Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Determination Of The Trace Elemental Signature Of Drywall Dust And Its Implication As Forensic Evidence, Emilee Holmes

Master of Science in Forensic Science Directed Research Projects

Drywall is found in most homes built in the United States of America because it is cost effective, light weight, and easy to install. Its brittle nature makes it less resistant to impact which can cause dust to form if a force is exerted on it. Airborne dust can settle on anything or anyone around it and can be considered trace evidence for its ability to connect suspects, victims, and scenes; however, this type of dust is not emphasized as trace evidence and is not always collected due to a lack of understanding of their forensic signatures.The seven producers of …

Utilizing Gc-Ms To Determine The Effect Of Solvent Extraction Parameters On Forensic Smokeless Powder Analysis, Leighann R. Weber

Master of Science in Forensic Science Directed Research Projects

Since its invention in 1884, smokeless powder has been of scientific interest. During World War II, research initially focused on developing methods to evaluate powders' stability. However, today, the focus has shifted to developing instrumental techniques sufficient for forensic classification and comparison work. Smokeless powder is typically encountered in forensic science casework involving firearms and explosives. In forensic investigations, determining the exact formulation of smokeless powders is challenging due to their complex chemistry and the proprietary nature of production. LC-MS and GC-MS techniques have been used to analyze intact and post-blast smokeless powders. Despite the vast amount of research that …

Evaluation Of Tooth Sample Preparation For Traditional Forensic Dna Vs Rapidhit Id Processing, Morgan E. Eaton

Master of Science in Forensic Science Directed Research Projects

Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) refers to the process of forensic identification of unknown individuals following a mass disaster or fatality incident.¹ In events of mass disaster, human dental structures are often the only viable DNA source remaining, as soft tissues are more easily degraded, contaminated, or otherwise compromised. Due to the protective nature of dental enamel and dentin surrounding the inner pulpal tissue, a labor-intensive sample preparation performed by extensively trained personnel is necessary to expose the nuclear material preceding the traditional forensic DNA workflow.^2,3 In high volume cases, such as those often submitted for DVI, the current …

Morphological And Autofluorescence Signatures For The Identification Of Vaginal Cells In Mixture Samples Containing Saliva And/Or Epidermal Cells, Hannah L. Burden

Master of Science in Forensic Science Directed Research Projects

In forensic casework the identification of body fluids at a crime scene can frequently play an important role in reconstructing the events that occurred. There are several bodily fluid identification methods to characterize unknown stains recovered as evidence. However, there has not been a reliable method for detecting the presence vaginal cells and/or differentiate it from other forensically relevant tissue types that may be recovered from a crime scene. The detection of vaginal fluid is important for forensic casework due to the abundance of sexual assault kits that are not only backlogged but continue to be submitted to the lab …

Amtrak Staples Mill Station: Strategic Vision Plan 2023, Daniel S. Longest

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Capstone Projects

This plan proposes the replacement of the current Amtrak Staples Mill Station with a new facility designed to incorporate civic art, multi-use development, and fast and easy train boarding. Drawing on successful examples like Union Station in D.C. and Main Street Station in Richmond, this plan encourages stakeholders to adopt a strategic vision for the station and its vicinity as an asset to the region. An independent commission with equal representation from state agency representatives and residents would enact these improvements through a public-private partnership, including a transit-oriented development scheme for adjacent land.

E Pluribus Unum: Increasing A Shared Understanding Of Mission At Marine Corps University, Edward Greiner, Kirstin Pantazis, Christopher Reid, Dominick White

Doctor of Education Capstones

E PLURIBUS UNUM: INCREASING A SHARED UNDERSTANDING OF MISSION AT MARINE CORPS UNIVERSITY

By Edward Greiner, Kirstin Pantazis, Christopher Reid, and Dominick White

A capstone project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education in the Department of Educational Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University

Virginia Commonwealth University, 2023.

Capstone Chair: Beth E. Bukoski, Ph.D., Department of Educational Leadership

Mergers between higher education institutions present unique challenges to creating and maintaining a shared understanding of mission. Additionally, professional military education institutions with civilian faculty and staff must blend military and civilian cultures in the workplace. …

The Cogenerate Innovation Fellowship: Supporting Leaders Of Intergenerational Initiatives, Cal J. Halvorsen, Eunice Lin Nichols, Janet Oh

Harvey A. Friedman Center for Aging

This Case Report provides a detailed overview of the CoGenerate Innovation Fellowship, a 9-month fellowship that supports leaders of intergenerational initiatives developed by the national nonprofit organization, CoGenerate. It describes the Fellowship’s recruitment and cohort development strategies, monthly meetings and community-building efforts, end-of-Fellowship celebration, and post-Fellowship support. It summarizes findings from the two-year pilot’s process and outcomes evaluation and provides recommendations to individuals and organizations seeking to support social sector innovators who are leading intergenerational initiatives.

Local Power Outages, Heat, And Community Characteristics In New York City, Peter J. Marcotullio, Olta Braçe, Kathryn Lane, Carolyn E. Olson, Jenna Tipaldo, Jennifer Ventrella, Liv Yoon, Kim Knowlton, Gowri Anand, Tom Matte

Publications and Research

Electrical power outages are of increasing interest to US urban scholars, government officials and stakeholders, as they have increased in number and duration with significant health and economic, among other, impacts. This analysis examines reports of power outages in New York City in relation to socioeconomic and health characteristics of neighborhoods. Using the city’s 311-call database we examine complaint calls for power outages from 2014 to 2022. While 311-calls for power outages occur all year long, volume trended higher during the warmer months (June, July and August), and as minimum daily temperatures exceeded 20 °C (68°F), the number of calls …

Establishing Roots Before Branching Out: Parameter Recovery In Item Response Tree Models, Tyler Ryan

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Item Response Trees are a type of item response model that incorporates information about conditional responding to items using a rooted tree graph structure. Researchers have used item response trees for common measurement tasks and for testing novel hypotheses. Previous simulation studies investigating item response trees either lack generalizability to the broad domain of their use or lack thorough investigation and reporting of the results. I conducted a simulation study to explore how sample size, test length, item characteristics, and tree structure affect both item and person parameter recovery for 1PL and 2PL models. The results suggested that, as with …

Autonomy :A Modern Perspective, Riley Schwanz

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Organizational leaders want to retain employees who are healthy and motivated. Physical and mental health issues are on the rise in America for younger and older generations. Researchers have found that higher levels of autonomy relate to improved mental health, physical health, job satisfaction, performance, and the list goes on. However, a gap in the literature is a lack of understanding of the complex relationships between autonomy and outcomes, both functional and dysfunctional. I found that intrinsic motivation and autonomy support can compensate for lower levels of autonomy in one’s work. These new findings provide researchers and organizational leaders with …

Development And Validation Of A Norm Violation Sexual Harassment Scale, Krista N. Harris

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Sexual harassment continues to be an important area of study. However, there’s a dearth of research regarding sexual harassment towards others that considers sex, gender, and sexual orientation. Previous research has suggested that gender harassment and heterosexist harassment are intertwined (Leskinen & Cortina, 2014), but little research has examined how the empirical and conceptual overlap of gender harassment and heterosexist harassment could allude to a more general construct, norm violation sexual harassment. Norm violation sexual harassment is an overarching construct focusing on norm violations rather than sex, gender, or sexual orientation specifically. Using two samples, my study demonstrates evidence for …

Leadership And Secure Base, Bincy Davis

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Research on Attachment theory has established the need for secure base in adulthood (e.g., Hazan & Shaver, 1990). However, few researchers have explored the importance of secure base in a work setting. The purpose of my study was to examine the relevance of secure base in the leadership process. Results from pilot research (N = 272) showed that 13 leader behaviors were positively associated with secure base. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that 5 factors underlay these 13 leader behaviors. Results from structural equation modeling provided support for a secure base model of leader behaviors in Study 1 (N = 272 …

Pragmatically Appropriate Abstractive Summarization Of Jtac Radio Conversations, Spencer M. Seals

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

In this work, I explore the development of computational methods for automatically creating after-action reports of JTAC radio conversations. Prior research has investigated related issues of sentence compression, text summarization, and conversation summarization (Banerjee, Mitra, & Sugiyama, 2015; Clarke & Lapata, 2008; L. Wang & Cardie, 2012; Raffel et al., 2020). However, this work makes limiting assumptions about what features are relevant to a summary and what sources of information should be included. I propose methods that combine knowledge from linguistic, procedural, and domain sources to address these limitations. Results indicate that the proposed model performs better than some of …

Short-Term Learning For Long-Term Retention : Dynamic Associative Memory, Joseph James Glavan Iv

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Instead of characterizing transfer from short-term memory to long-term memory as the relocation of information from one structural system to another, I propose a theory that conceives of transfer as the learning processes that act on and transform the representations of the information itself. Dynamic Associative Memory posits that recently encoded memories are supported by active maintenance and the relevance of the current context. Over time, the current context becomes less relevant; therefore, the brain must learn contextually invariant associations between memories so that they may support themselves. I instantiated my theory in the ACT-R cognitive architecture and created a …

Bail And Mental Illness, Samuel Wiseman

Faculty Scholarship

In many parts of the United States, the bail system is strikingly unfair, imposing burdensome, and often unmeetable, financial conditions on pretrial liberty even for low-risk defendants. Reforms that reduce or eliminate cash bail and lower pretrial detention rates have made progress in recent years, but now face growing opposition even in generally progressive jurisdictions such as San Francisco and New York City. One source of this opposition is rising concern about crime—particularly crime associated with the unhoused, who disproportionately suffer from mental illness, including substance abuse disorder. This is not a coincidence, as one effect of a cash-bail system, …

Reshaping The Narrative, Crystal Little Owl

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Establishing Digital Collections: Advocacy And Working With Institutions, Donica Swann

Library Scholarship

Discussion of emerging trends in digital preservation with an outline of ideal digital repository goals, assessment of content management and digital asset management systems, and tips for using digital collections in the classroom. Presentation concludes with ways to advocate for digital archives through collaboration with institutions.

Student-Led Learning In Public Libraries, Donica Swann

Library Scholarship

In recent years, the field of library science has developed a competitive, experience-driven hiring culture. Students are expected to graduate with years of varied hands-on experiences in addition to coursework. How can students gain these experiences? In what ways can practitioners provide a productive learning environment for students? With budget cuts and constraints on staff time, how can public libraries make space for library science students to gain practical experience and to engage in self-directed learning? For seven years (2016-2023), Donica Swann provided practicums, internships, and apprenticeships that benefited both The Urbana Free Library and the University of Illinois at …

Lear’S Daughters? Unenumerated Fundamental Rights And The Constitution, Thomas Halper

Publications and Research

How to determine whether fundamental unenumerated constitutional rights exist, and if so, what they are? The questions are of obvious enormous importance—witness the current controversy over abortion—and yet courts have generally been content to address the issues superficially, sometimes, cavalierly. Their treatment of the most common rationale, an historical/traditional consensus, exemplifies this shallow approach. The underdeveloped character of the argumentation on this topic stubbornly remains one of the most glaring shortfalls of modern constitutional law.

Automated Morphological Phenotyping Using Learned Shape Descriptors And Functional Maps: A Novel Approach To Geometric Morphometrics, Oshane O. Thomas, Hongyu Shen, Ryan L. Raaum, William E. H. Harcourt-Smith, John D. Polk, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson

Publications and Research

The methods of geometric morphometrics are commonly used to quantify morphology in a broad range of biological sciences. The application of these methods to large datasets is constrained by manual landmark placement limiting the number of landmarks and introducing observer bias. To move the field forward, we need to automate morphological phenotyping in ways that capture comprehensive representations of morphological variation with minimal observer bias. Here, we present Morphological Variation Quantifier (morphVQ), a shape analysis pipeline for quantifying, analyzing, and exploring shape variation in the functional domain. morphVQ uses descriptor learning to estimate the functional correspondence between whole triangular meshes …

Transforming Experiential Learning In The Honors Interpersonal Communication Course: Interpersonal Enrichment Journeys During The Covid-19 Pandemic And Beyond, Jennifer A. H. Becker

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

Drawing upon my own experience as an educator, I describe and reflect upon my experiential learning-pedagogical process of transforming my fall 2020 Zoom-based honors interpersonal communication course in which my students traversed through a series of experiential learning activities called Interpersonal Enrichment Journeys. Quantitative and written data revealed that students achieved desired learning outcomes and strengthened much-needed interpersonal connections despite the circumstances and stressors induced by the pandemic. Interpersonal Enrichment Journeys can be replicated to maximize the features of quality online courses identified by Kaufman and Vallade (2022), such as helping students develop personal connections in a positive learning climate …

Crisis, Collaboration, And Hope, Debra J. Ford

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Journal Of Communication Pedagogy, Complete Volume, 2023

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

A Multi-Measure Approach For Lexical Diversity In Writing Assessments: Considerations In Measurement And Timing, Kelly Woods, Brett James Hashimoto, Earl K. Brown

Faculty Publications

Several researchers (e.g., Gebril & Plakans, 2016; Crossley & McNamara, 2012) have noted a relationship between lexical diversity (LD) and writing proficiency. Previous research has indicated that typical LD measures can account for as much as 44 % of variability in writing proficiency (Crossley et al., 2011). However, it remains unclear which of the numerous LD measures (or combination of measures) that exist best predict writing proficiency (e.g., McCarthy & Jarvis, 2010). The present study addresses these issues using scored writing assessment samples from 911 ESL students. LD was assessed with a battery of ten measures through the Python lexical-diversity …

An Exploration Of Quality Of Life Perceptions Of Cochlear Implant Recipients And Their Frequent Communication Partners, Jessica L. Bishop, Ashley G. Flagge

Ashley Flagge Publications

Purpose: Quality of life (QoL) after cochlear implantation has been investigated using a variety of QoL questionnaires. However, few studies have examined the perceived QoL of cochlear implant (CI) recipients compared between the recipient and a frequent communication partner (FCP) using both hearing-related (hearing-specific), and health-general (health-general) measures.

Method: For this multiple case study, five participant pairs were recruited, consisting of five adult recipients who were implanted at least six months prior to the time of evaluation, and five adult frequent communication partners who lived with the recipient at the time of evaluation. All ten participants (five pairs) completed a …

Feeding Our Local Communities-The Benefits Of Food Assistance Programs At Local Farmers Markets, Courtney A. Archambeau

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Living in a rural area can make finding food that is good and affordable difficult, especially for those who rely on assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP. Federal incentive programs assist those with SNAP benefits to purchase fresh produce. I studied three farmers markets in Houghton County in Michigan’s western Upper Peninsula to identify how rural farmers markets are integrating these programs to increase access to fresh produce. Specifically, I asked: 1) How might farmers markets work to be more inviting and make their food more accessible to those of lower socioeconomic status?; 2) By studying these …

Information Use And Decision-Making For Evacuation At Fuego Volcano, Guatemala, Beth A. Bartel

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

For populations living with risk to rapid-onset environmental hazards, an effective early warning system (EWS) may be the most viable short- to mid-term solution for risk reduction. At Fuego volcano, Guatemala, more than 60,000 people distributed between more than 30 small communities live within the identified hazard zones for pyroclastic density currents (PDCS), highly lethal hot avalanches and surges of volcanic gases, rock, and ash. Despite ongoing risk reduction efforts by scientific and civil protection authorities, more than 400 people died during a paroxysmal eruption on 3 June 2018 when PDCs reached populated areas. A high-end resort, La Reunión, evacuated …

Explicit Rule Learning: A Cognitive Tutorial Method To Train Users Of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Systems, Anne Linja

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Today’s intelligent software systems, such as Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning systems, are sophisticated, complicated, sometimes complex systems. In order to effectively interact with these systems, novice users need to have a certain level of understanding. An awareness of a system’s underlying principles, rationale, logic, and goals can enhance the synergistic human-machine interaction. It also benefits the user to know when they can trust the systems’ output, and to discern boundary conditions that might change the output. The purpose of this research is to empirically test the viability of a Cognitive Tutorial approach, called Explicit Rule Learning. Several approaches have been used …

The Impact Of Pre-Experiment Walking On Distance Perception In Vr, Soheil Sepahyar

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

While individuals can accurately estimate distances in the real world, this ability is often diminished in virtual reality (VR) simulations, hampering performance across training, entertainment, prototyping, and education domains. To assess distance judgments, the direct blind walking method—having participants walk blindfolded to targets—is frequently used. Typically, direct blind walking measurements are performed after an initial practice phase, where people become comfortable with walking while blindfolded. Surprisingly, little research has explored how such pre-experiment walking impacts subsequent VR distance judgments. Our initial investigation revealed increased pre-experiment blind walking reduced distance underestimations, underscoring the importance of detailing these preparatory procedures in research—details …

Supporting Team Innovation With Design Thinking Cognitive Strategies, Lisa M. Casper

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Innovation is a 21st-century skill needed to design new systems, solve challenging problems, and develop novel solutions. Design Thinking (DT) is a tool used to support team innovation. In this experiment, 145 students (47 teams) used one of two DT methods during a semester-long project to come up with an innovative solution to one of the UNESCO 17 sustainable development goals. The key experimental manipulation was during the DT Ideate phase where teams brainstormed potential solutions. Teams either used a baseline DT Ideate strategy or an expanded one with additional prompts during a 10-minute period. Results indicated that teams using …