Middle Tennessee State University
JEWLScholar @MTSU (Middle Tennessee State University)Not a member yet
7964 research outputs found
Sort by
Muskogean Tribes Musical Influence on the Genre of Delta Blues
Get PDFLittle is known about the Native American influence on popular genres of music today. The subject has attracted little interest until recently, yet none of that interest has focused on the southeastern tribes, such as the Chickasaw or Choctaw. This is not altogether unusual as there remains much research to be done on how the various Native American cultures have influenced modern society. In terms of music specifically, there are very few descriptions and very little documentation of early Native American songs as the technology for recording was not invented until 1877. This thesis is merely a first step in introducing the idea that American Indigenous music has had an influence on popular forms of American music, such as Delta Blues. The written portion of this thesis has been done in conjunction with supporting audio musical compositions (many of which are original for this project) to assist in demonstration
STRENGTH AND MUSCLE ACTIVITY COMPARISONS OF WOMEN WITH AND WITHOUT PATELLOFEMORAL PAIN
Get PDFPatellofemoral pain (PFP) is a commonly occurring problem that is not well understood. However, it is thought to be related to decreased muscular control of the hip as it articulates with the pelvis, which can then be associated with faulty biomechanics at the knee. The purpose of the first study of this dissertation was to investigate and describe the hip strength and functional strength ratio profiles of women with PFP in comparison to women without PFP (N = 19). The purpose of the second study was to identify muscle activity patterns in four hip muscles in women with PFP in comparison to women without PFP (N = 21).
The primary finding in the first study was that women with PFP had a higher ratio of concentric hip abduction strength to eccentric hip adduction strength than women without PFP. This would suggest that there was a decreased level of muscular control and stability at the hip in women with PFP compared to women without. This may be associated with compromised biomechanics that could be related to increased dynamic valgus at the knee. This dynamic valgus has been attributed to PFP by previous research. Future studies should focus on continuing to identify both conventional as well as functional strength ratio patterns in persons with PFP, and how these ratios relate to the biomechanical attributes of the condition.
In the second study, the tensor fascia latae (TFL) was found to exhibit a higher level of muscle activity during several different functional movements in women with PFP when compared to women without PFP. It is thought that this higher level of activity may be related to a complex problem of decreased strength and activity in other muscle that stabilize the hip. It is possible that strengthening exercises that focus on increasing the strength of the external rotators of the hip as well as weight bearing stabilization exercises may improve symptoms in women with PFP. Future studies should focus on continued examination of muscle activity patterns in persons with PFP, including co-activation patterns and timing of activation.Ph.D
Testing for Associations Between Boldness and Thermoregulation in the Eastern Box Turtle, Terrapene carolina carolina
Get PDFThe study of animal personality in non-mammalian species is a relatively new and active area of focus in the field of animal behavior. Consequently, many factors and their mechanisms which influence personality are still being discovered. Previous studies have shown that box turtles exhibit consistent individual behavior and that their thermoregulatory ability may be connected to their personality. In this thesis, I attempted to determine whether higher shell temperatures were correlated with bolder personalities in the eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina). Behavioral and thermal data was collected from 15 turtles during the summer of 2020 in Rutherford County, TN. The turtles did demonstrate consistent individual differences and were classified as bold or shy. However, there was not a significant correlation between boldness and the turtles’ shell temperatures. This could reflect that turtles in naturally warmer climates do not need to expend much time and energy for behavioral thermoregulation, and, therefore, that boldness, as a personality trait, is uncoupled from thermoregulatory behavior. If correct, in more southern populations, boldness may have fitness benefits other than enhanced thermoregulation and the presumed higher growth rates
Preference Identification and Political Participation in Alternative Voting Systems
Get PDFThe purpose of this dissertation is to explore how modifying the structure of voting systems and procedures can identify and change people’s political behavior. By changing the voting rules or election structures faced by individual political agents, we ultimately change the incentive structures that underlie their decision making and should expect changes in political outcomes. The study examines two types of institutional changes and their associated effects on the behavior of political agents. The first study examines the formation of alternative voting rules and their use as a measure of voter preferences. The study defines the rules of a two-stage multivoting system and evaluates the performance of this system against traditional voting mechanism using experimental data gathered from college students. In the second part, the study examines the political entry decisions of political party candidates in state assembly general elections. Two approaches to political entry are presented: the first assumes that the probability of observing a candidate of a specific political party is dependent upon characteristics about a district’s election and demographic characteristics, while the other assumes candidates make election choices based on the expected payoff they receive by participating in elections.Ph.D
Language Agnostic Model: Detecting Islamophobic Content on Social Media
Get PDFIslamophobia or anti-Muslim racism is one dominant yet neglected form of racism in
our current day. The last few years have seen a tremendous increase in Islamophobic hate
speech on social media throughout the world. This kind of hate speech promotes violence
and discrimination against the Muslim community. Despite an abundance of literature on
hate speech detection on social media, there are very few papers on Islamophobia detection.
To encourage more studies on identifying online Islamophobia we are introducing the
first public dataset for the classification of Islamophobic content on social media. Past
work has focused on first building word embeddings in the target language which limits
its application to new languages. We use the Google Neural Machine Translator (NMT) to
identify and translate Non-English text to English to make the system language agnostic.
We can therefore use already available pre-trained word embeddings, instead of training our
models and word embeddings in different languages. We have experimented with different
word-embedding and classifier pairs as we aimed to assess whether translated English data
gives us accuracy comparable to English dataset. Our best performing model SVM with
TF-IDF gave us a 10-fold accuracy of 95.56 percent followed by the BERT model with a 10-
fold accuracy of 94.66 percent on the translated data. This accuracy is close to the accuracy
of the untranslated English dataset and far better than the accuracy of the untranslated Hindi
dataset.M.S
INTEGRATING GROUND-PENETRATING RADAR, FIELD DATA, AND GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR PALEOFLOOD STUDIES ALONG LYTLE CREEK, MURFREESBORO, TENNESSEE
Get PDFA geophysical investigation involving ground-penetrating radar (GPR) with soil probing was carried out on the floodplain of Lytle Creek, Murfreesboro, to understand the flood depositions and their subsurface lithology. Information was used to determine the watershed boundaries. A 350 MHz and 900 MHz Geophysical Survey Systems Inc. (GSSI) equipment was used for GPR data acquisition, and major interpretation procedures involving dewowing, filtering, and applying automatic gain were carried out. The GPR surveys in this study revealed significant sub-surface stratigraphy of depositional materials along the river channel. Three main characteristic radar facies were identified through the floodplain and bank exposure investigation. The majority of the profiles were noted to have horizontal, wavy, and hyperbolic reflections. The resulting floodplain structure was delineated and found to extend throughout the river channel and having fine-grained deposits (silty loam and silty clay). GPR proved to be a reliable tool in delineating subsurface stratigraphy non-invasively for this study.M.S
High Performance Scientific Computing as a Service in the Cloud
Get PDFThis thesis explores the process of developing and testing of a containerized Lightweight
Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server using a cloud-based resource model to successfully authenticate users as part of a high-performance computing (HPC) workflow for Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). In industry, it is commonplace to have an HPC workflow, but not have the orchestration capabilities provided by a cloud computing resource model. As a result, the work done for this thesis serves as a functional prototype to the creation of a containerized LDAP server on a HPC cloud computing cluster. Future work can be done by MTSU to establish a workflow that will package all the development tools students use during their time at the university
Where Did All the Parents Go?: An Intergenerational Approach to Incarceration
Get PDFThe United States incarcerates more people than any other developed nation in the world. However, the effects of incarceration are not limited to those incarcerated. The friends, family, employers, and children of that person also realize the consequences. In fact, millions of children experience the effects of parental incarceration before the time they reach maturity. In addition, research suggests that children of incarcerated parents have an increased likelihood of imprisonment. Using the 2004 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities, this study adds to the growing body of literature examining intergenerational incarceration. Specially, a series of binary logistic regression models examine how parent’s incarceration (first-generation) predicts the likelihood an inmate having a child incarcerated as well (third generation). Attention is given to the sex of the parent for first and second generations (i.e., mothers or fathers), strains and stressors such as physical abuse by a parent and prior parental incarceration, and sociodemographic factors. Findings suggest that female inmates were over three times more likely to have an incarcerated child compared to male inmates. Key to the research, having had an incarcerated parent significantly increased the likelihood of children’s incarceration by a factor of 2.758. This pattern holds across all models except mothers and incarcerated sons. Physical abuse by a parent and prior imprisonment both increased the odds of having an incarcerated child. Being married also resulted in higher odds of third-generation incarceration, but only for male inmates. These findings are discussed with reference to existing research and theory.M.A
APPRAISAL TENDENCY FRAMEWORK: EMOTIONS AND PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL INJUSTICE
Get PDFThis thesis implemented the ideas based on the Appraisal-Tendency Framework. Specifically, it observed whether felt emotions, such as sadness or anger, in an educational setting, affected judgments made on whether a situation was just or unjust. Previous research indicated evidence of an impact on justice perceptions when differing emotions were felt, and blame was attributed either situationally or individually. Further evaluation with the efforts related to this study may help move related research forward. For example, findings of this research provided supporting evidence that the emotion of anger indirectly negatively affects fairness perceptions when mediated by individual blame. However, evidence was not found to support sadness negatively impacting fairness perceptions when mediated by situational blame, contrary to the findings of earlier researchers (Kausel et al., 2016). Overall, findings suggest that emotion influences judgments of fairness when mediated by blame, but further research is recommended, especially to overcome a few limitations of this study.
In addition, past and current researchers appear divided regarding the impact of gender differences on judgments and decision-making. Therefore, this study also presented several research questions related to the question: do gender differences impact perceptions of fairness? After evaluating gender as a moderator of the relationship between emotion, blame, and fairness perceptions, however, support for gender differences was not found. Follow up research is needed to further evaluate these findings.
In summary, this study helped provide greater generalizability to previous findings suggesting emotions impact judgments of social injustice in the workplace.M.A
Indian American Attitudes Towards Seeking Mental Health Care
No full textThe purpose of this study is to analyze the attitudes of mental health care of Indian Americans. Indian Americans make up 4.7 million of the United States population and the numbers have been growing exponentially ever since. The cultures of India and the United States are very different and the way the view mental health is very different as well. Although there has been a lot of growth in the field of psychology in both countries, the United States has many more resources in respect to mental health care than India does. This study looks at aspects of immigration, acculturation, individual and collectivism, model minority stress, and stigma and the effects they may have towards the attitudes towards mental health care. The measures used in this study are the Mental Help Seeking Attitude Scale, the Social, Attitudinal, Familial, and Environmental Stress scale, and the reduced version of the Individualism and Collectivism Scale.M.A