Digital Commons Network^™

Tectonic Controls On Alluvial Fan Dissection In The El Paso Mountains, Michael Thomas Gaffney

Natural Resources Management and Environmental Sciences

The localized dissection of alluvial fans along the western El Paso Mountains is under question. A relatively minor, south dipping normal fault, previously unmentioned in scientific literature, cuts across Quaternary terraces and alluvial fans in the piedmont of the El Paso Mountains. The linear trend of footwall uplift and the pattern of stream incision into the footwall adjacent to the linear trend of footwall uplift reveal that fan dissection is a result of base level fall caused by ongoing tectonism along the El Paso fault system. The regional importance is discussed as the timing of faulting reveals relatively recent uplift …

Sea Urchins Reduce Fish Grazing On Algae, June 2018, Alice Beittel

Monteverde Institute: Tropical Ecology and Conservation

Overfishing of reef ecosystems poses a threat to key trophic interactions that regulate the food competition between fish and the sea urchin, Diadema mexicanum. An important ecosystem engineer, D. mexicanum can help control for positive coral growth at intermediate levels but at high levels can erode coral reefs and at low levels results in algae dominated reefs. Due to the overfishing of echinoderm-predators in Bahía de Cuajiniquil, Costa Rica. D. mexicanum populations are less regulated and have the potential to outcompete other herbivorous fish. My overarching question is how does Diadema mexicanum grazing impact fish feeding intensity? To answer this …

Assessing Relevance Of Tweets For Risk Communication, Xiaohui Liu, Bandana Kar, Chaoyang Zhang, David M. Cochran

Faculty Publications

Although Twitter is used for emergency management activities, the relevance of tweets during a hazard event is still open to debate. In this study, six different computational (i.e. Natural Language Processing) and spatiotemporal analytical approaches were implemented to assess the relevance of risk information extracted from tweets obtained during the 2013 Colorado flood event. Primarily, tweets containing information about the flooding events and its impacts were analysed. Examination of the relationships between tweet volume and its content with precipitation amount, damage extent, and official reports revealed that relevant tweets provided information about the event and its impacts rather than any …

Laughing With An Iranian American Woman: Firoozeh Dumas's Memoirs And The (Cross-) Cultural Work Of Humor, Ambreen Hai

English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications

This essay critically analyzes Firoozeh Dumas's humorous memoirs and situates them in the multiple contexts of post-9/11 Muslim American responses to Islamophobia, women's humor, and Iranian American women's life writing. Drawing on philosophical, feminist, ethnic, and contemporary scientific theories of humor and the methods of literary criticism, the author argues that Dumas employs the beneficial and inclusive (not malign and exclusive) positive mode of humorous personal storytelling to build connection through laughter via the emotional and cognitive shifts structurally central to humor. Dumas addresses multiple audiences and engages in important (cross-) cultural work in a particularly fraught political and cultural …

Dayak Lundayeh: A Report From The Border, Luqman Hakim Zainuri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Dayak Lundayeh: A Report from the Border" Luqman H. Zainuri explores the vulnerabilities and potential of national disintegration coming from indigenous communities in Indonesia. In particular, the paper focuses on one of the communities which has been largely ignored, the Dayak people, who have played an important role in the border between Indonesia and Malaysia in Borneo Island. The Dayak indigenous people which inhabit this highland plateau are known as the Lun Bawang, on the Malaysian side, and the Lun Dayeh (or Lundayeh) in the Indonesian side. Both groups are linguistically and culturally the same. This paper …

Lessons From Cancer Alley: How The Clean Air Act Has Failed To Protect Public Health In Southern Louisiana, Courtney J. Keehan

Colorado Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Upward Mobility In The American Mountain West, Richard Reeves

Brookings Mountain West Publications

Upward economic and social mobility is an intrinsic element of American society. Data from the Equality of Opportunity Project (EOP) demonstrates that upward mobility is a critical issue for our nation’s metros. An analysis of Mountain West metros and the performances of colleges and universities in this region reveal how the differing economic, demographic, and social characteristics affect mobility. This brief explores upward mobility rates, measures of diversity, levels of domestic and foreign migration, and students’ family household income and their eventual individual incomes. The comparison of postsecondary institutions in Mountain West metros serves as a microcosm to better understand …

Construction Of A Tropical Cyclone Size Dataset Using Retroactive Analysis Data With A Damage Application, Derek Trent Thompson

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis introduces a new tropical cyclone (TC) size dataset. Using the radius of the outermost closed isobar (ROCI) as the size metric of focus, a comprehensive record of TC size at landfall was constructed for tropical storms and hurricanes that made landfall in the United States along the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. The ROCI information was derived from mean sea level pressure maps generated using the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis I dataset over a 69-year period (1948 – 2016). Construction of the dataset involved using two methodologies, one based on hourly interpolated HURDAT2 best tracks and the …

Impact Of Energy Consumption On Poverty Reduction In Africa, Innocent Okwanya, Patricia O. Abah

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

This study investigates the impact of energy consumption on poverty reduction in a panel of 12 African countries over a period of 1981-2014. Using the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS) method, the study shows that a long-run negative relationship exists between energy consumption and poverty level, which underscores the importance of energy in poverty reduction in the selected African countries. The result also indicates that other variables such as capital stock and political stability have significant effect on poverty implying that these factors play critical role in reducing poverty. Furthermore, the granger causality test shows that a short-run unidirectional …

Russia's Frozen Conflicts And The Donbas, Erik J. Grossman

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

No abstract provided.

Temporal And Spatiotemporal Investigation Of Tourist Attraction Visit Sentiment On Twitter, Jose J. Padilla, Hamdi Kavak, Christopher J. Lynch, Ross J. Gore, Saikou Y. Diallo

VMASC Publications

In this paper, we propose a sentiment-based approach to investigate the temporal and spatiotemporal effects on tourists' emotions when visiting a city's tourist destinations. Our approach consists of four steps: data collection and preprocessing from social media; visitor origin identification; visit sentiment identification; and temporal and spatiotemporal analysis. The temporal and spatiotemporal dimensions include day of the year, season of the year, day of the week, location sentiment progression, enjoyment measure, and multi-location sentiment progression. We apply this approach to the city of Chicago using over eight million tweets. Results show that seasonal weather, as well as special days and …

Geomorphology Of The Potholes Of Rock Window Mesa, Chinle Valley, Az, Monte Fleming

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Potholes are depressions that have been carved out of bedrock. For this research project, we studied the 50 potholes on the top of Rock Window Mesa in Chinle Valley, AZ. Our first goal was to understand the processes currently affecting the addition or removal of pothole sediments. Our second goal was to understand pothole formation. While studying pothole sediment removal, we discovered that the wind speed threshold for deflation in the potholes is about 50 km/h, independent of pothole size. We conclude that deflation is the reason potholes don’t fill with sediment. In our study of pothole formation, we analyzed …

Evolution Of Water Institutions In The Indus River Basin: Reflections From The Law Of The Colorado River, Erum Sattar, Jason Robison, Daniel Mccool

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Transboundary water institutions in the Indus River Basin can be fairly characterized as broken in key respects. International relations between India and Pakistan over the Indus Waters Treaty, as well as interprovincial relations within Pakistan over the 1991 Water Accord, speak to this sentiment. Stemming from research undertaken by the authors for the Harvard Water Federalism Project and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), this Article seeks to spur the evolution of the Indus River Basin’s water institutions by offering a comparative perspective from North America’s most “institutionally encompassed” basin, the Colorado River Basin. Mindful of the importance …

The Observer, Central Washington University

Student Newspaper

Student newspaper for Central Washington University for June-September, 2018.

The Ethical Argument For Funding In Clemency: The "Mercy" Function And The Aba Guidelines, Laura Schaefer

Hofstra Law Review

No abstract provided.

“You Will Do Better Then I Did” The Positive Actions Black Parents Employ To Influence Their Child’S Choice To Attend College, Meagan Mitchell

College of Education Theses and Dissertations

This study employs an anti-deficit perspective in exploring how the parents of first generation, low-income African American students positively influence their child’s choice to attend college. This study examines the positive direct and indirect actions taken by African American parents with limited monetary resources to encourage their child to decide to attend college when they have not finished a four-year degree themselves. A qualitative approach that includes a critical narrative inquiry design was adopted to deconstructing the stories of the various families and provide a space to uncover assumptions about knowledge, power and reflexivity. Furthermore, this study deconstructs the participants’ …

More Than The Sum Of Its Parts: How Disturbance Interactions Shape Forest Dynamics Under Climate Change, Melissa S. Lucash, Robert M. Scheller, Brian R. Sturtevant, Eric J. Gustafson, Alec M. Kretchun, Jane R. Foster

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Interactions among disturbances are seldom quantified, and how they will be affected by climate change is even more uncertain. In this study, we sought to better understand how interactions among disturbances shift under climate change by applying a process-based landscape disturbance and succession model (LANDIS-II) to project disturbance regimes under climate change in north-central Minnesota, USA. Specifically, we (1) contrasted mortality rates and the extent of disturbance for four individual (single) disturbance regimes (fire, insects, wind, or forest management) vs. all four disturbance regimes operating simultaneously (concurrent) under multiple climate change scenarios and (2) determined how climate change interacts with …

Baroclinic Tidal Sea Level From Exact-Repeat Mission Altimetry, Edward Zaron

Portland Institute for Computational Science Publications

A near-global model for the sea-surface expression of the baroclinic tide has been developed using exact-repeat mission altimetry. The methodology used differs in detail from other altimetry-based estimates of the open ocean baroclinic tide, but it leads to estimates which are broadly similar to previous results. It may be used for prediction of the baroclinic sea level anomaly at the frequencies of the main diurnal and semidiurnal tides, K₁, O₁, M₂, S₂, as well as the annual modulates of M₂, denoted MA₂ and MB₂. Based on a …

Who Teaches Technical And Professional Communication Service Courses?: Survey Results And Case Studies From A National Study Of Instructors From All Carnegie Institutional Types, Sarah Read, Michael J. Michaud

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this article, we offer answers to the question, “Who teaches the technical and professional communication service course and in what institutional situations?” We present data from a national online survey of technical and professional communication instructors from across all Carnegie institutional types (2- and 4-year). In addition, we share four case-studies of survey respondents whose situations present the greatest challenges facing those who seek to improve or reform the technical and professional communication service course. We close the article by putting the case studies into the context of the reported survey data and arguing for how advocates for the …

A (Re)Adoption Story: What Is Driving Adoptive Parents To Rehome Their Children And What Can Texas Do About It, Emma Martin

Texas A&M Law Review

Ava was adopted from Africa when she was four years old. She became the baby sister to two older brothers and the daughter to two loving, experienced parents. A year or two after Ava moved to America, she and her “forever family” attended a Colorado summer camp. All was seemingly well until the camp staff and the other families at camp started to notice something strange about the way Ava’s parents treated her compared to her brothers. After an activity, the parents greeted the brothers with an excited “did you have fun?” or “what did you learn?,” while the parents …

Opening Access: Increasing Scholarly Impact With Digitalcommons@Uno, K. M. Ehrig-Page, Yumi Ohira

Criss Library Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

DigitalCommons@UNO (https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/) is an Institutional Repository (IR) and an initiative implemented by the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) Libraries to support our UNO scholars through providing a Green Open Access solution. DigitalCommons@UNO disseminates a wide variety of scholarship including faculty papers, electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), conferences and journals. Since its launch in 2014, the UNO Libraries have been implementing and managing DigitalCommons@UNO through outreach to the UNO community in an effort to collect scholarly works into the IR.

Cervis: Cervical Cancer Early Response Visual Identification System, Evangelia Bouzos, Ivy Fernandes, Marina Predovic

Bioengineering Senior Theses

Our goal is to make a positive impact in the cervical cancer diagnostic space through the development of an accurate, cost effective solution that enables women in low resource settings to test for cervical cancer on a frugal and effective platform. In developed countries, we rely on regular preventive care, such as pap smears, to identify any cellular abnormalities that may indicate the disease state. However, due to the high cost and laboratory requirements of this procedure, women in low resource settings typically do not have access to this procedure. Since they are not regularly screened and often have little …

A Performer’S Guide To Poema De Sete Faces, Song Cycle By Jeffrey Perry, Paulo Henrique Campos Silva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The American composer Jeffrey Perry composed the song cycle Poema de sete faces (Poem of seven faces), for tenor or soprano and piano, based on the poem of the same name by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, one of the greatest Brazilian modernist poets of the 20th century. Both Drummond’s poem and Perry’s music were written to be open to multiple interpretations. Together, the possibilities for their interpretation are even broader. This dissertation discusses the art that emerges at the intersection of the poem and the music from the perspective of the singer. I present a biography and an overview of …

On The Culturalization Of Ethnic Economy In China, Yi Liu, Jiayan Xiao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "On the Culturalization of Ethnic Economy in China" Liu Yiand Xiao Jia-Yan examine the cultural impact of autonomous minority regions on national economy. This study surveys the internal factors that include geography and history as well as external factor such as govermental policy. The findings suggest that cultural factors should be taken into greater consideration, as they are an important aspect in the inner motivation to push forward the economic development of ethnic areas at a faster pace. The paper argues that culture can afford the most efficient pathway for these ethnic areas in terms of economic …

Bibliography For The One Asia Foundation And Its Cooperation And Peace-Making Project, Shi Yan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Introduction To The One Asia Foundation And Its Cooperation And Peace-Making Project, Asunción Lópezvarela Azcárate

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Spatio-Temporal Variability Of Precipitation And Drought In The State Of Arizona, Usa, Samuel Nimako Nyarkoh

Masters Theses

As a result of climate change, several dry regions continue to get drier as precipitation amounts decline. This decline impact water resources and hinder economic development. Understanding the variability of precipitation and drought through climatic, agricultural and hydrological studies is therefore critical to decision makers and stakeholders in developing proactive measures that promotes economic development.

This study therefore uses dataset from 55 Meteorological stations containing 110-year (1900-2010) monthly precipitation data and a series of spatial and temporal tests to investigate the spatial and temporal patterns of precipitation and drought as well as the effects of local factors such as topography …

On-Farm Food Loss: Farmer Perspectives On Food Waste, David Campbell, Kate Munden-Dixon

Journal of Extension

Although food waste is a widely discussed topic, most efforts have focused on consumers, with on-farm food loss receiving little attention. Our pilot study in California revealed the variability and complexity of reasons for on-farm food loss, many of which farmers cannot control. Interviewees spoke of market volatility and unpredictable weather as key contributors to loss, noting that much lost food is repurposed on-farm rather than ending up in a landfill. On the basis of our findings, we identify potential strategies for better aligning food recovery efforts with farmer limitations and needs and make suggestions for the role Extension can …

Democidal Thinking: Patterns In The Mindset Behind Organized Mass Killing, Gerard Saucier, Laura Akers

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

We derived a model identifying observable attitudes among perpetrators of democides - mass-killing programs associated with governments that cost over 160 million lives in the last century. These attitudes, evident in rhetoric mobilizing support for killing, have previously received too little systematic study. Content-analysis of text from 20 prominent, diversely sampled cases of democide from around the world yielded 20 typical features of democidal mindset, present in most cases. These prominently included essentialist beliefs in out-group inferiority, dehumanization and moral exclusion, a paranoid-thinking style, and certain forms of nationalism, among numerous other features. These can function to facilitate the inculpation …

Three Essays On Panel Structure Models, Wuyi Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In panel structure models, individuals can be classified into different groups with the slope parameters being homogeneous within the same group but heterogeneous across groups, both the number of groups and each individual’s group membership are unknown. This dissertation proposes some methods to identify the panel structure models under different specifications, namely, developing a Lasso-type Panel-CARDS method in the linear panel, constructing two sequential binary segmentation algorithms in the nonlinear panel, and using K-means algorithm in the spatial panel.

Chapter 2 studies the estimation of a linear panel data model with latent structures. To identify the unknown group structure of …