This survey takes information on a participant’s beliefs on privacy security, the general digital knowledge, demographics, and willingness-to-pay points on if they would delete information on their social media, to see how an information treatment affects those payment points. This information treatment is meant to make half of the participants think about the deeper ramifications of the information they reveal. The initial hypothesis is that this information will make people want to pay more to remove their information from the web, but the results find a surprising negative correlation with the treatment.

For our project, we explored the growth of the ASU BioDesign Clinical Testing Laboratory (ABCTL) from a standard university research lab to a COVID-19 testing facility through a business lens. The lab has pioneered the saliva-test in the Western United States. This thesis analyzes the laboratory from various business concepts and aspects. The business agility of the lab and it’s quickness to innovation has allowed the lab to enjoy great success. Looking into the future, the laboratory has a promising future and will need to answer many questions to remain the premier COVID-19 testing institution in Arizona.

Optimal foraging theory provides a suite of tools that model the best way that an animal will <br/>structure its searching and processing decisions in uncertain environments. It has been <br/>successful characterizing real patterns of animal decision making, thereby providing insights<br/>into why animals behave the way they do. However, it does not speak to how animals make<br/>decisions that tend to be adaptive. Using simulation studies, prior work has shown empirically<br/>that a simple decision-making heuristic tends to produce prey-choice behaviors that, on <br/>average, match the predicted behaviors of optimal foraging theory. That heuristic chooses<br/>to spend time processing an encountered prey item if that prey item's marginal rate of<br/>caloric gain (in calories per unit of processing time) is greater than the forager's<br/>current long-term rate of accumulated caloric gain (in calories per unit of total searching<br/>and processing time). Although this heuristic may seem intuitive, a rigorous mathematical<br/>argument for why it tends to produce the theorized optimal foraging theory behavior has<br/>not been developed. In this thesis, an analytical argument is given for why this<br/>simple decision-making heuristic is expected to realize the optimal performance<br/>predicted by optimal foraging theory. This theoretical guarantee not only provides support<br/>for why such a heuristic might be favored by natural selection, but it also provides<br/>support for why such a heuristic might a reliable tool for decision-making in autonomous<br/>engineered agents moving through theatres of uncertain rewards. Ultimately, this simple<br/>decision-making heuristic may provide a recipe for reinforcement learning in small robots<br/>with little computational capabilities.

This thesis is a supplement textbook designed with ASU’s MAT 370, or more generally, a course in introductory real analysis (IRA). With research in the realms of mathematics textbook creation and IRA pedagogy, this supplement aims to provide students or interested readers an additional presentation of the materials. Topics discussed include the real number system, some topology of the real line, sequences of real numbers, continuity, differentiation, integration, and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. Special emphasis was placed on worked examples of proven results and exercises with hints at the end of every chapter. In this respect, this supplement aims to be both versatile and self-contained for the different mathematics skill levels of readers.