cometadata/datacite-titles-descriptions-related-identifiers huggingface dataset:
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-352344
title: The importance of pedagogy and local context in hunter education programs in improving safe hunting practices

description: The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to determine the differences in group means between the type of hunter education pedagogy and the frequency of hunting-related incidents. In order to make these findings actionable in Alaska, interviews with Alaska State Wildlife Troopers were conducted to gain their perspectives on the unique cultural and geographic issues affecting hunting in Alaska. Both quantitative and qualitative findings are presented. SPSS 24 was used to run a MANOVA analysis on the nationwide data. Interview transcripts were coded using open coding with a priori codes developed after the analysis of the nationwide data. This study is the first of its kind in analyzing national injury data and hunter education pedagogy and in regard to interviewing Alaska State Wildlife Troopers on the role of cultural and geographic elements in hunter safety. The key findings were that states offering hunter education instruction using traditional classroom delivery, offering online delivery and a field day are significantly less likely to have fatal hunting injuries. This study also finds that states that utilize traditional classroom seminar and online delivery but do not require a field day are significantly less likely to have non-fatal injuries from tree stand falls. Finally, hunter education curriculum in the United States may benefit from the incorporation of local context and increased inclusion of Native American cultural elements where relevant. This study adds to an extremely limited pool of literature on the topic of hunter education and hunter safety.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-384120
title: Geometric modeling and shape analysis of 3D point clouds

description: This thesis investigates the complex problem of automatically reconstruct large-scale scenes from 3D point clouds. The reconstruction problem is decomposed into two major components, namely, primitives and parts. While primitives are geometric shapes (e.g., planes, cylinders, etc.) and their connections (e.g., joints), parts are relatively isolated objects that can be hardly interpreted by geometric shapes. Two different strategies are presented to handle these two reconstruction problems. ❧ In primitive reconstruction, two systems focusing on different targets and scenes are presented. The first one reconstructs pipe-runs from industrial site point clouds, because they are dominant structures in most industrial sites. The key idea is that by adopting statistical analysis over point normals, global similarities are discovered from raw data to guide primitive fitting, thus increasing robustness to data noise and incompleteness. The second one extracts pole-like objects from urban point clouds and posed images. Pole-like objects are common in urban scenes but are difficult to model because their thin structures are usually undersampled in images and point clouds. The presented method takes advantage of the complementary information from 3D point clouds and 2D posed images to recover these objects. In both systems, the resulting model is more than a collection of 3D triangles, as it contains semantic labels for primitive shapes. ❧ In part reconstruction, a modeling-by-recognition strategy is followed. Instead of directly working on a noisy scan, a matching template point cloud is retrieved from a part library. The library object and input object should match in basic category, but can be dissimilar in geometry and topology. Then, geometric analysis is applied on template and input point cloud to accomplish two tasks. The first one is to automatically compute dense correspondences between input and template scans, thus making it possible to transfer real-world color to template models. The method segments both point clouds into parts and then computes part-level correspondences between source and target scans. The dense mapping allows color or other parameter transfers. The second one is to segment input scans using a small set of pre-segmented template point clouds as examples. The main idea is to register the target shape with exemplar shapes in a piece-wise rigid manner, so that pieces under the same rigid transformation are more likely to be in the same segment. The transferred segmentation of real scans is a key step towards shape understanding, and a good initialization of part-based dense correspondences.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-132821
title: An Analysis of the Dispositions Made by the Case Staffing Panel of the Juvenile Justice Center of Los Angeles
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-340890
title: Globalization and multinational corporations’ impact on Ireland’s educational policies and practices in developing 21st-century skills through science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and science fair competitions in schools such as School C

description: Globalization is a phenomenon that affects the entire world economically, politically, and culturally. In today’s world, countries that have chosen to embrace globalization have opened their doors to foreign direct investment and multinational corporations (MNCs), transforming them from developing countries to developed countries. Ireland serves as a model for developing countries on the economic benefits of globalization and the benefits to its citizens. In order for Ireland to maintain competitiveness, it has made changes to its educational policies, with a stronger emphasis in education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and development of key skills, also known as 21st-century skills. ❧ Within Ireland’s education system, science and technology competitions occur throughout the country and are supported by several MNCs. SciFest is one science and technology competition that has partnered with Ireland’s educational system to encourage all students to compete from the local site level through international competitions. Science and technology competitions expose students to a variety of STEM-related fields of study, in addition to utilizing and developing 21st-century skills. ❧ Findings from this study show a strong correlation between educational policy reforms in Ireland and globalization and MNCs’ influence on such changes. The research clearly identifies the need for STEM education and development of 21st-century skills as the primary focus of change to Ireland’s educational policies. These changes can be supported through student participation in SciFest competitions, which motivate students to advance their studies in STEM education through Senior Cycle, college, and careers in STEM-related fields.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-352488
title: Closing the achievement gap for Latino students in an outperforming non-traditional urban school

description: This qualitative study examined organizational practices that narrow the achievement gap in an outperforming non-traditional urban school. The history on the efforts to address the achievement gap is touched upon, the impact of the achievement gap amongst diverse populations is talked about, and solutions are offered. The study looked at high school completion rates, test scores, and college readiness to determine outperforming criteria. Data collection was conducted via surveys and interviews of staff, document analysis, and classrooms and campus observations. These data were triangulated to identify organizational practices that narrow the achievement gap in an outperforming non-traditional urban school as it pertains to instructional practices, leadership practices, and school culture. The findings of this study are presented through four lenses: academic excellence, educational goals, resources, and communication. In the lens of academic excellence, the themes of rigor and expectations, data-driven decision-making, continuous feedback, and early intervention are discussed. For educational goals, the themes found were managing transitions, having a progress mindset, and imparting life lessons. Through the lens of resources, the themes of internal and external supports, extracurricular activities and ongoing education are presented. The themes of open door policy, fostering relationships, and demonstrating respect are discussed under the lens of communication.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-365589
title: The sloppy development of diversity in the beauty industry

description: This thesis delves into the lack of diversity for women of color face in the beauty industry.
DOI: 10.15151/esrf-es-117583838
title: Structural Biology of Macromolecules and Macromolecular complexes from India
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-133299
title: Parents' perceptions of child-rearing and child neglect: An exploratory study
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-143774
title: An exploratory-descriptive study of the social service needs of Japanese Americans in the San Fernando Valley
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-149168
title: A Comparison of Continuers and Non-Continuers At a Crisis Clinic
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-332993
title: Experimental and genomic exploration of sperm competition in Mus

description: Sperm competition occurs when there is female multiple mating in a population. This force drives sexual selection and is expected to lead to adaptation of reproductive phenotypes in both males and females. The goal of this dissertation is to examine male reproductive traits that are adaptive under conditions of sperm competition. In Chapter 1, I discuss the body of literature that has previously determined the evolutionary significance of sperm competition in the context of its role in sexual selection. I examine how past studies have shaped our expectations for evolutionary outcomes due to sperm competition. In Chapter 2, I use three species of Mus that differ in inferred levels of sperm competition to determine whether sperm competition can lead to life history trait changes. Specifically, I analyze whether sperm competition can affect the timing of sexual maturity. In Chapter 3, I attempt to determine the genetic component responsible for the phenotypes found to be adaptive under sperm competition in an experimental evolution study on house mice. I discuss methods that may be used to determine genetic targets of selection when population sizes are small and selection is strong. Finally, in Chapter 4, I discuss possible future experiments that may answer some of the questions generated throughout these studies.
DOI: 10.25549/gar-c81-15707
title: William Harrison Hays, letter, 1921-11-14, to Hamlin Garland

description: William Harrison Hays (Office of the Postmaster General), Washington, District of Columbia, USA, letter, 1921 November 14, to Hamlin Garland (Cosmos Club), Washington, District of Columbia, USA. "Delighted with your ntoe and appreciate thoroughly the book which you gave me yesterday." -- first line.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-116740
title: A survey of Los Angeles area administrators' perceptions regarding the nature and extent of citizen, community, and other inputs utilized in the development of agency policy and decision making: Phase two 1975-1976
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-121535
title: A study of motivation and attitudes among volunteers working with elders
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-130696
title: A study of lunar influences on juvenile delinquency
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-134976
title: A study of selection of alternate types of group psychotherapy by hospitalized alcoholic patients
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-144941
title: A Comparative Study of Two Samples of Jewish Mothers
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-311430
title: Computational methods for taxonomic classification of 16S rRNA gene sequences

description: One of the main goals of metagenomics is to characterize microbial communities through taxonomic identification of metagenomic sequences. 16S rRNA gene is the most established marker gene through which scientists explore microbial diversity in different environments. 16S rRNA gene has many essential features which make it unique: it is present within all bacteria and archaea, and it consists of nine hypervariable regions that can be used for taxonomic identification. In this thesis, our focus are the essential computational problems related to the 16S rRNA gene sequencing data analysis. ❧ Clustering 16S rRNA gene sequences into taxonomic bins for OTU (Operational Taxonomic Units) prediction is the first step toward characterization of a microbial community. However, there is not a clear agreement on similarity calculation and similarity thresholds, especially at higher taxonomic levels such as phylum, class, order, family and genus. Typically, pairwise sequence similarity is computed as percentage of sites that agree in a pairwise sequence alignment. Several factors can have significant influence on the results, including how alignment gaps are treated in the definition of sequence similarity. First, we studied the problem of how gaps play a role in suggesting sequence similarity thresholds at higher taxonomic ranks, and how they can be used to differentiate each taxon from others. In addition, we examine how the measures derived for the analysis of full length 16S rRNA gene are applied to multiple hyper-variable regions. Finally, we showed that the sequence similarity was an oversimplified measure for taxonomic delimitation, and thus we proposed a machine learning approach to taxonomic delimitation. ❧ Furthermore, after clustering 16S rRNA sequences into bins, because of variation among different programs to calculate the sequence similarity and to use cut-off threshold for each taxonomic rank, many OTUs may remain at the borderline in taxonomic assignment in higher taxonomic ranks such as phylum and class. To obtain information about these borderline OTUs, we took advantage of the fact that microorganisms live in a complex community with highly interdependent relationships. Some of these relationships are reflected in the co-abundance between two microorganisms across multiple environmental perturbations. We demonstrated that the co-abundance information could be used to infer the taxonomic information about those borderline OTUs at higher taxonomic ranks such as phylum and class.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-356735
title: Age-related differences in cognitive effort during emotion regulation: a pupillometry investigation

description: Reappraisal requires working memory updating, a process which declines across the lifespan. Older adults naturally engage in distraction and selective attention strategies to regulate emotion in the laboratory, processes which are intact in later life. In this experiment, we tested whether reappraisal is more cognitively effortful than distraction for older adults, and how effort and arousal during uninstructed emotional image viewing predict memory. To examine whether distraction use tends to be less cognitively effortful than reappraisal, younger and older adults viewed a slideshow of negative images. During the viewing, they were instructed to distract, reappraise, or passively view each image as their pupil diameter was recorded. Prior to the instructed emotion regulation task, we tracked pupil response during a non-instructed emotional image slideshow. During instructed emotion regulation, older adults demonstrated greater pupil dilation (an index of cognitive effort) during reappraisal than distraction, but younger adults displayed no difference between conditions. In addition, both age groups showed lowest pupil response during passive image viewing compared to active regulation strategy use. When watching emotional images without instruction, older adults showed greater pupil dilation for negative than neutral images, compared to younger adults. Thus, findings suggest that older adults may automatically regulate arousing emotional responses, and that older adults may naturally redirect attention away from distressing information as a manner of minimizing cognitive effort during emotion regulation.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-370142
title: Potassium ion permeation mechanism revealed by a novel MD simulation approach

description: Our novel non-equilibrium MD simulation approach which is then combined with non-linear WHAM can be used to generate 2D and 1D PMFs. The 2D PMF has revealed a general pattern that is in consistent with the results from umbrella sampling approach. The knock-on mechanism derived is the well known S₂-S₄ or S₁-S₃ configurations of permeation. In addition, we are also able to extract 1D PMFs, which allow us to analyze the permeation pathways in details that are not easily reachable by 2D PMF. From 1D PMFs, we observed three possible permeation mechanisms. Beside the widely accepted S₂-S₄ or S₁-S₃ configurations, there are possibilities that four K⁺ ions occupy all four binding sites, or three K⁺ ions occupy S₄-S₃-S₂ at the same time. We observed that a water molecule could exists in between K⁺ ions that occupy S₃ and S₂ by pushing the carbonyl oxygen of the backbone residue away and its own oxygen participates in coordinating with the K⁺ ion. We hypothesize that this process could help the K⁺ ion dissociates from the stable binding site S₂. Further investigations need to be done to determine quantitatively whether the carbonyl oxygen “flipping” event helps lowering the energy barriers.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-116181
title: The Haven House treatment program for the families of alcoholics: A follow-up study
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-126555
title: Therapists' experiences as related to treatment approaches in marital therapy
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-156154
title: The role of the jail psychiatric team as perceived by line correctional personnel
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-375490
title: Determining the suitability of yak-based agriculture in Illinois: a site suitability analysis using fuzzy overlay

description: Yak are a high yielding but underutilized commodity in American agriculture; a sector that could benefit both economically and ecologically from diversification. Diversification in agriculture is important to help alleviate stress on the environment and provide economic security. This analysis used fuzzy overlay to conduct a statewide site suitability analysis in Illinois to locate the most favorable counties and subcounty divisions to begin yak-based agriculture. Yak-based agriculture refers to a farming or ranching operation where yak are raised as a commodity. Based on a review of literature regarding the conditions for successful yak-based agriculture, the fuzzy overlay analysis undertaken here incorporated both continuous data forms, particularly the climate criteria of temperature, precipitation, and vapor pressure deficit, and the categorical data of cropland use and soil associations. While initially considered to be key criteria for successful yak-based agriculture, the factors of slope and market proximity were removed from this analysis. Slope was not included because nowhere in the study area was the slope a limiting factor. Market proximity was not included due to the dense road network and easy road accessibility throughout the state. However, it is noted that these factors should be incorporated in any future studies that replicate this approach. In the final results, Will, Kankakee, and Iroquois counties were found to be suitable locations for potential yak-based agriculture but not highly suitable as Illinois’ climate is not similar to the yak’s native range of Tibet. Conclusions from this analysis and similar ones undertaken in the future have potential to assist county farm bureaus in better understanding how to diversify farming to protect the farmer from potential economic disasters and the soil from the harmful effects of monocropping.
DOI: 10.25549/gar-c81-975
title: St. John Adcock, letter, 1923-08-07, to Hamlin Garland

description: St. John Adcock (The Bookman), Warwick Square, London, England; United Kingdom, letter, 1923 August 7, to Hamlin Garland. "I am sorry to say I did not arrive here…" -- first line.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-140473
title: Students' evaluations of and feelings about the teaching methods employed by the University of Southern California Graduate School of Social Work, 1968-1969 academic year
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-141405
title: Family visiting patterns as indicators of girls' coping ability in a private residential treatment center
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-312377
title: Narrative roots of Bollywood: a paper that contrasts Western story telling with Indian story telling

description: According to the author, the ‘story’ the world over is the same. The end product of a story is universal—whether it is to entertain, give information, pass on collective experiences, inspire—perhaps all of the above. ❧ We know that all communication is ‘coded’. Thus each culture/civilization tells (and understands) the same story based on their own codes—codes that have evolved over time out of their own culture/civilization. ❧ Further, all communication is accompanied by noise. But, this author argues that, what is perceived as ‘noise’ in any communication by one receiver of the communication (who might not be familiar with the code used) may have deep significance for another (who might be familiar with the code). ❧ Cinema becomes even more problematic since Cinema is primarily Visual. And visuals—loaded with civilizational/cultural symbols—can be interpreted in multiple ways. Yes, there is sound (especially dialog) that allows easier understanding. But the coming of Sound was also a dilemma. Where Sound was meant to complete Cinema, it also made Cinema more civilization centric, since, along with sound, came language, culture. ❧ Thus the author argues that a story told using Western methods of storytelling (and understanding) will be opaque to Indian audiences where, in turn, the same story, told using Indian storytelling tropes will be incomprehensible to Western audiences.