The reduced form as an empirical tool: a cautionary tale from the financial veil

An analysis of the limitations of the reduced-form empirical strategy as a method of testing the Modigliani-Miller model of corporate financial structure, demonstrating that an empirical strategy that is not closely tied to an underlying economic theory of behavior will usually yield estimates that are too imprecise or too unreliable to form a basis for policy.Corporations - Finance ; Investments

Collaborative Collective Algorithms to Coordinate UGVs

Sentel/Brilliant Innovations has developed autonomous UGVs (unmanned ground vehicles) capable of generating a map of an unknown location through exploration using local software and the power of Google Tango technology. This project was tasked with developing an efficient and capable map-stitching solution allowing multiple UGVs to coordinate their movements and share information in order to greatly improve the speed at which these drones can be used to generate maps. The solution utilizes the processing power of a Raspberry Pi to pull maps from a Redis server and stitch them together. Once stitched, the maps are redistributed via the Redis server back through the network, providing every UGV the opportunity to obtain the global map. All of this stitching is performed on a single UGV, freeing the other drones to focus on generating and uploading their own unique maps to the server. The drones can use this new information to better inform their next move to prevent multiple drones from generating a map of the same location. In the future, Sentel/Brilliant Innovations hopes to take this technology and attach more advanced sensors to the drones, allowing them to add greater detail of the environment to the map rather than simply drawing boundaries. These drones have many potential applications, such as search and rescue, seeking out potential hazards, and intelligence for military and civil use.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/capstone/1187/thumbnail.jp

Jesus Tribe

Christians and churches in the early twenty-first century seem to belong to various tribes which leads to confused, disjointed loyalties. This confusion can lead to acrimony within churches. To develop and maintain the unity spoken of by Jesus Christ, these groups would benefit by better understanding and recognizing the prevalence of tribalism. Further, this should lead to the instigation of processes by which they can effectively evaluate and re-align their tribal loyalties toward a more definitive and effective modeling of Jesus and his lordship. Church leadership will benefit from a better understanding of the forces of tribalism at work both in our world and in their churches. Beyond that, they will need specific, intentional processes that can be employed to assist their communities to define, articulate, and understand together their tribal loyalties. Among the specific insights gathered through this research, I have found that many church leaders are only somewhat aware of the actual manifestations of tribalism. Seemingly because of the homogeneity that is seen in many churches, the conversations around tribalism are either one sided or non-existent. This project has emerged from my vocational place as a pastor of a church dying from tribalism. The church eventually closed in late summer of 2022 largely due to the inability of the congregation to have healthy discussions around key tribal conflicts. Key inflection points included disagreement on the most effective and Godly response to the management of COVID-19. A second disagreement involved the question of how the church leadership should respond to the concept of taking a partisan position in the contentious 2020 election and subsequent aftermath. Growing from that context, this project has culminated in the formation of a website that will equip church leaders with both knowledge and tools to understand, teach about, and confront tribalism in healthy ways

Reawakening Quality in Architecture: A Contemporary Idiom of Pattern Language

“Life peeks out of a thousand masks, One of these is architecture.” As technology advances forward architecture has continuously tried to find its place within the production of each new technology. This has led to thinking of architecture as causalities as an attempt to make it closer to a production line of efficient outputs. This has caused the problem a lack of evocation, the poetics, connection to memory, the idea of mind, body, and spirit being captured in the design. This inquiry began by looking at a missed opportunity within Christopher Alexander’s work A Pattern Language. Pattern Language introduced the idea of causality in architecture, wherein the author has final control to add gradation and intensity to enhance and evoke the memory of a place. The author (architect), many times, does not take advantage of this potential to control, “a thousand subtleties of position, color, view, and touch that create the complex and delicate experience of joy-in-inhabitation, to which we all have a right.” To interrogate these subtitles in the process of design we must uncover processes that establish a connection between mind, body, and spirit to have a better understanding of the qualitative elements that create our built environment. The tools that we use within this process will be researched to find opportunities within this exploration. Virtual reality is an immersive tool that allows these qualities to come forward. Therefore providing a basis of study that allows an understanding of space through memory association, spatial memory, and the senses working in conjunction. This thesis research is an attempt to create a contemporary idiom of architecture that bridges the gap between production of architecture and the phenomena of the life-world experience the connection of mind body and spirit through the lens of virtual reality

Entanglement, uncertainty and relativity in fundamental mechanics with an application in QKD

In this dissertation I will probe the innate uncertainty of quantum mechanics. After deriving the necessary tools I will tackle Popper\u27s experiment, a long misunderstood thought experiment with recent experimental results. I will then discuss how uncertainty changes when making measurements from different relativistic reference frames and resolve some on the tension between quantum mechanics and relativity. Finally I utilize the practical aspect of quantum uncertainty and describe a practical quantum key distribution scheme

Simulation of Alternative Marketing Strategies for U.S. Cotton

Three marketing strategies (selling a put option, cash sale at harvest, and cash sale in June) are simulated based on historical values and ranked based on certainty equivalents for a representative irrigated and dryland cotton farm Scenario analysis is also used to compare varying yield values.Simulation, Marketing, Cotton, Risk, Marketing, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,