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This study provides an overview and assessment of El Sol, Jupiter's Neighborhood Resource Center's influence in adult immigrant assimilation and integration in Florida. Since 2006 the center has provided programs and services for the Jupiter community, with a particular emphasis on its immigrants who come primarily from Guatemala and Southern Mexico. This thesis provides a background on the center's history and development as well as an overview of the leading theories and methods used for measuring immigrant integration and assimilation. Based upon an analysis of this literature and survey data collected by the center, I offer specific suggestions for future survey questions and methods to more accurately evaluate the effectiveness of El Sol’s policies promoting immigrant integration and assimilation.

In this study, I aim to explain the status of airline flag carriers as national and cultural symbols of their respected countries. With national interests and identity as part of their development, flag-carriers serve as “aerial ambassadors” representing their home nations. Through the media of design, uniforms, crew service, and advertising techniques, flag-carriers create a sense of place of their unique nations for both local and international passengers—promoting the “imagined communities” as coined by Benedict Anderson. Behind these flag-carriers are instances of public support and pride. The role of being an aerial ambassador emerges as the airline and nation become one entity, an association that could be either positive or negative. With examinations of airline websites, aviation marketing literature, and visual analyses, my research will show how flag-carriers express national identity across borders through their projected physical and cultural identities.

Montastraea cavernosa is a widely distributed scleractinian coral found in temperate and tropical waters globally. Because it occurs in both shallow and mesophotic reefs, it is often referred to as a depth generalist. This study examined the morphometics of shallow-water and mesophotic cohorts in various locations in the Gulf of Mexico and used measurements of skeletal characteristics to assess morphological variation. Results from multivariate analyses showed that these characteristics differed significantly by site, not by depth, though there existed a significant site-depth interaction. Additionally, sites evaluated using a pairwise comparison showed that there were significant morphological variations as well, however among fewer characteristics. Overall resulting showing morphological difference in M. cavernosa suggested that there is morphological acclimation to different depths or separate populations who demonstrate morphological traits may be adaptive for different depths.

Growing inequality over the past few decades has been a great problem for the
majority of Americans. Inequality is in part a reflection of privilege. The objective
of this research was to investigate the association between privilege (including
socioeconomic status or SES) and honesty (cheating behavior), along with
relationships between privilege and personality and finally personality and honesty.
This work furthered our knowledge of perceptions of social justice and the
mechanisms underlying unethical behavior. Participants completed a questionnaire
on Amazon MTurk that measured constructs of privilege (subjective SES, race,
education, occupation, gender) and unethical behavior (participants completed three
skill and chance-based tasks, each of which afforded the opportunity to report
scores honestly or dishonestly). Results did not show strong correlations between
privilege and cheating, but there was significant evidence that those high in
entitlement were most likely to cheat. Our conclusion provides further evidence of
personality’s influence on ethical behavior

In this study I provide an examination of the varying effects of globalization that
have impacted early childhood education programs, teaching methods, and other aspects
of the pre-primary learning system in regions dominated by two of China’s ethnic
minorities: Uyghur and Tibetan, compared to the impacts on Han area preschools. I look
at non-Chinese early childhood education methods such as Developmentally Appropriate
Practices (DAP), Montessori teaching, and bilingualism, and evaluate their prevalence in
the different regions. To investigate this topic I use both historical sources and online data
from preschools in China.

The dry-cleaning industry relies on solvents to perform the cleaning, and there are several environmental issues that result from the use of these solvents, which are dangerous to human and environmental health. These solvents are regulated by several agencies, but pollution can still be found in at least 75% of active drycleaners. This pollution is very expensive to remediate, and would put most drycleaners out of business unless they are in the Dry-cleaning Solvent Cleanup Program, which is a State Government program in Florida that finances the remediation costs for these businesses. I will analyze literature on the environmental impacts of dry-cleaning solvents, the economic burdens that the industry places on our society, and the policies regulating the dry-cleaning industry. There are several viable alternatives for operation, solvent choice, and regulation methods that would greatly improve the quality of the environment and the health of humans who are involved with the industry.

In this thesis, I compare the sustainability of two United States supermarket chains by means of the composite sustainable development index proposed by Krajnc and Glavic. The performance comparison is carried out based on the three pillars of sustainability postulated by the World Commission on Environment and Development: environmental impact, economic performance, and social responsibility. Using data from company annual reports and from sustainability and social responsibility publications, I systematically identify the deficiencies and successes in the environmental, economic, and social performances of one supermarket chain against the other. With more data this analysis can be extended to a large number of supermarkets, other businesses, and other public entities in order to construct a global best practices benchmark, or performance frontier, in all three dimensions of sustainability and in an overall measure of sustainability.

We recently discovered that autophagy, a conserved lysosomal degradation pathway, is necessary for increased lifespan and dauer morphogenesis of daf-2 mutant Caenorhabditis elegans. daf-2 encodes the worm orthologue of an insulin-like growth factor receptor. Moreover, we found neuronal autophagy activity is sufficient to fulfill this requirement. In this study we used the unc-42 promoter to express autophagy gene atg-18 in a subset of C. elegans neurons to examine whether autophagy activity in these neurons is sufficient to execute its function in extension of lifespan and completion of dauer morphogenesis in daf-2 mutants. Here we show expression of atg-18 in these ons fails to rescue the effect of atg-18 mutations on the longevity and dauer morphogenesis of daf-2 mutant worms, indicating that the requirement of neuronal autophagy in C. elegans for these effects is specific to neurons where unc-42 promoter is not active.

One of the most fundamental aspects of the evolution of spoken language over the course of history is the transformation of its speech sounds. These sound change transformations play an important role in the development of grammatical features such as declensional and conjugational paradigms. These sound changes often occur in highly regular patterns which lend themselves readily to mathematical modeling. Thus, we can construct a list of transformation rules that predict the evolution of words from a parent language to a daughter language to a significant degree of accuracy. This thesis constructs a model expressing these sound changes as a function from a set of words in the parent language to a set of words in the daughter language. This theoretical model is then translated to a practical application in C++ programming, and tested using the evolution of Classical Latin to modern standard Spanish as a sample case study.

Western attitudes toward nonhuman animal species can be organized into two kinds:
an ethical and a mythological. The ethical attitude is that which characterizes the animal
as a subject of ethical consideration, while the mythological attitude is that which
characterizes the animal as a semiotic tool for human communicability. Many important
conflicts on the issue of animal rights arise out of a conflict of these two attitudes. This
thesis examines these conflicts in case studies focused on the wolf species canis lupus as
well as in the practices of zoo maintenance and species conservation, with philosophical
background in structuralism in the case of the mythological attitude, and contrasting
forms of utilitarianism.