Digital Commons Network^™

The End Of Francafrique? French Economic And Political Strategies In Cote D’Ivoire And Their Local Responses (2019), Ruth Yohannes

International Studies Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper takes a critical look at the Francafrique, the relationship between France and its former colonies. Using a dependency theory approach, it will explain why the Francafrique as it stands today is not a partnership between equals but rather an unbalanced agreement that mostly benefits France, multinational corporations, and the ruling elites of the countries it operates in. This paper will show how dependency theory helps explain the way Francafriquefunctions and how it impacts the economic growth of France’s former colonies, in order to prove that as it stands, the relationship between France and Côte d’Ivoire is detrimental to …

A Trust In Air Traffic Controllers (T-Atc) Scale, Bradley S. Baugh, Scott R. Winter

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

Trust is a concept that cannot be easily measured. Further, trust is domain-specific. Trust is a foundational aspect of safe flight operations in the National Airspace System, and while there has been much attention to trust in teams and trust in automation, there appears to be a gap in knowledge of a pilot’s trust in air traffic controllers. The purpose of this study was to develop and validate the Trust in Air Traffic Controllers (T-ATC) scale, a summative scale to measure a pilot’s trust in air traffic controllers. This study followed a three-step methodology. In steps one and two, words …

The Hard, Simple Truth About Gun Control, Carl Bogus

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Predicting Violent Crime Reports From Geospatial And Temporal Attributes Of Us 911 Emergency Call Data, Vincent Corcoran

Dissertations

The aim of this study is to create a model to predict which 911 calls will result in crime reports of a violent nature. Such a prediction model could be used by the police to prioritise calls which are most likely to lead to violent crime reports. The model will use geospatial and temporal attributes of the call to predict whether a crime report will be generated. To create this model, a dataset of characteristics relating to the neighbourhood where the 911 call originated will be created and combined with characteristics related to the time of the 911 call. Geospatial …

Feminist Perspectives On Education And Pedagogy: A Meta-Synthetic Insight Into The Thought Of Four American Philosophers, Khadija Alhumaid

All Works

© 2019 Khadija Alhumaid. This is an open access article licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). The present paper reports on the views of four prominent feminist intellectuals and philosophers (Maxine Greene, bell hooks, Christine Sleeter and Patti Lather) and how their ideas, coloured by their lifestyles, experiences, careers and beliefs, impacted the educational field. In common, these feminists championed the universal values of equality, freedom, pluralism using different educational and political stratagems. Together, they mapped new terrains of equity and fairness and anti-racist practices as social and educational practices. A free informed conscientious aesthetic and artistic imagination …

A Life Sentence: An Evaluation Of Voter Disenfranchisement Through A Constitutional Lens, Miranda Noel Janssen

Departmental Honors Projects

As the number of incarcerated pupils has increased in the United States, so has the number of pupils who cannot vote, due to a felony conviction. This paper is organized, (i) the history of felon voter disenfranchisement, (ii) statistics on state and federal levels, (iii) the collateral consequences of felon voter disenfranchisement, (iv) different perspectives about felon voter disenfranchisement, (v) understanding suspect classification and voting as a fundamental right, (vi) understanding strict scrutiny, (vii) examining past court rulings, (viii) identifying why the United States needs to change its current laws on felon voter disenfranchisement, an (ix) the proposal of a …

Mn Food (In)Security: Are Anti-Hunger Interventions In The Twin Cities Perpetuating Food Insecurity And Poverty?, Emma Kiley

Departmental Honors Projects

While anti-hunger organizations across the nation have been doing important work to address this issue, we have yet to see a significant decrease in food insecurity or poverty. This project uses a literature review and interviews with Twin Cities anti-hunger organizations to answer the following questions: How are anti-hunger interventions and the root causes of food insecurity mismatched? And what would it look like if anti-hunger organizations who are heavily engaged in the ‘feeding movement’ shifted their understanding to see food insecurity as a symptom of poverty, rather than an isolated issue? Working through themes of food charity models, privatized …

“It’S In The Blood”: American Working-Class Identity And Memory Within Transformations Of Capitalism, Andy Stec

Departmental Honors Projects

This case study of northeastern Minnesota examines the economic, social, and cultural consequences of deindustrialization as it occured in the 1970s and 1980s. Operating under the understanding that deindustrialization is a symptom of the latest systemic transformation in capitalism, this case study helps us understand the interplay between global restructurings of world capitalism and the voices on the ground - those workers and residents in communities caught up in the sweeping tide of industrial decline. Through national, regional, and labor newspapers, recorded interviews, and interviews carried out by the author this research illuminates a particular reaction to economic decline: the …

Tribal Governance In American Indian Country, Terry E. Mcdonald

School of Business Student Theses and Dissertations

Public Administrators seek to synthesize, comprehend, and clarify challenging problems of social progress as it relates to the administration of public services. We must, therefore, think about all forms of governance to have a comprehensive understanding of the discipline. If civilization ignored the prehistory of the past 600 million years, from the Late Precambrian Era through the Mesozoic, there would be a consequential loss of knowledge. A comprehensive understanding would be absent regarding one of the fundamentals in our evolution – life's ability to avoid demise by symbiosis and adaptation. In the same way, we may have overlooked an essential …

Evangelical Faith And Culture In The Lives Of Vietnam’S Upland Hmong - 1987-2017, Jim Lewis

Biblical and Theological Studies Faculty Works

This paper centers on the contemporary conversion movement to Christianity among the Hmong of the Northern Mountainous Region (NMR). Taking place within the brief scope of only 30 years, religious change among the 1.2 million highland Hmong in Vietnam’s fourteen provinces has resulted in some 330,000 declaring they have exchanged many traditional beliefs for faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. They have embraced substantially the same faith as the Tin Lanh Church, which first came to Vietnam in 1911, one of Vietnam’s six officially approved religions. It is reasonable to claim that a mass movement of this magnitude among a …

A Global System Of Work, A Global System Of Regulation?: Crowdwork And Conflicts Of Law, Miriam A. Cherry

All Faculty Scholarship

On-demand platforms are changing and reshaping our conceptions of both the firm and the work relationship in far-reaching and critical ways, allowing companies to hire workers and to seek customers across national boundaries. Confronted with low pay, wage theft, and other problematic working conditions, gig workers around the world have turned to the courts, attempting to invoke the protections of traditional labor and employment law. While some commentators believe existing forms of labor and employment regulations can stretch to cover on-demand work, others have called for new legal initiatives specifically crafted for online platforms. The goal of this paper is …

From Venetian Glass To Contemporary Intellectual Property: Revisiting Tailored Patent Regimes (Book Review), Ana Santos Rutschman

All Faculty Scholarship

This piece reviews Stefania Fusco's “Murano Glass Vase" and "Lessons from the Past." In Murano Glass Vase, Fusco recounts the history of the glassmaking industry in Venice, framing it as the natural experiment from which the patent system sprang into the world. Fusco emphasizes the mix of exclusionary rights and trade secrecy that formed the backbone of Venetian innovation policy against the backdrop of a heavily regulated and protectionist economy. In “Lessons from the Past,” Fusco draws on original research performed at the Venetian State Archives to further the Murano narrative by looking at how the Venetian government fueled an …

In Search Of Best Practices On Gender Equity For University Faculty: An Update, Constance Z. Wagner

All Faculty Scholarship

This article updates the author’s earlier work on the search for gender equity among women faculty in the university setting in the United States. The author reflects on the fact that some of the literature in this area does not sufficiently address the challenges facing women of color. She seeks to fill the gap in her own research by referencing best practices discussed in three recent books on the professional lives of university faculty who are women of color. She argues that future work on best practices for achieving gender equity must address issues of intersectionality of race, gender, and …

Criminal Clear Statement Rules, Carissa Byrne Hessick, Joseph E. Kennedy

Faculty Publications

There is a broad consensus in the criminal justice community that our criminal statutes are a mess: They are imprecise, overly broad, and overly punitive. Legislatures write these laws because there are significant political incentives for them to be “tough on crime” and few incentives for them to write carefully crafted laws. The problems of over-criminalization thus seem to be both a predictable yet intractable consequence of the incentives that legislatures face. But this Article offers a novel solution: Judges should develop new clear statement rules to interpret criminal statutes. The Supreme Court has created clear statement rules to protect …

The New White Flight, Erika K. Wilson

Faculty Publications

White charter school enclaves — defined as charter schools located in school districts that are thirty percent or less white, but that enroll a student body that is fifty percent or greater white — are emerging across the country. The emergence of white charter school enclaves is the result of a sobering and ugly truth: when given a choice, white parents as a collective tend to choose racially segregated, predominately white schools. Empirical research supports this claim. Empirical research also demonstrates that white parents as a collective will make that choice even when presented with the option of a more …

Teachers Meaning-Making Process Of Yoga As An Embodied Self-Regulation Tool In High School Environments: The High School Yoga Mat Study, Andrea Paige Pirkey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

In yoga-research applied to education, yoga is viewed as an embodied self-regulation (ESR) tool to benefit students and teachers thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and physiology. Yoga is being widely implemented into schools to facilitate academic and non-academic growth and development. Teachers are essential in providing yoga as an ESR tools to students and supporting ESR development. To understand yoga as a tool for teaching and learning ESR, this research explores three areas: (1) initial phase of introducing and educating teachers about school-based, yoga program implementation; (2) the complexities of teachers meaning-making (M-M) and learning process in understanding yoga as a tool; …

A Hybrid Framework For Sentiment Analysis Using Genetic Algorithm Based Feature Reduction, Farkhund Iqbal, Jahanzeb Maqbool Hashmi, Benjamin C.M. Fung, Rabia Batool, Asad Masood Khattak, Saiqa Aleem, Patrick C.K. Hung

All Works

© 2019 IEEE. Due to the rapid development of Internet technologies and social media, sentiment analysis has become an important opinion mining technique. Recent research work has described the effectiveness of different sentiment classification techniques ranging from simple rule-based and lexicon-based approaches to more complex machine learning algorithms. While lexicon-based approaches have suffered from the lack of dictionaries and labeled data, machine learning approaches have fallen short in terms of accuracy. This paper proposes an integrated framework which bridges the gap between lexicon-based and machine learning approaches to achieve better accuracy and scalability. To solve the scalability issue that arises …

From Breast Pump To Best Pump: A Human-Centered Evaluation, Rachel L. Bartels

Open Access Master's Theses

Mothers can experience breastfeeding challenges, and the breast pump is often at the center. Existing literature outlines the range of mothers’ negative experiences with breast pumps, though there is a gap in which breast pump characteristics are important to mothers. Identifying which breast pump characteristics (i.e., portability, ease of use, low-weight, fast milk extraction, comfortability, low-noise, discreet) are important to breast pumping mothers, and whether or not this importance varies between mothers who do or do not work outside of the home will help identify user needs. Collecting user needs informs future breast pump designs in a user-centered design …

My Selfie-Image: An Artist’S Multimedia Perspective To Self-Discovery, Kelly Ahern

Open Access Master's Theses

The world we live in today is filled with different types of media and images constantly. Online technology allows for the exchange of this mass media instantly. With so much media swarming our daily lives, social media and visual imagery have become a part of our culture creating new forms of visual and perceptual communication to thrive online. Social media allows for an organizational system in which symbolic and expressive elements of visual culture are formed. This visual culture draws new platforms of social structures and interactions that include visual imagery such as pictures, videos, emoticons, gifs, memes, etc. Every …

Plastic Perceptions: Surveying Public Opinion Of Plastic Pollution In Rhode Island, Sabrina Pereira

Open Access Master's Theses

This research surveyed 200 coastal and noncoastal Rhode Island residents to determine their perceptions of marine plastic debris and their support for plastic and paper bag legislation. The results suggest that one’s residency, or geographic distance from the coast, has no bearing on plastic and paper bag policy support and that most participants, 77%, classify plastic pollution as a serious threat to various types of wildlife, the marine environment, human health, and Rhode Island’s economy. The data also seems to suggest support for a statewide plastic bag ban and a statewide fee of 10 cents on paper bags as a …

Closure Under The Majorization Relation And The Distinguishing Chromatic Number Of Circulant Graphs, Jean A. Guillame

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation addresses two distinct problems in graph theory and in each case advances results for invariants of graphs. The first problem investigates the arrangement of the degree sequences of various classes of graphs in the dominance order. In the second problem we consider a family of graphs, best described as a generalization of cycle graphs, and investigate the values of the distinguishing chromatic number for the complements of these graphs. An improvement of a known bound for this number is also given for this particular class of graphs.

Chapter 1 introduces fundamental definitions, concepts, notations and known results that …

Exploring The Lived Experience Of Being Pregnant While A College Student, Kristina M. Perrelli

Open Access Dissertations

Almost five million college students in the United States have child dependents (U.S. Department of Education, 2015), but little is known about the experience of pregnancy in college. This qualitative study addressed this gap in scholarship. A feminist intersectional theoretical framework and a feminist interpretive phenomenology methodology were used to explore the experiences of ten women from three institutions of higher education who were currently pregnant or recently pregnant. Most participants identified as low-income or working-class women of color. The phenomenological goal of this study was to learn about each woman’s lived experience of pregnancy in college toward identifying commonalities …

Impact Of Socialization In Elderly Public-Housing Residents, Taylor M. Wilkerson, Schanea Ward, Amy Popovich, Pamela Parsons, Faika Zanjani

Graduate Research Posters

Older adults who experience social isolation have higher rates of mortality relative to their counterparts. Social interactions are an important way to combat this isolation. This research aims to better understand how social isolation in older adults living in low-income households in Richmond, Virginia (RVA) is related to their economic, physical, and psychological health status. As part of the iCubed Health and Wellness Aging Core and in collaboration with the Richmond Memorial: East End Housing Coalition for Older Adults, older adults from a selected public housing unit (n=28) self-reported their financial status, experiences with physical and psycho-social health, and feelings …

Health & Nutritional Sciences Free Communication Day: Spring 2019 Plan B Abstracts, Viola Davies, Jonathan Shaeffer, Amy Hommes, Zachary Fehringer, Andrew Cheney, Alli Delay, Alyssa Finke, Kaitlin Reece, Jacob Elfmann, Maggan Froseth, Kala Nurnberg, Keith Thompson, David Andersen, Samantha Kratovil, Makenna Meier, Lezlie Pommer, Amanda Nack

Health and Nutritional Sciences Graduate Students Plan B Capstone Projects

This document contains Plan B abstracts presented by graduate students at the Health and Nutritional Sciences Free Communication Day, held on April 30th 2019.

Abstract titles include:

• Effect of supervised aquatic therapy and supervised land-based therapy on chronic low back pain.
• The College Football Recruiting Process and Ways to Improve It
• The Effects of Probiotics on Depression and Anxiety
• Arthroscopic Partial Meniscectomy versus Physical Therapy: Best Intervention to Improve Outcomes in Patients with Meniscal Tears?
• Does the inclusion of mental health education programs have an effect on the help seeking behavior of collegiate student-athletes?
• Establishing a Sustainable Nutrition Education Program …

Agents Of Soviet Decline: Mass Media Representations Of Prostitution During Perestroika, Emma C. Downing

Honors Papers

In 1986, the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya pravda printed an article titled “Nina of Minsk” detailing the scandalous adventures of a prostitute-turned-brothel owner. The first of its kind, this article horrified and fascinated the Soviet reading public in equal measure, serving as an initial exposure to the topic of prostitution in the mass media.

The conversation surrounding prostitution became more heated in light of the Soviet Union’s failing economy, as well as the policy of glasnost’, which freed the press from rigid censorship. Prostitution rapidly became a popular topic of debate due to its illicit nature and impact on labor and …

Love And Refusal: Contrasting Dialectical Interpretations And Its Implications In The Works Of Erich Fromm And Herbert Marcuse, 1941-1969, Cole Mantell

Honors Papers

This thesis is an intellectual history of dialecticism and its use in the works of the Frankfurt School members, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Famously, these two men had a ferocious and polemical debate in the pages of Dissent Magazine in 1955-56. The Fromm-Marcuse Debate has since become almost the sole lens in which the intellectual differences and similarities between these men are analyzed. Through a comparative and historical analysis of their individual work, largely removed from the Dissent Debate, I offer a new interpretation of their conflict, their personal relationship, and a new perspective on critical theory and its …

Fp-19-03 Marriage-To-Divorce Ratio In The U.S.: Geographic Variation, 2017, Valerie J. Schweizer

National Center for Family and Marriage Research Family Profiles

No abstract provided.

Fp-19-10 High School Seniors’ Attitudes Toward Cohabitation As A Testing Ground For Marriage, 2017, Colette A. Allred

National Center for Family and Marriage Research Family Profiles

No abstract provided.

Pursue Undergraduate Research Journal Volume 2 (Issue 1) 2019

Pursue: Undergraduate Research Journal

The scholarly journal, “PURSUE: Undergraduate Research Journal” (ISSN 2473-6201), provides undergraduates an avenue to publish their original research abstracts and articles in the following areas: psychology, sociology, biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, computer science, mathematics, humanities, agriculture, architecture, health, business, and education (this list is not exclusive).

The original research articles included in this journal are peer reviewed and selected by the journal’s Editorial Board. The review process allows undergraduate researchers to receive feedback from notable scientists in their field of study and teach them about the publication process. Publication of their work will not only inform the scientific community; it …

Abortion In Context, Jeanne Marecek

Psychology Faculty Works

Across the world, abortion is one of the commonest gynecological procedures and, properly carried out, one of the safest. However, some 25% of the world’s population lives in countries where legal statutes largely prohibit abortion, forcing women to seek clandestine abortions that often are unsafe. This chapter surveys legal, social, cultural, and political aspects of abortion, pointing to stark differences in women’s access to abortion in different locales and at various points in history. It also describes the wide range of methods that women have used to end an untenable pregnancy, including traditional methods such as botanical preparations and massage …