DOES INTERGROUP THREAT CAUSE DISTINCT CONTACT ORIENTATIONS FOR HIGH AND LOW STATUS GROUPS? By BRIAN M. JOHNSTON Advisor: Demis E. Glasford, PhD A variety of groups, such as White and Latino Americans, predominantly live in segregated clusters. This is evident by looking at demographic data in the U.S., and often occurs in the absence of legal mandates. To explain why segregation occurs, this di...

xperiments E show significant demobilizing and alienating effects of negative advertising. Although internally valid, experiments may have limited external validity. Aggregate and survey data offer two ways of providing external validation for experiments. We show that survey recall measures of advertising exposure suffer from problems of internal validity due to simultaneity and measurement er...

In the development of distance learning, advances in cognitive science merge with new technology to deliver instruction worldwide. However, one major difficulty in evaluating the efficacy of these tools is determining which elements of instruction truly lead to observed changes in student performance. The purpose of this paper is to briefly review current use of various research methods for eva...

Cognitive Science research is hard to conduct, because researchers must take phenomena from the world and turn them into laboratory tasks for which a reasonable level of experimental control can be achieved. Consequently, research necessarily makes tradeoffs between internal validity (experimental control) and external validity (the degree to which a task represents behavior outside of the lab)...

This study proposes a model that utilizes soft computing and Markov Chains within a data mining framework to observe the stability of customer segments. The segmentation process in this study includes clustering of existing consumers and classification-prediction of segments for existing and new customers. Both a combination and an integration of soft computing techniques were used in the propo...

Acoustic cluster control is proposed for the purpose of achieving global sound attenuation of a planar structure. First, acoustic cluster filtering using a point sensor array is presented, which enables the grouping of sound radiated from a target object into a set of clusters, such that each cluster possesses the same common characteristics. This allows the possibility of extracting the cluste...