Digital Commons Network^™

Dynamic Analysis Of Unevenly Sampled Data With Applications To Statistical Process Control, Laura Ann Mcsweeney

Doctoral Dissertations

Dynamic analysis involves describing how a process changes over time. Applications of this type of analysis can be implemented in industrial settings in order to control manufacturing processes and recognize when they have changed significantly. The primary focus of this work is to construct methods to detect the onset of periodic behavior in a process which is being monitored using a scheme where data is sampled unevenly.

Techniques that can be used to identify statistically significant periodic structure using the periodogram will be reviewed and developed. The statistical properties of the periodogram for unevenly sampled data will be calculated. These …

Analysis Of Impact And Value Of Neasc High School Accreditation Procedures On School Accountability And School Improvement From 1987-1997, George Allan Cushing

Doctoral Dissertations

From a 1983 federal study which concluded, as its title suggests, that America had become A Nation at Risk because of a failing public school system, the modern standards movement was born. This educational reform movement beginning in the 1980's and continuing through the 1990's brought about the development and establishment of many accountability and improvement initiatives aimed at public schools. Also during this time, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), through its Commission on Public Secondary Schools along with five other regional accrediting agencies across the country, was continuously engaged in the practice of evaluating and …

The Word Problem And The Ideal Membership Problem, Damon Anthony Demas

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation concerns two problems from computational algebra, the word problem for semigroups and the ideal membership problem for noncommutative polynomial rings. Historically, the word problem provided one of the first examples of an algorithmically unsolvable problem from outside of logic and computability theory. In terms of solvability, the word problem is equivalent to a restricted version of the membership problem.

For ideals whose membership problem is solvable, computational techniques such as Grobner basis methods often can be used to solve the problem, but not always. In Chapter two, we develop a method which can be used to solve the …

Annual Report From The Town Officers To The Townspeople Of: Errol, New Hampshire. Year Ending December 31, 1998., Errol Town Representatives

Errol, NH Annual Reports

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire.

Annual Reports Of The Selectmen And Other Town Officers, Charlestown, N.H., For The Year Ending December 31, 1998., Charlestown Town Representatives

Charlestown, NH Annual Reports

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire.

Paleoclimatic Significance Of Insoluble Microparticle Records From Canadian Arctic And Greenland Ice Cores, Christian Michel Zdanowicz

Doctoral Dissertations

The past and present variability of climate in the Arctic region is investigated using ice core records of atmospheric dust (microparticles) and volcanic aerosols developed from the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. A high-resolution, 10 4-year long proxy record of atmospheric dust deposition is developed from an ice core (P95) drilled through the Penny Ice Cap, Baffin Island. Snowpit studies indicate that dust deposited on the Penny Ice Cap are representative of background mineral aerosol, and demonstrate that the variability of dust fallout is preserved in the P95 core at multi-annual to longer time scales. The P95 dust record reveals a …

Mentoring In Adolescence: A Sociocultural And Cognitive Developmental Study Of Undergraduate Women And Sixth-Grade Girls In A Mentoring Program, Katharina Maria Fachin Lucas

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was two-fold. First, a quasi-experimental study was conducted to explore the cognitive developmental effects of taking on the role of "mentor" as an undergraduate or the role of "mentee" as a sixth grader in one university-based mentoring program. Second, an ethnographic study was conducted to study the experiences of ten sixth graders and ten undergraduates as they took on the role of "mentor" or "mentee" in a planned mentoring relationship. A sociocultural analysis explored processes occurring on the personal, interpersonal, and community level that shaped the mentoring experiences of the participants.

The participants in this …

Central Sequences And C*-Algebras, Hemant Pendharkar

Doctoral Dissertations

We study central sequences of C*-algebras. We find connections of the central sequences of a C*-algebra and its representations. More specifically, we prove the following results: (a) Characterization of central sequences in certain C*-subalgebras of C(X, Mn), where X is a compact Hausdorff space. We also state the conditions under which central sequences are trivial/hypercentral. (b) A representation of the C*-algebra is in the point norm closure of the set of all equivalence classes of irreducible representation if and only if it is multiplicity free. (c) For a C*-algebra A, all of whose representations are bounded by some fixed number, …

Topics In Chaotic Secure Communication, Andrew Thomas Parker

Doctoral Dissertations

Results in nonlinear dynamics and chaos during this decade have been applied to problems in secure communications with limited success. Most of these applications have been based on the chaotic synchronization property discovered by Pecora and Carroll in 1989 [37]. Short [44, 45, 48] demonstrated the effectiveness of nonlinear dynamic (NLD) forecasting methods in breaking this class of communication schemes. In response, investigators have proposed enhancements to the basic synchronization technique in an attempt to improve the security properties. In this work two of these newer communication systems will be analyzed using NLD forecasting and other techniques to determine the …

The Effects Of Reversible Inactivation By Lidocaine Of Ventral Striatum And Intralaminar Nucleus Of The Thalamus In Match To Sample Tasks With And Without Delays Trained In The Lever Box, Mary Christine Porter

Doctoral Dissertations

Three experiments systematically examined the effects of reversibly inactivating intralaminar nuclei and ventral striatum with infusions of lidocaine. The ventral striatum and the intralaminar nucleus were targeted based on deficits in accuracy and speed of responding in delayed conditional discrimination tasks associated with permanent lesions of these structures (Mair, Burk and Porter, 1998).

The present research showed that a 4.0 mul of 2% lidocaine caused impairments accuracy, but not in response speed, in a match to sample task trained in the lever box without delays when the internal cannula projects 0.5 mm from the guide cannula. One microliter of 2%, …

New Methods For Modeling Accelerated Life Test Data, Michelle Hopkins Capozzoli

Doctoral Dissertations

An accelerated life test (ALT) is often used to obtain timely information for highly reliable items. The increased use of ALTs has resulted in nontraditional reliability data which can not be analyzed with standard statistical methodologies. I propose new methods for analyzing ALT data for studies with (1) two independent populations, (2) paired samples and (3) limited failure populations (LFP). Here, the Weibull distribution, which can accommodate a variety of failure rates, is assumed for the models I develop. For case (1), a parametric hypothesis test, a Bayesian analysis and a test using partial likelihood are proposed and discussed. For …

Hardware-Software Codesign In A High-Level Synthesis Environment, Tamas L. Visegrady

Doctoral Dissertations

Interfacing hardware-oriented high-level synthesis to software development is a computationally hard problem for which no general solution exists. Under special conditions, the hardware-software codesign (system-level synthesis) problem may be analyzed with traditional tools and efficient heuristics. This dissertation introduces a new alternative to the currently used heuristic methods. The new approach combines the results of top-down hardware development with existing basic hardware units (bottom-up libraries) and compiler generation tools. The optimization goal is to maximize operating frequency or minimize cost with reasonable tradeoffs in other properties.

The dissertation research provides a unified approach to hardware-software codesign. The improvements over previously …

Thinking Through Performance: Children Make Sense Of Characters And Social Relationships Through A Gesture-Based Theatre Convention (Tableau), Georgia Patricia Wilson

Doctoral Dissertations

This inquiry considers a gesture-based theatre convention called tableau as used by first and second graders during language arts instruction. I argue that tableau acts as a medium of thinking, used to make sense of literary text and of social relationships. Tableau is largely non-language-based; it augments instructional practices that are primarily language-based. Tableau reveals sophisticated understandings children cannot yet put into language. As such, tableau offers educators a means to cast children as capable analysts of literature.

Qualitatively oriented, this inquiry uses instrumental case study methods of observation and data analysis coupled with a concurrent conceptual study of the …

Small Firms, Global Economies: The Economic Sociology Of The Northwest Atlantic Sea Urchin Industry, Sean Raymond Lauer

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the organizational dynamics of firms operating in the East Coast sea urchin industry. First, I examine the confluence of economic and political conditions under which the industry evolved. As a part of the export driven growth of the past decade in the US the East Coast sea urchin industry benefited from political conditions, which encouraged development of global markets for US products. Along with this, the Japanese have displayed a seemingly insatiable demand for sea urchin roe through the 1990s. In 1971 the governance of the international monetary system changed from a fixed to floating exchange rate. …

Atmospheric Transport And Deposition Of Water -Soluble Nitrogen To The Gulf Of Maine, Carolyn Estelle Jordan

Doctoral Dissertations

An intensive sampling program was carried out from May 1994 through November 1997 on the shore of the Gulf of Maine in New Castle, New Hampshire. Daily (24 hour averages) samples of bulk aerosol and gas phase HNO3, precipitation, and 20 aerosol size distributions were obtained. Particulate NH4+ and gas phase HNO3 were the dominant water-soluble nitrogen species in the atmosphere. Nitrate was the dominant inorganic nitrogen ion in precipitation.

These samples were used with 1000 hPa streamlines to classify sampled air masses according to their surface level transport and chemistry. Overall, mixed conditions occurred in 42% of the samples, …

Using Writing Composition Pedagogy In An Introductory Teacher Education Practicum To Learn About The Motivations, Journeys, And Understandings Of Preservice Teachers, Daniel Archer Rothermel

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the last third of the twentieth century, best practice in America's public schools has evolved from a focus on the teacher's behavior in presenting material to a focus on whether and how students learn. Over that same period, writing composition pedagogy has focused on the emphasis on students' growth and development as they think reflectively, write drafts, and self-monitor. Integrating writing composition pedagogy in the education of preservice teachers, I use Exploring Teaching, a learner-centered introductory course in teacher education that I teach, as the specific context of my inquiry. As my students write Dear Classmates Letters, portfolio reflections, …

A Constraint-Based Framework For Configuration, Daniel Sabin

Doctoral Dissertations

The research presented here aims at providing a comprehensive framework for solving configuration problems, based on the Constraint Satisfaction paradigm. This thesis is addressing the two main issues raised by a configuration task: modeling the problem and solving it efficiently. Our approach subsumes previous approaches, incorporating both Simplification and further extension, offering increased representational power and efficiency.

Modeling. We advance the idea of local, context independent models for the types of objects in the application domain, and show how the model of an artifact can be built as a composition of local models of the constituent parts. Our modeling technique …

Learning To Read Music Cooperatively In A Choral Setting: A Case Study, Andrew Inzenga

Doctoral Dissertations

Two volunteer cooperative teams of ninth grade girls were studied for six months to discover whether and how they learned to read music. The two teams represented novice students and students who had received private instruction. Study teams represented the population of the freshman Girls Chorus. Teams met regularly during daily chorus rehearsals, with only occasional help from the director. These meetings were analyzed through video tape recordings to observe if students employed traditional teaching and learning strategies to assist each other in learning. It was determined that team members regularly use certain teaching and learning strategies to assist in …

Using Character Varieties: Presentations, Invariants, Divisibility And Determinants, Jeffrey Allan Hall

Doctoral Dissertations

If G is a finitely generated group, then the set of all characters from G into a linear algebraic group is a useful (but not complete) invariant of G . In this thesis, we present some new methods for computing with the variety of SL2C -characters of a finitely presented group. We review the theory of Fricke characters, and introduce a notion of presentation simplicity which uses these results. With this definition, we give a set of GAP routines which facilitate the simplification of group presentations. We provide an explicit canonical basis for an invariant ring associated with a symmetrically …

Table Of Contents Volume 10, Number One, Winter 1999, Risk Editorial Board

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002)

Table of contents for the journal RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (ISSN: 1073-8673)

Designing An Analytic Deliberative Process For Environmental Health Policy Making In The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex, Seth Tuler, Thomas Webler

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002)

Using a National Research Council Report as a centerpiece, Drs. Tuler and Webler evaluate the effectiveness of a conceptual approach to risk policy-making.

Wet Deposition In A Global Size-Dependent Aerosol Transport Model: 2. Influence Of The Scavenging Scheme On 210pb Vertical Profiles, Surface Concentrations, And Deposition, W Guelle, Y J. Balkanski, Jack E. Dibb, M Schulz, F Dulac

Earth Sciences

The main atmospheric sink for submicron aerosols is wet removal. Lead 210, the radioactive decay product of ²²²Rn, attaches immediately after being formed to submicron particles. Here we compare the effects of three different wet-scavenging schemes used in global aerosol simulations on the ²¹⁰Pb aerosol distribution using an off-line, size-resolved, global atmospheric transport model. We highlight the merits and shortcomings of each scavenging scheme at reproducing available measurements, which include concentrations in surface air and deposition, as well as vertical profiles observed over North America and western and central North Pacific. We show that model-measurement comparison of total …

Soluble Species In Aerosol And Snow And Their Relationship At Glacier 1, Tien Shan, China, Junying Sun, Dahe Qin, Paul A. Mayewski, Jack E. Dibb, Sallie I. Whitlow, Zhongqin Lee, Qinzhao Yang

Earth Sciences

Simultaneous sampling of aerosol (n = 20) and snow (n = 114) was made at Glacier 1, Tien Shan, between May 19 and June 29, 1996. Similar temporal patterns of some major ion (calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, chloride, and sulfate) concentrations between snow and aerosol show that snow chemistry basically reflects changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere. This gives us confidence in the reconstruction of past atmospheric change using some snow data. There are no significant correlations between aerosol and snow samples for ammonium and nitrate. This suggests that post-depositional and/or post-collection processes may alter ammonium and nitrate concentrations …

Nitric Acid Scavenging By Mineral And Biomass Burning Aerosols, A Tabazadeh, M Z. Jacobson, H B. Singh, O Brian Toon, J S. Lin, R B. Chatfield, A N. Thakur, R. Talbot, Jack E. Dibb

Earth Sciences

The abundance of gas phase nitric acid in the upper troposphere is overestimated by global chemistry-transport models, especially during the spring and summer seasons. Recent aircraft data obtained over the central US show that mineral aerosols were abundant in the upper troposphere during spring. Chemical reactions on mineral dust may provide an important sink for nitric acid. In regions where the mineral dust abundance is low in the upper troposphere similar HNO₃ removal processes may occur on biomass burning aerosols. We propose that mineral and biomass burning aerosols may provide an important global sink for gas phase nitric acid, …

The New Hampshire, Vol. 88 [89], No. 18 (Nov. 3, 1998), The New Hampshire

The New Hampshire Print Edition

An independent student produced newspaper from the University of New Hampshire. This volume was printed as 88, but it is the 89th volume in the series. This was corrected in pencil.

Development Of A Hard X-Ray Polarimeter For Astrophysics, Mark L. Mcconnell, John R. Macri, M Mcclish, James M. Ryan, D J. Forrest, W T. Vestrand

Space Science Center

We have been developing a Compton scatter polarimeter for measuring the linear polarization of hard X-rays (100-300 keV) from astrophysical sources. A laboratory prototype polarimeter has been used to successfully demonstrate the reliability of our Monte Carlo simulation code and to demonstrate our ability to generate a polarized photon source in the lab. Our design concept places a self-containedpolarimeter module on the front-end of a a 5-inch position sensitive PMT (PSPMT). We are currently working on the fabrication of a science model based on this PSPMT concept. Although the emphasis of our development effort is towards measuring hard X-rays from …

The New Hampshire, Vol. 88 [89], No. 13 (Oct. 13, 1998), The New Hampshire

The New Hampshire Print Edition

An independent student produced newspaper from the University of New Hampshire. This volume was printed as 88, but it is the 89th volume in the series. This was corrected in pencil.

The New Hampshire, Vol. 88 [89], No. 12 (Oct. 9, 1998), The New Hampshire

The New Hampshire Print Edition

An independent student produced newspaper from the University of New Hampshire. This volume was printed as 88, but it is the 89th volume in the series. This was corrected in pencil.

Cusp Energetic Ions: A Bow Shock Source, S. W. Chang, J. D. Scudder, S. A. Fuselier, J. F. Fennell, K. J. Trattner, J. S. Pickett, Harlan E. Spence, J. D. Menietti, W. K. Peterson, R. P. Lepping, R. Friedel

Physics & Astronomy

Recent interpretations of cusp energetic ions observed by the POLAR spacecraft have suggested a new energization process in the cusp [Chen et al., 1997; 1998]. Simultaneous enhancement of H⁺, He⁺², and O^>+2 fluxes indicates that they are of solar wind origin. In the present study, we examine H⁺ and He⁺² energy spectra from 20 eV to several 100 keV measured by the Hydra, Toroidal Imaging Mass-Angle Spectrograph (TIMAS), and Charge and Mass Magnetospheric Ion Composition Experiment (CAMMICE) on POLAR. The combined spectrum for each species is shown to be continuous with a …

Educating Nomads: Narratives And The Future Of Civic Education, Melvin J. Dubnick

Faculty Publications

The concern for civic education has re-entered the mainstream agenda of American political science. The primary task is to consider what should be done to “reach” the next generation of students. Most efforts in this regard have operated under the assumption that students of the future will be like students of the past. Based on this view, the problem is most often regarded as a matter of selecting an effective way to disseminate relevant knowledge. In this paper I argue for operating on a different set of assumptions, i.e. that we need to take seriously the emergence of the new …