UTSA Runner Research Press (Univ. of Texas at San Antonio)
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Flags of Texas Settlers
No full textGrade Band/Level: High School/Grades 9-12Twenty-four flags of nations representing Texas' earliest settlement groups are outlined here. We attempt to answer some of the many questions your students may have about the flags of Texas, the flags of the world's nations, and the flags flown in front of the Institute of Texan Cultures. Where did the colors and symbols of flags originate? Which flags have been changed since the early settlers left their countries of origin and which have stayed the same? How do the flags of the world's nations differ? How are they similar? What are the reasons for these similarities
Computer Science Professional Development for Middle and High School Teachers: Insights from Three Cohorts
No full textComputer Science for San Antonio (CS4SA) was a computer science (CS) professional development program designed for in-service middle and high school teachers—educators actively teaching. CS4SA aimed to prepare teachers with essential CS knowledge and skills while expanding CS opportunities for Latinx and other underrepresented minority populations within a large, urban school district in South Texas. An Institutional Review Board approved this research.
The program engaged teacher participants through culturally responsive pedagogy, integrated professional learning communities, and project-based learning strategies. Teachers appreciated the collaborative nature of these approaches, which deepened their understanding and strengthened their professional networks. Over a pilot program and three cohorts (2020–2024), participants attended a Summer Institute, monthly workshops, and completed online modules aligned with state CS teacher certification standards.
This paper examines the program’s instructional design and shares insights from participants, including those who returned as peer mentors. It also outlines adaptations to address challenges such as COVID-19 disruptions and limited district support. Findings indicate that teacher participants valued their professional development experience and quickly applied their new skills in the classroom. Many teacher participants integrated CS into their math and science lessons. They introduced CS concepts in after-school clubs, supported by program resources that enabled projects ranging from Unity game development to robotics and Scratch programming. One teacher secured funding for additional robotics resources, while another invited a software developer to discuss app development, demonstrating the real-world applications of CS in various industries.
Despite challenges such as school closures due to declining enrollment, staffing reductions, and limited district support, educators found creative ways to engage students through robotics and coding projects. CS4SA helped build a community among participants, allowing them to exchange ideas and resources. While the program's impact on expanding computer science education within schools was more limited than anticipated, it played an essential role in supporting teachers as they integrated CS into their classrooms. These findings highlight the role of professional development in supporting teachers as they integrate CS into their schools and classrooms.Computer Scienc
A cognitive bias influences reports about conscious experience: Listening effort and the peak-end rule
No full textListening under challenging conditions is often effortful and aversive. Decision making research shows that affect at the peak and end of an experience have a disproportionate influence on memory relative to the entire experience. We tested if retrospective listening effort reports are biased by the peak-end rule. Participants (n=372) reported fatigue and mood before and after listening for intermittent tone “signals†in continuous white noise, as well as their mental workload related to the task. Decreasing the signal/noise ratio increases task difficulty. Four groups were tested, each with the same total signal/noise ratio over ~12 min. In three groups the signal/noise ratio decreased for two minutes, either at the beginning, middle, or end of the task, and a fourth group had a constant signal/noise ratio (static). We hypothesized that retrospective workload judgments would be greater for the peak vs. static group, and when the signal/noise ratio decreased at the end vs. the middle and beginning. Results supported both hypotheses: (peak>static group, p<.001, d=.81; end>middle/beginning, p<.001, d=.91). Findings suggest that reported listening effort includes a decision-making stage that is susceptible to the peak-end rule.Psycholog
The Quest to Map the Nanyang: An Analysis of Jesuit Influence on High Qing Maritime Cartography
No full textJesuit missionaries from Europe arrived in China during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 CE) and established a presence in the capital, which they maintained during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911 CE). This thesis project aims to answer the research question: How did the Western cartographic methods introduced by Jesuit missionaries influence Confucian scholarship and Qing cartography of the South China Sea and Southeast Asia during the High Qing era (1683-1799)? Through archival research and critical analysis, this study examines China's scientific development, the impact of Western technology and methodologies, and the relationships between the Jesuit missionaries and Qing China's literati scholars. This project narrows its research parameters to the Nanyang region, which includes Southeast Asia and the South China Sea. The purpose is to build upon established scholarship regarding imperial China’s cartographical endeavors in the High Qing Era, a period marked by cultural interactions and territorial growth. To explore the cartographical methods of this period, this project analyses primary sources such as maps, charts, and correspondence.
Previous research on Jesuit cartography in Qing China has primarily focused on land mapping and has argued that, instead of demonstrating Western intellectual superiority and undermining Chinese thought, the interactions between Jesuit and Chinese scholars resulted in a unique evolution of ideas and creative works that reflected the transforming landscape of the 17th and 18th centuries. This project investigates how this conclusion about Sino-Jesuit collaboration applies to the Qing's projects in the Nanyang region and contrasts the types of work done in land versus sea settings, considering that the maritime world presented a very different landscape with challenges and possibilities. It concludes that collaboration regarding maritime mapmaking was minimal due primarily to China’s limited regional presence.Histor
A Novel Entropy-Based Approach for Thermal Image Segmentation Using Multilevel Thresholding
No full textImage segmentation is a fundamental challenge in computer vision, transforming complex image representations into meaningful, analyzable components. While entropy-based multilevel thresholding techniques, including Otsu, Shannon, fuzzy, Tsallis, Renyi, and Kapur approaches, have shown potential in image segmentation, they encounter significant limitations when processing thermal images, such as poor spatial resolution, low contrast, lack of color and texture information, and susceptibility to noise and background clutter. This paper introduces a novel adaptive unsupervised entropy algorithm (A-Entropy) to enhance multilevel thresholding for thermal image segmentation. Our key contributions include (i) an image-dependent thermal enhancement technique specifically designed for thermal images to improve visibility and contrast in regions of interest, (ii) a so-called A-Entropy concept for unsupervised thermal image thresholding, and (iii) a comprehensive evaluation using the Benchmarking IR Dataset for Surveillance with Aerial Intelligence (BIRDSAI). Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposal compared to other state-of-the-art methods on the BIRDSAI dataset, which comprises both real and synthetic thermal images with substantial variations in scale, contrast, background clutter, and noise. Comparative analysis indicates improved segmentation accuracy and robustness compared to traditional entropy-based methods. The framework&rsquo;s versatility suggests promising applications in brain tumor detection, optical character recognition, thermal energy leakage detection, and face recognition.Electrical and Computer Engineerin
Orientation-Independent Suction Performance and Enhanced Fluid Handling in the Battlefield-Ready Innovative Suction Kit (BRISK)
No full textEffective airway management is crucial in emergency and combat scenarios, yet conventional portable suction devices are limited by orientation sensitivity – losing efficiency when tilted or inverted. In chaotic environments – such as active battlefields or during rapid patient transport – responders cannot guarantee that devices will remain upright, and traditional suction units often fail to clear obstructions if they are not correctly positioned. This limitation risks critical delays and can compromise life-saving care. The Battlefield Ready Innovative Suction Kit (BRISK) overcomes this challenge by employing an orientation-independent design that ensures reliable suction performance in any upright, tilted, or inverted position.Mechanical Engineerin
Cross-Modality Evaluation of Explainable AI Methods on Image and Audio Classification Tasks
No full textThis thesis presents an evaluation of six post-hoc XAI methods available in the Captum XAI framework for PyTorch (Saliency, Integrated Gradients, Guided GradCAM, DeepLIFT, Input × Gradient, Occlusion) applied to both image (MNIST) and audio (AudioMNIST) classification tasks using a consistent CNN architecture with grayscale inputs (MNIST Images, AudioMNIST Spectrograms) from both datasets. I benchmark these methods using faithfulness correlation and complexity metrics revealing significant modality-based performance discrepancies. I experiment with modifications to the baseline (none, median, noisy silence, and low-energy masks) input in Integrated Gradients across MNIST and AudioMNIST and observe minimal effect on performance metrics. This work contributes a reproducible, cross-modal benchmark for audio spectrogram explainability and highlights the challenges in existing interpretability techniques when transferred from image to audio modality.Computer Scienc
Multi-Scale Gaussian Smoothed Dynamic Class Activation Maps for Enhanced Visual Explanations
No full textDeep segmentation models have achieved remarkable accuracy, yet their inherent black-box nature poses challenges for interpretability. Existing methods such as Seg-Grad-CAM often lose spatial details due to global pooling, leading to noisy and less localized explanations. We introduce MSGS-CAM, a novel framework that enhances visual explanations by integrating multi-scale average pooling and Gaussian smoothing. By capturing both fine and coarse features through multi-scale fusion and reducing high-frequency noise with Gaussian filtering, MSGS-CAM produces clear and precise class activation maps. Our approach significantly improves localization accuracy and interpretability, as demonstrated by superior performance on both natural and medical image datasets.Computer Scienc
Drug Discovery and Characterization of Activity Against Coccidioides Spherules
No full textThe full text of this item is not available at this time because the author has placed this item under an embargo until August 26, 2027.Coccidioides is a genus of dimorphic fungal pathogens that cause the disease coccidioidomycosis (CM), also known as Valley Fever. The purpose of my research was to identify and characterize novel potential antifungals effective against Coccidioides, as the therapeutic options for CM are limited to only a handful of drugs in the triazole and polyene classes. My first aim encompassed screening several drug libraries, including the Broad Repurposing (5,200 compounds), Prestwick Chemicals (1,520 compounds), Selleck L8200 Antiparasitics (219 compounds), the MedChem Express CNS-Penetrants libraries (782 compounds), and the compound niclosamide ethanolamine (Adipogen), totaling 7,722 compounds screened. Libraries were screened using XTT assays to find hits that inhibited spherule initial growth more than 70% compared to DMSO controls and had B-score <-3 when normalized across all plates screened. Compounds were parsed and removed if they had previously been designated as toxic or as antifungals. Twenty-seven compounds met our initial cutoffs, and three additional compounds from our collaborators were also investigated to characterize their activity against the parasitic cells (spherules) of Coccidioides.
We characterized these 30 drugs using several methods. We profiled them for their antifungal activity (IC50) and cytotoxicity (CC50) in a HepG2 model using microdilution assays. We combined the compounds with amphotericin B (AmB), fluconazole (FLU), or caspofungin (CAS) to determine if the compounds acted synergistically when combined with clinical antifungals. Five compounds, including 10058-F4, niclosamide (NIC), niclosamide ethanolamine (NEN), oxethazaine (OXE), and pentamidine isethionate (PENT-I) demonstrated synergy with AmB. This discovery may facilitate novel therapeutic strategies and lower the required dose of AmB, which is highly toxic. These five drugs were tested in vivo using a Galleria mellonella model of CM to measure the survival and fungal burden of larvae following treatment. To better elucidate the mechanisms through which these five drugs acted, they were compared structurally to each other and other clinical antifungals, examined microscopically, and screened for location-specific staining using image flow cytometry. Spherules were also subjected to RNA-seq to identify their potential impacts and targets within known antifungal pathways and from their unique signatures. qRT-PCR further validated the RNA-seq data to confirm the drug impacts on Coccidioides growth.Molecular Microbiology and Immunolog
Evaluating Stormwater Filtration Basin Performance in the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone Using Microbial Source Tracking
No full textThe full text of this item is not available at this time because the author has placed this item under an embargo until August 26, 2030.Best management practices (BMPs) have been utilized in recent times to minimize peak flow and attenuate contamination during stormflow conditions. While a plethora of BMP types exist and have been researched extensively by means of examining their performance in reducing a variety of contaminant concentrations, fewer studies have focused unilaterally on stormwater detention basins – specifically, their ability to reduce microbial contaminant concentrations remains a relatively novel research focus that necessitates further analysis. BMPs are of particular importance in a large portion of land in and around San Antonio, due to the wide-spanning area of the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone. Karst structures all across the world – including the Edwards Aquifer in San Antonio – are critical sources of drinking water, and their recharge areas possess a unique vulnerability not shared by the vast majority of other aquifer types. As a result, preserving and ensuring the potability and overall caliber of water quality is vastly important.
Stormwater detention basins, like other BMP types, have the capability of mitigating runoff contamination – the question remains, which pollutant types are the most significant in their reduction with such structures. The current study seeks to evaluate and quantify the degree to which two stormwater detention basins (TPC basin, Kyle Seale basin), located overlying the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone, are able to attenuate and reduce microbial contamination in stormwater runoff during stormflow conditions. The current study builds off a past study (Moghadam et al., 2023) which examined the nutrient removal capabilities of the same two basins by (1) examining the degree to which the basins were effective in removing key microbial source tracking (MST) markers (HF183, Humanmt-ND5, BacCan, Entero1a) and general fecal coliforms, and (2) assessing the degree to which MST markers correlated with the nutrient removal efficacy found in Moghadam et al.’s 2023 analysis.
The current study found limited marker removal efficacy and significant fecal coliform removal efficacy in TPC basin and negligible marker removal efficacy and limited fecal coliform removal efficacy in Kyle Seale basin – likely a result of the significantly larger total area of TPC basin than the latter, due to the increased sedimentation efficiency provided by the additional area in TPC basin. Additionally, the study found notable correlation between the marker Humanmt-ND5 and nutrient removal capabilities in TPC basin, in addition to notable correlation between fecal coliform concentration and TSS levels in TPC basin, though these trends were absent in Kyle Seale basin. The current study recommends future research to be conducted utilizing a larger quantity of basins to be sampled over a longer duration to capture a larger sample size of stormflow events, in order to assess the degree to which the correlations found in the current study are able to be maintained over more significant test sizes.Civil and Environmental Engineerin