Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Understanding Students’ Global Interdependence In Science Instruction, Walter S. Smith

Journal of Global Education and Research

Multiple American educational organizations such as the National Education Association, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and the Council of Chief State School Officers have advocated for globalizing the K-12 curriculum. The National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) in a position statement on international education and the Next Generation Science Standards have produced goals and standards for internationalizing the science curriculum by addressing topics such as climate change, environment, and disease that cross borders. In contrast to those pronouncements on the curriculum, this article views global science education through an instructional lens that focuses on a students’ global interdependence in science …

Crystal Structure Prediction Of Materials At Extreme Conditions, Ashley S. Williams

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The prediction of the structure of a crystal given only the constituent elements is one of the greatest challenges in both materials science and computational science alike. If one were to try to predict a novel crystal by brute force, meaning by arranging the atoms in every possible position of the unit cell and optimizing the geometry to find the energy minima of the potential energy surface, the amount of computer resources required to complete the calculation on the timescale of a few years would vastly exceed the currently installed computational capacity of the entire world. Fortunately, several methods have …

Carbon And Other Low-Z Materials Under Extreme Conditions, Jonathan T. Willman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work is focused on understanding material's behavior and response to extreme conditions. Under extreme conditions, which is categorized as regions of high pressures and temperatures in (P-T) space, materials can undergo multiple types of phase transitions as well as exhibit substantial damage as well as other exotic behaviors. By studying matter at these extreme conditions, we can elucidate a broad range of fundamental physics including a material's energetic, mechanical, and electronic responses. This thesis describes work that makes contributions to the growing body of knowledge within these subsets of condensed matter physics. In the first thrust, crystal structure prediction …

Texturing In Bi2Te3 Alloy Thermoelectric Materials: An Applied Physics Investigation, Oluwagbemiga P. Ojo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Thermoelectric devices provide the means for direct conversion between heat and electricity. The device conversion efficiency, or performance, is directly related to the thermoelectric figure of merit, ZT, of the working materials. Bismuth telluride alloys are the materials currently in use in most thermoelectric devices for near room temperature solid-state refrigeration and power conversion applications. The vast majority of publications in the literature on thermoelectricity report on investigations towards developing new materials with enhanced thermoelectric properties, however Bi₂Te₃ alloys have been used in thermoelectric devices for decades.

In this thesis, an investigation of crystallographic texturing on large …

Vermiculations In Painted Caves: New Inputs From Laboratory Experiments And Field Observations, Perrine Freydier, Eric Weber, Jérôme Martin, Pierre-Yves Jeannin, Béatrice Guerrier, Frédéric Doumenc

International Journal of Speleology

Vermiculations are aggregates of small particles commonly found on cave walls. They are a major concern for the conservation of painted caves, as they can potentially alter valuable prehistoric cave paintings. A previous rheological study of fine sediment deposits on cave walls revealed that this material can undergo a solid-to-liquid transition triggered by variations in the chemical composition of the water film on the wall. Such a transition could occur at the origin of vermiculations by allowing the sediment to flow under low mechanical stress. In this work, we provide quantitative information on the conditions leading to this transition and …

The Early Medieval Transition: Diet Reconstruction, Mobility, And Culture Contact In The Ravenna Countryside, Northern Italy, Anastasia Temkina

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research project evaluates the effects of increased mobility and culture contact on dietary practices, and on dietary variation among people buried at two northern Italian sites, Chiunsano di Ficarolo and Chiesazza di Ficarolo, located near the ancient Roman capital of Ravenna and dating 4th to 7th century CE. The Early Medieval period was a time of change, political instability, migration and invasion of the “barbarian” tribes, and diet was not unaffected. In particular, it is hypothesized that a new staple crop, millet, was introduced and that meat consumption had increased. The goal of this research is to use stable …

Pregnancy And Fertility Amongst Women With The Mthfr C677t Polymorphism: An Anthropological Review, Caroline A. Maclean

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Effects of the MTHFR C677T allele on reproduction include multiple complications. The frequency of births with neural tube defects, Down Syndrome, or recurrent pregnancy loss of CC, CT, and TT mothers was measured using data collected from existing literature. Total participants n=2605 (n=1111 cases, n=1494 controls). Results show that folic acid supplementation did not prevent the incidence of NTD pregnancy in CT women. Furthermore, CT women are more fecund overall, producing more pregnancies than CC and TT women. While CT case women did have higher incidences of RPL, NTD pregnancy and DS pregnancy, this is due to the overall greater …

Identifying Skeletal Puberty Stages In A Modern Sample From The United States, Jordan T. Wright

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Investigating the onset and progression of puberty can provide insight and evidence for social changes regarding the transition to adulthood. There are also many social factors that can lead to variation in the timing of the onset and progression of puberty. Methods created by Mary Lewis and Fiona Shapland for assessing changes in skeletal development associated with pubertal timing were applied to computerized tomography scans (n=400) from the New Mexico Decedent Image Database and recorded in an attempt to identify adolescent growth trends in a modern skeletal sample from the United States. This is a novel study using the methods …

Listening To Women: Using A Mixed-Methods Approach To Understanding Women’S Desires And Experience During Childbirth, Nicole Loraine Falk Smith

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is based on evolutionary medicine and applied anthropological research where the narratives and biology of modern women are used to inform evolutionary theory, specifically obligate midwifery, and modern birth practices. Improvements to the US maternity care systems are needed as rates of maternal mortality and morbidity are continually higher than rates in other technologically advanced nations. Additionally, women birthing under the technocratic model of care, as is predominant in the US, report trauma and post-traumatic stress disorders due to their birthing experience, and more women are experiencing postpartum depression. Thus, I seek to use an evolutionary medicine perspective …

Probing The Ground State Magnetism In Materials With Competing Magnetic Interactions, Richa Pokharel Madhogaria

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Materials with competing magnetic interactions provide a unique combination of intriguing physics originating from structural, magnetic, and electronic degrees of freedom, along with their technological applications. The complex oxides and helimagnets also share an interesting physics involving competitive interactions and understanding the behavior of one helps us to yield an insight into the other system. A rigorous understanding about the competing interactions in strongly correlated magnetic systems provide an opportunity to explore the related effects like spin frustration, glassiness, metamagnetism, which play an essential role in manipulating their magnetic properties and functionality. In this dissertation, we combine dc magnetization [M(H,T)], …

Third-Order Frequency-Resolved Photon Correlations From A Single Quantum Dot's Resonance Fluorescence, Yamil A. Nieves González

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The ability to control the photon emission from light sources has sparked an increasing interest in the field of quantum optics due to potential applications in the development of quantum technologies. Motivated by such applications, photon statistics have been a powerful investigative tool used to characterize the properties of light sources capable of emitting a bundle of N photons. As such, the first-order and second-order photon correlations continue to be researched extensively providing invaluable information about the light and the mechanism underlying its generation. Meanwhile, third-order photon correlations have remained majorly unexplored due to the high degree of experimental challenges …