Midlife Suicide: Examination Through An Ecological And Interpersonal Lens, Jayna Bonfini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Suicide has increased over the past decade among midlife adults in the United States. It is the fourth leading cause of death among persons aged 35–54 years and the eighth leading cause of death among persons aged 55–64 years. The primary purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study is to examine, describe, and understand the lived experiences of midlife adults who have contemplated suicide and who have sought assistance and support from their peers via an online forum for those with an interest in and/or history of suicidality. Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) bioecological model, Joiner’s (2005) interpersonal theory of suicide, and van Manen’s …

Decolonizing American Democracy And The Problem Of Gerrymandering: Implications Of Border Designs From A Communication Ethics Perspective, Mark Gardner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project attempts to understand the powerful force of political borders from a historical and communicative perspective. Of particular importance to this research is the role that political borders play in shaping individuals’ relationship to structures and practices of democracy. Following insights of decolonial and communication ethics scholars, this work understands the importance of ethically framing deliberations surrounding physical, metaphorical, and categorical political borders. Five chapters make up this work in the culmination of analyzing political gerrymandering as a form of democratic competition grounded in the rhetoric of colonialism. Tracing the colonial history of borders throughout American democracy provides this …

A Darker Side Of Venus: An Empirical-Phenomenological Study Of Women's Negative Experiences Encountering Pornographic Imagery, Rebecca Gimeno

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This empirical-phenomenological study explores the psychological dimensions of negatively encountering a pornographic image. The study includes four participants, all adult women who have had an adverse encounter with a pornographic image within the past five years at the time of the data collection. The recollected experiences of the participants were collected through written narratives as well as semi-structured interviews.

The written narratives and recorded audio interviews were transcribed and subsequently analyzed using an empirical-phenomenological analysis, a process that yielded situated structures. From this analysis, thematic elements of each structure were brought to light. Some of the thematic elements that were …

"Frontline In Mental Healthcare": A Discourse Analytic Clinical Ethnography Of Crisis Intervention Team Trainings For Corrections, Daniel Gruner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the criminal justice system operates a discourse of corrections-reform. This responds to prisoner trauma and resistance by converting them into reforms that strengthen prisons and the larger carceral system while discounting issues of race and class that might undermine institutional legitimacy. The recent adoption of Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) Trainings in corrections is exemplary of corrections-reform discourse. ‘Crisis’ comes from the Greek krinein, meaning ‘to decide.’ The crisis in mental health in prisons involves deciding when to implement what “services” or “programming” for whom.

In this discourse analytic clinical ethnographic study, I focus on the trans-disciplinary corrections …

Bureaucratic Modernity And The Erosion Of Practical Reason: A Rhetorical Education As An Antidote, David Impellizzeri

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To what extent and in what ways does modernity reveal itself through the bureaucratic? This project aims at an interpretive understanding of bureaucratic modernity. The rationalization of society and action in the (late) modern world requires that an increasing number of human activities and domains be explained in allegedly neutral, ‘rational’ terms and without reference to morally substantive ends. Ultimately, this entails a form of epistemic reductionism that elevates instrumental rationality to the exclusion of practical reason and probabilistic ways of knowing. Bureaucratic modernity signifies a decrease in choices that can be legitimized in public on some basis other …

Effective Instructional Strategies In Sixth Grade Inclusion Mathematics Classrooms: The Effect Of Active And Passive Engagement On Concept Learning And Opportunity To Learn, Christy Mikolaj

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this mixed-method study focused on the effect of active engagement on opportunity to learn and concept learning among sixth grade special education students participating in the inclusion mathematical setting. By implementing two instructional strategies and using the theoretical frameworks of Vygotsky’s Social Constructivism and Erikson’s Stage of Psychosocial Development of Industry vs. Inferiority, findings showed there was a significant negative relationship between active engagement time during instruction and concept learning. The study showed students with identified needs within an inclusion mathematics setting increased concept learning in both instructional classrooms. Therefore, there was no difference in concept learning …

Nanomedicine-Driven Neuropathic Pain Relief In Rat Model Is Associated With Macrophage Polarity And Mast Cell Activation, Muzamil Saleem

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We explored the immune neuropathology underlying multi-day relief from neuropathic pain in a rat model initiated at the sciatic nerve by using a nanoemulsion-based nanomedicine as a biological probe. The nanomedicine is theranostic: both therapeutic (containing celecoxib drug) and diagnostic (containing near-infrared fluorescent (NIRF) dye) and is small enough to be phagocytosed by circulating monocytes. A model of neuropathic pain is initiated by tying four 1mm spaced knots around the sciatic nerve with chromic gut suture, which results in neuroinflammation, and a resultant pain-like behavior manifests. We show that pain-like behavior reaches a plateau of maximum hypersensitivity 8 days post-surgery, …

Natural Law, The Object Of The Act, And Double Effect: Moral Methodology For Catholic Health Care Ethics, Travis Stephens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pope John Paul II’s Encyclical Veritatis Splendor is the first and only magisterial document that systematically articulates a moral methodology for Catholic moral theology. This dissertation makes explicit the methodological connection between Vatican teaching and the United States Bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services. The thesis of the dissertation explains the systematic connection between Natural Law, the Moral Object of the Act, and the Principle of Double Effect and by extension the ethical Principle of Cooperation. Second, the thesis applies this complex moral method of official teaching to health care ethics.

Following the introduction, chapter …

An Exploration Of Motivational Interviewing And Strengths-Based Supervision To Improve Client Session Attendance, Jeremy Abel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Clients missing outpatient psychotherapy sessions is a problem that impacts clients, clinicians, and clinics. Scholarly research has shown that clinicians’ use of Motivational Interviewing (MI) may help to increase attendance rates and that most often MI training is done through a single training or workshop, which may not be a sufficient means to adequately prepare clinicians to effectively use MI. The purpose of this study was to determine whether using every other week, MI-focused, strength-based group supervision after an initial MI training can increase client attendance in two community outpatient substance use disorder and mental health treatment clinics. This study …

Learning Together In Public And In Private: Exploring Learner Interactions And Engagement In A Blended-Platform Mooc Environment, Arianna Montero-Colbert, Natalie Delia Deckard, Bonnie Stewart, Sundi Richard, Alexa Nanan

Current Issues in Emerging eLearning

With the growing popularity of connectivist MOOCs, the aim of facilitators has increasingly shifted from helping students meet completion-oriented goals to encouraging meaningful engagement among participants. In this paper, we study the relationship between platform of engagement and learner participation, controlling for relevant demographic factors of participants including gender, age, and level of education attained. Our study employs four distinct measures of participatory engagement: autonomous learning, knowledge reproduction, information networking, and scholarly engagement. We find that on the public platform of Twitter, participants were more likely to exhibit meaningful engagement patterns across all measures studied than they were on the …

Comparative Reflection On Best Known Instructional Design Models: Notes From The Field, Bengi Birgili

Current Issues in Emerging eLearning

This paper is intended to stimulate discussion on historical and evolving instructional design models in an educational era. After enriching the vision of what constitutes an instructional design, the paper explores the historical development and improvement of instructional design processes and models. The instructional design models of Dick and Carey, Morrison, Ross and Kemp, Posner and Rudnitsky, and Smith and Ragan are identified herein as being among the best known, most popular, and most widely applied instructional design models in the field of educational sciences. The philosophical underpinnings and the rationales for the arrangement of components in each instructional design …

The State, Aerospace Multinational Corporations And Variegated Forms Of Corporate Capture In Regional Training Systems: A Cross-National Comparative Study Between Charleston, Sc, U.S.A. And São José Dos Campos, Sp, Brazil, Tiago Roberto Alves Teixeira

Dissertations - ALL

In today’s globalized world, the power of influence of multinational corporations over the state and society is significant. One particular area is related to how MNCs have influenced states and public educational institutions in order to shape their educational agendas and training initiatives. Many scholars have conceptualized such an influence as processes of corporate capture. In this dissertation, I examine and compare the existing processes of corporate capture related to Boeing and Embraer in the regional training systems of Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.A., and São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil. I also investigate how their distinctive state forms and …

Knowing Leaders: Centering Gender And Identity Among Women Leaders In Higher Education, Meredith Harper Bonham

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation centered the experiences of women academic leaders – their backgrounds, educational experiences and leadership styles – to illuminate the intersection of identity and leadership. Using narrative inquiry as a methodological framework (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Creswell, 2013), the researcher conducted a qualitative study by interviewing seventeen women presidents and chief academic officers in a semi-structured format. In exploring and analyzing the stories of women leaders, the researcher avoided unidimensional characterizations and binary comparisons with male leaders. To incorporate the interlocking components of identity, the researcher considered the impact of race, class, gender, and first-generation status, as well as …

Regionalist Social Movements In Contemporary Chile: Production Of Space, Place, Territory, And Scale Through Collective Action, Miguel A. Contreras

Dissertations - ALL

In the last decade, the organization of several territorially based social movements in Chile has expressed a significant level of social discomfort about the political and economic system of the country. The central objective of this dissertation is to analyze how motivations, achievements, and failures of these movements have a dialectical relationship with the spatial features, specifically with the concepts place, territory and scale. Critical geography, political geography, and social movements’ studies provide the theoretical framework for the analysis, highlighting the significance of social movements as producers of collective knowledge. This research used a qualitative approach with a mix-methods design …

Homeostatic Elastic States And The Stability Of Elastic Arteries, Xinyu Zhang

Dissertations - ALL

Vascular mechanics has undergone significant growth within the last 50 years owing to the rapid development of nonlinear continuum mechanics occurring roughly within the same period and motivated primarily by rubber materials. However, one important distinction of blood vessels, in contrast to typical engineering materials is that, through a variety of physiological mechanisms, they seek to maintain constant a preferred mechanical state (mechanical homeostasis) thereby exhibiting a remarkable mechanical stability in response to temporal evolution and alterations in blood pressure, vessel tethering forces and geometry and material properties. The mechanical state experienced by blood vessels plays a critical role in …

Tailor Made In India: Jaipur's Masters Of Cloth, Doctors Of Clothing, Alisa Weinstein

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation is about Jaipur’s tailors, making custom-crafted clothing for individual customers in a rapidly changing and globally fashion-informed India. Indian-crafted clothing and textiles are a source of pride domestically and have long been used and admired throughout the world. So how is that India’s tailors, the people whose knowledge, abilities, and hard work form the backbone of this industry, receive so little thought or recognition? Although tailors are a seemingly well-respected and integral part of shaping Jaipur’s cultural landscape, my inquiries often revealed that tailors and their labor are popularly characterized as mundane. While considerable attention gets paid to …

Burden And Risk Of Non-Aids Defining Cancers In Hiv-Infected Persons Receiving Antiretroviral Therapy, Brittney L. Dickey

Theses & Dissertations

The burden of cancers not previously associated with an HIV infection, called non-AIDS defining cancers (NADCs), have increased in the years since highly active anti-retroviral therapy has been introduced. The studies in this dissertation attempted to quantify this burden via incidence and mortality compared to the general population. Further, an assessment of risk factors and creation of a predictive risk model, a nomogram, were utilized to better understand how factors associated with demographics, lifestyle, and immune response affected risk for an NADC diagnosis once therapy was initiated and HIV better controlled. Standardized incidence and mortality ratios showed that burden of …

Mechanism Of Bax/Bak Activation In Apoptotic Signaling, Kai Huang

Theses & Dissertations

The Bcl-2 family proteins, including the anti-apoptotic members, pro-apoptotic effectors Bax/Bak, and the BH3-only proteins, are key components of the mitochondrial apoptotic pathway. The BH3-only protein Bid is critical for the mitochondrial pathway of apoptosis after TRAIL-induced death receptor activation. However, the mechanism of Bid activation during TRAIL-induced apoptosis is unclear. By putting back wild-type and mutants of Bid in Bid deficient (Bid KO) and Bid/Bax/Bak TKO colon cancer cells, we demonstrated that cleavage by caspase 8 and mitochondrial targeting are critical events for Bid activation. One of the biggest mysteries in apoptosis is how Bax/Bak was activated by BH3-only …

The Role Of E3 Ubiquitin Ligase Fbxo9 In Normal And Malignant Hematopoiesis, R. Willow Hynes-Smith

Theses & Dissertations

Hematopoiesis is a critical system that provides blood cells necessary for nutrient and oxygen transfer throughout an organism and for protection from harmful agents. It is maintained throughout life by the hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) that reside within the bone marrow (BM) and are responsible for providing billions of new cells each day. HSCs maintain a careful balance between a quiescent state, that sustains the integrity of the stem cells, and a proliferative state, that provides new cells to replenish those that undergo apoptosis. Hematopoiesis is regulated by a variety of intrinsic pathways and extrinsic signals such as cytokine signaling, …

Characterizing The Combination Of Rpa Inhibitors With Parp Inhibitors In High-Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer, Yat Tang

Theses & Dissertations

High-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSC) is the most common and deadly gynecologic malignancy. HGSC patients with BRCA1/2 mutations have homologous recombination deficiency (HRD), requiring parallel pathways to maintain genome integrity (e.g., PARP1, PARP2). Approximately 50% of ovarian carcinomas are estimated to exhibit HRD. For the remaining 50% and the large percentage of HRD patients with acquired or innate resistance to single-agent PARP inhibitors, there is a need to develop alternative therapeutic strategies.

Replication Protein A (RPA) is a heterotrimeric protein crucial for genome maintenance. Phosphorylation of RPA in DNA damage response (DDR) is a negative regulator of DNA end resection. …

Identification Of More Potent And Efficacious Analogs Of The Novel Host-Derived Immunostimulant Ep67, Abdul Alshammari

Theses & Dissertations

EP67 is a human C5a-derived decapeptide agonist of C5a Receptor 1 (C5aR1/CD88) that selectively activates mononuclear phagocytes over neutrophils to stimulate protective innate and adaptive immune responses while potentially minimizing neutrophil-mediated toxicity. Two N-alkyl amino acids Pro⁷ and N-methyl-Leu⁸ (nme-Leu⁸) within EP67 induce structural changes that increase potency and selective activation of mononuclear phagocytes over neutrophils. Cis/trans isomerization at these positions, however, likely limits the activity of EP67 and low coupling efficiency between Pro⁷ and nme-Leu⁸ increases scale-up costs for clinical use. Thus, the goals of this study were to …

The Role Of Individual Difference In Predicting Psychopathology Following Peer Victimization, Miranda Evans

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

eer victimization is a common experience that is associated with later psychopathology. However, there is inconsistency in the strength and statistical significance of this effect. The current study used two methods to try to understand this inconsistency. First, co-occurring internalizing and externalizing symptoms were considered dimensionally. Second, the present study considered temperament as a potential moderator to explain the multifinality of outcomes that occur following peer victimization. A community sample (N = 387; 52% female) of early adolescents (11-15) from a longitudinal study of risk and resilience factors for psychopathology was utilized to test hypotheses. Cross-lagged examinations between victimization and …

Teachers' Perceptions Of How The Teacher Evaluation Process Impacts Classroom Instruction In Three High Poverty School Districts, Zina R. Jones Ms

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

Improving the educational system for students and teachers is of the upmost importance. Educational leaders have realized that the best way to improve student success is by improving teachers’ instructional practices and measuring their effectiveness (Mathers, Oliva, & Laine, 2008). Because of this awareness, educators have realized the importance of connecting student achievement with instructional practices and instructional practices with teacher effectiveness. Evaluation tools are used to measure how effective teachers are in their classrooms. Evaluations are crucial in assisting our teachers in their professional growth. When evaluations are utilized as supportive tools, they help teachers and administrators identify …

Bringing The Theory Of Street-Level Bureaucrats Into The 21st Century: A Study Of Social Workers In Louisiana, Quian J. Lewis

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the applicability of Michael Lipsky’s (1980) concept of “street-level bureaucracy” to the profession of social work in 2019. Street-level bureaucrats are public service workers “who interact with citizens in the regular course of their jobs; have significant independence in decision making, and potentially have extensive impact on the lives of their citizens” (Lipsky, 1980:3). They are faced with uncertainties in their work related to inadequate resources, unclear policies, and caseloads/workloads that defy what may be possible to achieve by any one worker. Workers develop routines and “coping mechanisms,” to manage their environments. The routines that they develop …

How To Get A Job In Book Publishing, Grecia Medina

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

There are many different doorways into the world of book publishing and it can be challenging, but there are choices that can make it easier. Aspiring publishers often have a hard time breaking into this world because they have no guide. This thesis will be a guide to traversing the different avenues into the world of publishing. Prospective publishers, editors, and writers will be provided with a landscape of what it’s like to work in book publishing. It will also cover the two different ways that people become publishers, an overview of the basic requirements that publishing houses look for …

A Domain Specific Language For Digital Forensics And Incident Response Analysis, Christopher D. Stelly

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

One of the longstanding conceptual problems in digital forensics is the dichotomy between the need for verifiable and reproducible forensic investigations, and the lack of practical mechanisms to accomplish them. With nearly four decades of professional digital forensic practice, investigator notes are still the primary source of reproducibility information, and much of it is tied to the functions of specific, often proprietary, tools.

The lack of a formal means of specification for digital forensic operations results in three major problems. Specifically, there is a critical lack of:

a) standardized and automated means to scientifically verify accuracy of digital forensic tools; …

Reliability Sensitivity Analysis Of Dropped Objects Hitting On The Pipeline At Seabed, Hanqi Yu

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays, as oil industry gradually moves towards deep sea fields with water depth more than 1000 meters, they are subjected to several threats which can cause failure of the pipeline, of which the accidentally-dropped objects have become the leading external risk factor for subsea developments. In this thesis, a sample field layout introduced in Det Norske Veritas (DNV) guide rules is selected as the study case with 100 m water depth. Six different groups of dropped objects are used in this paper. The conditional hit probability for long/flat shaped objects will be calculated with the methods from both DNV rules …

Consumer Attachment And Corporate Social Advocacy: Leveraging Political Behaviors To Bolster Organization-Public Relationships, Jonathan Borden

Dissertations - ALL

Corporations are increasingly weighing in to advocate for one side or the other in cultural and political debates. As these types of corporate social advocacy become increasingly common, much is still unknown as to how they affect consumer perceptions of the organization, attitudes regarding their relationship with the organization, and their future purchase or behavioral intentions.

This study aims to address this gap.

Utilizing a survey conducted in late spring-2019, this study assesses public perceptions of corporate political engagement/corporate social advocacy and their subsequent attitudes towards the organization and future behavioral intentions.

Analysis revealed that corporate social advocacy does have …

Understanding The Role Of Anisotropy On The Optoelectronic And Colloidal Properties Of Quantum Rods For Programmable Self-Assembly With Dna Origami, Yuetian Chen

Dissertations - ALL

Semiconductor nanocrystals, like quantum dots (QDs) and quantum rods (QRs), have tunable optoelectronic properties that depend on their composition, size and asymmetry. A small change in size or aspect ratio can lead to measurable changes in optical absorption and photoluminescence emission energies, as well as varied degrees of polarized optical behaviors at those energies. My dissertation research focuses on investigating the role of anisotropy on the optoelectronic and colloidal properties of quantum rods, as well as using DNA-mediated self-assembly to align these quantum rods on DNA origami for energy transfer applications in biocompatible systems. First, CdSe of systematically varied aspect …

Fft Phase Shift Of Water Wave Analysis, Chu-Kuan Lin, Shih-Yu Hsu, Jaw-Guei Lin

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

The fast Fourier transform (FFT) has been accepted as a tool for signal processing. This study conducted a series of numerical experiments using Matlab. By conducting FFT analysis on designated wave trains, the FFT results revealed that an extra phase shift of ��ሺ2�� ��⁄ ሻ , with N representing the number of data points for an i-th wave component, was implicitly added to the analyzed phases during the analysis. When extra phase shifts were subtracted from the analyzed phases of each component, signals could be completely reconstructed in the time domain with an acceptable difference. This study tested component and …