lifetime of a sex offender. It is the State’s burden to prove the necessity, and looking at the totality of the circumstances, the court found two factors significant in determining that lifetime SBM is unreasonable: the physical intrusion of the SBM device, and the continuous GPS monitoring. In light of the court’s holding that SBM affected a Fourth Amendment search (which was unreasonable even for a convicted sex …