Dissertations, Academic -- Florida Atlantic University

Landfills receive odor complaints from local residents potentially resulting in
legal ramifications and decreasing quality of life of the neighboring communities.
However, analytical technologies to objectively measure odors in the field that will
reflect human odor perceptions at a reasonable price do not currently exist. Hydrogen
sulfide (H2S) is detectable by humans at low odor thresholds and may be one of the main
nuisance odors emanating from landfills. For the first time, hOBPIIa complexed with 1-
AMA has been used to detect H2S concentrations by spectrofluorometry. The optimal
ratio of hOPBIIa-to-1-AMA was determined to be approximately 1:1. A strong linear
regression model was generated to predict H2S concentrations from peak fluorescent
emission intensity measurements within a range of 0-8.3 g of H2S. A novel
experimental exposure chamber prototype was developed that has the potential to be
incorporated into a portable sensor because it is compact.

Ubiquitous media communications technology necessitates democratic and
critical media literacy education for developing an active 21st century polity. This study
analyzed the context of democratic and critical media competencies in national
curriculum standards across Australia, England, and the United States. This, based on
Lefebvre’s (1991) conception of conceived space, where standards operate as manifest
educational policy and as a basis for establishing good practice.
The study employed a multi-theoretical approach to textual analysis, within
Bereday’s (1964) comparative structure of inquiry. A critical policy lens supported the
contextualization of ideological influences that frame democratic and critical media
literacies in standards, per Bay-Cheng, Fitz, Alizaga, and Zucker’s (2015) neoliberal
subscales. A purposive sample of civics and citizenship, English/English language arts,
and media arts/studies was employed. Differences across three main indicators were
identified: socio-cultural and youth-based concerns, personal growth via media production and other skills development, and reasoning and communication skills
improvement. The neoliberal influences on curricular standards were subsequently
explored across three emerging themes: identity politics, problem-based and critical
inquiry experiences, and the inclusion of digital new media in curriculum inquiry.
Though recognized in the countries’ standards as multifaceted and complex, each
obfuscates identity in some way. Both England and the United States inadequately
confront race, class, gender, socio-economic status, cultural commodification, and youthbased
issues. Though not overtly neoliberal, the Australian standards present identity
hegemonically.
The role of media is somewhat siloed from the curriculum’s conceptions of
identity and active citizenship across all three countries. The English standards are least
adept at developing learners’ understandings of the influence of media on identity
development, whereas both England and the United States over-emphasize text to the
neglect of new media understandings. An apolitical view of media literacy, accompanied
by techno-economic terminology, is pervasive in U.S. standards.
Despite a counter-critical approach to the framing of its curriculum priorities,
Australia presents the most balanced view of democratic/critical media citizenship.
England’s standards reflect neoliberal-communitarian citizenship and largely neglect
critical questioning. Whereas the United States takes a similarly cosmopolitan view of
citizenship to Australia and England, the standards fail to comprehensively explore the
links between digital democracy and political engagement.

Designing and developing enterprise applications is a complex and resource intensive process, as it often must address thousands of requirements. At the same time, the software architecture of most enterprise applications at their core have many features and structures in common. Designers from different teams do not normally share design elements because of the competitive and proprietary nature of development, and enterprise applications design and development teams end up re-inventing the wheel when tackling a new product.
My objective is to formulate new design patterns for enterprise application architectures that assist software architects with reusable solutions to improve design quality and productivity. I achieve this by presenting seven patterns, each providing a solution to a specific challenge or a problem that is common to many enterprise applications.
The Business Object Pattern provides a generic approach to design extensible Business Objects and their frameworks for enterprise applications. The pattern covers a number of concepts, including the Dynamic business object, the Static business object, constraints for validity, editability, and attribute visibility, as well as the mechanisms for workflow.
The Business Object Life Cycle Pattern introduces the concept of stages which comprise a business object’s life cycle, and their relation to the business object’s integrity during that life cycle.
The Simple Change History Pattern provides a concept of enforcing record keeping of the owner and date of the last change performed on a given business data object. The Business Data Object Versioning Pattern offers a solution by introducing a new version of a given business data object which allows for preservation of the original data. The Change History Record Pattern defines a solution for cases when there is a need to capture detailed information about the changes performed on a given business object, such as who made the changes, when, and what changes were made.
The Permission Based Granular Access Control Pattern offers a basic approach for access control to objects and their attributes.
Finally, the Money Object Pattern offers a language neutral approach to internationalization and globalization of business applications which require multi-currency capability.
It is hoped that applying these patterns will provide many advantages, ranging from quicker delivery times to a more reliable software, and ultimately help achieve a systematic approach to designing and building complex enterprise applications.

As the economy continues to struggle in its recovery from the recent recession,
higher education institutions have been hard-hit, affecting stakeholders at all levels,
including boards of trustees, students, faculty, and the surrounding communities. In the
middle of the turmoil and period of change are the presidents, needing to answer to board
members as well as other institutional stakeholders, while still maintaining a balance of
organizational consistency and change. Nearly all organizational change literature
incorporates interpersonal communication as an integral component in effective change
efforts; therefore, the constantly changing higher education landscape necessitates
presidents who are skilled in communicative leadership, of which interpersonal skills are
a cornerstone. Although all presidents need these skill sets, this study examines only a
newly appointed president and one of his change-initiative teams to capture the dynamic
environment surrounding new administration.

The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (2016) contends meeting the
challenge to transform care will require the successful leadership development,
preparation, and role support of the next generation of nurse leaders. Despite the urgency
to transform care, meeting the challenge to lead this charge cannot be accomplished
without the successful recruitment and retention of Millennial nurses to leadership
positions. Identifying the leadership role expectations and support variables that are
important to these young managers and creating the milieus that support these views
serve to address many pressing succession planning needs.
This study explored the experience of being a Millennial nurse manager, seeking
to understand how these young nurse managers make meaning of their lived experience.
This was a qualitative interpretative phenomenological research study. Three theoretical
perspectives contributed ideologies that framed this inquiry: Ray’s (1989) theory of
bureaucratic caring, generational cohort theory (Strauss & Howe, 1991), and authentic leadership theory (Avolio & Gardner, 2005). A purposeful targeted national sample of 25
Millennial nurse managers with a minimum of one year of nurse manager experience in
the role participated in audio-recorded telephone interviews. Content analysis identified
seven themes: Coming into the Role, Learning as I Go, Having the Support of My
Director, Making an Impact, Helping Staff Succeed, Managing Change, and Trying to
Stay Balanced.
Findings from this study suggest Millennial nurse managers gauge role success
and satisfaction in relation to their perceived levels of support and development and their
ability to master role expectations. Additional findings suggest adequate succession
planning for the nurse manager role remains challenged by the lack of formal mandated
requisites for the role.
The nurse manager role as it stands varies significantly among organizational
settings regarding responsibilities, mechanisms of support, number of direct reports, and
span of control. Recommendations included the need to address the nurse manager role,
academic requisites, and developmental variances in practice. Additionally, re-evaluating
the organizational responsibility to the leadership development of these young nurse
leaders is recommended to ensure their retention and success in the role.

A comprehensive study is conducted to evaluate global sea levels for trends and variations due to climate change and variability by using non-parametric methods. Individual and coupled effects of inter-annual ENSO, decadal PDO, multi-decadal AMO, and quasi-decadal NAO on sea levels are evaluated. Combined influences of different phases (cool or warm) of PDO, AMO, and NAO influences and ENSO are also evaluated. The results from this study showed that sea level at 60% of the sites is increasing with time with all four oscillations impacting global sea levels. AMO warm phase individually and PDO warm combined with La-Niña phase contribute to higher sea levels throughout the world. Trends and variations in sea levels are noted to be spatially non-uniform. Understanding and quantifying climate variability influenced variations in sea levels and assessment of long-term trends enables protection of coastal regions of the world from sea level rise.

The purpose of this phenomenological multi-case study and three-person
interview, was to discover what select prominent African-American scientists perceived
were obstacles to overcome to be successful leaders in their professional lives, and the
opportunities that aided in their professional growth. Through the addition of the threeperson
interview, the researcher discovered commonalities between the perceived
obstacles and opportunities of current science, technology, engineering and mathematics
(STEM) professionals and the perceptions of selected historically prominent scientists.
This study examined documents of the period and relics of prominent African-
Americans who were in STEM fields and lived from 1860 to 1968. A description of the
setting that influenced how the scientists perceived the phenomenon was written with the
approach being anchored in the social constructivist tradition. Commonalities emerged
through coding experiences of the individuals, which yielded patterns to help explain the
phenomenon. By investigating their perceptions, insight was gained into understanding the attributes, tools and skills, and tailored experiences that encouraged Thomas Burton,
Kelly Miller, George Carver, Daniel Williams, Matthew Henson, Ernest Just, Charles
Drew, Percy Julian, William Cobb, and Benjamin Peery to achieve success in STEM
fields between 1860 and 1968.
The significance of the study is multifaceted: understanding the obstacles that
African-American scientists had to overcome in their professional lives can result in the
development of science educators who are better informed regarding the appropriate
types of assistance that can be provided to aid their students in overcoming obstacles.
This can hopefully increase their opportunities to succeed within the science field. This
study can result in the development of science educators who are more sensitive in
addressing the needs of the developing minority student, and can encourage, educate, and
enlist more individuals to enter into the dialogue regarding the disparity of minority
representation in STEM fields.

This non-experimental, quantitative study explored the leadership of college
professors and the relationship to student assessments of their teaching performance. The
leadership constructs under investigation were strategic thinking capacity (cognitive
agility) and leader influence actions (behavioral agility), which are rooted in the theories
of behavioral and cognitive complexity. Research indicates that cognitive and behavioral
agility are two factors that produce more effective results for leaders in varying
organizational contexts. However, previous research does not include college professors
in those studies. Thus, this study sought to explore professors as classroom leaders and
the relationship between college professors’ cognitive and behavioral agility and their
students’ perceptions of their teaching effectiveness, if behavioral agility plays a
mediating role, and if that relationship is moderated by alterable and unalterable
contextual variables. Ninety-two full-time professors from one Florida college participated in the study.
The professors’ strategic thinking capacity (cognitive agility) was measured using the
STQP, an adaptation of Pisapia and Reyes-Guerra’s (2007) Strategic Thinking
Questionnaire (STQTM), and the professors’ leader influence actions (behavioral agility)
were measured using the SLQP, an adaptation of Pisapia, Reyes-Guerra, and Yasin’s
(2006) Strategic Leadership Questionnaire (SLQTM) with both instruments employing
Pisapia’s (2009) framework of strategic leadership. The ‘P’ denotes the ‘professor’
version of the original STQTM and SLQTM. Locus of control orientation as a contextual
variable was measured using Spector’s (1988) Work Locus of Control Scale (WLCS).
To measure student perceptions of professor effectiveness, the student
assessments of courses and faculty were compiled from existing records from Palm
Beach State College’s Institutional Research and Effectiveness (IRE) website. The data
were statistically analyzed using correlational and regression analyses and tested for
mediation and moderation effects. The findings of this study revealed that college
professors demonstrated the same strategic thinking capacity and leader influence actions
as leaders in more traditional leadership roles as measured by the STQP and SLQP. The
findings were also consistent with previous studies that found that cognitive agility is a
significant predictor of behavioral agility. However, it also found that student
perceptions of professor effectiveness as measured by student assessments were not
correlated to any of the research variables in this study. Findings and conclusions, as
well as recommendations for future research, are presented in the concluding chapter.

Prenatal maternal stress and mood, and early postnatal mother-infant interactions
set the stage for the child’s psychobiological, neurological and social development. While
a large body of research connecting maternal depression to infant EEG asymmetry exists,
the current study sought to add to the sparse literature on maternal anxiety and infant
EEG. Mother-infant dyads were assessed prenatally during the third trimester, soon after
birth, at 6 weeks and 3 months postnatal. Association between maternal depression and
later development of right mid-frontal alpha asymmetry was confirmed, while trends
suggested maternal anxiety may be associated with lateral frontal alpha asymmetry.
Greater maternal sensitivity and anxiety were each associated with lower post-stressor
cortisol in infants with right frontal asymmetry. Greater time spent in mutual gaze was
associated with positive infant affect. Finally, quality mother-infant dynamics encourage positive infant affect and healthy physiological stress regulation even when brain patterns
associated with dysregulation have been established.

This case study examined and described how under-served high school students
enrolled in medical sciences academy CTE programs (Certified Nursing Assistant [CNA]
and Electrocardiogram Technician [EKG]) at two Florida Title I high schools perceive
that their career and technical education experience prepared them with the academic and
technical skills and knowledge to pursue postsecondary training or higher education; be
better prepared to transition into an ever-more complicated economic workplace; and
become qualified and competent members of the workforce. The study participants were
53 CTE students (CNA and EKG juniors and seniors from both school sites), four CTE
instructors (two CNA and two EKG instructors from both school sites), and three CTE
administrators (one assistant principal from both school sites and one district Medical
Sciences Specialist Administrator) during the academic school year 2016-2017. There were six major findings and ten sub-themes of this study. The first finding
is that CTE programs at these schools provide career exploration and planning
opportunities and includes four sub-themes; school-based learning, work-based learning,
connecting activities, and need for improvement of CTE programs. The second finding is
that CTE programs at these schools offer career relevant curricula and includes three subthemes;
school-based learning, work-based learning, and connecting activities. The third
finding is that students enrolled in CTE programs at these schools are offered consistent
support and guidance, and includes three sub-themes: instructor support, guidance
counselor support, and administrator support. The fourth finding is that the district plays
a key role in the strategic planning and management of CTE programs at these schools.
The fifth finding is that procedures are in place that make allowances for accountability
and assessment of CTE programs at these schools. The sixth finding is the assessment of
students’ career decision-making self-efficacy enrolled in CTE programs at these schools.
Results indicated that students enrolled in CTE medical sciences academy
programs (CNA and EKG) at these schools reported a high degree of career decisionmaking
self-efficacy. Moreover, instructors,’ administrators,’ and students’ perceptions
of students’ CTE experiences and engagement in career exploration learnings supported
their career growth and development.