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Navigating Misperceptions: How Intersectionality Shapes the Experiences of Black Women Executive Leaders in K-12 Education
No full textIn K-12 public education, Black women serve in a variety of leadership roles in schools and central offices. Research is available and discusses the experiences of Black women leaders, teachers, principals, and superintendents; however, there is a gap in the literature about Black women in executive leadership within the school district’s central office, even more specifically as members of the superintendent’s cabinet. Research on school district central offices has centered on transforming organizational structures to impact student outcomes (Honig, 2014). There is a paucity of research that provides a deeper look at intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2019) concerning Black women executive leaders who are cabinet members. This qualitative dissertation explored the lived experiences of Black women executive leaders in K-12 school districts in the United States to learn how the intersectionality of race and gender influences their approach to leadership and the performance of their leadership responsibilities. Data sources included a survey, individual interviews, and a researcher’s journal. Twenty survey responses were gathered from self-selection, convenience, and snowball sampling. Six in-depth interviews were conducted with dedicated leaders from five school districts in the Northeast, Southeast, and Midwest regions of the United States. All had extensive leadership experience, with four of the six having held previous executive leadership roles. Their positions spanned the school system, including human resources, principal supervision, student services, and equity. Data were analyzed using a multi-layered coding approach, descriptive, in vivo, and theming, capturing exact key words, phrases, and experiences (Miles & Huberman, 2020) to better identify themes and patterns (Saldana, 2016) to ascertain the intersectional experience of Black women leaders. Findings revealed that intersectionality influenced participants’ approaches to leadership and work performance. Participants were conscious of the misperceptions people had of them and how bias influenced their interactions, preparation for work, and daily duties. This dissertation provides a forum for the voices of a population of Black women who exist but whose experiences have yet to be shared. Recommendations are provided for policy and workplace cultures to better support and create organizational culture changes for Black women executives in K-12 school districts
Resurgence of Severe Challenging Behavior and Schedule Thinning with the Terminal Schedule Probe Method
No full textMultiple schedules promote schedule thinning during treatment for challenging behavior. Some strategies for multiple-schedule-thinning progressions include dense-to-lean (DTL; gradually thinning schedules of reinforcement in small steps), fixed lean (FL; abruptly shifting to lean schedules), and terminal probe (TP; probing terminal schedule values to inform subsequent thinning steps) thinning. Recent research indicates that TP thinning offers an empirically derived process for schedule thinning to terminal schedule values. In the current investigation, we replicated, re-analyzed, and extended recent research on the TP-thinning method. The schedule-thinning outcomes were consistent with the initial investigation, indicating that longer periods of reinforcer unavailability were facilitated by TP thinning in comparison with DTL thinning. We also examined resurgence, or the temporary increase in challenging behavior after alternative behavior is placed on extinction, across a wide range of downshifts in reinforcement. When resurgence occurred across ranges of downshifts programmed for both schedule-thinning methods, it occurred more often with DTL thinning. The resurgence analyses did not reveal an exponential increase in challenging behavior as a function of downshifts in reinforcement, which is an interesting departure from recent investigations. Points of discussion include clinical implications and areas for future research on the TP-thinning method.The manuscript preparation was partially supported by grants 1R21HD113881-01, 1R21HD112724-01A1, and 1R21HD113794-01A1 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), as well as a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF). These funds were awarded to the third author (J.M.F.). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the official views of the NICHD or BBRF.https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/15/3/38
Gender Dynamics in Software Engineering: Insights from Research on Concurrency Bug Reproduction
No full textReproducing concurrency bugs is a complex task due to their unpredictable behavior. Researchers, regardless of gender, are contributing to automating this complex task to aid software developers. While some studies have investigated gender roles in the broader software industry, limited research exists on gender representation specifically among researchers working in concurrent bug reproduction. To address this gap, in this paper, we present a literature review to assess the gender ratio in this field. We also explore potential variations in technique selection and bug-type focus across genders. Our findings indicate that female researchers are underrepresented compared to their male counterparts in this area, with a current male-to-female author ratio of 29:6. Through this study, we emphasize the importance of fostering gender equity in software engineering research, ensuring a diversity of perspectives in the development of automated bug reproduction tools.This work was supported in part by NSF grants CCF2348277 and CCF-2518445.http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.2028
Impact of the frequency drift of a laser cooler on the phase noise of the microcomb repetition frequency
No full text LASE, 2025, San Francisco, CaliforniaWe study the repetition frequency phase-noise in an auxiliary laser cooler assisted soliton microcomb formed in a high-Q Si₃N₄ microresonator. We find that, below a 1-kHz offset from the carrier, this noise is dominated by the frequency drift of the laser cooler. We identify the dominant noise types in the phase-noise spectrum of the repetition frequency using the polynomial law and relate the underlying noise sources that lead to the phase instability. We find that the 1 ³ ⁄ noise dominates the repetition frequency phase-noise over three decades, which we attribute to the frequency drift of the laser cooler and the uncompensated cavity-pump detuning. Since the laser cooler acts on the cavity-pump detuning via the thermo-optic effect, the thermal response time of the cavity limits the filtering of 1 ³ ⁄ noise originating from the free-running pump laser. Hence, low-phase-noise operation that is obtained by using the auxiliary laser cooling scheme requires both the pump and cooler lasers to be locked to a stable frequency reference.Work at UMBC was supported by collaborative agreements 2022138 142232 and 2023200 142386 with the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences as a sub award from US DoD cooperative agreement HQ0034 20 2 0007https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/13349/1334905/Impact-of-the-frequency-drift-of-a-laser-cooler-on/10.1117/12.3043569.ful
Mode Participation and Inter-Area-Observability Blocking Controllers for Power Networks
No full textThe 9th IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA) 2025, August 25 - 27, 2025, San Diego, USAIn recent papers [1] and [2], the second author developed full-state feedback controllers for networked systems to block the observability and controllability of certain remote nodes. In this paper, we build on these control schemes to an interconnected power system with the aims of blocking (i) mode participation factors and (ii) inter-area mode observability in tie-line power flow measurements. Since participation factors depend on both controllable and observable eigenvectors, the control techniques from the cited works must be carefully tailored to this setting. Our research is motivated by cyber-security concerns in power systems, where an adversary aims to deceive the operator by tampering the system's modal content. We present extensive numerical results on a 3-machine, 9-bus system and a 16-machine, 68-bus system.http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.0402
Rejoining the Cult: Understanding and Reducing Blatant Political Bias
No full textPartisan bias poses serious challenges for democracies. Yet scholars rarely study the determinants of partisan bias directly. Further, despite individual-level bias existing in degrees, extant scholarship has yet to systematically study partisan bias in its most extreme form. In this study, we posit that such bias can be defined as support that is unconditional. We refer to this as “blatant bias” and contend that it represents a theoretically distinct category of partisan bias. Using nationally representative data, we first explore individual-level correlates of blatant bias. Second, we present two pre-registered survey experiments to examine whether exposure to blatant bias coming from the opposing party affects blatant bias in favor of their own party. We find that such exposure significantly lowers the likelihood of engaging in blatant bias. Our results thus indicate that extreme partisan bias is both predictable as well as more malleable than often assumed.https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/article-details/67e4d41c81d2151a02e3be6
INVESTIGATING THE EFFECTS OF WATERSHED DEVELOPMENT ON WETLAND GREENHOUSE GAS CONCENRATION DURING PLANT DORMANCY
No full textWetlands are critical in global carbon and nitrogen cycles, serving as both sources and sinks of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as methane (CH₄) and carbon dioxide (CO₂). While much research focuses on GHG dynamics during the growing season, when plants have a strong influence on GHG dynamics, less is known about these processes during plant dormancy. This study investigates the influence of watershed development on wetland GHG concentrations during the dormant season by comparing two Maryland wetlands: one in an urban watershed (Pike Branch) and one in a rural watershed (Goshen Branch). Monthly porewater samples were collected from upstream and downstream locations at each site from October through April. CH₄ and CO₂ concentrations were analyzed using gas chromatography. Results indicated that CH₄ concentrations were generally higher in downstream areas and more variable than CO₂, with a significant effect of watershed development observed at the urban site. In contrast, CO₂ concentrations showed a modest increase over time at the rural site but without consistent spatial trends. These findings suggest that watershed development and site-specific environmental conditions significantly influence winter GHG dynamics in wetlands. By focusing on the dormant season, this study enhances our understanding of microbially mediated GHG production in the absence of active plant processes and highlights the role of urbanization in shaping wetland biogeochemistry
DACC-Comm: DNN-Powered Adaptive Compression and Flow Control for Robust Communication in Network-Constrained Environment
No full text2025 17th International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS), 06-10 January 2025, Bengaluru, IndiaRobust communication is vital for multi-agent robotic systems involving heterogeneous agents like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) operating in dynamic and contested environments. These agents often communicate to collaboratively execute critical tasks for perception awareness and are faced with different communication challenges: (a) The disparity in velocity between these agents results in rapidly changing distances, in turn affecting the physical channel parameters such as Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI), data rate (applicable for certain networks) and most importantly "reliable data transfer", (b) As these devices work in outdoor and network-deprived environments, they tend to use proprietary network technologies with low frequencies to communicate long range, which tremendously reduces the available bandwidth. This poses a challenge when sending large amounts of data for time-critical applications. To mitigate the above challenges, we propose DACC-Comm, an adaptive flow control and compression sensing framework to dynamically adjust the receiver window size and selectively sample the image pixels based on various network parameters such as latency, data rate, RSSI, and physiological factors such as the variation in movement speed between devices. DACC-Comm employs state-of-the-art DNN (TABNET) to optimize the payload and reduce the retransmissions in the network, in turn maintaining low latency. The multi-head transformer-based prediction model takes the network parameters and physiological factors as input and outputs (a) an optimal receiver window size for TCP, determining how many bytes can be sent without the sender waiting for an acknowledgment (ACK) from the receiver, (b) a compression ratio to sample a subset of pixels from an image. We propose a novel sampling strategy to select the image pixels, which are then encoded using a feature extractor. To optimize the amount of data sent across the network, the extracted feature is further quantized to INT8 with the help of post-training quantization. We evaluate DACC-Comm on an experimental testbed comprising Jackal and ROSMaster2 UGV devices that communicate image features using a proprietary radio (Doodle) in 915-MHz frequency. We demonstrate that DACC-Comm improves the retransmission rate by ≈17% and reduces the overall latency by ≈12%. The novel compression sensing strategy reduces the overall payload by ≈56%.This work has been supported by ONR grant #N00014-23-1-2119, NSF grant #2233879, and U.S. Army Grant #W911NF2120076.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10885774
2025 Pride And Prejudice: From Pulpits To Protest, The Surprising History Of The Phrase ‘pride And Prejudice’
No full textThe phrase “pride and prejudice,” is mostly known as the title of Jane Austen's most popular novel. However, the phrase which has religious origins, appeared in hundreds of works before Austen was born. UMBC's Margie Burns, lecturer of English, explores this in her new book, “Jane Austen, Abolitionist: The Loaded History of the Phrase ‘Pride and Prejudice.’” She explains how the phrase traveled from Britain it to America, and from religious tomes it expanded to secular works. It even became a hallmark of abolitionist writing.https://umbc.edu/stories/from-pulpits-to-protest-the-surprising-history-of-the-phrase-pride-and-prejudice
Weakly Supervised Convolutional Dictionary Learning with Shared and Discriminative Components for Classification
No full textIn today's data-driven landscape spanning finance, government, and healthcare sectors, the exponential growth of information necessitates robust solutions for secure storage, efficient dissemination, and fine-grained access control. Convolutional dictionary learning emerges as a powerful approach for extracting meaningful representations from complex data. This paper presents a novel weakly supervised convolutional dictionary learning framework that incorporates both shared and discriminative components for classification tasks. Our approach leverages limited label information to learn dictionaries that capture common patterns across classes while simultaneously highlighting class-specific features. By decomposing the learned representations into shared and discriminative parts, we enhance both feature interpretability and classification performance. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in scenarios with limited labeled data. The proposed framework offers a promising solution for applications requiring both effective feature extraction and accurate classification in weakly supervised settings.https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.0857