2011 UMKC Dissertations - Access Restricted to UMKC
Permanent URI for this collection
The items in this collection are dissertations that are available only to members of the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus. Click on one of the browse buttons above for a complete listing of the works.
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item The evolution of the U.S. financial architecture, asset prices, and the role of fiscal and monetary policy(2015-03-04) Rezende, Felipe Carvalho de, 1981-; Wray, L. Randall, 1953-In the past years there has been increasing interest in shadow banking institutions. Economists identified the shadow banking system at the core of the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and it was a key component of the transmission of fragility within the U.S. financial system. This study explains the emergence and growth of shadow banking institutions in the U.S. financial system and investigates the implications for monetary and fiscal policies. While the traditional banking literature puts the burden on the bank regulatory system implemented in the 1930s to explain the emergence of the shadow banking system, the discussion about the coordination between monetary policy objectives and regulatory policies designed to promote financial stability had received little or no attention. Competition between regulated and unregulated (or less regulated) financial institutions generated and allowed for the growth of new financial institutions (shadow banks) that attempted to escape regulations imposed by the New Deal reform. The banking reforms implemented in the 1930s implicitly required the coordination between monetary policy and the regulatory framework. The relationship between the growth of shadow banks and the relative importance of debt markets is further explored to investigate the effects of monetary policy on financial assets.Item Automatic and controlled processing of faces in social anxiety(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2012-01-27) Duval, Elizabeth R.; Filion, Diane L. (Diane Louise)The aim of this dissertation was to investigate the automatic emotional response, attention allocation, and attention disengagement elicited by facial stimuli in undergraduate participants with high and low Social Anxiety (SA). Affective faces (happy, neutral, angry) were subliminally presented to participants in two phases. During the first phase, Prepulse Inhibition of Startle (PPI) was used as an index of attention allocation and attention disengagement in response to the subliminally presented affective faces. During the second phase, a subset of the participants from the first phase viewed the same faces during Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Activation in the amygdala was examined as an index of automatic emotional response. PPI and fMRI were compared across face expression and gender for participants with high and low SA. PPI results revealed that by 300 ms, more attention was allocated to subliminally presented angry faces compared to neutral faces in all participants. All participants then subsequently disengaged attention from the faces by 800 ms. fMRI results revealed that amygdala activation did not differ across face conditions or SA groups, but other brain areas, including the anterior cingulate cortex, were modulated by facial expression differently across SA groups. In addition, correlations were computed between measures. Finally, fMRI, PPI, and self-report data underwent Hierarchical Linear Modeling to investigate relationships between automatic emotional response, attention allocation, and attention disengagement in participants with high and low SA. Relationships between these measures were not supported, suggesting that they may be independent constructs. Limitations and future directions are discussed.Item Redundant adder architectures for cell-based technology(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2012-01-06) Kharbash, Fekri Q.; Chaudhry, Ghulam M. (Ghulam Miran)The amenity of our daily lives has come to rely on an enormous number of embedded systems, such as mobile phones, anti-spin systems for cars, high de nition streaming video and portable devices. The utmost important operation used in these systems and digital system in general is addition, since it is a fundamental operation of most arithmetic operations. The choice of arithmetic numbering system for this operation, its digit set and its possible encoding in addition to algorithms and their hardware implementations has been subject to continual advancement to allow superior speed and to reduce digital circuit area and power consumptions. In the case of conventional number systems, addition speed is logarithmically bounded by the number of digits. However, unconventional number systems provide the possibility of performing the addition operation with sub-logarithmic and even constant latency. In this dissertation, we present the hardware-e cient addition rules for the unconventional binary signed digit number (BSDN) system to facilitate the BSDN adders design. We use the rules with the possible addition schemes and the two bits encodings to investigate and introduce new architectures. The implementation results of the existing and proposed structures show that each structure has its own performance gures based on the employed encoding. Moreover, it show that the hardware-e cient rules provide designs that demonstrate higher gures compared to existing designs when considering area, delay, power and combined performance measures. This work also presents the hardware design and performance analysis of a BSDN adder structure employing the 1-out-of-3 encoding. This encoding adds an error detection capability to the adder's architecture at di erent levels. The adder performance gures indicate that its bene t lies primarily on providing error detection features as it is slower, consumes more area and dissipate more power compared to designs employing the two-bits encoding. We also present the limited selective redundancy injection (LSRI) technique to introduce limited redundancy to conventional adders. The theoretical analysis and implementation results show that the conventional adders with LSRI outperform adders without LSRI in area, delay, power and combined performance measures where there is no strict requirement on accuracyItem Effective teacher retention : Sustaining quality novice instructors through induction(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011-12-28) McNabb, Kelly A.; Davis, Donna M. (Donna Marie)The purpose of this heuristic case study was to develop a rich understanding of the effectiveness a teacher induction program has on transitioning and retaining novice teachers on the suburban secondary level. Induction programs are defined as a comprehensive, coherent, and sustained professional development process that is organized by a school district to train, support, and retain new teachers and seamlessly progress them into a lifelong learning program. Case studies of six novice teachers located in two high schools in the same Midwest suburban school district were used to investigate the research questions: What factors of a current teacher induction program in the District support teacher retention? What factors do the teacher participants in the current induction program identify as critical to their return? What do teachers identify as key strategies to be used as part of the current program to support novice teachers? All six of the participants in the study had completed the two-year induction program provided by the District and had returned as current employees. Reflection documents submitted to Human Resources, exit surveys provided by the Professional Development department, and individual interviews were utilized for data collection and analysis. Findings supported the conceptual framework of Socio-cultural Theory, Professional Socialization, Induction and Mentoring, and Teacher Accountability. A synthesis of the research revealed strengths and growth opportunities in the current program regarding mentoring, induction, time constraints and meeting the needs of novice teachers as they matriculate into the system.Item A multi-scale modeling study of the impact of land surface heterogeneity on the convective boundary layer in the U.S. Midwest(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011-06-03) Vezhapparambu, Sajith, 1974-; Adegoke, Jimmy O.Rain fed agricultural land is the predominant land cover class in the U.S. Midwest. The interannual and sub-seasonal climate variability of this region are determined by atmospheric oscillations on multiple temporal and spatial scales. The principal factors contributing to the growing season rainfall in the U.S. Midwest include synoptic scale moisture intrusion into the region from the Gulf of Mexico through the Great Plains Low Level Jet (LLJ); passing of meso-scale convective systems, which is influenced by the unique nature of air-mass mixing over the region; and the effect of high vegetation and soil moisture that enhances the lower level moisture flux over the region. This dissertation research investigated the influence of multiple land surface forcings, including agricultural practices, on the summer climate variability of the U.S. Midwest. The significant sub-seasonal moisture oscillations in the region and its interannual variability are also examined. Results indicate that wet years were characterized by predominant synoptic scale moisture intrusions into the region, in contrast to the dry years, which lacked significant moisture oscillations and experienced prolonged dry periods. Differences in crops planted in the region affected the sub-seasonal variability of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) with significant spatial differentiation. A regional climate model (the Colorado State University Regional Atmospheric Modeling System - RAMS) was employed in this study to evaluate the extent to which realistic surface boundary conditions add value to model simulations of warm season convective systems in the U.S. Midwest. Specifically, the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS) soil moisture data and satellite-derived leaf area index (LAI) were incorporated into RAMS for the model experiments. The results for the case period of August, 2000 showed that incorporating more realistic land surface data into RAMS improved the model performance by capturing locally forced precipitation and enhanced convective activities for the mid-August, 2000 period. The combined influence of heterogeneous soil moisture and satellite-derived LAI on model simulated convective activity was also clearly depicted in the enhanced spectral power of the moisture flux convergence (MFC) field for periods when rainfall was more likely to be locally forced. Importantly, this study provides new evidence on the influence surface heterogeneity in lower boundary layer forcing, such as soil moisture, on the organization of local scale summer convective systems in the U.S. Midwest. This effect is achieved principally through data into RAMS improved the model performance by capturing locally forced precipitation and enhanced convective activities for the mid-August, 2000 period. The combined influence of heterogeneous soil moisture and satellite-derived LAI on model simulated convective activity was also clearly depicted in the enhanced spectral power of the moisture flux convergence (MFC) field for periods when rainfall was more likely to be locally forced. Importantly, this study provides new evidence on the influence surface heterogeneity in lower boundary layer forcing, such as soil moisture, on the organization of local scale summer convective systems in the U.S. Midwest. This effect is achieved principally through the enhancement of differential heating over the region.