Masters Theses
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ItemForecasting Bitcoin Price Using an Adaptive Grey System Deep Neural Network(Middle Tennessee State University, 2022)Bitcoin was created in 2009 by a person or group of persons under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin trading quickly grew along with the creation of numerous other cryptocurrencies in what is now the crypto market. Linear and non-linear methods have been applied to the prediction of bitcoin price including Support Vector Machines, Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average, Random Forests, and Recurrent Neural Networks among many others. Grey System Theory, developed by Deng Julong in 1982, is a linear forecasting method known for performing well with limited data sets. The aim of this research is to forecast bitcoin price using a non-linear approach that incorporates Grey System Theory. The result is a well generalized non linear model trained on only 60 days of bitcoin price data.
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ItemSustainable Tourism Reflected in the Media(Middle Tennessee State University, 2022)This thesis reported on sustainable tourism in the media by analyzing articles from several news sources and travel blogs from January 1, 1980- August 1, 2022, that cover the topic. 88 articles were evaluated in this study, from news sources and travel blogs that featured topics on or related to sustainable tourism. The history of sustainability and tourism, as well as the rise of technology is uncovered via this thesis that plays into the image of sustainable tourism today. The academic findings on sustainable tourism appear to be very slight in the time period of this study which makes this thesis an important and interesting starting point for future studies. Two research questions were examined while doing this: how is sustainable tourism framed via the articles analyzed and which sources were used on this topic? To find out how sustainable tourism is framed as well as the sources used on the topic, this study used textual analysis to uncover these questions.
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ItemPre-Service Teachers Self-Efficacy for Inclusive Practices(Middle Tennessee State University, 2022)This study examines the perceived self-efficacy for inclusive practices in the classroom among pre-service teachers (N= 97) attending Middle Tennessee State University in the spring of 2018. All participants completed a standardized measure of teacher efficacy for inclusive practices, including subscales of efficacy to use inclusive instruction, efficacy in collaboration, and efficacy in managing behavior. The purpose of this study was to understand how formal training and personal experiences of preservice teachers relate to perceived self-efficacy of teaching inclusive classrooms. I also hoped to gain insight from the students enrolled in the teacher education program offered at Middle Tennessee State University and determine implications for inclusive teaching. Results indicate that there is no evidence to support that level education can predict levels of the measure of self-efficacy used here, but there is evidence to partially support that previous experience with inclusive classrooms can predict levels of self-efficacy to use inclusive instruction.
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ItemNew Interviewing Technologies: What do job applicants think?(Middle Tennessee State University, 2022)Recently, organizations have begun utilizing asynchronous online video interviewing platforms which combine video streaming technology with artificial intelligence to facilitate the interviewing step in their personnel selection process. As with many emerging technologies, little research exists to investigate how these platforms may be received by job applicants. The goal of this study is to examine how applicants may react to requests from organizations to complete asynchronous video interviews and the differences in perceptions of fairness, organizational attractiveness and job pursuit intentions, based on what information, if any, is provided about the decision-making agent. Participants (n = 287) completed a study where they were assigned a role as a recent job applicant that received an invitation to complete an interview using the organizations’ online video interview platform as the next step in the selection process. Participants were then randomly assigned to one of three conditions: the first provided no information about how the selection decision would be made, the second informed them that an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm would make the decision, and the third that a recruiter [human] would make the decision. Hypotheses stated that participants would rate the human decision maker more favorably than the AI decision maker and would rate both the human and AI decision maker conditions more favorably than the no information condition. Results indicated that perceptions of organizational attractiveness and job intentions were significantly influenced, but only for the human decision maker over the AI decision maker. Gender, comfort level and previous experience with recording asynchronous interviews were found to have moderating effects.
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ItemFieldwork and Public Interpretation in an Ethnic Enclave: The Temple Project in Butte, Montana(Middle Tennessee State University, 2022)Butte, Montana was once a bustling city of over 100,000 citizens with people from over nineteen different ethnic backgrounds, now the city is down to a declining population of 34,000. The mark these ethnic communities left on the city still shapes the current landscape and culture of the city. Within Butte, the oldest continuously in-use Jewish reformed Temple in the state of Montana has shifted from existing as solely a place of worship and is transitioning into an ethnic heritage center to highlight the history, impact, and stories of all the different groups that made Butte, Montana the thriving mining city it once was. The B’nai Israel Temple will become a space in Butte to give a large voice to the stories that are underrepresented within the public interpretation in Butte. There is a preconceived notion in Butte that the harshness of the frontier and mining culture level the playing field for those of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds for those who moved to the city, but while true for groups such as the Jewish who were treated with less antisemitism then elsewhere in the world, the same cannot be said universally for all whom lived in the city. The African American, Indigenous, and Chinese populations all still faced heavy persecution and mistreatment within the city like they were elsewhere across the country.