Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Improving Pure-Tone Audiometry Using Probabilistic Machine Learning Classification, Xinyu Song

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Hearing loss is a critical public health concern, affecting hundreds millions of people worldwide and dramatically impacting quality of life for affected individuals. While treatment techniques have evolved in recent years, methods for assessing hearing ability have remained relatively unchanged for decades. The standard clinical procedure is the modified Hughson-Westlake procedure, an adaptive pure-tone detection task that is typically performed manually by audiologists, costing millions of collective hours annually among healthcare professionals. In addition to the high burden of labor, the technique provides limited detail about an individual’s hearing ability, estimating only detection thresholds at a handful of pre-defined pure-tone …

Towards Food Service Sustainability In Suburban Environments By Optimally Locating Shared Anaerobic Digester Units, Rebecca Loraamm, Joni Downs, Robert Alonso Bair, Daniel Yeh

Suburban Sustainability

Anaerobic digestion is an effective method for reducing food waste at the consumer level. Drawbacks associated with this strategy include high construction costs for multiple digester units and limited public awareness of the method’s commercial potential. Given the large scale problem of food waste, an approach establishing community partnerships between local businesses and primary schools is offered to combat the problem of food waste. Optimizing the placement of shared digester units enabling utilization by multiple stakeholders is the suggested mitigation method. This research explores application of the p-median problem to determine the set of optimal sites for shared anaerobic digester …

Card Tricks: A Workflow For Scalability And Dynamic Content Creation Using Paper2d And Unreal Engine 4, Owen Gottlieb, Dakota Herold, Edward Amidon

Presentations and other scholarship

In this paper, we describe the design and technological methods of

our dynamic sprite system in Lost & Found, a table-top-to-mobile

card game designed to improve literacy regarding prosocial

aspects of religious legal systems, specifically, collaboration and

cooperation. Harnessing the capabilities of Unreal Engine’s

Paper2D system, we created a dynamic content creation pipeline

that empowered our game designers so that they could rapidly

iterate on the game’s systems and balance externally from the

engine. Utilizing the Unreal Blueprint component system we were

also able to modularize each actor during runtime as data may be

changed. The technological approach behind Lost …

Protecting The Environment: Awareness And Responsibility, Susan E. Mason, James J. Winkelman

Journal of Vincentian Social Action

Protecting the environment is not only the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do, in terms of both short-term and long term business goals. Green businesses can realize immediate financial benefits from environmental sustainability and energy conservation, and there are branding benefits associated with developing and maintaining a reputation for integrity and social responsibility. All participants first answered demographic questions and then responded to a ten-item questionnaire, which was a modified version of Simpson’s (1998) environmental awareness questionnaire. In conclusion, the study revealed gender, age, and political affiliation difference in environmental awareness.

Trade-Offs: The Production Of Sustainability In Households, Kirstin Marie Elizabeth Munro

Dissertations and Theses

Over the past half-century, environmental problems have become increasingly serious and seemingly intractable, and a careless, clueless, or contemptuous consumer is often portrayed as the root cause of this environmental decline. This study takes a different approach to evaluating the demand for resources by households, assessing possible pro-environmental paths forward through a study of highly ecologically-conscious households. By modeling "green" households as producers of sustainability rather than consumers of environmental products, the sustainability work that takes place in households is brought into focus. An investigation of household sustainability production makes possible the evaluation of the trade-offs inherent in these pro-environmental …

Acoustic Signatures Of Habitat Types In The Miombo Woodlands Of Western Tanzania, Sheryl Vanessa Amorocho, Dante Francomano, Kristen M. Bellisario, Ben Gottesman, Bryan C. Pijanowski

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The Miombo Woodlands of Tanzania comprise several habitat types that are home to a great number of flora and fauna. Understanding their responses to increasing human disturbance is important for conservation, especially in places where people depend so directly on their local ecosystem services to survive. Soundscapes are a powerful approach to study complex biomes undergoing change. The sounds emitted by soniferous fauna characterize the acoustic profile of the landscapes they inhabit such that habitats with the highest acoustic abundance are considered as the most diverse and possibly more ecologically resilient. However, acoustic variability within similar habitat types may pose …

Utilizing A Consumer-Grade Camera System To Quantify Surface Reflectance, Joseph J. Lehnert

Department of Geography: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Consumer-grade camera systems are often employed in aerial remote sensing to provide insight into patterns and processes of interest to science and industry, a trend that has largely been encouraged by the rapid growth of the small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS) industry. However, little research exists on the ability of these systems to accurately measure surface reflectance in specific wavebands, a crucial consideration for many remote sensing applications. This research was conducted on the premise that with proper equipment and calibration techniques consumer-grade cameras would be capable of accurately measuring surface reflectance in user-defined wavebands of interest. A stereo-pair, Fujifilm …

Breaking Into The Vault: Privacy, Security And Forensic Analysis Of Android Vault Applications, Xiaolu Zhang, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this work we share the first account for the forensic analysis, security and privacy of Android vault applications. Vaults are designed to be privacy enhancing as they allow users to hide personal data but may also be misused to hide incriminating files. Our work has already helped law enforcement in the state of Connecticut to reconstruct 66 incriminating images and 18 videos in a single criminal case. We present case studies and results from analyzing 18 Android vault applications (accounting for nearly 220 million downloads from the Google Play store) by reverse engineering them and examining the forensic artifacts …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 58 Number 3, August 2017, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

3 - PAINT BY NUMBERS By Harold Gutmann and Matt Morgan

4 - SUPERMAN By Sam Farmer

7 - A WILD GENEROSITY By Brian Doyle

Marketing Strategy Of School Of Professional Studies In China, Jiahui Liu, Jing Wang, Shuo An, Wengxing Wang, Yiwei Wang

School of Professional Studies

Chinese students are the most visible international presence at many universities across the United States, and the number continues to grow. Since 2010, The number of graduate students studying abroad has entered the period in which the increase has been declining. Under the circumstance of the weak global economy and high cost of education, the administration needs to attract the attention of Chinese students. In the process of competing for applicants, how to develop marketing strategies to attract students’ eyeballs has become an important means of trying to increase school income through Chinese students. The marketing strategy mentioned in this …

Spatial Models To Account For Variation In Observer Effort In Bird Atlases, Andrew M. Wilson, Daniel W. Brauning, Caitlin Carey, Robert S. Mulvihill

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

To assess the importance of variation in observer effort between and within bird atlas projects and demonstrate the use of relatively simple conditional autoregressive (CAR) models for analyzing grid-based atlas data with varying effort. Pennsylvania and West Virginia, United States of America. We used varying proportions of randomly selected training data to assess whether variations in observer effort can be accounted for using CAR models and whether such models would still be useful for atlases with incomplete data. We then evaluated whether the application of these models influenced our assessment of distribution change between two atlas projects separated by twenty …

Cybersecurity In An Age Of Cyberterrorism, University Of South Alabama

Crime/Violence

Bibliography and photographs of a display of government documents from the University of South Alabama.

Land Use And Land-Cover Change Detection And Its Effect On Bengal Tiger Mortality For Central India, Tania Banerjee

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This research investigates land use/land cover change in central India and it’s impacts on the tiger population. Central India is situated on the Deccan plateau with tropical climate patterns and includes two large states: Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. Central India has the largest tiger reserves in India. The land cover of this area is dominated by forest, agricultural land, and urban settlement. After the Green Revolution in the 1970s, the central India has undergone tremendous changes in land use/land cover. Time-series Landsat satellite imageries were processed and classified in a GIS environment to identify these land use/land cover changes. The …

Dental Microwear Textures Of Paranthropus Robustus From Kromdraai, Drimolen, And An Enlarged Sample From Swartkrans: Ecological And Intraspecific Variation, Alexandria Sachiko Peterson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The original microwear texture baseline for South African hominins was done by Scott et al. (2005) and concluded that Paranthropus robustus exhibited higher complexity values (Asfc) that are seen in occasional hard object feeders. Australopithecus africanus has higher anisotropy values (epLsar) consistent with consuming tough objects. This study expands upon this baseline by increasing the sample size from n = 9 for P. robustus and n = 10 for Au. africanus to n = 66 and n = 44, respectively. Additionally, this study incorporates multiple different sites and deposits. The P. robustus sample includes Drimolen, Kromdraai, and an expanded sample …

Essays On Common-Pool Resources: Evaluation Of Water Management And Conservation Programs, Kuatbay K. Bektemirov

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is comprised of three essays that examine water management and conservation programs through the context of sustainable development. These essays are distinct case studies of national, state and local policies. Their common approach is that they all use common-pool resources theory to generate specific recommendations for policymaking and water management.

The first essay explores opportunities for developing policy measures to prevent the collapse of the vital irrigation infrastructure in the Aral Sea region. The paper looks at the economic efficiency of various policy options, impacts on the country’s agricultural sector, and the regulations needed to make the cost-sharing …

Extending Difference Of Votes Rules On Three Voting Models., Sarah Schulz King

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In a voting situation where there are only two competing alternatives, simple majority rule outputs the alternatives with the most votes or declares a tie if both alternatives receive the same number of votes. For any non-negative integer k, the difference of votes rule M_k outputs the alternative that beats the competing alternative by more than k votes. Llamazares (2006) gives a characterization of the difference of votes rules in terms of five axioms. In this thesis, we extend Llamazares' result by completely describing the class of voting rules that satisfy only two out of his five axioms. …

Mapping The Ecology Of Information: Hierarchical Habitat Selection By Nebraska Pheasant Hunters, Lyndsie Wszola

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Hunting regulations are assumed to moderate the effects of hunting consistently across a game population. A growing body of evidence suggests that hunter effort varies temporally and spatially, and that variation in effort at multiple spatial scales can affect game populations in unexpected ways. We set out to determine the causes of variation in hunting effort among ring-necked pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) hunters at four spatial scales: among regions within the state of Nebraska, among sites within a given region, among access points at a given site, and among habitat patches within a site. At each scale, pheasant hunters used direct …

Remote Sensing Of The Environmental Impacts Of Utility-Scale Solar Energy Plants, Mohammad Masih Edalat

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Solar energy has many environmental benefits compared with fossil fuels but solar farming can have environmental impacts especially during construction and development. Thus, in order to enhance environmental sustainability, it is imperative to understand the environmental impacts of utility-scale solar energy (USSE) plants. During recent decades, remote sensing techniques and geographic information systems have become standard techniques in environmental applications. In this study, the environmental impacts of USSE plants are investigated by analyzing changes to land surface characteristics using remote sensing. The surface characteristics studied include land cover, land surface temperature, and hydrological response whereas changes are mapped by comparing …

A Cross-Sectional Exploration Of Household Financial Reactions And Homebuyer Awareness Of Registered Sex Offenders In A Rural, Suburban, And Urban County., John Charles Navarro

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As stigmatized persons, registered sex offenders betoken instability in communities. Depressed home sale values are associated with the presence of registered sex offenders even though the public is largely unaware of the presence of registered sex offenders. Using a spatial multilevel approach, the current study examines the role registered sex offenders influence sale values of homes sold in 2015 for three U.S. counties (rural, suburban, and urban) located in Illinois and Kentucky within the social disorganization framework. Homebuyers were surveyed to examine whether awareness of local registered sex offenders and the homebuyer’s community type operate as moderators between home selling …

Impact Of Home Visit Capacity On Genetic Association Studies Of Late-Onset Alzheimer's Disease, David W. Fardo, Laura E. Gibbons, Shubhabrata Mukherjee, M. Maria Glymour, Wayne Mccormick, Susan M. Mccurry, James D. Bowen, Eric B. Larson, Paul K. Crane

Biostatistics Faculty Publications

INTRODUCTION—Findings for genetic correlates of late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD) in studies that rely solely on clinic visits may differ from those with capacity to follow participants unable to attend clinic visits.

METHODS—We evaluated previously identified LOAD-risk single nucleotide variants in the prospective Adult Changes in Thought study, comparing hazard ratios (HRs) estimated using the full data set of both in-home and clinic visits (n = 1697) to HRs estimated using only data that were obtained from clinic visits (n = 1308). Models were adjusted for age, sex, principal components to account for ancestry, and additional health indicators.

RESULTS …

Digital Anti-Forensics: An Implementation And Examination, Stephanie Dachs

Student Theses

The rise of computer use and technical adeptness by the general public in the last two decades are undeniable. With greater use comes a greater possibility for misuse, evidenced by today’s incredible number of crimes involving computers as well as the growth in severity from that of cyber hooliganism to cyber warfare. Although frequently utilized for privacy and security purposes, the vast range of anti-forensic techniques has contributed to the ability for hackers and criminals to obstruct computer forensic investigations.

Understanding how anti-forensics may alter important and relevant data on an electronic device will prove useful for the success and …

Evaluating Relevance And Reliability Of Twitter Data For Risk Communication, Xiaohui Liu

Dissertations

While Twitter has been touted to provide up-to-date information about hazard events, the relevance and reliability of tweets is yet to be tested. This research examined the relevance and reliability of risk information extracted from Twitter during the 2013 Colorado floods using five different approaches. The first approach examined the relationship between tweet volume and precipitation amount. The second approach explored the relationship between geo-tagged tweets and degree of damage. In the third approach, the spatiotemporal distribution of tweets was compared with flood extent. In the fourth approach, risk information from tweets were compared with survey responses obtained in a …

Measuring Fine-Grained Metro Interchange Time Via Smartphones, Weixi Gu, Kai Zhang, Zimu Zhou, Ming Jin, Yuxun Zhou, Xi Liu, Costas J. Spanos, Zuo-Jun (Max) Shen, Wei-Hua Lin, Lin Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

High variability interchange times often significantly affect the reliability of metro travels. Fine-grained measurements of interchange times during metro transfers can provide valuable insights on the crowdedness of stations, usage of station facilities and efficiency of metro lines. Measuring interchange times in metro systems is challenging since agentoperated systems like automatic fare collection systems only provide coarse-grained trip information and popular localization services like GPS are often inaccessible underground. In this paper, we propose a smartphone-based interchange time measuring method from the passengers’ perspective. It leverages low-power sensors embedded in modern smartphones to record ambient contextual features, and utilizes a …

Smartphone Sensing Meets Transport Data: A Collaborative Framework For Transportation Service Analytics, Yu Lu, Archan Misra, Wen Sun, Huayu Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We advocate for and introduce TRANSense, a framework for urban transportation service analytics that combines participatory smartphone sensing data with city-scale transportation-related transactional data (taxis, trains etc.). Our work is driven by the observed limitations of using each data type in isolation: (a) commonly-used anonymous city-scale datasets (such as taxi bookings and GPS trajectories) provide insights into the aggregate behavior of transport infrastructure, but fail to reveal individual-specific transport experiences (e.g., wait times in taxi queues); while (b) mobile sensing data can capture individual-specific commuting-related activities, but suffers from accuracy and energy overhead challenges due to usage artefacts and lack …

The Role Of Knowledge Sharing Via Organizational Social Media In The Workplace, Murad A. Moqbel, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although a plethora of studies have been recently conducted on organizational social media, little research has specifically examined how organizational social media can contribute to organizational workers’ performance through knowledge sharing. The objective of this research is to fill this gap by investigating the role of knowledge sharing in organizational social media use and its effect on in-role and innovative performance through the lens of social capital and social cognitive theories. Hypotheses were developed and a survey study is proposed.

Numerical Methods For Option Pricing Under The Two-Factor Models, Jiacheng Cai

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Pricing options under multi-factor models are challenging and important problems for financial applications. In particular, the closed form solutions are not available for the American options and some European options, and the correlations between factors increase the complexity and difficulty for the formulations and implements of the numerical methods.

In this dissertation, we first introduce a general transformation to decouple correlated stochastic processes governed by a system of stochastic differential equations. Then we apply the transformation to the popular two-factor models: the two-asset model, the stochastic volatility model, and the stochastic interest rate models. Based on our new formulations, we …

Knowing Nature In The City: Comparative Analysis Of Knowledge Systems Challenges Along The 'Eco-Techno' Spectrum Of Green Infrastructure In Portland & Baltimore, Annie Marissa Matsler

Dissertations and Theses

Green infrastructure development is desired in many municipalities because of its potential to address pressing environmental and social issues. However, despite technical optimism, institutional challenges create significant barriers to effective green infrastructure design, implementation, and maintenance. Institutional challenges stem from the disparate scales and facility types that make up the concept of green infrastructure, which span from large-scale natural areas to small engineered bioswales. Across these disparate facilities 1) different performance metrics are used, 2) different institutions have jurisdiction, and, 3) facility types are differentially classified as assets, producing epistemological and ontological variegation across the spectrum of green infrastructure that …

Managing Sensor Systems For Early Detection Of Mild Cognitive Impairment In Community Elderly: Lessons Learned And Future Work, Boon Thai Ng, Hwee-Pink Tan, Hwee Xian Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The aging population is a pertinent issue faced by governments globally. One of the most common and costly health issues associated with the aging population is cognitive decline, leading up to dementia. In this paper, we describe a non-intrusive, continuous and scalable system for early detection of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) in the elderly, which enables early medical interventions to be provided. We focus on the system design and feature extraction of the sensor system, to validate our hypothesis of the use of sensor systems for early detection of MCI. Lessons learned from deploying the sensor system is presented, together …

Review Of Principles Of Computer Science, Ed. By Donald R. Franceschetti., Michael Knee

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

A review of "Principles of Computer Science" edited by Donald R. Franceschetti.

Generating Cultural Personas From Social Data: A Perspective Of Middle Eastern Users, Salminen Joni, Sercan Sengün, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard Jansen, Jisun An, Soon-Gyo Jung, Sarah Vieweg, D. Fox Harrell

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We conduct a mixed-method study to better understand the content consumption patterns of Middle Eastern social media users and to explore new ways to present online data by using automatic persona generation. First, we analyze millions of content interactions on YouTube to dynamically generate personas describing behavioral patterns of different demographic groups. Second, we analyze interview data on social media users in the Middle Eastern region to generate additional insights into the dynamically generated personas. Our findings provide insights into social media users in the Middle East, as well as present a novel methodology of using computational analysis and qualitative …