cometadata/datacite-titles-descriptions-related-identifiers huggingface dataset:
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-628380
title: Examining affect and transactive communicative processes in organizational teams

description: In the present research the implications of affective dynamics among team members for communication and knowledge management are explored through the lens of transactive memory theory. Transactive memory theory details the processes whereby groups form a mental map of ‘who knows what’ in the group and the resulting patterns of communication and knowledge exchange. The emergence of a well-developed transactive memory system has been linked to superior team outcomes (Austin, 2003; Lewis, 2004). There are two key components of transactive memory systems: the mental map, or directory, of who knows what, and the transactive communication, in the form of information and knowledge exchange, that occurs among team members. Research has demonstrated that a well-developed directory is positively related to transactive communication (Yuan, Fulk, Monge, & Contractor, 2010); however, we lack a full understanding of other factors that may influence the transactive communicative processes that take place among team members. One such factor that is worthy of further consideration is affect. Extant research on transactive memory systems has taken a primarily rational, cognitive orientation, and has overlooked the implications of affect, a key variable that has been demonstrated to influence group process and outcomes. The present research focuses on the impact of both individual and team level positive affect for communication in transactive memory systems. A new multi-level theoretical model is proposed and tested using a mixed-methods research design. First, hierarchical linear modeling is used to analyze data collected from student teams. Then, the proposed model development teams were examined using an ethnographic methodology. This study and its results are contained in Chapter 6.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-633766
title: In place over time: a spatial approach to popular culture and identity formation through the Danjiri Festival of Kishiwada City, 1745-1928

description: The Danjiri Festival originated in the mid-eighteenth century in the former castle town of Kishiwada. This southern Osaka festival of national notoreity is named after the wooden floats known as danjiri that have been paraded by the neighborhoods of the castle town since its inception. These neighborhoods still form the basis of the festival, which remains a lively public forum for expressing local identity through an intense neighborhood-based competition. The festival has also been a vehicle for expressing broader collective identities such as loyalty to the local lord (daimyo) in the early modern period and, more recently, identification with the emperor and nation. Moreover, today the festival serves as a common representation of traditional culture in the national media. Thus the Danjiri Festival offers a compelling case of the power of place to create and sustain culture while also expressing a broad range of identities from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Furthermore, a place-based approach to the festival allows one to reassess the conventional scholarly wisdom that regards tradition in modern Japan as inherently anachronistic, fetishistic, or a modern invention. Indeed, as the festival has remained in place over long periods of profound historical change, it shows how the local retains its particularity while also serving as the very site of historical change. In fact, the dissertation problematizes the master-narrative of the modern nation, and presumptions of radical historical discontinuity, as it illustrates the dissolution of conventional dyads such as traditional-modern and national-local as they merge in festival history. Looking locally permits a reassessment of the presumed oppositions and contradictions implicit in such persistent dyads. This study clearly breaks new ground as it shows how the categories within these dyads have often blurred as they materialized in varying degrees of harmony and tension, just as continuity and change materialized in the places of Kishiwada and the history of the Danjiri Matsuri
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-634544
title: Financial constraint and firms’ propensity to accept contractual risk

description: Understanding the factors affecting the expected value of a contract’s payoffs is essential to predicting and interpreting agents’ choices. Likewise, understanding influences on firms’ valuation of risky projects is essential to understanding firms’ investment and production under uncertainty.  Combining confidential eligibility data with public data on operating characteristics and financial measures, I examine a unique choice of contracts made by 421 U.S. hospitals in 2003. Consistent with predictions based on theories of firms’ investment behavior under imperfect capital markets, I find that hospitals’ propensity to accept a contract with explicit financial and reputational risk is associated with accounting measures of creditworthiness. The association of creditworthiness with the choice of risky contracts is concentrated among those hospitals with the greatest revenue exposure to the contract’s financial incentives. My findings suggest that firms’ financing characteristics can distort the expected value of contract payoffs to induce seemingly risk-averse choices. My findings have important implications for the literature on inter-firm contracting and provide additional evidence concerning firms’ investment and production under uncertainty.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-666315
title: Mapping complex traits in structured populations

description: Genome-wide association mapping has become widely popular in recent years as a method to dissect the genetic architecture of traits.  With the $1,000 dollar genome on the horizon, genome-wide association studies are being conducted in large samples, often combining several human sub-populations in meta studies.  These data are challenging to analyze as not only are the samples typically structured but most traits of interest (such as human diseases) are usually also complex and polygenic. ❧ For complex traits, linkage disequilibrium can cause misleading or synthetic associations in genome-wide association studies.  On a local scale, synthetic associations caused by linkage have received increased attention recently, highlighting the difficulties involved with fine-mapping traits.  Linkage disequilibrium on a global scale, e.g. caused by population structure, is similarly also a source for confounding.  Mixed linear models have been shown to handle the confounding effects of a diffuse background of large numbers of loci of small effect well, but will not generally be able to account for multiple causative loci of moderate effect. ❧ This dissertation addresses common problems encountered when mapping complex traits in structured populations and describes how linear mixed models can be used to tackle these.  Chapter 2 presents the results from a genome-wide association study of 107 traits in very structured set of 199 Arabidopsis thaliana accessions, where I show how most of the 107 traits are significantly confounded by population structure as well as discuss a handful of interesting associations, both simple and complex.  In chapter 3 a multiple loci mixed model is proposed as a general method for mapping complex traits in structured populations.  By including markers as cofactors in the model the linear mixed model is dynamically updated, resulting in improved power to detect associations in simulated data (when restricting to small false discovery rates).  Finally, in chapter 4 I present an approach for combining correlated traits in one linear mixed model which allows for analysis of pleiotropic effects in complex traits confounded by population structure.  Using both human and A. thaliana examples, interesting associations which were missed in the single trait and single marker analysis, will be identified and discussed.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-120478
title: An exploratory study to determine whether there are differentiating characteristics of patients in group therapy in an outpatient psychiatric clinic which are related to continuance
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-148107
title: Aging women and depression
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-150698
title: An evaluative study of a group treatment program for abusing parents in the Department of Public Social Services
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-328160
title: Spatial patterns of food accessibility across Lane County, Oregon in 2015-2016

description: This analysis of the local food environment in Lane County, OR aimed to investigate inequalities associated with access to healthy food. The findings suggest that the problem is complex and is not simply a lack of healthy food stores. Retail food environments evolve quickly and research approaches to evaluate the phenomena are nimble with advanced technology and high quality data. Spatial access to healthy food is a key factor for dietary decisions. Previous research linked diet related diseases in disadvantaged communities to disparities in food access. Disadvantaged residents were associated with low access to healthy food outlets and high access to unhealthy food stores. Neighborhood food access was tracked through statistical analysis of economic and demographic characteristics that were collected in the federal census. This analysis quantified the food environment in Lane County, Oregon. The primary assessment measured residential proximity to five different food store types over the road network in Esri’s Network Analyst. The distances were aggregated into Census Block Groups to determine whether access to healthy food decreased in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This research aimed to fill the gap in the literature for distance-based food access analyses using residential address points at a local scale. This work employed systematic methods that addressed food retail dispersion across heterogeneous space to determine food outlet presences and absences at various distance bands across the study area. This research contributes to methodological developments that would eliminate the standard practice of compartmentalizing urban and rural food environment research into silos that are evaluated separately. The primary finding of the study was that neighborhoods in Lane County characterized as high deprivation with higher minority compositions had better access to healthy food store types. Future research should consider the affordability of healthy foods and include farmers’ markets, roadside stands, and community supported agriculture.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-345337
title: The impact of globalization and science and technology fairs on STEM education and 21st century skills development in one north Dublin County second-level school and second-level schools in the Republic of Ireland

description: Ireland has increasingly become an attractive destination for foreign direct investment(FDI) and multinational corporations (MNCs) since the mid-20th century. Economic incentives such as low corporate tax and a steady supply of workers have continued to attract FDI and MNCs to Ireland. However, international economic competition through globalization and the requirement of MNCs for more knowledge-based, skilled workers have created a need to revise Ireland’s current education system. Revisions would require an emphasis on teaching students 21st-century skills and increased opportunities for student participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses utilizing project-based learning (PBL) strategies, such as science and technology fairs. The current education system in Ireland is centered around preparing students for the Leaving Certificate Examination, which is used for student placement in universities and colleges. ❧ This study examined the influence of globalization, FDI, and MNCs on Ireland’s education system. Also examined were the influence of science and technology fairs, particularly SciFest, on the development of 21st-century skills, STEM education, and the fairs’ impact on students’ selection of STEM-related courses and choice of study in college. The main findings of this qualitative study indicated that globalization, FDI, and MNCs are influencing Irish educational policy and the need for further development of 21st-century skills and STEM education. Study participants stated a desire for stronger relationships between MNCs and schools with limited MNC influence on the curriculum. Study participants further stated that participation in PBL experiences, such as SciFest and other science and technology fairs, are influencing students’ choices in Senior Cycle course selection and studies in college.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-373605
title: Safe walk: a Network Analyst framework for safe routes to school

description: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can greatly strengthen Safe Routes to School (SRTS) programs by helping stakeholders to visualize service areas and study the process of walking to school. Information from a GIS can help drive policies and change processes at a district level. The purpose of this study is to provide a framework for how GIS, particularly Esri’s Network Analyst, may be used by a school district in SRTS programs. This study demonstrates how to analyze and visualize the process of students safely walking to school for two elementary schools in Chula Vista, California. This framework provides districts with procedures on how to acquire GIS data, preprocess data for Network Analyst, and analyze data by setting up a network with appropriate barriers and impedances. It shows district administrators a simple yet effective means of using a GIS to strengthen SRTS programs. This study resulted in maps of several routes within the Harborside Elementary and Wolf Canyon Elementary school zones. The maps and outputs helped to determine where the model worked well and where there were areas for improvement. Overall, Esri’s Network Analyst extension was found to be an effective tool in modeling the safest routes to school; however, each school zone needed model customization. This research also emphasizes factors that school districts would need to consider in the use of GIS for SRTS programs. Such implementations of GIS may help school districts better understand the process of students walking to school and help district administrators to make better-informed decisions regarding SRTS programs.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-384924
title: Secondary teacher perceptions of the Common Core State Standards

description: This study applied sociocultural theory to examine the theoretical beliefs teachers have concerning language and language acquisition and how these beliefs influenced their perceptions of the Common Core State Standards as a means of closing the achievement gap for English learners. This quantitative study analyzed teachers with differing theoretical beliefs about language development and the degree to which this affected implementation of the Common Core State Standards. There were a total of 82 high school teachers in the content areas of English, math, science, social studies, English language development, other electives, and coordinator/administrators who participated in this study. A cross sectional survey using a Likert scale was developed and completed using Qualtrics, a web-based instrument. Initial data analyses included frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations to summarize overall survey results. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to identify variations between teachers of different subject areas and their perceptions of the Common Core State Standards. A Chi Square was calculated to examine the relationship between teacher theoretical beliefs and subject area. The results from the one-way ANOVA indicated that there were differences in perception of the Common Core State Standards by teacher subject area. The Chi Square did not reveal any relationship between teachers of different subject areas and theoretical belief. This study contributed to the research on organizational change.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-617952
title: Quantitative unique continuation and complexity of solutions to partial differential equations

description: In the first part of the thesis, we address the strong unique continuation properties for 1D higher order parabolic partial differential equations with coefficients in the Gevrey class G^σ for σ&gt;1. We establish a quantitative estimate of unique continuation (observability estimate) under a mild assumption on the Gevrey exponent σ. Also, we improve the existing upper bounds on the size of the level sets of solutions and remove the analyticity requirement on the coefficients. Next, we consider the strong unique continuation problem for elliptic and parabolic equations in higher space dimensions. As an application, we provide a polynomial upper bound on the Hausdorff measure of the nodal (zero) sets of solutions in terms of the coefficients. In particular, we cover the case of the Navier-Stokes equations with non-analytic forcing. For this purpose, we provide Carleman-type inequalities with the same singular weight for the Laplacian and for the heat operator.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-636656
title: Optimizing information querying and dissemination in wireless networks

description: The recent advancement in semiconductor technologies brings more and more smart devices everywhere around us. Many emerging networks of such devices are envisioned to bring forward the era when we can gather information from everywhere, process them in real-time to make better decision on our activities, and tap into the necessary information from anywhere, whether at a standstill or moving around. In this dissertation, we consider two such promising networks — Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Vehicular Networks — to see how they can effectively share the information they produce and consume. ❧ First, we investigate how to search efﬁciently for the interesting information generated by monitoring the physical world through WSNs and look into the implication of our ﬁndings. We derive mathematical models for communication costs in information sharing (through search and replication) and optimize the energy-wise communication costs when the WSN operates as a distributed database system. The optimization results are then used to reveal the scaling laws of the network in terms of energy requirements. ❧ As a second study we investigate how to effectively disseminate over a vehicular network the information (e.g. multimedia ﬁles) that a group of people want to consume while they are moving around in the vehicles. We consider a hybrid network of vehicles in which vehicles are equipped with two kinds of radios: a high-cost low-bandwidth, long-range cellular radio, and a free high-bandwidth short-range radio. We formulate an optimization problem to maximize content dissemination from central servers to vehicles within a predetermined deadline while minimizing the cost associated with communicating over the cellular connection. We mathematically analyze the dissemination process and derive a closed-form optimal solution. We also develop a polynomial-time algorithm to obtain the optimal discrete solution better suited for practice and verify our results using real GPS traces of taxis.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-643230
title: Lenguaje sin fronteras (language without borders): the Spanish language in New Mexico and California politics, education, and identity, 1848-1952

description: When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican American War in 1848, Mexicans in conquered territories could become citizens without knowing the English language.  Lenguaje sin fronteras examines how people in California and New Mexico dealt with language usage in the generations following the war.  It describes the profound implication of language choices on racial perception and treatment, ideas of patriotism, national identity, and social acceptance in the United States. ❧ The war with Mexico left a population of individuals who continued to speak, think, and live in Spanish that has been constantly replenished by their progeny and immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries ever since.  Large numbers of Spanish-speaking citizens have been the reality, yet they were not always given full rights as citizens.  This dissertation explains how Spanish-speaking citizens have been perceived by the larger society and within the Spanish-speaking community as well as demonstrating how they chose to participate in different local, economic, and educational sectors of the United States.  It does so by using primary sources including individual and organizational archival papers, government documents, and Spanish language newspapers.  Lenguaje sin fronteras observes that efforts to retain and teach in a language other than English were profoundly impacted by ideas of national identity, racial categorization, and foreign policy.  In exploring these topics, this project contributes to discussions of varied language learning situations in other United States colonial settings and in comparisons with other immigrant groups. ❧ The varied responses of American policy regarding expectations of language leave an ambivalent legacy.  By retaining Spanish, a language with deep roots in these states, many United States citizens also retained transnational connections with Latin America through a language without borders.  In turn, language has contributed to a persistent appearance of non-citizenship, an ""otherness"" among many United States-born citizens over generations.  Language mdash; as a common bond, as identity, as access, and as a symbol of what is American mdash; has constantly influenced beliefs, attitudes, and values in unexpected ways.  Studying our views of Spanish language usage over a long period advances our understanding of how Americans continuously change their perceived -- and received -- identity.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-645586
title: Bilateralism in a globalized world: trade agreements among north-south partners in the Americas

description: The main thesis of this dissertation is stalemates at the multilateral trade negotiations and domestic institutions affect the probability of signing asymmetric (North-South) Preferential Trade Agreements between Latin American and OECD countries. I use theoretical debates of regional integration to build on that literature a new approach to analyze these new agreements. Even though many of the cases analyzed in this dissertation violate the key assumption about geographical proximity of this literature, still it is a useful point of departure for this research as both types of integration do not follow a completely different logic. ❧ More specifically, I argue that there are two intertwined dynamics that explain why some Latin American countries have joined asymmetric preferential trade agreements. First, I analyze an international-regional dimension arguing that the interaction between stalemates at the WTO and increasing regional asymmetric PTA density are the main reasons to explain why this type of agreements has been signed in Latin America. Second, I turn to study an institutional-domestic dimension in which I explore the role of the main veto players in Latin America in order to understand their influence in these asymmetric negotiations. I argue that in Latin America strong presidents undermined the veto power of other institutional actors but, being restrained by opposite social sectors to the asymmetric PTAs, particularly the ones that were strong and cohesive. These claims are supported by the evidence collected in three case studies about the U.S.-Costa Rica, U.S.-Ecuador and U.S. Peru negotiations for a preferential trade agreement and also tested in quantitative terms.