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The Andry Family, The 1811 Slave Revolt, and The German Coast Project
Get PDFThe German Coast Project explores the early nineteenth century history of the Louisiana’s German Coast, spanning its formative years, the 1811 Slave Revolt, and the aftermath of the revolt, through the perspective of the Andry family. The website is powered through Omeka software, which creates a historical exhibition of compiled research. In addition, ArcGIS contributed to the website’s construction, as it allowed for the inclusion of interactive programs and maps within the website. Designed for high school students and genealogists, The German Coast Project creates new scholarship pertaining to the German Coast and the 1811 Slave Revolt, through the often-overlooked perspective of the Andry family. The primary theme of the project is to portray how Manuel Andry and his family were able to prosper financially after the 1811 Slave Revolt, even though they suffered a heavy emotional loss
Re-positioning a School District to Embrace Equity and Change: A Qualitative Examination of Central Office Leaders’ Experiences with Implementing a Desegregation Plan
Get PDFLeadership at the district level is a contributing factor to student achievement and the overall success of individual schools and school districts. However, with respect to leading equity-oriented transformations, most research has centered on the work of leaders and administrators at the school-building level. Considering their direct involvement in formulating and executing equity-framed change initiatives, understanding the role and influence of central office-based leaders is paramount. Designed as an instrumental case study, the process of executing a court-ordered desegregation plan was utilized to assist in deepening the understanding of the role of school district-based leadership as it relates to developing and implementing policies that seek to decrease and/or eliminate vestiges of racial and social injustices as well as evoke system-wide transformations. This case study was framed by a broad scope of scholarly work on change leadership and transformative practices. A collection of semi-structured interviews, guided by Seidman’s (2006) three-interview series structure, served as the primary source of data. With respect to district-level leadership, the data gathered from this study identifies conditions, structures, and behaviors that support and hinder equity-driven change and inclusive practices within schooling. Moreover, the findings indicate a need to focus on building capacity for equity-oriented transformations at the central office, managing multi-dimensional resistance within a social justice context, and empowering community groups to support and/or drive systemic change efforts within the educational setting. Additionally, recommendations aimed to extend and focus areas of practice, policy, and future research are presented
The Impact of Intangible Capital and Diversity Reputation on Firm Performance
Get PDFThis dissertation examines the effects that intangible capital and diversity reputation have on firm performance. In Chapter 1, entitled “CEO Overconfidence and Intangible Corporate Investments,” we extend the corporate investment and CEO overconfidence literature by examining how CEO overconfidence affects investment-cashflow sensitivity using a new measure of Tobin’s q and cashflow. Specifically, we incorporate intangible capital, which neo-classical investment theory mostly ignores, in the empirical analysis. We develop three overconfidence measures and their interaction with the respective standard and new cashflow settings to capture the investment-cashflow sensitivity effect of CEO overconfidence. We use three investment measures (physical, intangible, and total investments) and find that the effect of managerial overconfidence on investment-cashflow sensitivity is more prominent for corporate intangible investments than physical investments. Moreover, our results show that the standard measure of physical capital weakly explains the intangible investment-cashflow density. Our study offers useful insights in that it explains the reason why investment-cashflow sensitivity has been weaker in recent years. We also show that investment-cashflow sensitivity is stronger when intangible capital is incorporated into the analysis. Chapter 2 is entitled “Diversity Reputation and Firm Performance.” The modern American workplace is a microcosm of modern American society. The increasing diversity of the American workforce has made the increasing diversity of the American workplace a necessity. We explore the impact of diversity reputation on firm performance. We measure a firm’s diversity reputation by its inclusion in DiversityInc’s list of Top 50 Companies for Diversity. We measure firm performance by various accounting measures (return on assets, return on investment, and return on sales) as well as one market-based measure, Tobin’s Q. We find that firms that have a better diversity reputation outperform firms that do not
Prediction of Hierarchical Classification of Transposable Elements Using Machine Learning Techniques
Get PDFTransposable Elements (TEs) or jumping genes are the DNA sequences that have an intrinsic capability to move within a host genome from one genomic location to another. Studies show that the presence of a TE within or adjacent to a functional gene may alter its expression. TEs can also cause an increase in the rate of mutation and can even promote gross genetic arrangements. Thus, the proper classification of the identified jumping genes is important to understand their genetic and evolutionary effects. While computational methods have been developed that perform either binary classification or multi-label classification of TEs, few studies have focused on their hierarchical classification. The existing methods have limited accuracy in classifying TEs. In this study, we examine the performance of a variety of machine learning (ML) methods and propose a robust augmented Stacking-based ML method, ClassifyTE, for the hierarchical classification of TEs with high accuracy
Everything that Shines is not Gold
Get PDFABSTRACT
This paper will detail the process of creating and making the film Everything that Shines is not Gold. This paper divides into four parts: writing process, pre-production, production, and postproduction. The first part will touch on how the story came about and the writing process. The second part will cover the pre-production aspects and how I dealt with a strict deadline. Next, I will talk about directing. In the fourth part, I will discuss the long and tiring postproduction workflow. Last, I will reflect on making and what I learned
Innovations in Metocean Sensors
Get PDFReal-time observations are critical to understand, predict and estimate the impact of extreme weather events such as extratropical hurricanes and storms. Remote sensing, moored wave buoys and advances in predictive models have greatly advanced understanding and predictive capability of extreme ocean weather. However, due to cost and complexity of traditional moored buoys, in-situ networks are typically sparse and often close to shore and not well suited to drive predictive models over meaningful geophysical scales. Here we will discuss ongoing efforts to extend the capability of the Sofar Spotter to measure marine boundary layer dynamics. With the advancement to more portable metocean buoys such as Spotter, free-drifting strategies can be deployed, including fast-moving vessels and airplanes. This opens up opportunities for rapid deployment to improve predictive capabilities of extreme weather events and provide continuous data for validation of theoretical models
Towards A New Paradigm in Psychiatry
Get PDFThe reductionist tenets of the biomedical model of mental illness generate research methods and clinical practices that neglect significant cultural elements of mental illness. The biomedical model is reductionist because it assumes a view of the mind that lends itself to biological reductionism. Developing a more holistic model of mental illness requires replacing the accepted view of mind with a new one. In this paper, research demonstrating the significance of culture to mental illness will be reviewed in order to illuminate the flaws of the biomedical model. The extended mind theory will be analyzed and discussed as a potential basis for the development of a new paradigm within psychiatry, one which transcends the reductionist tendencies of the biomedical model
State Ownership, Firm Specific Risk and Momentum Trading
Get PDFThe dissertation consists of two essays. In the first essay, we investigate the relation of government ownership to the idiosyncratic volatility of Saudi Arabian firms that traded in the Saudi stock exchange between 2010 and 2016. The results show that publicly traded firms with an increase in government ownership have less idiosyncratic volatility. Furthermore, we investigate market leverage ratio, dividend payout ratio, and illiquidity ratio as potential roles in which government ownership influences the idiosyncratic volatility. The results prove the negative relationship between government ownership and idiosyncratic volatility. In the second essay, we investigate the association between government ownership and momentum trading of firms traded in the Saudi stock exchange between 2010 and 2016. The results show that firms with higher state ownership are expected to have greater price momentum. We used two approaches: the portfolio sorting approach and the fixed effect approach, and these two approaches confirm the positive relationship between government ownership and momentum
The Gulf Between
Get PDFGreat swaths of Southeastern Louisiana are drowning, land giving way to water at an alarming rate. Since the 1920s, Louisiana has lost more than 1,800 square miles of wetlands to open water, an area about the size of the state of Delaware. In the same amount of time it takes to watch an episode of Breaking Bad, our state loses the equivalent of a football field’s-worth of solid ground to the rising seas. My thesis is the first part of an accessible creative nonfiction book that tells the story of what’s happening in my home state. To what extent is it feasible to engineer ourselves out of harm’s way? What communities get relocated, and on whose terms? Most centrally, how will we address the troubling gulf between what we know to be true about our changing climate and what we are willing to do about it