Digital Commons Network^™

Voices Bearing Witness: Culture And The Birth Process In The District Of Labé, Fouta Djallon, Guinea, Rachel Kristine Lang-Balde

All Dissertations

Every woman has the right to safe motherhood. Over half of the global maternal deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. In Guinea, where this study took place, a woman has a one-in-26 chance of dying in childbirth, compared to a one-in-1,400 in a developed nation. Thus, the purpose of this study was to identify the characteristics and the role of cultural beliefs and practices on a woman's birth process (conception to post-partum) among the Fulani in the Labé district of the Fouta Djallon region in Guinea using qualitative and participatory methods and collaborating with those most impacted by this issue, the …

Exploring The Moderating Effect Of Maternal Scaffolding On The Temperament - Language Development Relationship, Chelsea L. Robertson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many studies have examined the relationship between a child’s temperament and its effect on his or her early language development. However, few studies have investigated the detrimental effects a child’s negative affectivity may have on their language development and potential ways these effects may be limited through parental behaviors. The current study aimed to investigate if physical or verbal maternal scaffolding behaviors moderated the effect negative affect has on language development. Although it was expected that maternal encouragement of physical activity would play a moderating role in the relationship between temperament and language development, no such relationship was found. One …

The Rural Health Physician Narrative: A New Historic Analysis Of Appalachian Representation In Twentieth-Century Rural Physician Narratives, Ashley Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The rural health physician narrative is one of the most understudied genres in non-fictional Appalachian literature. Physician narratives are significant in the historical, social, and political contexts of twentieth-century Appalachian representation. These accounts provide insight into the social contexts in which physicians lived as they wrote about healthcare and Appalachian communities. New Historicism is an analytical tool used to better understand the complexity surrounding Appalachian representation, particularly in terms of the politics of representation, gender, and race that influenced these narratives in the twentieth century. I engage in close readings of narratives written by or about rural health physicians who …

Examining The Effects Of Discussion Strategies And Learner Interactions On Performance In Online Introductory Mathematics Courses: An Application Of Learning Analytics, Ji Eun Lee

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation study explored: 1) instructors’ use of discussion strategies that enhance meaningful learner interactions in online discussions and student performance, and 2) learners’ interaction patterns in online discussions that lead to better student performance in online introductory mathematics courses. In particular, the study applied a set of data mining techniques to a large-scale dataset automatically collected by the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) for five consecutive years at a public university in the U.S., which included 2,869 students enrolled in 72 courses.

First, the study found that the courses that posted more open-ended prompts, evaluated students’ discussion messages posted …

Ensuring A Holistic And Quality Education For Every Child: A Phenomenological Inquiry Of Principals’ Transformational Leadership, Elijah Granger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Researchers have not fully examined how school leaders impact the teaching and learning environment when working toward generating students’ academic success. Balyer (2012) called for more work on understanding the transformational leadership behaviors that create conditions conducive to generating student achievement within educational accountability. Therefore, the purpose of this phenomenological inquiry is to explore the lived experiences of principals and their perceptions concerning the state accountability system and how it may impact their transformational efforts in ensuring a holistic and quality education for every child. The phenomenological inquiry will yield the opportunity to compare administrators’ in-depth perceptions of the accountability …

Pantomime: The History And Metamorphosis Of A Theatrical Ideology, Karl E. Toepfer

Open Educational Resources

This book offers perhaps the most comprehensive history of pantomime ever written. No other book so thoroughly examines the varieties of pantomimic performance from the early Roman Empire, when the term “pantomime” came into use, until the present. After thoroughly examining the complexities and startlingly imaginative performance strategies of Roman pantomime, the author identifies the peculiar political circumstances that revived and shaped pantomime in France and Austria in the eighteenth century, leading to the Pierrot obsession in the nineteenth century. Modernist aesthetics awakened a huge, highly diverse fascination with pantomime. The book explores an extraordinary variety of modernist and postmodern …

Improving Student Attitudes Toward Discussion Boards Using A Brief Motivational Intervention, Virginia Clinton, Alison E. Kelly

Education, Health & Behavior Studies Faculty Publications

Discussion boards are tools to afford student interaction and engagement in online courses, but students often have negative attitudes toward discussion boards. The purpose of this study was to determine whether an intervention informing students of the usefulness of online discussion boards affected their attitudes toward discussion boards. The instructor randomly assigned students (N = 65) to view a video and answer an essay question on either the benefits of discussion boards (treatment) or how discussion boards were graded (control). Students in the treatment condition indicated discussion boards as being more useful than did students in the control condition, p …

A Multimodal Approach To Sarcasm Detection On Social Media, Dipto Das

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

In recent times, a major share of human communication takes place online. The main reason being the ease of communication on social networking sites (SNSs). Due to the variety and large number of users, SNSs have drawn the attention of the computer science (CS) community, particularly the affective computing (also known as emotional AI), information retrieval, natural language processing, and data mining groups. Researchers are trying to make computers understand the nuances of human communication including sentiment and sarcasm. Emotion or sentiment detection requires more insights about the communication than it does for factual information retrieval. Sarcasm detection is particularly …

So . . . We're Going For A Walk: A Placed-Based Outdoor Art Experiential Learning Experience, Priscilla Anne Stewart

Theses and Dissertations

Schools in the United States often emphasize making children competitive in a global economy while neglecting the importance of developing citizens who are ecologically responsible. Problems of climate change, loss of biodiversity, mass extinctions and degradation of the natural environment, are often ignored. Some researchers have suggested that children lack unstructured play time in nature, have an increased amount of screen time, lack mindfulness, and are insulated from the natural world. Many children rarely have significant experience with nature's wildness. It is common for people to experience a sense of placelessness in the hyper-mobility of present times where "globalizing" agendas …

Semantically Aligned Sentence-Level Embeddings For Agent Autonomy And Natural Language Understanding, Nancy Ellen Fulda

Theses and Dissertations

Many applications of neural linguistic models rely on their use as pre-trained features for downstream tasks such as dialog modeling, machine translation, and question answering. This work presents an alternate paradigm: Rather than treating linguistic embeddings as input features, we treat them as common sense knowledge repositories that can be queried using simple mathematical operations within the embedding space, without the need for additional training. Because current state-of-the-art embedding models were not optimized for this purpose, this work presents a novel embedding model designed and trained specifically for the purpose of "reasoning in the linguistic domain".Our model jointly represents single …

Identifying Academically At-Risk Incoming Freshmen At A Private University In Uruguay: Psychometric Evaluation Of A Mathematics Diagnostic Test, Wilson J. Gonzalez-Espada

Faculty Research at Morehead State University

This study determined to what extent the mathematics diagnostic test (MDT) used at the Catholic University of Uruguay (CUU) was psychometrically appropriate. Also, after removing “red-flagged” items, the study measured to what extent MDT scores correlated with academic success. It was found that five MDT items (out of 30) did not meet the guidelines and were discarded. The score on the remaining items showed the highest correlation with the number of mathematics courses completed, confirming that students with low MDT-Revised scores might need additional academic support to remain in the engineering program.

Para Comunicarnos Mejor: Respuestas A Cuestiones Lingüísticas, Orlando Alba

Books

No abstract provided.

The Perception Of Voice Onset Time By English-Speaking L2 Learners Of Spanish With An Extended Partial Immersion Experience, Jeremy Leigh Ingersoll

Theses and Dissertations

For adult learners of a second language, the similarities and differences in acoustic properties between their native language and the language they are learning can affect how they perceive the sounds of the new language. How learners perceive these acoustic properties will directly affect their ability to communicate. According to the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) (Best 1995), learners will perceive the sounds of a language that is new to them based on how similar or different the sounds are from the learner’s native language. Between the English and Spanish language, there are some sounds that share acoustic properties and others …

From Justice To Injustice: Lowering The Threshold Of European Consensus In Oliari And Others Versus Italy, Nazim Ziyadov

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Oliari and Others v. Italy, decided by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 2015, changed its case law. The ECHR changed its position stated in Schalk and Kopf v. Austria (2010) when evaluating an alleged violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It concluded that Italy has a positive obligation under the convention to guarantee alternative legal recognition for same-sex couples. The same conclusion was not reached in Schalk. In Oliari and Others, the ECHR heavily relied on the European consensus doctrine and eventually deepened formalization of two different institutions (marriage and civil unions). …

Questioning Questions: A Grounded Theory Investigation Of Teacher Questioning In Seminary For The Church Of Jesus Christ, Zachary R. Horton

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This study investigated teacher questioning practices and rationales in released-time seminary classes for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Church of Jesus Christ or the Church). Seminary teachers focus their questions on helping students learn course principles, value those principles, and apply them to their lives by discussing potential actions that can be taken by students outside of class. The purpose of this study was to observe and interview teachers relative to their questions and questioning practices in class and the reasoning and rational they explain underlying those practices. The resultant findings indicate the specific questioning principles …

The Rise Of Populist Rhetoric And The Mainstreaming Of A Party? Testing The Rhetorical Shifts Between Front National’S Presidents Jean-Marie Le Pen And Marine Le Pen, Muriel C. Mcgregor

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Populist movements have been on the rise across Europe and the Americas. In France, the far right-wing party, Le Front National, has experienced recent growth in electoral success. Scholars of the Front National have in part attributed the party’s success to its increased use of populist rhetoric. This thesis examines the populist rhetoric used between the Front National’s past president Jean-Marie Le Pen and current president Marine Le Pen in order to test these scholarly claims. Based on their campaign speeches for the 2002, 2007, 2012, and 2017 French presidential elections, I conducted a quantitative dictionary-based analysis on …

"There Should Be No Tolerance For Intolerance": Internal Antagonism In Online Fan Communities, Michelle W. Jones

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis focuses on exploring cases of internal antagonism in fan communities, with a specific focus on the Steven Universe (2013 -) and Undertale (2015) communities present on Tumblr and Twitter. Internal antagonism is a phenomenon that occurs when a community targets a member within itself instead of outside itself, often as a way to mediate and regulate the community and reinforce its values. This thesis considers three case studies of internal antagonism with both physical and digital implications in order to better understand the role it plays in shaping and sustaining online fan communities as well as mediating the …

Comparative Hermeneutics Of Constitutional Revision Clauses And The Question Of Structural Closure Of Legal Systems, Otto Pfersmann

Cardozo Law Review

Arthur Jacobson is, with J. David Bleich, the author of a wonderful book on Jewish Law, along with very fine papers on difficult issues in this domain, as well as in constitutional law. As he clearly and convincingly argues, problems of interpretation are of particular difficulty and interest, when we try to understand and apply the message of a revelation as legal provisions, especially under the circumstances of the diaspora. How can the requirements given by divinity itself to mankind or to one particular people bound by a covenant give rise to controversy, conflicting understandings and even conflicting concretizations? Jacobson …

On Constitutional Identity And The Loyalties Of The Constitutional Judge, András Sajó

Cardozo Law Review

The following remarks consider the relation of judicial loyalty and constitutional identity. These two concepts were always of great interest to Arthur Jacobson's scholarship and their combined discussion is not only necessitated by certain constitutional developments in this age's return to nationalist sovereignty but is a token of Arthur's appreciation.

The Four Discourses Of Law And Arthur Jacobson's Legal Plenum, Jeanne L. Schroeder

Cardozo Law Review

I concentrate on an early work of Arthur Jacobson's that he published just as I started my academic career. Not only did it greatly impress me at the time, but when I reread it recently I was struck with how much it had influenced my thinking. His distinction between correlative and dynamic jurisprudences echo in my Lacanian-based jurisprudential theory of the four discourses of law.

Energy-Based Modelling For Dialogue State Tracking, Anh Duong Trinh, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

The uncertainties of language and the complexity of dialogue contexts make accurate dialogue state tracking one of the more challenging aspects of dialogue processing. To improve state tracking quality, we argue that relationships between different aspects of dialogue state must be taken into account as they can often guide a more accurate interpretation process. To this end, we present an energy-based approach to dialogue state tracking as a structured classification task. The novelty of our approach lies in the use of an energy network on top of a deep learning architecture to explore more signal correlations between network variables including …

John The Solitary's Epistle To Marcianus: Edition, Translation, And Analysis, Ethan K. Laster

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents an edition, translation, and analysis of the heretofore unpublished Epistle to Marcianus, an early fifth-century letter attributed to Mar John the Solitary of Apamea. Mar John has long remained a somewhat shadowy figure in Syriac studies, given the complexities of his writings, confusion about what texts should be attributed to him, and his condemnation as a heretic by later Syriac writers. However, scholars have recently begun suggesting that Mar John was in fact quite influential in the development of Syriac ascetic theology. The Epistle to Marcianus (EpMar) considers the passion of lust, which is …

Exploring Mathematics Anxiety Of Students At-Risk For Mathematics Difficulties, Sarah Mccarthy

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Students in mathematics classrooms are found to experience various levels of stress and anxiety during instructional time. Negative feelings associated with participation in math activities can lead to both physical and emotional manifestations, affecting performance, achievement, and even confidence with the academic subject. Students found to be at-risk for mathematics difficulties have greater risks when it comes to the possible experience of mathematics anxiety. Students with learning disabilities, students needing supplemental interventions, and students who are English learners can experience potential bouts of anxiety and stress, magnifying academic struggles in the math classroom. In addition, academic deficits can intensify levels …

Static Malware Detection Using Deep Neural Networks On Portable Executables, Piyush Aniruddha Puranik

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

There are two main components of malware analysis. One is static malware analysis and the other is dynamic malware analysis. Static malware analysis involves examining the basic structure of the malware executable without executing it, while dynamic malware analysis relies on examining malware behavior after executing it in a controlled environment. Static malware analysis is typically done by modern anti-malware software by using signature-based analysis or heuristic-based analysis.

This thesis proposes the use of deep neural networks to learn features from a malware’s portable executable (PE) to minimize the occurrences of false positives when recognizing new malware. We use the …

Millennial Midwifery: Online Connectivity In Midwifery Education, Sadie Geraghty, Angela Bromley, Angela Bull, Mpho Dube, Cindy Turner

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Aim: The aim of this study was to explore graduate midwives’ experiences of completing a Bachelor of Midwifery online theory course and how that experience led to preparation for practice and future employment as a midwife. Methods: This study used a questionnaire, with the core research design having a quantitative component using open-ended questions, via the use of an electronic platform. Results: The main themes emerging from the data that the graduates considered important issues were flexibility, isolation and lack of support. Conclusion: Course completion, experience of online learning/preparation for practice, and recommendations for improvement were identified as areas of …

The Bridwell Quill. Issues 9-12: Clear Language, Conscious Society, Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Publications

No abstract provided.

Language Access In Early And Late Spanish-English Bilinguals: An Erp Study, Lissete Gimenez-Arce

Student Theses

Research suggests that code-switching between two languages is possible because there is nonselective access to both languages, i.e., both languages are interdependent and stored in a shared lexicon. In this study, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to measure the neural processes associated with language access, in particular, the ERP components: N200 and N400. Although previous studies have utilized these ERPs to investigate language access using interlingual homographs, i.e., words that look the same in two languages but have different meanings, these have focused on comparisons of monolingual and bilinguals. In contrast, we used a design that looked at Spanish …

Analysis Of Social Unrest Events Using Spatio-Temporal Data Clustering And Agent-Based Modelling, Sudeep Basnet

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Social unrest such as appeals, protests, conflicts, fights and mass violence can result from a wide ranging of diverse factors making the analysis of causal relationships challenging, with high complexity and uncertainty. Unrest events can result in significant changes in a society ranging from new policies and regulations to regime change. Widespread unrest often arises through a process of feedback and cascading of a collection of past events over time, in regions that are close to each other. Understanding the dynamics of these social events and extrapolating their future growth will enable analysts to detect or forecast major societal events. …

Mapping Rural Literacy Sponsorship Networks : Literacy Infrastructures And Perceptions In Abbyville., Amy Mccleese Nichols

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recently, the academy has become aware that rural students are choosing to attend institutions of higher education less often than their urban counterparts. Rationalizing why this particular population remains underserved by institutions of higher learning is a new conversation for higher education. And yet, in literacy studies, the perceived urban/rural divide in terms of national politics sometimes seeps into conversations about the perceived “literacy” or culture of rural peoples. This polarization, unaccompanied by detailed portraits of rural community literacy sponsorship, means that rural areas do not benefit from the consistent attention paid to their urban counterparts in New Literacy Studies. …

Cognitive Satellite Communications And Representation Learning For Streaming And Complex Graphs., Wenqi Liu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation includes two topics. The first topic studies a promising dynamic spectrum access algorithm (DSA) that improves the throughput of satellite communication (SATCOM) under the uncertainty. The other topic investigates distributed representation learning for streaming and complex networks. DSA allows a secondary user to access the spectrum that are not occupied by primary users. However, uncertainty in SATCOM causes more spectrum sensing errors. In this dissertation, the uncertainty has been addressed by formulating a DSA decision-making process as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) model to optimally determine which channels to sense and access. Large-scale networks have attracted …