THREE ESSAYS ON RURAL EDUCATION: DESCRIPTIVE STUDIES FOCUSED ON FEDERAL RURAL DEFINITIONS AND POLICY CHANGES

Rural education issues in K-12 public schools are understudied despite a large rural student population in the U.S. This dissertation studies how different federal definitions of rural change how rural school districts and their diverse communities are portrayed, in comparison to their non-rural counterparts. This study also explores the recent federal rural policy changes on rural district revenue and student academic outcomes. This dissertation consists of three descriptive essays. The first chapter shows how we choose to define ‘rural’ changes what differences are accentuated between rural and non-rural districts. Definitions of ‘rural’ is closely related to who gains access to federal rural financial assistance. I find that both rural and non-rural school districts show differences in their district characteristics and level of district revenue when two different federal rural definitions are applied to define which districts belong to ‘rural’. The second chapter investigates a federal rural financial assistance initiative, the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP) and its recent policy changes on funding eligibility requirements. I find new rural federal funding policy changes increased the number of poor rural districts receiving the funding. The new policy change also allowed rural districts to make more independent financial decisions by choosing their preferred program to receive the rural funding when they are qualified for both Rural Low-Income School Program (RLIS) and Small, Rural School Achievement Program (SRSA). The third chapter explores the relationship between current rural policy changes and student achievement gaps between rural and non-rural school districts, and within rural districts. I look at the historical student achievement gap trends and find the interesting patterns that existed before and after the REAP policy changes. Rural school districts receiving additional funding from REAP program are observed to have increases in student test scores, especially for rural districts with high fractions of minority and poverty-status students

The Market Valuation Of Pre-Registration For Firms In The Online Gaming Industry

Under the uncertainty of market conditions, top management and shareholders keep seeking evidence for whether a new product development project truly improves firm value. In an effort to find the evidence, this study examines the effect of firm’s innovative outcome on stock market performance. Specifically, we conduct an event study to test whether stock market reacts to pre-registration marketing campaign in online game. In the business practice, the pre-registration is often considered as an important event right before the commercialization of a new game launch. In our empirical analysis on the pre-registration events and daily stock returns of game companies in 2010-2014, we find that stock market responds to the pre-registration event of a new online game positively, with the abnormal returns up to 1.49%. In addition, the stock market rewards the pre-registration events of small firms more than that of large firms. Overall results suggest that stock investors take into account the pre-registration event as economically valuable information and perceive the uncertainty of the innovation process resolved.

The Mediating Role of Popularity Rank on the Relationship between Advertising and In-app Purchase Sales in Mobile Application Market

In the booming industry of mobile application, a new business model has arisen as a lucrative way of monetization, which is characterized by scaling up user base via free distribution and following partial monetization. As a result, popularity rank and in-app purchase revenue are increasingly emphasized. In this context, understanding the relation among popularity rank, in-app purchase sales, and advertising is essential to optimal marketing decisions. For this purpose, this research investigates how advertising influences in-app purchase sales via popularity rank. Through our empirical analysis of a mobile game data collected on a daily basis, we show advertising expenditure not only improves popularity rank, but also increases in-app purchase sales. In addition, we demonstrate that mobile advertising effect on in-app purchase sales is fully mediated by popularity rank

DeepStory: Video Story QA by Deep Embedded Memory Networks

Question-answering (QA) on video contents is a significant challenge for achieving human-level intelligence as it involves both vision and language in real-world settings. Here we demonstrate the possibility of an AI agent performing video story QA by learning from a large amount of cartoon videos. We develop a video-story learning model, i.e. Deep Embedded Memory Networks (DEMN), to reconstruct stories from a joint scene-dialogue video stream using a latent embedding space of observed data. The video stories are stored in a long-term memory component. For a given question, an LSTM-based attention model uses the long-term memory to recall the best question-story-answer triplet by focusing on specific words containing key information. We trained the DEMN on a novel QA dataset of children's cartoon video series, Pororo. The dataset contains 16,066 scene-dialogue pairs of 20.5-hour videos, 27,328 fine-grained sentences for scene description, and 8,913 story-related QA pairs. Our experimental results show that the DEMN outperforms other QA models. This is mainly due to 1) the reconstruction of video stories in a scene-dialogue combined form that utilize the latent embedding and 2) attention. DEMN also achieved state-of-the-art results on the MovieQA benchmark.Comment: 7 pages, accepted for IJCAI 201

A Suspended Nanogap Formed by Field-Induced Atomically Sharp Tips

A sub-nanometer scale suspended gap (nanogap) defined by electric field-induced atomically sharp metallic tips is presented. A strong local electric field (\u3e109 V=m) across micro/nanomachined tips facing each other causes the metal ion migration in the form of dendrite-like growth at the cathode. The nanogap is fully isolated from the substrate eliminating growth mechanisms that involve substrate interactions. The proposed mechanism of ion transportation is verified using real-time imaging of the metal ion transportation using an in situ biasing in transmission electron microscope (TEM). The configuration of the micro/nanomachined suspended tips allows nanostructure growth of a wide variety of materials including metals, metal-oxides, and polymers. VC 2012 American Institute of Physics

Nurse-midwifery education through graduate programs to provide a sufficient number of high quality nurse-midwives

There is a decrease in the number of new midwives, resulting from the shutdown of midwifery education program in hospitals due to a decrease in birthrate in the Republic of Korea. To solve this problem, the current medical laws on midwifery education system in Korea should be revised; nurse-midwifery specialist programs must be established in educational institutes with nursing programs. To support this argument, the midwifery education programs of America, Europe, Australia, and Japan have been discussed, and a nurse-midwifery specialist curriculum at the master's level, based on the nurse-practitioner system of Korea, has been suggested. Since this assertion is very important and urgent for solving the future population problem of Korea and providing health care for women and children, it should be realized into action immediately

Genome-wide analysis to predict protein sequence variations that change phosphorylation sites or their corresponding kinases

We define phosphovariants as genetic variations that change phosphorylation sites or their interacting kinases. Considering the essential role of phosphorylation in protein functions, it is highly likely that phosphovariants change protein functions and may constitute a proportion of the mechanisms by which genetic variations cause individual differences or diseases. We categorized phosphovariants into three subtypes and developed a system that predicts them. Our method can be used to screen important polymorphisms and help to identify the mechanisms of genetic diseases