Digital Commons Network^™

New Orleans Revisited: Notes Of A Native Daughter, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

“Best Culinary Destination.” “Best City for Night Owls.” “Best NFL City to Party In.“ “Best City for Girlfriend Getaways.” “Top National Halloween Destination.” “Best Destination in the US and World for Nightlife.” “America's Favorite City.” And on. And on. The list of tourist destination rankings and accolades have mounted in the 10 years since Hurricane Katrina threatened to decimate New Orleans's tourism industry and, quite possibly—as some predicted and others hoped for—New Orleans itself. Things are different now. Recently, the New York Times proclaimed that New Orleans was “resilient and renewed, a decade after Katrina.” Listing New Orleans as one …

The Best Interests Of A Trafficked Adolescent, Anah Hewetson Gouty

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

For decades, the world has faced a tremendous obstacle in locating trafficking victims and their perpetrators. The United States has enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) and implemented a system of Trafficking in Persons Reports (TIPs) to track domestic progress. Nonetheless, even more challenging than addressing adult trafficking is conquering the rampant existence of child trafficking, which inherently has its own unique challenges. Child trafficking comes in many forms and affects different regions of the world in various ways. Misunderstanding precisely what constitutes trafficking is one of the obstacles to ridding the world of its existence. Moreover, the victimsadolescents- …

Executive Compensation In Controlled Companies, Kobi Kastiel

Indiana Law Journal

Conventional wisdom among corporate law theorists holds that the presence of a controlling shareholder should alleviate the problem of managerial opportunism because such a controller has both the power and incentives to curb excessive executive pay. This Article challenges that common understanding by proposing a different view based on an agency problem paradigm. Controlling shareholders, this Article suggests, may in fact overpay managers in order to maximize controllers’ consumption of private benefits, due to their close social and business ties with professional managers or for other reasons, such as being captured by professional managers. This tendency to overpay managers is …

Hostile Attributional Bias And Aggressive Behavior In Global Context, Kenneth A. Dodge, Patrick S. Malone, Jennifer E. Lansford, Ann T. Skinner, Sombat Tapanya, Liliana Maria Uribe Tirado, Arnaldo Zelli, Liane Peña Alampay, Dario Bacchini, Anna Silvia Bombi, Marc H. Bornstein, Lei Chang, Kirby Deater-Deckard, Laura Di Giunta, Paul Oburu, Concetta Pastorelli

Psychology Department Faculty Publications

We tested a model that children’s tendency to attribute hostile intent to others in response to provocation is a key psychological process that statistically accounts for individual differences in reactive aggressive behavior and that this mechanism contributes to global group differences in children’s chronic aggressive behavior problems. Participants were 1,299 children (mean age at year 1 = 8.3 y; 51% girls) from 12 diverse ecological-context groups in nine countries worldwide, followed across 4 y. In year 3, each child was presented with each of 10 hypothetical vignettes depicting an ambiguous provocation toward the child and was asked to attribute the …

Solar: Scalable Online Learning Algorithms For Ranking, Jialei Wang, Ji Wan, Yongdong Zhang, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional learning to rank methods learn ranking models from training data in a batch and offline learning mode, which suffers from some critical limitations, e.g., poor scalability as the model has to be retrained from scratch whenever new training data arrives. This is clearly nonscalable for many real applications in practice where training data often arrives sequentially and frequently. To overcome the limitations, this paper presents SOLAR- a new framework of Scalable Online Learning Algorithms for Ranking, to tackle the challenge of scalable learning to rank. Specifically, we propose two novel SOLAR algorithms and analyze their IR measure bounds theoretically. …

A Hassle-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Method Using Instance Similarity Features, Jianfei Yu, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present a simple yet effective unsupervised domain adaptation method that can be generally applied for different NLP tasks. Our method uses unlabeled target domain instances to induce a set of instance similarity features. These features are then combined with the original features to represent labeled source domain instances. Using three NLP tasks, we show that our method consistently out-performs a few baselines, including SCL, an existing general unsupervised domain adaptation method widely used in NLP. More importantly, our method is very easy to implement and incurs much less computational cost than SCL.

Exploring Cultural Proficiency: A Case Study Of A Culturally And Linguistically Diverse Middle School In A Predominantly White School District, Jared Peo

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Theses and Other Student Research

Issues of diversity continue to plague our nation. Recent events and Supreme Court cases have revealed a side of the United States that many wanted to believe was only part of our nation’s past. Diversity is a reality and predictions about future population demographics estimate an increase in diversity. As diversity increases, conflict becomes more frequent because “difference threatens dominance” (Howard, 2006, p. 57). The academic achievement and socioeconomic gaps between minorities and the dominant culture have been extensively researched and debated. However, they have not diminished despite legislation aimed at reducing them. This begs the question: how will the …

Conceptual Thinking: How To Quantify Meaning In Projects And Processes Through Structured Non-Linear Thinking, Marijn Van Der Poll

Interior Design Program: Student Creative Activity

Things have meaning. Your job, your smartphone, even your insurance has another layer of meaning than its intended reason for existence. Products have become complex combinations of applications and features so small, that their shape no longer characterizes them. As people we have evolved into empowered consumers looking for purpose in our lives and in the things we buy. Advertising discovered the power of meaning more than a century ago. Since then, what has proven difficult is to quantify meaning. The skills we are taught in our educational system and the processes we apply in business fall short of identifying …

After Postmodernism, Thomas W. Sieberhagen

Great Commission Research Journal

For the past 30 years, Christians have written about and discussed postmodernism. The topic is a favorite among scholars and students, who have enjoyed endless debates on the impact of postmodernism and who have speculated what the Church’s proper response should be to the West’s dominant worldview. This article urges the reader to recognize postmodernism’s demise, and to start thinking about the Church’s response to the next dominant worldview: Neo-realism. Could it be that God has brought the greater culture through the emptiness of postmodernism so that they will be ready to hear the truth of the Gospel as they …

A Fuzzy Logic Approach To Teacher Performance Measured By Principal Evaluations, Ashley Johnson Moran

Theses and Dissertations

While principals and current methods used to evaluate teacher performance have been found to accurately identify the teachers with students who have the largest and smallest achievement gains in their schools, they are less able to distinguish among teachers in between these extremes. A majority of states have implemented new reform in teacher evaluation strategies in order to diagnose and improve teacher performance, but unfortunately, have not incorporated a method capable of accurately representing qualitative factors and the relationships between them. The main objective of this study was to examine to what degree a fuzzy logic expert system could elicit …

Missing Photos, Suffering Withdrawal, Or Finding Freedom? How Experiences Of Social Media Non-Use Influence The Likelihood Of Reversion, Eric P.S. Baumer, Shion Guha, Emily Quan, David Mimno, Geri K. Gay

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

This article examines social media reversion, when a user intentionally ceases using a social media site but then later resumes use of the site. We analyze a convenience sample of survey data from people who volunteered to stay off Facebook for 99 days but, in some cases, returned before that time. We conduct three separate analyses to triangulate on the phenomenon of reversion: simple quantitative predictors of reversion, factor analysis of adjectives used by respondents to describe their experiences of not using Facebook, and statistical topic analysis of free-text responses. Significant factors predicting either increased or decreased likelihood of reversion …

July 2015, University Archives And Special Collections Department

This Month in UT Tyler History

No abstract provided.

Reflections Of A Recovering Aggregationist, Linda S. Mullenix

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Tracing The Linguistic Crossroads Between Malay And Tamil, Tom G. Hoogervorst

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

Speakers of Malay and Tamil have been in intermittent contact for roughly two millennia, yet extant academic work on the resultant processes of contact, lexical borrowing, and language mixing at the interface of these two speech communities has only exposed the tip of the proverbial iceberg. This paper presents an historical overview of language contact between Malay and Tamil through time and across the Bay of Bengal. It concludes with a call for future studies on the lexicology, dialectology, and use of colloquial language of both Malay and Tamil varieties.

A Linguistic Kaleidoscope Of The Malay Letter; The Case Of The Eighteenth Century Official Letters From The Sultanate Of Buton, S. Suryadi

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

The Malay letters make up the largest category of documents among the Malay manuscripts preserved at Leiden University Library, the Netherlands. The corpus represents the scope of the territories under Dutch East Indies authority during the colonial era. In fact, they are authentic documents which denote not only political contact between the local kingdoms in the Archipelago (Nusantara) with the Dutch East Indies government in Batavia during colonial times but also constitute an important source for the study of the historical development of the Malay language. This essay looks at the language characters of such letters which came from the …

The Acquisition Of Stylistic Variation By Jakarta Indonesian Children, Bernadette Kushartanti

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

No abstract provided.

Brandeisian Experiment Meets Federal Preemption: Is Cooperative Federalism A Panacea For Marijuana Regulation?, Saby Ghoshray

Northern Illinois University Law Review

This Article traces marijuana regulation's federal-state dichotomy through a multi-dimensional prism to evaluate states' rights with a Brandeisian experiment under the Constitution's Tenth Amendment. The genesis of this federalism conflict is evaluated through the ambiguity of the applicable federal law, while the federal preemption is examined through the dual lens of the Supremacy Clause and the Anti-commandeering doctrine. By evaluating the relevance of cooperative federalism through its constitutional inheritance, this Article proposes a roadmap for implementing cooperative federalism for marijuana regulation. In taking note of the deficiency in contemporary discourse in adequately contextualizing the intersecting rights framework for marijuana regulation, …

Usage Of Mobile Technology In Women Entrepreneurs: A Case Study Of Uganda, Mary -. Komunte

The African Journal of Information Systems

This study was motivated by the fact that despite Uganda having mobile phone service penetration of as much as 80% of its population, studies of mobile phone usage among women entrepreneurs in developing countries are still rare. Relatively little is known about women’s entrepreneurship and the mobile phone usage. Grounded in Habermas’ Critical Social Theory (CST), this paper applies the theory of emancipation to understand the usage of mobile phones among women entrepreneurs in urban and rural areas of Uganda. To select participants in the study, multi-stage and purposive sampling were used. Data was collected through questionnaire and focus group …

The Art And Science Of Literary Study, Jamie Carr

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The discipline of literary studies has recently gained powerful allies in the sciences and popular media. Scholars in the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience and cognitive psychology, have newly taken up literature's defense, conducting empirical studies to prove that literature has value—particularly researching whether fiction reading produces empathy. Both the media reports, and the empirical studies themselves, however, fail to acknowledge a long history of literary criticism and theory that articulate similar claims. Implicit in this subtext, is the privileging of empirical over interpretive or theoretical ways of knowing. In this discourse, literary criticism is broadly criticized for its variability and …

Becoming Moral: Natural Destruction And Ethical Violence In Wuthering Heights, John Mazzoni

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

<1> "Nature," to Emily Brontë, was "an inexplicable problem, it exists on a principle of destruction" (qtd. in Torgerson 191). Taken from her private writings, this quote serves as a critical signpost for approaching Wuthering Heights, the "savage" and "gnarled" novel that the Victorian reading public rejected on the basis of a moral duty to outcast modes of human behavior outside the precincts of their ethical systems (Surrage 171). Brontë's oppositional treatment of the two binaric terms, nature and destruction, supports a bifurcated reading of the novel that positions acts of violence committed at the title abode against those …

Acronyms And Identities: The Perceptions Of Latino Teenagers Regarding Their Experiences As Long-Term Second Language Learners, Kristina E. Granby

Doctor of Education (EdD)

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to explore the perceptions of older Latino teenagers regarding their experiences as long-term English language learners. The data were gained from in-depth interviews based on a phenomenological methodology. The participants were interviewed individually using a modified three-part interview structure. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using initial and thematic coding to identify common and related themes. The data was presented primarily using participant quotes to illustrate identified themes. The results of the study were organized into three major aspects of the culturally and linguistically diverse participants’ life experiences: Articulations of Personal …

Cubans In The United States, Antonio J. Lopez

Great Commission Research Journal

The term “Hispanic” is used in the United States for a large and diverse group of people. Cubans are among those that fall under this category, though they differ from other Hispanics. To understand some of the characteristic of Cubans, and to effectively reach them it is important to understand their history and culture. Mainly in Florida, Cubans are diffused throughout the United States, which requires flexibility and intentionality in reaching them. This article seeks to familiarize the reader with some of the historical, and cultural aspects of Cubans in order to reach them with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Identity-Based Conflict And The Role Of Print Media In The Pahadi Community Of Contemporary Nepal, Sunil Kumar Pokhrel

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects (Full IR Collection)

Despite the formal abolishment of the discriminative caste system in Nepal in 1963, caste still influences social, economic, and political sectors of Hindu society. Indicators and existing research suggest that caste-based discrimination remains one of the major sources of unrest in a Hindu majority nation such as Nepal. Questions remain, however, about the media‘s role in caste-based identity conflict. This dissertation seeks to answer the question: How do various print media outlets (i.e., public vs. private) depict Pahadi identity-based conflicts in contemporary Nepal? In this study, I employed focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews with Nepalese opinion leaders. Further, I …

Perspectives On Equity In Gifted Education, Karen A. Kraeger

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects (Full IR Collection)

Increasing pressures of accountability in education and calls for equity make gifted education a controversial topic. While much has been written about certain aspects of equity, such as underrepresented groups in gifted education, little research has examined a more complex view of what makes a gifted education program equitable. More specifically, there was no research combining perceptions of the different aspects of equity in gifted education-access, participation, and benefit.

This qualitative study used grounded theory to establish a coherent understanding of the current perspectives on equity in gifted education. Drawing on gifted specialists at the local, regional, and state level, …

Describing Spiritual Growth In An Online Religious Education Course: A Phenomenological Perspective, Benjamin Trevor Fryar

Theses and Dissertations

An estimated 33% of all college students take at least one online class (Allen & Seaman, 2013). Online classes are offered across a wide range of domains, including courses designed for spiritual development. Little research exists examining students' experiences in these types of classes. The purpose of this research is to help address this gap by describing the phenomenon of spiritual growth in an online religious education course. Brigham Young University-Idaho (BYU-Idaho) offers online courses designed to help students grow spiritually. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten students who took one of these classes and who reported positive gains in …

An Inquiry Into A Literary Depiction Of The Construction Of Reality Through The Use Of Nondualism In Vandana Singh's Distances, Amanda Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Vandana Singh's Distances reasons why existence is its own purpose from the framework of nondualism (Advaita Vedanta in Hindu philosophical nondualism). Singh uses her knowledge of concepts from nonduality and represents that which underlies existence for the Advaitan. The concept of a primary state is depicted through the use of nondualist philosophy and the symbol of Vara in Distances. The representation of the binary or triadic structure inherent within nonduality is depicted as Singh creates philosophical realms to construct a novel of latticed meaning-ultimately questioning understanding over experiencing. Singh weaves together a challenging work that lends a poetry to …

The Home Field Advantage: Exploring Elements Of Immigrant Entrepreneurship, Loren H. Rich

Theses and Dissertations

Immigrants participate in entrepreneurial activity more frequently than other groups, largely resulting from restricted access to traditional occupational advancement. Recent studies have reported that immigrant entrepreneurs focus on their abundance of human and social capital to obtain the financial resources necessary to fund their ventures. Lack of financial resources has been identified as a major barrier for immigrant entrepreneurs; however, as this study indicates, both native and immigrant entrepreneurs face similar financial hurdles in locating initial startup funding. Where major differences arise between native and immigrant entrepreneurs is that native entrepreneurs more frequently transition to business forms of debt, a …

Shared Reading Activities: A Recommendation For Deaf Children, Donna Jo Napoli, G. Mirus

Linguistics Faculty Works

There should be a focus on fun in shared reading activities with preschoolers in order to prepare them for later literacy, particularly those at risk of a poor foundation in a first language (L1), including deaf children (here “deaf” covers hard of hearing, as well). We look at how shared reading activities (SRAs) develop pre-literacy skills and describe bilingual-bimodal ebooks aimed purely at producing enjoyment, so families will engage in SRAs frequently.

Neurobiology Research Findings: How The Brain Works During Reading, Siusana Kweldju

PASAA

In the past, neurobiology for reading was identical with neuropathology. Today, however, the advancement of modern neuroimaging techniques has contributed to the understanding of the reading processes of normal individuals. Neurobiology findings today have uncovered and illuminated the fundamental neural mechanism of reading. The findings have helped researchers and educators in the field of reading expand their understanding of the different levels of the reading process for evidence-based reading instruction. The aims of this paper are to provide a review of the results of neuroscience laboratory research for understanding the reading process. First, the subprocesses of reading and the activated …

Idea Sharing: Reporting Verbs In Research Writing: Lessons From Experts, Woravut Jaroongkhongdach

PASAA

Using reporting verbs in research writing seems to be a problem for graduate students (or novice researchers) when writing a research paper. The aim of this paper is to raise the awareness of students in using reporting verbs. The main argument in this paper is based on the comparison of reporting verbs used by two expert researchers and two Thai novice researchers in the field of applied linguistics. The comparison reveals that reporting verbs used by the experts tend to be both factive (i.e., the current researcher portrays the previous researcher as presenting true information or a correct opinion) and …