Bronze statue at Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site in Goliad, TX.

Bronze statue at Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site in Goliad, TX.

Stone seating in the Amphitheater at Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site in Goliad, TX.

The most useful feature used in finance of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) stochastic process is its mean-reverting property: the OU process tends to drift towards its long- term mean (its equilibrium state) over time. This important feature makes the OU process arguably the most popular statistical model for developing best pair-trading strategies. However, optimal strategies depend crucially on the first passage time (FPT) of the OU process to a suitably chosen boundary and its probability density is not analytically available in general. Even for crossing a simple constant boundary, the FPT of the OU process would lead to crossing a square root boundary by a Brownian motion process whose FPT density involves the complicated parabolic cylinder function. To overcome the limitations of the existing methods, we propose a novel class of non-linear boundaries for obtaining optimal decision thresholds. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the maximizer of our decision rules. We also derive simple formulas for some FPT moments without analytical expressions of its density functions. We conduct some Monte Carlo simulations and analyze several pairs of stocks including Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Target and Walmart, Chevron and Exxon Mobil. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing procedures.

Probiotics/prebiotic supplementation represents a viable option for addressing systemic inflammation and chronic disease risk resulting from excessive body weight. The purpose of this feasibility study was to determine if 90-d of supplementation with prebiotic and probiotic could alter mRNA responsible for inflammation and subsequently metabolic health in weight stable overweight adults. Participants were advised to not change their diet or exercise habits during the study. All protocols were approved by the University IRB and participants gave written informed consent. Participants were randomly assigned to either placebo (N=7; rice flour) or combined (N=8) prebiotic (PreticX® Xylooligosaccharide; 0.8 g/d; ADIP) and probiotic (MegaDuo® Bacillus subtilis HU58 and Bacillus coagulans SC-208; 3 Billion CFU/d) and measurements were made at baseline, 30, 60, and 90-d. Whole body DXA scans (GE iDXA®) and blood 574-plex mRNA analysis (Nanostring®) were used to generate primary outcomes. Compared to placebo, supplementation was associated with a 36% reduction in visceral adipose tissue (p = 0.001). Supplement resulted in significant, differential expression of 15 mRNA associated with adipose tissue inflammation, systemic inflammation, and/or chronic disease risk. The key findings support that 90-d prebiotic/probiotic supplementation may be associated with an improved metabolic health, reduced adipose tissue inflammation, reduced systemic inflammation, and …

Researchers of historic voice pedagogy texts have generally focused their objectives towards reviewing the recommendations of historic voice teachers pertaining to the physiological, acoustical, and musical elements of training singers; however, researchers have given less attention to the evidence of humanistic pedagogical elements presented by historic teachers of voice. This study aims to examine historic resources of vocal pedagogy for qualitative data representing exemplification of or advocacy for character strengths for voice teachers. Additionally, this study explores practical applications of character strengths within the context of the modern applied voice studio. In this context, character strengths are defined as the positive attributes of a personality that influence how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. In this document, historic pedagogical resources (N = 80) represent works published between 1811 and 1975. Using the scientifically validated VIA (Values-in-Action) Classification of Strengths, the relevant data extracted from these resources were categorized first into six virtues – wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. These data were further divided into the subcategories of character strengths based on descriptions located in seminal resources in character strengths research.

White paper discussing the results of a public survey regarding keyword assignment for digital library photographs and providing initial analysis regarding the responses and next steps for the project.

The quality of workplace morale can positively and negatively affect employee engagement. Engaged employees are more likely to participate in active communication with one another. They are also more likely to adopt the organizational goals and work towards creating a productive work environment. Communication and engagement build trust. Established trust between employees and executive leadership is a delicate relationship to maintain, though it is necessary when contending with periods of stress. The organization profiled below experienced the stressor of needing to grow without alienating those afraid of change or used to operating in one predictable direction. There was a desire to generate engagement, build trust and make room for employee-directed change. This desire left the organization open to exploring its culture and its impact on employee engagement.

The findings of this study serve as an exploratory case-study examining the conditions of professional learning for in-service principals in one north Texas suburban district with changing student demographics. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of a variety of data collected sought to reveal how professional development of principals increased a principal's contingent leadership skills to positively affect student achievement through school improvement efforts. Perceptions were examined from the sample of seven executive directors at the district level; six campus principals (two elementary, two middle, and two high school); and eight teachers selected from among four of the six campuses whose principal participated in a semi-structured interview. Additionally, responses from a principal survey were examined. Findings were organized around three themes that surfaced from the deductive and inductive analysis of data collected in response to the three research questions. The themes were: instructional leadership and other principal responsibilities, principal professional development and components of professional learning, and measuring the effectiveness of principal professional learning. Findings revealed that there are many offerings of professional development opportunities available to principals in Learning ISD. The components essential in effective principal professional learning opportunities in the studied district consisted of embedding social capital, professional capital, and …

Due to inadequate long-term and large-scale observation approach for observation of soil moisture across the globe, this study intends to unveil the importance of using simulated soil moisture fields from land surface models, forced with observed precipitation and near-surface meteorology in monitoring drought and formulating effective water management practices for continued production irrigation applications. This study shows that socio-economic and ecosystem effects can be determined by evaluating spatial-temporal changes in irrigation applications. Thus, it facilitates understanding of the importance of water management and how water, energy, and carbon flows protect our climate and environment. By using Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) in monitoring soil moisture, the information obtained is critical in providing early drought warnings, particularly in those parts of the United States that experience flash agricultural droughts. Further, this study highlights that frequent and reliable soil moisture measurements from SMAP helped improve the predictive capability of weather and climate models.

This study encompasses my attempt to understand the lived experience of students in a higher education art appreciation course when a traditional textbook was replaced by a computer game. The methodology uses a mixture of phenomenological interviews and games as well as game machines to interpret these lived experiences. The process of allowing the research to dictate the direction I would take in my research is central to my research process. The initial research idea evolved into three research games and three versions of those games by using the data from student interviews as a generative data. The implications from this study focus upon creating new pedagogical interventions in the form of a studious labyrinthian pedagogy rather than a finite maze-like approach to art education. This dissertation examines how art education can benefit from more freedom and exploration for students to navigate their own learning.

This study examined professional identity of biology faculty at four-year colleges and universities and the relationship between their perceived identity, as a scientist or a teacher, and their participation in activities related to evidence-based teaching practices. This study drew upon online survey results of 328 college and university biology faculty from across the country. Results from ordinary least squares regression indicated faculty who work at very high, high, and Master's institutions had higher perceptions of science identity. Nontenure track faculty showed higher perceptions of teaching identity. Additionally, the results of this study indicated a strong teaching identity and favorable views on evidence-based teaching related to greater participation in evidence-based teaching practices. Science identity, though positively relate to the outcome, was not a statistically significant predictor of participation in activities related to evidence-based teaching practices. An implication for practice is to recognize biology faculty members' use of newer teaching methods, such as demonstrations of student-centered teaching in lectures in promotion and tenure review. An important implication for future research would be to explore if recognition for outstanding teaching through promotion and tenure cause an increase in the number of faculty who gravitate toward more education-based scholarly activities and, in turn, develop …

In this study, I analyze the relationship between sexual permissiveness and affiliation with a fundamentalist religion and how this relationship has changed over time. I first consider previous research that reviews how religious affiliation, religiosity, and religious fundamentalism shapes sex attitudes and, therefore sexual permissiveness. I then review existing studies that discuss what factors influence permissiveness toward different sexual behaviors. Next, I discuss the mechanisms of religious institutions that influence sexual permissiveness. Prior literature motivates my research question as there is a lack of studies that explore sexual permissiveness across religious affiliations. This study fills a void in the existing literature by exploring the gap in sexual permissiveness between religious affiliations and how that gap has changed over time. After considering the current literature, I introduce a hypothesis exploring the relationship between sexual permissiveness and affiliation with fundamentalist religion. This study performs OLS regression using secondary data from the General Social Survey (GSS) that describes respondents' religiosity, religious affiliation, and attitudes towards sex. The study's findings show that affiliation with more fundamentalist groups is significantly correlated with more conservative sex attitudes reflecting lower levels of sexual permissiveness. The results also suggest that the gap in sexual permissiveness between those that …

By organically fusing the methods of convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN), this dissertation focuses on the application of optical character recognition and image classification processing. The first part of this dissertation presents an end-to-end novel receipt recognition system for capturing effective information from receipts (CEIR). The main contributions of this research part are divided into three parts. First, this research develops a preprocessing method for receipt images. Second, the modified connectionist text proposal network is introduced to execute text detection. Third, the CEIR combines the convolutional recurrent neural network with the connectionist temporal classification with maximum entropy regularization as a loss function to update the weights in networks and extract the characters from receipt. The CEIR system is validated with the scanned receipts optical character recognition and information extraction (SROIE) database. Furthermore, the CEIR system has strong robustness and can be extended to a variety of different scenarios beyond receipts. For the convolutional recurrent structure application of land use image classification, this dissertation comes up with a novel deep learning model for land use classification, the convolutional recurrent land use classifier (CRLUC), which further improves the accuracy in classifying remote sensing land use images. Besides, the …

Cyber physical systems (CPS) are an integration of computational and physical processes, where the cyber components monitor and control physical processes. Cyber-attacks largely target the cyber components with the intention of disrupting the functionality of the components in the physical domain. This dissertation explores the role of semantic inference in understanding such attacks and building resilient CPS systems. To that end, we present SIMON, an ontological design and verification framework that captures the intricate relationship(s) between cyber and physical components in CPS by leveraging several standard ontologies and extending the NIST CPS framework for the purpose of eliciting trustworthy requirements, assigning responsibilities and roles to CPS functionalities, and validating that the trustworthy requirements are met by the designed system. We demonstrate the capabilities of SIMON using two case studies – a vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) safety application and an additive manufacturing (AM) printer. In addition, we also present a taxonomy to capture threat feeds specific to the AM domain.

Multicomponent high-entropy and amorphous alloys represent relatively new classes of structural materials with complex atomic configurations and exceptional mechanical properties. However, there are several knowledge gaps in the relationships between their atomic structure and mechanical properties. Understanding these critical relationships will enable novel alloy design and tailoring of their mechanical properties for desired engineering applications. In this dissertation, first-principles calculations and molecular dynamics simulations are applied to investigate the local atomic configurations and ordering in high-entropy and amorphous alloys. Our findings suggest that fluctuations in local atomic configurations for high- entropy alloys result in significant changes in stacking fault energy, twin energy, dislocation behavior, dislocation-twin interactions, and critical shear stress. For amorphous alloys or metallic glasses, the short-range order (SRO) and medium-range order (MRO) were found to play decisive roles in determination of their mechanical properties. Structural relaxation was found to lead to shear localization, which was attributed to free volume change and evolution of SRO and MRO to more brittle nature. In contrast, rejuvenated metallic glasses had relatively large and uniform free volume distribution giving rise to homogeneous flow and increased plasticity.

This study aimed to gain insight into the clinical practices and attitudes of currently practicing play therapists working with children with a parent with a substance use disorder. Participants in the study were play therapists credentialed by the Association for Play Therapy, either as a Registered Play Therapist™ or Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor™. A total of 198 play therapists participated in the study. Results demonstrated that variables including prior education, caseload of children affected by parental substance use, and the number of years since obtaining a mental health licensure explained 16% of the variance in participant attitude scores on the Drug and Drug Problems Perceptions Questionnaire (DDPPQ). Specifically, education (β = -.335, rs2 = .884, p < .001) was found to be a significant predictor of play therapist attitudes towards substance users as it explained 88% of the variance accounted for in the effect. Additionally, although not found to be significant, caseload (β = -.134, rs2 = .325, p = .058) was found to explain 33% of the variance accounted for in the effect. This initial exploration of play therapists' attitudes towards substance users provides strong evidence towards the importance of education and training in substance use disorders. Further exploration of …

A projective plane tropical curve is a proper immersion of a graph into the real Cartesian plane subject to some conditions such as that the images of all the edges must be lines with rational slopes. Two important combinatorial invariants of a projective plane tropical curve are its degree, d, and genus g. First, we explore Gathmann and Markwig's approach to the study of the moduli spaces of such curves and explain their proof that the number of projective plane tropical curves, counting multiplicity, passing through n = 3d + g -1 points does not depend on the choice of points, provided they are in tropical general position. This number of curves is called a Gromov-Written invariant. Second, we discuss the proof of a theorem of Mikhalkin that allows one to compute the Gromov-Written invariant by a purely combinatorial process of counting certain lattice paths.

One basic assumption of the celebrated Black-Scholes-Merton PDE model for pricing derivatives is that the volatility is a constant. However, the implied volatility plot based on real data is not constant, but curved exhibiting patterns of volatility skews or smiles. Since the volatility is not observable, various stochastic volatility models have been proposed to overcome the problem of non-constant volatility. Although these methods are fairly successful in modeling volatilities, they still rely on the implied volatility approach for model implementation. To avoid such circular reasoning, we propose a new class of stochastic volatility models based on directly observable volatility proxies and derive the corresponding option pricing formulas. In addition, we propose a new GARCH (1,1) model, and show that this discrete-time stochastic volatility process converges weakly to Heston's continuous-time stochastic volatility model. Some Monte Carlo simulations and real data analysis are also conducted to demonstrate the performance of our methods.