Digital Commons Network^™

Best Practices In Disaster Public Communications: Evacuation Alerting And Social Media, Frannie Edwards, Kaikai Liu, Amanda Lee Hughes, Jerry Zeyo Gao, Dan Goodrich, Alan Barner, Robert Herrera

Mineta Transportation Institute

This research project examines the current state of the practice for disaster public communication, the distrust of government, the training available to public information officers, and the literature available to guide the design of effective public outreach messaging, especially for rapid on-set events. Growing distrust in government had led to lack of public confidence in public agency messaging during emergencies, yet public agency public information officers are using multiple pathways, including both traditional and social media resources, to try to reach impacted communities effectively. The introduction explains the development of wildfire events in the West and their context. A literature …

Perception Of Police And The Mediation Of Memory Distortion Via Trauma: Body Worn Camera Footage Of An Emotional Police-Citizen Encounter, Arlyn Abreu

Student Theses

This present study calls to question the objectivity of police body-worn camera (BWC) footage. Proponents assume that BWCs will be a panacea in a climate of heightened tensions between officers and communities. In spite of this, our findings challenge the rhetoric, and the purpose BWC is intended to serve. We explored its implications on memory distortion by posing two questions (a) can people come to remember BWC footage as more traumatic than they initially experienced (b) to what degree can external information and internal influences impact peoples' judgment about a traumatic event. We addressed both questions in this two-part study, …

Tympanostomy Tubes In Children: A Fem Study Of Adverse Effects, Manuel Nicolas Jaramillo Bucheli

Theses and Dissertations

Background: The current study investigates if tympanic (myringotomy) tubes affect hearing by comparing the harmonic displacement response to sound excitation within the hearing frequency range for healthy vs. surgically-treated pediatric tympanic membranes. The use of ear myringotomy tubes has proven an effective method for combating recurrent ear infections in infants and children. These tubes are placed in the tympanic membrane through an incision and connect the middle ear to the external ear, thereby allowing fluid drainage and middle-ear ventilation. While this treatment has been proven beneficial in alleviating urgent pus accumulation in the middle ear, recent research shows that it …

Teaching Chinese As A Second Language: Exploring L2 Reading Via Dynamic Assessment, Siyu Ji

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This portfolio includes a collection of essays reflecting the writer’s beliefs and exploration of teaching Chinese as a second language. The first part of the portfolio is the writer’s professional environment and teaching philosophy statement. The second part of the portfolio is the writer’s professional learning experience from a class observation. The third part of the portfolio is a reflection paper on the writer’s exploration of reading dynamic assessment.

Facilitating Second Language Development Via Interaction In An Online Classroom, Jen Cummings

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This portfolio is a collection of essays tying together perspectives and major themes in second language teaching of importance to the writer. It begins with an introduction piece, followed by a description of professional environment and a teaching philosophy statement focused on teacher-student relationships, varied assessments, and culture-focused teaching. This section is followed by a classroom observation. The main section of the portfolio is a reflection paper presenting perspectives on the importance of providing interaction opportunities in asynchronous online language learning classrooms. The portfolio concludes with a statement of future goals.

Training Needs And Applications For Special Educators With Paraeducator Supervision Responsibilities, Joanna M. Cornejo

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This project highlights the need for training for paraeducators working in Special Education settings. Duties performed by paraeducators often overlap with teacher duties and much of the direct instruction provided to students in self-contained classrooms is delivered by paraeducators. The tasks of training and supervising paraeducators often falls on the special education teacher, who may not have received training in supervision. The project includes a brief review of the literature on this topic and two project reports. I designed my project with the objective of improving the quality of instruction being delivered to students in my classroom through training of …

From Lesson Plan To Observation To Self-Assessment In A Chinese As A Second Language Class, Yu-Shan Lin

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This portfolio is a compilation of what the author has learned in the field of Chinese as a second language in the Master of Second Language Teaching program at Utah State University. There are three main sections in the portfolio. The first section contains the author’s teaching philosophy statement, with a focus on the communicative approach, a game-based approach, and alternative assessment. The second section consists of a reflection on a classroom observation. The main paper presents how the author designed a lesson plan and implemented it, as well as her analysis and introspection on a video recording of the …

Identifying Motivations Of New Counselors For Continuing Professional Development Of Multicultural Competencies: A Qualitative Study, Larry English

Dissertations

The need to increase multicultural counseling skills is a crucial area of focus in the continued evolution of the counseling profession. This necessity is due to a number of factors, including the ongoing demographic and societal changes in the United States. The research has helped to bring awareness of the need for increased and continued professional development in the area of cultural literacy and multicultural competencies skills for beginning counselors and others in counseling-related programs. At the micro level, the research investigated new clinicians’ self-awareness of their own biases, assumptions, internalized/externalized actions, and beliefs toward other cultures. The purpose of …

The Effect Of Video Model Dosage And Self-Monitoring On Parent's Use Of Language-Promoting Behavior, Kacie Marie Mcgarry

Theses and Dissertations

Previous research has found a disparity between the language trajectories of children within a high, medium, or low-economic-status family. A relationship is reliably found between the language trajectory of toddlers and success throughout school. This study will evaluate a training package to teach parents to engage in behaviors that promote language and assess the training's short-term effect on the trajectories of children (i.e., growing language) within low-socioeconomic backgrounds. Specifically, experimenters will evaluate the impact of the dosage of video modeling, self-evaluation, and self-monitoring on the acquisition of the targeted skills. Data may suggest that the more accurate the individual is …

Modeling, Verification, And Simulation Of A Uav Swarm Consensus Protocol, Rohit Martin Menghani

Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), particularly electrically powered multi-rotors, are becoming increasingly popular in the entertainment, transportation, logistics, and military sectors. One of the main drawbacks presented by these vehicles at the time of writing is the limited range achieved as a consequence of the limits of battery technology. One common method used to overcome such limitations, is the use of multiple vehicles in cooperation to achieve a certain goal. This application of UAVs is called swarming, where multiple agents can coordinate their actions to fly in a certain formation, to access a certain challenging area, or to fly further. As …

Representation Learning For Open Set Recognition And Novel Category Discovery, Jingyun Jia

Theses and Dissertations

As machine learning models have achieved great success in various research and industry fields, the success of these models heavily relies on the massive amount of data collection and human annotations. While the real world is an open set, the daily emerged categories and the lacking of annotations have become new challenges for machine learning models. The absence of newly emerged categories in training samples can be captured by Open Set Recognition (OSR). Then, given the newly emerged samples, the process of automatically identifying the novel categories is called Novel Category Discovery (NCD). In this dissertation, we focused on learning …

The Use Of Flexible Organic And Inorganic Building Blocks In Complex Metal- Organic Frameworks, Sahar Yahia Rajeh

Theses and Dissertations

Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) are new class of hybrid materials that draw the attention of scientists to discover new properties that help in many fields. The structural diversity of MOFs is accessible by incorporating different organic linkers to the same metal cluster. In this work, we reacted seven flexible organic linkers with different lengths varying from 4-carbons to 10-carbons to a copper-paddlewheel metal cluster. The flexibility of the linkers make the confirmation of MOFs a challenge, although we were able to prepare a new crystalline MOF from a 5-carbon organic linker with two different copper-clusters. Another MOF in powder form …

Deep Learning Approach To Speech Recognition: A Signal Extractor & Producer For Artificial General Intelligence, Ahmad Zuhair S. Hasanain

Theses and Dissertations

The efficient use of a communication bandwidth starts with the data source. The features of the speech signals can be extracted and reconstructed to lower the Internet traffic of the acoustic artificial agents and to increase the quality of the automatic speech recognition systems. The Speech Quefrency Transform (SQT) is hereby introduced in the work to enrich the communication space between the artificial agents and mankind. We describe the motivation, methodology, and deep learning approach in detail as we apply the SQT technology to several applications: sharp pitch track extraction, real-time speech communications, and emotion recognition. The results were excellent. …

Non-Negative Matrix Factorization In The Identification Of Co-Mutations, Michael Robert Kolar

Theses and Dissertations

One of the difficulties of genetic research is the asymmetrical relationship between data collection techniques and data analysis techniques. The goal of this research was to test a novel application of non-negative matrix factorization, which would allow researchers to more easily identify co-mutations. Those co-mutations then can then be further verified by frequency analysis. This pruning process allows researchers to identify more fruitful research opportunities, saving time, energy, and funding. Past research has utilized non-negative matrix factorization to extract factors which meaningfully express underlying data features. This study extends the depth of non-negative matrix factorization knowledge in various ways. First, …

Headache Disorders And Neurocognitive Performance Pre- And Post-Concussive Injury, Kaci Gorres

Theses and Dissertations

Objective: The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between pre-existing headache disorders, such as headache or migraine, and neurocognitive testing obtained before and after college-athletes sustain a concussion. Method: A total of 1129 NCAA Division II college athletes from Florida Tech were included in the present study. Participants were included in this study if they completed baseline and/or post-trauma neuropsychological evaluations that included the Sports Concussion Assessment Tool – Fifth Edition (SCAT-5) and Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Tool (ImPACT). Athletes’ headache and/or migraine history was self-reported at baseline and indicated their position in headache history or …

High Local Control And Low Ocular Toxicity Using Ultra-Low-Dose “Boom-Boom” Radiotherapy For Indolent Orbital Lymphoma, Sanjna Shelukar, Christian Fernandez, Zeynep Bas, Lydia Komarnicky, Sara E. Lally, Carol L Shields, Adam Binder, Pierluigi Porcu, Onder Alpdogan, Ubaldo Martinez-Outschoorn, Wenyin Shi

Department of Medical Oncology Faculty Papers

Background: The first line definitive treatment for early-stage indolent B-cell lymphoma is radiation therapy (RT). Due to the sensitivity of orbital structures to radiation, ultra-low-dose RT (4 Gy in 2 fractions, "boom-boom") has and been utilized as an attractive option for orbital lymphoma. In this retrospective study, we evaluated the outcome and toxicity of "boom-boom" RT for indolent orbital lymphoma with an emphasis on ophthalmologic toxicity.

Methods: This is a retrospective case series with 17 patients with orbital lymphoma who received boom-boom RT at a single tertiary referral center between January 2017 and June 2022. Medical records, imaging and radiation …

On Clinical Use Of Infrared Cameras For Video-Based Estimation Of 3d Facial Kinematics, William Mackenzie Harrington

Theses and Dissertations

Neurological and neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease (PD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and stroke can cause speech and orofacial motor impairments with devastating effects on quality of life. Analysis of orofacial movement provides vital information for early diagnosis and tracking disease progression, but current clinical practice relies on perceptual assessments performed by clinicians, which are unreliable and insensitive to early symptoms. New methods in machine learning have enabled automatic and objective assessment of orofacial kinematics from color and depth videos, hence we introduce MEADepthCamera, a mobile application for RGB-D video and audio recording and automatic estimation of 3D facial …

Cloud Image Classification Using Machine Learning, Marcus Peter Cote

Theses and Dissertations

Machine learning is a rapidly expanding technology that has proven to be highly useful for image classification. Ground-based camera networks are an emerging resource for aviation weather information with near real-time imagery available online for public viewing and download. While raw web camera imagery can be analyzed by aviators, high pilot workload motivates the use of machine learning to autonomously interpret cloud type information from images that is relevant to aviation weather hazards. In particular, transfer learning is a machine learning approach by which elements of a pre-trained machine learning model are refitted for new tasks. By employing transfer learning …

Deciphering The Genetic Architecture Of Key Female Floral Traits For Hybrid Wheat Seed Production, Juan David Jimenez

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is a staple cereal that provides 20% of the calories and proteins in human intake (Ray et al., 2013). Global population is projected to increase to 9.7 billion by 2050. Food production must increase by 70% to feed this future population. Wheat production is in crisis due to political and environmental challenges and is projected to decline by 0.8% in 2022 (FAO, 2022). To ensure food security yield genetic gain must increase by around 1.4% annually. Taking advantage of heterosis, hybrid wheat has the potential to boost grain yield. However, hybrid wheat seed production systems …

Galla Placidia And The “Daughter Of The Queen Of The South”: The Historical Consequences Of A Late Roman Interpretation Of Daniel 11, Kenneth Atkinson

Faculty Publications

The tragic story of the Roman Empire’s decline and fall has captivated the imaginations of countless artists, scholars, and filmmakers, among others. The many rulers of the Roman Empire—regardless of whether they were competent or not to hold office—dealt with insurmountable problems such as frequent invasions, numerous civil wars, attempted coups, unchecked immigration, racism, economic downturns, inept government officials, political corruption, changing values, religious violence, and sexism. Yet, despite overwhelming odds, the Roman Empire managed to survive these and other threats until September of 476 A.D. when a Roman of Gothic origin, Odoacer, forced the emperor Romulus Augustulus, to abdicate. …

Pull Planning Workshop - Central California Valley, Thomas A. Camargo

Construction Management

Lean scheduling and pull planning are both excellent methods of scheduling and sequencing a project. It has made huge impacts on scheduling for general contractors in southern and northern region of California. However, Central California has not been able to see the benefits and impacts of these scheduling tools because of the regions lack of use of lean scheduling and pull planning. Lean scheduling is a technique that encourages communication and collaboration between the project stakeholders. Pull planning offers project stakeholders a chance to rally together and collaborate. These pull planning sessions are useful for sequencing work to meet milestones …

Technological Integration To Enhance Jobsite Safety, Luke Barragan

Construction Management

The content derived in this paper portrays the effect that technology has on safety and how it may be enhanced and altered in the built environment. Ensuring safety on the jobsite is the most important aspect of concluding a successful project. Alongside safety on the jobsite is technology, both of which work coherently together to ensure proper construction. Technology has advanced tremendously in the built environment and it is difficult for all aspects of the project to be up to date universally. Safety lacks the technological integration that is found in the design and preconstruction phases of a project. There …

Use Of Gps And Smartgrade Technology In Heavy Civil Construction, Cristian Zarate-Ramirez

Construction Management

Heavy Civil is a sector in the construction industry involving a variety of different heavy machinery and construction practices. Technology has evolved as an important aspect in this sector striving to improve efficiency, productivity, and traditional construction methods. Global Positioning System (GPS) technology is one of the many technological advancements that benefit any size of contractor in the heavy civil industry. With the help of a 3D model, base station, and rover, contractors implement advanced building methods that provide excellent owner satisfaction. Similar to GPS, SmartGrade is a tool integrated into heavy machinery that enhances performance without the need of …

Quantifying The Relationship Between Soil Organic Carbon And Soil Color In Nebraska, Aldi J. Airori

Applied Science Program: Theses

Soil color is easily measured in the field and holds potential to be used as an indirect measurement of soil organic carbon (SOC). The main limitation to this approach is knowledge about the specific color-SOC relationship in a region, which often varies in relation to parent material, soil texture, climate, and land use. Furthermore, the Munsell color data is subjective in nature. The objectives of this study are: 1) to develop and evaluate the accuracy of pedotransfer functions (PTFs) for the prediction of SOC based on soil color and texture in the state of Nebraska and 2) to evaluate digital …

The Growing Trends In Prefabricated Commercial Construction In The Bay Area, Conner Edgar

Construction Management

With the rise in demand for building greener and more efficient buildings, commercial construction companies, in the San Francisco Bay Area, are constantly finding new methods to keep up with new trends. Prefabricated construction has grown exponentially as a building method over the last decade in the commercial construction industry and continues to evolve and become more efficient. Many companies are resorting to prefabricated construction as it decreases time, expenses, and even the amount of waste on construction jobsites. It is important to realize what the future will hold for prefabricated construction while gaining knowledge of the benefits and disadvantages …

Bevers: A General, Simple, And Performant Framework For Automatic Fact Verification, Mitchell Dehaven

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Fact verification has become an important process, primarily done manually by humans, to verify the authenticity of claims and statements made online. Increasingly, social media companies have utilized human effort to debunk false claims on their platforms, opting to either tag the content as misleading or false, or removing it entirely to combat misinformation on their sites. In tandem, the field of automatic fact verification has become a subject of focus among the natural language processing (NLP) community, spawning new datasets and research. The most popular dataset is the Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) dataset. In this thesis an end-to-end …

Is It Undervalued? A Qualitative And Quantitative Review Of The Work Values-Job Performance Relationship, Sherif Al-Qallawi

Theses and Dissertations

Researchers have been calling for greater exploration of the relationship between work values and job performance for about five decades (Goodale, 1973; J.-I. C. Hansen & Wiernik, 2017). The current study integrates research on the relationship between work values and job performance over the course of those five decades to better understand this connection. First, a thorough review of work values is presented, including a discussion of their nature, antecedences, construct clarification (how they differ from other individual differences), construct specification (how they differ from other value-based constructs), operationalization, taxonomy, measurement, group differences, stability, and outcomes. This review also includes …

Insights On Factors Influencing Startup Failure In The Hospitality Industry, Shivangi Khurania

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Hospitality businesses and innovative startups have faced extremely high failure rates. The author provides insights on the factors that impact startup failure in the hospitality industry after performing a deep analysis on innovation frameworks such as the diffusion of innovation theory, the theory of disruptive innovation, and the ten types of innovation framework. Not only that, the author also provides insights based on their own personal experience and knowledge gained through education at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada. The research explored in this paper revealed that startup failure is not based on one factor alone and how leaders in …

The Emergence Of Serviced Apartments/Apart-Hotels And Opportunities Post Covid-19, Ding Jie Ang

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Serviced apartments are becoming more mainstream as people become more aware of this asset class. Since the onset of Covid-19, people have opted for serviced apartments instead of a hotel for self-contained, typically with more space with a living area, kitchen and access to laundry facilities throughout the pandemic. Combined with lower operating costs, higher profit margin, and lower cost per key at development revealed the financial resilience of this asset class as most serviced apartments operated at a higher occupancy than hotels. With renewed interest from developers and owners keen to build or convert their existing properties to serviced …

Identification Of Factors Contributing To Traffic Crashes By Analysis Of Text Narratives, Cristian D. Arteaga-Sanchez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The fatalities, injuries, and property damage that result from traffic crashes impose a significant burden on society. Current research and practice in traffic safety rely on analysis of quantitative data from crash reports to understand crash severity contributors and develop countermeasures. Despite advances from this effort, quantitative crash data suffers from drawbacks, such as the limited ability to capture all the information relevant to the crashes and the potential errors introduced during data collection. Crash narratives can help address these limitations, as they contain detailed descriptions of the context and sequence of events of the crash. However, the unstructured nature …