cometadata/datacite-titles-descriptions-related-identifiers huggingface dataset:
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-355116
title: Culturally responsive andragogy in a synchronous virtual learning environment

description: Distance learning has been increasing in the past few years, and in 2016, 50% of undergraduate and graduate students will be taking courses online (National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, 2015b). Of this 50%, 33,563 students outside the United States are enrolled in distance learning (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). For this study, the focus is on one type of distance learning which is real-time synchronous webcam enabled learning. This population of international students is exposed to synchronous technology and the American educational system at the same time. Few studies have looked at cultural issues in distance learning and it is important for educators to use the appropriate andragogy when teaching international students. This study will address culturally responsive andragogical strategies instructors can use in a virtual environment. These strategies range from clear communication of the syllabus, feedback, technological features, and cultural sensitivity when instructing international students in a synchronous webcam enabled virtual learning environment in a post-secondary course.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-629726
title: An "evil system"?: planning for environemental health in America's mobile and most polluted metropolis, 1959 to the present

description: This dissertation contributes to interdisciplinary dialogues connecting history, urban studies/planning, and environmental health.  Using evidence gleaned from government transportation agencies such as public works manuscripts, annual reports, master plans, and environmental impact reports, I argue there is a long history of diverse groups and agencies intervening in the urban planning process in order to improve environmental health standards.  In fact, the sources reveal that urban planners and individuals within the planning process knew a great deal about the link between transportation and environmental health and implemented an array of measures aimed to protect human health.  Sound walls, increased mass transit developments, scaled down transportation projects, off-shore airports, high occupancy lanes, park-and-ride stations, and significantly increased environmental review through compulsory environmental impact reports were only a few of the measures that helped protect environmental health during the construction of Southern California’s airports, seaports, and freeways.  Although urban planning still created one of the most polluted and congested regions in the U.S., without the significant increase in environmental review from the myriad of individuals, groups, and agencies that make up the urban planning process, environmental health outcomes could have been considerably worse. ❧ This project examines the environmental planning process in order to illuminate how Los Angeles became one of the most saturated and polluted transportation hubs in the United States.  Through the lens of history, this dissertation interrogates how, despite the implementation of numerous environmental health standards into the planning process, transportation exhaust accounted for 90% of the region’s smog during the 1960s and is still responsible for 94% of the basin’s carcinogenic risk.  What did urban planners know about the relationship between transportation and environmental health, when did they know it, and what did they do about it?  This historical analysis is accomplished through an examination of Southern California’s Century 105 and Long Beach 710 Interstate Freeways, Los Angeles International Airport, and the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, essentially employing one chapter for each major mode of 20th Century transportation.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-636481
title: The role of pknG in mycobacterial physiology, including M. tuberculosis

description: Tuberculosis continues to be a major cause of mortality worldwide, killing about two million people every year.  The emergence of drug resistant strains of the bacterium has hindered efforts to successfully control the pandemic.  The main causative agent, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, employs several strategies that help it survive in host macrophages.  Recent studies have shown that the eukaryotic-like serine/threonine protein kinase G (PknG), secreted by M. tuberculosis, can inhibit phagosome-lysosome fusion and mediate intracellular survivability.  Through transposon-insertion mutagenesis, a Mycobacterium smegmatis knockout of the pknG gene was generated.  This mutant was found to be hypersusceptible to erythromycin, an antimycobacterial agent.  This finding suggests that pknG is involved in processes that affect the activity of antimicrobial agents.  The objective of the project is to characterize the roles that this gene plays in mycobacterial physiology, which may give us insight to the drug susceptibility and pathogenicity of mycobacteria, including M. tuberculosis.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-640318
title: Falling: a matter of national gravity: analysis of a 4-person game for the Apple iPad

description: This paper examines the inspiration, conceptual overview, user experience, and testing and evaluation methods for the 4-person iPad game Falling: A Matter of National Gravity; and also pinpoints critical design decisions in the project’s development.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-646653
title: Exactly obvious

description: Wedged Interloper: Aesthetic Object ❧ Sculpture exists in the space between rational existence and the literal void of language -- a wedged interloper stuck somewhere between the thing and its description.  Every object straddles the divide between brute necessity and its own aesthetic impact.  This thesis discusses the impact of language on the transition of objects from the unknown to the obvious.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-672074
title: The role of BMP signaling in the regulation of hair follicle progenitor cells

description: The spatially defined differentiation programs of the hair follicle provide a significant model to study the underlying mechanisms of stem cell lineage determination. The biochemical signals that govern these biological mechanisms continue to be unraveled. Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMP) play an integral role in the homeostasis and differentiation of the hair follicle. ❧ To further study the role of BMP signaling in regulation of hair follicle progenitors, we labeled hair follicle progenitor cells in conditional K14-Cre-mediated-BMPR1A mice using a green fluorescent protein (GFP) reporter gene to investigate the target genes of BMP signaling involved in the differentiation of progenitor cells into the inner root sheath and hair shaft. Without BMPR1A activation, BMP signaling responsive genes are downregulated and the differentiation program is compromised. ❧ Our studies indicate the important role of Wnt signaling in the differentiation program of hair follicle progenitors and an elusive crosstalk between the Wnt and BMP pathway that further define the differentiation of the hair shaft cortical layer.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-104017
title: An evaluation of Child Welfare and Attendance services in The Compton Unified School District
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-122141
title: Adolescence into adulthood: A follow-up study of young adults discharged from residential treatment
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-326879
title: Establishing clinical efficacy of botanical products: a survey of industry views

description: In 1994, passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) provided a pathway by which botanical products could be marketed as dietary supplements. This pathway shielded most botanicals from requirements to provide evidence of efficacy and safety, but allowed them to claim health-giving effects. This marketing route has become the preferred path for botanicals, so few have been studied in rigorous clinical trials to establish their therapeutic potential and even fewer have been developed as botanical drugs. This research study sought to explore the views of regulatory affairs professionals in dietary supplement industry concerning the limitation affecting the clinical study of botanical ingredients and their development as drugs. A literature review first examined the challenges associated with assuring the quality and safety of such products and the current state of efficacy testing. Based on this review a framework to systematize areas of concern was established to guide development of a survey instrument, that the survey instrument was reviewed by a focus group of industry and academic experts to identify areas in which validity might be improved. It was then disseminated to senior regulatory, marketing, and professionals knowledgeable about dietary supplement and drug regulations and marketing. Results suggested that many hurdles existed in financial, marketing, regulatory and product development domains. The most important hurdle appeared to be the challenge of shielding a company that pursues an expensive development program from competition from dietary supplement manufacturers. In addition, results suggested that management often disagreed on the need and approach for clinical trials in a way that impeded decision-making.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-342561
title: Woman with vision: the romantic re-conception of the Spenserian psyche

description: The concept of vision is at the heart of Romantic poetics, and vision is in turn generated by the soul’s desire, both to know and to internalize the desired Other. Romantic romance poetry contains the clearest delineations of what it means, and what it can mean to become a man of vision; the mode of magic worlds and flights of fancy offers the poet license to test the moral values that drive development. Scholars have hitherto argued that visionary Romantic heroism is driven by male values, for the male soul. This categorization fails to recognize the textual manifestations of female desire, or, at best, deems it a counter-force the hero overcomes. Heroines are excluded from visionary development, that, according to Marlon Ross, is constituted by the ideology of “self-possession.” Even feminist scholars who argue the presence of female characters that are written, per Susan Wolfson, to “reconceive the ideologies of gender that grant only men’s souls the privilege of desire and a claim to power,” conclude that heroines fall short of achieving vision. My project is a defense of the existence of Romantic romance heroines who undergo visionary development, one that accompanies, if not surpasses, that of the heroes. Each chapter is an intensive close reading of a canonical romance that I argue subverts the hyper-masculine expectations from the soul’s quest for knowledge: William Blake’s Jerusalem, Mary Tighe’s Psyche, Percy Shelley’s Laon and Cythna, and John Keats’s Endymion. These diverse texts exhibit a particular brand of revolutionary Spenserianism that I trace back to The Faerie Queene. In this first English romance, Spenser purposefully destabilizes patriarchal order by an undercurrent of female desire, and explores this desire’s heroic potentials through the Psyche, the allegorical (female) soul. Blake, Tighe, Shelley, and Keats appropriate the Spenser-mediated Psyche to create heroines whose souls experience the privilege of desire, and cultivate it through a universalizing love—explained through Salomé’s theory of the female erotic—that allows them to assert their roles in reforming the self-possession of male power. Psychean love is transformative and counter-egotistical, allowing intellectual union between genders.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-386676
title: An intercultural study on how consumers’ attitudes about corporate sustainability influence purchase intention

description: In recent years, the issue of sustainability has become one of the most important concerns for the whole society. To assess the relationship between consumers’ attitude and their purchase intentions, this study used the IKEA brand as the model. The author conducted a quantitative, online survey to examine the relationships between the consumers’ attitude towards sustainability principles, and their purchase intention. The paper concludes that: (1) Consumers’ attitude towards a corporation’s sustainability principles and strategies are positively related with purchasing intention; (2) For both Chinese and US consumers, neither their attitude nor purchase intention differed significantly when considered among IKEA’s three defined sustainability domains (“Sustainable Lifestyle at Home”, “Energy & Resource Independence” and “A Better Life for People and Communities”); (3) Chinese consumers expressed a significantly more positive attitude towards all three of IKEA’s sustainability principles, and stronger purchase intentions based on their awareness of the environment-related principles, than did US consumers.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-387396
title: The structure of noun phrases in Bengali: what it tells us about phases and the universality of DPs

description: The overarching question in this dissertation research is how the internal structure of a noun phrase can be best represented: is the structure of noun phrases universal, i.e, the same in all languages? Or is there a typological divide in terms of the structure of the noun phrase? It is proposed, primarily based on findings regarding the behavior of an Indo-Aryan language Bengali/Bangla, that the languages of the world can be divided into three types regarding the structure of the noun phrase: (i) languages with articles, (ii) languages with no articles but with special word-order and movement to signal definiteness, and (iii) languages with no articles and with no designated special word-order and movement for marking definiteness.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-43818
title: A comparative study of caseworkers' and generalists' clinical judgments
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-621759
title: Applications of loop closure and stochastic potential switching to Monte Carlo simulations of large systems

description: Simulations of many body systems suffer from a myriad of problems; the complexity of interactions, the number of interacting units, the length scale at which interactions happen, etc. It is a challenge to devise methods that can sample phase space efficiently for such systems and accurately estimate equilibrium properties. The present work focuses on the construction and application of two distinct techniques for the simulation of such systems. These methods involve large-scale changes in the system configuration and have the potential to be applicable to a variety of systems. These methods were used to study the critical behavior in a Sine-Gordon lattice model and for achieving enhanced conformational sampling in an all-atom model of proteins. ❧ A novel switching algorithm is described in which a reverse Monte Carlo method is implemented. Here, the potential is stochastically modified before the system configuration is moved. This new algorithm facilitates a generalized formulation of cluster-type Monte Carlo methods, and the generalization makes it possible to derive cluster algorithms for systems with both discrete and continuous degrees of freedom. This Reverse Monte Carlo has been applied to study the roughening transition in the Sine-Gordon model and high-accuracy simulations for system sizes up to 1024X1024 were carried out to examine the logarithmic divergence of the surface roughness above the transition temperature. This logarithmic divergence is a clear evidence that the transition belongs to the Kosterlitz-Thouless type. ❧ Proteins and other biomolecules like RNAs are extremely difficult systems to simulate because of the large system sizes involved and the complexity of interactions present. The time-scales over which interesting phenomena occur also makes it difficult for Molecular Dynamics techniques to do full justice in such systems. A loop closure Monte Carlo algorithm is derived and implemented for simulation of proteins at ambient temperatures. The loop closure method generates alternative structures for an internal segment of a chain when atomic coordinates of the atoms outside the segment are fixed. The formulation makes use of a novel representation of boundary constraints and allows the loop closure problem to be reduced in complexity from a 6-variable 6-constraint problem to a 4-variable 4-constraint problem. The proposed method is no longer limited to small loops, but can be used to close loops of arbitrarily large sizes. This brings to life the possibility to facilitate very large conformational sampling with each move.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-622286
title: Fault diagnosis with reconstruction-based contributions for statistical process monitoring

description: Fault detection and diagnosis are important for the safe operation and control of a process, and for the reduction of its operation and maintenance costs. The implementation of mechanisms for the early  detection and diagnosis of faults is called process monitoring. Due to the size and complexity of industrial processes, multivariate statistical methods are finding wide application in process monitoring. Some popular methods are principal component analysis (PCA) for linear processes, and kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) for nonlinear processes. In statistical process monitoring, faults are detected with fault detection indices that trigger alarms when an index has violated its control limit; after a fault is detected, a diagnosis method is used to find its root cause. A popular method for fault diagnosis has been contribution plots. This method uses the idea that a variable with a high contribution to a faulty index is likely the cause of the fault; however, there is no guarantee that a faulty variable would have the largest contribution. For the case of nonlinear processes, very few methods are available for fault diagnosis with KPCA models. ❧ In this dissertation, a new diagnosis method is proposed based on the reconstruction of a detection index along an arbitrary direction. The method is called reconstruction-based contributions (RBC) and is able to provide contributions along single variable, univariate and multivariate directions. ❧ An analysis of the diagnosis power of the RBC method shows that it guarantees correct diagnosis of sensor faults with large magnitudes while the traditional contributions do not. Analysis of the RBC and other diagnosis methods shows that several of these methods can be unified into some general methods; further analysis shows which of them fail to guarantee correct diagnosis for sensor faults with large magnitudes. ❧ The RBC method is extended to the diagnosis of faults in nonlinear processes using KPCA models, where the RBC values are calculated along univariate and multivariate directions using nonlinear optimization methods. ❧ Analysis and simulations show the effectiveness of the RBC method for the diagnosis of simple and complex faults, with univariate or multivariate directions that are known or unknown; and that happen in linear or nonlinear processes.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-624059
title: The ethics of form: politics, the passions, and genre formation in Renaissance England

description: This dissertation investigates the social, political, and psychological influences on literary genre formation in early modern England.  Taking a cue from Sir Philip Sidney’s discussions of genre in the Defense of Poesie, my project constructs a theory of genre that responds to the interconnection of sociological conditions and theories of psychological affect, which in the early modern period were generally known as “passions.”  I argue that writers of genres new to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries first identified particular psychological affects as important to the reception of their work, and in response developed poetic techniques designed specifically to engage those passions.  Over time, these techniques became conventions of the developing genre as later writers appropriated them for their own work in that genre.  In my study of tragicomedy, utopian fiction, overseas travelogues, and interregnum anthologies known as “fancies,” I examine the work of writers as influential as William Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, Sir Francis Bacon, and John Dryden as well as lesser known figures such as John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, and Margaret Cavendish.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-637367
title: Survival in de novo metastatic breast cancer: association with clinicopathologic and treatment-related factors

description: Purpose: There are limited data that directly associate utilization of novel systemic therapies with survival trends in metastatic breast cancer (MBC).  In the setting of de novo MBC, large registry analyses cite positive temporal trends in survival, but it is not clear to what extent advances in systemic therapy have contributed to these gains. ❧ Patients and Methods: The City of Hope Cancer Registry was used to identify consecutive series of patients with de novo MBC who received their first line of therapy between 1985 and 2004.  Comprehensive clinicopathologic and treatment-related data were collected for each patient.  Univariate analyses were conducted via Cox regression to identify factors associated with improved survival.  Stepwise multivariate Cox regression analysis was also conducted to identify independent predictors of survival. ❧ Results: A total of 324 patients with de novo MBC were identified.  After application of exclusion criteria, including the sole presence of supraclavicular node metastasis, 274 patients were retained in the analysis.  Among treatment-related characteristics, use of endocrine therapy was associated with improved survival (hazard ratio [HR] 0.60, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.47-0.77; p &lt; 0.0001), as was therapy with bisphosphonates (HR 0.70, 95% CI 0.52-0.96; p = 0.02).  However, recipients of novel cytotoxic agents (defined as drugs approved for MBC since 1994) had no improvement in survival relative to patients treated with older cytotoxic agents.  On multivariate analysis, age (&lt; 50), receipt of aromatase inhibitors, and receipt of zoledronic acid were independent predictors of survival. ❧ Conclusions: Novel cytotoxic agents are not clearly associated with improved survival in the setting of de novo MBC.  Biomarkers and other predictive tools that identify subsets of patients that derive benefit from these agents may be of substantial utility.  On the other hand, novel endocrine therapies and bone-directed agents seem to improve survival in advanced breast cancer, supporting continued investigation of such agents.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-656647
title: On the block: a collaborative storytelling project about life in the shadow of mass incarceration

description: This thesis documents the first phases of work done for On The Block, a web-based series of audio-visual reports created collaboratively with students and organizers at FREE L.A High, a small community-run charter school in South Central Los Angeles for youth affected by street life, gang violence, and mass incarceration.