Against all odds: Success stories of Latino students who survived the educational pipeline

The purpose of this interview study was to explore the experiences of Latino students, from their perspectives, as they journeyed through the educational pipeline, particularly the part focusing on the transfer experience from a 2-year college to a 4-year institution. This was accomplished by conducting in-depth interviews with 17 self-identified Latino men and women. All of the participants had attended Florida International University for at least 1 semester and had transferred from Miami Dade College. The participants varied in age, generational status, and cultural identity.^ The participants were asked to reflect on the external and internal influences that lead them to the 4-year institution. Tinto's (1993) model of student departure theory provided the theoretical framework for data collection and analysis. Based on the coding of the interviews, numerous themes emerged, including the role of the family, the impact of early education, the experiences of being Latino in Miami, the decisions to choose a college, the experience at the 2-year institution, the experience with the transfer process, and the obstacles and strategies the participants used for overcoming obstacles. These themes were furthered developed to determine which influences were most important for a successful journey through the educational pipeline. ^ The study found that viewing the pipeline via the students' perspectives juxtaposed with Tinto's (1993) model of student departure gave greater insight into the experiences of a population of students who have been underrepresented in higher education. The findings of this case study indicate that the transfer process for Latinos attending a Hispanic Serving Institution such as Florida International University, situated in a majority-minority city, is complex, with participants having to rely on peers and significant others for pertinent information and support. Several factors, including the importance of positive support networks and increased confidence nurtured by the 2-year institution, influenced the students' transfer to a 4-year institution. For professionals in the field, the findings of this study may lead to a broader understanding of the experiences of Latino students in the pipeline and, more importantly, assist college administrators and faculty in successfully guiding a population through a 4-year institution who first came via a 2-year institution. ^

The nitrate to ammonia and ceramic (NAC) process for the denitration and immobilization of low-level radioactive liquid waste (LLW)

Hazardous radioactive liquid waste is the legacy of more than 50 years of plutonium production associated with the United States' nuclear weapons program. It is estimated that more than 245,000 tons of nitrate wastes are stored at facilities such as the single-shell tanks (SST) at the Hanford Site in the state of Washington, and the Melton Valley storage tanks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. In order to develop an innovative, new technology for the destruction and immobilization of nitrate-based radioactive liquid waste, the United State Department of Energy (DOE) initiated the research project which resulted in the technology known as the Nitrate to Ammonia and Ceramic (NAC) process. However, inasmuch as the nitrate anion is highly mobile and difficult to immobilize, especially in relatively porous cement-based grout which has been used to date as a method for the immobilization of liquid waste, it presents a major obstacle to environmental clean-up initiatives. Thus, in an effort to contribute to the existing body of knowledge and enhance the efficacy of the NAC process, this research involved the experimental measurement of the rheological and heat transfer behaviors of the NAC product slurry and the determination of the optimal operating parameters for the continuous NAC chemical reaction process. Test results indicate that the NAC product slurry exhibits a typical non-Newtonian flow behavior. Correlation equations for the slurry's rheological properties and heat transfer rate in a pipe flow have been developed; these should prove valuable in the design of a full-scale NAC processing plant. The 20-percent slurry exhibited a typical dilatant (shear thickening) behavior and was in the turbulent flow regime due to its lower viscosity. The 40-percent slurry exhibited a typical pseudoplastic (shear thinning) behavior and remained in the laminar flow regime throughout its experimental range. The reactions were found to be more efficient in the lower temperature range investigated. With respect to leachability, the experimental final NAC ceramic waste form is comparable to the final product of vitrification, the technology chosen by DOE to treat these wastes. As the NAC process has the potential of reducing the volume of nitrate-based radioactive liquid waste by as much as 70 percent, it not only promises to enhance environmental remediation efforts but also effect substantial cost savings. ^

Essays on the impact of stakeholders' sentiment on the financial decision making process

The most important factor that affects the decision making process in finance is the risk which is usually measured by variance (total risk) or systematic risk (beta). Since investors’ sentiment (whether she is an optimist or pessimist) plays a very important role in the choice of beta measure, any decision made for the same asset within the same time horizon will be different for different individuals. In other words, there will neither be homogeneity of beliefs nor the rational expectation prevalent in the market due to behavioral traits. This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first essay, “ Investor Sentiment and Intrinsic Stock Prices”, a new technical trading strategy was developed using a firm specific individual sentiment measure. This behavioral based trading strategy forecasts a range within which a stock price moves in a particular period and can be used for stock trading. Results indicate that sample firms trade within a range and give signals as to when to buy or sell. In the second essay, “Managerial Sentiment and the Value of the Firm”, examined the effect of managerial sentiment on the project selection process using net present value criterion and also effect of managerial sentiment on the value of firm. Final analysis reported that high sentiment and low sentiment managers obtain different values for the same firm before and after the acceptance of a project. Changes in the cost of capital, weighted cost of average capital were found due to managerial sentiment. In the last essay, “Investor Sentiment and Optimal Portfolio Selection”, analyzed how the investor sentiment affects the nature and composition of the optimal portfolio as well as the portfolio performance. Results suggested that the choice of the investor sentiment completely changes the portfolio composition, i.e., the high sentiment investor will have a completely different choice of assets in the portfolio in comparison with the low sentiment investor. The results indicated the practical application of behavioral model based technical indicator for stock trading. Additional insights developed include the valuation of firms with a behavioral component and the importance of distinguishing portfolio performance based on sentiment factors.

A study of stock market fluctuations and their relation to business conditions

Most research on stock prices is based on the present value model or the more general consumption-based model. When applied to real economic data, both of them are found unable to account for both the stock price level and its volatility. Three essays here attempt to both build a more realistic model, and to check whether there is still room for bubbles in explaining fluctuations in stock prices. In the second chapter, several innovations are simultaneously incorporated into the traditional present value model in order to produce more accurate model-based fundamental prices. These innovations comprise replacing with broad dividends the more narrow traditional dividends that are more commonly used, a nonlinear artificial neural network (ANN) forecasting procedure for these broad dividends instead of the more common linear forecasting models for narrow traditional dividends, and a stochastic discount rate in place of the constant discount rate. Empirical results show that the model described above predicts fundamental prices better, compared with alternative models using linear forecasting process, narrow dividends, or a constant discount factor. Nonetheless, actual prices are still largely detached from fundamental prices. The bubblelike deviations are found to coincide with business cycles. The third chapter examines possible cointegration of stock prices with fundamentals and non-fundamentals. The output gap is introduced to form the nonfundamental part of stock prices. I use a trivariate Vector Autoregression (TVAR) model and a single equation model to run cointegration tests between these three variables. Neither of the cointegration tests shows strong evidence of explosive behavior in the DJIA and S&P 500 data. Then, I applied a sup augmented Dickey-Fuller test to check for the existence of periodically collapsing bubbles in stock prices. Such bubbles are found in S&P data during the late 1990s. Employing econometric tests from the third chapter, I continue in the fourth chapter to examine whether bubbles exist in stock prices of conventional economic sectors on the New York Stock Exchange. The ‘old economy’ as a whole is not found to have bubbles. But, periodically collapsing bubbles are found in Material and Telecommunication Services sectors, and the Real Estate industry group.

Reduced-parameter model of head-related transfer functions for synthesized spatial audio

Digital systems can generate left and right audio channels that create the effect of virtual sound source placement (spatialization) by processing an audio signal through pairs of Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) or, equivalently, Head-Related Impulse Responses (HRIRs). The spatialization effect is better when individually-measured HRTFs or HRIRs are used than when generic ones (e.g., from a mannequin) are used. However, the measurement process is not available to the majority of users. There is ongoing interest to find mechanisms to customize HRTFs or HRIRs to a specific user, in order to achieve an improved spatialization effect for that subject. Unfortunately, the current models used for HRTFs and HRIRs contain over a hundred parameters and none of those parameters can be easily related to the characteristics of the subject. This dissertation proposes an alternative model for the representation of HRTFs, which contains at most 30 parameters, all of which have a defined functional significance. It also presents methods to obtain the value of parameters in the model to make it approximately equivalent to an individually-measured HRTF. This conversion is achieved by the systematic deconstruction of HRIR sequences through an augmented version of the Hankel Total Least Squares (HTLS) decomposition approach. An average 95% match (fit) was observed between the original HRIRs and those re-constructed from the Damped and Delayed Sinusoids (DDSs) found by the decomposition process, for ipsilateral source locations. The dissertation also introduces and evaluates an HRIR customization procedure, based on a multilinear model implemented through a 3-mode tensor, for mapping of anatomical data from the subjects to the HRIR sequences at different sound source locations. This model uses the Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition (HOSVD) method to represent the HRIRs and is capable of generating customized HRIRs from easily attainable anatomical measurements of a new intended user of the system. Listening tests were performed to compare the spatialization performance of customized, generic and individually-measured HRIRs when they are used for synthesized spatial audio. Statistical analysis of the results confirms that the type of HRIRs used for spatialization is a significant factor in the spatialization success, with the customized HRIRs yielding better results than generic HRIRs.

Essays on the Impact of Stakeholders' Sentiment on the Financial Decision Making Process

The most important factor that affects the decision making process in finance is the risk which is usually measured by variance (total risk) or systematic risk (beta). Since investors' sentiment (whether she is an optimist or pessimist) plays a very important role in the choice of beta measure, any decision made for the same asset within the same time horizon will be different for different individuals. In other words, there will neither be homogeneity of beliefs nor the rational expectation prevalent in the market due to behavioral traits. This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first essay, Investor Sentiment and Intrinsic Stock Prices, a new technical trading strategy is developed using a firm specific individual sentiment measure. This behavioral based trading strategy forecasts a range within which a stock price moves in a particular period and can be used for stock trading. Results show that sample firms trade within a range and show signals as to when to buy or sell. The second essay, Managerial Sentiment and the Value of the Firm, examines the effect of managerial sentiment on the project selection process using net present value criterion and also effect of managerial sentiment on the value of firm. Findings show that high sentiment and low sentiment managers obtain different values for the same firm before and after the acceptance of a project. The last essay, Investor Sentiment and Optimal Portfolio Selection, analyzes how the investor sentiment affects the nature and composition of the optimal portfolio as well as the performance measures. Results suggest that the choice of the investor sentiment completely changes the portfolio composition, i.e., the high sentiment investor will have a completely different choice of assets in the portfolio in comparison with the low sentiment investor. The results indicate the practical application of behavioral model based technical indicators for stock trading. Additional insights developed include the valuation of firms with a behavioral component and the importance of distinguishing portfolio performance based on sentiment factors.

Planning Buy-Sell Agreements In The Hospitality Industry

In the article - Planning Buy-Sell Agreements In The Hospitality Industry - by John M. Tarras, Assistant Professor, School of Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Management at Michigan State University, the author initially observes: “The vast majority of hospitality firms (restaurants, hotels, etc.) would be considered closely-held corporations. As such, they have unique planning problems compared to large, publicly-traded hospitality firms. One area of special concern to the closely-held hospitality firm is the planning and adoption of a buy-sell agreement.” The above thesis statement outlines the heart of the article; the buy-sell agreement in regard to smaller [closely held, as Tarras calls them] corporations. The theory is narrow and pro-active, spanning the gap between personal-to-corporate stock manipulations. “The primary purpose of a buy-sell agreement is to contribute to the orderly transfer of a shareholder's stock in a hospitality firm upon some future incident [typically retirement, withdrawal of a shareholder, disability, or death], as Tarras defines the concept. “The hospitality firm or the other shareholders would be committed to purchase the departing shareholder's stock at an agreed upon price and method, and to ensure that ample cash will be obtainable for such an impending sale. The buy-sell agreement provides a market for the shareholder or the shareholder's estate for the sale of otherwise illiquid stock,” the author further provides as canons of buy-sell agreements. In defining the buy-sell agreement with restrictive clauses, Tarras demonstrates, “…many closely-held hospitality firms desire to limit ownership to those individuals, either family or principal corporate employees, who are essential to the well-being of the firm.” Tarras says, another element of the buy-sell agreement is to furnish the departing shareholder with liquidity. “…there typically is some form of cash down payment with the remainder denoted by an interest-bearing promissory note [usually 5 to 15 years],” he informs. “The departing shareholders may require that the hospitality firm pledge the assets of the firm and that the remaining shareholders personally guarantee the promissory note.” “…the most frequent reason for establishing buy-sell agreements is for estate planning purposes,” Tarras says. There are tax advantages and liabilities for both the seller and buyer of stock via the buy-sell agreement, and the author enumerates many of these. One, big advantage of the buy-sell agreement is that it provides for the running of the company with a minimum of disruption through the stock-cash transition process, Tarras offers.

System-on-a-Chip (SoC) based hardware acceleration in Register Transfer Level (RTL) design

Today, modern System-on-a-Chip (SoC) systems have grown rapidly due to the increased processing power, while maintaining the size of the hardware circuit. The number of transistors on a chip continues to increase, but current SoC designs may not be able to exploit the potential performance, especially with energy consumption and chip area becoming two major concerns. Traditional SoC designs usually separate software and hardware. Thus, the process of improving the system performance is a complicated task for both software and hardware designers. The aim of this research is to develop hardware acceleration workflow for software applications. Thus, system performance can be improved with constraints of energy consumption and on-chip resource costs. The characteristics of software applications can be identified by using profiling tools. Hardware acceleration can have significant performance improvement for highly mathematical calculations or repeated functions. The performance of SoC systems can then be improved, if the hardware acceleration method is used to accelerate the element that incurs performance overheads. The concepts mentioned in this study can be easily applied to a variety of sophisticated software applications. The contributions of SoC-based hardware acceleration in the hardware-software co-design platform include the following: (1) Software profiling methods are applied to H.264 Coder-Decoder (CODEC) core. The hotspot function of aimed application is identified by using critical attributes such as cycles per loop, loop rounds, etc. (2) Hardware acceleration method based on Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is used to resolve system bottlenecks and improve system performance. The identified hotspot function is then converted to a hardware accelerator and mapped onto the hardware platform. Two types of hardware acceleration methods – central bus design and co-processor design, are implemented for comparison in the proposed architecture. (3) System specifications, such as performance, energy consumption, and resource costs, are measured and analyzed. The trade-off of these three factors is compared and balanced. Different hardware accelerators are implemented and evaluated based on system requirements. 4) The system verification platform is designed based on Integrated Circuit (IC) workflow. Hardware optimization techniques are used for higher performance and less resource costs. Experimental results show that the proposed hardware acceleration workflow for software applications is an efficient technique. The system can reach 2.8X performance improvements and save 31.84% energy consumption by applying the Bus-IP design. The Co-processor design can have 7.9X performance and save 75.85% energy consumption.

Process of privatization: Benefits of *reform in management of public housing

The study of the private management of public housing is an important topic to be critically analyzed as the government search for ways to increase efficiency in providing housing for the poor. Public Housing Authorities must address the cost for repairing or replacing the deteriorating housing stock, the increase in the need for affordable housing, and the lack of supply. There is growing pressure on efficient use of public funds that has heightened the need for profound structural reform. An important strategy for carrying out such reform is through privatization. Although privatization does not work in every case, the majority position in the traditional privatization literature is that reliance on private organizations normally, but not always, results in cost savings. ^ The primary purpose of this dissertation is to determine whether a consensus exist among decision-makers on the efficiency of privatizing the management of public housing. A secondary purpose is to review the techniques (best practices) used by the private sector that results in cost-efficiencies in the management of public housing. The study employs the use of a triangulated research design utilizing cross-sectional survey methodology that included use of a survey instrument to solicit responses from the private managers. The study consists of qualitative methods using interviews from key informants of private-sector management firms and public housing agencies, case studies, focus groups, archival records and housing authorities documents. ^ Results indicated that important decision-makers perceive that private managers made a positive contribution to cost-efficiencies in the management of public housing. The performance of private contractors served as a yardstick for comparison of efficiency of services that are produced in-house. The study concluded that private managers made the benefits of their management techniques well known creating a sense of competition between public and private managers. Competition from private contractors spurred municipal worker and management productivity improvements creating better management results for the public housing authorities. The study results are in concert with a review of recent research and studies that also concluded private managers have some distinct advantages to controlling costs in the management of public housing. ^

A Study of Stock Market Fluctuations and their Relations to Business Conditions

Most research on stock prices is based on the present value model or the more general consumption-based model. When applied to real economic data, both of them are found unable to account for both the stock price level and its volatility. Three essays here attempt to both build a more realistic model, and to check whether there is still room for bubbles in explaining fluctuations in stock prices. In the second chapter, several innovations are simultaneously incorporated into the traditional present value model in order to produce more accurate model-based fundamental prices. These innovations comprise replacing with broad dividends the more narrow traditional dividends that are more commonly used, a nonlinear artificial neural network (ANN) forecasting procedure for these broad dividends instead of the more common linear forecasting models for narrow traditional dividends, and a stochastic discount rate in place of the constant discount rate. Empirical results show that the model described above predicts fundamental prices better, compared with alternative models using linear forecasting process, narrow dividends, or a constant discount factor. Nonetheless, actual prices are still largely detached from fundamental prices. The bubble-like deviations are found to coincide with business cycles. The third chapter examines possible cointegration of stock prices with fundamentals and non-fundamentals. The output gap is introduced to form the non-fundamental part of stock prices. I use a trivariate Vector Autoregression (TVAR) model and a single equation model to run cointegration tests between these three variables. Neither of the cointegration tests shows strong evidence of explosive behavior in the DJIA and S&P 500 data. Then, I applied a sup augmented Dickey-Fuller test to check for the existence of periodically collapsing bubbles in stock prices. Such bubbles are found in S&P data during the late 1990s. Employing econometric tests from the third chapter, I continue in the fourth chapter to examine whether bubbles exist in stock prices of conventional economic sectors on the New York Stock Exchange. The ‘old economy’ as a whole is not found to have bubbles. But, periodically collapsing bubbles are found in Material and Telecommunication Services sectors, and the Real Estate industry group.

System-on-a-Chip (SoC) based Hardware Acceleration in Register Transfer Level (RTL) Design

Today, modern System-on-a-Chip (SoC) systems have grown rapidly due to the increased processing power, while maintaining the size of the hardware circuit. The number of transistors on a chip continues to increase, but current SoC designs may not be able to exploit the potential performance, especially with energy consumption and chip area becoming two major concerns. Traditional SoC designs usually separate software and hardware. Thus, the process of improving the system performance is a complicated task for both software and hardware designers. The aim of this research is to develop hardware acceleration workflow for software applications. Thus, system performance can be improved with constraints of energy consumption and on-chip resource costs. The characteristics of software applications can be identified by using profiling tools. Hardware acceleration can have significant performance improvement for highly mathematical calculations or repeated functions. The performance of SoC systems can then be improved, if the hardware acceleration method is used to accelerate the element that incurs performance overheads. The concepts mentioned in this study can be easily applied to a variety of sophisticated software applications. The contributions of SoC-based hardware acceleration in the hardware-software co-design platform include the following: (1) Software profiling methods are applied to H.264 Coder-Decoder (CODEC) core. The hotspot function of aimed application is identified by using critical attributes such as cycles per loop, loop rounds, etc. (2) Hardware acceleration method based on Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is used to resolve system bottlenecks and improve system performance. The identified hotspot function is then converted to a hardware accelerator and mapped onto the hardware platform. Two types of hardware acceleration methods – central bus design and co-processor design, are implemented for comparison in the proposed architecture. (3) System specifications, such as performance, energy consumption, and resource costs, are measured and analyzed. The trade-off of these three factors is compared and balanced. Different hardware accelerators are implemented and evaluated based on system requirements. 4) The system verification platform is designed based on Integrated Circuit (IC) workflow. Hardware optimization techniques are used for higher performance and less resource costs. Experimental results show that the proposed hardware acceleration workflow for software applications is an efficient technique. The system can reach 2.8X performance improvements and save 31.84% energy consumption by applying the Bus-IP design. The Co-processor design can have 7.9X performance and save 75.85% energy consumption.