Measuring Service Performance, Student Satisfaction and its Impact on Student Retention in Private, Post-Secondary Institutions

With an ever growing assortment of educational options, students seek institutions that will provide for them a unique educational experience that they will remember for a life time. In addition, the present student is a customer seeking an educational program that will prepare him/her for a successful career and gainful employment. Since institutional budgets are developed based upon projected enrolments, it is becoming crucial for private institutions to retain the students they recruit. This situation has created a need for continued research in the area of student satisfaction and student retention. A reduction in student numbers, therefore, leads to a reduction in budgeted funds available to operate, maintain, and grow a private institution. The purpose of this study is to add additional contributions to the body of work on service quality, satisfaction, and student retention in higher education. This study attempts to show the relationship between service expectations, service performance, student satisfaction, and salient student retention constructs hoping to shed new light on the research question: Is there a significant relationship between service quality, student satisfaction and student retention in higher education? The results show that there are significant relationships between service performance and student satisfaction that will aid private, post-secondary institutions to predict and measure student satisfaction and retention

Resonant laser tunnelling

We propose an experiment involving a gaussian laser tunneling through a twin barrier dielectric structure. Of particular interest are the conditions upon the incident angle for resonance to occur. We provide some numerical calculations for a particular choice of laser wave length and dielectric refractive index which confirm our expectations.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

Interplay of phase boundary anisotropy and electro-autocatalytic surface reactions on the lithium intercalation dynamics in LiX_XFePO4_4 platelet-like nanoparticles

Experiments on single crystal Li$_X$FePO$_4$ (LFP) nanoparticles indicate rich nonequilibrium phase behavior, such as suppression of phase separation at high lithiation rates, striped patterns of coherent phase boundaries, nucleation by binarysolid surface wetting and intercalation waves. These observations have been successfully predicted (prior to the experiments) by 1D depth-averaged phase-field models, which neglect any subsurface phase separation. In this paper, using an electro-chemo-mechanical phase-field model, we investigate the coherent non-equilibrium subsurface phase morphologies that develop in the $ab$- plane of platelet-like single-crystal platelet-like Li$_X$FePO$_4$ nanoparticles. Finite element simulations are performed for 2D plane-stress conditions in the $ab$- plane, and validated by 3D simulations, showing similar results. We show that the anisotropy of the interfacial tension tensor, coupled with electroautocatalytic surface intercalation reactions, plays a crucial role in determining the subsurface phase morphology. With isotropic interfacial tension, subsurface phase separation is observed, independent of the reaction kinetics, but for strong anisotropy, phase separation is controlled by surface reactions, as assumed in 1D models. Moreover, the driven intercalation reaction suppresses phase separation during lithiation, while enhancing it during delithiation, by electro-autocatalysis, in quantitative agreement with {\it in operando} imaging experiments in single-crystalline nanoparticles, given measured reaction rate constants

Learning to translate by learning to communicate

We formulate and test a technique to use Emergent Communication (EC) with a pretrained multilingual model to improve on modern Unsupervised NMT systems, especially for low-resource languages. It has been argued that the currently dominant paradigm in NLP of pretraining on text-only corpora will not yield robust natural language understanding systems, and the need for grounded, goal-oriented, and interactive language learning has been highlighted. In our approach, we embed a modern multilingual model (mBART, Liu et. al. 2020) into an EC image-reference game, in which the model is incentivized to use multilingual generations to accomplish a vision-grounded task, with the hypothesis that this will align multiple languages to a shared task space. We present two variants of EC Fine-Tuning (Steinert-Threlkeld et. al. 2022), one of which outperforms a backtranslation-based baseline in 6/8 translation settings, and proves especially beneficial for the very low-resource languages of Nepali and Sinhala

Bumpy Black Holes in Alternate Theories of Gravity

We generalize the bumpy black hole framework to allow for alternative theory deformations. We construct two model-independent parametric deviations from the Kerr metric: one built from a generalization of the quasi-Kerr and bumpy metrics and one built directly from perturbations of the Kerr spacetime in Lewis-Papapetrou form. We find the conditions that these "bumps" must satisfy for there to exist an approximate second-order Killing tensor so that the perturbed spacetime still possesses three constants of the motion (a deformed energy, angular momentum and Carter constant) and the geodesic equations can be written in first-order form. We map these parameterized metrics to each other via a diffeomorphism and to known analytical black hole solutions in alternative theories of gravity. The parameterized metrics presented here serve as frameworks for the systematic calculation of extreme-mass ratio inspiral waveforms in parameterized non-GR theories and the investigation of the accuracy to which space-borne gravitational wave detectors can constrain such deviations.Comment: 17 pages, replaced with version published in Phys. Rev.

Precise half-life measurement of the 10 h isomer in 154Tb

The precise knowledge of the half-life of the reaction product is of crucial importance for a nuclear reaction cross section measurement carried out with the activation technique. The cross section of the 151Eu(alpha,n)154Tb reaction has been measured recently using the activation method, however, the half-life of the 10 h isomer in 154Tb has a relatively high uncertainty and ambiguous values can be found in the literature. Therefore, the precise half-life of the isomeric state has been measured and found to be 9.994 h +- 0.039 h. With careful analysis of the systematic errors, the uncertainty of this half-life value has been significantly reduced.Comment: Accepted for publication in Nuclear Physics

SCHOOL CLIMATE AND ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING CAPABILITIES AMONG TEACHERS IN POLANCO DISTRICT II: Education

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the school climate and organizational learning capacities of teachers in the Polanco II District during the calendar year 2020. In this study, a quantitative descriptive-correlational research design was used. Data from 154 instructors in the Polanco II District are collected using frequency counting and percent, weighted mean, standard deviation, Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis test, and Spearman Rank-Order Correlation. The findings revealed that the perceived degree of school climate was very high. All indicators had standard deviations less than 3.00, indicating that the mean responses were closely clustered. Organizational learning capability was assessed to be quite capable. According to the data, teachers' assessed school climate and organizational learning capability are highly associated and significantly related to organizational learning capability