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Not All Political Ties Are The Same: Firms' Ties To The Government And Pollution, Wen Helena Li, Ilya R. P. Cuypers, Gokhan Ertug, Hari Bapuji, Wei Liu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Complementing research on the implications of political ties for firms’ strategic decisions and financial performance, recent studies are increasingly focusing on the environmental consequences of firms’ political connections. We contribute to this stream of work by integrating insights from the literature on political ties and the multifaceted nature of governments to explore how the level of government influences the pollution implications of firms’ political ties. Specifically, we theorize and demonstrate that, in China, firms' achieved political ties with high levels of the government reduce pollution, while such ties with low levels of the government increase it. Furthermore, we examine how …

The Effect Of Wise Leadership On Sustainable Performance, Haneen Raid Rasheed, Hadeel Kadhm Saeed

Journal of Economics and Administrative Sciences

The research aims to know the impact of wise leadership in its dimensions (Intellectual shrewdness, Spurring action, Moral conduct, and Cultivating humility) in achieving sustainable performance (economic performance, social performance, and environmental performance). The researcher chose the Midland Oil Company as a field for applying the research. The researcher distributed a questionnaire to a purposive sample of (126) managers working within the Midland Oil Company, which included (department managers and division officials). The number of questionnaires valid for analysis was (121) out of (126) distributed questionnaires. The researcher relied on the questionnaire as a primary source for collecting information from …

I See Sick People: Beliefs About Sensory Detection Of Infectious Disease Are Largely Consistent Across Cultures, Joshua M. Ackerman, Theodore Samore, Daniel M. T. Fessler, Norman P. Li, Et Al

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Identifying cues to contagious disease is critical for effectively tracking and defending against interpersonal infection threats. People hold lay beliefs about the types of sensory information most relevant for identifying whether others are sick with transmissible illnesses. Are these beliefs universal, or do they vary along cultural and ecological dimensions? Participants in 58 countries (N = 19,217) judged how effective, and how likely they were to use, cues involving each of the five major sensory modalities in an imagined social interaction during a flu outbreak. Belief patterns were strongly consistent across countries (sight > audition > touch > smell > taste), suggesting a largely …

Evaluating Demand-Responsive Scheduling In Public Transportation Service Offerings To Retirement Communities, Steven D. Silver

Mineta Transportation Institute

This project addresses alternatives to fixed schedule local transportation service offerings to members of retirement communities. The project design measures the effects of the contrast between fixed schedule (Fixed) service and demand-responsive services (DRT) in retirement communities in Santa Clara County that are closely matched in demographic profiles and geographic location. The research team investigates the effects of scheduling alternatives in a diary format with a within-person variable of four recent trips. The measure of public transportation usage under the Fixed schedule and DRT service offerings is supplemented by a measure of subjective well-being (STS) for each trip—in other words, …

International Comparison Of Weather And Emission Predictive Building Control, Christian Hepf, Ben Gottkehaskamp, Clayton Miller, Thomas Auer

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Building operational energy alone accounts for 28% of global carbon emissions. A sustainable building operation promises enormous savings, especially under the increasing concern of climate change and the rising trends of the digitalization and electrification of buildings. Intelligent control strategies play a crucial role in building systems and electrical energy grids to reach the EU goal of carbon neutrality in 2050 and to manage the rising availability of regenerative energy. This study aims to prove that one can create energy and emission savings with simple weather and emission predictive control (WEPC). Furthermore, this should prove that the simplicity of this …

Immune Modulation Affects Olfactory Glomerular Recovery In Zebrafish, Bonnie E. Ebendick

Dissertations

Adult zebrafish regenerate neurons throughout their lifetime and exhibit rapid recovery from neuronal damage with support from their immune system, making them an excellent model for studying neuroinflammation and brain repair mechanisms. When olfactory sensory neurons are lesioned, their cell death stimulates the immune system by activating microglia and other immune cells in the olfactory bulb, initiating tissue repair and neuronal replacement. This dissertation investigates how the immune system influences recovery from neuronal damage, testing the hypothesis that immune perturbation in zebrafish alters neural recovery.

To investigate the link between immune function and neuronal regeneration, zebrafish received a unilateral lesion …

Mexican Americans’ Attitudes Toward Mexican Immigrants In The United States, Sandra Daisy Espinoza Montes

Dissertations

The United States (U.S.) has often been described as a nation of immigrants. Among the 40 million immigrants in the U.S., Mexican-descent individuals comprise 25% of the overall immigrant population, positioning them as the largest immigrant group in the country. Additionally, Mexican Americans constitute 63% of the Latinx population, making them the largest minoritized ethnic group in the U.S. Considering that Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans have a significant presence in the country, scholars have called for additional research on attitudes towards Mexican immigrants (Byrne & Dixon, 2016; Flores et al., 2022). However, much of the existing literature on attitudes …

Understanding Residential Development In A High-Quality Transit Area (Hqta): An Application Of Deep Learning, Dohyung Kim

Mineta Transportation Institute

Considerable research addresses the dynamics between land use and public transportation, including the impacts of transit systems on urban development and vice versa. However, this research has underestimated the heterogeneity of contributing factors to urban developments near transit by property type: vacant lot and occupied property. That is, what drives development in vacant lots differs from what drives development in already-occupied property. A lack of comprehensive data that differentiates development records based on the type of property is one explanation for this research gap. This project fills this research gap by employing a deep learning algorithm and separately examining the …

Developing An Integrated Risk Assessment Framework To Quantify The Resilience Of Critical Railway Infrastructure: Characterization Of Risks And Hazards To The U.S. Rail Network Through Empirical Data And Past Events, Haizhong Wang, Brian M. Staes, Benyamin Ghoreishi

Mineta Transportation Institute

To improve understanding of the impact of natural hazards on the U.S. railway system, this project developed a comprehensive, geospatially precise dataset that maps historical hazard events to specific rail segments. The project provides insight into when, where, and how much damage natural hazards have inflicted on rail infrastructure across the country. While a rail-specific hazard database did not previously exist, this research combines data from the Geological Survey (USGS) Flood Events Database, Hydrologic Unit Codes (HUC), the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Weather Service (NWS) forecast zones. …

Roadside Asset Extraction From Mobile Lidar Point Cloud, Yushin Ahn, Riadh Munjy, Stephen Choi

Mineta Transportation Institute

Mobile LiDAR systems are powerful tools that help us map roads and their surroundings in 3D with great speed and precision. The data provided by these systems support urban planning efforts, digital mapping, transportation infrastructure maintenance, and more. This report presents a comprehensive workflow for roadside asset extraction using Mobile Terrestrial Laser Scanning (MTLS) data, focusing on road lane detection, cross-section slope analysis, and point cloud classification. Roadside asset extraction is the identification and classification of roadside features like signs and poles. The dataset, acquired using a high-resolution mobile LiDAR system, contains over 5.7 billion points (pieces of data) across …

The Impact Of Mindfulness Therapy To Reduce Disruptive Behavior In High School, Wendy Nell Peters

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this project was to determine the impact and effectiveness of Gina Biegel’s mindfulness techniques for stressed teens method on adolescent anxiety and the disruptive symptoms that lead to high school adolescents being assigned to detention. This project described a quantitative correlational design research project that investigated a small adolescent sample size, with a goal of decreasing the number of local high school adolescent students who are repeat detention offenders, by implementing Gina Biegel’s mindfulness techniques for stressed teens method on those high school adolescents who were assigned to detention. This was achieved by collecting demographic data from …

An Exploratory Descriptive Study Of Urban Professional High School Counselors' Work Culture, Burnout, And Mental Well-Being, Alexandria L. Hall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This descriptive, exploratory, qualitative study examined urban, public U.S. high school counselors’ perceptions of job-related stress, autonomy, and administrative support within urban school environments. Seven current high school counselors working in urban public schools were recruited through convenience sampling in educator forums on Facebook, followed by snowball sampling to expand the participant pool. Counselors participated in semistructured interviews conducted via Zoom or asynchronous online focus groups hosted on Padlet, depending on the participant’s preference. Data were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s six-step thematic analysis process, supported by Dedoose software for coding and data management. The analysis revealed four major themes: …

Perceived Leadership Behaviors And Workplace Motivation: The Predictive Role Of Generational Cohorts In The U.S. Construction Industry, Leslie D. Klinegardner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which perceived leadership behaviors predicted workplace motivation among construction workers across generational cohorts in the Greater Houston, Texas area. Grounded in self-determination theory, the research explored how transformational, transactional, and passive-avoidant leadership behaviors predicted the satisfaction and frustration of psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The analysis also considered whether leadership behaviors and generational cohort served as significant predictors of workplace motivation outcomes. The study followed a quantitative, predictive, cross-sectional design using survey methodology. Data were collected using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) and the Basic Psychological Need …

Assessing And Developing Higher Education Faculty Digital Competency For Workplace Preparation In A Digital Society, Yolanda T. Martinez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A shared global theme across higher education institutions is the need for training and development regarding digital competencies for higher education, yet there are little to no digital competency frameworks for faculty at higher educational institutions, like there are for K12. What can leaders in higher educational institutions do to prepare adult learners for a digital society and workplace that continues to expand globally in every field? Should every school adopt XYZ College’s approach, where leadership collaborated and developed an emerging technologies academy (ETA) to provide support and training on emerging technologies provided and supported by the college to self-enrolled …

Overcoming Second-Order Barriers To Teachers’ Technology Integration: A Study Of Positive Impacts, Crystal Ann Hume

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explored K–12 public school teachers’ self-efficacy, value, and pedagogical beliefs about technology. The teachers worked in a medium-sized, semi-affluent public school district in North Texas. The study investigated second-order barriers to technology integration and what might positively impact teachers’ self-efficacy, value, and pedagogical beliefs. This study used a qualitative descriptive methodology to collect qualitative data about their beliefs by interviewing and observing K–12 classroom teachers who had completed a bachelor’s degree through a traditional teacher education program. Teachers with alternative certifications or noncertified classroom instructors were omitted. Findings revealed that external factors, failure, mistakes, confidence, and professional development …

Principal Self-Efficacy: A Qualitative Study, Vance E. Self

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study explored elementary principals’ perspectives on the importance of selfefficacy in relation to management responsibilities, instructional leadership, and moral leadership as they impact student achievement measured by the STAAR in a Central Texas school district. The research addressed the growing challenges principals face in high-accountability environments, focusing on how their beliefs in their leadership abilities affect school performance and student outcomes. The purpose was to examine principals’ views on selfefficacy across three domains and to consider implications for leadership preparation, district support, and policy. The study was grounded in a constructivist paradigm and employed a qualitative case study …

Electronic Health Record Downtime, Grace R. Baldauf

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Electronic health record (EHR) downtime presents significant challenges to patient safety and care quality in acute care settings, particularly regarding timely medication administration. This project addressed the problem of late or absent medication doses during planned or unplanned EHR downtime. The investigator aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a structured downtime plan in improving nurses’ ability to administer medications on time during periods of EHR unavailability. The investigator used a quantitative design to implement a downtime plan evaluation paradigm. Data were collected using retrospective chart reviews of medication administration records pre-implementation and postimplementation of the downtime plan. The sample included …

Institutional Betrayal And Military Vaccine Mandates: An Inquiry Into Loss Of Health Autonomy Concerning Unlimited Liability Contractual Employment In The Covid-19 Era, Aaron G. Dehaven

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The balance between government control and personal liberty is a growing concern in the modern world. Nowhere is this more evident than in discussions surrounding government policy in public health and individual health autonomy. The Covid-19 pandemic forced many institutions to change their standard operating procedures by adapting to rapidly changing health guidance instituted to protect public health. These changes highlighted the role of health autonomy and individuals’ rights to refuse medical treatments. The Department of Defense changed many aspects of how it operated during the pandemic, including the mandate of the Covid-19 vaccine for all service members. For various …

A Study Of Urban High School Teachers' Perceptions Of Multicultural Education, Clifford D. Alexander

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigated urban high school teachers’ perceptions of multicultural education and how those perceptions related to instructional practices. Guided by culturally responsive pedagogy, the study addressed the persistent achievement gap among minority students and the limited integration of multicultural education in U.S. public schools. The purpose of this study was to evaluate teachers’ perceptions of multicultural education and examine their connection to teaching practices and cultural background. A quantitative cross-sectional survey design was employed with a sample of 331 urban high school teachers. Findings indicated that the majority of participants held positive views toward multicultural education, recognizing its role …

Gcot: Chain-Of-Thought Prompt Learning For Graphs, Xingtong Yu, Chang Zhou, Zhongwei Kuai, Xinming Zhang, Yuan Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). However, its vast potential remains largely unexplored for graphs. This raises an interesting question: How can we design CoT prompting for graphs to guide graph models to learn step by step? On one hand, unlike natural languages, graphs are non-linear and characterized by complex topological structures. On the other hand, many graphs lack textual data, making it difficult to formulate language-based CoT prompting. %Therefore we cannot directly adopt the CoT prompting methods used in the language domain. In this work, we propose the first CoT prompt learning framework …

Akma+: Security And Privacy-Enhanced And Standard-Compatible Akma For 5g Communication, Guomin Yang, Guomin Yang, Yingjiu Li, Minming Huang, Zilin Shen, Imtiaz Karim, Ralf Sasse, David Basin, Elisa Bertino, Jian Weng, Hwee Hwa Pang, Deng, Robert H.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Authentication and Key Management for Applications (AKMA) protocol is a fundamental building block for security and privacy of 5G cellular networks. Therefore, it is critical that the protocol is free of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers. Unfortunately, based on a detailed analysis of AKMA, we show that AKMA has several vulnerabilities that may lead to security and privacy breaches.We define AKMA+, an enhanced protocol for 5G communication that protects against security and privacy breaches while maintaining compatibility with existing standards. AKMA+ includes countermeasures for protecting communication between the user equipment (UE) and application functions (AFs) from attackers, …

Faithfulrag: Fact-Level Conflict Modeling For Context-Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Qinggang Zhang, Zhishang Xiang, Yilin Xiao, Le Wang, Junhui Li, Xinrun Wang, Jinsong Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval systems have demonstrated significant potential in handling knowledge-intensive tasks. However, these models often struggle with unfaithfulness issues, generating outputs that either ignore the retrieved context or inconsistently blend it with the LLM’s parametric knowledge. This issue is particularly severe in cases of knowledge conflict, where the retrieved context conflicts with the model’s parametric knowledge. While existing faithful RAG approaches enforce strict context adherence through well-designed prompts or modified decoding strategies, our analysis reveals a critical limitation: they achieve faithfulness by forcibly suppressing the model’s parametric knowledge, which undermines the model’s internal knowledge structure …

Memotune: A Measure And Moment-Driven Fine-Tuning Framework For Quantized Large Language Models, Yun Zhang, Xue Geng, Lizi Liao, Jintong Sun, Minghe Yu, Ge Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Quantizing large language models (LLMs) is essential for reducing memory and computational costs in natural language processing. Existing methods combine quantization with parameter-efficient fine-tuning but often fail to meet practical performance requirements. This paper introduces MeMoTune, a novel fine-tuning framework for quantized LLMs. By employing a measure and moment approach within a low-rank approximation framework in probability measure space, MeMoTune optimizes the objective function for superior fine-tuning results. The update process is further refined through scaled gradient, enhancing convergence efficiency and noise robustness. Experiments on tasks like text generation, summarization, and understanding show MeMoTune significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, e.g. fine-tuning …

R2dqg: A Quality Meets Diversity Framework For Question Generation Over Knowledge Bases, Yimeng Ren, Yanhua Yu, Lizi Liao, Yuhu Shang, Kangkang Lu, Mingliang Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The task of Knowledge-Based Question Generation (KBQG) involves generating natural language questions from structured knowledge sources, posing unique challenges in balancing linguistic diversity and semantic relevance. Existing models often focus on maximizing surface-level similarity to ground-truth questions, neglecting the need for diverse syntactic forms and leading to semantic drift during generation. To overcome these challenges, we propose Refine-Reinforced Diverse Question Generation (R2DQG), a two-phase framework leveraging a generation-then-refinement paradigm. The Generator first constructs a diverse set of expressive templates using dependency parse tree similarity, capturing a wide range of syntactic patterns and styles. These templates guide the creation of question …

The Back Page: Hospital General Dentistry: Needed Now More Than Ever, Tanaya K. Porter Dds, Craig C. Spangler Dds

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

This commentary emphasizes the increasing necessity of hospital-based general dentists. Historically, dentists faced challenges for privileges in hospitals, but today they are crucial, especially for neurodivergent adult patients and those with complex chronic illnesses requiring general anesthesia for dental care. Untreated oral issues can lead to severe infections, complicating acute medical conditions and threatening the success of life-saving surgeries like organ transplants. Hospital dentists provide vital pre-surgical evaluation, diagnosis, and follow-up care to prevent dental complications and improve patient quality of life post-surgery. Despite their critical role, the article highlights a concerning trend of fewer hospitals having general dentists on …

Genwriter: Reducing Gender Cues In Biographies Through Text Rewriting, Shweta Soundararajan, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

Gendered language is the use of words that indicate an individual’s gender. Though useful in certain context, it can reinforce gender stereotypes and introduce bias, particularly in machine learning models used for tasks like occupation classification. When textual content such as biographies contains gender cues, it can influence model predictions, leading to unfair outcomes such as reduced hiring opportunities for women. To address this issue, we propose GenWriter, an approach that integrates Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) with Large Language Models (LLMs) to rewrite biographies in a way that obfuscates gender while preserving semantic content. We evaluate GenWriter by measuring gender bias …

Sad Music Listening: What Is It Good For? An Exploratory Study Of Motivations For Listening To Sad Music, Ariel Gelfand

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study sought to bolster research related to the function of sad music listening. Music listening is a common coping strategy for individuals attempting to cope with and manage different emotional states, including negative or sad moods and emotions. Research surrounding self-reported reasons or motivations for listening to sad music outlines several factors that appear to serve as mood-management strategies. However, there are discrepancies among these motivations across research, which thus far has consisted of qualitative interviews of participants. (Garrido & Schubert, 2011; Saarikallio & Ekkila, 2007; Van den Tol & Edwards, 2013). Additionally, it is unclear whether listening to …

2025 August, Morehead State University. Office Of Communications & Marketing.

Morehead State Press Release Archive, 1961 to the Present

Press releases for August of 2025.

The Vvv Near-Ir Galaxy Catalogue Of The Southern Galactic Disc, M. V. Alonso, L. D. Baravalle, J. L. Nilo-Castellón, C. Villalon, M. Soto, M. A. Sgro, I. V. Daza-Perilla, C. Valotto, M. Lares, Lucas M. Macri

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Publications

Context. The distribution of galaxies in the zone of avoidance (ZoA) is incomplete due to the presence of our own Galaxy.

Aims. Our research is focussed on the identification and characterisation of galaxies in the ZoA, using the new near-infrared (NIR) data from the VVVX survey in regions covering the southern Galactic disc (230° <  l <  350°).

Methods. We used our previously established procedure, based on photometric and morphological criteria, to identify galaxies. The large data volume collected by the VVVX required alternatives to visual inspection, including artificial intelligence techniques such as classifiers based on neural networks.

Results. The VVV NIR galaxy …

Development Of A New Groundbased Instrumentation Technique For Low-Resolution Exoplanet Transmission Spectroscopy, Mary Anne Limbach, Luke M. Schmidt, Ryan J. Oelkers, Darren L. Depoy

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Publications

We present a new instrumentation technique for high-precision, ground-based spectrophotometric measurements ideal for low-resolution (R ∼ 20–60) exoplanet transmission spectroscopy. This technique employs novel thin-film coating technology for wide-band, simultaneous multi-band imaging, enabling high-precision differential photometry through self-referencing and comparison stars. Theoretical calculations and on-sky results show that this method effectively reduces 96% of amplitude scintillation noise and other systematics that typically limit ground-based spectrophotometric precision for bright stars. On-sky results are demonstrated using the custom-built Exoplanet Transmission Spectroscopy Imager (ETSI), deployed at the McDonald Observatory 2.1 m telescope in 2022. For a V = 9.7 mag star, ETSI …