Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Late Paleo-Indian Period Lithic Economies, Mobility, And Group Organization In Wisconsin, Ethan Adam Epstein

Theses and Dissertations

The following dissertation focuses upon the organization of Pleistocene / Holocene period lithic technology in Wisconsin circa 10,000 – 10,500 years before present. Lithic debitage and flaked stone tools from the Plainview/Agate Basin components of the Heyrman I site (47DR381), the Dalles site (47IA374), and the Kelly North Tract site at Carcajou Point (47JE02) comprise the data set. These Wisconsin sites are located within a post glacial Great Lakes dune environment, an inland drainage/riverine environment, and an inland wetland/lacustrine environment. An assemblage approach is used to examine the structure of each site’s lithic economy. This broad approach to lithic organization …

An Integrated Environmental Analysis Framework For Multi-Functional Urban Food Production Utilizing Nutrient Recycling From Organic Waste Streams, William Kort

Theses and Dissertations

Increasing enthusiasm for local food, including urban agriculture, has piqued research interest in the tenets underlying perceived benefits of localizing food production. This study develops and demonstrates the application of a comprehensive framework for the life cycle environmental assessment of the utilization of urban organic wastes in urban agriculture, specifically fruit and vegetable production. Results indicate that this full “urban nutrient cycle” may have significant environmental benefits in terms of land area requirements, water use, wastewater generation, nutrient recovery, environmental contamination and green infrastructure potential, compared to more conventional methods of waste processing and food production. Urban intensive food production …

Three Essays On The Effects Of Appraisal, Cultural, Emotional, And Cognitive Factors On Information Technologies Acceptance And Use, Chun-Lung Huang

Theses and Dissertations

In essay 1, we propose a model, which utilized Lazarus and Folkman’s Cognitive Appraisal Theory of Emotion or Appraisal Theory (1984, 1987) as a structural foundation to lay out the nomological relationships among a person’s personal, cognitive, and emotional factors in predicting technology use behaviors. Emotion, likes many social and psychological factors, is challenging to give a full-consensus definition, and has been treated as a polar counterpart of cognition. Lazarus and Folkman’s Appraisal Theory suggested that when a person is facing a (disruptive) event, he or she appraises the possible outcomes (we suppose that appraising is a form of cognitive …

Writing English Sentences More Effectively By Avoiding Arabian Students’ Typical Mistakes, Alaa Mohammed Alsharif

Theses and Dissertations

In Arabic speaking countries like Saudi Arabia, English is considered as the most important second language to be taught and used. Unfortunately, a sizeable percentage of students there appear to still have significant difficulty learning English, possibly due to the difficulty in finding sufficiently qualified teachers. This type of problem is self-perpetuating since the taught students might become weak teachers in the future also. This thesis aims to address the problem of helping Arabic students to improve their writing in English and to help them learn so that they will make fewer mistakes in the future and possibly become better …

A Machine-Aided Approach To Generating Grammar Rules From Japanese Source Text For Use In Hybrid And Rule-Based Machine Translation Systems, Sean Michael Jones

Theses and Dissertations

Many automatic machine translation systems available today use a hybrid of pure statistical translation and rule-based grammatical translations. This is largely due to the shortcomings of each individual approach, requiring a large amount of time for linguistics experts to hand-code grammar rules for a rule-based system and requiring large amounts of source text to generate accurate statistical models. By automating a portion of the rule generation process, the creation of grammar rules could be made to be faster, more efficient and less costly. By doing statistical analysis on a bilingual corpus, common grammar rules can be inferred and exported to …

Neurobehavioral And Gene Expression Effects Of Early Embryonic Methylmercury Exposure In Yellow Perch (Perca Flavescens) And Zebrafish (Danio Rerio) Larvae, Francisco Xavier Mora Zamorano

Theses and Dissertations

Methylmercury (MeHg) is a pervasive and persistent neurotoxic environmental pollutant known to affect the behavior of fish, birds and mammals. The present study addresses the neurobehavioral and gene expression effects of MeHg in yellow perch (Perca flavescens) and zebrafish (Danio rerio) embryos. The rationale for this study originated from an interest to understand the behavioral and molecular phenotypes of environmental MeHg exposure in the yellow perch, an ecologically and economically relevant species of the North American Great Lakes region. Both MeHg and the yellow perch coexist in a common ecosystem: the North American Great Lakes. However, the effects of this …

The Impact Of International Water Treaties On Transboundary Water Conflicts: A Study Focused On Large Transboundary Lakes, Victoria Eileen Lubner

Theses and Dissertations

Lakes are the largest reservoir of available surface freshwater on Earth, representing an irreplaceable ecosystem, essential for all life. Despite the crucial need for these lakes, there has been minimal research focused on their health and security. There are over 1,600 transboundary lakes worldwide, which do not follow political borders and thus result in governance and management challenges. International water treaties have been cited to be a main mechanism for cooperation between riparian countries. This study researches the impact of international water treaties as well as economic, political, and environmental variables on transboundary water conflict between riparian countries of the …

Perceptions Of Bike Sharing In Underserved Communities Within Milwaukee And The Twin Cities, James Hannig

Theses and Dissertations

Despite becoming increasingly more popular in cities across North America, many bikeshare systems have received criticism for not reaching minority and low-income populations. Several bikeshare operators have implemented measures to reach these populations including removing financial barriers, placing stations in underserved neighborhoods, and partnering with various community organizations. However, until recently, few have explored how people in these underserved areas perceive bike sharing.

Feedback was solicited from key community partners in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota to better understand how bike sharing is perceived in underserved communities and to determine whether other models could better address the transportation needs …

Essays On Environmental Policy And Technological Change, Sahar Milani

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is comprised of three empirical essays on technological change. The first chapter examines how industrial R&D intensities respond to environmental regulations when considering specific industry characteristics such as pollution intensity and immobility. Specifically, I study the impact of environmental regulations on R&D intensities in 21 manufacturing industries in 28 OECD countries from 2000-2007. I consider pollution intensity and the relative ease of relocation (immobility) as industry characteristics that determine the optimal industry response to increased environmental policy stringency. I find that more pollution intensive industries innovate less as regulatory environments become more restrictive relative to less pollution intensive …

Relationships, Knowledge, And Resilience: A Comparative Study Of Stakeholder Participation In Great Lakes Areas Of Concern, Kathleen Colin Williams

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the current practices of environmental governance in the Great Lakes region, where at one time the rivers that fed the Great Lakes were choked with debris and on fire. The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1978 and the 1987 updates inspired collective action to remediate and restore the rivers and nearshore zones of the lakes through the implementation of an ecosystem approach, which included a public participation dimension. While funding and momentum has fluctuated, the constructs – Areas of Concern (AOC), Remedial Action Plans (RAP), and Public Advisory Councils (PAC) persist. In 2010, the Great Lakes …

Informational Power On Twitter: A Mixed-Methods Exploration Of User Knowledge And Technological Discourse About Information Flows, Nicholas John Proferes

Theses and Dissertations

Following a number of recent examples where social media users have been confronted by information flows that did not match their understandings of the platforms, there is a pressing need to examine public knowledge of information flows on these systems, to map how this knowledge lines up against the extant flows of these systems, and to explore the factors that contribute to the construction of knowledge about these systems. There is an immediacy to this issue because as social media sites become further entrenched as dominant vehicles for communication, knowledge about these technologies will play an ever increasing role in …

Spatial Dimensions Of Tower Karst And Cockpit Karst: A Case Study Of Guilin, China, Wei Huang

Theses and Dissertations

Tower karst (fenglin) and cockpit karst (fengcong) are two globally important representative styles of tropical karst. Previously proposed sequential and parallel development models are preliminary, and geomorphological studies to date do not provide enough satisfactory evidence to delineate the spatial and temporal relation between the two landscapes. This unclear interpretation of tower-cockpit relationships not only obscures understanding of the process-form dynamics of these tropical karst landforms, but also confuses their definition. Moreover, previous technological limitations, as well as the fragmental nature of the karst landscapes, has limited incorporation of geologic and other data into broad geospatial frameworks based on geographic …

Text Mining Of Patient Demographics And Diagnoses From Psychiatric Assessments, Eric James Klosterman

Theses and Dissertations

Automatic extraction of patient demographics and psychiatric diagnoses from clinical notes allows for the collection of patient data on a large scale. This data could be used for a variety of research purposes including outcomes studies or developing clinical trials. However, current research has not yet discussed the automatic extraction of demographics and psychiatric diagnoses in detail. The aim of this study is to apply text mining to extract patient demographics - age, gender, marital status, education level, and admission diagnoses from the psychiatric assessments at a mental health hospital and also assign codes to each category. Gender is coded …

Inferential Procedures For Dominance Analysis Measures In Multiple Regression, Shuwen Tang

Theses and Dissertations

In order to better interpret a selected multiple regression model, researchers are often interested in whether a predictor is significantly more important than another or not. This study investigates the performance of the Normal-Theory based (asymptotic) confidence interval and bootstrap confidence intervals for predictors' dominance relationships using both normal and non-normal data. The results show that asymptotic confidence interval method is adequate to make inferences for comparing two general dominance measures when the distribution is multivariate normal or slightly non-normal and when the effect size is no less than 0.15 and the sample size is at least 100. However, the …

Mind & Matter: The Discursive Construction Of The Iphone In Apple's Advertising, Nicholas Stratton

Theses and Dissertations

The widespread adoption of smartphone technology in the contemporary United States requires critical reflection on its role within society. This thesis compares the way Apple's television advertising discourse, from 2007 to 2011, frames the iPhone to consumers with the way Apple's iAd promotional material frames the iPhone to advertisers, and considers what the disparity between these two frameworks says about the still-evolving role of smartphone technology in society. It argues that the disparity between these two frameworks is indicative of a fundamental tension within smartphone technology. This tension is reflected in Apple's ability to discursively construct the iPhone as a …

Complex Network Analysis For Scientific Collaboration Prediction And Biological Hypothesis Generation, Qing Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

With the rapid development of digitalized literature, more and more knowledge has been discovered by computational approaches. This thesis addresses the problem of link prediction in co-authorship networks and protein--protein interaction networks derived from the literature. These networks (and most other types of networks) are growing over time and we assume that a machine can learn from past link creations by examining the network status at the time of their creation. Our goal is to create a computationally efficient approach to recommend new links for a node in a network (e.g., new collaborations in co-authorship networks and new interactions in …

The Implications Of Content Analysis For The Interpretation Of Unguentaria In Museum Collections, Jenna L. Mortensen

Theses and Dissertations

Scent has traditionally been an ephemeral component of rituals in ancient societies, including burial and other practices associated with the anointing of the body (Classen et al. 1994: 43; Houston and Taube 2000: 271). This thesis investigates the possible signifiers and social impact such scents might have had for individuals participating in such rituals by using the little explored approach of sensory archaeology. A discussion of the correlation between olfaction and the triggering of both the experiential and emotional aspects of memory contributes to a broader view of these rituals in the anthropological literature (Classen et al. 1994), while Houston …

#Mplp: A Comparison Of Domain Novice And Expert User-Generated Tags In A Minimally Processed Digital Archive, Edward A. Benoit Iii

Theses and Dissertations

The high costs of creating and maintaining digital archives precluded many archives from providing users with digital content or increasing the amount of digitized materials. Studies have shown users increasingly demand immediate online access to archival materials with detailed descriptions (access points). The adoption of minimal processing to digital archives limits the access points at the folder or series level rather than the item-level description users' desire. User-generated content such as tags, could supplement the minimally processed metadata, though users are reluctant to trust or use unmediated tags. This dissertation project explores the potential for controlling/mediating the supplemental metadata from …

Urban River Restoration And Environmental Justice: Addressing Flood Risk Along Milwaukee's Kinnickinnic River, Nicholas Joel Schuelke

Theses and Dissertations

Flood risk has only recently received attention in environmental justice research. Few `flood justice' studies in the US have focused on urban inland flooding or flood control efforts. I develop a conceptual framework of a paradigm shift from a technocratic, utilitarian approach to river engineering to that of bioengineering and public participation. Qualitative analysis of a combination of archival, interview, and observational data is conducted using the Kinnickinnic River in Milwaukee as a case study. I demonstrate that the channelization of the river in the early 1960s was largely the result of political pressures following significant flood events, rather than …

Impacts Of Spatial, Environmental, And Compositional Differences On Community-Level Flowering Phenology, Isaac William Park

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates three important topics related to flowering phenology throughout the United States. First, this work evaluates the utility of herbarium records for estimating historical variation in community-level flowering phenology, and evaluate the relationship of such estimates to satellite-derived greenup timing at regional scales. This dissertation then reconstructs historical variations in flowering phenology throughout the spring, summer, and autumn across South Carolina for the years 1951 through 2009. These estimates will then be compared to seasonal temperature variations throughout this period. Finally, this dissertation develops novel herbarium-based methods to separate intraspecific phenological variations over space from changes in flowering …

Google Books As Infrastructure Of In/Justice: Towards A Sociotechnical Account Of Rawlsian Justice, Information, And Technology, Anna Lauren Hoffmann

Theses and Dissertations

The Google Books project is germane for examining underappreciated dimensions of social justice and access to information from a Rawlsian perspective. To date, however, the standard account of Rawls as applied to information and technology has focused almost exclusively on rights to access and information as a primary good (Drahos 1996; van den Hoven and Rooksby 2008; Duff 2011). In this dissertation, the author develops an alternative to the standard account--the sociotechnical account--that draws on underappreciated resources available within discussions of Rawls' work. Specifically, the author focuses on the importance of Rawls' basic structure argument and the value of self-respect--two …

Re-Examining An Air Mass-Based Approach To Detecting Structural Climate Change, 1948-2011, Joseph James Larsen

Theses and Dissertations

Air mass-based approaches to observing changes in climate can have considerable value beyond simple trends of temperature and moisture, providing more thorough understanding of structural climate patterns. Few methodologies have adequately characterized recent air mass modification, however. This research seeks to update and improve upon the methods of a prior study, providing new data from 1948-2011, as well as more rigorous statistical analyses. Air mass types were created, and monthly averages of temperature, dewpoint, and relative frequency were calculated for each of the air masses in all four seasons; then the time series were submitted to regression analysis. The results …

Landscape Ecological Analysis Of Patterns Influencing Bat Activity In Southeast Glacial Plains Of Wisconsin, Angela Leckie Jackson

Theses and Dissertations

Nearly half of the world's bat species are threatened by anthropogenic land use. To contribute to the conservation of these cryptic mammals, it is imperative to understand bat habitat selection in human-dominated landscapes. Bat activity was calculated using active acoustic surveys conducted June and July for three years along river and lake transects in an agricultural matrix. Using multiple logistic regression and ANOVA regression tree analyses, I examined the relationship between bat activity of four species and habitat structure at multiple scales.

Aquatic features were determined to be the greatest predictor of bat activity with rivers supporting greater amount of …

Examining Spring And Autumn Phenology In A Temperate Deciduous Urban Woodlot, Rong Yu

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an intensive phenological study in a temperate deciduous urban woodlot over six consecutive years (2007-2012). It explores three important topics related to spring and autumn phenology, as well as ground and remote sensing phenology. First, it examines key climatic factors influencing spring and autumn phenology by conducting phenological observations four days a week and recording daily microclimate measurements. Second, it investigates the differences in phenological responses between an urban woodlot and a rural forest by employing comparative basswood phenological data. Finally, it bridges ground visual phenology and remote sensing derived phenological changes by using the Normalized Difference …

Bi- And Multi Level Game Theoretic Approaches In Mechanical Design, Ehsan Ghotbi

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents a game theoretic approach to solve bi and multi-level optimization problems arising in mechanical design. Toward this end, Stackelberg (leader-follower), Nash, as well as cooperative game formulations are considered. To solve these problems numerically, a sensitivity based approach is developed in this dissertation. Although game theoretic methods have been used by several authors for solving multi-objective problems, numerical methods and the applications of extensive games to engineering design problems are very limited. This dissertation tries to fill this gap by developing the possible scenarios for multi-objective problems and develops new numerical approaches for solving them.

This dissertation …

Global Technical Communication And Content Management: A Study Of Multilingual Quality, Tatiana Batova

Theses and Dissertations

The field of technical communication (TC) is facing a dilemma. Content management (CM) strategies and technologies that completely reshape writing and translation practices are adopted in an increasing number of TC work groups. One driving factor in CM adoption is the promise of improving quality of multilingual technical texts, all the while reducing time/cost of technical translation and localization. Yet, CM relies on automation and privileges consistency¯an approach that is problematic in global TC with its focus on adapting texts based on the characteristics of end-users.

To better understand the interdisciplinary dilemma of multilingual quality in CM, during my dissertation …

Regionalization Of Hydrologic Response In The Great Lakes Basin: Considerations Of Temporal Variability, Jonathan Martin Kult

Theses and Dissertations

Methods for predicting streamflow in areas with limited or nonexistent measures of hydrologic response commonly rely on regionalization techniques, where knowledge pertaining to gaged watersheds is transferred to ungaged watersheds. Hydrologic response indices have frequently been employed in contemporary regionalization research related to predictions in ungaged basins. In this study, regionalization models were developed using multiple linear regression and regression tree analysis to derive relationships between hydrologic response and watershed physical characteristics for 163 watersheds in the Great Lakes basin. These models provide a means for predicting runoff in ungaged basins at a monthly time step without implementation of any …

Rapid Knowledge Assessment (Rka): Assessing Students Content Knowledge Through Rapid, In Class Assessment Of Expertise, Erin Margaret O'Connell

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding how students go about problem solving in chemistry lends many possible advantages for interventions in teaching strategies for the college classroom. The work presented here is the development of an in-classroom, real-time, formative instrument to assess student expertise in chemistry with the purpose of developing classroom interventions. The development of appropriate interventions requires the understanding of how students go about starting to solve tasks presented to them, what their mental effort (load on working memory) is, and whether or not their performance was accurate. To measure this, the Rapid Knowledge Assessment (RKA) instrument uses clickers (handheld electronic instruments for …

Decadal Changes And Future Projections Of Precipitation In The Metropolitan Area Of Milwaukee, Anke Petra Maria Keuser

Theses and Dissertations

This research investigated decadal changes and future projections of precipitation in the Metro Milwaukee and surrounding area, the largest urban area in Wisconsin. Spatial and temporal precipitation patterns derived for the Metro Milwaukee from the high-resolution gridded historical climatic dataset for Wisconsin were analyzed for 1950-2006. In addition, precipitation scenarios were generated via statistical downscaling of the Third Generation Coupled Global Climate Model (CGCM3) outputs. The delta method was chosen for the statistical downscaling of the CGCM3 output for the two future time periods, 2041-2070 (2050s) and 2071-2100 (2080s). The Mann-Kendall test and the Sen's slope test were applied to …