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The problem of this study was to determine by means of Judgment Analysis (JAN) Technique the admission policies of selected faculty and administrators for foreign graduate students at North Texas State University.

Neural assemblies in hippocampus encode positions. During rest, the hippocam- pus replays sequences of neural activity seen during awake behavior. This replay is linked to memory consolidation and mental exploration of the environment. Re- current networks can be used to model the replay of sequential activity. Multiple sequences can be stored in the synaptic connections. To achieve a high mem- ory capacity, recurrent networks require a pattern separation mechanism. Such a mechanism is global remapping, observed in place cell populations. A place cell fires at a particular position of an environment and is silent elsewhere. Multiple place cells usually cover an environment with their firing fields. Small changes in the environment or context of a behavioral task can cause global remapping, i.e. profound changes in place cell firing fields. Global remapping causes some cells to cease firing, other silent cells to gain a place field, and other place cells to move their firing field and change their peak firing rate. The effect is strong enough to make global remapping a viable pattern separation mechanism. We model two mechanisms that improve the memory capacity of recurrent net- works. The effect of inhibition on replay in a recurrent network is modeled using binary neurons and binary synapses. A mean field approximation is used to de- termine the optimal parameters for the inhibitory neuron population. Numerical simulations of the full model were carried out to verify the predictions of the mean field model. A second model analyzes a hypothesized global remapping mecha- nism, in which grid cell firing is used as feed forward input to place cells. Grid cells have multiple firing fields in the same environment, arranged in a hexagonal grid. Grid cells can be used in a model as feed forward inputs to place cells to produce place fields. In these grid-to-place cell models, shifts in the grid cell firing patterns cause remapping in the place cell population. We analyze the capacity of such a system to create sets of separated patterns, i.e. how many different spatial codes can be generated. The limiting factor are the synapses connecting grid cells to place cells. To assess their capacity, we produce different place codes in place and grid cell populations, by shuffling place field positions and shifting grid fields of grid cells. Then we use Hebbian learning to increase the synaptic weights be- tween grid and place cells for each set of grid and place code. The capacity limit is reached when synaptic interference makes it impossible to produce a place code with sufficient spatial acuity from grid cell firing. Additionally, it is desired to also maintain the place fields compact, or sparse if seen from a coding standpoint. Of course, as more environments are stored, the sparseness is lost. Interestingly, place cells lose the sparseness of their firing fields much earlier than their spatial acuity. For the sequence replay model we are able to increase capacity in a simulated recurrent network by including an inhibitory population. We show that even in this more complicated case, capacity is improved. We observe oscillations in the average activity of both excitatory and inhibitory neuron populations. The oscillations get stronger at the capacity limit. In addition, at the capacity limit, rather than observing a sudden failure of replay, we find sequences are replayed transiently for a couple of time steps before failing. Analyzing the remapping model, we find that, as we store more spatial codes in the synapses, first the sparseness of place fields is lost. Only later do we observe a decay in spatial acuity of the code. We found two ways to maintain sparse place fields while achieving a high capacity: inhibition between place cells, and partitioning the place cell population so that learning affects only a small fraction of them in each environment. We present scaling predictions that suggest that hundreds of thousands of spatial codes can be produced by this pattern separation mechanism. The effect inhibition has on the replay model is two-fold. Capacity is increased, and the graceful transition from full replay to failure allows for higher capacities when using short sequences. Additional mechanisms not explored in this model could be at work to concatenate these short sequences, or could perform more complex operations on them. The interplay of excitatory and inhibitory populations gives rise to oscillations, which are strongest at the capacity limit. The oscillation draws a picture of how a memory mechanism can cause hippocampal oscillations as observed in experiments. In the remapping model we showed that sparseness of place cell firing is constraining the capacity of this pattern separation mechanism. Grid codes outperform place codes regarding spatial acuity, as shown in Mathis et al. (2012). Our model shows that the grid-to-place transformation is not harnessing the full spatial information from the grid code in order to maintain sparse place fields. This suggests that the two codes are independent, and communication between the areas might be mostly for synchronization. High spatial acuity seems to be a specialization of the grid code, while the place code is more suitable for memory tasks. In a detailed model of hippocampal replay we show that feedback inhibition can increase the number of sequences that can be replayed. The effect of inhibition on capacity is determined using a meanfield model, and the results are verified with numerical simulations of the full network. Transient replay is found at the capacity limit, accompanied by oscillations that resemble sharp wave ripples in hippocampus. In a second model Hippocampal replay of neuronal activity is linked to memory consolidation and mental exploration. Furthermore, replay is a potential neural correlate of episodic memory. To model hippocampal sequence replay, recurrent neural networks are used. Memory capacity of such networks is of great interest to determine their biological feasibility. And additionally, any mechanism that improves capacity has explanatory power. We investigate two such mechanisms. The first mechanism to improve capacity is global, unspecific feedback inhibition for the recurrent network. In a simplified meanfield model we show that capacity is indeed improved. The second mechanism that increases memory capacity is pattern separation. In the spatial context of hippocampal place cell firing, global remapping is one way to achieve pattern separation. Changes in the environment or context of a task cause global remapping. During global remapping, place cell firing changes in unpredictable ways: cells shift their place fields, or fully cease firing, and formerly silent cells acquire place fields. Global remapping can be triggered by subtle changes in grid cells that give feed-forward inputs to hippocampal place cells. We investigate the capacity of the underlying synaptic connections, defined as the number of different environments that can be represented at a given spatial acuity. We find two essential conditions to achieve a high capacity and sparse place fields: inhibition between place cells, and partitioning the place cell population so that learning affects only a small fraction of them in each environments. We also find that sparsity of place fields is the constraining factor of the model rather than spatial acuity. Since the hippocampal place code is sparse, we conclude that the hippocampus does not fully harness the spatial information available in the grid code. The two codes of space might thus serve different purposes.

This study examined the effects of good teaching practices on post-baccalaureate degree aspirations using logistic regression techniques on a multi-institutional, longitudinal sample of students at four-year colleges and universities. Using College Choice and College Outcomes models as a theoretical foundation, I examined whether eight good teaching practices (non-classroom interactions with faculty, prompt feedback, frequency of interactions with faculty, teaching clarity and organization, challenging classes and high faculty expectations, frequency of higher-order exams and assignments, academic challenge and effort, and integrated ideas, information, and experiences) influenced post-baccalaureate degree aspirations at the end of four academic years, while controlling for students' background characteristics and institutional characteristics that are theoretically associated with aspirations. Using pre-test and post-test data from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education (WNS), the findings suggest that good teaching practices are positively related to undergraduate students' aspirations for graduate education. This study contributes to college outcome models by emphasizing the importance of faculty to the undergraduate experience. Finally, this study has implications for higher education policy, including practical applications for those involved with undergraduate and graduate education, including administrators, faculty, staff, and students.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Antioch University New England, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Apr. 12, 2007). Advisor: Heidi Watts. "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy [in] Environmental Studies at Antioch New England Graduate School 2006"--The title page. Keywords: environmental advocacy, activist training, social movements, curriculum action research, master's curriculum, environmental studies, popular education, critical pedagogy, education for citizenship. Includes bibliographical references (p. 345-357).

Thesis (M. Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references.

The “I” in lyric poetry has not only shifted expectations throughout time, but has been called many names including the authorial persona, the biographical self, or, in Helen Vendler’s term, the ‘fictive poetic self.’ Currently, the term “authorial ‘I’,” which denotes a first-person poem (or collection) that invites conflation between the author and speaker, such as with the Confessionals, continues to face critique as it has since the 1950s, critique toward The New York School poets and later toward the New Formalists, Language poets, and these days toward the New Thing poets who stress self as object. Furthermore, amidst the current fascination with recording private moments and distributing them to the public via Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and blogs, poetry that reveals personal details and conflates the identity between speaker and author can inadvertently be viewed as yet another commoditization of the self. Stephen Burt and other critics voice another concern that the authorial “I” is a “bourgeois illusion, an outmoded epiphenomenon” that is simply a construct of systems outside the self. This issue regarding the authorial “I” is of particular importance to me since my dissertation is heir to Confessional poetry. My dissertation, This We Call Many Things, combines personal and scientific inquiries regarding evolution, specifically addresses the anatomical changes that enabled communal living within our species, as well as my father’s paranoid schizophrenia and subsequent chronic homelessness. The interdisciplinary weave of the personal with another subject in a tightly unified collection, which I term a “concept collection,” represents one strategy to subvert the authorial “I.” Post-millennial practitioners of such concept collections include C.D. Wright, Anne Carson, Louise Glück, as well as a growing number of other poets who merge the concept collection with the Confessional such as Joseph Harrington, Beth Bachmann, Karyna McGlynn, and Natasha Tretheway. The concept collection’s structure and subject matter suggests that the personal and political, the domestic and the international, and the private and public are not dichotomous subjects, but interconnected ones. This sense that all spheres are connected encouraged me to find the connection between my family’s personal story and the human race’s evolutionary story.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--RAND Graduate School, 1996. / "RGSD-129." "Dissertation." Includes bibliographical references (p. 107-112).