American Studies Commons^™

Assessment Of Resource Selection Using Remote Sensing And Geographic Information Systems (Gis) For Two Vertebrates In Disparate Habitats: The Gopher Tortoise (Gopherus Polyphemus) And The North Atlantic Right Whale (Eubalaena Glacialis), Cherie A. Keller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a treatise on spatially-explicit resource selection on two very different vertebrate species. The North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) is the most endangered large whales in the world. Ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement are impediments to recovery. The gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) is an imperiled species whose upland habitats are shrinking from urban and agricultural development. Determining spatial distribution of important resources is important for conservation strategies. Historical and modern thinking of habitat selection theory and analytical techniques are reviewed and applied to these species. Fine-scale resource selection of sea surface temperature …

An Analysis Of Pedagogical Strategies: Using Synchronous Web-Based Course Systems In The Online Classroom, Shauna J. Schullo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated a synchronous web-based course system (SWBCS) as a supplement todistance learning courses. Although challenges exist (such as the complex interface and potentialtechnological problems); these systems hold the potential to enhance the distance learning experiencethrough increased interaction, immediacy, social presence, group work, and collaboration.

Using a rigorous blend of research methods, the study investigated the following questions: (1) what types of pedagogical strategies do instructors implement, (2) how do instructors utilize the tools, (3) which tools do instructors choose to use, (4) why do instructors use the tools and strategies that they choose, and (5) what perceptions do …

African American Adult Education Professors: Perceptions Of Graduate Studies In Adult Education, Sharon Gatling Waldrum

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to provide historical and philosophical information regarding the field of Adult Education from the perspective of 15 African Americans. This studys design utilized the findings from African-American Adult Educators (A-AAE) to add to the depth and breadth of information about Adult Education by engaging participants in reflective dialogue regarding the field and their experiences.

This qualitative design used semi-structured interviews to obtain information about the relationships among and influences of major professors and dissertation committees. The study included influences, direct and indirect, as well as influential authors, books, and publications. Adult Education was analyzed …

Area Access Control Systems: Zone Management And Personnel Tracking, Bharath Natarajan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Area access control is defined as the process of mediating requests to enter a physical area through one or more entry points. Area access control database systems are the collections of information required for an access control system to access, query, retrieve and match real time user inputs with persistent data to ensure the integrity of the resources it protects. This thesis presents an object oriented approach to the design and implementation of a centralized area access control database system and focuses on two features, zone management and personnel tracking. Zone management is defined as the process of hierarchically …

The Effect Of Knowledge Gain On Capital Punishment: A Partial Test Of The Marshall Hypothesis, Alexander Able Savon

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Justice Thurgood Marshall proposed a three-pronged postulate in his dissent in1972 in the Furman v. Georgia (408 U.S. 238) Supreme Court case. The American public is generally uninformed when it comes to the death penalty, and given information a "great mass of citizens" would be against it, unless their underlying beliefs were rootedin retribution (Furman v. Georgia, p. 363). These statements subsequently came to be known as the Marshall Hypothesis, and were deemed testable by researchers.

This study examines the influence on death penalty opinion as a consequence of participating in a college class on the death penalty. …

Integrated Pricing And Seat Allowance For Airline Network Revenue Management, Baskar Mohan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The airline industry is facing unprecedented challenges in generating sufficient revenues to stay in business. Airlines must capture the greatest revenue yield from every flight by leaving no seats unsold and not over filling the cabin with discount fares. To succeed in doing the above airlines must be able to accurately forecast each of their market segments, manage product andprice availability to maximize revenue and react quickly to competitive changes in the market place. Thus seat inventory control and ticket pricing form the two major tools of revenue management. The focus of this paper is to consolidate the ideas of …

Organic Vapor Sensing Using High Frequency Thickness Shear Mode Resonators, Randolph Williams

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Thickness shear mode (TSM) sensors, also known as quartz crystal micro-balances (QCM) are a class of acoustic wave sensors that have been used for gas/vapor sensing. Fast and sensitive chemical vapor sensing, specifically of hydrocarbon vapors is an important application for these vapor sensors. The TSM sensors typically used have a lower sensitivity compared with other acoustic wave sensors. This thesis describes the development of high sensitivity organic vapor sensors using thin polymer film coatings on TSM devices. Commercially available AT-quartz TSM devices were milled leaving a thin quartz membrane surrounded by a thicker outer ring. This resulted in an …

Implant Annealing Of Al Dopants In Silicon Carbide Using Silane Overpressure, Shailaja P. Rao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this research is to develop a post-implantation annealing process in silicon carbide (SiC). Due to the low diffusivities of dopants in SiC, even at temperatures in excess of 2000°C, diffusion is not a suitable process to achieve selective, planar doping. Ion implantation is therefore the most suitable means for achieving selective doping in SiC crystals. The strong covalent bonding in SiC requires that selective doping be performed via high-energy ion implantation. As a consequence of the high ion energy and flux, there is considerable lattice damage to the crystal surface. To repair the damage caused by the …

Characterization Of The Dopaminergic Potential Of The Human Ntera2/D1 (Nt2) Cell Line In Vitro, Iwona E. Misiuta

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Our laboratory is working with the human NTera2/D1 (NT2) cell line which have properties similar to progenitor cells in the CNS. These neural-like precursors cells can differentiate into all three major lineages - neurons, astrocytes, andoligodendrocytes. The pure neuronal population, called the hNT cells, possess characteristics of dopamine (DA) cells. In this dissertation, we performed various experiments to examine the neuronal and dopaminergic development of this cellline. We first cultured our hNT neurons with cells from the developingnigrostriatal (NS) pathway, the ventral mesencephalon and striatum, to determine their influence on survival, neuritic outgrowth, and DA phenotype. The survival ofhNT neurons …

Perceptions On Policy: The Effects Of The U.S. Greater Middle East Initiative On Egyptian Political Attitudes, Maureen M. Mansour

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the political attitudes of seven educated Egyptians from Alexandria, Egypt. It seeks to understand their interpretations of the U.S. democratization policy in the Middle East, the Greater Middle East Initiative. The goal is to understand if these Egyptians are receptive to the suggestion of democratic reforms and Egypt. Personal interviews with open-ended questions allowed for individual insights and rich depth of information.

Interviews were conducted in Alexandria, Egypt as a traditionally liberal city with a long history of exposure to Western ideas. The respondents are a part of a small elite subgroup of Egyptian society. As …

Using Video Modeled Social Stories To Increase The Social Communication Skills Of Children With High Functioning Autism/Asperger’S Syndrome, Frank J. Sansosti

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of individualized video-modeled Social Story interventions on the social communication skills of three children with High Functioning Autism/Aspergers Syndrome (HFA/AS). Using a multiple-baseline across participants design, video-modeled Social Stories were implemented and direct observations of the participants identified target behaviors were collected two times per week during unstructured school activities (e.g., recess). Overall, data demonstrated that video modeled Social Stories were effective for improving the rates of social communication for the participants, though modifications to allow access to social reinforcement was needed in two cases. In addition, all three participants …

Interaction Patterns And Web-Structures Of Resonant Solitons Of The Kadomtsev-Petviashvili Equation, Anupama Tippabhotla

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, the interaction pattern for a class of soliton solutions of the Kadomtsev- Petviashvili (KP) equation (−4u_t + u_xxx + 6uu_x )_x + 3u_yy = 0 is analyzed. The complete asymptotic properties of the soliton solutions for y → ±∞ are determined. The resonance characteristic of two sub-classes of the soliton solutions, in which N_- incoming line solitons for y → −∞ interact to form N₊ outgoing line solitons for y → ∞, is described. These two specific sub-classes of (N_-,N₊)-soliton solutions are the following:

1) [(2, …

A Web100-Dummynet Testbed For Education And Research In Transport Layer Protocols, Steven Bassi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With recent developments in technology broadening the complexity and performance issues of computer networks, more work is being put into studying the behavior of network protocols under various new environments. As it stands today, TCP is the dominant protocol for communicating over the Internet. It has been shown to be reliable and efficient in the relatively low-bandwidth networks it was designed for. With the increasing availability of high-speed optical, wireless, and ad hoc networks, more research is being done to study new TCP variants that will perform well under these new environments. In order to perform such work, researchers require …

A Vision-Based Approach For Unsupervised Modeling Of Signs Embedded In Continuous Sentences, Sunita Nayak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The common practice in sign language recognition is to first construct individual sign models, in terms of discrete state transitions, mostly represented using Hidden Markov Models, from manually isolated sign samples and then to use them to recognize signs in continuous sentences. In this thesis we use a continuous state space model, where the states are based on purely image-based features, without the use of special gloves. We also present an unsupervised approach to both extract and learn models for continuous basic units of signs, which we term as signemes, from continuous sentences. Given a set of sentences with a …

One More River To Cross: The Therapeutic Rhetoric Of Race In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Nigel I. Malcolm

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The rhetoric of W.E.B. Du Bois contributed both to a sense of group failure among blacks and a sense of individual failure. Du Bois also created a need to explain the reasons for the failure of the group, as well as that of individuals within the group, specifically those within a segment of the black population deemed the talented tenth. Today the talented tenth is more generally spoken of as those occupying positions within the black middle class. Explanations for failure among blacks as a group are generally of two kinds. The first posits that the failure blacks experience as …

A Theoretical Description Of The Vibrational Sum Frequency Generation Spectroscopy Of Interfaces, Angela S. Perry

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Our work investigates theoretical approximations to the interface specific sum frequency generation (SFG) spectra at aqueous interfaces constructed using time correlation function (TCF) and instantaneous normal mode (INM) methods. Both approaches lead to signals in excellent agreement with experimental measurements. This work demonstrates how TCF and INM methods can be used in a complementary fashion to describe interfacial vibrational spectroscopy.

Our approach is to compare TCF spectra with experiment to establish that our molecular dynamics (MD) methods can reliably describe the system of interest. We then employ INM methods to analyze the molecular and dynamical basis for the observed spectroscopy. …

A Fuzzy Logic Based Controller To Provide End-To-End Congestion Control For Streaming Media Applications, Bay Pavlick

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The stability of the Internet is at risk if the amount of voice and video traffic continues to increase at the current pace. While current transport layer protocols do work well for most applications, they still present some problems. TCP is reliable, tracks the state of some network conditions and reacts drastically to an indication of congestion. TCP serves data-oriented applications very well but it can lead to unacceptably low quality for streaming applications by multiplicatively reducing the congestion window upon a sign of congestion. The other main transport layer protocol, UDP, provides good service for streaming applications but is …

Facial Strain Maps As A Biometric Source, Sangeeta J. Kundu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Current two dimensional face recognition methods rely on visible photometric or geometric attributes that are present in the intensity image. In many of these approaches a technique called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is extensively used. PCA extracts the maximum intensity variations from the set of input images in the form of "eigen" faces which are used as a feature vector. In these approaches the intensity images used were mostly that of the subject's frontal face, which yielded promising results after doing PCA. These approaches however fail in the presence of facial expression, unstable lighting conditions and artifacts such as make-up, …

Cervical Cancer Screening Disparities In An Ethnically Diverse Population Of Women Residing In The United States In 1999: A Secondary Analysis Of Data From The 1999 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, Chodaesessie Wellesley-Cole Morgan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Black American women have the highest screening rates for cervical cancer among all the ethnic groups in the United States. Even though evidence from the literature suggests that the number of deaths from cervical cancer in the United States could be reduced by preventive screening, this particular minority population still suffers disproportionately higher mortality from the disease than the other minority and majority populations in the United States. This study was proposed to investigate cancer screening disparities among different subpopulations of women residing in the United States during 1999, and to recommend public health interventions that could potentially increase cervical …

Perceived Competency In Female Primary Caregivers Of Infants And Toddlers With Medical And/Or Developmental Disabilities, Berney J. Wilkinson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research has clearly demonstrated that variables associated with the family, child, and utilization of social supports relate to parent perceived competency. However, the research has failed to demonstrate which variable best predicts parent perceived competency. The primary goals of this study were to identify those variables that account for the most variability in parent perceived competency, to examine the relative effects of child characteristics on parental psychopathology, and to evaluate the moderating effects of social support on parent perceived competency based upon various parental characteristics. Participants for this survey study consisted of a convenience sample of 91 female primary caregivers …

Analysis Of Statnamic Load Test Data Using A Load Shed Distribution Model, Sonia L. Lowry

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the field of civil engineering, particularly structural foundations, low-cost options and time saving construction methods are important because both can be a burden on the public. Drilled shafts have proven to both lower cost and shorten construction time for large-scale projects. However, their integrity as load-carrying foundations has been questioned. The statnamic load test was conceived in the 1980s as an alternative method of testing these larger, deeper foundation elements. Performing a load test verifies that the load carrying capacity of a foundation is agreeable with the estimated capacity during the design phase and that no significant anomalies occurred …

Effects Of Using Graphing Calculators With A Numerical Approach On Students’ Learning Of Limits And Derivatives In An Applied Calculus Course At A Community College, Arumugam Muhundan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the effects of using graphing calculators with a numerical approach designed by the researcher on students learning of limits and derivatives in an Applied Calculus course at a community college. The purposes of this study were to investigate the following: (1) students achievement in solving limit problems (Skills, Concepts, and Applications) with a numerical approach compared to that of students who solved limit problems with a traditional approach (primarily an algebraic approach); and (2) students achievement in solving derivative problems (Skills, Concepts, and Applications) with a numerical approach compared to that of students who solved derivative problems …

Sputum Induction Literature Review And Proposal For A Protocol, Indrek Melder

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sputum induction by inhalation of hypertonic saline has been used for more than15 years. It has become one of the most intriguing methods to study airway inflammation. It is the only direct, non-invasive method for measuring airway inflammation indices.Sputum induction has been used in the diagnosis of many respiratory illnesses including asthma, chronic pulmonary obstructive disease, tuberculosis, chronic cough, lung cancer and Pneumocystis Carinii on patients who are unable to produce sputum spontaneously. There are currently many different methods used worldwide to induce sputum, but there is a lack of one generally accepted gold standard method.

The proposed protocols for …

Human Umbilical Cord Blood Cells Migration To Stroke Cns Tissue Extracts And The Potential Cytokines And Chemokines Involved, Mary B. Newman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Human umbilical cord blood (HUCB) cells consist of a heterogeneous population of cells, rich in hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells. These cells have been used in the treatment of various nonmalignant and malignant hematopoietic diseases. With in the last few years HUCB cells have been used in pre-clinical animal models of brain and spinal cord injuries, in which functional recovery has been shown. The properties of cord blood cells that could be important in cell transplantation (repair or replacement) of CNS injury or disease are currently being evaluated. The major focus of this study was to determine whether HUCB cells …

The Relationship Between Professional Training Experiences And School Psychologists’ Work With Parents Of Children With Adhd, Rebecca Sarlo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between several school psychologist variables and overall engagement in parent training/education activities with the parents of children with ADHD. Specifically, school psychologists were surveyed regarding their general attitude toward parent-focused activities, role profiles, intensity of training, perception of barriers/facilitators, and frequency of engagement in parent training/education activities.

Participants included 163 school-based school psychologists in Florida who were members of FASP. Data were collected through the use of an Internet survey. Hypotheses were analyzed using correlations and a backward multiple regression analysis.

Results indicated that school psychologists in Florida were engaging …

Topology, Morphisms, And Randomness In The Space Of Formal Languages, David E. Kephart

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper outlines and implements a systematic approach to the establishment, investigation, and testing of distances and topologies on language spaces. The collection of all languages over a given number of symbols forms a semiring, appropriately termed a language space. Families of languages are defined by interrelations among words. The traditional classification begins with the syntax rules or grammar of the language, that is, the word-transformations by which the entire language can be produced from a single axiom, or starting word. The study of distances between languages as objects and of the topologies induced by language distances upon spaces of …

The Rapid Unexpected, Daniel Pantano

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

These lyric poems were written between August 2003 and June 2005 and bear witness to the human condition in all its facets, from birth and the first taste of lemon ice to exile and suicide. Within a landscape that encompasses many locales, the poems included here attempt to portray the particular to denote the universal and are always confronted by the ineffable connection between the two.

Virtual Cadaver Navigation System: Using Virtual Reality For Learning Human Anatomy, Abhijit V. Lothe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The use of virtual reality (VR) for visualization can revolutionize medical training by simulating real world medical training procedures through intuitive and engaging user interface. Existing virtual reality based visualization systems for human anatomy are based on 3D surface and volumetric models and simulative systems based on model libraries. The visual impact as well as facilitation for learning are inadequate in such systems. This thesis research is aimed at eliminating such inadequacies by developing a non-immersive virtual reality system framework for storage, access and navigation of real human cadaveric data. Based on this framework, a real time software system called …

Effects Of Adoptive Transfer Of Beta-Amyloid Sensitive Immune Cells In A Mouse Model For Alzheimer’S Disease, Daniel Shippy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

One major therapeutic target for preventing and treating Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is removal of excess β-amyloid (Aβ) from the brain. Both active and passive immunotherapies targeting Aβ have proven effective in reducing brain Aβ levels and improving cognitive function in mouse transgenic models of AD. However, these approaches can induce adverse neuropathologic effects and immunologic over-activation. Indeed, clinical trials of active Aβ immunotherapy in AD patients were halted due to development of meningoencephalitis, apparently resulting from wide-spread neuroinflammation. Here we show that a more restricted and specific immune re-activation through a single adoptive transfer of Aβ-specific T cells can provide …

Performance Optimization In Three-Dimensional Programmable Logic Arrays (Plas), Supriya Sunki

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Increased chip size and reduced feature size has helped following Moores law for long decades. This has an impact on interconnect length, which is resulting in chip performance degradation. Despite the introduction of new materials with Low-K dielectrics for interconnects, their delay is expected to substantially limit the chip performance. To overcome this problem the need for new technology has arrived. One such promising technology is the three-dimensional Integrated chips (3D ICs) with multiple silicon layers.

In this thesis, three dimensional integrated chip (3D IC) technology has been implemented on programmable logic arrays (PLAs). The two-dimensional PLAs are converted to …