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Living with Javelinas: On the Co-production of Human-Javelina Conviviality in Texas
Get PDFThis dissertation investigates the coexistence of humans and javelinas in Texas. Through a blend of traditional ethnography, ethology, and GIS mapping, the study explores the dynamics of interactions at three primary sites across Texas, emphasizing the mutual shaping of shared spaces and the significance of negotiation. The dissertation argues that convivial human-javelina relations in Texas emerge from the negotiation of encounters—a form of intersubjective politics—leading to stable social arrangements and imbuing landscapes with meaning. The argument is drawn from three years of research on human-javelina relations in different contexts, situating these relationships within their unique sociohistorical and ecological contexts. The investigation of these convivial relations emphasizes the importance of engagement and understanding of others' positionalities for fostering coexistence. It contends that such coexistence is achievable through deliberate and thoughtful negotiation of shared spaces and experiences, underlining the potential for harmonious multispecies living.
Chapters One and Two situate javelinas in the broader social, ecological, and scholarly discourse, placing them alongside other lively actors in Texas (Chapter Two). Chapter Three explores encountering javelinas in various contexts and how perception and experience shape encounters. Chapter Four investigates how convivial human-javelina relationships develop through the practice of "multispecies politics." Chapter Five considers the effects of multispecies politics on the construction of meaningful landscapes. Finally, Chapter Six reflects on the intellectual contributions of the dissertation and its broader impacts on multispecies living in a precarious world.Anthropolog
Engaging Aural Skills Students Through Model-Eliciting Activities
No full textThis mixed methods study aimed to explore how using Model-Eliciting Activities (MEAs) in an aural skills classroom can promote student motivation and engagement. Aural skills courses, which focus on ear training and sight singing, benefit from MEAs?activities that require students to create models to solve progressively complex problems. As students develop and refine their models, they engage in a testing and iteration process that prioritizes learning over final outcomes, which fosters student empowerment. This approach fosters student empowerment, highlights the relevance of the curriculum, promotes success, and sustains interest within a supportive classroom environment. The specific MEA implemented within the aural skills classroom was focused on music transcription skills and used the MUSIC Inventory of Motivation survey to assess student motivation and engagement, complemented by follow-up interviews to explain the results of the survey.
Students felt that MEAs empowered them to engage with the content in their own way. Being situated in a real-world scenario demonstrated the relevance of students' work and highlighted their potential for success. Many students expressed enthusiasm for the collaborative nature of the MEA, as well as for a prior activity that encouraged them to develop their transcription skills. Students also noted that a supportive environment increased their confidence. Additional findings included students expressing excitement for collaboration and benefits to their own perceived transcription skills. Overall, the findings suggest that MEAs create an opportunity within the aural skills curriculum to foster high levels of student motivation and engagement.Interdisciplinary Learning and Teachin
Novel Entropy for Enhanced Thermal Imaging and Uncertainty Quantification
No full textThis paper addresses the critical need for precise thermal modeling in electronics, where temperature significantly impacts system reliability. We emphasize the necessity of accurate temperature measurement and uncertainty quantification in thermal imaging, a vital tool across multiple industries. Current mathematical models and uncertainty measures, such as Rényi and Shannon entropies, are inadequate for the detailed informational content required in thermal images. Our work introduces a novel entropy that effectively captures the informational content of thermal images by combining local and global data, surpassing existing metrics. Validated by rigorous experimentation, this method enhances thermal images’ reliability and information preservation. We also present two enhancement frameworks that integrate an optimized genetic algorithm and image fusion techniques, improving image quality by reducing artifacts and enhancing contrast. These advancements offer significant contributions to thermal imaging and uncertainty quantification, with broad applications in various sectors.Electrical and Computer Engineerin
Enhancing Emergency Airway Management: User-Centric Device Design, Experiential Methods, Suction Standards Reform, and Interpatient Contamination Assessment
Get PDFThis work focused on gathering user feedback from over 100 end-users about portable suction devices, reviewing manufacturing standards, and proposing experimentally and mathematically validated reforms. A novel portable suction device was designed, fabricated, and tested to address the gaps between clinical needs and existing market offerings. Portable suction devices are crucial for clearing airway obstructions caused by trauma within 15 seconds. Despite adhering to the ISO 10079-1 standard, current market options are either bulky or insufficiently powerful. Our research led to proposals for revising standards, including a new 'time-averaged air flowrate' metric that correlates better with liquid flowrate than the 'instantaneous maximum air flowrate.' We also suggested changes to the ISO 10079-1 standard, such as weight limit of less than 2 kg and tubing diameters greater than 8 mm and identified a 2 to 5% backflow issue in the VVAC manual suction device. Addressing the gaps in the literature and commercial market, and incorporating suggested changes to ISO standards and end-user input, we framed the design requirements for the development of the Battlefield Ready Innovative Suction Kit (BRISK). This lightweight device, weighing just 0.97 kg, is designed to operate effectively in any orientation, featuring a dual-filter system to maintain vacuum regardless of device positioning. Contamination testing confirmed that cross-contamination between the canister and pump remains within acceptable levels. Testing demonstrated that BRISK statistically performs on par with leading market devices like the SSCOR Quickdraw and Laerdal LCSU4, while maintaining suction in any orientation.Biomedical Engineerin
How to Get Involved in GenAI
No full textSlide deck for in-person presentation at the 2024 GenerationAI Summit at the University of Texas at San Antonio.MarketingMultidisciplinary Studie
An Examination of Career Readiness Among Music Education Doctoral Alumni
No full textThe purpose of this research was to examine recent doctoral music education
alumni perceptions of how their doctoral programs informed their current work.
We placed a specific focus on how the curricular, scholarly, and experiential facets
of music education doctoral programs have transferred to graduates’ current
positions. Participants (N = 74) completed a researcher-designed survey based on
previously conducted research that consisted of three categories: description of
current positions, doctoral experiences, and the significance of doctoral experiences
in preparation for their current positions. Results indicated that most participants
were employed in full-time tenure track and nontenure track positions and that the
most common opportunities during doctoral programs involved writing, presenting,
and publishing research. Implications include examining recruitment practices for
doctoral programs, degree program environments and expectations, the connection
between degree programs and definitions of career success, and ways to prepare
alumni for positions both in and outside of R1 institutions.Musi
Motion Planning for Relational Maneuvering of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Limited Information
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 December 12, 2029.This dissertation addresses the challenge of motion coordination for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by introducing inter-vehicle relational maneuvering schemes that enable robust and adaptable motion planning. Traditional motion planning methods for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) typically direct them to predefined configurations, relying extensively on vehicle-to-vehicle communication and global information. Such reliance will lead to various constraints, which often assume simple vehicle models and limited agility, thus compromising robustness in variable operating conditions. To overcome these limitations, this dissertation presents a flexible motion planning framework that utilizes relative information and models UAVs as non-holonomic agents. This framework enables UAVs to achieve desired relative positions that fulfill multi-vehicle motion objectives while allowing each vehicle the flexibility to occupy a broader set of relative positions and dynamically shift within this set to adapt to changing environments.
Specifically, this dissertation focuses on two core motion planning problems, leader-follower formation control and target enclosing, sharing a common theme of inter-vehicle behavior requiring an agent (pursuer or follower) to monitor/follow a mobile object of interest (leader or target). For leader-follower formation control, we first introduce flexible formation in the 2D space by exploring various relational maneuvering schemes, where the follower UAV stabilizes on fixed-radius circle around the leader depending on the chosen maneuvering scheme and leader movements. In the 3D case, we propose new methods for the follower to maintain flexible formation converging on partial hemisphere behind the leader. For target enclosing, we develop a 3D flexible target enclosing approach, allowing the pursuer to converge to a spherical shell around the target and maintain stable orbits within a safe region around it. Additionally, we extend this flexible motion planning framework to multiple pursuers, enabling self-organizing target enclosing where agents autonomously position themselves around a fixed target. Extensive simulation studies, alongside Software-in-the-Loop (SITL) and flight experiments, demonstrate the effectiveness and benefits of the proposed flexible motion planning schemes under various formation maneuvers.Electrical and Computer Engineerin
Sovereignty of spirit: the embodied healing technologies of Chicana Indigena and Afro Mexicana narratives at the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.
No full textThis dissertation narrativizes Healing Technologies of Indigenous Chicana and Afro Mexicana earth-based knowledges at the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands/Transfronteriza that draw upon both Indigenous sciences and spirituality. Religion and spirituality are interchangeable in this narrative as a syncretic conduit of Indigenous Knowledge in the face of ongoing, oppressive, and multifaceted coloniality. Colonial-centered scholarship maintains a fallacy by assuming the erasure of Indigenous Knowledge by religion and state. To center healing technologies of Indigenous Chicana and Afro Mexicana narrative I acknowledge the Indigenous oral tradition as the original framework of Borderlands narrative. My decision to use academic sources, written, and oral Border literature is seated in the autochthonous root of poetics derived from the Indigenous Knowledge sharing of my own lived Indigenous Chicana and Afro Mexicana heritage. The healing praxis of narrative and spiritual activist practice stories is often abridged with the cultural-intuitive lifeways of familial, social, and spiritual embodiment of radical freedom. Herein, I have used Chicana and Black feminist theories to assist in my theorizing of Indigenous storytelling as the healing praxis of Borderland women's work to counter the colonial construct of native impermanence as the narratives are multigenerational and waves of resurgent knowledge. The literary and physical site of water in my research assists in metaphorical fluidity of that narrative and how it is essentially synonymous with the essence of freedom embodied in the waves of narrative told across all spectrums of our healing stories.
May it be noted as well, that the term Transfronteriza speaks upon the cultural resistance in praxis and Transfrontera speaks upon the dynamics of the socio-economic and political dynamics that frame, transform, and alter the complexities of Borderlands literary and physical space and place.Englis
Investigating the Contributions of Molecular Mimicry in the Induction of Neuroinflammation
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 December 1, 2025.Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neuroinflammatory autoimmune disease characterized by the demyelination of axons in the central nervous system. Several genetic and environmental risk factors, such as the HLA-DRB1*15:01 allele and infection with Epstein-Barr Virus, respectively, have been identified, but the pathoetiology of this disease remains incompletely understood. Previous studies have suggested a role for “molecular mimicry” in the induction of neuroinflammation, but causative agents have yet to be consistently implicated in physiologically relevant disease models. Herein, we present data suggesting that the induction of MS-like disease in mice through molecular mimicry is impeded by functional tolerance mechanisms and that ablation of these mechanism can promote the generation of potentially pathogenic T cell populations as a result of molecular mimicry.Microbiology and Immunolog
Aquila-LCS: GPU/CPU-accelerated particle advection schemes for large-scale simulations
No full textWe introduce Aquila-LCS, GPU and CPU optimized object-oriented, in-house codes for volumetric particle advection and 3D Finite-Time Lyapunov Exponent (FTLE) and Finite-Size Lyapunov Exponent (FSLE) computations. The purpose is to analyze 3D Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCS) in large Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) data. Our technique uses advanced search strategies for quick cell identification and efficient storage techniques. This solver scales effectively on both GPUs (up to 62 NVIDIA V100 GPUs) and multi-core CPUs (up to 32,768 CPU-cores), tracking up to 8-billion particles. We apply our approach to turbulent boundary layers at different flow regimes and Reynolds numbers.Mechanical Engineerin