Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Firm-Level Productivity Spillovers In China’S Chemical Industry: A Spatial Hausman-Taylor Approach, Peter H. Egger, Badi H. Baltagi, Michaela Kesina

Center for Policy Research

This paper assesses the role of intra-sectoral spillovers in total factor productivity across Chinese producers in the chemical industry. We use a rich panel data-set of 12,552 firms observed over the period 2004-2006 and model output by the firm as a function of skilled and unskilled labor, capital, materials, and total factor productivity, which is broadly defined. The latter is a composite of observable factors such as export market participation, foreign as well as public ownership, the extent of accumulated intangible assets, and unobservable total factor productivity. Despite the richness of our data-set, it suffers from the lack of time …

Review: The Wilderness Writings Of Howard Zahniser, Jillian M. Slater

Marian Library Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Notes From The Director, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Applications Of A New Geodata Crawler For Landscape Ecology: From Mapping Natural Stream Hydrology To Monitoring Endangered Beetles, Douglas Ryan Leasure

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

An investigation of endangered American burying beetle (Nicrophorus americanus) ecology led to development of a Geodata Crawler with applications in eco-hydrology. Geodata Crawler includes a national GIS (geospatial information systems) database with layers that quantify climate, land cover, soils, human development, and other attributes of the biosphere. For user-locations in the continental United States, Geodata Crawler can rapidly tabulate site-specific statistics within automatically delineated sample areas: points, site radii, watersheds, and riparian zones, among others. Geodata Crawler supported a multi-scale analysis of N. americanus habitat at a military installation in western Arkansas to produce a Landsat-based monitoring tool. Royle's N-mixture …

Geographic Assessment Of The Perception Of Nature Reserves And National Parks In Kuwait, Meshari S. Alenezi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Arabian Gulf countries have passed strict laws to preserve their environment. Kuwait has a strong history with preserving natural areas. The ecological value and richness of Kuwait's ecosystems have increased since the nature reserves were built. This research has evaluated the perceptions that Kuwaitis have of the design, creation, and development of nature reserves in Kuwait. It involved the use of survey instruments (questionnaires) and interviews with respondents of both urban and rural communities. Data from these surveys and interviews analyzed regarding perceptions of nature reserves' needs, sizes, functions, and future plans.

The results of examinations (surveys) demonstrate that …

Research: South Dakota State University, Winter 2014, Christie Delfanian, Eric Landwehr

State of Discovery South Dakota State University's Research Magazine

CONTENTS:

Weeds influence gene expression, growth in corn [Page] 2
Graduate research targets childhood obesity [Page] 3
Transmammary drug delivery system for early-stage breast cancer may reduce side effects [Page] 5
Biochemical pathways may be key to scab resistance [Page] 7
New filtration system saves water, money for City of Sioux Falls [Page] 8
Doulas ease stress, increase satisfaction with the birthing experience [Page] 9
Structure lab evaluates strength, durability of structural components [Page] 10
Device gives sunflower producers reprieve from combine fires [Page] 12
Graduate scholarship winner works on renewable energy storage [Page] 12

Message From The Vice President For Research, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Scholarships Awarded To Mcnair Scholars, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Issues Of Social Data Analytics With A New Method For Sentiment Analysis Of Social Media Data, Zhaoxia Wang, Victor J. C. Tong, David Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Social media data consists of feedback, critiques and other comments that are posted online by internet users. Collectively, these comments may reflect sentiments that are sometimes not captured in traditional data collection methods such as administering a survey questionnaire. Thus, social media data offers a rich source of information, which can be adequately analyzed and understood. In this paper, we survey the extant research literature on sentiment analysis and discuss various limitations of the existing analytical methods. A major limitation in the large majority of existing research is the exclusive focus on social media data in the English language. There …

Gis Framework For Spatiotemporal Mapping Of Urban Flooding And Analyze Watershed Hydrological Response To Land Cover Change, Sayed Joinal Hossain Abedin

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Urban flooding is a manmade disaster, and a recurrent problem in cities around the globe. Increased surface imperviousness due to urbanization along with inadequate drainage infrastructure system are the chief culprits for urban flooding. Flooding in an urban area brings about severe economic, structural, and environmental damages, and can be associated with casualties too. In order to evade flooding, an efficient flood model is imperative to study current flooding, and analyze flooding behavior to urban surface characteristics.

This research aims to develop a framework using Geographic Information System (GIS) to perform modeling and mapping of flood spatiotemporal variation in urban …

Keeping In Touch: Exchange As An Adaptive Strategy In Southern Nevada, Timothy Joshua Ferguson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Archaeologists have always wondered about the extent of vessel movement in the American Southwest. Identifying vessel movement allows for the study of social interactions across a region and the role of ceramics in the adaptive processes of agriculturalists living in marginal, highly variable environments. In many instances, exchange may act as a way to reduce the risk of resource shortfalls by creating social ties in other areas. This research investigated the changing risk reduction strategies of households in the lowland Virgin region of southern Nevada by using geochemical methods to trace the exchange of locally produced pottery. It was hypothesized …

Modeling And Analysis Of Pedestrian Flows, Romesh Khaddar

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

According to the Traveler Opinion and Perception Survey of 2005, about 107.4 million Americans regularly use walking as a mode of transport during their commute, which amounts for 51% of the total American population. In 2009, 4092 pedestrian fatalities were reported nationwide, out of 59,000 pedestrian crashes. This amounts for 12% of the fatalities in the total traffic accidents recorded, and shows an over-representation of pedestrians incidents. Thus, it is imperative to understand the causes behind such statistics, and conduct a comprehensive research on pedestrian walking behavior and their interaction with surroundings.

A lot of researches on pedestrian flows have …

Global Climate Change: The Political Impact Of Global Warming On Developing Countries. The Case Studies Of Egypt And Oman, Eugene Thomas O'Neal

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The discourse of climate change has become important in the field of political science, as well as in the policy-making community. Climate change has become a political phenomenon that has and will greatly impact political stability regionally and globally. Using the ecological security theory as a framework, I explored the relationship between climate change and political stability in developing countries.

This study utilizes both qualitative and quantitative analyses to investigate the relationship between climate change and its effects on political volatility in developing countries. Using regression models, the author examined all non-OECD countries (140 countries) and their relationship to political …

An Optimal Harvesting Strategy Of A Three Species Syn-Ecosystem With Commensalism And Stochasticity, M. N. Srinivas, A. Sabarmathi, K. S. Reddy, M. A. S. Srinivas

Applications and Applied Mathematics: An International Journal (AAM)

In this paper we have studied the stability of three typical species syn-ecosystem. The system comprises of one commensal S₁ and two hosts S₂ and S₃ . Both S₂ and S₂ benefit S₁ without getting themselves affected either positively or adversely. Further S₂ is a commensal of S₃ and S₃ is a host of both S₁ and S₂. Limited resources have been considered for all the three species in this case. The model equations of the system constitute a set of three first order non-linear ordinary differential equations. …

An Lntegrated Approach (Remote Sensing, Gls, Engineering, Datamining) For Modeling, Assessing And Mitigating Slope Stability Hazards In Mountainous Environments, Racha El Kadiri

Dissertations

Mountainous areas are quite often subjected to hazards related to their steep relief and intense precipitation events. These hazards (e.g., debris flows, mudflows, rockfalls) pose serious threats to settlements and structures that support transportation, agriculture, tourism, and other economic activities.

This study applies and develops a wide range of methodologies and tools that take advantage of readily available remote-sensing datasets, geographic information system technologies, and artificial intelligence techniques. The developed approaches allow the characterization of both spatial and temporal conditions that controlled mass movement occurrences and use these characteristics to model and mitigate future occurrences. The Jazan area in the …

Misalignments: Challenges In Cultivating Science Faculty With Education Specialties In Your Department, Seth D. Bush, Nancy Pelaez, James A. Rudd Ii, Michael T. Stevens, Kimberly D. Tanner, Kathy S. Williams

PIBERG Publications

Science Faculty with Education Specialties (SFES) are increasingly being hired across the United States. However, little is known about the motivations for SFES hiring or the potential or actual impact of SFES. In the context of a recent national survey of US SFES, we investigated SFES perceptions about these issues. Strikingly, perceptions about reasons for hiring SFES were poorly aligned with perceptions about potential and actual contributions reported by SFES themselves, and the advice they extended to beginning SFES was varied. While preparation of future teachers and departmental teaching needs were common reasons offered for SFES hiring, the potential and …

Empirical Studies On Interest Rate Derivatives, Xudong Sun

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Interest rate models are the building blocks of financial market and the interest rate derivatives market is the largest derivatives market in the world. In this dissertation, we shall focus on numerical pricing of interest rate derivatives, estimating model parameters by Kalman filter, and studying various models empirically. We shall propose a front-fixing finite element method to price the American put option under the quadratic term structure framework and compare it with a trinomial tree method and common finite element method. Numerical test results show the superiority of our front-fixing finite element method in the aspects of computing the option …

Marshfield Harbor, Rivers, And Waterways Management Plan, Urban Harbors Institute, University Of Massachusetts Boston, Marshfield Waterways Committee

Urban Harbors Institute Publications

This Waterways, Rivers and Harbors Plan is an initiative of the Marshfield Waterways Committee (the Waterways Committee) whose mission is to “recommend procedures, policies and regulations to the Board of Selectmen of the Town of Marshfield on matters affecting the safety, navigation, recreational activities, fishing interests, natural resources and the planning and management of Marshfield's waterways.”

This plan provides recommendations to address safe navigation, natural resource protection, improvements to public access, safe recreational boating, protection of working waterfronts and related infrastructure, improvements to water quality, preparation for impacts from changes in sea level and climate, opportunities for collaboration, and clarification …

Data Preparation For Social Network Mining And Analysis, Yazhe Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation studies the problem of preparing good-quality social network data for data analysis and mining. Modern online social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have rapidly grown in popularity. The consequent availability of a wealth of social network data provides an unprecedented opportunity for data analysis and mining researchers to determine useful and actionable information in a wide variety of fields such as social sciences, marketing, management, and security. However, raw social network data are vast, noisy, distributed, and sensitive in nature, which challenge data mining and analysis tasks in storage, efficiency, accuracy, etc. Many mining algorithms cannot …

Empowering Citizens In A Global Era: A Grounded Theory Study Of Community Gardens, Anita Tam

All Dissertations

In our global era, the modern food system can be viewed as consisting of a dominant macro-level corporate food industry, challenged by broad-based meso-level food justice and democracy movements, which are in turn fueled by micro-level community food initiatives. Research has yet to examine the role of community gardens in the context of this complex, multi-level food system. Grounded theory methodology was thus used to explore the deeper meaning of the community gardening experience to participants, in order to better understand the ways in which community gardens may scale up and contribute to democratizing the food system. Analysis of the …

Is The Smartphone Smart In Kathmandu?, Seth Bird

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This is the extensive study of the smartphone in the developing country of Nepal, specifically the Kathmandu valley. Throughout my research I conducted various interviews with businesses, Tibetan refugees, and Nepali millennials (18yrs-33yrs) with the goal of identifying how the smartphone is used and understood. I chose the Kathmandu valley as my main area of research because the usage of smartphones in rural Nepal is extremely limited, and the valley represents the economic hub where progressive thinking flourishes. As a main objective I sought to understand how, if at all, the smartphone is used differently between Nepal and America. All …

Seeing Below The Surface With Electrical Resistivity Tomography: Exploring The Deepest Reaches Of Arkansas' Tallest Prehistoric Mounds, James Robert Zimmer-Dauphinee

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite decades of research and over a century of public interest, the most prominent features at Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park, Mound A and Mound B, remain virtually unexamined by modern archaeological techniques, and poorly understood. The tremendous scale and importance of these mounds makes most standard research methods difficult if not impossible. Electrical Resistivity Tomography, a geophysical technique rarely used in North America, was employed to survey both Mound A and Mound B, resulting in models of the subsurface that provide insights into the construction, modification and condition of the mounds.

Extracting Interest Tags From Twitter User Biographies, Ying Ding, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter, one of the most popular social media platforms, has been studied from different angles. One of the important sources of information in Twitter is users’ biographies, which are short self-introductions written by users in free form. Biographies often describe users’ background and interests. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been much work trying to extract information from Twitter biographies. In this work, we study how to extract information revealing users’ personal interests from Twitter biographies. A sequential labeling model is trained with automatically constructed labeled data. The popular patterns expressing user interests are extracted and …

Anomaly Detection Through Enhanced Sentiment Analysis On Social Media Data, Zhaoxia Wang, Victor Joo, Chuan Tong, Xin Xin, Hoong Chor Chin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly detection in sentiment analysis refers to detecting abnormal opinions, sentiment patterns or special temporal aspects of such patterns in a collection of data. The anomalies detected may be due to sudden sentiment changes hidden in large amounts of text. If these anomalies are undetected or poorly managed, the consequences may be severe, e.g. A business whose customers reveal negative sentiments and will no longer support the establishment. Social media platforms, such as Twitter, provide a vast source of information, which includes user feedback, opinion and information on most issues. Many organizations also leverage social media platforms to publish information …

Ecosystem Services In The Wet Tropics: A Literature Review And Economic Valuation, Alyson Cheney

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The present study can be broken down into two sections. First, it created a literature review on the current body of knowledge regarding ecosystem services in the Australian Wet Tropics World Heritage Area. The second portion of the study was an economic valuation determining how much residents that live in the Wet Tropics value the benefits provided to them through ecosystem services. The literature review found that there were large gaps in the present body of knowledge. Biophysical studies made up the vast majority of the literature and very few ecosystem service economic valuations have been carried out for the …

Value-Based Land Management Conflict: Alpine Cattle Grazing In Victoria , Matthew Luciani

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In Victoria, the practice of cattle grazing in alpine areas has shaped land, culture, and history since the early nineteenth century. Characterized by early gold mining, grazing, and skiing tourism, the Victorian Alps eventually seized the attention of conservationists who understood its ecological significance and need for protection, with beginnings of an Alpine National Park idea in 1969 (Johnson, 1974, p. 180). Not until 1989, however, did the park enter into existence, meeting much resistance from farmers and graziers along the way (Mosley, 1999, p. 80). Today, however, the region remains contested between two very distinct groups of people: environmentalists …

Economic Equity In The Annapurna Conservation Area: Effects Of Government And Community-Based Organizations, Hanna Seltz

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This research addresses the impact of community-based and government organizations on rural livelihoods in protected areas (PAs) by investigating whether benefits of such organizations involved in conservation and community development reach more marginalized members of communities in the Annapurna Conservation Area (ACA) of Nepal. I conduct a case study focusing on two villages within ACA, Kagbeni and Phalyek, examining how local groups interact with each other and with the government in trying to promote equity through the ACA Project primarily through indepth, unstructured interviews. Locally-created and locally-based groups in these communities appear to be successful in managing local resources and …

River Health In Puyo, Ecuador The Use Of Macroinvertebrates As Bioindicators Of Water Quality And Alternatives To Chlorine For Whitening Clothes In The Puyo River Watershed, Allison Rowe

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Fresh water is an important resource in Puyo, Ecuador, a city named after the Kichwa word for ‘cloudy’ in reference to its overcast weather. However, the Puyo River watershed is the most contaminated in all of Pastaza Province. The objective of this investigation was first to evaluate the health of the Puyo River using macroinvertebrate analyses and measurements of chlorine concentrations, temperature, pH, turbidity, velocity, and flow rate. The second objective was to learn about practices used to whiten clothes in Puyo and perceptions of water quality in order to understand the magnitude of bleach pollution and the population’s awareness …

A Vegetation Analysis On Horn Island, Mississippi, Ca. 1940 Using Characteristic Dimensions Derived From Historical Aerial Photography, Guy Wilburn Jeter Jr.

Master's Theses

Horn Island is part of the MS/AL barrier island chain in the northern Gulf of Mexico located approximately 18kn off the coast of Mississippi. This island’s habitats have undergone many transitions over the last several decades. The goal of this study was to quantify habitat change over a seventy year period using historical black and white photography from 1940. Using present NAIP imagery from the USDA, habitat structure was estimated by using geo-statistics, and second order statistics, from a co-occurrence matrix, to characterize texture for habitat classification. Percent land cover was then calculated to determine overall land cover change over …

A Novel Method For Confirming The Presence Of Volatile Reduced Sulfide Compounds Via Inductively Coupled Plasma-Optical Emission Spectroscopy, Krystal Lynne Parker

Master's Theses

Millions of dollars in destruction in the past decade have resulted from the use of Chinese drywall in homes. There are also potential health hazards related to this corrosive material. As such, it is important to find a way to identify Chinese drywall. Drywall can be tested for certain markers, such as strontium, sulfur, and carbonates to identify it as corrosive Chinese drywall. The laboratory preparation and analysis should be efficient and cost effective. The methods previously used, such as an X-ray fluorescence gun have had issues with getting a proper reading due to the layers of other materials found …