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Thesis (DBA)--Argosy University/Sarasota, 2005. / Digitized and made available on the World Wide Web by Interamerican University of Puerto Rico, 2005.

Throughout an adult life that witnessed drastic cultural upheaval between the Civil War and World War I, Bertha Honoré Palmer (1849-1918) was continually called on to deploy her Victorian values in response to modern events. Being a woman only complicated this negotiation. But being a child of the American frontier granted her a latitude and mobility that were rare for women of her class and era – allowing her to challenge gender boundaries and occupy more than one cultural space at a time. Most of what has been written about Bertha Palmer’s life has been exceptionalist in approach and tone, ascribing her outsized social and political successes to her physical beauty and perfection of temperament. I believe Bertha Palmer’s importance as a crucial transitional bridge between True Woman and New Woman has been underestimated in this discourse. Near the end of her life, a move to Florida offered her the potential to resolve the inside/outside, domestic/public, feminine/masculine dialectics that lay at the heart of her restless movements. These contradictions and dichotomies that Bertha Palmer embodied on a grand scale do more to make her knowable to us today than the record of her words and actions can accomplish. Both her Victorian reticence and her modernistic construction of a seamless public façade have a way of hindering our best efforts to understand her motivations – especially the choice to move to Florida – despite a wealth of biographical material, including her correspondence housed in Chicago and Sarasota history centers, and contemporary news accounts. In the end, the cultural history of the Gilded Age gives us the only reliable lens for penetrating the veneer of Bertha Palmer.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Joint Program in Biological Oceanography (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Biology; and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. / Odontocetes are assumed to use echolocation for navigation and foraging, but neither of these uses of biosonar has been conclusively demonstrated in free-ranging animals. Many bats are known to use echolocation throughout foraging sequences, changing the structure and timing of clicks as they progress towards prey capture. For odontocetes, however, we do not know enough about their foraging behavior to describe such sequences. To conduct detailed behavioral observations of any subject animal, the observer must be able to maintain continuous visual contact with the subject for a period commensurate with the duration of the behavior(s) of interest. Behavioral studies of cetaceans, which spend approximately 95% of their time below the water's surface, have been limited to sampling surface behavior except in special circumstances, e.g. clear-water environments, or with the use of technological tools. I addressed this limitation through development of an observation platform consisting of a remote controlled video camera suspended from a tethered airship with boat-based monitoring, adjustment, and recording of video. The system was used successfully to conduct continuous behavioral observations of bottlenose dolphins in the Sarasota Bay, FL area. This system allowed me to describe previously unreported foraging behaviors and elucidate functions for behaviors already defined but poorly understood. Dolphin foraging was modeled as a stage-structured sequence of behaviors, with the goal-directed feeding event occurring at the end of a series of search, encounter, and pursuit behaviors. The behaviors preceding a feeding event do not occur in a deterministic sequence, but are adaptive and plastic. A single-step transition analysis beginning with prey capture and receding in time has identified significant links between observed behaviors and demonstrated the stage-structured nature of dolphin foraging. Factors affecting the occurrence of specific behaviors and behavioral transitions include mesoscale habitat variation and individual preferences. The role of sound in foraging, especially echolocation, is less well understood than the behavioral component. Recent studies have explored the use of echolocation in captive odontocete foraging and presumed feeding in wild animals, but simultaneous, detailed behavioral and acoustic observations have eluded researchers. The current study used two methods to obtain acoustic data. The overhead video system includes two towed hydrophones used to record 'ambient' sounds of dolphin foraging. The recordings are of the 'ambient' sounds because the source of the sounds, i.e. animal, could not be localized. Many focal follows, however, were conducted with single animals, and from these records the timing of echolocation and other sounds relative to the foraging sequence could be examined. The 'ambient' recordings revealed that single animals are much more vocal than animals in groups, both overall and during foraging. When not foraging, single animals vocalized at a rate similar to the per animal rate in groups of>=2 animals. For single foraging animals, the use of different sound types varies significantly by the habitat in which the animal is foraging. These patterns of use coupled with the characteristics of the different sound types suggest specific functions for each. The presence of multiple animals in a foraging group apparently reduces the need to vocalize, and potential reasons for this pattern are discussed. In addition, the increased vocal activity of single foraging animals lends support to specific hypotheses of sound use in bottlenose dolphins and odontocetes in general. The second acoustic data collection method records sounds known to be from a specific animal. An acoustic recording tag was developed that records all sounds produced by an animal including every echolocation click. The tag also includes an acoustic sampling interval controller and a sensor suite that measures pitch, roll, heading, and surfacing events. While no foraging events occurred while an animal was wearing an acoustic data logger, the rates of echolocation and whistling during different activities, e.g. traveling, were measured. / by Douglas Paul Nowacek. / Ph.D.

Large-scale voting usability problems have changed the outcomes of several recent elections. The 2006 election in Sarasota County, Florida was one such incident, where the number of votes lost was nearly 50 times greater than the margin of victory for the US Representative race. Multiple hypotheses were proposed to explain this incident, with prevailing theories focused on malicious software, touchscreen miscalibration or poor ballot design, Study I aimed to empirically determine whether Sarasota voters unintentionally skipped the critical US Representative race due to poor ballot design. The Sarasota ballot was replicated initially, then header highlighting and number of races presented on the first screen were manipulated. While the presentation of multiple races had a significant effect on undervotes in the US Representative race, header highlighting did not. Nearly 20% of all voters (27 of 137) skipped the race their first time on that screen, an even greater undervote rate than that originally seen in Sarasota. In conjunction with other research, Study I results strongly suggests that the 2006 Sarasota election was almost certainly a human factors problem. A cognitive model of human voters was developed based on Study I data. Model predictions were then compared with behavioral data from Study 2, in which participants voted on a replica of the Charlotte County, Florida 2006 ballot.

The bottlenose dolphin exhibits a fission-fusion social structure characterized by temporary associations lasting from minutes to hours. Although social structure has been described for some dolphin communities, the selective pressures affecting fission-fusion patterns and their consequences on dolphin communication are not well understood. The goals of the present study were three-fold: 1) to quantify the rate with which fission-fusion occurred and identify the selective pressures influencing an individual's decision to leave and join a temporary group; 2) to examine the communication signals produced during temporary separations; and 3) to estimate the distances over which dolphins could remain in acoustic contact while separated. It was found that a dolphin's decision to join or leave a group was related to social considerations such as the class of individual encountered (e.g., mothers with calves, adult single females, adult males, and juveniles) as dolphins move in different environments. The decision was also influenced by ecological characteristics such as the habitat where a dolphin was found. The two aspects in turn determined the rate of fission-fusion. Mothers with calves regularly using deep waters had high rates of fission-fusion. Those females encountered other females in the same reproductive condition frequently and associated with them. In contrast, mothers with calves using shallow waters had lower fission-fusion rates. Those females encountered juvenile dolphins often but they did not associate with them frequently. Temporarily separated dolphins did not always produce the sounds typically used for long-distance communication, and sometimes they did not use any detectable acoustic signal to find each other. On average, this absence of communication occurred at distances less than 50 m. When both whistles and echolocation produced, they were apparently involved in maintaining contact between mothers and their calves and other associates. Estimates of active spaces defined by whistle transmission indicated that communication range varied between habitats. Shallow seagrass areas had the smallest active space while channels had the greatest active space. Findings indicated that the distances over which dolphins remain in acoustic contact and can be considered members of groups are much greater than has been described from observations of dolphin spacing and activity alone.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Covenant Theological Seminary, 1997. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 307-312).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Covenant Theological Seminary, 1997. / Includes abstract. This is an electronic reproduction of TREN, #030-0064. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 307-312).

Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 78 pages. / Thesis (M.S.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: With increasing encroachment on natural communities by anthropogenic activity, it is important to understand the functions of natural ecosystems in an effort to conserve natural areas. A first-hand study of the population dynamics of South Florida Slash Pine (P. elliottii Engelm. var. densa) following a fire event provided insight to its recovery and dispersal following a fire. A natural fire (lightning-induced) occurred in the spring of 2000 at the T. Mabry Carlton, Jr. Reserve, Sarasota County, providing an opportunity to study aspects of slash pine in relation to fire. One objective of my research was to look at dispersal/recruitment conditions and slash pine dynamics in relation to fire. I looked at the varying degrees of tree mortality due to fire at different stands of slash pines. / ABSTRACT: I also looked at the stands in terms of stand composition and spatial arrangement of surviving adults. Finally, I studied how variable seedling establishment and survival was between stands. Few inferences could be drawn between fire and these individual analyses; however, all analyses revealed that at the scale of this study, pine flatwoods are patchy. I also looked at the dispersal of slash pines following a fire event. I modeled my research after Ribbens et al. (1994) and Clark et al. (1998), who took a phenomenological approach to dispersal modeling. This approach involved using distances between adults and seeds/seedlings and fecundity of adults to create dispersal models based on maximum likelihood estimates (MLE). I found that, while I could predict a model within acceptable parameters for most of the stands, more data was needed to predict models that better fit the data. / ABSTRACT: This finding, along with the fact that I recovered no seed data for analysis, suggests factors are contributing to dispersal and recruitment (e.g. cone-crop) that need to be accounted for in the future. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.