Digital Commons Network^™

Living In The Outskirts, Thomas De La Cruz

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Living in the Outskirts is a bildungsroman collection of short stories of a young Chicano growing up in the Rio Grande Valley town of Elsa, Texas. In the critical introduction of this thesis, I discuss how my stories challenge traditional Chicano/a cultural ideals of masculinity, language, class and nationality. Included in my introduction are other Chicano/a writers who engaged with these Chicano/a cultural ideals, and who I find myself in conversation with through my work. Inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of the “New Mestiza Consciousness,” I show how the protagonist of my stories gradually changes throughout the collection and adopts …

The Effectiveness Of Alternative Certification Teachers Versus Traditionally Trained Teachers In Three School Districts In Texas On Hispanic Students' Scores In 9th Grade Algebra I: What Leaders Should Know, Anysia R. Trevino

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The purpose of this quantitative study is to measure the effectiveness of alternative certification teachers versus traditionally trained teachers of 9th grade Hispanic students enrolled in Algebra I. The dependent variable, teacher effectiveness, will be measured by the students' raw score on the Texas Algebra I End Of Course (EOC) Assessment. The factors examined in this study will be 1) teachers trained through a traditional teacher certification program and 2) teachers trained through an alternative certification program. The researcher will examine the identified group of teachers' attendance as well as years of experience to determine if there is a correlation …

Energy Analysis Of A Student-Designed Solar House, Samantha Wermager, Stuart Werner Baur

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents the findings from an undergraduate research project concerning the energy efficiency, consumption, and generation of a 1000 ft² (92.9 m²) solar house. The results were compared to a home of similar size and layout, built using traditional construction methods. The solar house was modeled after the Chameleon House: Missouri University of Science and Technology's 2013 entry in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. The efficiency of the design was analyzed using Energy-10 Version 1.8 software. For this comparison, a fictional American couple was created and a breakdown of their energy-use habits was recorded …

Proteins In High Electric Fields, David Michael Landry

Theses and Dissertations

Being able to control protein function directly and in real time is attractive. In this thesis, I discuss controlling protein activity using alternating current electric fields on the order of 1 MV/m. Since protein structures result in localized and/or protein-wide charge gradients, it is expected that a sufficiently high electric field applied across a protein should result in structural distortions which can temporarily alter or halt protein function. The field is set to oscillate above the influences of the electrochemical double layer effects (1 kHz) and below the level needed for hydrodynamic rotation of proteins (10 MHz). A device is …

Canadian Family Leisure, Family Functioning, And Family Satisfaction: A Family Perspective, Shaun C. Nua

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to further examine the relationship between family leisure variables and the dependent variables of family functioning and satisfaction with family life among a broad, national sample of Canadian families using the Core and Balance framework. Specifically, this study examined how both family leisure involvement (core and balance) and family leisure satisfaction contributed to the explanation of variance in family functioning and satisfaction with family life. Because the data were nested in families, this study accounted for family-level variance by incorporating mixed modeling. The sample consisted of 943 families across Canada including one parent and …

An Investigation Of Practices And Tools That Enabled Technology-Mediated Caring In An Online High School, Andrea Velasquez, Charles R. Graham, Richard E. West

Faculty Publications

The ethic of care has been an important part of the dialogue related to learning in traditional K-12 learning environments particularly because emotional relationships and caring pedagogies have been shown to be particularly important for adolescent learners. However, as online learning has become increasingly popular, there are concerns about the perceived impersonal nature of the online medium, and how this might particularly affect adolescent learners. The purpose of this study was to examine technology choices when experiencing caring interactions in the online schooling context of Mountain Heights Academy (formerly Open High School of Utah). The caring experience of two teacher …

Workforce Preparedness Of Information Systems Students: Perceptions Of Students, Alumni, And Employers, Susan Bristow

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Employers of newly hired higher education graduates report their new workforce is not prepared. Further research was required to discover insights to the workforce readiness gap. This concurrent mixed methods study explored what competencies influenced employer's perceptions of the work-readiness of Information Systems (ISYS) undergraduate students and discovered ISYS graduates' and current ISYS students' perceptions of their work-readiness. Participants consisted of a convenience sample including 69 ISYS program upperclassmen, 20 ISYS program alumni, and 8 employers of the ISYS program graduates. ISYS program alumni completed an online Qualtrics survey to measure the participants' perception of their workforce preparedness. ISYS program …

Morning Shower, Bob De Smith

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

Poetry, Bob De Smith

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

Rootrol, Joshua Matthews

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

I Recognized The Mitten, David Schelhaas

Pro Rege

Erratum: Second page of poem missing. Corrected version published In Pro Rege, Vol. 42, No. 4, 34-35: http://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege/vol42/iss4/6/

Making It Through, Jeri Schelhaas

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

Ordinary Time, Leah A. Zuidema

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

Swimming Lessons, Bill Elgersma

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

Just Plains Crazy, Howard Schaap

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

Modeling Preferences With Availability Constraints, Bingtian Dai, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User preferences are commonly learned from historical data whereby users express preferences for items, e.g., through consumption of products or services. Most work assumes that a user is not constrained in their selection of items. This assumption does not take into account the availability constraint, whereby users could only access some items, but not others. For example, in subscription-based systems, we can observe only those historical preferences on subscribed (available) items. However, the objective is to predict preferences on unsubscribed (unavailable) items, which do not appear in the historical observations due to their (lack of) availability. To model preferences in …

Improving Patient Length-Of-Stay In Emergency Department Through Dynamic Queue Management, Kar Way Tan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Francis Chun Yue Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Addressing issue of crowding in an Emergency Department (ED) typically takes the form of process engineering or single-faceted queue management strategies such as demand restriction, queue prioritization or staffing the ED. This work provides an integrated framework to manage queue dynamically from both demand and supply perspectives. More precisely, we introduce intelligent dynamic patient prioritization strategies to manage the demand concurrently with dynamic resource adjustment policies to manage supply. Our framework allows decision-makers to select both the demand-side and supply-side strategies to suit the needs of their ED. We verify through a simulation that such a framework improves the patients' …

Factors Influencing Research Contributions And Researcher Interactions In Software Engineering: An Empirical Study, Subhajit Datta, A. S. M. Sajeev, Santonu Sarkar, Nishant Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Research into software engineering (SE) education is largely concentrated on teaching and learning issues in coursework programs. This paper, in contrast, provides a meta analysis of research publications in software engineering to help with research education in SE. Studying publication patterns in a discipline will assist research students and supervisors gain a deeper understanding of how successful research has occurred in the discipline. We present results from a large scale empirical study covering over three and a half decades of software engineering research publications. We identify how different factors of publishing relate to the number of papers published as well …

Management Forecast Credibility And Underreaction To News, Jeffrey Ng, Irem Tuna, Rodrigo Verdi

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In this paper, we first document evidence of underreaction to management forecast news. We then hypothesize that the credibility of the forecast influences the magnitude of this underreaction. Relying on evidence that more credible forecasts are associated with a larger reaction in the short window around the management forecasts and a smaller post-management forecast drift in returns, we show that the magnitude of the underreaction is smaller for firms that provide more credible forecasts. Our paper contributes to the literature by providing out-of-sample evidence of the drift in returns documented in the post-earnings-announcement drift literature, with the credibility of the …

Accounting Challenge App: An Interview With Ceeman Champions 2013, Poh Sun Seow, Suay Peng Wong

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

No abstract provided.

Counterparty Responses To Managerial Overconfidence, Paul Hribar, Jaewon Kim, Ryan Wilson, Holly I-Hwa Yang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Existing research links CEO overconfidence to a number of corporate decisions including overinvestment, external acquisitions, and earnings management. These findings raise the question of whether counterparties distinguish between differences in CEOs, and how they respond to it. We focus on two key counterparties – auditors and credit rating agencies – and examine whether audit fees and credit ratings are affected by CEO overconfidence. We find a positive association between audit fees and CEO overconfidence, suggesting that auditors exert more effort or increase the risk premium associated with auditing firms with more overconfident CEOs. We also find a significant negative association …

Price Shocks, News Disclosures, And Asymmetric Drifts, Hai Lu, Kevin Wang, Xiaolu Wang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Motivated by investor disagreement and corporate disclosure literatures, we examinehow stock price shocks affect future stock returns. We find that both large short-termprice drops and hikes are followed by negative abnormal returns over the subsequent year,consistent with the conjecture that price shocks are useful indicators of inter-temporalspikes in investor disagreement and investor opinion converges gradually. The asymmetricdrifts, return continuation for negative price shocks versus return reversal for positive ones,are in sharp contrast to the general findings of symmetric drifts in corporate event studies.Moreover, price shocks associated with public news events are followed by significantlyweaker downward drifts, suggesting that news disclosures …

Survey On The Role Of Investor Relations In The Modern Day Corporation, Andrew Lee

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The Investors Relations Professionals Association (Singapore) (IRPAS), incollaboration with the School of Accountancy at Singapore Management University(SMU) and the Singapore Exchange (SGX), embarked on this study in March 2013with the objective of achieving a better understanding of the role of investor relations(IR) in today’s modern corporation as well as the role of IRPAS in further developingthe investor relations profession in Singapore. The study aimed to provide insights into the structure and organisation of the IRfunction as well as the roles and responsibilities of Investor Relations Officers (IROs)in SGX-listed companies. An online questionnaire survey was administered in August 2013 to the …

Survey On The Role Of Investor Relations In The Modern Day Corporation, Andrew Lee, Jiwei Wang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In March 2013, the Investors Relations Professionals Association (Singapore) (IRPAS), in collaboration with the School of Accountancy at Singapore Management University (SMU) and the Singapore Exchange (SGX), embarked on this study with the objective of achieving a better understanding of the role of investor relations. (IR) in today’s modern corporation as well as the role of IRPAS in further developing the investor relations profession in Singapore. The study aims to provide insights into the structure and organisation of the IR function in Singapore listed companies as well as the roles and responsibilities of Investor Relations Officers (IROs) in these organisations. …

A Simple Integration Of Social Relationship And Text Data For Identifying Potential Customers In Microblogging, Guansong Pang, Shengyi Jiang, Dongyi Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Identifying potential customers among a huge number of users in microblogging is a fundamental problem for microblog marketing. One challenge in potential customer detection in microblogging is how to generate an accurate characteristic description for users, i.e., user profile generation. Intuitively, the preference of a user’s friends (i.e., the person followed by the user in microblogging) is of great importance to capture the characteristic of the user. Also, a user’s self-defined tags are often concise and accurate carriers for the user’s interests. In this paper, for identifying potential customers in microblogging, we propose a method to generate user profiles via …

The Jim Lindsey Story, Clinton Robert Fullen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The history of Arkansas Razorback football is composed of legends, and without a doubt, Jim Lindsey is one of its most successful players—on and off the field. Lindsey won a national championship, became an NFL captain and built a thriving real–estate empire across the South.

Narrated by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, “The Jim Lindsey Story” begins in the Arkansas Delta. Back then, Lindsey was simply a small boy who dreamt of playing ball. Weekdays were spent in the cotton fields, and weekends were used for cow–pasture baseball. In time, that boy grew up to be a very big man. …

Ecological Importance Of Ectomycorrhizal Linkages In The Ozark Mountains And The Fernow Experimental Forests, Shelly Kendra Bursick

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Underground stem-to-stem linkages involving ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi are probably important in forest ecosystems, since these linkages could assist in the survival of established trees as well as increasing the growth and development of seedlings and saplings. This study compared forest communities of the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas and the Fernow Experimental Forest in West Virginia by examining species richness, diversity, relative abundance, and the potential for stems to exhibit spatial distribution and clustering patterns that reflected the existence of linkages by ECM fungi. Data on forest communities in the Ozarks were obtained from eight plot locations in Devil's Den …

Perceptions Of Poverty: The Evolution Of German Attitudes Towards Social Welfare From 1830 To World War I, Rebekah O'Zell Mcmillan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Today's Western European countries have the world's most extensive government Social welfare systems, beginning with Germany as the forerunner. Prior to the eventual 20th century German welfare state, Germany was not devoid of distributing aid to combat the effects of poverty. Religious and public benevolent institutions, several centuries earlier, managed local poverty, resulting in an interesting relationship between the German citizens and these charities. The willingness of these institutions to address the poverty issue opened the door for the 20th century German welfare state to emerge.

This study examines the evolution of the attitudes towards poverty in nineteenth century Germany. …

Successful Marketing Strategies For Promoting Event Destinations, Evease Iniece Tucker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Travel and tourism has been recognized as being an important driver of jobs, growth and economic recovery in the United States. Meetings, events and incentive travel contribute $98.7 billion of the direct spending, $15.0 billion in taxes and 859,000 jobs. As a result, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) in the United States are taking advantage of this impact for growth in their destinations. As a destination marketing organization's main job responsibility is to promote their destination to attract visitors, which requires superior marketing strategies to achieve these goals.

This research investigates the marketing strategies of DMOs in the United States. The …

A Tangled Hope: America, China, And Human Rights At The End Of The Cold War, 1976-2000, Jared Michael Phillips

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A Tangled Hope: America, China, and Human Rights at the End of the Cold War, 1976-2000, discusses the evolution of both the international and American understanding of human rights. Beginning with a discussion of the philosophical and cultural frameworks concerning "rights" that developed in Europe and the Americas throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, this work moves into the post-World War II climate that shaped Jimmy Carter and his unique understanding of human rights and America's role in the Cold War world. In particular, I argue that the existing narrative concerning Carter's foreign policy is lacking in a nuanced understanding …