Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Fitting Proportional Odds Models To Educational Data With Complex Sampling Designs In Ordinal Logistic Regression, Xing Liu, Hari Koirala

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

The conventional proportional odds (PO) model assumes that data are collected using simple random sampling by which each sampling unit has the equal probability of being selected from a population. However, when complex survey sampling designs are used, such as stratified sampling, clustered sampling or unequal selection probabilities, it is inappropriate to conduct ordinal logistic regression analyses without taking sampling design into account. Failing to do so may lead to biased estimates of parameters and incorrect corresponding variances. This study illustrates the use of PO models with complex survey data to predict mathematics proficiency levels using Stata and compare the …

Classification Of Satellite Time Series-Derived Land Surface Phenology Focused On The Northern Fertile Crescent, Brian Embree Bunker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Land surface phenology describes events in a seasonal vegetation cycle and can be used in a variety of applications from predicting onset of future drought conditions, to revealing potential limits of historical dry farming, to guiding more accurate dating of archeological sites. Traditional methods of monitoring vegetation phenology use data collected in situ. However, vegetation health indices derived from satellite remote sensor data, such as the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), have been used as proxy for vegetation phenology due to their repeated acquisition and broad area coverage. Land surface phenology is accessible in the NDVI satellite record when images …

Personalized News Recommender Using Twitter, Satya Srinivasa Nirmal Jonnalagedda

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Online news reading has become a widely popular way to read news articles from news sources around the globe. With the enormous amount of news articles available, users are easily swamped by information of little interest to them. News recommender systems are one approach to help users find interesting articles to read. News recommender systems present the articles to individual users based on their interests rather than presenting articles in order of their occurrence. In this thesis, we present our research on developing personalized news recommendation system with the help of a popular micro-blogging service "Twitter". The news articles are …

Your Love Is Public Now: Questioning The Use Of Personal Information In Authentication, Payas Gupta, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most social networking platforms protect user's private information by limiting access to it to a small group of members, typically friends of the user, while allowing (virtually) everyone's access to the user's public data. In this paper, we exploit public data available on Facebook to infer users' undisclosed interests on their profile pages. In particular, we infer their undisclosed interests from the public data fetched using Graph APIs provided by Facebook. We demonstrate that simply liking a Facebook page does not corroborate that the user is interested in the page. Instead, we perform sentiment-oriented mining on various attributes of a …

Integrating, Developing, And Testing Methods To Generate More Cohesive Approaches To Biogeographic Inference, Mallory Elizabeth Eckstut

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

As a fundamental component of the developing discipline of conservation biogeography, broadscale analyses of biotic assembly and disassembly across multiple temporal and spatial scales provide an enhanced understanding of how geologic transformations and climate oscillations have shaped extant patterns of biodiversity. As with any scientific field, there are limitations in the case of biogeographic historical reconstructions. Historical reconstructions are only as robust as the theoretical underpinnings of the methods of reconstruction (including data collection, quality, analysis, and interpretation). Nevertheless, historical reconstructions of species distributions can help inform our understanding of how species respond to environmental change.

My dissertation takes a …

The Evaluation Of Water Storage In Death Valley Using Grace Satellite Data, Maile Sweigart

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

As drought conditions spread across the United States, concerns over water supplies, water use, and water management policies are growing and possible contributing environmental factors are continually being scrutinized. This thesis examines Death Valley as an analog for Southern Nevada and utilizes NASA EOS data, combined with ancillary climate data, to assess the effect of decadal climate variability on groundwater storage in the Death Valley area. Historical climate data, combined with satellite imagery observations, were compiled and calculated for analyses. Conclusions derived from statistical analyses infer trends between GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite data and fluctuating levels of …

Congressional Preferences And The Advancement Of American Nuclear Waste Policy, Rhoel Gonzales Ternate

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The problem of nuclear waste disposal has existed since the time of the Manhattan Project in World War II. Although there exist a number of technological hurdles, the main cause that has consistently plagued a solution to nuclear waste has been the politics behind it. This thesis attempts to add to the political literature behind nuclear waste disposal by examining the nuclear waste disposal preferences of members of the United States House and Senate. It then compares and contrasts those preferences with a report by President Obama's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future. The hope was to determine if …

Traffic Modeling In Lagrangian Coordinates Using Smartphone Apps, Sergio Contreras

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Traditionally, one of the ways traffic flow has been studied is by using the kinematic wave model. This model is derived in the Eulerian framework by using conservation of the number of vehicles. Recently, the kinematic wave model has been transformed into Lagrangian coordinates. In this framework, the independent variables are unique

vehicles and time. The detailed change in framework, and the properties of the model in the changed framework are reviewed. Numerical results from different traffic cases are explained. Since vehicle trajectory data can be easily collected from smartphones,

a smartphone application is developed for this purpose. This data …

Geotechnics And Regionalism: The Lineage Of Thought From John Wesley Powell To Benton Mackaye, Nikkilee Cataldo

Muskie School Capstones and Dissertations

John Wesley Powell and Benton MacKaye, each developed exceptionally comprehensive and innovative regional planning visions that had a great deal in common. They both were Jeffersonian idealists, who considered those who tilled the soil and worked the land for primary production a class of men above all the rest.

This paper will explore some of the fundamental theory behind the work of both Powell and MacKaye, as well as examples of the plans that they developed. It will become clear that the two men were working from very similar theoretical vantage points, though in relatively different socio-political eras. It will …

A Policymaker's Guide To Feed-In Tariffs: Encouraging A Responsible Transition To Renewable Electricity In California, Roland P. Thayer

Pomona Senior Theses

The feed-in tariff is a flexible, yet effective mechanism in promoting the proliferation of renewable electricity in California. The tariff creates a stable investment environment that protects both the utilities and the renewable electricity generators. Not only does the system foster capacity growth, but also technological advancement to the point where renewable electricity can compete in the market without assistance. From an environmental standpoint, the feed-in tariff contributes significantly towards achieving the emissions reduction goals set forth by AB32 without causing harmful increases to electricity prices.

The feed-in tariff model has been used in countries all over the world and …

Breckenridge Shelter Geoarchaeology, Trevor John Seekamp

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My graduate research mainly focuses on Breckenridge Shelter (3CR002), Carroll County, Arkansas. As a geoarchaeologist, my concerns are geomorphological and geological processes affecting the shelter and surrounding hill slope. Breckenridge is one of several similar, Pine Hollow bluff shelters, about Beaver Lake, an impoundment of the White River, in northwest Arkansas.

Communication Artifacts And Interaction Evaluation For Requirements Engineering, Miloslava Plachkinova

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This paper aims to answer an important question regarding the development of new information systems (IS): "What is the predominant factor for the selection of communication artifacts for requirements engineering (RE)?". Many researchers have focused on the RE and communication as separate disciplines, but little or no research addressed the RE communication issues. These problems are important because they often lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the gathered requirements. We develop expectations about the RE communication process based on prior literature from both disciplines and we test them through several case studies. Our methodology consists of analysis of six case …

Comparison Of Liquid-Liquid Extraction And Solid Phase Extraction Of Mephedrone, Brittany Simone Love

Master's Theses

Legal high drugs are modified scheduled drugs. As with any new drug, researchers have to conduct studies to gather information about the drug. The problem with obtaining accurate information on new drugs is that by the time information is gathered, drug abusers and street chemists have developed new ones. Comparing designer drugs to their illegal counterparts is often helpful in that it can provide a starting point. Mephedrone is a new designer drug that has become a problem over the past few years. Often marketed as bath salts and plant food, mephedrone has become the knockoff replacement for amphetamines. This …

Factors In Mobile Game Design, Robert Mccloud, Ardiana Sula, Carrie A. Picardi

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Mobile is the fastest growing area for computer gaming. Fueled by the every growing sales of handheld devices, the increasing comfort of gamers with their devices, larger screens and availability of casual games, mobile games offer the developer an area of rapid growth. In this paper we report on the commencement of research that attempts to identify the key development concepts for a mobile game. Gamers’ locus of controlis examined to determine the extent to which this personality trait impacts both interest level and type of game. We consider two mobile games, Grand Theft Auto and Edge, in an attempt …

Unified Entity Search In Social Media Community, Ting Yao, Yuan Liu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tao Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The search for entities is the most common search behavior on the Web, especially in social media communities where entities (such as images, videos, people, locations, and tags) are highly heterogeneous and correlated. While previous research usually deals with these social media entities separately, we are investigating in this paper a unified, multilevel, and correlative entity graph to represent the unstructured social media data, through which various applications (e.g., friend suggestion, personalized image search, image tagging, etc.) can be realized more effectively in one single framework. We regard the social media objects equally as “entities” and all of these applications …

The Consciousness Of Water: Narrative Flows, Environmental Change, And The Voice Of Yemen, Tricia Nellessen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Icebergs are melting in the Arctic. The Gulf of Mexico is warming and producing hurricanes such as Katrina. The delta of the southern United States is drying. And, Yemen will be the first country in modern history to experience a lack of accessible ground water, as soon as 2017 possibly. Yemen's situation has been tracked by scholars and governments since the 1960s. Despite this fact, cities have expanded in Yemen and the population has increased its use of water while little has been invested in desalination or infrastructure to offset growth. Climate change has affected humans for thousands of years; …

Concurrent Neurological And Behavioral Assessment Of Number Line Estimation Performance In Children And Adults, Joseph Michael Baker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Understanding the brain’s response to common math-learning activities may help improve math education. For example, by imaging the brains of typically developing children and adults throughout a number line estimation task, it is possible to establish a baseline of what “typical” brains do in such situations. Thus, comparisons may be made to determine the degree to which brain functioning differs between typical and atypical math learners. Moreover, by identifying methods that may increase the brain’s response to real-world math activities, it may be possible to improve the math learning process for typical and atypical learners alike.

Brain imaging devices such …

Student Motivation For Pursuing A Minor In Environmental Sustainability, Luanne Woods Lewis

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Environmental sustainability dominates the global conversation seeking to increase awareness and change the culture of thinking concerning the relationship between humans and the Earth. Because many universities offer programs relative to environmental sustainability, a need exists to understand why students pursue these programs. This study examined student motivation for pursuing an environmental sustainability minor in one institution of higher education. Career, learning, monetary, and Social responsibility were the motivational factors considered in this study. The results of this study indicated significant differences among the motivational factors for pursuing a minor in sustainability among those students surveyed. Significant differences existed for …

Agricultural Production And Stability Of Settlement Systems In Upper Mesopotamia During The Early Bronze Age (Third Millennium Bce), Tuna Kalayci

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the relationship between rainfall variation and rain-fed agricultural production in Upper Mesopotamia with a specific focus on Early Bronze Age urban settlements. In return, the variation in production is used to explore stability of urban settlement systems. The organization of the flow of agricultural goods is the key to sustaining the total settlement system.

The vulnerability of a settlement system increases due to the increased demand for more output from agricultural lands. This demand is the key for the success of urbanization project. However, without estimating how many foodstuffs were available at the end of a production …

Impact Of Multimedia In Sina Weibo: Popularity And Life Span, Xun Zhao, Feida Zhu, Weining Qian, Aoying Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimedia contents such as images and videos are widely used in social network sites nowadays. Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service, is one of the first microblog platforms to incorporate multimedia content sharing features. This work provides statistical analysis on how multimedia contents are produced, consumed, and propagated in Sina Weibo. Based on 230 million tweets and 1.8 million user profiles in Sina Weibo, we study the impact of multimedia contents on the popularity of both users and tweets as well as tweet life span. Our preliminary study shows that multimedia tweets dominant pure text ones in Sina Weibo. Multimedia …

Fragmented Social Media: A Look Into Selective Exposure To Political News, Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Jon Crowcroft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people crave like-minded information and eschew information that conflicts with their beliefs, and that has negative consequences on political life. Yet, despite decades of research, this hypothesis remains theoretically promising but empirically difficult to test. We look into news articles shared on Facebook and examine whether selective exposure exists or not in social media. We find a concrete evidence for a tendency that users predominantly share like-minded news articles and avoid conflicting ones, and partisans are more likely to do that. Building tools to counter partisanship on social media would require the ability …

Retweeting: An Act Of Viral Users, Susceptible Users, Or Viral Topics?, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

When a user retweets, there are three behavioral factors that cause the actions. They are the topic virality, user virality and user susceptibility. Topic virality captures the degree to which a topic attracts retweets by users. For each topic, user virality and susceptibility refer to the likelihood that a user attracts retweets and performs retweeting respectively. To model a set of observed retweet data as a result of these three topic specific factors, we first represent the retweets as a three-dimensional tensor of the tweet authors, their followers, and the tweets themselves. We then propose the V 2S model, a …

A Semantic Situation Awareness Framework For Indoor Cyber-Physical Systems, Pratikkumar Desai

Kno.e.sis Publications

Recently, the domain of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) has emerged as a successor to the traditional embedded systems and the wireless sensor networks. The relatively new cyber-physical domain offers tight integration of control, communication and computation components to develop advanced web based application in various heterogeneous domains such as health care, disaster management, automation and environment monitoring. The applications of indoor CPSs include remote patient monitoring, smart home, etc. with focus on situation awareness via event identification from context information. The principal challenges associated with the development of situation awareness applications include uncertainty in contextual data, incomplete domain knowledge, interoperability between …

Development Of A Comprehensive Database System For A Highway Safety Engineering And Management, Naveen Veeramisti, Justin Baker, Indira Khanal, Kenny Moupita, Alexander Paz

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

In simple words, the objective of this study is to develop a comprehensive database system to provide a data for highway safety engineering and management.

Calibration Of Traffic Flow Models, Victor Molano

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

This study proposes a methodology to calibrate microscopic traffic flow simulation models. A Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA) algorithm searches for the set of model parameters that minimizes the difference between actual and simulated values

Development Of A Smart Application For Police Crash Reports, Sebastien Bonnet, Victor Molano, Alexander Paz

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

• Gaining a significant amount of time to help police work
• Developing a User Friendly Interface
• Optimizing the GPS Gaining a significant amount of time to help police work
• Developing a User Friendly Interface
• Optimizing the bar code scan technology
• Application for MC 75 mobile technology

Owners’ Satisfaction Level With The Use Of Alternative Project Delivery Methods In Water And Wastewater Infrastructures, Pramen Shrestha, Jacimaria R. Batista

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

In 2013, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Report Card for America’s Infra-structure stated that the US needs up to $1.3 trillion in capital investments to replace the aging water pipes and repair the wastewater infrastructures. It is further believed by the industry that the streamlined approach of alternative project delivery methods, such as Design-Build (DB), and Construction Manager At-Risk (CMAR) helps ensure the economical and timely design and construction of the water and wastewater infrastructures.

A Visualization Tool For A Highway Safety Management System, Indira Khanal, Naveen Veeramisti, Justin Baker, Alexander Paz

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

• With lot of research, Federal Highway Administration
  has released a highway Safety management System
  software called as SafetyAnalyst (SA)
• SA has a suite of analytical tools to identify and
  manage system-wide safety improvements:
  Network Screening
  Diagnosis and Countermeasure Selection
  Economic Analyses and priority Ranking
  Countermeasure Evaluation
• SA provides a very rudimentary approach to display
  results just in tabular and textual format
• This study proposes a visualization tool that expands
  the output capabilities provided by SafetyAnalyst

Actual Vs. Perceived Value Of Players Of The National Basketball Association, Stephen Righini

Honors Projects in Mathematics

Over the past few decades the media has played an increasingly large role in shaping how player effectiveness in the National Basketball Association (NBA) is perceived. Several factors have caused fans, announcers, and even NBA team management to have unintentional bias toward certain players. This study aims to utilize various formulas created by NBA statisticians, called Player Raters, to identify how efficient each NBA player actually is in comparison to the rest of the league. Data from the past 12 seasons was compiled and six Player Raters were used to place values on every NBA player since the 2000-2001 season. …

The Santa Clara, 2013-04-25, Santa Clara University

The Santa Clara

No abstract provided.