Digital Commons Network^™

Radically Inclusive Pedagogy And Praxis, Danie Jules Hallerman

English Theses & Dissertations

Although the current definition exists at the intersection of critical pedagogy, disability studies, critical race theory, critical embodiment pedagogy, feminism, cultural rhetoric, expressivism, and queer theory, as it stands now, radical inclusive pedagogy has few, if any, identifiable, distinctive qualities of its own. The pedagogies and theories from which radically inclusive pedagogy draws from speak to the mind, the body, and the spirit separately, or will focus on two aspects while neglecting the third. As I envision it for the classroom practice I have designed and would like others to adopt, radically inclusive pedagogy addresses the mind (embracing students’ knowledge, …

Diffusion Of Public Library Innovations: A Case Study On Parking Lot Wi-Fi Hotspots Diffusion Development, Samantha Laine Hull

STEMPS Theses & Dissertations

Public libraries have begun to provide services well beyond books and online databases. Prior to the pandemic, many libraries expanded their collection to include items like power drills or board games in their circulation. They also started partnering with social service organizations to better serve their patrons’ needs beyond those that are educational and entertainment based. Despite being broadly trusted by most people and having clever and innovative ideas, some public libraries’ budgets and time limits left marketing efforts at a minimum. In order to address the communication problem many public libraries face, in this study I sought to align …

“Smart Optometry” Phone-Based Application As A Visual Acuity Testing Tool Among Pediatric Population, Lina H. Raffa, Nasser T. Balbaid, Mariam M. Ageel

Saudi Medical Journal

Objectives: To evaluate the validity of a smartphone-based application for visual acuity (VA) testing in children and to compare parent and clinician-performed VA to standard VA assessment. Methods: A cohort of 100 children aged <18 years old was recruited. Subjects were randomly assigned to either start with conventional distance VA chart screening or the smartphone VA assessment twice by both the clinician and the caregiver if applicable. Near VA scores were assessed using the near vision E chart. Accuracy and reliability values were analyzed. Results: One hundred patients with an average age of 9.92 ± 3.0 years old were enrolled. The difference between conventional distance and application logMAR values was -0.023, and the difference between near vision and application logMAR values was -0.004. “Smart Optometry” had a sensitivity of 89.3% in detecting subnormal VA compared with conventional vision testing methods. Sensitivity in detecting subnormal VA was found to be higher in younger age groups up to 91.7% in comparison with the older age groups. The interclass correlation of application-measured VA scores by the caregivers and the clinician were 0.77 (95% CI; 0.67-0.83) using single measures and 0.87 (95%CI; 0.8-0.9) using average measures. Conclusion: “Smart Optometry” phone application was found to be an acceptable home-based VA testing tool with good inter-rater reliability for young children showing good sensitivity in detecting subnormal VA, but lower sensitivity in detecting amblyopia.

The Effects Of Online Reviews And Promotional Messages On Product Performance : Review Helpfulness And The Power Of Language, Ziru Bao

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

This dissertation contains two essays. For Essay One, previous studies on review helpfulness focus on what makes a review helpful and how to predict review helpfulness. In so doing, researchers hope to identify the most helpful reviews for consumers and improve the recommendation system. However, little is known about the effect of these helpful reviews on product performance. Thus, this paper investigates how helpful reviews or the helpfulness votes influence product sales. Since product sales are only available at the group (product) level, estimating the effect of helpfulness votes presents a challenging multilevel problem. This research considers both the disaggregating …

Application Of The Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency Weighting Scheme To The Pauline Corpus, Brandon Van Der Ventel, Richard Newman

Andrews University Seminary Studies (AUSS)

The term frequency--inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) weighting scheme is applied to the text of the thirteen epistles traditionally associated with the Apostle Paul. The data for the analysis is the morphologically tagged text of the Society for Biblical Literature’s Greek New Testament. The TF-IDF scheme is then used to construct the Document Term Matrix (DTM) for a corpus under consideration. The DTM allows each document to be represented by a multi-dimensional document vector. A query document is then chosen and a vector representation of it is constructed. The cosine similarity between the query document and documents in the corpus is …

"The Antichrist Tradition In Antiquity: Antimessianism In Second Temple And Early Christian Literature" [Review]/Kusio, Mateusz, Rodrigo Galiza

Andrews University Seminary Studies (AUSS)

This is a book review by Rodrigo Galiza.

“I’M Not Like That!” : Reframing Contemporary Ecopoetic Criticism And De-Metaphorizing The Nonhuman Animal, Alexandra Franke

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In this paper, I seek to highlight the benefits and necessity of reframing our critical approach to ecopoetry. In order to do so, I attempt to define “ecopoetry,” as well as terms like “nonhuman animal” and “anthropocentrism.” Historically, critics have routinely romanticized the nonhuman natural world, rendering it something two-dimensional, like a painting or landscape, rather than an encompassing environment. As a result, critics have often failed to consider the legitimacy of the animals who populate the nonhuman natural world. Instead, these animals are typically romanticized and metaphorized, ultimately furthering anthropocentric hierarchies and distancing us from them. When anthropocentric thought …

Secrep : A Framework For Automating The Extraction And Prioritization Of Security Requirements Using Machine Learning And Nlp Techniques, Shada Khanneh

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Gathering and extracting security requirements adequately requires extensive effort, experience, and time, as large amounts of data need to be analyzed. While many manual and academic approaches have been developed to tackle the discipline of Security Requirements Engineering (SRE), a need still exists for automating the SRE process. This need stems mainly from the difficult, error-prone, and time-consuming nature of traditional and manual frameworks. Machine learning techniques have been widely used to facilitate and automate the extraction of useful information from software requirements documents and artifacts. Such approaches can be utilized to yield beneficial results in automating the process of …

The Eye’S Construction Of Power In Richard Ii, Julius Caesar And Macbeth, John O’Brien

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This study seeks to analyze the optical performance of power in three of Shakespeare’s plays: Richard II, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. Using a political framework via Kantorowicz’s King’s Two Bodies and Maus’s Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, this paper explores the interior and exterior personas as they pertain and interact with public and private spaces. This paper will track Shakespeare’s contribution to this developing “modern” shift in the understanding of appearance and its role in the presentations of power in these three plays. In each of these plays, I argue, Shakespeare provides us with a series of presentational …

Effective Knowledge Graph Aggregation For Malware-Related Cybersecurity Text, Phillip Ryan Boudreau

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the rate at which malware spreads in the modern age, it is extremely important that cyber security analysts are able to extract relevant information pertaining to new and active threats in a timely and effective manner. Having to manually read through articles and blog posts on the internet is time consuming and usually involves sifting through much repeated information. Knowledge graphs, a structured representation of relationship information, are an effective way to visually condense information presented in large amounts of unstructured text for human readers. Thusly, they are useful for sifting through the abundance of cyber security information that …

Case Study: Exploring Inservice Teachers’ Perceptions And Experiences Of The Effectiveness Of Gifted Preparation And Training Programs In Saudi Arabia, Khlood Khaled Alshareef

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In Saudi Arabia, the teaching of gifted and talented students is relatively new, and research that describes the quality and effectiveness of teachers' gifted preparation programs and the training sessions they receive remain rather limited and inconsistent. Purpose: This dissertation focuses on understanding the perceptions and experiences of in-service teachers regarding gifted-focused preparation and training programs in the country. Research Design: Data were collected through observation and semi-structured interviews with teachers of gifted and talented students in the country. Findings: Analysis of the data revealed six themes related to teachers’ perceptions and experiences of preparation and training programs in Saudi …

Crosscbr: Cross‑View Contrastive Learning For Bundle Recommendation, Yunshan Ma, Yingzhi He, An Zhang, Xiang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bundle recommendation aims to recommend a bundle of related items to users, which can satisfy the users' various needs with one-stop convenience. Recent methods usually take advantage of both user-bundle and user-item interactions information to obtain informative representations for users and bundles, corresponding to bundle view and item view, respectively. However, they either use a unified view without differentiation or loosely combine the predictions of two separate views, while the crucial cooperative association between the two views' representations is overlooked.In this work, we propose to model the cooperative association between the two different views through cross-view contrastive learning. By encouraging …

The Forgotten Faith: The Experiences Of Enslaved Muslims And The Influence Of Islam In The United States From 1730-1864, Amani Altwam

All Theses

Muslims were present in North America before the establishment of the

American/British colonies. The first Muslims in America were not citizens, but

enslaved Africans forced into the slave trade in the eighteenth century. Muslim slaves

in America were much more prevalent than anyone could have imagined and yet, the

religion of these slaves was rarely ever brought to the surface. In this thesis, I argue

that Muslim slaves not only existed in America but most of them were literate in

multiple languages, well-educated, and were capable of holding on to a set of beliefs.

History books and previous literature have …

“I Held On At Any Price”: Victim Self-Preservation In The Sonderkommando In Auschwitz And Treblinka, Jessica Christina Foster

All Theses

Many Holocaust victims have expressed uneasiness or even shame regarding the actions they took to stay alive in the death camps. These acts of self-preservation were usually humiliating and often came at the expense of their fellow victims. This comes out most clearly in the testimonies of the members of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz and Treblinka. Writers such as Filip Müller, Zalmen Gradowski, and Richard Glazar recount how they survived the lethal environment of the camp by appropriating the food, clothing, and valuables of the people murdered in the gas chambers. Although most scholars have interpreted these testimonies, and the …

From “Victorian” To “Unmanageable”: Radical Irish Women In The Revolutionary Years, 1900-1923, Kayla M. Cook

All Theses

During the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century, women participated increasingly in the fight for Irish independence, with this level of participation increasing significantly following the 1913 Dublin Lockout, a labor strike which lasted about five months from late summer of 1913 into the early weeks of 1914. Though this was not a nationalist demonstration, many of the participants, both men and women, were also members of various nationalist organizations and would later go on to participate in the various nationalist uprisings in the following years. Historian Fearghal McGarry in particular argues that the Lockout served as an inciting …

Consciousness To Teach Bilingual Education In The Borderlands: Pláticas With Latina Teacher Candidates, Helena Muciño Guerra

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Despite the 3.9 million Latinx emergent bilinguals (EB) across U.S. classrooms (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2019), most bilingual teachers are White monolinguals (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016). Literature on teacher preparation in bilingual education (BE) has shown that due to the shared identities and origin and similar schooling experiences with their Latinx students, Latinx bilingual teacher candidates have a personal commitment to improving their studentsâ?? educational opportunities (Cervantes-Soon, 2018). Yet, most research on teacher preparation in bilingual education has been conducted in predominantly White-monolingual contexts, using Eurocentric research methodologies and methods, disregarding how the past educational experiences of Latinx inform …

Examining Social Determinants Of Health And Cervical Cancer Risk And Outcomes In Ecuadorian Women, Pooja Tewari

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Background and Significance: The burden of cervical cancer in the Latin American region is high. The crude incidence rate and the crude mortality rate in Ecuador are significantly higher than that of South America and the World. Riobamba, Ecuador, where the Fundación Internacional Buen Samaritano Paul Martel (FIBUSPAM) hospital is located, has been found to be one of the cities most affected with cervical cancer in the country. Risk factors for cervical cancer that have been identified in Latin American women include chronological age, age of first sexual intercourse, number of sexual partners, number of pregnancies, use of oral contraceptives, …

Multiple Intelligence Theory And Individual’S Intellectual Potential, Najwa Yanya Santiworakun

Halal Insight

No abstract provided.

The Emergence Of Core (Hash)Tags And Its Effects On Performance, Larry Zhiming Xu, Matthew Sargent, Yu Xu, Jingyi Sun, Yiqi Li, Janet Fulk

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

The informational and social impacts of tags on forming networked publics have drawn extensive scholarly attention. However, existing literature lacks systematic and longitudinal accounts of how trending tags garner community interest and facilitate the promotion of user-generated content. This study addresses this issue by explicating the structures and functions of social tagging, showing how users employed certain tags to improve performance. To provide empirical evidence, we tracked and analyzed social tagging activities in an online community from its early stage for seven years. Over this time frame, very few tags emerged as core tags--the consensus choices that both occurred and …

The Word-Level Prosodic System Of Mangghuer, Teresa Ellen Arthur

Theses and Dissertations

Mangghuer’s prosodic system has been described as a stress system (Slater 2003), and alternately, because of a few minimal pairs, as a system that is undergoing tonogenesis. (Dwyer 2008). This thesis looks at new data to evaluate both of these claims. I analyze the prosody of native words and confirm that Mangghuer has a stress system. Duration is one of the indicators of stress, which has not been mentioned in previous literature. Potential minimal pairs are considered, including the minimal tone pairs that Dwyer found; her minimal pairs are not minimal pairs in my data. However, one set of nativized …

Verticality Metaphors In Classical Hebrew Revisited: Refining The Analysis Using Primary Metaphor Theory, Andrew Scott Hodge

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies a new theory to old data. It reanalyzes VERTICALITY metaphors for distress in Classical Hebrew using Primary Metaphor Theory. Previously, this pattern of metaphors in Hebrew was analyzed by King (2012) within the general framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. This study focuses on the ways that Primary Metaphor Theory radically changes the organization of conceptual structure as dictated by Conceptual Metaphor Theory and as used by King in his analysis of Hebrew VERTICALITY metaphors. The reorganization of conceptual structure following Primary Metaphor Theory hinges on the assumption that conceptual structures with direct, independent experiential motivations also have …

A Phonological Analysis Of Asu, James Passetti

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides an analysis of the phonology of Asu, a small and endangered Nupoid language of Nigeria. The corpus of data used for the analysis comes from more than two hours of recordings of a word list for the language, provided to me by the historian and anthropologist Constanze Weise.

The Asu language recognizes only two syllable structures, CV and CGV. The only syllables without onsets are formed by four noun class prefixes [è-,ē-, à-,ā-], that create Asu nouns without onsets word-initially.

The phonemic inventory of consonants consists of seven pairs of corresponding voiced-voiceless obstruents at the labial, alveolar, …

Weaving Ethnic Identity: Discovering The Threads Of Multilingual Diversity In The Fabric Of Group Identity Among Karen Communities Of Denver, Colorado, Charity J. Seidler

Theses and Dissertations

How do Karen immigrants use language within Colorado communities? My thesis answers this question through narrative case studies of six S’gaw Karen women. Many Karen refugees, who flee the decades-long conflict within their homeland in Myanmar (Burma), find themselves navigating life first in Thailand, and eventually in the United States as foreign-language speakers. These refugees encounter numerous linguistic and cultural barriers in their new U.S. homeland, where it is difficult to function in many domains if they do not have the opportunity to learn much English upon arrival.

The six case studies are based on recorded sociolinguistic qualitative open interviews. …

Multilingual Education Curriculum Development In Low And Middle-Income Countries, Gena N. Wambsganss

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis evaluates the curricula implemented in four mother-tongue based multilingual education programs in the Philippines, Thailand, East Timor, and Cameroon. The method for conducting research in this thesis is based on the five principles to enhance learning presented by the World Bank and the prism model developed by Thomas and Collier. The five principles presented by the World Bank are as follows: (1) Teach children in a language they understand starting with Early Childhood Education and Care services through at least the first six years of primary schooling. (2) Use a language children understand for instruction in academic subjects …

Calculus Iii: Under The Influence Of Peer Instruction, Alan Von Herrmann, L. Jeneva Clark

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In peer Instruction, students engage with core course concepts and then explain those concepts to one another in small groups. Unlike in lecture format, peer instruction involves every student in the class. In Spring 2019, the first authot began using a modified version of peer instruction in Calculus III classes. He started each class by discussing important Calculus III concepts from three standpoints (the formula, the geometry behind the formula, and the physics behind the formula). During the last 20 minutes of each 50-minute class session, he polled the students using questions in the “Goldilocks Zone” – not too hard …

Higher Meanings: A Speaker Series Connecting Mathematics And Religion, Lawrence M. Lesser, Patricia S. Barrientos, Ben Zeidman

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

An innovative grant-funded general adult audiences international speaker series on connections between mathematics and religion yielded six 2021 (now archived) presentations. We share reflections and lessons learned, informed by two sets of surveys.

Beyond Ethics: Considerations For Centering Equity-Minded Data Science, Nathan Alexander, Carrie Diaz Eaton, Anelise H. Shrout, Belin Tsinnajinnie, Krystal Tsosie

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In this paper, we utilize duoethnography - a research method in which practitioners discursively interrogate the relationships between culture, context, and the mechanisms which shape individual autobiographical experiences - to explore what may be beyond ethics in the context of data science. Although ethical frameworks have the ability to reflect cultural priorities, a singular view of ethics, as we explore, often fails to speak to the multiple and diverse priorities held both within and across institutional spaces. To that end, this paper explores multiple perspectives, epistemologies, and worldviews that can collectively push researchers towards considerations of a data science education …

Ethics And Mathematics – Some Observations Fifty Years Later, Gregor Nickel

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Almost exactly fifty years ago, Friedrich Kambartel, in his classic essay “Ethics and Mathematics,” did pioneering work in an intellectual environment that almost self-evidently assumed a strict separation of the two fields. In our first section we summarize and discuss that classical paper. The following two sections are devoted to complement and contrast Kambartel’s picture. In particular, the second section is devoted to ethical aspects of the indirect and direct mathematization of modern societies. The final section gives a short categorization of various philosophical positions with respect to the rationality of ethics and the mutual relation between ethics and mathematics.

Et Phone Camelot: Alien Life Forms In Arthurian Fiction, Michael Torregrossa

Mythcon

As a living tradition, the Matter of Britain displays a voracious appetite as it grows over the centuries, absorbing characters, legends, motifs, stories, and even genres to create new Arthurian narratives. Science fiction is one genre that has recently found a place within the Arthurian tradition. Inspired by Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, tales abound of time travelers journeying to Arthur’s realm, but a smaller, less well-known subset of Arthurianthemed science fiction brings various extraterrestrial creatures to Camelot. Sometimes, these beings are hostile, but, more often, they try to make the realm a better place. Most …

“Let’S Start With The End Of The World, Why Don’T We?” The Disorienting Phenomenology Of N. K. Jemisin’S The Stone Sky, Robin Anne Reid

Mythcon

N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy made history: each novel won the Best Hugo for Novel (2016-2017-2018). Jemisin is not only the First person to win the novel award three years running, but also the First Black person and the First woman of color to win the novel award. Sony Entertainment purchased the series for adaptation in 2018 (Fleming), and Jemisin will be adapting her series for Film. The Fifth Season has an epic structure (beginning in media res, a quest, world-changing events and characters, and supernatural forces). Given the conventions of the epic genre, my interest in this …