Digital Commons Network^™

American Options And Semilinear Parabolic Partial Differential Equations In Weighted Sobolev Spaces., Terrence K. Muthoka

All ETDs from UAB

To value an American option as a function of time t and price of the underlying asset S is currently a major research problem in both Financial Markets and for academic purposes. Options and more general financial derivatives (also known as contingent claims) are now an important tool in risk management. One of the earliest models used in pricing derivatives is the Black-Scholes model, for which the movement in the price of the underlying asset on which the claim is based is modeled by geometric Brownian motion. Other models used for theoretical and numerical analysis of American options include the …

Quantum Computation Approach To Information Theoretic Modeling And Analysis Of Systems, Luai Najim

All ETDs from UAB

The modeling of systems has been addressed in the physical sciences from the perspective of Energy and matter. The 3rd original idea of Communication as a means of modeling systems has been established and applied. In this study, we apply the 3rd original idea of communication to systems on a quantum level. By marrying Shannon's noisy communication channel to Feynman QED and Quantum Computing, we realize a visual model for the representation of the entropy of a noisy communication channel on a quantum scale. We also use that visual representation concept to define a geometric view into the superposition of …

Valuation In Light Of Uncertainty: How Stock Option Pricing Models Can Inform More Accurate Valuation Discounts For Built-In Gains, Rebecca N. Morrow

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

4% Absent = 100% Disaster: Why The Math Doesn't Add Up On Fixed Attendance Leave Policies Under The Fmla, Laraclay Parker

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Subprime Scriveners, Milan Markovic

Kentucky Law Journal

Although mortgage-backed securities ("MBS") and other financial products that nearly caused the collapse of the global financial system could not have been issued without attorneys, the legal profession's role in the financial crisis has received relatively little scrutiny.

This Article focuses on lawyers' preparation of MBS offering documents that misrepresented the lending practices of mortgage loan originators. While attorneys may not have known that many MBS would become toxic, they lacked incentives to inquire into the shoddy lending practices of prominent originators, such as Washington Mutual Bank ('WaMu"), when they and their clients were reaping considerable profits from MBS offerings. …

Effects Of Coteaching Instruction Between A Speech Pathologist And First Grade Teachers, Chrisonia Busch

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The effects of coteaching instruction used by speech language pathologists (SLP) and 1st grade teachers on students' early literacy skills have not been widely examined in current literature. This lack of research may hinder the efforts of SLPs to provide support services for students with and without disabilities who struggle with early literacy skills. Guided by the ecological systems theory, this quasi-experimental study examined the impact of coteaching instruction on students' literacy skills by comparing scores of 2 groups, experimental group who received coteaching and control group who did not receive coteaching instruction. The scores were measured by the final …

Teachers' Perceptions Of The Use Of Read 180 With Secondary Remedial Reading Students, Melanie Mclaughlin Cleveland

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Read 180 is a research-based reading intervention program. One local district implemented the program to improve student performance on the state assessment, and after a year of implementation, nearly half of the students in the district studied still did not make adequate progress in reading. The purpose of this study was to explore teachers' perceptions of and experiences with the use of Read 180 in secondary reading classrooms. Guided by Carroll's framework on the critical aspects of implementation, the study examined teachers' perceptions of (a) availability of resources necessary to adhere to the program's design, (b) ample class time to …

Adolescent And Community Adult Perceptions Of Adolescent Tobacco Use, Susan M. Franko

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In 1964, the Surgeon General issued the first report that linked smoking cigarettes as a direct cause of emphysema, heart disease, and lung cancer. Despite this landmark publication, the primary cause of preventable deaths each year in the United States continues to be related to the use of tobacco. Regardless of decades of health education and resources available to inform society that the use of tobacco products can have deleterious effects on health, adolescents continue to experiment with them. The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the influences of adolescent tobacco use. Based on the …

Collaborative And Creative Thinking Skill Development Through The Design Of Wearable Technologies, Laurie E. Korte

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Skills inherent in the creative thinking process such as reflecting and collaborating are needed for success in many careers. However, a focus on standardized testing in K-12 schools in the United States has resulted in the restructuring, reduction, and in some cases, elimination of arts in the curriculum to the detriment of students' creative thinking process. The purpose of this study was to discover whether creative thinking and collaborative skills were positive unintended consequences of a curriculum that includes the design of wearable technologies. Jonassen's modeling using Mindtools for conceptual change and Rosen's culture of collaboration provided the conceptual framework. …

High School Student Athletes And Nonathletes' Disciplinary Referrals And Grade Point Averages, Jack Willard Calhoun

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

High School Student Athletes and Nonathletes'

Disciplinary Referrals and Grade Point Averages

by

Jack Calhoun

MEd, Georgia Southwestern State University, 1998

BS, Georgia Southwestern State University, 1997

Doctoral Study Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Education

Walden University

December 2014

This quantitative study investigated how athletic participation in public high schools influenced students' academic achievement and positive social behavior. Disciplinary referrals are on the rise in American schools and are a cause of concern for teachers, administrators, parents, and community members. School personnel currently implement programs designed to curb discipline problems in the …

Combining Appreciative Inquiry And Emotional Intelligence To Understand And Improve The Professional Development Of K-12 Teachers, Jamie Elizabeth Dewitt

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Creating meaningful and effective professional development (PD) programs for K-12 teachers is an ongoing challenge. The problem is exacerbated when PD models are implemented without fully aligning PD resources and plans with the training needs of teachers and the organization. The guiding question sought to understand the experiences of teachers at an online charter school about the implementation of PD as a means for improving student outcomes. The purpose of the study was to find ways to enhance PD in order to improve student outcomes at the school. The conceptual framework for this study is interwoven through the constructs of …

The Burden Of Avian Influenza Viruses In Community Ponds In California, Zin Htway

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Emerging influenza viruses continue to challenge public health. The problem is public health science professionals have been battling emerging human influenza diseases with tactile and reactionary methods because there is a lack of knowledge and data at the human-animal interface. This research was a baseline study of the proportion of influenza A virus (IAV) in urban and rural communities in California. The population was artificial recirculating water ponds in the geographic locations of rural and urban Californian communities. Surface water samples [N = 182] were collected from artificial recirculating ponds in California. Positivity for IAV was verified by real time …

Worked Examples In Video Lessons To Reduce Cognitive Load, Kiera Llord-Ratcliffe

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Informed parent advocates are essential to planning the educational outcomes of their children with special needs in the K through 12 public school system. However, inappropriate instructional techniques used in advocacy training may reduce trainees' learning outcomes by adding complexity and increasing cognitive load. This study examined whether using worked examples to break down complex problems into component parts to build long term schema could lower cognitive load and thus improve learning outcomes for parent advocacy trainees. Based on cognitive load theory, this 2 x 3 factorial design study examined the efficacy of noninteractive video lessons for parent trainees using …

The Bear And The Tiger: Decoding Attitudes And Anxieties Towards Nature Through A.A. Milne's Winnie-The-Pooh In Post-Wwi Britain, Joanna Catherine Wilson

All ETDs from UAB

This thesis aims to demonstrate how the two volumes of Winnie-the-Pooh stories, published in 1926 and 1928, and written by A.A. Milne and illustrated by E.H. Shepard, operate as a unique lens through which early twentieth-century attitudes towards nature and wildlife in Britain may be discerned, and in particular how the stuffed animal characters of Pooh the bear and Tigger the tiger represent a shift in post-war British worldviews concerning nature and domination. The initial stage of this investigation determines how the exceptionally broad demographic constituting the audience for children's fiction makes the medium a particularly expressive record of the …

Fifth Graders' Understanding Of Fractions On The Number Line: A Standard Introduced In The Common Core State Standardards For Third Graders, Taajah Felder Witherspoon

All ETDs from UAB

This was a case-study design of the various ways students represented fractions on number lines. Students responded to task-based interview questions based on identifying fractions as a number on the number line as well as equivalency and problem solving. The tasks were administered individually to 26 fifth-grade students over a 15-minute time frame in their respective schools. The two groups of 10-year-old students answered most questions in written form on pencil and paper. The students were often asked to explain how they arrived at an answer. Student performance was highest when instructed to plot ½ on a number line of …

Targeting Reactive Oxygen Species Production To Prevent Left Ventricle Remodeling In Volume Overload, Danielle Marie Yancey

All ETDs from UAB

Mechanisms of left ventricular dysfunction in cardiac volume overload (VO) are not well understood and currently, no medical therapy exists to treat this condition. Cardiac VO is marked by eccentric remodeling and contractile dysfunction ultimately resulting in cardiac failure. Oxidative stress is implicated in the pathophysiology of heart failure and recent evidence suggests mitochondrially- produced reactive oxygen species play a role in VO. To study VO, we used a rat model of aortocaval fistula (ACF). ACF results in early diastolic stress on the left ventricle (LV) and recapitulates the progressive nature of heart failure with contractile function being initially maintained …

High Spatiotemporal Resolution Mapping Of Retinal Physiology, Qiuxiang Zhang

All ETDs from UAB

The objective of my PhD dissertation research is to explore high resolution imaging of retinal function using transient intrinsic optical signals (IOSs) correlated with retinal physiological activation. The retina is responsible for capturing photons and preliminary visual information processing. Functional examination of retinal neural cells is important for eye disease detection and treatment evaluation. It is known that different diseases can target different retinal cell types, and thus high resolution imaging of retinal function is desirable. Fast IOSs with time courses comparable to retinal electroretinogram (ERG) kinetics can act as a unique biomarker to map physiological distortions correlated with eye …

Principals' Perceptions Of The National Board Certification Process For Administrators: A Phenomenological Study, Wendolyn Conner-Knight

All ETDs from UAB

temperature for the Kemp’s ridley. The fourth chapter evaluates sex ratios produced in

Constraints On Cosmic Strings From The Ligo-Virgo Gravitational-Wave Detectors, Daniel Bessis, Teviet Creighton, H. Daveloza, Mario C. Diaz, Soma Mukherjee, Volker Quetschke, Malik Rakhmanov, Robert Stone, Lappoon R. Tang, Cristina V. Torres

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Publications

Cosmic strings can give rise to a large variety of interesting astrophysical phenomena. Among them, powerful bursts of gravitational waves (GWs) produced by cusps are a promising observational signature. In this Letter we present a search for GWs from cosmic string cusps in data collected by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors between 2005 and 2010, with over 625 days of live time. We find no evidence of GW signals from cosmic strings. From this result, we derive new constraints on cosmic string parameters, which complement and improve existing limits from previous searches for a stochastic background of GWs …

Implementation Of An F-Statistic All-Sky Search For Continuous Gravitational Waves In Virgo Vsr1 Data, J. Aasi, B. P. Abbott, R. Abbott, T. Abbott, M. R. Abernathy, Mario C. Diaz, Malik Rakhmanov, Joseph D. Romano, Soma Mukherjee, Volker Quetschke, Teviet Creighton, Robert Stone

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Publications

We present an implementation of the -statistic to carry out the first search in data from the Virgo laser interferometric gravitational wave detector for periodic gravitational waves from a priori unknown, isolated rotating neutron stars. We searched a frequency f0 range from 100 Hz to 1 kHz and the frequency dependent spindown f1 range from Hz s−1 to zero. A large part of this frequency–spindown space was unexplored by any of the all-sky searches published so far. Our method consisted of a coherent search over two-day periods using the -statistic, followed by a search for coincidences among the …

Utilization Of Dual Energy Computed Tomography Based Metal Artifact Reduction To Improve Radiation Treatment Planning In Patients With Implanted High-Z Materials, Evan Thomas

All ETDs from UAB

High quality computed tomography (CT) scans are integral to the successful cancer radiation therapy treatment plan. Metal streak artifact in the CT image originates when a high density medical implant (dental, orthopedic, etc.) disproportionally attenuates the imaging beam and corrupts the imaging data. This impairs the physician's task of identifying important boundaries between tumor and healthy issue. The ability of treatment planning software to accurately compute vital radiation dosimetry metrics is also compromised. Many methods have been explored to mitigate the complications of streak artifact; however, none have been found effective and efficient for routine clinical use. This work explores …

Studying The Looping Cycle In Early Childhood Public Education: A Multiple Case Study Analysis, Katherine Allsopp Thomas

All ETDs from UAB

STUDYING THE LOOPING CYCLE IN EARLY CHILDHOOD PUBLIC EDUCATION: A MULTIPLE CASE STUDY ANALYSIS KATHERINE ALLSOPP THOMAS CURRICULUM AND INSTRUCTION, EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION ABSTRACT This study addressed the nature of the looping cycle in early childhood public education in central Alabama. In addition, factors were explored that influence a teacher's decision to loop as well as the reasons behind why the practice is not more prevalent in early childhood public education. The purpose of this research was to describe the nature of the looping cycle for early childhood public education teachers in central Alabama in order to understand why looping …

Evaluation Of Environmental Factors And Dengue Fever In Sri Lanka Using Geospatial Tools, Meghan Tipre

All ETDs from UAB

The incidence of dengue fever has increased exponentially in Sri Lanka, from 24.4 cases per 100,000 in 2003 to 165.3 per 100,000 population in 2013. Despite concerted effort by the Sri Lankan government, dengue control remains a challenge in the country, indicating a need for novel approach for dengue prevention and control. The aim of this research was to identify environmental risk factors that may be associated with dengue incidence rate at the Gram Niladhari Divisions level (smallest administrative unit) in Colombo city, Sri Lanka, using geospatial tools such as remote sensing and geographic information system. These factors included climate …

How Children Quantify Area, James Wilder

All ETDs from UAB

The Common Core State Standards (2010) requires the quantification of area with the formula for a rectangle, length multiplied by width. More specifically, according to the Standards, third graders are to find the area of a rectangle by tiling it and showing that the area is the same as it would be from multiplying the side lengths. Is this a realistic expectation for third graders? The present study focuses on how children quantify area after receiving instruction on length x width, when asked to compare two rectangles having different dimensions. Fourth, sixth, and eighth graders were interviewed to find out …

Graduate Teaching Assistants; Critical Colleagues Or Casual Components In The Undergraduate Learning Laboratory? An Exploration Of The Role Of The Postgraduate Teacher In The Sciences., Barry Ryan

Articles

Laboratory training is key to many science subjects and those that teach the practical laboratory skills maintain a pivotal role in undergraduate science training. Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) are regularly used in higher education institutes to teach these practical lab skills. The GTA can be involved in both laboratory teaching and assessing all levels of undergraduates. This varied and challenging role requires support from the institute and if appropriately provided the learning experience can be rewarding not only for the undergraduate, but also for the GTA. In this review, the critical role of the laboratory GTA will be examined, their …

Play Hard, Work Harder. Alternative Reality Game And Scenario Based Assessments For Learning., Barry Ryan

Articles

In this paper, an evaluative case study is detailed as an example of alternative reality game and scenario based assessments for learning. This pedagogic approach is evaluated and recommendations for practice offered. Integrating technology into the assessment process, and final student product, influenced the chosen pedagogy. The use of technology permitted this assessment approach to be adopted for a medium sized (n=40) student cohort. The use of wikis, eportfolios and digital reflective diaries were central to creating a learning environment that centralised the student and allowed them to construct and create their knowledge through scaffolded alternative reality games and scenarios. …

The Maximum Number Of Complete Subgraphs In A Graph With Given Maximum Degree, Jonathan Cutler, A. J. Radcliffe

Department of Mathematics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Extremal problems involving the enumeration of graph substructures have a long history in graph theory. For example, the number of independent sets in a d-regular graph on n vertices is at most (2d+1-1)n/2d by the Kahn-Zhao theorem [7,13]. Relaxing the regularity constraint to a minimum degree condition, Galvin [5] conjectured that, for n≥2d, the number of independent sets in a graph with δ(G)≥d is at most that in Kd,n-d.In this paper, we give a lower bound on the number of independent sets in a d-regular graph mirroring the upper bound in the Kahn-Zhao theorem. The main result of this paper …

The T-Tone Chromatic Number Of Random Graphs, Deepak Bal, Patrick Bennett, Andrzej Dudek, Alan Frieze

Department of Mathematics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

A proper 2-tone k-coloring of a graph is a labeling of the vertices with elements from (formula presented.) such that adjacent vertices receive disjoint labels and vertices distance 2 apart receive distinct labels. The 2-tone chromatic number of a graph G, denoted τ 2(G) is the smallest k such that G admits a proper 2-tone k coloring. In this paper, we prove that w.h.p. for (formula presented.) where X represents the ordinary chromatic number. For sparse random graphs with p = c/n, c constant, we prove that (formula presented.) where Δ represents the maximum degree. For the more general concept …

Concern-Driven Integrated Toxicity Testing Strategies For Nanomaterials - Report Of The Nanosafety Cluster Working Group 10, Hugh Byrne, Agnes G. Oomen, Peter M.J. Bos, Teresa F. Fernandes, Kerstin Hund-Rinke, Diana Boraschi, Karin Aschberger, Stefania Gottardo, Frank Von Der Kammer, Dana Kühnel, Danail Hristozov, Antonio Marcomini, Lucia Migliore

Articles

Bringing together topic-related European Union-(EU)-funded projects, the so-called “NanoSafety Cluster” aims at identifying key areas for further research on risk assessment procedures for nanomaterials (NM). The outcome of NanoSafety Cluster Working Group 10, this commentary presents a vision for concern-driven integrated approaches for the (eco-)toxicological testing and assessment (IATA) of NM. Such approaches should start out by determining concerns, i.e. specific information needs for a given NM based on realistic exposure scenarios. Recognized concerns can be addressed in a set of tiers using standardized protocols for NM preparation and testing. Tier 1 includes determining physico-chemical properties, non-testing (e.g. structure …

Effect Of Substrate Choice And Tissue Type On Tissue Preparation For Spectral Histopathology By Raman Microspectroscopy, Hugh Byrne, Leanne M. Fullwood, Dave Griffiths, Katherine Ashton, Timothy Dawson, Robert W. Lea, Charles Davis, Franck Bonnier, Matthew J. Baker

Articles

Raman spectroscopy is a non-destructive, non-invasive, rapid and economical technique which has the potential to be an excellent method for the diagnosis of cancer and understanding disease progression through retrospective studies of archived tissue samples. Historically, biobanks are generally comprised of formalin fixed paraffin preserved tissue and as a result these specimens are often used in spectroscopic research. Tissue in this state has to be dewaxed prior to Raman analysis to reduce paraffin contributions in the spectra. However, although the procedures are derived from histopathological clinical practice, the efficacy of the dewaxing procedures that are currently employed is questionable. Ineffective …