Everything’s Bigger in Texas: Examining the Mandatory (and Additional) Financial Burden of Postsecondary Education

Student fees remain an under-researched aspect of postsecondary education and finance (Kelchen, 2016). This study examines the mandatory and additional fees charged to full-time, in-state undergraduate students by public and private not-for-profit four-year institutions in Texas (n=96). Findings demonstrate the average four-year institution in Texas charges over $1,500 per academic year in mandatory fees,$500 higher than the national average. Moreover, private institutions charge an average of $1,100 less than publics, while fees comprise 6.8% of the total cost of attendance at private and 29.1% at publics. Institutions of higher education compose fee explanations above the 12th-grade reading level and only 5.2% of the sample provided fee explanations in a language other than English, thus further marginalizing non-English speaking language populations in Texas. Implications for policy makers, practitioners, and future research are addressed.Educatio

Are We Prepared for the Future? a Case Study on the Education of Journalists

Throughout my college experience at the University of South Carolina as a journalism major, I heard about one thing for four years – senior semester. Senior semester for journalism majors is a set number of classes the student must take his or her senior year, either the last or second to last semester before graduation. It includes four specific classes on reporting, producing, writing and web management. But there is a catch. The four classes do not meet for specific class periods. Students in senior semester meet Monday through Friday from 8:45am to 6:00pm, producing a 4:00pm newscast every day. For four years, journalism students at the University of South Carolina are taught that this senior semester is the absolute best possible training to prepare them for the future. They both look forward to and dread this final phase of their education. But again, they believe that this is the best education out there because that’s what they’ve been told. But is it? Is a senior semester, let alone USC’s senior semester, the best way to educate today’s budding journalists? Does this senior semester provide the real world experience students need in their first job to succeed? I asked these questions of myself, and then I took them into the local news outlet in Columbia and asked them of others. With my thesis project, I wanted to discover if the professors of the program; the past and current students and current employers of those students believe that senior semester is the ultimate answer to educating future journalists

High temperature supercapacitors

The scientific objective of this research program was to determine the feasibility of manufacturing an ionic liquid-based supercapacitor that could operate at temperatures up to 220 °C. A secondary objective was to determine the compatibility of ionic liquids with other cell components (e.g. current collectors) at high temperature and, if required, consider means of mitigating any problems. The industrial motivation for the present work was to develop a supercapacitor capable of working in the harsh environment of deep offshore boreholes. If successful, this technology would allow down-hole telemetry under conditions of mechanical vibration and high temperature. The obstacles, however, were many. All supercapacitor components had to be stable against thermal decomposition up to T ≥ 220 °C. Volatile components had to be eliminated. If possible, the finished device should be able to withstand voltages greater than 4 V, in order to maximise the amount of stored energy. The internal resistance should be as low as possible. Side reactions, particularly faradaic reactions, should be eliminated or suppressed. All liquid components should be gelled to minimise leakage in the event of cell damage. Finally, any emergent problems should be identified. [Continues.

Poly(bisphenol) polymers as passivating agents for carbon electrodes in ionic liquids

Poly(bisphenol) polymers are identified as a new class of passivating agents for carbon electrodes in ionic liquids. They are inert and can readily be deposited as thin, conformal films by electropolymerization. Unlike conventional poly(monophenol) polymers, a single voltammetric scan is sufficient to accomplish their deposition. This is seen, for example, in the cases of poly(bisphenol A) and poly(bisphenol P). In each case, the thickness of the electropolymerized films is determined by the quantum tunneling distance of the faradaic electrons. Thus, film growth terminates when the faradaic electrons can no longer transit the film at a measurable rate. At that point, all the faradaic reactions cease, while the capacitive charging processes continue unabated. Experimentally, film thicknesses are observed in the range 4–30 nm. A challenging test for the poly(bisphenol) polymers is to coat them onto arrays of microelectrodes (RAM electrodes). Normally, microelectrodes are difficult to coat by electropolymerization due to the intense flux of soluble intermediates away from their surfaces. In the present work, however, coating is facile due to the extreme insolubility of the intermediates. This same property makes the films strongly adherent. Such remarkable behavior suggest that poly(bisphenol) films may have an important role to play as passivating agents in supercapacitors. They may also find application in other areas of technology that require thin-film passivity, such as nanostructural engineering and device physics

Mentorability : understanding and exploring first-year students’ perception of engaging in a mentoring relationship at a Hispanic serving institution

Higher education institutions have emphasized retention as one of the measurable outcomes linked with institutional performance, state and federal funding appropriations, and publicized rankings (Hagedorn, 2012). Therefore, higher education institutions intentionally have become more focused on providing a robust first-year college experience, including high-impact practices intended to help with adjustment, transition, and retention of students during their first year. One high-impact practice is a formal mentoring program focused on relationship building, positive peer support, and social guidance (Kuh, Cruce, Shoup, Kinzie, & Gonyea, 2008; Kuh, Kinzie, Buckley, Bridges & Hayek, 2006). More specifically, peer mentoring is an important component of a student’s first year and undergraduate experience (Crisp & Cruz, 2009; Crisp et al., 2017; Gershenfeld, 2014; Jacobi, 1991; Miller, 2004). Mentorability is a term that conceptualizes mentees’ ability to engage in a mutually beneficial and developmental relationship (Reddick, 2014). It focuses on mentees understanding of their role and responsibilities engaging in the relationship. This study employed a phenomenological approach in examining how 17 mentees described their lived experiences of and how they perceived their ability to commit, contribute, and engage in a peer mentoring partnership in a formal mentoring program at an Hispanic Serving Institution. The key findings of the study demonstrated: (1) mentorability as a process: from unclear expectations to viewing a mentor as a lifeline for success; (2) mentees as information seekers and mentors as influential contributors; and (3) communication and open-mindedness as key mentee contributions, trust as a gatekeeper for relationship formation, and mentorability as multi-level of exchange including understanding a mentee’s role extends beyond the reciprocity with the mentor to other peers. Drawing from three social science theories, this study introduces a mentorability conceptual model for practice derived from findings from the study (Astin, 1993; Lin, 2001; Cropanzano et al., 2017). Additional findings, and implications for future research, practice, and theory are discussed.Educational Leadership and Polic

A universal equivalent circuit for carbon-based supercapacitors

A universal equivalent circuit is proposed for carbon-based supercapacitors. The circuit, which actually applies to all porous electrodes having non-branching pores, consists of a single vertical ladder network in series with an RC parallel network. This elegant arrangement explains the three most important shortcomings of present-day supercapacitors, namely open circuit voltage decay, capacitance loss at high frequency, and voltammetric distortion at high scan rate. It also explains the shape of the complex plane impedance plots of commercial devices and reveals why the equivalent series capacitance increases with temperature. Finally, the construction of a solid-state supercapacitor simulator is described. This device is based on a truncated version of the universal equivalent circuit, and it allows experimenters to explore the responses of different supercapacitor designs without having to modify real supercapacitors

Towards Racially Unbiased Skin Tone Estimation via Scene Disambiguation

Virtual facial avatars will play an increasingly important role in immersive communication, games and the metaverse, and it is therefore critical that they be inclusive. This requires accurate recovery of the appearance, represented by albedo, regardless of age, sex, or ethnicity. While significant progress has been made on estimating 3D facial geometry, albedo estimation has received less attention. The task is fundamentally ambiguous because the observed color is a function of albedo and lighting, both of which are unknown. We find that current methods are biased towards light skin tones due to (1) strongly biased priors that prefer lighter pigmentation and (2) algorithmic solutions that disregard the light/albedo ambiguity. To address this, we propose a new evaluation dataset (FAIR) and an algorithm (TRUST) to improve albedo estimation and, hence, fairness. Specifically, we create the first facial albedo evaluation benchmark where subjects are balanced in terms of skin color, and measure accuracy using the Individual Typology Angle (ITA) metric. We then address the light/albedo ambiguity by building on a key observation: the image of the full scene -- as opposed to a cropped image of the face -- contains important information about lighting that can be used for disambiguation. TRUST regresses facial albedo by conditioning both on the face region and a global illumination signal obtained from the scene image. Our experimental results show significant improvement compared to state-of-the-art methods on albedo estimation, both in terms of accuracy and fairness. The evaluation benchmark and code will be made available for research purposes at https://trust.is.tue.mpg.de.Comment: Camera-Ready version, accepted at ECCV202

FLARE: Fast Learning of Animatable and Relightable Mesh Avatars

Our goal is to efficiently learn personalized animatable 3D head avatars from videos that are geometrically accurate, realistic, relightable, and compatible with current rendering systems. While 3D meshes enable efficient processing and are highly portable, they lack realism in terms of shape and appearance. Neural representations, on the other hand, are realistic but lack compatibility and are slow to train and render. Our key insight is that it is possible to efficiently learn high-fidelity 3D mesh representations via differentiable rendering by exploiting highly-optimized methods from traditional computer graphics and approximating some of the components with neural networks. To that end, we introduce FLARE, a technique that enables the creation of animatable and relightable mesh avatars from a single monocular video. First, we learn a canonical geometry using a mesh representation, enabling efficient differentiable rasterization and straightforward animation via learned blendshapes and linear blend skinning weights. Second, we follow physically-based rendering and factor observed colors into intrinsic albedo, roughness, and a neural representation of the illumination, allowing the learned avatars to be relit in novel scenes. Since our input videos are captured on a single device with a narrow field of view, modeling the surrounding environment light is non-trivial. Based on the split-sum approximation for modeling specular reflections, we address this by approximating the pre-filtered environment map with a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) modulated by the surface roughness, eliminating the need to explicitly model the light. We demonstrate that our mesh-based avatar formulation, combined with learned deformation, material, and lighting MLPs, produces avatars with high-quality geometry and appearance, while also being efficient to train and render compared to existing approaches.Comment: 15 pages, Accepted: ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia), 202