Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies are uniformly considered highly challenging in terms of technical execution. However, their artistic value is frequently questioned. This dissertation examines the compositional elements that are often overlooked in these virtuoso works, and provides a viewpoint into their interpretative characteristics. Furthermore, it pursues a claim that besides being excellent performance pieces, these works also make an intriguing contribution to Liszt scholarship, and deserve meaningful consideration in terms of their artistic quality. Following the Introduction (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 provides a brief historical perspective of the critical affirmation Liszt the composer encountered from the musical society. It also includes a short background on Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, as well as the general reactions these works evoked from pianists, audiences, and scholars, during the time they were composed to the present day. As the main body of the dissertation, Chapter 3 investigates the three primary compositional concepts found in Rhapsodies Nos. 6, 10, and 12. These concepts are divided into three subchapters: Transformation of Themes, Controlled Pianistic Textures, and Coloristic Effects. Each of these subchapters provides explanatory information, as well as some of the most characteristic passages presented.

The purposes of this investigation were to examine the students' perceptions concerning the student services available at North Texas State University (NTSU HAS) and the need for student services (NTSU NEEDS). Other purposes were to determine which group of students had the greatest perceived need for services and to provide data that would aid various departments in the Student Service Division in program planning. Recommendations are included which suggest that more effort be made in publicizing those services available to students. Each department should establish procedures for assessing student needs as an indicator of changes in student perceptions. The Vice President for Student Affairs should support and encourage the gathering of data in each department. Research should be conducted to determine the differences between married and unmarried commuter students, married and unmarried in-town students, and commuter and non-commuter married students. The survey instrument should be individualized for each department. Data on student perceptions and characteristics should be utilized as input in formulating the mission and goal statements of the departments.

Twitter has quickly become one of the most popular social media sites. It has 313 million monthly active users, and 500 million tweets are published daily. With the massive number of tweets, Twitter users share information about a location along with the temporal awareness. In this work, I focus on tweets where author of the tweets exclusively mentions a location in the tweet. Natural language processing systems can leverage wide range of information from the tweets to build applications like recommender systems that predict the location of the author. This kind of system can be used to increase the visibility of the targeted audience and can also provide recommendations interesting places to visit, hotels to stay, restaurants to eat, targeted on-line advertising, and co-traveler matching based on the temporal information extracted from a tweet. In this work I determine if the author of the tweet is present in the mentioned location of the tweet. I also determine if the author is present in the location before tweeting, while tweeting, or after tweeting. I introduce 5 temporal tags (before the tweet but > 24 hours; before the tweet but < 24 hours; during the tweet is posted; after the tweet is posted but < 24 hours; and after the tweet is posted but > 24 hours). The major contributions of this paper are: (1) creation of a corpus of 1062 tweets containing 1200 location named entities, containing annotations whether author of a tweet is or is not located in the location he tweets about with respect to 5 temporal tags; (2) detailed corpus analysis including real annotation examples and label distributions per temporal tag; (3) detailed inter-annotator agreements, including Cohen's kappa, Krippendorff's alpha and confusion matrices per temporal tag; (4) label distributions and analysis; and (5) supervised learning experiments, along with the results.

The purposes of this study were to examine the problems of international students, assess the intensity of these problems, and describe relationships between the intensity of the problems and the following demographic variables: age, gender, number of years in the study of English, number of years living in the United States, grade point average at North Texas State University, major area of study at North Texas State University, and country of origin. International students pragmatically view their sojourn in the United States as an educational experience that will allow them to improve their minds and to travel. Financial concerns were expressed by the desire to work either part time or during vacation periods. As a group, international students do not exhibit concerns which debilitate their movement toward established goals. However, there are individual students who are in need of cultural refraining, communication abilities, and coping skills.