The purpose of this study was to explore the role and impact of adventure therapy (AT) on student development and to identify the greatest challenges to the implementation of AT in schools. The Delphi method was used to generate consensus of opinion within a group of experts in the field of adventure therapy and school counseling. Purposive sampling was used to identify the members of the expert panel and the definition of consensus was set at 80% for each item. Content and descriptive analysis were used to develop representative statements from participant responses between rounds. Ten Caucasian respondents, 6 men and 4 women, having met at least one of the expert criteria for the study, completed three rounds of participation which resulted in the attainment of consensus on 36 items addressing the role of adventure therapy in school counseling and the impact of AT in the areas of academic/career and social/emotional development. Twelve challenges to the implementation of AT in schools were identified and put in rank order. According to the results, experts believe adventure therapy has the greatest impact on social connectedness, problem solving, and student engagement in schools. Access to appropriate training in AT, administrative support, and funding …

This study applied the impression management theory in the context of social networking to investigate the generalized research question of this dissertation which is "Do active social media presence and various privacy concerns influence online behaviors of students on social media?" The results and conclusions are presented via the conduct of three different studies and the summary provides insights and explain the overall contribution of the research. For each study we developed a research model for which data was collected separately for each of these models. Hypotheses of each model were tested by partial least squares- structural equation modeling techniques using SmartPLS 2.0. Our findings confirm the hypotheses and showed that all the predictors positively influence online social networking behaviors. Active social media presence is operationalized as predictors such as SNS stalking awareness, Selective disclosure, desired differential persona, impression motivation, and information trustworthiness. Privacy concerns have been operationalized as SNS privacy awareness, technology awareness. Online behaviors have been operationalized as responsible image and reckless image.

This dissertation is devoted to study of complex systems in human physiology particularly heartbeats and brain dynamics. We have studied the dynamics of heartbeats that has been a subject of investigation of two independent groups. The first group emphasized the multifractal nature of the heartbeat dynamics of healthy subjects, whereas the second group had established a close connection between healthy subjects and the occurrence of crucial events. We have analyzed the same set of data and established that in fact the heartbeats are characterized by the occurrence of crucial and Poisson events. An increase in the percentage of crucial events makes the multifractal spectrum broader, thereby bridging the results of the former group with the results of the latter group. The crucial events are characterized by a power index that signals the occurrence of 1/f noise for complex systems in the best physiological condition. These results led us to focus our analysis on the statistical properties of crucial events. We have adopted the same statistical analysis to study the statistical properties of the heartbeat dynamics of subjects practicing meditation. The heartbeats of people doing meditation are known to produce coherent fluctuations. In addition to this effect, we made the surprising …

Nanoparticles, simple yet groundbreaking objects have led to the discovery of invaluable information due to their physiological, chemical, and physical properties, have become a hot topic in various fields of study including but not limited to chemistry, biology, and physics. In the work presented here, demonstrations of various applications of chemical free nanoparticles are explored, from the determination of a non-invasive method for the study of the exposome via using soft-landing ion mobility (SLIM) deposited nanoparticles as a matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI-MS) matrix replacement, to the direct SLIM-exposure of nanoparticles onto living organisms. While there is plenty of published work in soft-landing at operating pressures of 1 Torr, the work presented here shows how this technology can be operated at the less common ambient pressure. The ease of construction of this instrument allows for various modifications to be performed for a wide array of applications, furthermore the flexibility in metallic sample, operating pressure, and deposition time only open doors to many other future applications. The work presented will also show that our ambient SLIM system is also able to be operated for toxicological studies, as the operation at ambient pressure opens the door to new applications where vacuum conditions are …

Articulation is an element of musical performance that affects the attack, sustain, and the decay of each sound. Musical articulation facilitates the degree of clarity between successive notes and it is one of the most important elements of musical expression. Many believe that the expressive capabilities of percussion instruments, when it comes to musical articulation, are limited. Because the characteristic attack for most percussion instruments is sharp and clear, followed by a quick decay, the common misconception is that percussionists have little or no control over articulation. While the ability of percussionists to affect the sustain and decay of a sound is by all accounts limited, the ability of percussionists to change the attack of a sound with different implements is virtually limitless. In addition, where percussion articulation is limited, there are many techniques that allow performers to match articulation with other instruments. Still, percussion articulation is often a topic of little concern to many musicians. The problem is not that this issue has been completely ignored, but rather that a vast number of contradictory and conflicting viewpoints still permeate pedagogical methods and literature. This is most certainly the case with the marimba, where a review of method books reveals …

This dissertation applies philosopher Henri Bergson's methodology and his ideas of duration and creativity to the definitional problem of art, particularly as formulated within analytic aesthetics. In mid-20th century, analytic aesthetics rejected essentialist definitions of art, but within a decade, two predominant definitions of art emerged as answers to the anti-essentialism of the decade prior: functionalism and proceduralism. These two definitions define art, respectively, in terms of the purpose that art serves and in terms of the conventions in place that confer the status of art onto artifacts. Despite other important definitions (including historical and intentionalist definitions), much of the literature in the analytic field of aesthetics center on the functional/procedural dichotomy, and this dichotomy is an exclusive one insofar as the two definitions appear incompatible with each other when it comes to art. I use Bergson's methodology to demonstrate that the tension between functionalism and proceduralism is an artificial one. In turn, abandoning the strict dichotomy between these two definitions of art opens the way for a more fluid conception of art. Using Bergson's application of duration and creativity to problems of laughter and morality, I draw parallels to what a Bergsonian characterization would entail.

As epidemiologic research demonstrates health concerns for hand problems among pianists, scientists are measuring historic piano keyboards and realizing that much of the piano literature was composed for and played on pianos with smaller keys compared to what is used on the modern piano. Having to play this literature on a larger keyboard is especially difficult for small-handed piano students and professionals. Fortunately, smaller keyboards are now available for use with standard pianos - and research shows that this ergonomic adjustment does reduce piano-related hand pain for small-handed musicians. Major universities are now offering this option to students, but only a few music schools possess these keyboards and not many people know about them. There are no known research studies to address people's awareness and attitude toward ergonomically scaled piano keyboards (ESPKs). The purpose of this study was to assess perception and attitude toward ESPKs and help to raise its awareness. To examine pianists' perception, two surveys was composed. First one was conducted on UNT campus in which ESPKs are available for their students, and the second survey was carried out on schools of music in the United States. The results reveal that substantial number of people already know about …

Optimization of relief networks in humanitarian logistics often exemplifies the need for solutions that are feasible given a hard constraint on time. For instance, the distribution of medical countermeasures immediately following a biological disaster event must be completed within a short time-frame. When these supplies are not distributed within the maximum time allowed, the severity of the disaster is quickly exacerbated. Therefore emergency response plans that fail to facilitate the transportation of these supplies in the time allowed are simply not acceptable. As a result, all optimization solutions that fail to satisfy this criterion would be deemed infeasible. This creates a conflict with the priority optimization objective in most variants of the generic vehicle routing problem (VRP). Instead of efficiently maximizing usage of vehicle resources available to construct a feasible solution, these variants ordinarily prioritize the construction of a minimum cost set of vehicle routes. Research presented in this dissertation focuses on the design and analysis of efficient computational methods for optimizing high-consequence variants of the VRP for relief networks. The conflict between prioritizing the minimization of the number of vehicles required or the minimization of total travel time is demonstrated. The optimization of the time and capacity constraints in …

While unaccompanied music encompasses an ever increasing portion of clarinet literature, it comprises a comparatively small percentage of music performed. However, study of unaccompanied repertoire provides a valuable pedagogical bridge between etudes and accompanied music that is abundant with opportunity to address larger universal musical concepts, rather than repertoire-specific solutions. This dissertation demonstrates the application of concept-based pedagogy to selected unaccompanied clarinet repertoire of five different ability levels. Using principals of concept-based pedagogy, each work is broken down to its component technical and expressive parts in order to address larger musical concepts. Three to five exercises addressing each work's technical and expressive challenges are provided and explained.

This qualitative two-case study draws from the intersection of three theoretical perspectives: sociocultural theory, transactional theory, and complex systems theory. Guided by two research questions, this qualitative study explored the conditions two seventh grade English language arts teachers set for teaching expository writing and their implications. Deductive coding based on seven a priori patterns of powerful writing instruction (empathy, inquiry, dialogue, authenticity, apprenticeship, re-visioning, and deep content learning) revealed six conditions for teaching expository writing. Inductive pattern analysis of these conditions revealed three emergent themes: reinforcing structures, mediating transactions, and balancing tensions. These findings suggest that teaching expository writing is a complex system filled with dialectical relationships. As interdependent pairs, these relationships encompass the entire system of expository writing instruction, including the structural and transactional aspects of teaching and learning to write. The overlapping conditions and themes demonstrate that expository writing appears ambiguous at times; however, routine, yet responsive instruction, framed by apprenticeship and a balance of reading and writing activities designed to inspire self-discovery are fundamental to the process of teaching expository writing. The final chapter includes instructional implications and a discussion about the significance of setting conditions for generative literacy learning. Recommendations for future research include writing research …

In this dissertation we focus on the application of thermodynamic formalism to non-autonomous and random dynamical systems. Specifically we use the thermodynamic formalism to investigate the dimension of various fractal constructions via the, now standard, technique of Bowen which he developed in his 1979 paper on quasi-Fuchsian groups. Bowen showed, roughly speaking, that the dimension of a fractal is equal to the zero of the relevant topological pressure function. We generalize the results of Rempe-Gillen and Urbanski on non-autonomous iterated function systems to the setting of non-autonomous graph directed Markov systems and then show that the Hausdorff dimension of the fractal limit set is equal to the zero of the associated pressure function provided the size of the alphabets at each time step do not grow too quickly. In trying to remove these growth restrictions, we present several other systems for which Bowen's formula holds, most notably ascending systems. We then use these various constructions to investigate the Hausdorff dimension of various subsets of the Julia set for different large classes of transcendental meromorphic functions of finite order which have been perturbed non-autonomously. In particular we find lower and upper bounds for the dimension of the subset of the Julia …

In this work, I trace and reconstruct Taiwan's nation-formation as it is reflected in literary texts produced primarily during the country's two periods of colonial rule, Japanese (1895-1945) and Kuomintang or Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) (1945-1987). One of my central arguments is that the idea of a Taiwanese nation has historically emerged from the interstices of several official and formal nationalisms: Japanese, Chinese, and later Taiwanese. In the following chapters, I argue that the concepts of Taiwan and Taiwanese have been formed and enriched over time in response to the pressures exerted by the state's, colonial or otherwise, pedagogical nation-building discourses. It is through an engagement with these various discourses that the idea of a Taiwanese nation has come to be gradually defined, negotiated, and reinvented by Taiwanese intellectuals of various ethnic backgrounds. I, therefore, focus on authors whose works actively respond to and engage with the state's official nationalism. Following Homi Bhabha's explication in his famous essay "DissemiNation," the basic premise of this dissertation is that the nation, as a narrated space, is not simply shaped by the homogenizing and historicist discourse of nationalism but is realized through people's diverse lived experience. Thus, in reading Taiwanese literature, it is …

An assessment of the standard voice instructor or performer collection of printed music would likely reveal numerous operatic repertoire volumes in anthology format appropriated to the primary four voice categories. However, thorough investigation divulges little in comparable printed material accessible to the countertenor. This scarcity of systemized collections is especially evident in the territory of comprehensive countertenor operatic repertoire. This project fills that present void by creating a compilation of sixteen countertenor arias drawn from various styles and historical periods for suggested application in studio instruction and performance. Perhaps, a more meaningful project intent is the presentation of a beneficial graded literature continuum resource for the studio teacher who instructs a countertenor in various stages of vocal development. For this purpose, each of the 16 arias is categorized into four difficulty levels based on considerations of range, tessitura, coloratura demands, rhythm, sustained phrase length, tonality, melodic considerations/overall musical difficulty, accompaniment support, and ornamentation requirements. The project also addresses common issues of pedagogy and ornamentation for voice teacher consideration when instructing a developing countertenor.

Imagination and creative self-efficacy are important components of the creative process and outcomes but are rarely investigated together. To explore the relationship between personality factors, imaginative thinking, and creative self-efficacy, survey responses were gathered from university students in a southwestern region in the United States (n = 1,731). Personality was measured using the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), imagination was measured using the Imaginative Capability Scale (ICS), and creative self-efficacy was measured using items based on reliability in previous studies. Participants were asked to complete the three surveys along with demographic information through an online format. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted first to confirm measurements used. After fit indices confirmed measurement models used, subsequent analyses were conducted using structural equation modeling (SEM). The model of best fit supported creative self-efficacy as a strong predictor of all three factors of imagination. Additionally, the model indicated a strong relationship between conscientiousness and conceiving imagination as well as other notable relationships with personality factors.

Hymnus Paradisi (1938), a large-scale choral and orchestral work, is well-known as an elegiac masterpiece written by Herbert Howells in response to the sudden loss of his young son in 1935. The composition of this work, as noted by the composer himself and those close to him, successfully served as a means of working through his grief during the difficult years that followed Michael's death. In this dissertation, I provide linear analyses for Howells' Hymnus Paradisi as well as its predecessor, Howells' Requiem (1932), which was adapted and greatly expanded in the creation of Hymnus Paradisi. These analyses and accompanying explanations are intended to provide insight into the intricate contrapuntal style in which Howells writes, showing that an often complex musical surface is underpinned by traditional linear and harmonic patterns on the deeper structural levels. In addition to examining the middleground and background structural levels within each movement, I also demonstrate how Howells creates large-scale musical continuity and shapes the overall composition through the use of large-scale linear connections, shown through the meta-Ursatz (an Ursatz which extends across multiple movements creating multi-movement unity). Finally, in my interpretation of these analyses, I discuss specific motives in Hymnus Paradisi which, I hypothesize, …

Although Latinos are the largest minority group in the country, research examining how different psychological and cultural variables affect Latino individuals' wellbeing is disproportionately developed and cross-cultural comparison studies are particularly scarce. To address these issues, this dissertation research examined cross-cultural adult attachment-social self-efficacy-psychosocial wellbeing conceptual mediational model while investigating the moderator effects of country membership and familismo on the proposed mediational model using a cross-cultural sample of Mexican and Mexican-American university students. A total of 595 participants, including 360 Mexican students from Mexico and 235 Mexican-American students from the United States completed the research questionnaires. Results indicated that social self-efficacy was a significant mediator for the effects of insecure attachment on life satisfaction and conflict resolution in both cultural groups and for the links between attachment insecurity and depressive symptoms in the Mexican-American group. Additionally, moderated mediation analyses showed that country membership was a significant moderator for the links between attachment avoidance and social self-efficacy when life satisfaction, conflict resolution style, and depressive symptoms were the dependent variables, as well as for the direct link between attachment anxiety and physical health symptoms. Familismo was also found to be a significant moderator for the direct effects of attachment anxiety on …

Individuals evidencing psychopathic personality traits have been shown to have problematic attachment to others. Moreover, research suggests that culture affects attachment style as well as the expression of various psychopathic traits using the four-factor model of psychopathy. However, the majority of this research has included only white college students, which is a limiting factor. The current study assessed the relations among attachment representations and psychopathic features across two independent samples (one adult & one adolescent) from different world regions (adults only), ethnicity (adolescents only), and gender. Using similar assessments of attachment and psychopathic traits for both samples, dismissing attachment was related to aspects of psychopathic traits in nearly all cultures and ethnicities sampled. In the world sample, secure attachment was found to positively relate to impulsive and parasitic lifestyle traits in all regions. Culture and gender were found to moderate several relations between specific attachment styles and psychopathic features. Overall, the patterns of data indicated that many of the differences found between groups may be rooted in individualistic versus collectivistic values, and were consistent with previous research assessing these constructs across diverse samples.

This multi-faceted research study examined the current approach of educational technology courses and how integrating modern learning technologies into curriculum effectively is addressed in pre-service education programs at U.S. universities. The primary goal was to explain the current trends in the reviewed pre-service programs in relation to how future educators are prepared by the universities to incorporate educational technology and use technology enhanced curriculum. This study was an exploratory, non-positivistic qualitative study that employed multi-strategy and survey research approaches in order to establish a baseline of the way that technology integration skills are being addressed in undergraduate pre-service educator programs today. Survey participants were educators within a public or private K-12 system in the U.S. The participants' level of education, university attended, educational technology experience, and technology perceptions were gathered from the survey's Likert-type and open-end questions. Current and historically statistics and data were collected for each university identified from the survey responses. Findings of this study revealed outcomes related to participants' education, perception of educational technology, and university educational technology course offerings and/or requirements for undergraduate pre-service educator programs. Results of this research study provide a solid foundation for future research in these areas within the field of education.

The large difference between processor CPU cycle time and memory access time, often referred to as the memory wall, severely limits the performance of streaming applications. Some data centers have shown servers being idle three out of four clocks. High performance instruction sequenced systems are not energy efficient. The execute stage of even simple pipeline processors only use 9% of the pipeline's total energy. A hybrid dataflow system within a memory module is shown to have 7.2 times the performance with 368 times better energy efficiency than an Intel Xeon server processor on the analyzed benchmarks. The dataflow implementation exploits the inherent parallelism and pipelining of the application to improve performance without the overhead functions of caching, instruction fetch, instruction decode, instruction scheduling, reorder buffers, and speculative execution used by high performance out-of-order processors. Coarse grain reconfigurable logic in an energy efficient silicon process provides flexibility to implement multiple algorithms in a low energy solution. Integrating the logic within a 3D stacked memory module provides lower latency and higher bandwidth access to memory while operating independently from the host system processor.

The primary purpose of this study is to provide connections between a formal motivic analysis and the programmatic content of David Maslanka's three works for unaccompanied marimba: Variations on Lost Love (1977), My Lady White (1980), and A Solemn Music (2013). A comparison of the compositional process of each of these works is proposed through terms of Maslanka's use of depiction. Depiction is the action or result of representing through drawing, painting, or other art form, in this case, music. In each work for unaccompanied marimba, Maslanka uses this process of depiction in a unique way. The depictive mediums are categorized as evocative, representative, and introspective and these distinct approaches to depiction lead to three drastically different musical works. The different methods of depicting source materials are the distinguishing characteristics that separate these three works for solo marimba. This document includes a motivic analysis and comparisons of compositional devices used in these three works. A brief overview of Maslanka's life and works as well as a listing of all of his works that feature percussion instruments are also included.

Max Reger was a prolific composer on the threshold of modernism. The style of his extensive musical output was polarizing among his contemporaries. A criticism of Reger's music is its complex and dense musical structure. Despite writing tonal music, Reger often pushes the boundaries of tonality so far that all sense of formal organization is seemingly imperceptible. In this dissertation, I offer what I observed to be a new way of discerning Reger's motivic relationships and formal structures within and between movements. There are three primary tools and methods I incorporated to make these observations: Schoenberg's developing variation; melodic contour analysis as discussed by Elizabeth West-Marvin and Diana Deutsch; and Janet Schmalfeldt's motivic cyclicism stemming from internal themes. In this dissertation I examine five different musical works by Reger: D minor Piano Quartet, Clarinet Quintet, Piano Concerto, String Quartet, op. 121 and E minor Piano Trio, op. 102. My analysis shows how Reger relies on melodic contours of his motives to connect musical moments across entire movements and entire works with multiple movements. These motives are developed and often mark structurally significant moments providing the organization often perceived as missing in Reger's music.

This paper examines the relation between banks' dividends and their future financial health. Using banks' Nonperforming Loans Ratio, Loan Loss Provision Ratio, and Z-score as proxies for their financial health, I show that there is a strong positive relation between banks' dividends lagged by one quarter and their financial health in the current quarter. This main finding continues to hold following several additional tests, including the application of an instrumental variable approach, the use of change in dividends as the key independent variable, the exclusion of banks that are subject to stress test, the addition of macroeconomic variables, the exclusion of too-big-to-fail banks, and the exclusion of non-depository banks. I also find that the positive relation between banks' dividends and their future financial health is more pronounced for banks with a higher degree of opacity, a lower Tier 1 capital ratio, and during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. This paper contributes to three strands of the finance literature, including the Risk Reduction Hypothesis of dividend signaling in corporate finance, bank dividend policies, and the determinants of banks' financial stability. First, I show that there is a positive relation between banks' dividends lagged by one quarter and their financial health in the …

This dissertation examines how parties respond and adapt their behavior to political violence. Building a theoretical argument about strategic party behavior and party capture, I address the following questions: How do parties select and recruit their candidates in regions with high levels of violence and the pervasive presence of VNAs? Do parties respond to violence by selecting certain types of candidates who are more capable of fighting these organizations? Do parties react differently at different levels of government? And finally, how do VNSAs capture political selection across at different levels of government? I argue that in regions where there is high "uncertainty," candidate selection becomes highly important for both party leaders and DTOs. Second, I argue that as violence increases and the number of DTOs also, criminal organizations, as risk-averse actors, will capture candidate selection. I posit that as violence increases, there is a greater likelihood that candidates will have criminal connections. To test my theory, I use the case of Mexico. Violence in Mexico and the presence of criminal organizations across the country has experienced a great deal of variation since the 1990s. In Chapter 2, I find that violence affects the gubernatorial candidate selection of the PRI, PAN …

Female athletes have been established as a high-risk group for disordered eating due to the high prevalence rates of clinical (i.e., 1.9% to 19.9%) and subclinical eating disorders (i.e., 7.1% to 49.2%). To date, only a few studies have examined the long-term stability of eating disorders in collegiate female athletes, a design that will allow examination of change in prevalence rates over time. Additionally, researchers have attempted to identify psychosocial risk factors in the development of disordered eating, but short time frames (e.g., competitive season, one year) during which data was collected have limited their findings. The current study investigated the progression in prevalence of eating disorder classification (i.e., eating disordered [ED], subclinical ED, asymptomatic), pathogenic weight control behaviors (e.g., laxative use, vomiting), and the predictive ability of psychosocial risk factors (e.g., body dissatisfaction, negative affect) from the time in which female athletes were active collegiate competitors (Time 1) to a time six years later, in which the women were retired (Time 2). By Time 2, the women were categorized as asymptomatic (69.9%), subclinical ED (26.9%), and clinical ED (3.1%). The prevalence of those who were disordered (i.e., either subclinical or clinical ED) increased from 22.8% (Time 1) to 30.1% …