Community College Governing Boards Effects of Structure and Composition on Student and Institutional Outcomes

This dissertation examined if community college governing board structure and trustee selection influence institutional and student outcomes. This study employed a causal-comparative design and one-way between subjects ANOVA to examine the effects of board structure and trustee selection on the average cost of attendance, graduation rate, and salary after attending. The participants were 894 public community colleges in the United States. The independent variables included board structure (local boards versus statewide boards) and board composition (elected boards versus appointed boards). The independent variable data were collected from a report, Public Community College Governing Boards: Structure and Composition, compiled by the Association of Community College Trustees. The 3 dependent variables (i.e., average cost of attendance, graduation rate, and salary after attending) was collected from pre-existing publicly available data from the United States Department of Education College Scorecard. The research indicated that a locally governed board does result in a lower cost of attendance. The results also signaled that community college boards with elected boards of trustees have a lower cost of attendance and a higher salary after attending

The use of monosaccharides in metal-catalyzed coupling reactions

The addition of monosaccharides to metal-catalyzed coupling reactions can be beneficial in terms of decreasing the time required, chemical waste products and overall cost of the process. Monosaccharides are used in a number of different ways, including: (a) acting as a ligand for the metal, (b) providing the appropriate reduction potential for a chemical process and (c) acting as a reducing agent for the formation and stabilization of catalytically active metal nanoparticles. Recently, there has been a significant amount of research in this growing field and there is thus the potential for the addition of monosaccharides to coupling reactions to have significant impact on the synthesis of the important small molecules on which we have all come to rely. This Perspectives Article will cover recent developments in the addition of monosaccharides to metal-catalyzed coupling reactions with an emphasis on their utility and limitations in order to facilitate the further development of this exciting area of research

Synthesis of ureas in the bio-alternative solvent Cyrene

Cyrene as a bio-alternative solvent: a highly efficient, waste minimizing protocol for the synthesis of ureas from isocyanates and secondary amines in the bio-available solvent Cyrene is reported. This method eliminated the use of toxic solvents, such as DMF, and established a simple work-up procedure for removal of the Cyrene, which led to a 28-fold increase in molar efficiency versus industrial standard protocols

Dissemination of Earth Remote Sensing Data for Use in the NOAA/NWS Damage Assessment Toolkit

The National Weather Service has developed the Damage Assessment Toolkit (DAT), an application for smartphones and tablets that allows for the collection, geolocation, and aggregation of various damage indicators that are collected during storm surveys. The DAT supports the often laborintensive process where meteorologists venture into the stormaffected area, allowing them to acquire geotagged photos of the observed damage while also assigning estimated EFscale categories based upon their observations. Once the data are collected, the DAT infrastructure aggregates the observations into a server that allows other meteorologists to perform quality control and other analysis steps before completing their survey and making the resulting data available to the public. In addition to inperson observations, Earth remote sensing from operational, polar-orbiting satellites can support the damage assessment process by identifying portions of damage tracks that may be missed due to road limitations, access to private property, or time constraints. Products resulting from change detection techniques can identify damage to vegetation and the land surface, aiding in the survey process. In addition, higher resolution commercial imagery can corroborate groundbased surveys by examining higherresolution commercial imagery. As part of an ongoing collaboration, NASA and NOAA are working to integrate near realtime Earth remote sensing observations into the NOAA/NWS Damage Assessment Toolkit. This presentation will highlight recent developments in a streamlined approach for disseminating Earth remote sensing data via web mapping services and a new menu interface that has been integrated within the DAT. A review of current and future products will be provided, including products derived from MODIS and VIIRS for preliminary track identification, along with conduits for higherresolution Landsat, ASTER, and commercial imagery as they become available. In addition to tornado damage assessments, the team is also investigating the use of near realtime imagery for identifying hail damage to vegetation, which also results in large swaths of damage, particularly in the central United States during the peak growing season months of June, July, and August. This presentation will present an overview of recent activities, challenges and successes, best practices, and opportunities for future work and collaboratio

Levoglucosenone: Bio-Based Platform for Drug Discovery

Levoglucosone (LGO) is a bio-privileged molecule that can be produced on scale from waste biomass. This chiral building block has been converted via well-established chemical processes into previously difficult-to-synthesize building blocks such as enantiopure butenolides, dihydropyrans, substituted cyclopropanes, deoxy-sugars and ribonolactones. LGO is an excellent starting material for the synthesis of biologically active compounds, including those which have anti-cancer, anti-microbial or anti-inflammatory activity. This review will cover the conversion of LGO to biologically active compounds as well as provide future research directions related to this platform molecule

SQuId: Measuring Speech Naturalness in Many Languages

Much of text-to-speech research relies on human evaluation, which incurs heavy costs and slows down the development process. The problem is particularly acute in heavily multilingual applications, where recruiting and polling judges can take weeks. We introduce SQuId (Speech Quality Identification), a multilingual naturalness prediction model trained on over a million ratings and tested in 65 locales-the largest effort of this type to date. The main insight is that training one model on many locales consistently outperforms mono-locale baselines. We present our task, the model, and show that it outperforms a competitive baseline based on w2v-BERT and VoiceMOS by 50.0%. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of cross-locale transfer during fine-tuning and highlight its effect on zero-shot locales, i.e., locales for which there is no fine-tuning data. Through a series of analyses, we highlight the role of non-linguistic effects such as sound artifacts in cross-locale transfer. Finally, we present the effect of our design decision, e.g., model size, pre-training diversity, and language rebalancing with several ablation experiments.Comment: Accepted at ICASSP 2023, with additional material in the appendi

Independent natural extension for choice functions

We introduce an independence notion for choice functions, which we call ‘epistemic independence’ following the work by De Cooman et al. [17] for lower previsions, and study it in a multivariate setting. This work is a continuation of earlier work of one of the authors [29], and our results build on the characterization of choice functions in terms of sets of binary preferences recently established by De Bock and De Cooman [11]. We obtain the many-to-one independent natural extension in this framework. Given the generality of choice functions, our expression for the independent natural extension is the most general one we are aware of, and we show how it implies the independent natural extension for sets of desirable gambles, and therefore also for less expressive imprecise-probabilistic models. Once this is in place, we compare this concept of epistemic independence to another independence concept for choice functions proposed by Seidenfeld [28], which De Bock and De Cooman [2] have called S-independence. We show that neither is more general than the other

Independent Natural Extension for Choice Functions

We investigate epistemic independence for choice functions in a multivariate setting. This work is a continuation of earlier work of one of the authors [23], and our results build on the characterization of choice functions in terms of sets of binary preferences recently established by De Bock and De Cooman [7]. We obtain the independent natural extension in this framework. Given the generality of choice functions, our expression for the independent natural extension is the most general one we are aware of, and we show how it implies the independent natural extension for sets of desirable gambles, and therefore also for less informative imprecise-probabilistic models. Once this is in place, we compare this concept of epistemic independence to another independence concept for choice functions proposed by Seidenfeld [22], which De Bock and De Cooman [1] have called S-independence. We show that neither is more general than the other

Exploring the reactivity of 2-trichloromethylbenzoxazoles for access to substituted benzoxazoles

The reactivity of 2-trichloromethylbenzoxazoles towards various nucleophiles, under metal free or iron-catalyzed conditions, for the synthesis of substituted benzoxazoles is described. These methods allow for selective substitution at either the 2- or 2’- position of the benzoxazoles using the same starting materials / reagents. This approach allows for the controlled synthesis of a variety of key derivatives from a single 2-trichloromethylbenzoxazole starting material