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Discovering Your Cinematic Cultural Identity
No full textThis paired set explores the experience of cultural identities constructed by and experienced through popular film. The essay “Discovering Your Cinematic Cultural Identity” reflects the authors’ decades of residence in the state of Iowa and their personal irritation with the stereotypes that Hollywood regularly calls upon in evoking the American rural. We gained a new perspective on this sort of imagery when it surfaced again in Field of Dreams (1989) and The Bridges of Madison County novel (1992) and film (1995). Each of these films triggered unprecedented film tourism for the state. Through an exploration of these films and others such as State Fair (1933, 1945), The Music Man (1962), Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), and A Thousand Acres (1997), we clarify the kinds of identity most popular with national audiences and anchor it in nostalgia about an imagined simpler and happier past. We also reflect on the absences in this popular picture and describe representative patterns of consistency and selectivity of stereotypes for other regions of the country in Hollywood’s cultural cartography
Spivak after Marx after Derrida
No full textSpivak is often viewed as an unequivocally deconstructive theorist, and she frequently reinforces this impression by proclaiming her allegiance to Derrida\u27s ideas. Recent comments by her suggest, however, that there are limits to her deconstructive convictions. This essay considers some of Spivak\u27s debts to Derrida\u27s work, though it is primarily concerned with those occasions when she states her misgivings about his ability to understand postcoloniality, global power, and resistance movements. Reading Marx more accurately would, she insists, have allowed Derrida both to grasp capitalism\u27s complex logic and to consider the effects of subaltern interventions upon capitalism\u27s global authority. Such an assertion does indeed raise important questions about the usefulness of Derrida\u27s ideas for postcolonial and globalization theory. But, this essay argues, Spivak manages to highlight problems in Derrida\u27s work only by appealing a curious form of textual positivism -- a positivism that seems impossible to reconcile with her earlier claim that textuality is the place where the subaltern subject simultaneously appears and disappears
Chasing the Dream and Buying the Promise in a Conceptual Framework for Consumer Decision-Making
No full textThe American dream is a concept that is echoed across our society, and while the data show Americans do not overwhelmingly believe in the dream, marketers continue to pair it and the issue of economic prosperity in their agendas. Through a novel framework that overlaps a deeply studied mass communication theory with a decision-making framework used in marketing, this paper demonstrates a new lens to understand how marketers identify strategies and tactics, build agendas, and make sales by touting the American dream. As separate entities, decision-making models and agenda setting theory are powerful, but together can create an environment that is powerfully persuasive. The conceptual model presented in this paper helps to visualize these interconnected processes in a way that has not been done before in today’s modern media landscape. This model is an important visualization of the power marketers have when they build strategies and plan tactics to move an individual down the path of purchase
Large Language Models (LLMS) for Clinical Note Generation: International Classification of Disease (ICD) Code, Knowledge Graph (KG) and Prompt Evaluation
No full textIn the past decade, a surge in the amount of electronic health record (EHR) data in the United States occurred, driven by a favorable policy environment created by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 and the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016. Clinical notes for patients’ assessments, diagnoses, and treatments are captured in these EHRs in free-form text by physicians, who spend a considerable amount of time entering them. Manually writing these notes is time-consuming, increasing patient waiting times and potentially delaying diagnoses. Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4o, possess the ability to generate news articles that closely resemble human-written ones.
In this work, we present several Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompt engineering strategies that improve the LLM’s response in clinical note generation. In our prompts, we incorporate International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes and basic patient information along with similar clinical case examples which effectively enhance the LLMs to formulate clinical notes. We evaluated our CoT prompt strategies on six clinical cases from the CodiEsp test dataset against several LLMs and our results show that it outperformed the standard one-shot prompt
Proactive Onboarding Services Model as an Academic and Social Integration Strategy for First-Time in College Students at a Virginia Community College
No full textA recent survey by the Education Advisory Board (EAB) found that of the 1000 community college students surveyed, 56% nearly quit before classes started due to challenges during college onboarding. Similarly, admissions data from the Virginia Community Colleges System (VCCS) indicated that more than half of the students who apply do not enroll in classes, highlighting a need to closely examine the onboarding process and support services provided to understand what is effective and what is not. The purpose of this study is to understand the predictive utility of certain student onboarding services, such as an appointment with an admissions coordinator, orientation attendance, financial preparedness, academic planning, academic advising appointment, and use of wrap-around services, on student enrollment at a Virginia community college. The study explored whether onboarding services contribute to student success related to enrollment and retention at a VCCS community college.
The findings indicated that admissions appointments, orientation attendance, and financial preparedness were significant predictors for first-term enrollment for both first-time in college and first-time in college first-generation students. Academic planning during the first term also showed a strong predictive utility for next-term enrollment, whereas attending academic advising appointments and using wrap-around services showed no significant impact. Community college leaders can use these findings to identify the college’s onboarding services that improve student enrollment outcomes. Leaders can apply the findings to guide decisions on which onboarding services the college administration should consider mandatory rather than optional. Future research could expand this work to other community colleges at the VCCS, examine how the onboarding services support the entire student journey, and augment the current study by adding a qualitative perspective to understand the impact of students’ experiences with onboarding services
Community College Student Parents and Their Experiences with Mindfulness Training
No full textCommunity college students who are parents (student parents) are highly motivated to succeed but face many challenges, including finances, transportation, and childcare, which leads to high levels of stress and anxiety. Mindfulness practices of returning to the breath and staying present in the body have been shown to help people manage stress and anxiety and live with greater ease. Using the stress and coping theory of Lazarus and Folkman (1984) as a theoretical framework, the purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of student parents who participated in mindfulness training. Participants attended mindfulness classes, facilitated by an instructor trained in yoga, reiki, and mindfulness practices such Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path, and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. The participants completed a Mindfulness Training Welcome Survey that allowed for tabulation of their stress and coping scores. They submitted weekly journals about their experiences and participated in a final semistructured interview. Throughout the process, the researcher kept analytic memos, recording analysis of the interactions and conversations that occurred before, during, and after the training.
Collected data was used to identify common themes derived through process and pattern coding, then shared through the relating of the participants’ personal stories, consistent with the testimonios methodology (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012). The common themes revealed that participants embraced the mindfulness strategies and found them helpful in managing personal and academic stress in their daily lives. The participants suffered from many stresses and the burden of heavy responsibility but found the strategies to help them cope better. They highly valued education and being role models for their children, inspired by the hope of improving life for themselves and their children. Furthermore, the student parents in the study were open to trying the strategies presented in class and to connecting with each other, and taking time for self-care. Having dealt with various types of trauma and painful life events, they considered the strategies taught in mindfulness training as beneficial in helping them process the past and live more fully in the present, better equipped to manage their many stresses and persevere in achieving their goals
Research to Practice Gap: Impact of Principal Perceptions & Communication on Change Initiatives
No full textThe purpose of this study is to examine the experiences, perceptions, and practices of school principals related to evidence-based change initiatives and the continued divide between the findings of educational researchers and the use of these findings by school practitioners. Since the prevalent dichotomy of theory and practice is detrimental to school improvement efforts, it is important to examine the underlying values and beliefs that contribute to perpetuating this divide. For this qualitative phenomenological study, semi-structured interviews with seven elementary school principals provided first-hand accounts of the principals\u27 lived experiences. Through an iterative process of coding, clustering, and cross-case analysis, a set of six interrelated themes emerged that illuminate how principals experience and make sense of evidence-based change initiatives. These themes are not isolated categories but interconnected dimensions of a larger phenomenon. To reflect this complexity, the findings are presented as The Four Phase Initiative Fatigue Model: Mediated Cycles of Ambivalence, Sense-Making Constraints, Drift, and Recurrence depicting both the distinct elements of principals’ sense-making and the dynamic relationships among them. This cyclical, four-phase model outlines how principals experience research-based change initiatives where new mandates typically enter schools already saturated with initiative history, producing a starting point of ambivalence and fatigue. During implementation, sense-making is constrained by mediating factors such as time scarcity, limited access to research, low psychological safety, and hierarchical pressures. These constraints lead to an epistemic drift – a shift away from engaging with the research-based principles of an initiative and toward procedural compliance. Because implementation under these conditions rarely produces the intended outcomes, the need for improvement persists, prompting the cycle to repeat. Implications include a greater priority on preserving time and creating psychologically safe spaces to engage in the kinds of collaborative sense-making needed to implement research-based practices with fidelity. Similarly, policymakers at all levels should re-conceptualize reform and improvement processes to normalize uncertainty and questioning, and shift from monitoring and supervision to scaffolding and supporting iterative and reciprocal professional learning and growth
Human Identification and Action Recognition Using Small Data and Deep Domain Adaptation
No full textHuman identification and human action recognition problems are two important research areas for real-world security and surveillance applications. In both human identification and action recognition, it is necessary to operate by collecting small datasets in the field, possibly in a short time window of observation. This dissertation studies and develops computational modeling and high-performance machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models for human identification and human action recognition using small amounts of data. These methods and computational models may be useful for different security and surveillance applications.
This dissertation on human recognition develops a ML computational model to estimate bone length from 3D Lidar sensor data. We hypothesize that the 3D Lidar sensor may be amenable to bone length estimation, and bone length, in turn, may be used as an invariant feature to identify a human. We obtain 3D joint location and subsequent bone length estimations using a computational model based on several image processing steps and novel human silhouette and 3D skeleton estimation algorithms. This computational model estimates the 3D skeleton without needing to train a deep model that would require large data for training. In comparison to existing methods, we achieve competitive results with far field Lidar data, which is better suited to surveillance where human identification at a longer distance offers a better security product.
Then, this dissertation explores human activity recognition by using a DL method for deep domain adaptation to estimate human action. Training data for human action recognition is expensive to collect, so we use domain adaptation to learn from multiple publicly available datasets for human action recognition to solve recognition on an unlabeled target dataset. This may be useful in a real-world application where we may train the models with a large amount of publicly available yet unrelated human subject data while the target test dataset is specific and small and may be collected in the field. We develop a novel Bayesian DL framework that can learn from different multiple source domain adaptation during the training process. We show that this framework outperforms the existing state-of-the-art multidomain adaptation methods by 17% on an example target Daily-DA dataset in the literature
A Systematic Review of Corporate Ethics Program Training Strategies to Improve Ethical Workplace Cultures
No full textThe demand for corporations to practice more ethically responsible conduct and decision making is growing with every news report of another corporate scandal, lawsuit, fine, or high-visibility C-suite firing. To develop an ethical workplace culture, organizations should implement a comprehensive ethics program that fosters and encourages ethical decision making, especially among current and future leaders. However, there is little research and few guidelines for how ethics program administrators should design corporate ethics training to effectively practice and master the skill of ethical decision-making in efforts to continually grow a more ethical work environment. This study aims to identify corporate ethics training trends and best practices utilized today to better understand gaps and areas for future research.
This study consists of a literature review as well as a systematic review. The literature review focuses on industry’s best practices, insight from corporate ethics surveys, and current trends and issues concerning corporate ethics. The findings of the systematic review examine research published between 2020 and 2025 according to inclusion and exclusion criteria. A priori coding demonstrated that ethics training is a globally studied topic with the majority of research conducted in Asia, Europe, and North America. Research activity remained consistent throughout the five-year period with a decline in 2022 and a gradual increase through 2025, most likely residual impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. About half of the studies were conducted within higher education business ethics schools compared to actual corporate environments. This disparity emphasizes a research gap between academic environments and actual corporate environments.
Grounded theory coding of training strategies resulted in five categories: Collaborative Learning, Hybrid Modalities, Immersive Virtual Reality, Integration of Philosophy, or no training strategy identified. Collaborative Learning and Immersive Virtual Reality categories dominated the results, emphasizing role-play, group discussion, serious games, and virtual simulations. Hybrid Modalities and Integration of Philosophy demonstrated unique approaches emphasizing self-reflection with group discussion. Studies not emphasizing specific training strategies instead gave insight into ethics program contextual influences such as leadership and organizational culture. Discussion of these findings and recommendations for future research conclude the study
Design And Assessment of a Single-Blade Rotary Wing for Use in Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) Aircraft
No full textA single-bladed propeller was designed to determine its efficacy in increasing efficiency of quadplane aircraft in the cruise configuration while still providing sufficient vertical lift for the vertical takeoff portion of flight. Aerodynamic theory predicts higher efficiency for single-blade propellers, resulting in a lower power requirement. A counter-weighted single-blade was modeled after a 10x5 model aircraft propeller used in small unmanned vehicles with a steel counterweight to balance centrifugal forces. The propeller was tested in the ODU wind tunnel to determine performance at various Advance Ratios (J). The research suggests that single-blade propellers show comparable performance compared to two-bladed propellers in the climb phase and reduced drag in the forward, or cruise, phase of flight, leading to an increase in range, endurance and speed for Quadplane aircraft