The LAIR at East Texas A&M
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Characterization of Ti/SnO2 Interface by X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy
No full textThe Ti/SnO2 interface has been investigated in situ via the technique of x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Thin films (in the range from 0.3 to 1.1 nm) of titanium were deposited on SnO2 substrates via the e-beam technique. The deposition was carried out at two different substrate temperatures, namely room temperature and 200 C. The photoelectron spectra of tin and titanium in the samples were found to exhibit significant differences upon comparison with the corresponding elemental and the oxide spectra. These changes result from chemical interaction between SnO2 and the titanium overlayer at the interface. The SnO2 was observed to be reduced to elemental tin while the titanium overlayer was observed to become oxidized. Complete reduction of SnO2 to elemental tin did not occur even for the lowest thickness of the titanium overlayer. The interfaces in both the types of the samples were observed to consist of elemental Sn, SnO2, elemental titanium, TiO2, and Ti-suboxide. The relative percentages of the constituents at the interface have been estimated by curve fitting the spectral data with the corresponding elemental and the oxide spectra. In the 200 C samples, thermal diffusion of the titanium overlayer was observed. This resulted in the complete oxidation of the titanium overlayer to TiO2 up to a thickness of 0.9 nm of the overlayer. Elemental titanium resulting from the unreacted overlayer was observed to be more in the room temperature samples. The room temperature samples showed variation around 20% for the Ti-suboxide while an increasing trend was observed in the 200 C samples
The Use of Digital Health Tools for Health Promotion Among Women With and Without Chronic Diseases: Insights From the 2017-2020 Health Information National Trends Survey
No full textBackground: In the United States, almost 90% of women are at risk of at least one chronic condition. However, the awareness, management, and monitoring of these conditions are low and present a substantial public health problem. Digital health tools can be leveraged to reduce the alarmingly high rates of chronic condition–related mortality and morbidity in women. Objective: This study aimed to investigate the 4-year trend of digital health use for health promotion among women with chronic conditions in the United States. Methods: Data for this study were obtained from the 2017 to 2020 iterations of the Health Information Trends Survey 5. Separate weighted logistic regression models were conducted to test the unadjusted and adjusted association of the study variables and each digital health use. The 95% CI, adjusted odds ratio (aOR), and P value (.05) were reported. Analysis was conducted using Stata 17 software. Results: In total, 8573 women were included in this study. The weighted prevalence of the use of a smartphone or tablet for various activities were as follows: track health goals, 50.3% (95% CI 48.4%-52.2%; 3279/7122); make a health decision, 43.6% (95% CI 41.9%-45.3%; 2998/7101); and discuss with a provider, 40% (95% CI 38.2%-41.8%; 2834/7099). In the preceding 12 months, 33% (95% CI 30.9%-35.2%; 1395/4826) of women used an electronic wearable device, 18.7% (95% CI 17.3%-20.2%; 1532/7653) shared health information, and 35.2% (95% CI 33.2%-37.3%; 2262/6349) sent or received an SMS text message with a health professional. Between 2017 and 2020, the weighted prevalence of having 0, 1, and multiple chronic conditions were 37.4% (2718/8564), 33.4% (2776/8564), and 29.3% (3070/8564), respectively. However, slightly above half (52.2%, 95% CI 0.50%-0.53%; 4756/8564) of US women reported having at least one chronic disease. Women with multiple chronic conditions had higher odds of using their tablet or smartphone to achieve a health-related goal (aOR 1.43, 95% CI 1.16-1.77; P=.001) and discuss with their provider (aOR 1.55 95% CI 1.20-2.00; P=.001) than those without any chronic conditions. Correspondingly, in the past 12 months, the odds of using an electronic wearable device (aOR 1.40, 95% CI 1.00-1.96; P=.04), sharing health information (aOR 1.91, 95% CI 1.46-2.51; P\u3c.001), and communicating via SMS text messaging with a provider (aOR 1.31, 95% CI 1.02-1.68; P=.03) were significantly higher among women with chronic conditions than those without a chronic condition. Conclusions: This study suggests that women with chronic conditions accept and integrate digital health tools to manage their care. However, certain subpopulations experience a digital disconnect that may exacerbate existing health inequities. Implications for research and opportunities to leverage and integrate digital health tools to prevent, monitor, manage, and treat chronic conditions in women are discussed
An Embedded Descriptive Case Study: Exploring Urban Teacher Retention Through Job Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction
No full textThe purpose of this embedded descriptive case study was to describe job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction factors that influence urban teacher retention, along with looking at the influence and role of principal leadership through looking at the State of Texas Attrition Report, interviewing an elementary principal, and surveying the teachers at the same campus. The findings of this study will offer insight into what factors contribute to increased job satisfaction and decreased job dissatisfaction in urban schools while also identifying initiatives that the principal thought to be the most impactful in sustaining a teacher force on an urban campus. The principal participated in a semi-structured interview of nine questions while the teachers took the 36-item Spector Job Satisfaction Survey which measures areas of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The embedded-descriptive design included multiple data sources which supported validation of the study and provided various perspectives into teacher retention on urban campuses
Teacher Perceptions Regarding the Impact of Bilingual Teacher Shortages on Mainstream Classroom Instruction in a Small Rural East Texas District
No full textTexas Education Code requires school districts to provide bilingual education to English learners when enrollment reaches 20 or more students in the same grade level with the same first language (Texas Education Code, 2019a). Rural school districts in Texas are challenged to hire sufficient certified bilingual teachers to implement a consistent and complete bilingual program due to teacher shortages. The 2017 Texas Rural Schools Task Force Report noted that teacher shortages are intensely felt in rural areas, and teacher recruitment is particularly difficult for hard-to-staff positions, including bilingual teachers (Texas Education Agency [TEA], 2017). The inability of a district to provide a complete bilingual program has resulted in students not receiving recommended bilingual services. English learners who would normally remain in a bilingual setting are reclassified and placed in mainstream classrooms, without having had sufficient instruction in English to reach an appropriate level of English language proficiency (TEA, 2020c). This qualitative research study explored teacher perceptions regarding the impact of the bilingual teacher shortages on mainstream classroom instruction in a small rural east Texas school district. This study focused on the perceptions of teachers who have personally experienced delivering instruction to students who had previously been in a bilingual program that could not be completed due to a lack of sufficient bilingual teachers. The study was conducted through open interviews with semistructured guiding questions that allowed the teachers the freedom to let their voices be heard (Creswell, 2013). Five primary themes emerged from the analysis of the data collected in the interviews. These themes were (a) lack of language support in the first language, (b) impact on instructional delivery, (c) observed behaviors, (d) impact on instructional planning, and (e) impact on the district. Each theme had several aspects, which were explored and presented in the findings. Some of the aspects were found in more than one theme
School Administrators’ Perceptions of Texas House Bill 2398 and Texas Truancy Prevention Measures in Schools Reaching State Achievement Goals in Fighting Absenteeism and Truancy
No full textThis research study was to obtain, through the application of a qualitative narrative design of open-ended questions, the perceptions of school administrators regarding the effectiveness of the 2015 modified legislated implementation of House Bill 2398 and Texas Truancy Prevention Measures programs (TTPM).The TTPM policies and procedures are focused on the use of student-centered interventions to decrease campus truancy and excessive absenteeism. This research explores administrators’ perceptions from lived experiences of how successful one popular approach is to truancy in the hopes of closing significant learning gaps through strong interventions and persistent, committed hard work. This narrative inquiry research was conducted in a Southeast Texas Region 5 Educational Service Center Area and included four participants who were secondary campus administrators serving Grades 9 through 12. The participants completed a questionnaire in Qualtrics. The themes that emerged regarding implementation of House Bill 2398 and TTPM programs from Research Question 1.1 include (a) campus and community programs; (b) incentives; (c) and parental involvement. The themes developed from Research Question 1.2 include (a) addressing absenteeism and (b) student outcomes
The Implementation of a Financial Software into an Educational Farm
No full textIn today’s world, education is essential for humanity to prosper. All human activities rely on education as a foundation. Education is an important factor in the development and new knowledge dissemination (Poungsuk, 2020). Each aspect of educational practices in science, agriculture, and finance is very important to maintain and perpetuate continuing development. In today’s educational program, educational farms are often multifunctional and allow for students to learn about all aspects of agriculture whether it is in livestock, horticulture, urban agriculture such as food processing systems, meat packaging, vertical farming (hydroponic systems), and so on. However, for an educational farm to be more effective, the farm manager needs to be able to conduct rigorous financial analyses for all enterprises. The efficient use of financial software fills in the need for educational farms to organize and analyze their finances and even assist with everyday tasks. FINPACK is financial software that was created by financial experts at the University of Minnesota to help agricultural producers conduct financial analyses for their business. A financial statement and a benchmarking analysis are two key components to perform a good financial analysis. Financial statements such as the balance sheet, the income statement, and the statement of cash flow, help ensure that businesses are on track. Benchmarking complements financial analyses by allowing companies to compare themselves with other businesses to evaluate their performance. The benchmarking analysis showed that the educational farm was less liquid and less profitable than the average for-profit farm. However, the educational farm was very solvent; and in general, the educational farm operates differently from the typical or private for-profit farms. This study aims to assist a 1300 acres educational farm located in Northeast Texas with financial managerial performance by implementing FINPACK
Illusions, Myths, and Great Divides: Representations of Literacy Narratives
No full textThis dissertation extends conversations in literacy studies, specifically surrounding the literacy myth, by examining three fictional novels - Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, and Susan Froetschel’s Fear of Beauty – which represent literacy and the way it lives. In regards to the ideological versus the autonomous models of literacy, these novels offer useful representations of fictionalized accounts that align with the ideological model of literacy and suggest the violence that is the perpetuation of the pernicious literacy myth. By coining and defining the term “literacy novels,” and laying out the tenets, codes, and markers of such, I argue that these texts illuminate the flaws in the autonomous model. The autonomous model is not only inaccurate but it is a problematic false consciousness used in perpetuating systematic oppression. The examination of these fictional representations of literacy extends understandings of the way literacy lives, and the ways in which it impacts the lives of working-class women. I use this dissertation to look at the rhetoric of illiterate working-class women and their paths to literacy and how acquiring traditional literacy impacts (or rather doesn’t) their lives. I do so through examining the literacy myth, and how it fails the characters repeatedly, in order to draw attention to what is rather than what should be regarding the way literacy lives
Automated Profiling-Based Zero-Day Malware Detection
No full textSince the development of the automated malware variant toolkit, malware attacks have been growing and evolving more significantly, and more critical infrastructures and computer devices are being exposed to the attacks. The worse case is that writing new variants and families of malware utilizing the automated malware variant toolkits is getting handier and handier. At the same time, publishing observed patterns analyzed and suggested by experts manually in a conventional manner. Besides, attackers can evade existing detectors using malware signatures or machine learning (ML) models using various functions of the toolkits. Prior research has shown the promising performance of techniques of malware detection. However, ironically, they are bounded to the requirement of already-seen malware considering their flaw in its principle when training in supervised learning techniques. To overcome this issue, a body of study suggested a semi-supervised learning approach that would resolve it by classifying the unprecedented malware attacks as anomalies (i.e., zero-day malware detection). Unlike the expectations of the popular semi-supervised approaches, the preliminary research of this study shows the following limits in zero-day detection. First, the performance of one-class (OC) classification approaches is relatively far lower to be a good detector than the supervised approaches. Second, approaches using an autoencoder required an optimized threshold to be used as a detector, while they show more promising performance than OC approaches. Moreover, threshold selection always requires the usage of malware when training, which indicates that the approach relies on the quality of the malware dataset. This research tackles the issues of the prior research and suggests a novel detection architecture of a combined autoencoder and OC classifier. Thus, this architecture mainly focuses on benefiting from the advantages of the two approaches; abstraction by powerful abstraction using an autoencoder and replacement of its threshold selection with OC classification. The extended experiments using a public malware dataset (Meraz’18) report that the proposed model is effective with an accuracy of up to 96.0% in zero-day detection, which indicates that the proposed methods and the given supervised learners (forced to include reported malware classes when training) appears reasonably comparable for detecting zero-day malware. Also, this research simulates the zero-day variants of malware to compare the reliance on the proposed methods and that of the supervised models. In conclusion, the proposed methods yield better resilience in discriminating synthetic malware variants created by adversarial evasion attack tools than the supervised approaches
Ion Mobility Mass Spectrometry Analysis of Alternative Metal Binding Peptides for the Utilization of Cloning, Overexpression and Purification of Affinity Tagged Lactamase
No full textAffinity tags have many applications; they can be used for tracking proteins, improving solubility, and are a tool in protein purification of recombinant proteins. Recombinant proteins have broad use as therapeutic agents for cancers, autoimmune diseases, infectious agents, viral treatments, antibodies, diabetes, and genetic disorders. Poly-histidine tag (His-tag), P (HHHHHHH), is an established affinity tag that consist of all histidine residues. This His-tag binds readily to Ni(II), Zn(II), and Co(II), and is the primary affinity tag used to track proteins during expression cloning and purification of recombinant proteins. For this research we have designed a series of alternative metal binding (amb) heptapeptides, A (HCGPYHC), C (HCGPYGC), H (DCGPYHC), I (DDGPYHC), J (DDGPYHD), K (DDGPYHD), L (HCGPFHC), N (DCGPFHC), O (HHGPYHH), Q (HHHPHHH), and R (HHGPGHH). These peptides were designed to test their binding affinity for Ni(II)-NTA, Zn(II)-NTA, and Co(II)-NTA complexes, where NTA is nitrilotriacetic acid. The six peptides that will exhibit the greatest binding affinity for the metal NTA complexes will be further tested against the control P. This testing included competitive binding studies, collision cross section, collision induced dissociation, and computational testing. The studies were tested using ion mobility - mass spectrometry from a series of samples prepared at pH 7.0-8.0 to mimic the physiological pH and purification pH using the immobilized metal affinity chromatography (IMAC). The results were analyzed by Masslynx and Driftscope. These studies are important for developing our understanding of how the peptides would compare to an established affinity tag. The results indicated that amb5 J was the most suitable peptide to act as an affinity tag and Ni(II) was the best metal to utilize in the IMAC. A J tagged lactamase recombinant enzyme underwent gene cloning, protein expression and purification. The results indicated that lactamase recombinant protein was able to be purified with further optimization of the column conditions
A Content Analysis of the Perceptions of Vocabulary Instruction by Early Grade Teachers
No full textIt was still true that some children came to school with a smaller vocabulary than their peers (David, 2010, Duff & Brydon, 2020; Templin, 1957; White, Graves, & Slater, 1990). If students did not have enough word knowledge to access the correct meanings of the words they read in text, they failed to comprehend those texts and struggled to keep up with their peers that could. This was critical because the link between vocabulary and comprehension was very clear. If teachers did not do something to intervene when students were in the early grades, we saw that those children who knew lots of words, learned additional words quicker and subsequently, other children could continue to struggle (Stanovich, 1986). Consequently, some children would struggle even more once they entered the upper grades where they fell into what Chall and Jacobs (2003) referred to as the fourth-grade slump where students were transitioning from learning to read to reading to learn. Although the intellectual shortfalls in children from low income families could seem discouraging, the strategies available today were far more targeted and effective than ever before (Jenson, 2009). This content analysis aimed to communicate and understand the teaching methods, perceptions, and backgrounds of teachers of early grade students. Data were collected in the form of a survey to uncover themes and patterns as Connelly and Clandinin, (1990) stated “uncover the voices” of each of the teachers studied