15 research outputs found
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SUPERCONDUCTING TRANSITION TEMPERATURE OF DISORDERED TRANSITION METAL FILMS
No full textAlter egos: An exploration of the perspectives and identities of science comic creators
No full text© 2018 The Author(s). While academic interest in science comics has been growing in recent years, the creators of these materials remain understudied. This research aimed to explore the experiences and views of science comic creators through the lens of science communication. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 science comic creators. Interviewees felt that the visual, narrative, permanent, and approachable qualities of comics made them particularly adept at explaining science and bringing it to new audiences. Science comic creators often had complex identities, occupying an ambiguous territory between 'science' and 'art', but were otherwise unconcerned with strict definitions. They emphasised the importance of balance between entertaining and informing, striving to create an engaging visual narrative without overcrowding it with facts or compromising scientific accuracy. This balancing act, and how they negotiate it, sheds light on what it means to be a science communicator operating in the space between entertainment and information/education
Work in progress — Initial identification of program components leading to retention of women in a pre-engineering high school program, and an undergraduate engineering program
No full textThe Virginia Tech First Robotics Program Partnership: Technological Literacy Through Self Efficacy
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Equity Style Investing
No full textDespite the well documented benefits of equity style investing in today’s financial markets, the academic view of the underlying cause for such benefits remains an ongoing debate. A number of theories have been proposed to explain why some asset classes earn better returns than others do under the same economic regimes. Rational finance links the outperformance of some stock groups to the equity characteristics that proxy for the common risk factors, behavioural finance, however, argues that mispricing resulting from irrational investor’s sentiment to fundamentals plays a key role. Meanwhile, a variety of business cycle variables have also suggested to contain information useful in explaining the expected stock returns. The observed style returns change all the time with predictable time-varying components, reflecting the structural and cyclical shocks to the macroeconomy.
Motivated by the current ongoing controversy of anomaly versus risk compensation over interpreting equity style premiums, this thesis investigates how firm characteristics and business cycle conditions function separately to affect the style return dynamics based on the size and value-growth categorisations. It adds to the extant literature by explicitly examining the relative importance of the common risk factors versus firm-specific information as driving sources in the divergent equity style returns in the U.K. market. By identifying the dominant driving force that determines the relative style performance, it provides a further dimension to the current debate regarding the sources of style premiums and offers the choice of corresponding style investing strategies.
The divergent style returns and its time-varying nature offer astute investors the opportunity to implement active style management to enhance portfolio returns. Motivated by the benefits of capitalising on such style return cyclicality and in particular the availability and popularity of Exchange Traded Funds based on market segments in leading financial markets as investment vehicle that offers low cost and high liquidity, this thesis examines a dynamic long-short tactical trading strategy by applying a binomial approach to focus on the rotation between pairs of equity styles. By answering key questions of whether equity style cycles exist in the U.K. market and whether the return dynamics of such style momentum strategy is distinct from the price and industry momentum effects, it contributes to the literature by providing valuable empirical evidence to compare with other studies in different economic and institutional environments.
In response to the increasing popularity of using macro information to aid optimal style selection for the quant circles in the investment community, building on the methodology of Brandt and Santa-Clara (2006), this thesis approximates a solution of a mean-variance multi-style investor’s optimal style investing problem incorporating the business cycle predictability. This approach is parsimonious as the optimal style weights are parameterised directly on a set of pervasive business cycle predictors. By exploring how the distributions of the expected style returns and the location or the shape of the optimal style allocations are affected by given shocks to the business cycles, this thesis contributes to the extant literature by demonstrating the transmission mechanism of how business cycle volatility affects equity style return volatility and in turn a mean-variance investor’s optimal style allocation
Collaborative Mobile Robot Surveyors (Fall 2003) IPRO 308: Collaborative Mobile Robot Surveyors IPRO308 Fall2003 Final Presentation
No full textExamine the need for error correction Develop means for measuring the distance the robot has traveled Create algorithm to dynamically adjust the signals sent to the motors to compensate for deviationsSponsorship: NAProject Plan for IPRO 308: Collaborative Mobile Robot Surveyors for Fall 2003 semeste
Wind Dispersal of Natural and Biomimetic Maple Samaras
No full textMaple trees (genus Acer) accomplish the task of distributing objects to a wide area by producing seeds, known as samaras, which are carried by the wind as they autorotate and slowly descend to the ground. With the goal of supporting engineering applications, such as gathering environmental data over a broad area, we developed 3D-printed artificial samaras. Here, we compare the behavior of both natural and artificial samaras in both still-air laboratory experiments and wind dispersal experiments in the field. We show that the artificial samaras are able to replicate (within one standard deviation) the behavior of natural samaras in a lab setting. We further use the notion of windage to compare dispersal behavior, and show that the natural samara has the highest mean windage, corresponding to the longest flights during both high wind and low wind experimental trials. This study demonstrated a bioinspired design for the dispersed deployment of sensors and provides a better understanding of wind-dispersal of both natural and artificial samaras
