DIRT CHEAP: THE GARDENDALE EXPERIMENT AND RAMMED EARTH HOME CONSTRUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES

This document has had referenced material removed in respect for the owner's copyright. A complete version of this document, which includes said referenced material, resides in the University of Maryland, College Park's library collection. Masters final project submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Historic Preservation. HISP 710/711 Spring 2010.This work addresses an understudied and little appreciated construction type—rammed earth—and argues that understanding its history helps us better evaluate the relationship between our built environment and cultural values. Historically, rammed earth has expressed itself as an economical do-it-yourself project for farmers, enthusiasts, and environmentalists. It has also been understood as a way to correct social ills, minimize financial difficulties, and remedy overabundances of labor. During the Great Depression, these factors came together and pushed the federal government to experiment with the technique, erecting seven rammed earth homes as part of the Resettlement Administration’s Gardendale Homestead north of Birmingham, Alabama. They remained an experiment, as a true federal rammed earth initiative never fully developed. Gardendale thus provides an example of an alternative building technology that has not received wide cultural acceptance in the United States, despite a history that reaches back to the 19th century. This reluctance to adopt rammed earth could be attributed to the groups that have utilized the technique, who until recently, were considered marginal. Documenting and preserving Gardendale’s extant rammed earth homes is necessary because of their unique construction type and the story they tell about our nation and the way we live. Moreover, the successes and failures of Gardendale provide context for rammed earth’s latest reincarnation within the current green building movement

Limited English Proficiency in Healthcare; Taking Down Language Barriers Toolkit

It is the obligation of health care professionals to provide safe and effective communication to all patients and families. Language barriers provide an additional challenge when communicating and providing care in the hospital setting. With all patients and family members having the right to complete, clear, and understandable information, nurses have the responsibility in obtaining interpretive services for those whom English is not their primary language. Nurses are responsible and accountable for protecting, promoting, and restoring health and well-being. As well as injury and illness prevention, and to alleviate pain and suffering (ANA, 2015). When language barriers are present, all of these components in nursing practice can be hindered with improper utilization of resources, resulting from an inability to communicate efficiently. Although resources are available for nursing staff to use, language barriers still pose as a risk due to the difficult process and knowledge gap, ultimately impacting patient-centered care

Estimation of Employee Stock Option Exercise Rates

This paper is the first to perform a comprehensive estimation of employee stock option exercise behavior and option cost to firms. We develop a GMM-based methodology, robust to heteroskedasticity and correlation across exercises, for estimating the rate of voluntary option exercise as a function of the stock price path and of various firm and option holder characteristics. We use it to estimate an exercise function from a sample of 870,624 employee-option grants at 47 publicly-traded firms between 1980-2005, finding that volatility has a counterintuitive effect, and that men exercise faster than women. We also estimate the rate of employment termination, which determines forfeitures, cancellations, and forced exercises. We use the estimated exercise and termination functions in a simulation based valuation model to analyze the effect of different firm and option holder characteristics on option value, and show that the true value of these options can differ substantially from values calculated using the usual FASB approximation

Medical student reporting of factors affecting pre-clerkship changes in empathy: a qualitative study

Objective: To isolate factors that medical students identify as possibly affecting empathy in pre-clerkship years of medical school. Methods: 12 students in their second year of medical school at Queen’s University were randomly selected and asked to participate in semi-structured interviews conducted from an ethnographic perspective. Results: Students reported both negative and positive changes in empathy. Negative changes included desensitization and focusing on the disease process, decreased ability to see things from patients’ perspectives, and routine responses in emotional situations. These changes occur due to time constraints, objective lessons in empathy, and a changing identity. Positive changes included an increased awareness of the impact of illness, and increased ability to read feelings. These changes result from increased exposure to patients, discussions surrounding the psychosocial impact of illness, and positive role models. Conclusion: Students should be made aware of the limitations of objective lessons in empathy, and non-evaluated, implicit lessons should be emphasized when possible. Students should be encouraged to maintain relationships outside of medicine. Aspects of medical school that currently promote empathy should be reinforced, including exposure to patients, opportunities to work closely with positive role models, and practical discussions surrounding the psychosocial impact of illness

Estimation of Employee Stock Option Exercise Rates and Firm Cost: Methodology

Investors have become increasingly concerned about the cost of executive stock options to shareholders. Because executives face hedging constraints, standard option theory does not apply.The valuation problem reduces to accurately characterizing the option payoff. This paper develops a methodology for estimating option exercise and cancellation rates as a function of the stock price path, time to expiration, and firm and option holder characteristics. Our estimation accounts for correlation between exercises by the same executive. Valuation proceeds by using the estimated exercise rate function to describe the option’s expected payoff along each stock price path and then computing the present value of the payoff. The estimation of empirical exercise rates also allows us to test the predictions of theoretical models of option exercise behavior. The paper not only illustrates an ideal valuation method for a large dataset, but also shows how to evaluate the usefulness of some of the approximations proposed in the literature

Optimal Exercise of Executive Stock Options and Implications for Valuation

The cost of executive stock options to shareholders has become a focus of attention in finance and accounting. The difficulty is that the value of these options depends on the exercise policies of the executives. Because these options are nontransferable, the usual theory does not apply. We analyze the optimal exercise policy for a utility-maximizing executive and indicate when the policy is characterized by a critical stock price boundary. We provide a counterexample in which the executive exercises at low and high stock prices but not in between. We show how the policy varies with risk aversion, wealth, and volatility and explore implications for option value. For example, option value can decline as volatility rises

Portfolio Performance and Agency

The evaluation and compensation of portfolio managers is an important problem for practitioners. Optimal compensation will induce managers to expend effort to generate information and to use it appropriately in an informed portfolio choice. Our general model points the way towards analysis of optimal performance evaluation and contracting in a rich model. Optimal contracting in the model includes an important role for portfolio restrictions that are more complex than the sharing rule. The agent's compensation gives the agent approximately to benchmark return plus an incentive fee equal to a portfolio measure that is approximately the excess of return above the benchmark. This measure is often used by practitioners but is simpler than the Jensen measure and other measures commonly recommended in the academic literature. In addition to the excess return above the fixed benchmark, the manager is given some additional incentive to take a position that deviates from the benchmark to remove an incentive to tend towards being a "closet indexer." Efficient contracting involves restrictions on what portfolio strategies can be pursued, and prior communication of the information gathered

The Recorder Tutors in 't Uitnement Kabinet

Paulus Matthysz, a prominent music printer in Amsterdam during the seventeenth century, published Jacob van Eyck's Der Fluyten Lust-hof and a collection entitled 't Uitnement Kabinet. Three extant copies of Lust-hof include a tutor Vertoninge...op de Handt-fluit, presumably by Matthysz, and a tutor by Gerband van Blanckenburgh, Onderwyzinge...op deHandt-Fluyt. Their content is not correlated with Lust-hof, and they were presumably designed for inclusion in the Kabinet II. Confusion over the tutors' conception has led to published misinformation jeopardizing their historical worth. The casual generalizations regarding the two tutors can be refuted by reestablishing the interrelationship between the tutors and the two collections. This paper employs a comprehensive study into their origins in order to rectify how the tutors are referenced in the twenty-first century