Effect of Color on License Plate Recall

Accurate and quick license plate recall is important for identification purposes, especially in emergency situations, such as hit-and-runs. Previous research has shown that there are particular patterns of license plate designs that are easier to recall, such as a higher digit to letter ratio. Missouri license plate patterns (AB1-C2D) somewhat diverge from what research suggests works best for recall. The current study sought to determine if including color into license plate designs would improve recall. There were 48 undergraduate students from Missouri State University who participated in the experiment. Participants saw 100 timed trials of license plate stimuli, where they saw the stimuli for half a second, waited six seconds, then had 10 seconds to recall the license plate stimulus they saw. Participants randomly saw one of two formats for the license plate stimuli; either the digits in the stimuli would be in color or the stimuli would be in all-black text. The hypothesis that the inclusion of color would improve recall was not supported, as there were no significant differences in recall between the two groups based on format. While color may be useful, future research should continue to look for additional ways to improve designs that would be easy to implement

Sensor Relationship Inference in Single Resident Smart Homes Using Time Series

Determining sensor relationships in smart environments is complex due to the variety and volume of time series information they provide. Moreover, identifying sensor relationships to connect them with actuators is difficult for smart home users who may not have technical experience. Yet, gathering information on sensor relationships is a crucial intermediate step towards more advanced smart home applications such as advanced policy generation or automatic sensor configuration. Therefore, in this thesis, I propose a novel unsupervised learning approach, named SeReIn, to automatically group sensors by their inherent relationships solely using time series data for single resident smart homes. SeReIn extracts three features from smart home time series data - Frequent Next Event (FNE), Time Delta (TD), and Frequency (FQ). It then applies Spectral Clustering, K-Means clustering, and DBSCAN to group the related sensors. The application of unsupervised learning enables this approach to operate anywhere in the smart home domain regardless of the sensor types and deployment scenarios. SeReIn functions on both large deployments consisting of around 70 sensors and small deployments of only 10 sensors. Evaluation of SeReIn on real-world smart home datasets has shown that it can recognize inherent spatial relationships. Using three different unsupervised clustering evaluation metrics: Calinski-Harabasz Score, Silhouette Score, and Davies-Bouldin Score, I ensure that SeReIn successfully builds clusters based on sensor relationships

Exploring the Role of Social Capital in Beginning Farmer Success in the State of Missouri

As the average age of the American farmer continues to increase (NASS, 2019), concerns about attracting future agriculturalists remain. Several governmental programs exist to assist beginning farmers and ranchers (generally defined as those with 10 years or less experience as a principal operator), but unfortunately numerous barriers remain. Using focus groups and qualitative analysis, this research aims to identify critical factors of success. Focus group participants were farmers who participated in beginning farmer and rancher programs, those who had not participated in beginning farmer and rancher programs, and program administrators . Attention was paid to their use of social capital as they entered the industry

Common Ground: An Examination of Rural Planning and the Growing Amish Presence in Missouri

How do rural communities in Missouri balance the potentially conflicting land use and economic planning needs between incoming and growing Amish populations and non-Amish populations? This qualitative research addresses a gap in the literature by examining the growing Amish population in rural America through the lens of community planning. A comparative case study was conducted in three Amish communities in Missouri and included interviews with public officials who engage in planning and planning-related tasks and an Amish leader at each case site. This project finds that Amish growth and expansion is resulting in both community conflicts and collaborative efforts in rural areas. The project culminates in the development of implications that planners might consider in order to actualize better outcomes for rural communities in the midst of the growth of this ethnoreligious group

Use of Force under Scrutiny: Impacts of Body-Worn Cameras on Types of Force Used by Police

While several studies have examined the impact of body-worn cameras (BWCs) on the frequency of use of force incidents with mixed results, research evaluating the impact of BWCs on types of force is scant. Utilizing 86-months of use of force report data from a medium-sized mid-Atlantic police department (36 months pre, and 50 months post-BWC implementation), the current study addresses limitations in prior BWC research and explores the potential relationship between BWCs and the level/types of force used through the use of Vector Autoregression Analysis

What Camelot Means : Women and LGBTQ+ Authors Paving the Way for a More Inclusive Arthuriana through Young Adult Literature

Arthurian literature has long been regarded as the domain of “dead white men,” dominated by Thomas Malory and Lord Alfred Tennyson. However, since medieval times, women have also been producing Arthurian literature that not only treats the women characters of the story more equitably, but makes social commentary on how the marginalized of their societies are treated. More recently, women and LGBTQ+ authors (basically, authors who are not cisgender white men) have answered the call for more diverse Young Adult literature with an Arthuriana that has a place for all, both creating a more diverse and equitable Camelot and giving its marginalized characters, especially young women, the power to change their societies for the better. These women and LGBTQ+ authors of YA Literature are the driving force behind not only a more diverse and accepting Camelot, but a more equitable Arthuriana for all readers and scholars

A generalized alternating harmonic series

This paper introduces a generalization of the alternating harmonic series, expresses the sum in two closed forms, and examines the relationship between these sums and the harmonic numbers

Affinity-Seeking: Student Desirability and Motivation in the Classroom

Affinity-seeking research once provided teachers with effective strategies to create an overall better classroom environment. Over the last twenty years there has been no continuation of this research and the effectiveness of these strategies seemed to be agreed upon. The purpose of this study is to bring affinity-seeking research back into the modern era and see how motivation is affected for both in-person and online classes. This study is a contribution that adds to these strategies for effectiveness in both in-person and online classrooms

Leading Change in Academic Libraries

Chapter 11: The Evolution of the STEM Libraries at Florida State University, co-authored by Rachel Besara, MSU faculty member. Institutions of higher education and academic libraries are not the traditional organizations they once were. They are subject to a variety of forces, including shifting and changing populations, technological changes, public demands for affordability and accountability, and changing approaches to research and learning. Academic libraries can no longer establish their excellence and ground their missions, visions, and strategic directions using the old means and methods. Leading Change in Academic Libraries is a collection of 20 change stories authored by academic librarians from different types of four-year institutions. Librarians tell the story firsthand of how they managed major change in processes, functions, services, programs, or overall organizations using John Kotter’s Eight-Stage Process of Creating Major Change as a framework for examining change at their institutions, measuring their successes and areas for improvement, and determining progress.https://bearworks.missouristate.edu/books/1000/thumbnail.jp

A Novel UV Resistance in Rad23-Depleted Tetrahymena thermophila

Rad23 is a highly conserved cellular scaffold protein which participates in the nucleotide excision repair pathway and ubiquitin proteasome system. It is hypothesized that the contradictory roles of Rad23 within these two systems, acting to enhance stability or facilitate degradation respectively, could be regulated via post-translational modification of the ubiquitin-like domain of the protein. To this end, a Rad23 somatic knockout cell line was established in Tetrahymena thermophila, with the eventual goal of knocking in a mutant Rad23 protein lacking potential for UbL ubiquitylation. In contrast to the UV-sensitive phenotype observed in similar models, Rad23-depleted Tetrahymena cell lines displayed significantly increased resistance to UV irradiation. While the mechanism of this survivability remains poorly understood, this model may shed new light on potential compensatory DNA repair mechanisms, pathways of failed apoptotic induction, or additional novel roles of the Rad23 accessory protein that have yet to be explored