Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Bitcoin's Technical Foundation And Its Potential For A Decentralized And Environmentally Friendly Future, Iqtiar Md Siddique

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This research examines a systematic analysis of Bitcoin, employing a Coefficient of Variation (CV) approach to gauge its degree of decentralization. Bitcoin, an innovative decentralized digital currency, has received much attention for its potential to revolutionize traditional financial systems. This study employs the Coefficient of Variation (CV) to acquire insights into the wealth distribution and concentration among Bitcoin users. This research demonstrates how decentralized the network of Bitcoin is. The methodology uses real data on Bitcoin addresses and their holdings to compute the Coefficient of Variation (CV). This approach provides valuable insights into the ongoing discourse surrounding Bitcoin's decentralization, offering …

How Active Rainwater Harvesting May Help Reduce Nuisance Flooding: Flood Analysis And Social Barriers To Adoption, Isabel Lopez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

As urbanization continues to expand, fewer pervious surfaces are available to help reduce stormwater runoff from rainfall. The impacts of urbanization are becoming evident through sunny day flooding - flooding that occurs in areas not designated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as flood zones. Nevertheless, water accumulates in low-lying areas and compromises street intersections and other parts of neighborhoods. Some methods can help alleviate the impacts of unexpected heavy rains, such as passive and active rainwater harvesting. As a pilot study, in a selected area in the northeast of El Paso, the level of adoption (e.g., what percentage …

Comparative Study Of Supervised Classification Techniques With A Modified Knn Algorithm, Noah Owusu

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The goal of classification is to develop a model that can be used to accurately assign new observations to labeled classes based on the patterns learned from the training data. K-nearest Neighbors algorithm (KNN) is a popular and widely used algorithm for classification, however, its performance can be adversely affected by the presence of outliers in a dataset. In this study we have modified this existing KNN algorithm that can alleviate the effect of outliers in a dataset, thereby improving the performance of the KNN algorithm. We compared the performances of the Modified KNN method and the Existing KNN algorithm …

Geological Mapping Of Ferric And Ferrous Irons In The Apache Hills, New Mexico: Applying Landsat 8 (Oli), Spectrometry, And Geographic Information System (Gis) Methods, Sergio Gerardo Macias

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Mineral discoveries are typically tangible on surface studies. Previous research describes mineral deposits of ferric and ferrous irons in the lithology, structures, and alluvial fans in the Apache Hills in southwest New Mexico. The research for this thesis combines and models four methods for validating and mapping the presence of Ferric and Ferrous Irons developed in weathered zones above mineral deposits. A beneficial steppingstone before exploration and discovery begins with extensive research. This study began with data acquisition and reviewing previous research and was essential for the project methods. The study combines four techniques: spectral geology (e.g., remote sensing and …

Developing A Risk Assessment Instrument For Immigration Cases Under Federal Supervision, Mayra Eydie Pacheco

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Intersection Of Urban Heat Islands And The Cdc Social Vulnerability Index In Two Border Cities, Ileana Morales

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Glacier Segmentation From Remote Sensing Imagery Using Deep Learning, Bibek Aryal

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Large-scale study of glaciers improves our understanding of global glacier change and is imperative for monitoring the ecological environment, preventing disasters, and studying the effects of global climate change. In recent years, remote sensing imagery has been preferred over riskier and resource-intensive field visits for tracking landscape level changes like glaciers. However, periodic manual labeling of glaciers over a large area is not feasible due to the considerable amount of time it requires while automatic segmentation of glaciers has its own set of challenges. Our work aims to study the challenges associated with segmentation of glaciers from remote sensing imagery …

Transportation Asset Management For The Electric Road System, Kamalen Maria Santos Diaz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Electric road systems (ERS) have been presented as a new solution towards a sustainable transportation future, fueling the widespread adoption of electric vehicles by eliminating range anxiety, reducing battery size, and being regional friendly. These systems consist of four components: electric power supply, roads, vehicles, and operations. Much of the early research conducted on ERS has been on how to initially construct these systems by focusing on the first three components, however, there is limited knowledge on how ERS will impact traditional road operations after the systems are in place. Transportation Asset Management (TAM), a major focus within the transportation …

The Physiological Factors Of Diabetes And Their Effect On The Cognitive And Emotional Functioning In Older Populations: A Secondary Data Analysis, Celeste Anahi Alvidrez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Background: The rates of Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) have increased over the past 20 years in all age groups. The physiological factors that underlie T2D could have impact on specific brain pathways that support cognitive and emotional functioning. Aims and Objective: The goal of this study was to examine whether older Mexican American individuals with a history of T2D were more likely to develop later cognitive impairment and/or depression. Hypotheses: It was predicted that elderly participants (mean age at time of interview = 87.87 years) with a history of T2D onset prior to age 65, are more likely to have …

Environmental Justice Issues And Sea Level Rise In Frontline Communties Along The Gulf Coast, Karla Michel Lopez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Sea level rise poses a great threat to coastal areas and our way of life. As flooding increases in frequency and intensity across the country, vulnerable populations become a target to its impacts. The U.S. dedicates much research to risk communication and climate change adaptation strategies; however, these coastal areas are home to a large percentage of underserved and underrepresented communities that can be challenging to meaningfully engage. The impacts of short-term sea level rise combined with long-term sea level rise will not only cause flooding, erosion, and intrusion of saltwater into freshwater resources but also increased financial consequences, such …

Examining The Effects Of Information And Communication Technologies In The Legal Representation Of Latin American Asylum Seekers, Victor M. Portillo Ochoa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to explore how legal defense nonprofit organizations (NPO) are using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to provide legal defense for asylum seekers and improve the conditions of immigrants at detention centers. In addition, this research explored the impact of ICTs on legal defense NPOs, bottlenecks, and security implications when supporting vulnerable communities. ICTs profoundly impacted the way we interact in a post-pandemic world, and it presents new challenges and possibilities for legal defense nonprofit organizations that are helping vulnerable communities. This study consists of staff and volunteers from different legal defense nonprofit organizations NPOs …

Identification And Evaluation Of Critical Transportation Infrastructure Resilience After Hydro-Meteorological Event, Herman Serrato

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Modern civilization is dependent on essential infrastructure assets that allow society to function in today’s standards. Critical interdependent infrastructure such as transportation, communication, security, and public health are marvels of human innovation and an important aspect of civilization's evolution. Recent world events such as climate change have underlined the necessity to develop strategic plans to enhance the resilience of infrastructure. This study aimed to identify and evaluate the flooding potential of critical transportation infrastructure that will influence traffic flow and impact the economy. The technical workflow is based on observations, predictions, experiments, testing, and analysis to derive a resilience score …

Interval Estimates: How To Make Them More Adequate And How To Use Them In Economic Analysis And Decision Making, Laura Adriana Berrout-Ramos

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In many real-life situations, we need to make decisions in situations when we do not have full information about the consequences of different decisions. In particular, instead of the exact values of the relevant quantities, we only know lower and upper bounds on these values – i.e., we know an interval that contains the actual (unknown) value. These interval estimates often come from experts. This fact naturally leads to the following important questions: How should we make decisions under such interval uncertainty? How to gauge the quality of the resulting decisions? And if this quality is not sufficient – because …

Associations Between Exposure To Air Pollution After A Dust Event And Hospitalizations., Estrella De Jesus Herrera-Molina

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Southwestern region has been identified as one of the most persistent dust producing regions of North America. Exposure to inhalable particulate matter (PM10) originating from desertic landscape during dust events/dust exposures (DEs) can reach hazardous levels. El Paso, Texas’s ambient air has reached hazardous levels of PM10 above 4000 μg/m3 with near zero visibility due to these natural events. There are very few prior studies in the southwestern United States pertaining to the associations between exposure to atmospheric aerosol after DEs and hospitalizations, nor are there many epidemiological studies globally in dusty environments where most of the atmospheric aerosol …

Small Commercial And Industrial Electricity Consumption In Las Cruces, New Mexico, Andrew Taylor Yurachek

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Research examining small commercial and industrial electricity usage patterns have historically received less attention than residential electricity consumption patterns. This study examines electricity as an input to commercial and industrial production in Las Cruces, New Mexico using annual frequency data from 1978 to 2018. Those data examined include labor, per capita personal income, price measures for electricity and natural gas, and weather variables. The long-run and short-run elasticities of the data are then estimated using an autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL). In the long run, CIS customers in Las Cruces respond to natural gas a complimentary good, and the derived-demand …

So How To Make Group Decisions? Arrow's Impossibility Theorem 70 Years After, Hung T. Nguyen, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In 1951, Kenneth Arrow proved that it is not possible to have a group decision making procedure that satisfies reasonable requirements like fairness. From the theoretical viewpoint, this is a great result -- well-deserving the Nobel Prize that was awarded to Professor Arrow. However, from the practical viewpoint, the question remains -- so how should we make group decisions? A usual way to solve this problem is to provide some reasonable heuristic ideas, but the problem is that different seemingly reasonable idea often lead to different group decision -- this is known, e.g., for different voting schemes. In this paper, …

Is It Fair That Advanced Workers Get Paid Disproportionally More: Economic Analysis, Olga Kosheleva, Sean R. Aguilar

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

On the one hand, everyone agrees that economics should be fair, that workers should get equal pay for equal work. Any instance of unfairness causes a strong disagreement. On the other hand, in many companies, advanced workers -- who produce more than others -- get paid dispropotionally more for their work, and this does not seem to cause any negative feelings. In this paper, we analyze this situation from the economic viewpoint. We show that from this viewpoint, additional payments for advanced workers indeed make economic sense, benefit everyone, and thus -- in contrast to the naive literal interpretation of …

What Is Wrong With Micromanagement: Economic View, Sean R. Aguilar, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Purpose: It is well known that micromanagement -- excessive control of employees -- is detrimental to the employees' morale and thus, decreases their productivity. But what if the managers keep people happy -- will there still be negative consequences of micromanagement? This is the problem analyzed in this paper.

Design/methodology/approach: To analyze our problem, we use general -- but simplified -- mathematical models of how productivity depends on the working rate.

Findings: We show that even in the absence of psychological discomfort, micromanagement is still detrimental to productivity. Interestingly, the negative effect of micromanagement increases as the population becomes more …

Randomized Tax Deadlines Can Help Economy, Julio C. Urenda, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Purpose: While the main purpose of reporting -- e.g., reporting for taxes -- is to gauge the economic state of a company, the fact that reporting is done at pre-determined dates distorts the reporting results. For example, to create a larger impression of their productivity, companies fire temporary workers before the reporting date and re-hire then right away. The purpose of this study is to decide how to avoid such distortion.

Design/methodology/approach: We want to make our solution applicable for all possible reasonable optimality criteria. Thus, we use a general formalism for describing and analyzing all such criteria.

Findings: We …

Digital Twin Technology Applications For Transportation Infrastructure - A Survey-Based Study, Hector Cruz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In the past couple of decades, various industries have taken advantage of emerging advanced technologies, such as digital twin (DT), to find more effective solutions in their respective areas. In the transportation infrastructure sector, the concept and implementation of DT technologies are slowly gaining traction but lagging behind other major industries. To better understand the limitations, opportunities and challenges for the adoption of DT in this sector, a survey questionnaire was distributed to collect information from industry professionals involved in transportation infrastructure projects. The purpose of this study is to understand how DT technology is being perceived by the industry. …

How Does Land Cover Classification In Google Earth Engine Compare With Traditional Methods Of Land Cover Classification? What Are The Tradeoffs?, Carlos Sebastian Reyes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The project focuses on comparing land cover classification of traditional methods such as ArcGIS with newer ones such as Google Earth Engine (GEE) as well as discussing any potential tradeoffs. Two studies were performed in both platforms, the first involved analyzing land cover change in the Middle Rio Grande (MRG) region of southern New Mexico, far west Texas, and northern Chihuahua, Mexico. The MRG study focused on urban and agricultural change in the region using two different classification methods. The second study focused on creating a post-hurricane damage assessment (PDA) with the goal of developing an automated method of estimating …

When To Stop Computing And Start Investing, Sean R. Aguilar, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to analyze when -- while predicting the future price of a financial instrument -- we should stop computations and start using this information for the actual investment.

Design/methodology/approach: We derive the explicit formulas explaining how the resulting gain depends on the duration of computations.

Findings: We provide an algorithm that enables us to decide the computation time that leads to the largest possible gain.

Originality/value: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution to the problem. Following our recommendations will allow investors to select the computation time for which the …

Need For Diversity In Elected Decision-Making Bodies: Economics-Related Analysis, Nguyen Ngoc Thach, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

On a qualitative level, everyone understands the need to have diversity in elected decision-making bodies, so that the viewpoint of each group be properly taken into account. However, when only the usual economic criteria are used in this election -- e.g., in the election of company's board -- the resulting bodies often under-represent some groups (e.g., women). A frequent way to remedy this situation is to artificially enforce diversity instead of strictly following purely economic criteria. In this paper, we show the current seeming contradiction between economics and diversity is caused by the imperfection of the use economic models: in …

Why Quadratic Log-Log Dependence Is Ubiquitous And What Next, Sean R. Aguilar, Vladik Kreinovich, Uyen Pham

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many real-life situations ranging from financial to volcanic data, growth is described either by a power law -- which is linear in log-log scale, or by a quadratic dependence in the log-log scale. In this paper, we use natural scale invariance requirement to explain the ubiquity of such dependencies. We also explain what should be a reasonable choice of the next model, if quadratic turns out to be not too accurate: it turns out that under scale invariance, the next class of models are cubic dependencies in the log-log scale, then fourth order dependencies, etc.

Economics Of Reciprocity And Temptation, Laxman Bokati, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Nguyen Ngoc Thach

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Behavioral economics has shown that in many situations, people's behavior differs from what is predicted by simple traditional utility-maximization economic models. It is therefore desirable to be able to accurately describe people's actual behavior. In some cases, the difference from the traditional models is caused by bounded rationality -- our limited ability to process information and to come up with a truly optimal solutions. In such cases, predicting people's behavior is difficult. In other cases, however, people actually optimize -- but the actual expression for utility is more complicated than in the traditional models. In such case, it is, in …

Commonsense Explanations Of Sparsity, Zipf Law, And Nash's Bargaining Solution, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Kittawit Autchariyapanitkul

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

As econometric models become more and more accurate and more and more mathematically complex, they also become less and less intuitively clear and convincing. To make these models more convincing, it is desirable to supplement the corresponding mathematics with commonsense explanations. In this paper, we provide such explanation for three economics-related concepts: sparsity (as in LASSO), Zipf's Law, and Nash's bargaining solution.

How To Explain The Anchoring Formula In Behavioral Economics, Laxman Bokati, Vladik Kreinovich, Chon Van Le

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

According to the traditional economics, the price that a person is willing to pay for an item should be uniquely determined by the value that this person will get from this item, it should not depend, e.g., on the asking price proposed by the seller. In reality, the price that a person is willing to pay does depend on the asking price; this is known as the anchoring effect. In this paper, we provide a natural justification for the empirical formula that describes this effect.

Quantum (And More General) Models Of Research Collaboration, Oscar Galindo, Miroslav Svitek, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the last decades, several papers have shown that quantum techniques can be successful in describing not only events in the micro-scale physical world -- for which they were originally invented -- but also in describing social phenomena, e.g., different economic processes. In our previous paper, we provide an explanation for this somewhat surprising successes. In this paper, we extend this explanation and show that quantum (and more general) techniques can also be used to model research collaboration.

Understanding The Connections: An Analysis Of Climate Change And Human Security, Erica Martinez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Increasing evidence shows that the impacts of anthropogenic climate change have magnified and will have dramatic implications for both the natural and social systems (Adger et al., 2014). While research on the security implications of climate change has been found to have a major bearing on policy making, experts have not reached a consensus about how climate change and human security are related, leaving the climate-security nexus and corresponding policies underdeveloped.

The purpose of this study is to delineate and scrutinize the relationship between climate change and human security so that a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon is achieved. …

Glacier Segmentation In Satellite Images For Hindu Kush Himalaya Region, Bibek Aryal

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Climate change poses a risk to individuals whose livelihoods depend on the health of glacier ecosystems. Monitoring glaciers in the Himalayan Hindu Kush (HKH) region is of high importance especially when we consider the impact of recent climate change on them. Our work aims to provide an automated method to outline glaciers using machine learning techniques and publicly available remote sensing imagery.In this work, we present ways to delineate glaciers from Landsat-7 imagery using various machine learning and computer vision techniques. The multi-step methodology that we present in this work is generalizable across different types of satellite and overhead imagery, …