Household Preferences for Financing Hurricane Risk Mitigation: A Survey Based Empirical Analysis

After a series of major storms over the last 20 years, the state of financing for U.S. natural disaster insurance has undergone substantial disruptions causing many federal and state backed programs against residential property damage to become severally underfunded. In order to regain actuarial soundness, policy makers have proposed a shift to a system that reflects risk-based pricing for property insurance. We examine survey responses from 1394 single-family homeowners in the state of Florida for support of several natural disaster mitigation policy reforms. Utilizing a partial proportional odds model we test for effects of location, risk perception, socio-economic and housing characteristics on support for policy reforms. Our findings suggest residents across the state, not just risk-prone homeowners, support the current subsidized model. We also examine several other policy questions from the survey to verify our initial results. Finally, the implications of our findings are discussed to provide inputs to policymakers.

A high efficient biometrics approach for unconstrained iris segmentation and recognition

This dissertation develops an innovative approach towards less-constrained iris biometrics. Two major contributions are made in this research endeavor: (1) Designed an award-winning segmentation algorithm in the less-constrained environment where image acquisition is made of subjects on the move and taken under visible lighting conditions, and (2) Developed a pioneering iris biometrics method coupling segmentation and recognition of the iris based on video of moving persons under different acquisitions scenarios. The first part of the dissertation introduces a robust and fast segmentation approach using still images contained in the UBIRIS (version 2) noisy iris database. The results show accuracy estimated at 98% when using 500 randomly selected images from the UBIRIS.v2 partial database, and estimated at 97% in a Noisy Iris Challenge Evaluation (NICE.I) in an international competition that involved 97 participants worldwide involving 35 countries, ranking this research group in sixth position. This accuracy is achieved with a processing speed nearing real time. The second part of this dissertation presents an innovative segmentation and recognition approach using video-based iris images. Following the segmentation stage which delineates the iris region through a novel segmentation strategy, some pioneering experiments on the recognition stage of the less-constrained video iris biometrics have been accomplished. In the video-based and less-constrained iris recognition, the test or subject iris videos/images and the enrolled iris images are acquired with different acquisition systems. In the matching step, the verification/identification result was accomplished by comparing the similarity distance of encoded signature from test images with each of the signature dataset from the enrolled iris images. With the improvements gained, the results proved to be highly accurate under the unconstrained environment which is more challenging. This has led to a false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0% and a false rejection rate (FRR) of 17.64% for 85 tested users with 305 test images from the video, which shows great promise and high practical implications for iris biometrics research and system design.

Assessing the net effect of anthropogenic disturbance on aquatic communities in wetlands: community structure relative to distance from canals

Anthropogenic alterations of natural hydrology are common in wetlands and often increase water permanence, converting ephemeral habitats into permanent ones. Since aquatic organisms segregate strongly along hydroperiod gradients, added water permanence caused by canals can dramatically change the structure of aquatic communities. We examined the impact of canals on the abundance and structure of wetland communities in South Florida, USA. We sampled fishes and macroinvertebrates from marsh transects originating at canals in the central and southern Everglades. Density of all aquatic organisms sampled increased in the immediate proximity of canals, but was accompanied by few compositional changes based on analysis of relative abundance. Large fish (>8 cm), small fish (<8 >cm) and macroinvertebrates (>5 mm) increased in density within 5 m of canals. This pattern was most pronounced in the dry season, suggesting that canals may serve as dry-down refugia. Increases in aquatic animal density closely matched gradients of phosphorus enrichment that decreased with distance from canals. Thus, the most apparent impact of canals on adjacent marsh communities was as conduits for nutrients that stimulated local productivity; any impact of their role as sources of increased sources of predators was not apparent. The effect of predation close to canals was overcompensated by increased secondary productivity and/or immigration toward areas adjacent to canals in the dry season. Alternatively, the consumptive effect of predatory fishes using canals as dry-season refuges is very small or spread over the expanse of marshes with open access to canals.

Can Executive Skills Help Underachieving Bilingual Students? Pedagogical Implications

The author explores solutions for bilingual students’ underachievement by embedding elements of executive functioning into bilingual education. Based on analysis of theoretical perspectives, the author recommends teaching executive functions to bilingual students. Implications indicate the importance of embedding executive functions in curriculum development, textbook compiling, and instruction.

Metacommunity Structure Along Resource and Disturbance Gradients in Everglades Wetlands

We evaluated metacommunity hypotheses of landscape arrangement (indicative of dispersal limitation) and environmental gradients (hydroperiod and nutrients) in structuring macroinvertebrate and fish communities in the southern Everglades. We used samples collected at sites from the eastern boundary of the southern Everglades and from Shark River Slough, to evaluate the role of these factors in metacommunity structure. We used eigenfunction spatial analysis to model community structure among sites and distance-based redundancy analysis to partition the variability in communities between spatial and environmental filters. For most animal communities, hydrological parameters had a greater influence on structure than nutrient enrichment, however both had large effects. The influence of spatial effects indicative of dispersal limitation was weak and only periphyton infauna appeared to be limited by regional dispersal. At the landscape scale, communities were well-mixed, but strongly influenced by hydrology. Local-scale species dominance was influenced by water-permanence and nutrient enrichment. Nutrient enrichment is limited to water inflow points associated with canals, which may explain its impact in this data set. Hydroperiod and nutrient enrichment are controlled by water managers; our analysis indicates that the decisions they make have strong effects on the communities at the base of the Everglades food web.

Exoneration or Observation? Examining a Novel Difference Between Liars and Truth Tellers

Individual cues to deception are subtle and often missed by lay people and law enforcement alike. Linguistic statement analysis remains a potentially useful way of overcoming individual diagnostic limitations (e.g. Criteria based Content Analysis; Steller & Köhnken, 1989; Reality monitoring; Johnson & Raye, 1981; Scientific Content Analysis; Sapir, 1996). Unfortunately many of these procedures are time-consuming, require in-depth training, as well as lack empirical support and/or external validity. The current dissertation develops a novel approach to statement veracity analysis that is simple to learn, easy to administer, theoretically sound, and empirically validated. Two strategies were proposed for detecting differences between liars' and truth-tellers' statements. Liars were hypothesized to strategically write statements with the goal of self-exoneration. Liars' statements were predicted to contain more first person pronouns and fewer third person pronouns. Truth-tellers were hypothesized to be motivated toward being informative and thus produce statements with fewer first person pronouns and more third person pronouns. Three studies were conducted to test this hypothesis. The first study explored the verbal patterns of exoneration and informativeness focused statements. The second study used a traditional theft paradigm to examine these verbal patterns in guilty liars and innocent truth tellers. In the third study to better match the context of a criminal investigation a cheating paradigm was used in which spontaneous lying was induced and written statements were taken. Support for the first person pronoun hypothesis was found. Limited support was found for the third person pronoun hypothesis. Results, implications, and future directions for the current research are discussed.

Exoneration or observation? Examining a novel difference between liars and truth tellers

Individual cues to deception are subtle and often missed by lay people and law enforcement alike. Linguistic statement analysis remains a potentially useful way of overcoming individual diagnostic limitations (e.g. Criteria based Content Analysis; Steller & Köhnken, 1989; Reality monitoring; Johnson & Raye, 1981; Scientific Content Analysis; Sapir, 1996). Unfortunately many of these procedures are time-consuming, require in-depth training, as well as lack empirical support and/or external validity. The current dissertation develops a novel approach to statement veracity analysis that is simple to learn, easy to administer, theoretically sound, and empirically validated. ^ Two strategies were proposed for detecting differences between liars' and truth-tellers' statements. Liars were hypothesized to strategically write statements with the goal of self-exoneration. Liars' statements were predicted to contain more first person pronouns and fewer third person pronouns. Truth-tellers were hypothesized to be motivated toward being informative and thus produce statements with fewer first person pronouns and more third person pronouns. Three studies were conducted to test this hypothesis. The first study explored the verbal patterns of exoneration and informativeness focused statements. The second study used a traditional theft paradigm to examine these verbal patterns in guilty liars and innocent truth tellers. In the third study to better match the context of a criminal investigation a cheating paradigm was used in which spontaneous lying was induced and written statements were taken. Support for the first person pronoun hypothesis was found. Limited support was found for the third person pronoun hypothesis. Results, implications, and future directions for the current research are discussed.^