Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How Training Set And Prior Knowledge Affect Preschoolers' Perception Of Quantity And Early Number Learning, Arum Han

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines how training on the iPad can improve children’s quantity recognition, and whether different types of training might be warranted for children with different levels of experience. Study 1 tested the effects of multiple exemplar training (3 cars / 3 apples / 3 ducks, etc.) versus single exemplar training (3 cars / 3 cars / 3 cars, etc.) in recognizing quantities. For children just learning to recognize quantities (0-2 knowers), training with multiple exemplars was most effective for quantities three and four. For 3-6 knower children, single exemplar training was most effective for learning quantities five and six. …

Finding The Ghost With The Machine: Breaking Through The Assessment Center Validity Ceiling By Exploring Decisional Processes Using New Sources Of Behavioral Data Within Virtual Assessments, Brett W. Guidry

Open Access Dissertations

Decades of assessment center (AC) research has resulted in an inevitable “validity ceiling” whereby increasing the validity of the AC method is becoming increasingly difficult. To overcome this challenge, new avenues for collecting and evaluating AC participant behaviors must be explored, with a particular focus on overcoming the inherent limitations of human observation—a hallmark of the AC method. This study examines detailed logs of AC participant behaviors captured automatically and unobtrusively during a computer-based simulation assessment. Using a decision making framework, basic characteristics of the new behavioral data are tested against existing theories of decisional efficacy. The construct-related validity of …

Sounding Sacred: The Adoption Of Biblical Archaisms In The Book Of Mormon And Other 19th Century Texts, Gregory A. Bowen

Open Access Dissertations

The Book of Mormon is a text published in 1830 and considered a sacred work of scripture by adherents of the Latter-day Saint movement. Although written 200 years later, it exhibits many linguistic features of the King James translation of the Bible. Such stylistic imitation has been little studied, though a notable exception is Sigelman & Jacoby (1996).

Three hypotheses are considered: that this is a feature of 19th century religious texts, and the Book of Mormon adopts the style of its genre as a religious text; that this is a feature of translations of ancient texts, and the Book …

Quantifying Terrestrial Ecosystem Carbon Dynamics With Mechanistically-Based Biogeochemistry Models And In Situ And Remotely Sensed Data, Shaoqing Liu

Open Access Dissertations

Terrestrial ecosystem plays a critical role in the global carbon cycle and climate system. Therefore, it is important to accurately quantify the carbon dynamics of terrestrial ecosystem under future climatic change condition. This dissertation evaluates the regional carbon dynamics by using upscaling approach, mechanistically-based biogeochemistry models and in situ and remotely sensed data.

The upscaling studies based on FLUXNET network has provided us the spatial and temporal pattern of the carbon fluxes but it fails to consider the atmospheric CO2 effect given its important physiological role in carbon assimilation. In the second chapter, we consider the effect of atmospheric CO2 …

College Students' Suicidal Ideation: Testing The Predictions Of The Existential - Constructivist Theory Of Suicide, Jennifer Danielle Lockman

Open Access Dissertations

Suicide is the second leading cause of death in the college student population (Schwartz, 2006), and empirically supported theories for understanding suicide among college students are lacking (Lester, 1989; Prinstein, 2008; Rogers & Benson, 2013). Although not yet examined empirically, Rogers (2001) proposed an Existential - Constructivist Theory of Suicide (ECTS), in which existential distress and the inability to reconstruct meaning from adverse life events contribute to suicidal ideation. ECTS includes both interpersonal and intrapersonal drivers of suicidal ideation, and for this reason, may better explain suicidal ideation in college students than existing theoretical models. Existing research focuses on Joiner’s …

State Judicial Selection Methods As Public Policy: The Missouri Plan, James A. Gleason

Open Access Dissertations

State judiciaries are foundational institutions of governance in the United States. They are coequal, policy-making branches of government whose members, along with the legislative and executive branches, are constitutionally authorized and empowered in all fifty American states. Extant research on judicial selection in the American states provides neither a comprehensive theory of why states choose their particular judicial selection method nor a comprehensive empirical assessment of this important question. This research seeks to fill this lacuna by increasing understanding of American state courts through the formulation of a theory of state judicial selection, a short but comprehensive history of state …

Race, Class And Gender In Engineering Education: A Quantitative Investigation Of First Year Enrollment, Canek Moises Luna Phillips

Open Access Dissertations

Research explanations for the disparity across both race and gender in engineering education has typically relied on a deficit model, whereby women and people of color lack the requisite knowledge or psychological characteristics that Whites and men have to become engineers in sufficient numbers. Instead of using a deficit model approach to explain gender and race disparity, in the three studies conducted for this dissertation, I approach gender and race disparity as the result of processes of segregation linked to the historic and on-going perpetuation of systemic sources of oppression in the United States. In the first study, I investigate …

Understanding The Formation Of American Mental Health Policy Preferences, 1952-1981, Andrew D. Tuholski

Open Access Dissertations

In the United States, the emergence of an outpatient-centered, drug-based model of mental health care was physically feasible from the 1950s onward, with the introduction of thorazine and other first-generation antipsychotics. However, it was not until 1981, with President Reagan’s veto of the Mental Health Systems Act, that American mental health policy tipped over definitively into the outpatient-centered, drug-based model. In this quantitative study of the formation of policy preference, the delay between the feasibility of the outpatient-centered, drug-based model and its adoption was explored through five research questions answered through corpus analysis and time series statistics: How do shifts …

Identifying And Prioritizing Critical Success Factors For Fixed Base Operators In The United States: A Mixed Method Approach, Yu Wang

Open Access Dissertations

Fixed Base Operators (FBOs) are major service providers for the general aviation (GA) sector, which closely connect the public with the aviation industry. However, over the past decade, the U.S. GA industry has experienced a decline in the numbers of registered aircraft, pilots, and airports. Due to the fact that FBOs significantly contribute to the aviation industry, further research studies regarding the FBO-sector at a national level are needed. The purpose of this dissertation was to identify and prioritize the critical success factors (CSFs) that promote the success of FBO operations in the United States.

The methodology consisted of a …

Seeking Interdependence: Commitment Desirability And The Initiation And Maintenance Of Close Relationships, Yu-Yang Kenneth Tan

Open Access Dissertations

People vary in the extent to which they believe that a committed relationship is desirable for them. The current research offers and examines the concept of commitment desirability, defined as the subjective desire to be involved in a committed romantic relationship. In six studies, the present research developed and tested a measure of commitment desirability and explored how it influences relationship initiation among those not currently involved in a relationship, and maintenance and dissolution decisions among those who are involved in a relationship. Study 1 and 2a developed and validated a reliable measure of commitment desirability. Study 2b examined the …

Open Scholarly Publishing Plugin, Barry Bailey

Sabbatical Projects

Presentation reflecting author's sabbatical project, which reviewed the need for and developed a plugin to allow institutions to convert WordPress into an institutional repository.

What We Know: Planning, Implementing, And Assessing A Media Literacy Themed Summer Camp, Philina Richardson, Nancy Garmer, Erin Mahaney, Lisa Petrillo, Rebecca Weber

Evans Library Publications

Information and media literacy are essential for today’s children and teens as they navigate an increasingly saturated information environment. Educators at all levels must seek to communicate and teach the skills that students need to evaluate, understand, and use information in engaging and innovative ways. This paper highlights such an effort by librarians and staff at Florida Institute of Technology in the planning and implementation of a camp called “What We Know: Understanding Media and Its Influence.” The camp was administered by five library staff and attended by ten teens between the ages of 12 and 16. Throughout the camp, …

The Knowledge Of Ideophones In Multilingual Contexts: A West African Pilot Study, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This presentation examines the ubiquity of multilingualism and its somewhat uncertain characterization; the claim for linguistic repertoires vs. languages; how to evaluate and document a linguistic repertoire, economically and expeditiously; ideophones as functionally areal but formally local, thus a control for borrowings; and, is there any sharing in highly multilingual areas? Are ideophones less local than has been empirically shown?

Are States That Legalized Physician-Assisted Death Also More Lenient Towards Abortion?, Young Sun Kim

Criminal Justice

No abstract provided.

Pass-Through And The Prediction Of Merger Price Effects, N. H. Miller, Marc Remer, C. Ryan, G. Sheu

Economics Faculty Works

We use Monte Carlo experiments to study how pass-through can improve merger price predictions, focusing on the first order approximation (FOA) proposed in Jaffe and Weyl [2013]. FOA addresses the functional form misspecification that can exist in standard merger simulations. We find that the predictions of FOA are tightly distributed around the true price effects if pass-through is precise, but that measurement error in pass-through diminishes accuracy. As a comparison to FOA, we also study a methodology that uses pass-through to select among functional forms for use in simulation. This alternative also increases accuracy relative to standard merger simulation and …

Archives & Special Collections Preservation And Reformatting Report, Meg Miner

Administrative Reports

No abstract provided.

Indoor Scene Localization To Fight Sex Trafficking In Hotels, Abigail Stylianou

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Images are key to fighting sex trafficking. They are: (a) used to advertise for sex services,(b) shared among criminal networks, and (c) connect a person in an image to the place where the image was taken. This work explores the ability to link images to indoor places in order to support the investigation and prosecution of sex trafficking. We propose and develop a framework that includes a database of open-source information available on the Internet, a crowd-sourcing approach to gathering additional images, and explore a variety of matching approaches based both on hand-tuned features such as SIFT and learned features …

The Link Between Greek Involvement And Alcohol Consumption: A Utilization Of The Theory Of Planned Behavior To Examine Fundamental Influences, Alex Knoll

USC Aiken Psychology Theses

Elevated levels of alcohol consumption among college students associated with Greek life are a well-documented occurrence in the United States (Baer, 1994; Capone et al., 2007). Many studies have sought to understand the precise influence(s) responsible for facilitating such inflated amounts of alcohol consumption behaviors. This study utilized the theory of planned behavior in an attempt to ascertain the most salient influences that may be contributing to Greek and non-Greek collegiate alcohol consumption. Specifically, one’s attitudes, perception of acceptable norms, and their perceived level of control over their behaviors were examined in relation to alcohol consumption.

An undergraduate collegiate sample …

Information Outlook, November/December 2016, Special Libraries Association

Information Outlook, 2016

Volume 20, Issue 6

Plant Community Composition And Structure Monitoring For Scotts Bluff National Monument, 2016 Data Report, Molly B. Davis, Daniel J. Swanson

United States National Park Service: Publications

Abstract

This report presents the results of vegetation monitoring efforts in 2016 at Scotts Bluff National Monument (SCBL) by the Northern Great Plains Inventory and Monitoring Network (NGPN) and Northern Great Plains Fire Ecology Program (NGPFire).

During the sixth full year of field work, crew members from NGPN visited eight long-term monitoring plots on May 23-25, 2016 to collect data on the plant communities at SCBL. This is part of a long-term monitoring effort to better understand the condition of the vegetation at SCBL. NGPN staff captured data relating to species richness, herb-layer height, abundance of individual native and non-native …

Plant Community Composition And Structure Monitoring For Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, 2016 Data Report, Aaron T. Rasor, Daniel J. Swanson

United States National Park Service: Publications

Abstract

This report presents the results of vegetation monitoring efforts in 2016 at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument (AGFO) by the Northern Great Plains Inventory and Monitoring Network (NGPN).

During the sixth full year of field work, crew members from NGPN visited six long-term plant community monitoring (PCM) plots and the Northern Great Plains Fire Effects Crew (NGPFire) visited nine fire plant community monitoring (FPCM) plots to collect data on the plant communities at AGFO. This effort is part of a long-term monitoring program established to better understand the condition of the mixed-grass prairie, riparian, and upland regions in AGFO. …

The Void Between Us, Hannah D. Blumer

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My interactive thesis installation, The Void Between Us, addresses the topic of human connection in relationship to the body. The human body marks a physical barrier between one’s self and others. While we exist in the same physical sphere as one another, our minds are isolated in our own self-centered versions of reality. Our bodies allow us to perceive others and be perceived—including having verbal communications—and, therefore, could be seen as helpful or restrictive in the social world. However, our bodies also allow us to engage in physical interactions with others, such as sex, which is a means to …

The Melanesian Spearhead Group And Pacific Regional Cooperation, Gordon Leua Nanau

Pacific Studies

The Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) is a subregional organization in Oceania where friendly diplomatic relations, free trade, and cultural and technical exchanges are encouraged. One of its founding principles is to promote the aspirations of Melanesians under colonial servitude to political autonomy. At the same time, it is a forum by member states to drive their national interests under the auspices of subregional resolutions. Recent developments and decisions by MSG leaders provided profound insights into the affairs of the organization and its member states. In 2010, the prime ministers of Fiji and Vanuatu were at loggerheads over whom to transfer …

Vol. 39 No. 3 (2016): Pacific Studies Front Matter, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Front Matter for the Vol. 39, No 3-Dec 2016 edition of the Pacific Studies Journal.

Vol. 39 No. 3 (2016): Pacific Studies Full Issue, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US$40.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, and …

The Future Of Web Citation Practices, Robin Camille Davis

Publications and Research

Citing webpages has been a common practice in scholarly publications for nearly two decades as the Web evolved into a major information source. But over the years, more and more bibliographies have suffered from “reference rot”: cited URLs are broken links or point to a page that no longer contains the content the author originally cited. In this column, I look at several studies showing how reference rot has affected different academic disciplines. I also examine citation styles’ approach to citing web sources. I then turn to emerging web citation practices: Perma, a “freemium” web archiving service specifically for citation; …

Book Review: A History Of Rwandan Identity And Trauma: The Mythmakers' Victims, James J. Snow

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

60 | ‘Akko Ii: The 1991–1998 Excavations: The Early Periods, Moshe Hartal, Danny Syon, Eliezer Stern, Ayelet Tatcher

IAA Reports—Monograph Series of the Israel Antiquities Authority

chapter 1. `Akko-Ptolemais - a maritime city at the crossroads of ancient civilizitions until Roman times / Nadav Kashtan -- part I. Excavations at the courthouse site. chapter 2. The courthouse site: architecture and stratigraphy of areas TB and TC / Moshe Hartal -- chapter 3. The courthouse site: the glass from areas TB and TC / Natalya Katsnelson -- chapter 4. The courthouse site: loomweights and whorls / Orit Shamir -- part II. Excavations in the Hospitaller compound. chapter 5. The Hospitaller compound: Hellenistic and early Roman remains / Eliezer Stern -- chapter 6. The Hospitaller compound: Hellenistic and …

Massachusetts Community Mediation Center Grant Program: Fiscal Year 2016 Report & Evaluation, Massachusetts Office Of Public Collaboration, University Of Massachusetts Boston

Massachusetts Office of Public Collaboration Publications

During Fiscal Year 2016, the Community Mediation Center Grant Program proved generally effective in supporting the delivery of mediation services for dispute resolution from community mediation centers to Massachusetts communities. As a result of a $750,000 legislative appropriation, thirteen community mediation centers were awarded operating grants that proved critical to the centers’ sustained existence and thriving. The Program’s value was demonstrated by evidence of the contribution made by the funded centers towards reducing conflict and increasing access to procedural justice for residents in every Massachusetts county. Furthermore, the commonwealth as a whole benefited economically from the Program due to an …

The Effects Of Individual And Social Comparison Graphic Feedback On Incented Performance, Yngvi Freyr Einarsson

Masters Theses

This study examined whether graphic displays of individual performance and graphic displays of the individual performance of each group member would increase performance when individuals were paid monetary incentives. All participants were paid piece-rate pay and there were three conditions: (a) no feedback, (b) graphic display of individual performance, and (c) graphic display of the performance of each group member. Participants were 80 undergraduate students who performed a computerized data entry task. The main dependent variable was the number of correctly completed entries. A monotone ANCOVA was used to detect performance differences, using data from the first session as a …