Getting Out: Women in Transition

From the Washington University Senior Honors Thesis Abstracts (WUSHTA), 2017. Published by the Office of Undergraduate Research. Joy Zalis Kiefer, Director of Undergraduate Research and Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences; Lindsey Paunovich, Editor; Helen Human, Programs Manager and Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences Mentor: Linda Lindse

Effect of Credit Risk on Shareholders’ Wealth of Listed Commercial Banks in Kenya

The financial manager’s mandate is to maximize shareholders’ wealth by investing in projects with positive cash flows. Credit risk is the potential loss incurred by a company when counterparties default in their financial obligations. This leads to cash out flow, which in turn affects shareholders’ wealth. To achieve higher returns, financial managers must take more risk. This paper focuses on determining the effect of credit risk on shareholders’ wealth of listed commercial banks in Kenya. Secondary data was collected from the annual financial statements of 11 listed commercial banks and the corporation credit ratings publications for the period 2014 to 2018. Through quantitative research design, panel data was analyzed using multiple linear regression model. The study found that capital adequacy had a significant positive effect on shareholders wealth. Non-performing loans, credit liquidity, loan loss provision, and credit ratings had an insignificant effect on shareholders wealth. Based on F statistic results, credit risk had a significant negative effect on shareholders wealth. The study recommends that financial managers should retain more capital based on the risk weighted assets which acts as a buffer if the bank incurs losses arising from credit risk. Commercial banks in Kenya should also fully adopt the Basel III Accord requirements so as to maximize the wealth of the shareholders

Long-Term Services and Supports (LTSS) Policy Lab: Using Data to Drive Public Policy and Funding Decisions

The unprecedented growth in the elder population will create a marked increase in the demand for quality long-term services and supports (LTSS) in the Commonwealth. For low-income elders who have limited assets, the cost of these services – including home- and community-based services (HCBS) and nursing home stays – will be borne primarily by MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program. Policy makers, executive-level leaders, and program managers need to plan for the expanded service needs of this population while also addressing the cost of services that threatens to be unsustainable. The LTSS Policy Lab, a collaboration among the University of Massachusetts Medical School, the Executive Office of Health and Human Services, the Executive Office of Elder Affairs, and the Office of Medicaid, is a resource to aid in program planning and fiscal forecasting, not just for the immediate budget cycle but also for the next five to 10 years and beyond

Use of personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic

This article provides an introduction to personal protective equipment (PPE) and looks at the latest guidelines in the context of nursing patients with COVID-19 in the UK. The current situation is such that the reader should continue to refer to contemporary guidelines because they are frequently updated as the situation evolves

Is Unaided Active Learning an Effective Teaching Method for Those with Learning Disabilities?

The work presented here aims to address a critical knowledge gap in the engineering education literature through a preliminary study meant to determine if active learning is more effective when students with learning disabilities are first front-loaded with information. These preliminary findings aimed at not only determining if the work should be continued in the future, but also at evaluating if frontloading resulted in: (1) increased student engagement and (2) increased learning effectiveness. Preliminary findings conclude that students with documented, and undocumented, learning disabilities did have an increased understanding of the course content as a result of combining frontloading and active learning

Creating correct aberrations: why blur isn’t always bad in the eye

In optics in general, a sharp aberration-free image is normally the desired goal, and the whole field of adaptive optics has developed with the aim of producing blur-free images. Likewise, in ophthalmic optics we normally aim for a sharp image on the retina. But even with an emmetropic, or well-corrected eye, chromatic and high order aberrations affect the image. We describe two different areas where it is important to take these effects into account and why creating blur correctly via rendering can be advantageous. Firstly we show how rendering chromatic aberration correctly can drive accommodation in the eye and secondly report on matching defocus-l generated using rendering with conventional optical defocus

Ocular accommodation and wavelength: The effect of longitudinal chromatic aberration on the stimulus-response curve.

The longitudinal chromatic aberration (LCA) of the eye creates a chromatic blur on the retina that is an important cue for accommodation. Although this mechanism can work optimally in broadband illuminants such as daylight, it is not clear how the system responds to the narrowband illuminants used by many modern displays. Here, we measured pupil and accommodative responses as well as visual acuity under narrowband light-emitting diode (LED) illuminants of different peak wavelengths. Observers were able to accommodate under narrowband light and compensate for the LCA of the eye, with no difference in the variability of the steady-state accommodation response between narrowband and broadband illuminants. Intriguingly, our subjects compensated more fully for LCA at nearer distances. That is, the difference in accommodation to different wavelengths became larger when the object was placed nearer the observer, causing the slope of the accommodation response curve to become shallower for shorter wavelengths and steeper for longer ones. Within the accommodative range of observers, accommodative errors were small and visual acuity normal. When comparing between illuminants, when accommodation was accurate, visual acuity was worst for blue narrowband light. This cannot be due to the sparser spacing for S-cones, as our stimuli had equal luminance and thus activated LM-cones roughly equally. It is likely because ocular LCA changes more rapidly at shorter wavelength and so the finite spectral bandwidth of LEDs corresponds to a greater dioptric range at shorter wavelengths. This effect disappears for larger accommodative errors, due to the increased depth of focus of the eye

Model checking user interfaces

User interfaces are crucial for the success of most software projects. As software grows in complexity there is a similar growth in the user interface com- plexity which leads to bugs which may be difficult to find by means of testing. In this paper we use the method of automated model checking to verify user interfaces with respect to a formal specification. We present an algorithm for the automated abstraction of the user interface model of a given system, which uses asynchronous and interleaving composition of a number of programs. This technique was successful at verifying the user interface of case study and brings us one step forward towards push button verification.peer-reviewe

Automatically generating runtime monitors from tests

A large portion of the software development industry relies on testing as the main technique for quality assurance while other techniques which can provide extra guarantees are largely ignored. A case in point is runtime verification which provides assurance that a system’s behaviour is correct at runtime. Compared to testing, this technique has the advantage of checking the actual runs of a system rather than a number of representative testcases.peer-reviewe