Digital Commons Network^™

Redhawks Reckon With Resignation, Matt Price, Cielita Maguddayao

The Spectator Online

No abstract provided.

Redhawks Men's Soccer Soar In Spectacular Fashion To Win The Wac, George Burquest

The Spectator Online

No abstract provided.

Application Of Optimization Techniques In Corporate Cash Management, Venkateswara Reddy Dondeti

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

For any individual person or firm, there is a trade-off between carrying too much or too little cash on hand to meet the day-to-day transactions demand for cash. The BAT model, named after three eminent economists, Baumol, Allais, and Tobin, is the foundation for almost all cash management models in use today. The goal of the BAT model is to minimize the total costs involving the brokerage fees and the opportunity cost of interest lost on the cash held on hand. The brokerage fees are incurred in connection with the transactions for liquidating securities and converting them into cash. The …

Intention-Behavior Discrepancies For Alcohol Consumption Among College Students, Emily Kaye Junkin

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Unplanned drinkers may experience elevated risk for drinking-related harm. Research examining unplanned drinking focuses on the unplanned nature of a drinking episode (i.e., did the student drink when no drinking was planned), yet this does not capture the importance of the unintended quantity consumed. For instance, a discrepancy between drinking intentions and actual consumption has the potential to differentially impact alcohol-related outcomes beyond what is accounted for by unplanned drinking episodes. Further, research has not investigated how college students’ unintended drinking is associated with alcohol-related consequences. Moreover, utilization of protective behavioral strategies (PBS) has been shown to decrease negative outcomes …

Integrated Processing Of Municipal Solid Waste For Maximizing Waste Reduction, Carbon Recovery And Fuel Production, Kameron J. King

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Nationally and internationally, waste generation is increasing and along with it negative environmental impacts. Many people think waste ends at disposal; however, environmental impacts have already begun. Unfortunately, 50% of waste ends up in a landfill which is the third largest source of human related methane emissions and a leading cause of global climate change. This study investigated a novel waste management strategy in hopes of mitigating negative environmental effects caused by conventional waste management practices. The novelty of the study lies in the development of an integrated method of hydrothermal carbonization and an anaerobic digestion (HTC + AD) process …

How Leader And Follower Mindfulness Relate To Performance And Ocb Through Conversation Quality And Empathy: A Moderated Mediation Model, Arianna White-Levatich

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Interest within the organizational research community regarding mindfulness has recently surged. Little research, however, has examined how employees’ mindfulness may influence interactions between leaders and followers. This study examined how followers’ trait mindfulness related to two specific aspects of dyadic interactions: leader – member conversational quality (LMCQ) and follower empathy toward a leader. Further, the study examined how this influence extended (via LMCQ and leader-oriented empathy) to task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), two important workplace outcomes for followers. Leader mindfulness was also expected to have a significant influence on the relationships, in that it was expected to strengthen …

The Impact Of A Crisis Intervention Team Program On Psychiatric Boarding, Kurtis Hooks

Counseling & Human Services Theses & Dissertations

Psychiatric boarding is the phenomenon of housing individuals in emergency departments while awaiting access to mental health services in the community. The expansion of psychiatric boarding is attributed to continued deinstitutionalization and under-resourcing of mental health services. Psychiatric boarding is also associated with deleterious outcomes for individuals in need of access to behavioral health services, facilities. There is limited research on programmatic efforts to reduce psychiatric boarding as it pertains to Crisis Intervention Team programs colocated in medical settings. Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) programs are community-based, multi-stakeholder partnerships that include dedicated assessment centers crisis response and referral. This study utilized …

Towards Characterizing Adversarial Opportunity And Behavior In Critical Infrastructure Network, Md Sharif Ullah

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The growth of information and communication technology is constantly revolutionizing various domains, e.g., energy utility systems, healthcare, the internet of things, etc. This inception of widespread cyber technology enables reliability and first operability of the system, yet simultaneously imposed a risk of significant impact due to disruption of safe and secure operation. The attack surface is expanding, creating a cyber exposure gap which indicates a higher threat landscape and increased risk of compromise. Motivated by this increased threat exposure, this dissertation investigates the attack surface as a static and dynamic indicator of adversary propagation, seeking an efficient modeling paradigm to …

Joint Linear And Nonlinear Computation With Data Encryption For Efficient Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning, Qiao Zhang

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Deep Learning (DL) has shown unrivalled performance in many applications such as image classification, speech recognition, anomalous detection, and business analytics. While end users and enterprises own enormous data, DL talents and computing power are mostly gathered in technology giants having cloud servers. Thus, data owners, i.e., the clients, are motivated to outsource their data, along with computationally-intensive tasks, to the server in order to leverage the server’s abundant computation resources and DL talents for developing cost-effective DL solutions. However, trust is required between the server and the client to finish the computation tasks (e.g., conducting inference for the newly-input …

Hydrothermal Processes For Extraction And Conversion Of Biomass To Produce Biofuels And Value-Added Products, Anuj Hemant Thakkar

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

An integrated biorefinery approach based on subcritical hydrothermal processes was developed to maximize utilization of biomass components by producing multiple products. Biomass from various sources like agricultural waste (lignocellulose), food waste (spent yeast), and dedicated cultivation (micro-algae) was used in this research.

Corn stover (agricultural waste) was hydrothermally pretreated to remove lignin and xylan while preserving most of the glucan. The pretreated corn stover was utilized to produce levulinic acid (thermochemically) and fermentable sugars (biochemically). The solid residue generated during levulinic acid production was utilized to produce biocarbon electrode material. The results generated from the experiments were used for designing …

Lean Application: An Assessment Of 5s On Employee Attitudes And Productivity, Nickolaos Dimitrios Karvounis

STEMPS Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the effect of the implementation of 5S on employee attitudes and productivity in an Asian based facility of a global manufacturing company. Utilizing an assessment of the 5S implementation in various areas of the facility and organizational performance data for each of those areas, a non-experimental, causal comparative approach is used to analyze the impact. The study concluded that statistically significant improvements from the implementation of 5S were found both in quality and product cost for this facility; however, the study also found statistical significance where the implementation of 5S led to a decrease in performance and …

Mobilizing Discomfort For Water Security As A Human Right: A Newspaper Analysis Of Social Conflict In South Africa, Madison Gonzalez

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

There are 884 million people globally that do not have access to improved drinking water, while 2.5 billion do not have improved access to sanitation (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2010). Those living in informal settlements and slums—what I call the ‘solidaric disaffiliated’ zones—represent one such location where individuals around the world have found themselves in a situation of neglected crisis as their geographic, economic, and social expulsion pushes them beyond the reach of opportunity and access to basic human rights such as water and sanitation. As individuals feel their dignity deteriorating due to the extreme precarity …

Experiences Of Low-Income Student-Parents At A Community College During The Coronavirus (Covid-19) Pandemic, Marlena Yvonne Jarboe

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Theses & Dissertations

Twenty-two percent of United States undergraduate students are parents (Cruse, et al., 2020). Referred to as student-parents, they are most likely to have low-incomes and attend community colleges (Cruse, et al., 2019; Gault et al., 2014). They tend to reduce their course loads and drop out of college due to work-life balance challenges even though they typically have better grade point averages than their non-parent peers (Cruse et al., 2019; Manze, et al., 2021; Peterson, 2016).

The problem to be addressed was how community college instructors, leaders, and legislators can support low-income student-parents’ persistence toward a postsecondary credential. There is …

Estimating The Risk Of Future Plastic Marine Debris Resulting From The Urban Coastal Built Environment, Kelly C. Jones

OES Theses and Dissertations

The growing urban built environment in the coastal zone poses an unknown risk to the marine biosphere as a source of marine debris. Plastic, since its introduction in the mid- 1900s, is now used in nearly all aspects of human life. Growth in human population and urbanization in coastal zones has resulted in the accumulation of large stocks of plastic in the coastal built environment, and these stocks are still growing exponentially. The coastal zone is exposed to a number of hazards including storms, tsunamis, and sea level rise, and most of these hazards are expected to change in the …

Covid-19, Technology, And The Math Classroom: Changes, Obstacles, And Victories Integrating Digitally, Lauren Fifield Bellamy

Teaching & Learning Theses & Dissertations

Secondary math teachers faced new experiences and struggles this past virtual school year due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Nine secondary math teachers from a school division in southeastern Virginia participated in this qualitative single case study. Data collection included individual semi-structured interviews and technology integration artifacts. Through a three round coding process, ten themes emerged to answer the following three research questions: 1) In terms of curriculum, teaching methods, and assessments, how did teachers describe their pedagogical change in virtual learning? 2) How do teachers perceive student performance has changed within the virtual learning space? 3) From teachers’ perspectives, …

The Spooky Vein: The Reparative Gothic-Modern In The Works Of Richard A.W. Hughes, Corwin R. Baden

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the dual nature of Richard A.W. Hughes as a marginalized Gothicist and modernist. This duality facilitated the development of the author’s reparative vision for a 20th-century world traumatized by planetary war. The present study utilizes close readings—both surface and symptomatic—combined with archival research to assert that Hughes fashions this reparative imperative consistently across his corpus: in his short stories, poems, novels, stage plays, and screenplays. In his short stories, this vision includes an embrace of the Stranger, a shadowy Gothic figure whose possessions, power, difference, and familiarity lead the human subject from contestation, through representation, and toward …

Genetically Engineered Thermosynechococcus Elongatus Bp1: Assessment Of Potential Biorisks And Biofuel Production, Thu Ho Anh Nguyen-Jones

Chemistry & Biochemistry Theses & Dissertations

According to the International Energy Outlook 2019, released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, it is projected that the energy consumption will increase up to 50% between 2018 and 2050 worldwide. As fossil fuel being a finite source of energy with the risk of depletion, many countries are now facing an energy security crisis. Therefore, it is important to develop other renewable and sustainable energy sources that will allow countries to shift away from depending on fossil fuels. Among several types of renewable energy, biofuel production using genetically engineered cyanobacteria is capturing much interest due to its many advantages. Different …

Synthesis And Characterization Of 4,6-Protected Glucosamine Derivatives And Branched Glycoconjugates, Jonathan Bietsch

Chemistry & Biochemistry Theses & Dissertations

Low molecular weight gelators (LMWGs) are small molecules that self-assemble in appropriate solvents to form three dimensional networks that immobilize the solvent, creating a supramolecular gel. The self-assembly of LMWGs occurs through non-covalent interactions such as hydrogen bonding, aromatic interactions, donor-acceptor interactions, Van der Waals interactions, hydrophobic forces, halogen bonding, etc. Due to self-assembly occurring through reversible non-covalent interactions, supramolecular gels can undergo a gel to solution transformation. Because of this, these materials can be sensitive to external stimuli such as temperature changes, pH changes, and other stimuli that effect non-covalent interactions. This makes the synthesis of LMWG’s an appealing …

Interpreting Summer In The Parks In The National Capital Area Of The National Park Service, Brendan J. Kane

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Theses & Dissertations

Washington D.C. has witnessed many watershed events throughout the history of the United States of America. One of these events was the Summer in the Parks (SITP) program organized by the National Park Service (NPS) from 1968-1976. Summer in the Parks was a community-based series of events including concerts, park visits, and exhibitions designed to quell racial tensions and promote park usage. Researchers have begun chronicling SITP, but have yet to explore how the story of SITP is conveyed by park interpreters to visitors and subsequently what themes are shared to inform public understanding of the historic relationship between NPS …

Design, Synthesis And Characterization Of Carbohydrate Based Macrocycles, Photo Responsive Derivatives, And Glycoconjugates Based Low Molecular Weight Gelators, Surya Bahadur Adhikari

Chemistry & Biochemistry Theses & Dissertations

Functional glycoconjugates are important classes of compounds with many applications in different research fields. Our lab has been studying the synthesis and applications of different classes of glycoconjugates ranging from macrocycles to sugar heterocycle derivatives. Due to the importance of these compounds, our research is based on development of synthetic methods for various carbohydrate derivatives. This dissertation includes introduction and overview of projects, followed by the synthesis and studies of several different series of glycomacrolactones. The second project focuses on two classes of photoresponsive molecules, the coumarins and diarylethenes. The third project involves the synthesis and self-assembling properties of isoxazole-based …

Space Charge Effects In Low Energy Magnetized Electron Beams, W. M. Sajini Anushika Kumari Wijethunga

Physics Theses & Dissertations

Magnetized electron cooling of the ion beam is one of the major approaches towards obtaining the required high luminosity in the proposed Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). To increase the cooling efficiency, a bunched electron beam with a high bunch charge and high repetition rate is required. However, these features can combine to enhance the collective interactions, such as the space charge effect. A magnetized electron beam was successfully generated at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) using a compact, 300 kV DC high voltage photo-gun with an inverted insulator geometry and bi-alkali antimonide photocathode. The beam magnetization was characterized using …

Elementary Classroom Teachers’ Perceptions Of Redesigned Classroom Space: A Qualitative Case Study, Kristin Lee Pender

Teaching & Learning Theses & Dissertations

Classroom redesign is being recognized globally as necessary to better increase student’s enjoyment levels, engagement, collaboration, and learning. Instead of seeing traditional classrooms in a fixed setting where students are seated in rows facing the front of the room, classrooms are being arranged in multiple ways. As a result of this focus on redesigned learning spaces, there is a need to examine teachers’ perceptions about redesigned classroom spaces and understand the decisions behind their design. Thus, it is important to examine teachers’ perceptions of their classroom space to better understand if they consider their students learning needs, engagement levels, and …

Emotion Regulation Variability And Relationship Functioning In Emerging Adulthood, Laura B. Kenneally

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Emotion regulation is a transdiagnostic factor that functions as a crucial contributor to individual well-being and social functioning. Research seeking to identify adaptive or maladaptive strategies of emotion regulation has often focused on individual strategies, though emerging evidence suggests that what constitutes “adaptive” regulation is often context-dependent. Having a large repertoire of emotion regulation strategies that one is willing to use at different rates has been termed “emotion regulation variability,” and has been linked to positive individual outcomes. While the benefits of emotion regulation variability have been demonstrated on an individual level, the impact on romantic relationships has yet to …

Subtalar Joint Definition In Biomechanical Models, Julia Noginova

Biomedical Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The effect of including a subtalar joint in a dynamic musculoskeletal model has not been fully explored or validated. The subtalar joint is often modeled as a one DOF hinge with the tri-planar axis defined as a combination of inclination and deviation angles measured from the ground and midline of the foot, respectively. The overall purposes of this dissertation were to explore how the inclusion of the subtalar joint and the definition of origin location and axis orientation affect the kinematics, joint kinetics, and muscle activations of the knee, ankle, and subtalar joint during dynamic tasks of walking and running …

Phytoplankton Community Response To Upwelling Events: Distribution And Abundance Investigated Using Genomic Methods, Sveinn V. Einarsson

OES Theses and Dissertations

Upwelling events are known to support blooms of phytoplankton, important primary producers at the base of the oceanic food web. Phytoplankton community structure changes in response to upwelling support higher trophic level growth and increased efficiency of carbon export from the euphotic zone. While these events occur globally, this study examined upwelling in coastal regions, where alongshore winds can drive Ekman transport and upwelling of deeper waters. The two upwelling regimes examined were the California Current System and the Alaskan Beaufort Sea. In the California Current System, the relative diatom community composition was examined using 18S sequencing to determine how …

An Examination Of Environmental Applications For Uncooled Thermal Infrared Remote Sensing Instruments, Cody M. Webber

Theses

Advancements in system design for thermal instruments require assessment of potential environmental applications and appropriate data processing techniques. A novel multi-band thermal imaging system was proposed by DRS Leonardo for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Earth Science Technology Office Instrument Incubator Program, for which these criteria were assessed. The Multi-Band Uncooled Radiometer Imager (MURI) is a six spectral channel instrument designed to collect images in the thermal infrared, specifically in the range of 7.5 to 12.5 μm. The work detailed in this thesis characterizes the ability of a thermal imager with an uncooled microbolometer focal plane array to provide …

System Design Of Hybrid 350w Audio Receiver And Amplifier, Matthew Segada

Theses

Music, for thousands of years, has been at the center of social and cultural aspects to convey emotions and stories to a vast audience. In the modern world, the usage of digital audio has been the main method of consuming music; however, the method in which the translation of a digital audio signal to the analog realm is taken for granted. In this paper, a audio receiver was designed to accept a USB audio signal from any digital source and output an audio signal for headphones or speakers. The receiver was designed to output a maximum of 350W into speakers …

Among Us, Kaixin Chen

Theses

The networked society provides an extremely complex environment where we are free to swim, and to sink. In this thesis, I used different materials and forms to visualize this concept. The final work is a series of human faces floating from the water surface with steady gaze. Affected by the background of my sculpture and oil painting, I explored how to combine the two, and drew a 3D portrait, then completely transformed from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, and produced a set of installations with repeated face elements. With the experience and emotional response to working three-dimensionally, I once again returned to …

Modeling The Speed And Timing Of American Sign Language To Generate Realistic Animations, Sedeeq Al-Khazraji

Theses

While there are many Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH) individuals with excellent reading literacy, there are also some DHH individuals who have lower English literacy. American Sign Language (ASL) is not simply a method of representing English sentences. It is possible for an individual to be fluent in ASL, while having limited fluency in English. To overcome this barrier, we aim to make it easier to generate ASL animations for websites, through the use of motion-capture data recorded from human signers to build different predictive models for ASL animations; our goal is to automate this aspect of animation synthesis …

Measuring Shadows: Fpga-Based Image Sensor Control Systems For Next-Generation Nasa Missions, Irfan Rafi Punekar

Theses

Astronomy and astrophysics are fields of constant growth and exploration, and discoveries are being made every day. Behind each discovery, however, is the equipment and engineering that makes that science possible. The science and engineering go hand in hand in two ways: advances in engineering make new scientific discoveries possible, and new scientific questions create the need for more advanced engineering. The work that led to this thesis is an example of the latter statement. The big-picture goal is to support the development of next-generation detectors such as the Quanta Image Sensor (QIS), a gigapixel-scaleble Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) photon-number …