Division, College, and Department Research

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Research, creative, and scholarly works created by the university community organized by area.

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A Brief Exploration in Statistics and Quantum Mechanics
(Texas State University-San Marcos, 2011-05) Blankmeyer, Eric
Quantum mechanics has some probabilistic or statistical features that have been considered paradoxical or exotic; at least, this impression is frequently conveyed in introductory textbooks on the subject and informal explanations of quantum theory. The often idiosyncratic treatment of statistics and probability seems unhelpful to the student and the interested layperson: it may tend to exaggerate and mystify the real differences between the microscopic and the macroscopic worlds. In this paper I try to show that some of the statistical esoterica of quantum mechanics can be made more transparent by their very close analogies to several macroscopic topics.
A Quantitative Comparison of Two Biomechanics Concept Inventory Versions
(2019-07) Wallace, Brian J.; Knudson, Duane V.
This study quantified student responses between two different versions (1 and 3) of the Biomechanics Concept Inventory (BCI) assessment. Fifty students from a comprehensive university in the USA took both BCI versions on the first (pre) and last (post) day of an introductory undergraduate biomechanics course. Students scored significantly higher on BCI 3 for the post-test and gain score (i.e.: difference between pre and post). Eight of the twelve competency areas resulted in significantly different correct scores between versions. Correlations of competencies between versions ranged from -0.13 to 0.43, however, only two were significant. Discriminant analysis of the competency areas determined that BCI 1 predicted overall assessment performance better than BCI 3. The disparate results between versions should be considered in determining which to use.
Active Learning and Student Beliefs About Learning
(International Society of Biomechanics in Sport Conference, 2019-07) Knudson, Duane V.
This study documented the potential change in student epistemology of learning biomechanical concepts over a 5-week introductory biomechanics course implementing low-tech AL exercises. Twenty-five students agreed to participate and completed a pre- and post-test consisting of the Biomechanics Concept Inventory version 2 and two questions on their perceptions about the nature of learning. The active learning instruction increased mastery of biomechanical concepts over levels previously reported for lecture alone. Most students had positive perceptions of active learning experiences, however, some (4-12%) students had negative perceptions and decreased their interest in working with other students. Student epistemology did not change over the course and was not related to mastery of biomechanics concepts.
Ambidextrous Civil Military Relations: Integrating the Two Hands of Peace
(2016-01) Shields, Patricia M.
In January of 2016, Patricia M. Shields, the editor of Armed Forces & Society, addressed the Association of Civil Military Studies of Israel at their bi-annual conference at Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee. The following is the text of her speech. The speech has been slightly modified to incorporate references.
An Examination of the Technological Aspects and Changes Influencing Healthy Girl-Produced Media and How Female Adolescents' Perceive Beauty
(Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, 2013-03) Summers, Emily; Lasser, Jon S.
This mixed methods study explored how technological changes influenced female adolescents' access to and perceptions of healthy girl-produced media images of feminine beauty. We utilized an online survey, web-based interviews, and content analysis of girl-produced media. The study focuses on how 21st century technical advances influenced girls’ access to and use of healthy girl-produced, media-produced female images, and how changes in media technology influenced understandings of beauty. Foci include how the type of media exposure girls consumed influenced their perceptions of beauty; and how girls differed in perceptions of beauty based on amount of media consumed. Finally, we would share how technological changes influenced research methodologies related to adolescent girls’ perceptions of beauty. Interdisciplinary research indicates that understandings and interpretations of beauty may influence females’ success and well-being throughout their lives. Thus, our study could have enduring influence on chosen participants.
Applying Pragmatism to Public Budgeting and Financial Management
(2008-10) Bartle, John R.; Shields, Patricia M.
Pragmatism is a philosophy that emphasizes learning through action and building a knowledge base from experience and reflection. It is a potentially compelling approach for public budgeting and financial management. The largely normative theories of public finance, public financial management and public budgeting are examined and critiqued. We do not seek to abandon these valuable contributions to practice, however they often fail to describe and explain the practices of the field. In some cases, the norms prescribed may not be shared by government officials and citizens, and thus the management or policy prescription become unhelpful. We believe theory should guide practice, but theory must also be informed by practice. We seek to establish a better basis to understand the structure and evolution of government budgeting and finance, and to help practitioners face difficult situations that call for workable solutions. The classical pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Jane Addams is presented and applied to the theories of public finance, budgeting and financial management. Pragmatism focuses on inquiry and the problematic situation. Theories are viewed as tools to resolve the problematic situation. And, just as there are often many tools used to approach a problematic situation, there are many theories that, like tools or maps, are judged by their usefulness. This orientation makes sense for financial management because like all managers, they are focused on solutions to problems and cannot be wedded to academic theories to guide their action when the elected officials and citizens they serve need a solution.
Arctic Change and Possible Influence on Mid-Latitude Climate and Weather: A US CLIVAR White Paper
(2018-03) Cohen, Judah; Zhang, Xiangdong; Francis, Jennifer; Jung, Thomas; Kwok, Ronald; Overland, James E.; Taylor, Patrick; Lee, Sukyoung; Coumou, Dim; Handorf, Doerthe; Semmler, Tido; Vihma, Timo; Smith, Doug; Ballinger, Thomas J.
The Arctic has warmed more than twice as fast as the global average since the mid 20th century, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification (AA). These profound changes to the Arctic system have coincided with a period of ostensibly more frequent events of extreme weather across the Northern Hemisphere (NH) mid-latitudes, including extreme heat and rainfall events and recent severe winters. Though winter temperatures have generally warmed since 1960 over mid-to-high latitudes, the acceleration in the rate of warming at high-latitudes, relative to the rest of the NH, started approximately in 1990. Trends since 1990 show cooling over the NH continents, especially in Northern Eurasia. The possible link between Arctic change and mid-latitude climate and weather has spurred a rush of new observational and modeling studies. A number of workshops held during 2013-2014 have helped frame the problem and have called for continuing and enhancing efforts for improving our understanding of Arctic-mid-latitude linkages and its attribution to the occurrence of extreme climate and weather events. Although these workshops have outlined some of the major challenges and provided broad recommendations, further efforts are needed to synthesize the diversified research results to identify where community consensus and gaps exist. Building upon findings and recommendations of the previous workshops, the US CLIVAR Working Group on Arctic Change and Possible Influence on Mid-latitude Climate and Weather convened an international workshop at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, on February 1-3, 2017. Experts in the fields of atmosphere, ocean, and cryosphere sciences assembled to assess the rapidly evolving state of understanding, identify consensus on knowledge and gaps in research, and develop specific actions to accelerate progress within the research community. With more than 100 participants, the workshop was the largest and most comprehensive gathering of climate scientists to address the topic to date. In this white paper, we synthesize and discuss outcomes from this workshop and activities involving many of the working group members.
Assessment and the Self-Study: The Roles of External Constituencies in Mission-Based Accreditation
(2002-10) Shields, Patricia M.
This document was prepared by Patricia M. Shields (MPA Director, Southwest Texas State University) for use as a handout at her October 2002 Accreditation Institution session at the NASPAA annual conference. The paper is intended to provide insight and suggestions for conducting employer assessments as part of the self study process. It is based on her personal experience and is not issued or endorsed by COPRA. COPRA's "Self Study Instructions" provide the specific instructions and directions for including employer (and other external constituency) assessments in the self study.
Assessment of Shift-Invariant CNN Gaze Mappings for PS-OG Eye Movement Sensors
(IEEE Computer Society, 2019-08) Griffith, Henry; Katrychuk, Dmytro; Komogortsev, Oleg
Photosensor oculography (PS-OG) eye movement sensors offer desirable performance characteristics for integration within wireless head mounted devices (HMDs), including low power consumption and high sampling rates.To address the known performance degradation of these sensors due to HMD shifts, various machine learning techniques have been proposed for mapping sensor outputs to gaze location. This paper advances the understanding of a recently introduced convolutional neural network designed to provide shift invariant gaze mapping within a specified range of sensor translations. Performance is assessed for shift training examples which better reflect the distribution of values that would be generated through manual repositioning of the HMD. The network is shown to exhibit com-parable accuracy for this realistic shift distribution versus a previously considered rectangular grid, thereby enhancing the feasibility of in-field initialization. In addition, this work further supports the practical viability of the proposed initialization process by demonstrating robust mapping performance versus training data scale. The ability to maintain reasonable accuracy for shifts extending beyond those introduced during training is also demonstrated.
Attitudes toward Gays and Lesbians: Gender and Sexism
(2006-04) Ogletree, Shirley M.; Harper, Ann E.
Heterosexuals, particularly males, typically hold more negative attitudes towards gays than lesbians (Herek, 2002; Kerns & Fine, 1994). We explored the relation between sexism and the attitudes toward homosexuality in 99 male and 226 female college students, using the stereotype content model (Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2004), the Attitude towards Lesbians and Gay Men Scale (Herek, 1999) and the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (Glick & Fiske, 2001). For men and women together as well as for each sex separately the sexism measures were significantly correlated with attitudes towards gay men and attitudes toward lesbians. Also, compared to women, men had significantly more negative attitudes towards gay men than lesbians.
Attitudes Toward Sunset Review in Texas
(1990-03) Curry, Landon; Shields, Patricia M.
No abstract prepared.
Automatic Text Summarization with Neural Networks
(2004-06) Kaikhah, Khosrow
A novel technique for summarizing news articles using neural networks is presented. A neural network is trained to learn the relevant features cf sentences that should be included in the summary of the article. The neural network is then modified to generalize and combine the relevant fertures apparent in summary sentences. Finally, the modified neural network is used as a filter to summarize news article.
Biometric Performance as a Function of Gallery Size
(2020-01) Friedman, Lee; Stern, Hal; Prokopenko, Vladyslav; Djanian, Shagen; Griffith, Henry; Komogortsev, Oleg
Many developers of biometric systems start with modest samples before general deployment. But they are interested in how their systems will work with much larger samples. To assist them, we evaluated the effect of gallery size on biometric performance. Identification rates describe the performance of biometric identification, whereas ROC-based measures describe the performance of biometric authentication (verification). Therefore, we examined how increases in gallery size affected identification rates (i.e., Rank-1 Identification Rate, or Rank-1 IR) and ROC-based measures such as equal error rate (EER). We studied these phenomena with synthetic data as well as real data from a face recognition study. It is well known that the Rank-1 IR declines with increasing gallery size. We have provided further insight into this decline. We have shown that this relationship is linear in log(Gallery Size). We have also shown that this decline can be counteracted with the inclusion of additional information (features) for larger gallery sizes. We have also described the curves which can be used to predict how much additional information is required to stabilize the Rank-1 IR as a function of gallery size. These equations are also linear in log(gallery size). We have also shown that the entire ROC curve is not systematically affected by gallery size, and so ROC-based scalar performance metrics such as EER are also stable across gallery size. Unsurpringingly, as additional uncorrelated features are added to the model, EER decreases. We were interested in exploring what changes in similarity score distributions might accompany these declines in EERs. For this, we evaluated the effect of number of features and gallery size on key distribution characteristics (median and IQR) of the genuine and impostor similarity score distributions. We present evidence that these decreases in EER are driven primarily by decreases in the spread of the impostor similarity score distribution.
Brief Communication: A Re-Examination of the Eye Movement Data used by Hooge et al (2018) ["Is human classification by experienced untrained observers a gold standard in fixation detection?"]
(2020-01) Friedman, Lee
Hooge et al. (2018) asked the question: ``Is human classification by experienced untrained observers a gold standard in fixation detection?'' They conclude the answer is no. If they had entitled their paper: ``Is human classification by experienced untrained observers a gold standard in fixation detection when data quality is very poor, data are error-filled, data presentation was not optimal, and the analysis was seriously flawed?'', I would have no case to make. In the present report, I will present evidence to support my view that this latter title is justified. The low-quality data assessment is based on using a relatively imprecise eye-tracker, the absence of head restraint for any subjects, and the use of infants as the majority of subjects (60 of 70 subjects). Allowing subjects with more than 50% missing data (as much as 95%) is also evidence of low-quality data. The error-filled assessment is based on evidence that a number of the ``fixations'' classified by ``experts'' have obvious saccades within them, and that, apparently, a number of fixations were classified on the basis of no signal at all. The evidence for non-optimal data presentation stems from the fact that, in a number of cases, perfectly good data was not presented to the coders. The flaws in the analysis are evidenced by the fact that entire stretches of missing data were considered classified, and that the measurement of saccade amplitude was based on many cases in which there was no saccade at all. Without general evidence to the contrary, it is correct to assume that some human classifiers under some conditions may meet the criteria for a gold standard, and classifiers under other conditions may not. This conditionality is not recognized by Hooge et al. (2018). A fair assessment would conclude that whether or not humans can be considered a gold standard is still very much an open question.
Brief Communication: Three Errors and Two Problems in a Recent Paper: gazeNet : End-to-end Eye-movement Event Detection with Deep Neural Networks (Zemblys, Niehorster, and Holmqvist, 2019)
(2020-04) Friedman, Lee
A final version of this research is now published as of April 13, 2020 in Behavior Research Methods. Access to this article is through this link: Brief communication: Three errors and two problems in a recent paper: gazeNet: End-to-end eye-movement event detection with deep neural networks (Zemblys, Niehorster, and Holmqvist, 2019) https://rdcu.be/b3z4n
Can We Get Some Order Here? The Application of Principles of IT Project Management for Online Library Projects
(Texas State University Libraries, 2012-01) Uzwyshyn, Raymond
This article overviews principles of IT project management for online library projects. It reviews project management methodologies, SWOT analysis, stakeholder documents, agile programming and project management methodologies for library IT and other large library projects reflecting on efficacy and necessity on these projects, especially in the case of large technology projects.
Children of the Colonias: 10 Students from the Southwest United States Border
(2000-03) Chahin, T. Jaime
No abstract prepared.
Citations to Biomechanics Articles from Four Databases
(2022-04) Knudson, Duane V.
Four (Dimensions, Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science) multi-disciplinary databases were searched for journal articles published by one scholar to document the coverage of exercise and sports biomechanics. Cleaned searches returned 65 to 93 articles in common between these databases from 116 journals articles published between 1989 and 2019. Citations and mean citation rates were qualitatively higher for Google Scholar (3206 & 3.2) than the other three databases (1100-1400 & 1.6-2.1). Strong positive correlations (0.88-0.96) of citations between databases indicated that for this case, study citations from subscription databases (Scopus & Web of Science) could be predicted (SEE 3 to 7) from the free databases (Dimensions and Google Scholar). This case study indicated incomplete coverage and subtle inconsistences are likely between these databases in exercise and sport biomechanics. Skillful searching of multiple databases is recommended.
Comparison of Association Between LC Subject Headings And Class Notations in Single- and Multiple-Heading Records
(1987-10) Khosh-khui, Sam Abolghasem
Subject headings and their corresponding class notations of 101,347 of the Library of Congress MARC records were analysed to determine variations in the association between Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSHs) and Library of Congress Classification Notations (LCCNs) with respect to the variations in the number of subject headings per record. As the number of LCSHs per record increased, the association between LCSHs and LCCNs decreased. The probability of having identical LCCNs for identical LCSHs in single-heading records was found to be significantly higher than in multiple heading records. This implies that in recommending a class notation to a patron, distinction should be made between single- and multiple heading bibliographic records.
Cutting Back by Charging More: What Public Administrators Should Know About the Demand for their Products
(1984-04) Shields, Patricia M.
This paper applies the economics "Law of Demand" to the problems of local government decision making. As the title implies, fees can be tools to help local government administrators allocate resources more efficiently. Elementary economic concepts like elasticity, and non-price determinants of demand are applied to local government goods and services. These ideas should help local public administrators analyze and predict their service delivery patterns from an economic point of view. The paper ends with 9 implications for local government user fee policy. Equity issues are developed in detail.

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