Electronic Thesis or Dissertation

In the last two years, the United States has been greatly impacted by the global health pandemic of COVID-19 and a renewed national recognition of racial injustice catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd. These crises have created extensive pressures for school leaders to revamp their policies and procedures to ensure physiological safety and address systemic racism in schools, respectively. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how school principals dealt with and reacted to COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd and the pressures of this crisis context. Guided by multiple contextual lenses and theoretical frameworks, this study used an abductive analysis approach to uncover surprising and anomalous data to build renewed understandings in educational leadership. In doing so, I discovered elements of healthcare and sensemaking around life and death that led to the integration of a healthcare humanization framework. Together, this study found that principals adopted new or shifted roles and identities that focused on humanizing practices. Principals became first responders; mediators of health, political, and humanizing communications; needs-based leaders; civil rights leaders; and leaders who sought agency by supporting others in uncontrollable situations. These changes were embedded in systems that remained acontexual and dehumanistic that created tensions for leaders to navigate. These findings supported the early developments of a humanizing leadership peri-crisis framework to elucidate leaders’ responses in crisis contexts particularly when loss is imminent. This research is significant because the literature on theoretical frameworks for crisis school leadership is small and even fewer studies have operationalized humanizing school leadership practices. Recommendations based on the findings are also proposed for researchers,
practitioners, and policy-makers.

Sharks respond to low frequency pulsed sounds but are documented to lack the capacity to detect these sounds beyond the acoustic near field. The purpose of my study was to quantify the distance blacktip sharks (Carcharhinus limbatus) oriented to sound stimuli, and determine if responses occurred in the far field. Using an aerial drone and underwater speaker, C. limbatus were filmed responding to sound stimuli (100 – 200 Hz; 200 – 400 Hz; and 400 – 800 Hz). Upon detection, C. limbatus elicited a 20 – 160° turn from the speaker, and rapidly swam away. Sharks responded to all frequencies from at least 62 m, and 71.6% of all responses (n = 209) occurred in the far field. This indicates that blacktip sharks can detect and orient away from a sound stimulus at distances that extend beyond the acoustic near field, which suggests that they are not detecting sound using the inner ear otoconia.

The 21st Century is seeing an unprecedented wave of psychedelic drug research after decades of stagnancy. Despite this revival, there has been little research or interest in the current revival of psychedelic subculture or the attitudes of psychedelic users today—from here referred to as “psychedelia.” This qualitative study of 19 self-described psychedelic users/psychedelia members probes their intimate experiences with psychedelic drugs, their involvement in the broader subculture, and their political and social beliefs. By analyzing the subculture through post-subcultural theory, this study examines the state of psychedelic subculture today, its participants, and members beliefs in relation to drugs, politics, and society. Findings show psychedelia exists as a loose subculture, yet has several parallels to the hippies demographically and politically. Second, psychedelia members share several values such as openness, compassion, and caring for others. Third, despite their pessimism towards America’s future, interviewees engage in everyday activism to help disenfranchised groups.

Researching the determinants of bank failure is an important task, yet the extant literature on bank failure early warning models fail to identify which model technique, sampling methodology, or set of coefficients provides the most accurate model when predicting failure on out-of-sample data. In this two-essay study, I examine previously published studies on bank failure prediction to determine with statistical significance which among the chosen set is most accurate. I also examine the effects of bias-adjusting models from the Machine Learning literature to determine if bias-correcting sampling algorithms improve accuracy.
In the first essay, I replicate three bank failure models (Martin (1977), Cole and White (2012), and DeYoung and Torna (2013) and use them to demonstrate the importance of out-of-sample predictive accuracy using bias-adjusting metrics and the use of McNemar’s Test to show, with statistical significance, that one set of predictive variables is better than the rest. Future researchers may use this framework to demonstrate significant contributions to the field, and regulators may apply these strategies to choose between candidate early warning models. I also test whether including savings banks (in addition to commercial banks) affects out-of-sample predictive accuracy.

Lack of resources, mental health issues, low self-esteem, financial hardships and other maladaptive coping patterns are stressors that significantly impact low-income mothers. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence and perceived stress among low-income Brazilian mothers. Additionally, the study investigated the influence of age, educational level, and employment status on the relationship between participants’ emotional intelligence and perceived stress.
Sixty-eight (n = 68) adult low-income Brazilian mothers receiving financial assistance from the Centers of Reference in Social Services (CRAS) in Brazil participated in this correlational study. Recruitment and interviews of the participants were conducted by Brazilian case managers. The Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT), Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-14), and a demographic questionnaire were used to collect data. Results from a Pearson correlation coefficient (Pearson’s r) test indicated a negative correlation between emotional intelligence and stress in the sample. The findings from the multiple regression analysis revealed that the correlation between emotional intelligence and perceived stress in low-income Brazilian mothers does not differ based on age, educational level, or employment.

Although state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are often viewed as a model of biological object recognition, they lack many computational and architectural motifs that are postulated to contribute to robust perception in biological neural systems. For example, modern CNNs lack lateral connections, which greatly outnumber feed-forward excitatory connections in primary sensory cortical areas and mediate feature-specific competition between neighboring neurons to form robust, sparse representations of sensory stimuli for downstream tasks. In this thesis, I hypothesize that CNN layers equipped with lateral competition better approximate the response characteristics and dynamics of neurons in the mammalian primary visual cortex, leading to increased robustness under noise and/or adversarial attacks relative to current robust CNN layers. To test this hypothesis, I develop a new class of CNNs called LCANets, which simulate recurrent, feature-specific lateral competition between neighboring neurons via a sparse coding model termed the Locally Competitive Algorithm (LCA). I first perform an analysis of the response properties of LCA and show that sparse representations formed by lateral competition more accurately mirror response characteristics of primary visual cortical populations and are more useful for downstream tasks like object recognition than previous sparse CNNs, which approximate competition with winner-take-all mechanisms implemented via thresholding.

This thesis examines contemporary African-American church rhetoric within the Protestant evangelical tradition, focusing specifically on two influential preachers, one past and one present: Thomas Adams (1583-1652) and Thomas Dexter Jakes, also known as T.D. Jakes. I analyze sermons by both men to show common features in their strategic use of religious rhetoric. In particular, I focus on their organization of entire sermons around a guiding metaphor and on their creative use of references to various kinds of non-religious experiences to reach their targeted audience. Also, because this comparison has not been made before, I seek to discover the influential impact of early modern religious rhetoric on contemporary religious rhetoric in the church and its limitations. But finally, I argue that while Adams sees spiritual rebirth as the way to heaven, Jakes treats it as the beginning of a new life on earth.

Providing family caregiving during transitional care of a stroke patient is the most challenging for family caregivers. This is because of the shift in the care environment from a hospital with an organizational culture to a home with a traditional culture. Yet, cultural influences on family caregiving during transitional care are not well studied. This ethnographic study aims to describe the family caregiving of older Thai-Isan stroke survivors through the transition from hospital to home. This study employs Lininger's culture care theory (CCT) as the theoretical framework and utilizes the ethnonursing method to discover cultural knowledge. Data was collected through a demographic questionnaire, participant observations, and a semi-structured interview. Data was analyzed using the Four Phases of the Data Analysis Enabler. Fifteen dyads of older stroke patients and their family caregivers were recruited following the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The research settings included Srinagarind Hospital units and key informants’ homes in a Thai-Isan community.

The potential of paper waste-derived activated carbon was investigated for the removal of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide from landfill gas. Activated carbon materials were prepared by carbonizing paper waste followed by acid treatment to remove ash, mixing with aqueous phase potassium hydroxide, and activation via microwave heating. Activated samples were tested using thermogravimetric analysis to determine their equilibrium uptake of carbon dioxide. The adsorbent materials were modified with both tetraethylenepentamine and diethanolamine to potentially increase the carbon dioxide uptake, however, all the modified samples had a performance significantly worse than their unmodified counterparts. Adsorbent screening was conducted in conditions mimicking that of landfill gas, namely temperature of 40 °C and 40% carbon dioxide in nitrogen. Performant samples were identified as those achieving uptakes greater than 3 wt.%. The best performing sample achieved an uptake of 5.03 wt.% and maintained 97% of its uptake during 100 successive adsorption-desorption cycles. Column-breakthrough experiments demonstrated that the final candidate achieved complete removal of both carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, suggesting viability for larger scale landfill gas purification.

This thesis explores the cross-cultural demands from self-driving cars in regards to their trust, safety, and driving styles. Through the use of international survey data we establish several AI trust and behavior metrics that can be used for understanding cross-cultural expectations from self-driving cars that can potentially address problems of trust between passengers and self-driving cars, social acceptability of self-driving cars, and development of customized autonomous driving technologies. Further this thesis provides a serverless data-collection framework for future research in driving behaviors.