MS, Kent State University, 2021, College of Architecture and Environmental Design

Coconut coir is an inert fibrous material found between the hard, internal shell and the outer coat of a coconut and is considered a waste-product of the coconut oil industry. Because of the global demand for sustainable, renewable, and reusable products, coconut coir has risen as a natural alternative in many markets. With its high-water absorption, lignin content, density, bending capacity, and neutral pH, coconut coir has become an ideal alternative for soilless growing media. However, it remains unstudied in vertical systems, where less space, energy use, and water consumption are prevalent. This thesis posits that coconut coir can be used as a vertical farming textile to promote curly cress microgreens growth. This study seeks to identify the use of coconut coir as a reusable media to encourage food production and sustainable architecture. Implementing reusable waste-products like coconut coir into architectural design may provide an impact on design materials and the way designers integrate sustainability. Considering food production as an architectural application may provide designers with opportunities to economically strengthen cities' food accessibility and diversity while supporting a mission for sustainability. This study utilizes an experimental approach through growth trials for two commercial brands of coconut coir mats to provide data about the germination and treatment of curly cress microgreens in a vertical system. The analysis revealed data that involved mat types, treatment manipulations, and trial repetition. The research was conducted for four successive trials, with two different mat brands, and three different treatments per brand. The research found that curly cress microgreens have the potential to grow on soilless coconut coir media. The study also concluded that germination may be further increased without surface manipulation or an additional adhesive. The study further investigated the efficacy of coconut coir as a knitted (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Diane Davis-Sikora (Advisor); Reid Coffman Ph.D. (Committee Member); Petra Gruber Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2020, Communication

Over the past three decades, partisanship has become an increasingly salient social identity for Americans, resulting in an electorate that is affectively polarized. An electorate characterized by affective polarization cuts against normative models of democracy, as party loyalists tend to dislike members of other parties, prefer confrontation to compromise, and distrust government when their preferred party is out of power. The commercial US media environment has been a frequent culprit in theories of the origins of affective polarization. Cross-national comparisons find that the United States may have experienced the most rapid gains in affective polarization but Americans' fixation on party identity is far from unique. This comparative analysis categorizes 14 countries' national media systems and tests whether news media consumption in commercial media systems, such as the United States, predicts higher levels of partisan animus and party loyalty in vote choice than media consumption in other types of media systems. The results indicate that television consumption in commercial media systems is associated with higher levels of partisan affect than in public-service or hybrid media systems.

Committee: Erik Nisbet Ph.D. (Advisor); R. Kelly Garrett Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Political Science

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2016, Mechanical Engineering (Engineering and Technology)

The aim of this work was to investigate the use of a catalytic material to accelerate the formation of carbonic acid in a thin liquid film using a vertical membrane mass transfer system. Results comparing the rate of formation of Total Inorganic Carbon (TIC) for similar experimental conditions between the non-catalytic and the catalytic mass transfer systems indicated a statistically significant increase in carbonic acid formation with catalytic mass transfer system. The increased rate of TIC accumulation in the media indicated that the catalytic galvanized mesh potentially accelerated the rate limiting step, i.e. the formation of carbonic acid on the thin liquid film.

Committee: David Bayless Ph.D., P.E., Fellow of ASME and NAI (Advisor); Gregory Kremer Ph.D. (Committee Member); Frank Kraft Ph.D. (Committee Member); Morgan Vis-Chiasson Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Chemical Engineering; Chemistry; Energy; Engineering; Environmental Engineering; Mechanical Engineering

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Wright State University, 2015, Computer Science and Engineering PhD

Web 2.0 (social media) provides a natural platform for dynamic emergence of citizen (as) sensor communities, where the citizens generate content for sharing information and engaging in discussions. Such a citizen sensor community (CSC) has stated or implied goals that are helpful in the work of formal organizations, such as an emergency management unit, for prioritizing their response needs. This research addresses questions related to design of a cooperative system of organizations and citizens in CSC. Prior research by social scientists in a limited offline and online environment has provided a foundation for research on cooperative behavior challenges, including 'articulation' and 'awareness', but Web 2.0 supported CSC offers new challenges as well as opportunities. A CSC presents information overload for the organizational actors, especially in finding reliable information providers (for awareness), and finding actionable information from the data generated by citizens (for articulation). Also, we note three data level challenges: ambiguity in interpreting unconstrained natural language text, sparsity of user behaviors, and diversity of user demographics. Interdisciplinary research involving social and computer sciences is essential to address these socio-technical issues. I present a novel web information-processing framework, called the Identify-Match- Engage (IME) framework. IME allows operationalizing computation in design problems of awareness and articulation of the cooperative system between citizens and organizations, by addressing data problems of group engagement modeling and intent mining. The IME framework includes: a.) Identification of cooperation-assistive intent (seeking-offering) from short, unstructured messages using a classification model with declarative, social and contrast pattern knowledge, b.) Facilitation of coordination modeling using bipartite matching of complementary intent (seeking-offering), and c.) Identification of user group (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Amit Sheth Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Guozhu Dong Ph.D. (Committee Member); Patrick Meier Ph.D. (Committee Member); Srinivasan Parthasarathy Ph.D. (Committee Member); Valerie Shalin Ph.D. (Committee Member); Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science; Information Systems

Master of Science, University of Akron, 2015, Applied Mathematics

In this work we consider a natural generalization of classical Frank-Kamenetskii theory of thermal explosion (autoignition) to single phase porous energetic materials. The resulting model consists of a system of two reaction diffusion equations with a super-linear reaction term posed in a smooth bounded domain with Dirichlet boundary conditions. This model describes the initial state of evolution of temperature and pressure fields in reactive porous media. In a framework of this model, successful autoignition is associated with a blow up of the solution for the system under consideration (here, "blow up" means that the solution becomes unbounded in finite time). We show that if blow up takes place then it is complete; that is, a solution can not be prolonged in any reasonable weak sense for any time after blow up. From a physical perspective this means that if autoignition takes place, then it occurs in the entire domain occupied by the porous material. This result is a generalization of a similar result for classical Frank-Kamenetskii model obtained in [1].

Committee: Peter Gordon Dr. (Advisor); Dmitry Golovaty Dr. (Committee Member); J. Patrick Wilber Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Mathematics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2009, Communication

This 2-part study examines key factors that may play a critical role in determining consumer attitudes based on online consumer feedback. Study I indicates that positive online consumer feedback leads to significantly more desirable consumer attitudes than sites with no consumer feedback, or sites with overly negative consumer word-of-mouth (NWOM). Study I also indicates that with the consistent exception of a service not specifically related to Black culture, but which has overwhelmingly positive consumer reviews, Blacks tend to respond more favorably to services that are linked to their own racial ingroup as long as those services have some positive consumer evaluations. Additionally, Study I demonstrates that for Whites, the e-WOM (electronic word-of-mouth) effect is larger for negative WOM than for positive WOM. Study II reinforced the impact of NWOM on Whites such that even when the race and viewable identity of a source was revealed negative WOM was still more influential than PWOM for Whites. Study II demonstrates that in general, regardless of the racial relevance of a service, Blacks' attitudes are influenced by online evaluations given by their racial-ingroup. Moreover, Blacks responded to the Black relevant condition favorably even with negative Black evaluations. This implies Blacks require only a minimal degree of ingroup association to display ingroup favoritism. Additional implications for Social Identity Theory and the Distinctiveness Principle are discussed.

Committee: Osei Appiah Ph.D. (Advisor); Dan McDonald Ph.D. (Committee Member); Prabu David Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; Business Community; Communication; Marketing; Social Research

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Computer and Information Science

With the dramatic increase of media traffic on the Internet, existing media systems have shown their inefficiencies in resource utilization and performance bottlenecks on high quality media services. Although the inconsistency between the media access patterns and the Zipf-like distributions of Web workloads has been observed by a number of measurement studies, existing media system designs and evaluations still assume that media workload has the same access pattern as that of conventional Web workload. An insightful understanding of media access patterns is essential to guide Internet system design and management, including resource provisioning and performance optimizations. In this Ph.D. dissertation, we analyze the access patterns of Internet media systems and study effective system designs for large scale media content delivery. With extensive measurements on the Internet, we find current media systems tend to over-supply or over-utilize server hardware and network bandwidth to provide high quality media service, which is not a scalable and effective approach for serving the explosively increasing media traffic on the Internet. We then systematically study the access patterns of different kinds of Internet media systems, in order to exploit the temporal locality among media requests for efficient and high performance system design. Our study shows that the reference ranks of media objects on the Internet follow stretched exponential distribution, despite different underlying systems and delivery techniques used. With this kind of access patterns, the performance of media caching in a client-server model is far less effective than that of Web content caching. We further analyze the evolution of object reference rank distributions in long duration media workloads, and find that the temporal locality in media systems increases with time. Thus, long term caching is beneficial to improve the performance of media systems. However, a high volume of storage size is req (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Xiaodong Zhang (Advisor) Subjects: Computer Science

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2010, Telecommunications (Communication)

Since the late 1990s, political democratization and new broadcasting technologies have transformed African countries' mediascapes. In addition to new private local television, broadcasters of transnational television officially gained access to African audiences. As such, transnational football (soccer) broadcasting became increasingly accessible to African football fans. This study aims to understand and to explain how television broadcasting's political and technological changes in the late 1990s induced electronic colonialism in Francophone Africa. This qualitative study was conducted in Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Benin, Burkina, and Cameroon. It constituted at first the goal to achieve an understanding of the intricacies of football television broadcasting by public, private, and transnational television broadcasters. The in-depth interviews, documents analysis, and field observations provided required data to analyze transnational television broadcasting in Francophone Africa within the theoretical framework of Thomas McPhail's (2006) electronic colonialism. Several significant findings emerged from this study. The main players in football television broadcasting are public and transnational television broadcasters. The newly installed private television broadcasters remain too economically fragile to compete for broadcasting rights. The economics of broadcasting rights (along with the access to satellite technology) give to European transnational television broadcasters – and media and marketing groups – a competitive advantage over local public television broadcasters. Consequently, media flows from Europe (and the one produced by Africans) are controlled by European media and marketing groups. What contributes to the control of the media broadcasting by European media and marketing corporations are the cultural and linguistic connections facilitated by African players in various French and European leagues, and the inherent cultural discount of football. Th (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Steve Howard Ph.D (Advisor); Rafael Obregon Ph. D (Committee Member); Kreutzer Andrew Ph. D (Committee Member); Muhammad Najee Ed. D (Committee Member); Zyati Ali Ph. D (Committee Member) Subjects: Mass Media; Political Science; Sociology

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2008, Telecommunications (Communication)

This research begins with the assumption that Afghanistan should have a system that is suitable for the current economic, political, social and technological conditions of the country. Afghanistan is a young democratic country with strong social, religious and cultural values. To complement a growing commercial broadcasting sector, Afghanistan needs a structure for content production and distribution that is better integrated into its social structure. In terms of content, structure, operations and mission, this thesis presumes that a media system that serves the development process of the country based on Afghanistan's National Development Strategy (ANDS) will be best for Afghanistan.A centralized radio and television network with the capacity to reach the marginalized rural population that constitutes 85 percent of the population is recommended. The goal is to make media outlets and production facilities available in every village. In these locations, people will be invited to watch and participate in programming in close coordination with the community leaders. Formal educational, capacity building and public awareness programs will be designed based on the expectations and cultural sensitivities of the public. Unlike commercial broadcasters, the system of public service broadcasting (PSB) will involve the general population in ways that accommodate to their religion and culture. The idea is to use modern telecommunications and media not to entertain the public but to involve and educate them in an entertaining and uplifting way. To address the shortage of human and financial resources in Afghanistan, social channels of communication will be formalized among media, community leaders, government agencies and the United Nations. This approach is recommended as a way to solve the country's problems collectively. The concepts of diffusion of innovation, with particular attention to the diffusion networks, social channels of communication and the use of human and fina (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Don Flournoy PhD (Committee Chair); Drew McDaniel PhD (Committee Member); Greg Newton PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Journalism; Mass Media

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2013, Judith Herb College of Education

Many studies have been conducted where a face-to-face training environment is compared to an online training environment. While some research has been conducted on the nature of online training in faith-based not-for-profit organizations, little to no research has been found on engagement. The purpose of this study was to determine if the level of engagement of participants in a training course for new staff and interns with Campus Crusade for Christ would be increased by conducting training online instead of face-to-face and by utilizing multiple forms of media. The survey that was utilized included questions adapted from the Student Course Engagement Questionnaire (Handelsman et al., 2005) and was analyzed utilizing the Rasch measurement model to understand whether the survey successfully met the requirements for measuring engagement. The Rasch measurement analysis revealed that the survey was weak and did not measure engagement, thus the results of the survey revealed no significant differences in the level of engagement. Further research is recommended with new questions being added to the survey that are considered to have a greater level of difficulty as well as research should be conducted that involve qualitative data collection.

Committee: Judy Lambert Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Gregory Stone Ph.D. (Committee Member); Tony Sanchez Ph.D. (Committee Member); Savilla Banister Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Adult Education; Business Education; Curriculum Development; Educational Evaluation; Educational Software; Educational Technology; Higher Education; Information Technology; Instructional Design; Teaching