Digital Commons Network^™

Humor In Western European Instrumental Music: How Humor Works, Its Usage Over Time, And Accessible Teaching Strategies, Hunter K. Thompson

Senior Theses

This research’s purpose was to examine the perception of humor, both generally and musically, and to provide an overview of how humor has been incorporated into Western European instrumental music from the Medieval Age to the 20th century. In order to evaluate this, the researcher conducted a listening survey to gauge how well college music majors perceive humor in instrumental music. The survey consisted of eleven total listening excerpts approved by the Music History faculty at the University of South Carolina School of Music. Nine excerpts were coded humorous, and two excerpts were coded non-humorous for control. There was a …

Making Music Social: Creating A Spotify-Based Social Media Platform, Dalton J. Craven

Senior Theses

DKMS is a new type of social media platform for music lovers and groups of friends. It integrates tightly with Spotify, one of the largest music streaming services in the world. Users of DKMS can see what their friends are listening to, receive recommendations of new songs to listen to, and analyze their several key numerical metrics (happiness, danceability, loudness, and energy) of their top songs.

DKMS was built as part of the year-long Capstone senior design course at the University of South Carolina. A deployed app is visible at https://dkms.vercel.app, and the open-source code is visible at https://github.com/SCCapstone/DKMS.

Mapping Per- And Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (Pfas) In South Carolina Surface Waters: Are There Hotspots?, Thomas C. Geiger

Senior Theses

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are synthetic chemicals used in consumer products for their unique chemical properties. PFAS compounds are resistant to water, oil, heat, and grease, making them useful for a wide variety of everyday items such as non-stick cooking pans, food packaging, electronics, carpets, upholstery, paints, adhesives, and personal care products.¹ The resilient nature of PFAS has made these compounds immensely popular with consumers but has since been considered a potential environmental and public health hazard for their ability to bioaccumulate and for their stability in the environment. More than 6000 PFAS have been discovered in the …

Wernicke's Encephalopathy: Mapping The Risk Factors Throughout The State Of South Carolina, Shannon M. Rychener

Senior Theses

Wernicke’s Encephalopathy is a consistently underrecognized neurodegenerative brain disorder resulting from prolonged thiamine deficiency. Clinical presentation of the disease results from brain lesions attributable to thiamine deficiency. Because these lesions occur in various locations in the cerebral cortex, symptoms can vary significantly. Varied presentation of symptoms, in addition to the lack of a widely accepted biomarker for the disorder cause challenges to clinicians when identifying and diagnosing the disorder. Due to these challenges, healthcare providers must heavily rely on patient history and risk factor prevalence when multiple symptoms of the disorder are present. By mapping the prevalence of the four …

Development And Validation Of A Diagnostic Aid For Convulsive Epilepsy In Sub-Saharan Africa: A Retrospective Case-Control Study, Gabriel Davis Jones, Symon M. Kariuki, Anthony Ngugi, Angelina Kakooza Mwesige, Honorati Masanja, Seth Owusu-Agyei, Ryan Wagner, J Helen Cross, Charles R. Newton, Arjune Sen

Pathology, East Africa

Background Identification of convulsive epilepsy in sub-Saharan Africa relies on access to resources that are often unavailable. Infrastructure and resource requirements can further complicate case verification. Using machine- learning techniques, we have developed and tested a region-specific questionnaire panel and predictive model to identify people who have had a convulsive seizure. These findings have been implemented into a free app for health- care workers in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania, and South Africa.

Methods In this retrospective case-control study, we used data from the Studies of the Epidemiology of Epilepsy in Demographic Sites in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania, and South Africa. …

Assessing The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On Project Management Methodologies, Adrian Leung

LMU Theses and Dissertations

This research paper explores the impact of COVID-19 and the shift to remote work on project management practices across multiple industries. Through interviews with project managers, the study finds that companies with pre-existing remote work policies were better equipped to handle the transition to remote work. In contrast, companies without pre-existing policies faced increased challenges in communication, team morale, and workload management. The study also highlights the struggle to maintain work-life balance, the importance of communication, and the need to address technical difficulties. Project managers emphasized the importance of accountability and maintaining productivity during remote work. Overall, the study finds …

A Look Into The Physiological Impacts Of Childhood Cancers And Modeling Of Tumor Growth Rate, Erica Steiner, Kimberly Hansen, Marissa Stanton

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Cancer is one of the deadliest diseases present in the world. Children have different reactions to diseases and treatments; thus, it is important to study those reactions specifically in children. Knowing how children are impacted by these factors can be helpful in diagnosis and treatment of cancer. I performed this study by researching the different types of cancer I was interested in and using MATLAB to code for and simulate a growth curve of a brain tumor. I found that there are many different physiological impacts of different cancers in children. As for the modeling, I was able to get …

Comparing The Trajectory Of Urban Impervious Surface In Two Cities: The Case Of Accra And Kumasi, Ghana, Thomas Mumuni Bilintoh, Andrews Korah, Antwi Opuni, Adeline Akansobe

Student Publications [Scholarly]

In this study, we present methods to assess newly developed urban impervious surface (UIS) datasets derived from satellite imagery of the cities of Kumasi and Accra, Ghana, at three different time points. Each city has three binary maps from 2000, 2011, and 2021, in which one shows the presence of UIS and zero shows its absence. We employed the binaryTimeSeries method to compare the gross gains and losses in the two cities. In addition, we show how three components of change—quantity, allocation, and alternation—compare across the two sites. The results show that both cities experienced a large proportion of gains …

Accurately Valuing Blue Carbon Sequestration And Storage To Foster Coastal Conservation Via Evidence-Based Policymaking And Model Environmental Services Statute Methodologies, John Shelton Penton Jr

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Blue carbon ecosystems, especially mangrove forests, provide one of nature’s most effective means for sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in subsurface soils. The six nearshore coastal morphologies found in tropical and subtropical regions each possess a conspicuous environmental signature that can be employed to accurately estimate and predict mangrove forests’ carbon storage in above-ground biomass, below-ground biomass, and the soils by system type. The consistent geomorphology and geophysical processes within each of these coastal environmental settings, that is, the wave and tidal forcings, the rate of coastal sediment accretions, nutrient load and limitations (e.g., nitrogen-to-phosphorus …

There’S Land Between Us: Rurality In The Northern Great Plains, Jarrett D. Moore, Louise M. Yoho

The Rural Educator

While there is a significant body of educational literature addressing the character and needs of rural communities in the Appalachian and southern regions of the US, there is a need for a better understanding of rural communities outside of this region. Existing literature focused on US rurality revolves around four main themes: the rural idyllic, isolation and deficits, rural identity, and community. The voices, experiences, and needs of future teachers of the Northern Great Plains are missing from this dominant narrative and this study begins to address this gap. This qualitative study is based on data collected from 16 semi-structured …

Dipole Cooperativity And Polarization Frustration Determine The Secondary Structure Distribution Of Short Alanine Peptides In Water, Ying Yuan, Feng Wang

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

The physical driving forces for secondary structure preferences of hydrated alanine peptide are investigated with B3LYP-D3(BJ) and the adaptive force matching (AFM) method. The AFM fit to the DFT surface, ALA2022, provides excellent agreement with the nuclear magnetic resonance scalar coupling constants from experiments. In turn, the model is used to gain insight into the physical driving forces behind secondary structure preferences of hydrated peptides. DFT calculations with and without the Conductor-like Screening Model (COSMO) show that the α helix is stabilized by solvent polarization due to dipole cooperativity. The two adjacent amide groups in β strand form a near-planar …

How Do Arts Contribute To Educational Research? A Book Review Of Arts-Based Research In Education: Foundations For Practice, Niroj Dahal

The Qualitative Report

I write this review as a recommendation for potential readers: those who are new to and veterans with respect to arts-based research. Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice is edited by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and Richard Siegesmund, with contributions from 22 authors and a cover artist. In addition to providing some information from a usual structure around contents, central themes and concepts, intended audience, genres of writing styles, strengths and weaknesses, and uniquenesses, I primarily focus on the content of the chapter entitled “Four guiding principles for arts-based research practice” which I found extraordinarily significant in the second edition of …

The Challenges Of Educating Children In Low-Income Contexts: A Book Review Of Learner-Centred Pedagogy In The Global South Pupils And Teachers’ Experience, Reni Marlina, Hamdani Hamdani

The Qualitative Report

Learner-Centred Pedagogy in the Global South: Pupils and Teachers' Experience, published by Routledge in 2022 is a book written by Nozomi Sakata. The purpose of writing this book review is to guide readers through a case-based and mixed methods investigation of Learner-Centred Pedagogy (LCP) implementation in the global South, which has primarily been investigated through qualitative methodologies. This book can shed further light on the connection between students' learning attitudes and their academic achievement, particularly those of low-income students. This book serves as a link between early education, which was still founded on culture, and modern education, which is …

Beyond News Values On Twitter: Predicting Factors That Drive User Engagement In News, Zhiyan Zhong

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

When deciding on what news stories to cover, traditional journalism determines news values by following several elements of newsworthiness, such as impact, timeliness, and prominence. However, these guidelines do not always seem to correspond with the success of content on social media. As people are increasingly turning to social media for news, our research aims to understand and predict factors that drive user engagement for news on social media. In this study, we analyze news content published on Twitter, and examine a diverse set of characteristics like metrics retrieved from the Twitter API and semantics by natural language processing, including …

Admissions Magazine Spring 2023, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Admissions Magazine

Altitude: Soaring Above and Beyond A 100,000-Foot Journey to the Upper Atmosphere.

• Business is our Business
• Education of a Higher Altitude: At Embry-Riddle, Daring to Think Big Isn't Just in Our Curriculum - It's a Way of Life
• Eagles Get Down to Business with Boeing
• Going for a Spin
• Detecting Emotion
• Shifting Gears
• Sparking Change
• Helping Athletes With STEM
• Above and Beyond
• Turtle Tech Power
• Lose the Illusion
• Training Tommorrow's Cyber Warriors
• Design Build Fly
• Beyond the Stars and the Classroom
• Luck of the Eagles
• Student Becomes Teacher in Zambia
• Florida Campus
• Fusion on the Horizon
• Road Trip, anyone?
• Awarding …

Clean Air For All? An Analysis Of Eu Air Pollution Legislation And Health Inequality, Bonnie Nolan

The International Law Review Association Student Forum

Communities around the world face health risks due to air pollution. These health risks can include asthma, cognitive impairment, and even death. But these negative health effects are not equally spread among communities. Studies have established that air pollution affects socially disadvantaged areas more. The correlation between socioeconomic levels and increased risk of environmental harm is referred to as environmental inequality. The World Health Organization has found that environmental health inequality occurs in every European Union (EU) member country. The EU has implemented multiple pieces of legislation to reduce air pollution, including Directive 2008/50/EC, which sets specific air quality that …

Why Word Problems Are Hard For High School Math Students: Problem Formulation And Disciplinary Literacy, Emily Charlotte Elliott

Senior Theses

This thesis is an extensive literature review designed to better understand the obstacles high school math students encounter when solving word problems (WPs). While many high school students find math difficult in general, students especially struggle with WPs. Often they are unable to provide correct solutions to WPs even when they are successful in solving computational problems using the same mathematical concepts (Cummins, 1988). Data from the 2007 National Survey of Algebra Teachers suggests that solving WPs is one of the skills that students are most unprepared for when entering Algebra 1 (Hoffer et al.). Additionally, many students try to …

Moral Injury To Inform Analysis Of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Amanda Julia Manea

Senior Theses

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that almost one out of ten veterans struggle with. Although the National Center for PTSD has made extensive progress in characterizing and developing new treatments for PTSD, most veterans still experience symptoms of PTSD following treatment. Novel avenues of investigation, such as developing algorithms to review electronic health record (EHR) data and better understanding moral injury, are being pursued to address the gap that still exists when it comes to treating veterans. Moral injury is the individual evaluation of exposure to a potentially morally injurious event (PMIE) and can lead to …

Computational Investigation Of Porphyrin-Based Host Design For Anions And Ion Pairs, Symphony Hill

Honors Theses

Little research has heretofore been devoted to studying the binding interactions between porphyrin-based molecular hosts and anions or ion pairs. Such interactions could be important in synthesizing molecules capable of detecting, binding, extracting, and transporting ions of biological, environmental, and industrial significance. With this in mind, computational studies of nine different porphyrin hosts were performed to examine the structural and binding properties of each molecule and potential ion guests. Using the Spartan computational chemistry software, each porphyrin was modeled and binding was tested with a number of ions of different shapes and sizes. Data was then collected regarding the distances …

Substituent Effect Analysis On Halogen Bonding Interactions, Summer Hanson

Honors Theses

This study was used to determine the significance of substituents placed on aromatic molecules and how electron-donating groups (EDG) and electron-withdrawing groups (EWG) affect the strength of the halogen bond. Each study involved the same substituents, each differing in electron-withdrawing and electron-donating capability. Five different systems were created on computational software to evaluate the distance between the halogen bond donor and halogen bond acceptor. In two studies, the goal was to find the best electron-donor on the halogen bond acceptor (donor of electron density) while the halogen bond donor remained constant. For one study, the goal was to determine the …

Folding Collision Probability In The Nyquist Folding Receiver, Hunter J. D. Miller

Honors Theses

As the radio-frequency spectrum becomes more crowded, there is a growing need for signal processing technology that can instantaneously interpret an ultra-wideband range of frequencies. Existing conventional systems, however, are not the most efficient solution due to the processing capability limitations of current analog-to-digital converter technology. Specifically, with regard to radars, traditional receivers are required to process large amounts of unused data, wasting time and energy. This project highlights a newer analog-to-information receiver that utilizes compressive sensing which is seeking to overcome these challenges. The innovative technology being evaluated allows users to sample far below the standard Nyquist/Shannon sample rates …

Covid-19 Is Not All Bad News: Negative And Surprisingly Positive Reports From College Stem Students And Implications For Stem Instruction, Yuchen Jiang, Boyan Ma, Zimo Ma, Pamela M. Propsom, Zaheen Rashed '24, Rudrayani Upadhyay, Zichen Zhao

Student Research

The negative educational consequences of COVID-19 are well documented. Much less investigated have been any potential positive outcomes of the pandemic. We surveyed 392 students at one college querying why they continue studying STEM or leave the STEM disciplines and about the effects of COVID-19 on their education. STEM students may have been especially impacted by pandemic-imposed remote instruction given STEM’s reliance on hands-on laboratory experiences. Because the literature indicates that people of color and those from lower socioeconomic groups were more negatively affected by COVID-19, we hypothesized that students from these groups would report greater adverse educational consequences of …

Evaluating Species-Specific Replenishment Solution Effects On Plant Growth And Root Zone Nutrients With Hydroponic Arugula (Eruca Sativa L.) And Basil (Ocimum Basilicum L.), Lauren L. Houston, Ryan W. Dickson, Matthew B. Bertucci, Trenton L. Roberts

Horticulture Faculty Publications and Presentations

Managing nutrients in recirculating solutions can be challenging in hydroponic production, and poor management practices can rapidly result in root zone nutrient imbalances in reduced yield. Using mass balance principles to formulate hydroponic replenishment solutions is a proposed strategy to reduce nutrient imbalances and the need to periodically replace the hydroponic solution. Objectives were to (1) formulate species-specific nutrient replenishment solutions for arugula (Eruca sativa L.) and basil (Ocimum basilicum L.) using mass balance principles and (2) evaluate the effects of using these replenishment solutions on plant growth and root zone nutrients over time. In the first experiment, …

Measuring Social Influence In Online Social Networks - Focus On Human Behavior Analytics, Shyamala N. Chalakudi, Dildar Hussain, Gnana Bharathy, Murthy Kolluru

AMTP Proceedings 2023

With the advent of online social networks (OSN) and their ever-expanding reach, researchers seek to determine a social media user’s social influence (SI) proficiency. Despite its exploding application across multiple domains, the research confronts unprecedented practical challenges due to a lack of systematic examination of human behavior characteristics that impart social influence. This work aims to give a methodical overview by conducting a targeted literature analysis to appraise the accuracy and usefulness of past publications. The finding suggests that first, it is necessary to incorporate behavior analytics into statistical measurement models. Second, there is a severe imbalance between the abundance …

An Exploration Of Computational Text Analysis Of Co-Design Discourse In A Research-Practice Partnership, Mei Tan, Victor R. Lee

Publications

In combination with contextualized human interpretation, computational text analysis offers a quantitative approach to interrogating the nature of participation and social positioning in discourse. Using meeting transcript data from the development of a co-design research-practice partnership, we examine the roles and forms of participation that contribute to an effective collaboration between a multileveled school system and researcher partners. We apply computational methods to explore the language of co-design and multi-stakeholder perspectives in support of educational improvement science efforts and our theoretical understanding of partnership roles. Results indicate participation patterns align with documented roles in co- design partnerships and highlight the …

Geometry And Coding: Introducing An Interactive And Integrated Mathematics-Computer Science Unit, Kimberly Beck, Jessica F. Shumway

Publications

As part of a collaborative project between Utah State University, the Cache County School District, and Stanford, instructional units were designed for fifth-grade students. These units integrated math concepts of geometrical shapes and computer science concepts of sequences, conditionals, and loops. One component of the unit was implemented in math classrooms by math teachers, and the other component was implemented in computer labs. This presentation will focus on the math unit as presented at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM-V).

Speckle Development And Application In Uav-Based Digital Image Correlation For Transportation Infrastructure Monitoring And Assessment, Taylor Wyatt

Theses and Dissertations

A critical aspect of civil infrastructure is structural health monitoring, of which digital image correlation (DIC) has been proven to be an effective and appropriate method. There is sufficient literature on the use of stationary DIC, but an unexplored aspect is DIC-equipped unmanned aircraft systems. It has been verified in University of South Carolina labs but has not been proved in a field environment. One of the challenges of field implementation is large scale speckle application. This work focusses on identifying and addressing challenges in bringing UAV-DIC technology from the lab to the field. This includes the development of optimized …

The Extremes Of Galaxy Formation & Evolution, Kelly E. Whalen

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Galaxy populations are shaped by the physical processes that regulate their star formation and central black hole growth throughout cosmic time. The primary aim of this thesis is to understand how these processes occur and how they shape evolution in some of the most extreme galaxies in the Universe including quasars, compact starbursts, and ultra-diffuse dwarfs. Gas-rich major mergers funnel large amounts of gas towards the nucleus, triggering rapid AGN accretion and compact star formation. In this work, I study powerful quasars and extreme, massive, compact starburst galaxies within the context of merger-driven galaxy evolution scenarios. One aim of this …

Coevolutionary Signals In Metabotropic Glutamate Receptors Capture Residue Contacts And Long-Range Functional Interactions, Olivier Lichtarge

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Upon ligand binding to a G protein-coupled receptor, extracellular signals are transmitted into a cell through sets of residue interactions that translate ligand binding into structural rearrangements. These interactions needed for functions impose evolutionary constraints so that, on occasion, mutations in one position may be compensated by other mutations at functionally coupled positions. To quantify the impact of amino acid substitutions in the context of major evolutionary divergence in the G protein-coupled receptor subfamily of metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs), we combined two phylogenetic-based algorithms, Evolutionary Trace and covariation Evolutionary Trace, to infer potential structure-function couplings and roles in mGluRs. We …

Machine Learning And Health Care: Potential Benefits And Issues

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

We discuss the potential for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve health care, while detailing caveats and important considerations to ensure unbiased and equitable implementation. If disparities exist in the data used to train ML algorithms, they must be recognized and accounted for, so they do not bias performance accuracy or are not interpreted by the algorithm as simply a lack of need. We pay particular attention to an area in which bias in data composition is particularly striking, that is in large-scale genetics databases, as people of European descent are vastly overrepresented in the existing resources.