Digital Commons Network^™

Immobilized Liquid Membranes For Facilitated Transport And Gas Separation, Anjaneya Sarma Kovvali

Dissertations

Separation and purification of gas mixtures is a major area of activity in chemical engineering. Gas separation using facilitated transport membranes has been the subject of considerable research for many years. Immobilized liquid membranes (ILMs) are an important class of facilitated transport membranes. Despite their potential to provide superior performance, they could not achieve commercial success so far due to their instability. Recent research addressed the issue of stability of ILMs by replacing water as the solvent successfully with glycerol. In the present thesis, the relevance of glycerol as an ideal solvent for developing stable ILMs is demonstrated using the …

Buffer Management And Cell Switching Management In Wireless Packet Communications, Jongho Bang

Dissertations

The buffer management and the cell switching (e.g., packet handoff) management using buffer management scheme are studied in Wireless Packet Communications.

First, a throughput improvement method for multi-class services is proposed in Wireless Packet System. Efficient traffic management schemes should be developed to provide seamless access to the wireless network. Specially, it is proposed to regulate the buffer by the "Selective- Delay Push-In (SDPI)" scheme, which is applicable to scheduling delay-tolerant non-real time traffic and delay-sensitive real time traffic. Simulation results show that the performance observed by real time traffics are improved as compared to existing buffer priority scheme in …

Design Of Traffic Shaper / Scheduler For Packet Switches And Diffserv Networks : Algorithms And Architectures, Surong Zeng

Dissertations

The convergence of communications, information, commerce and computing are creating a significant demand and opportunity for multimedia and multi-class communication services. In such environments, controlling the network behavior and guaranteeing the user's quality of service is required. A flexible hierarchical sorting architecture which can function either as a traffic shaper or a scheduler according to the requirement of the traffic load is presented to meet the requirement. The core structure can be implemented as a hierarchical traffic shaper which can support a large number of connections with a wide variety of rates and burstiness without the loss of the granularity …

The Effects Of Reengineering On Hospital Performance Indicators, Linda Rutgers Albery

Dissertations

Reengineering was a management tactic designed to reduce costs and increase efficiencies in the work place. Although many hospitals reported reengineering efforts were a priority during the latter part of the 1990s, little research has been done to determine the effects of reengineering on cost and quality performance indicators.

This research studied a large regional medical center located in southwest Michigan, which implemented patient-focused care redesign. Within this medical center, ten separate and distinct patient care departments were studied over a 5-year period. These departments included critical care, medical, surgical, obstetric and pediatric areas. During the first year o f …

The Effects Of Educational Development Plans Motivation To Learn, And Attitudes And Behaviors Toward Learning Among Eighth Graders, Mary Alice Schultz-Krajenta

Dissertations

Educational Development Plans (EDP) have been utilized by school students to structure their curricular programs to meet their high school educational outcomes and to align their curriculum with their desired adult roles. The focus of this study was to examine the effects of EDPs on motivation, attitudes and behaviors towards learning.

A total of 342 eighth-grade students participated in this research which utilized a quantitative and a qualitative approach. The quantitative study used existing data obtained from a small Midwest school district. There were 151 students in the treatment group and 191 students in the control group. Scores from the …

Transitioning And Adapting To College: A Case-Study Analysis Of The Experience Of University Students With Psychiatric Disabilities, Kenneth M. Werner

Dissertations

The psychiatric rehabilitation literature (Unger, 1987) indicates that few studies have been conducted about the adaptational demands associated with the transition to college for young adults with psychiatric disabilities who negotiate the university experience without the benefit o f a supported education program .

The purpose of this study was to describe how individual, social, and institutional factors contributed to the successful transition and adaptation to college life for students with psychiatric disabilities. The study sought to identify how students with psychiatric disabilities disclosed their illness in order to request support services and accommodations, and which services were essential or …

The Sense Of Nonsense: An Annotated Edition Of Ring W. Lardner’S Short Plays, Scott A. Topping

Dissertations

This edition presents twenty-one short plays by Ring W. Lardner (1885-1933), most of which have previously been accessible only on microfilm and in special collections. No edition exclusively dedicated to Lardner’s plays has ever been published. Though Lardner is known primarily for his short stories and sports writing, he considered himself to be a playwright and lyricist. Throughout his career he wrote several full-length plays (collaborating with George Cohan and George Kaufman, among others) and hundreds of short plays and sketches from which my collection is derived. Lardner’s sensitive ear for American dialects, praised by H. L. Mencken, Carl Van …

First Nations Students: What Some Teachers Do That Make Them Successful, Robert M. Peacock Edd

Dissertations

With the European settlement of North America, the education of First Nations children shifted from being carried out in a natural setting by all community members, communicated through observation and trial, and instructed through values, needs, and traditions; to a whole-group learning model founded on a standard curriculum based on successes and failures. For at least the past fifty years First Nations adults have demanded greater control over their children's education. Recently, the Ministry of Education in British Columbia (BC) has advocated for greater success of First Nations students by providing funding for additional support and by increasing the number …

Perceptions Of International Students And University Personnel Of Cultural Adjustment Problems At Two Private Universities, John R. Jenkins Edd

Dissertations

The influx of international students studying at United States colleges and universities during the past five decades has presented many challenges related to accommodating the needs of these “special” students. In the early 1950s, fewer than 40,000 international students were enrolled within the higher education system of the U.S.; today that number has grown to more than 490,000 students. The problems confronted by these students are both numerous and complex. University personnel often address these problems by developing specific programs designed to meet the needs of the international students at their university. However, the perceptions of these problems by international …

Crossing Myriad Borders: A Dimensional Analysis Of The Migration And Health Experiences Of Indigenous Oaxacan Women, Sharon Mcguire Phd, Op, Msn, Rn-C

Dissertations

The growing feminization of the migration of ethnic indigenous women, such as Mixtecs, Zapotecs and Triquis from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, are altering the dynamics and configuration of traditional Mexican migration, making it especially significant for the health professions. Informed by a postcolonial ecofeminist paradigm, this bi-national grounded theory study explored the migration and health experiences of indigenous Oaxacan immigrant/migrant women. Data collection using participant observation and interviewing occurred in Oaxaca, Mexico, along the US-Mexico border, and the interior of California. Dimensional analysis was used as the method of data analysis to generate theoretical understandings of these phenomena. …

Video Indexing And Summarization Using Motion Activity, Kadir Askin Peker

Dissertations

In this dissertation, video-indexing techniques using low-level motion activity characteristics and their application to video summarization are presented. The MPEG-7 motion activity feature is defined as the subjective level of activity or motion in a video segment. First, a novel psychophysical and analytical framework for automatic measurement of motion activity in compliance with its subjective perception is developed. A psychophysically sound subjective ground truth for motion activity and a test-set of video clips is constructed for this purpose. A number of low-level, compressed domain motion vector based, known and novel descriptors are then described. It is shown that these descriptors …

Phase-Locked Loop, Delay-Locked Loop, And Linear Decorrelating Detector For Asynchronous Multirate Ds-Cdma System, Sok-Kyu Lee

Dissertations

The performance of phase synchronization and code tracking of a digital phase-locked loop (PLL) and delay-locked loop (DLL), respectively, is investigated in wideband asynchronous multirate DS-CDMA system. Dynamic Partial Correlation (DPC) method is proposed to evaluate the autocorrelation and its power spectrum density (PSD) of the cross-correlated terms in the presence of multirate multiple access interference (MMAI) under additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) and fading channel environments. The steady-state probability density function (PDF) and variance of the phase estimator error and code tracking jitter is evaluated by solving the first-order Fokker-Planck equation.

Among many linear multiuser detectors which decouple the …

Resource Allocation For Cdma Downlink To Achieve Maximum Throughput, Anil Bircan

Dissertations

Growing interest in cellular phones, wireless modems, instant messaging, pagers with the increasing use of the Internet in daily life indicate that wireless high speed Internet access and wireless multimedia applications are in great demand. The barrier to satisfy this demand is the provision of sufficiently high bit rates in severe wireless mobile channel conditions, for a multitude of services, each requiring different and perhaps even time-varying quality of services (QoS) that can be more demanding than the QoS required by today's voice service. New generation systems will enable provision of a multitude of services each with different QoS and …

Empirical Model-Based Control For End Milling Process, Abdelmalak Salib

Dissertations

The main objective of this research is to develop an empirical model-based control mechanism to maintain a fine surface finish quality by maintaining on-line cutting force values. The proposed model has been developed to present the control model constraints, by varying the machining parameters to control the force output to be constant. To relate the surface finish and the cutting force in the end milling machining process, a design of experiment has been conducted to determine the effect of two different materials (aluminium and steel) and the machining parameters (feed rate, spindle speed) at a predefined depth of cut.

Regression …

Nonlinear Optical Properties Of Nano Structures, Mahesh U. Ajgaonkar

Dissertations

Nonlinear optical properties of nanoscale semiconductors had been a topic of intense research in recent years in attempts to realize all-optical communication systems. These semiconductor nanoclusters, in the range of 1-100nm are hosted in a dielectric material and are considered as a particular example of Conditional Artificial Dielectric (CAD). It has been reported that the dielectric properties of such materials will be greatly changed by light intensity.

Two main paths to realize nano semiconductor clusters are reported in this dissertation. The Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) technique is first described. Here we were investigating the effect of surface modification of nano …

Interference Suppression And Diversity For Cdma Systems, Xiaodong Cai

Dissertations

In code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems, due to non-orthogonality of the spreading codes and multipath channels, the desired signal suffers interference from other users. Signal fading due to multipath propagation is another source of impairment in wireless CDMA systems, often severely impacting performance. In this dissertation, reduced-rank minimum mean square error (MMSE) receiver and reduced-rank minimum variance receiver are investigated to suppress interference; transmit diversity is applied to multicarrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) systems to combat fading; packet combing is studied to provide both interference suppression and diversity for CDMA random access systems.

The reduced-rank MMSE receiver that uses a reduced-rank estimated covariance …

Analysis And Control Of Monolithic Piezoelectric Nano-Actuator, Xuemei Sun

Dissertations

The study of the monolithic piezoelectric actuator, the dominant type of micropositioner is an attractive and challenging area, where realtime control theory and digital signal processing are effectively applied. The actuator can be applied in precision instruments and precision control, such as microscopes, medical and optics instruments because of the piezoelectric ceramic's high resolution, fast transient response, and potential low cost. However, hysteresis nonlinearity and lightly damped vibration exist in the system, which limit the actuator applications.

This work focuses on the hysteresis characteristics in time and frequency domains along with experimental and simulated results to verify the effectiveness of …

Environmental Science In The New Millennium : A Model To Give Structure And Guidance, James M. Lipuma

Dissertations

This work proposes a template for successful interdisciplinary Environmental Science (EVSQ) programs at four-year American learning institutions. The first conclusion reached is that there is no one "perfect" program. Only by identifying clear goals for EVSC can programs improve. It was determined that a clear definition of EVSC and mission statements related to these definitions are necessary first steps to allow improvement to occur. One major outcome of the work is the educational model built to understand EVSC education. The model identifies methods by which the goals and objectives of EVSC can be identified and accomplished. The research found that …

Object Detection And Activity Recognition In Digital Image And Video Libraries, Ibrahim Burak Ozer

Dissertations

This thesis is a comprehensive study of object-based image and video retrieval, specifically for car and human detection and activity recognition purposes. The thesis focuses on the problem of connecting low level features to high level semantics by developing relational object and activity presentations. With the rapid growth of multimedia information in forms of digital image and video libraries, there is an increasing need for intelligent database management tools. The traditional text based query systems based on manual annotation process are impractical for today's large libraries requiring an efficient information retrieval system. For this purpose, a hierarchical information retrieval system …

A More Efficient Document Retrieval Method For Texpros, Yin Dong

Dissertations

Document processing is a critical element of office automation. Through document classification, extraction and filing, documents are automatically placed into a knowledge base according to certain rules. Document retrieval is a process to get a document back according to a user's requirements and to show the results to the user. Hence, a good user-interface and an efficient retrieval algorithm become core parts of document retrieval.

Unlike previous browsers that have been proposed for this purpose, this dissertation develops a new browser that has a user interface with more tools, and one that has a more efficient retrieval algorithm that can …

The Social Construction Of The Sex Offender, Lisa L. Sample

Dissertations

Over the last two decades, Americans have come to perceive sex offending as a serious and widespread problem. As a response to the public's concern, new sex offender legislation has been enacted. This dissertation examines the contemporary sex offender problem and the legislative responses, within a social constructionist framework. I performed a content analysis of newspaper accounts, conducted interviews with public officials, and analyzed arrest data to determine the current definitions of sex offenders, the process by which those definitions found their way into law, and how they were applied to offenders.

I found that the media depict and policy …

A Study Of Officer's Use Of Leadership Skills Learned In The Navy's Intermediate Officer Leadership Course, William F. Conroy Edd

Dissertations

The U.S. Navy's present-day leadership training program, referred to as the Leadership Continuum, provides for leadership training for all enlisted personnel and officers at initial entry into the naval service and at designated career milestones until retirement. The Leadership Continuum evolved from a series of formal Navy leadership training programs dating back to the late 1970s. The Navy has expended a considerable amount of fiscal resources over the past 20 years in an attempt to provide quality leadership training to its personnel. However, past studies have revealed that leadership training course graduates are provided with little to no incentives by …

Values Education Influence On Elementary Students' Self-Esteem, Ron W. Germaine Edd

Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to determine if there was a significant difference in measures of self-esteem between elementary school students to whom specific values were formally taught in their school as part of the curriculum and those who did not receive such instruction. The setting for the study was a school district in Canada that had identified sixteen values through community consensus. The district developed curriculum and lessons for the teaching of these values. A quasi-experimental research design was utilized. The treatment group was taught values as a formal part of their curriculum for a period of four …

Aligning Practice With Vision: Leadership For Developing Character And Employability Attributes, Douglas Archibald Hoey Edd

Dissertations

Leadership to achieve the development of character and employability attributes depends highly on one significant principle—aligning practice with vision. The purpose of this study was to investigate the leadership necessary to design and implement an intervention process to develop character and employability attributes in secondary school students. The work habit mark was the means of assessing the degree of success to which a student demonstrated the attributes. The research questions under investigation were: (1) Is there a change in the demonstration of work habits marks after the intervention, and (2) Do any changes in the demonstration of work habits marks …

Reflective Practices: Collective Case Studies Of Selected K–8 General Music Teachers In Peer Problem-Solving Discipline And Management Workshop Settings, Nan Leslie Mcdonald Edd

Dissertations

Considerable research indicates that classroom discipline is the most important factor influencing teachers' self-concepts of teaching effectiveness and job satisfaction. Yet, time is not allotted for critical reflection with peers closest to these practice concerns. K–8 general music teachers are further isolated from other teachers and experience discipline concerns specific to music teaching, concerns they need to reflectively problem-solve with job-alike peers. This qualitative study examined processes of guided critical reflection of 137 K–8 general music teachers from 16 states within researcher-led discipline and management workshops. Multiple sources of data included observation notes, participants' self-written case studies of their own …

The Balancing Act: Work Environment Issues For Women With Children In Student Affairs, Mary Kimberly Braun Padulo Edd

Dissertations

Increasingly in the past two decades, student affairs work at American's universities has been undertaken by women. This work with the co-curricular life of the students in higher education requires administrators at all levels to have a flexible schedule with the ability to commit evenings and weekends to their work. Challenges for academe and for women in the profession have emerged as more women enter the field. One of the most problematic areas is the retention of highly educated and experienced female administrators once they have children. Workplace environment, including work schedule, job demands and employer support, have been suggested …

A Case Study Of Shared Governance At Imperial Valley College, Gregorio A. Ponce Edd

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to analyze and synthesize the perceptions and experiences of individuals and groups responsible for implementing shared governance at Imperial Valley College. Consequently, this investigation sought to establish (a) who was directly involved with the governance process, (b) how the process was operationalized, and (c) the benefits, drawbacks, and unresolved issues for implementing the governance process. The design of this investigation was a qualitative case study. Noting that the use of multiple sources of data collection adds to the reliability and validity of a study, interviews, observations, documents, and the professional literature on governance were …

Changes In Navy Leadership Theory And Practice: Post-Vietnam, Nicholas A. Trongale Edd

Dissertations

Since the Vietnam War, Navy leadership theory and practice has changed, becoming more like current civilian leadership theory and practice than traditional leadership of old. Indicators of this change have been seen in journal writings, the new Navy performance evaluation structure, current Navy leadership training, and by the birth of a Navy Command Leadership School. This study was designed to explore the evolution and recent history of the Navy's leadership theory and practice for indications of change. Combining a qualitative and quantitative methodology, this study used a 5-point Likert-type scale survey that included a written comments section. Over 70% of …

School-Based Management In Alberta: Perceptions Of Public School Leaders, 1994–1997, Robert James Wilson Edd

Dissertations

In 1994, the Government of Alberta, Canada, instituted major fiscal measures designed to reduce operating costs and a large provincial debt. In tandem, Alberta Education restructured public education by: reducing the number of school districts, redefining the role of school boards, increasing the involvement of parents, initiating Charter schools, expanding student testing, downsizing Alberta Education, improving delivery of services to children, and mandating the implementation of school-based management in all public schools (Alberta Education News Release, January 18, 1994). The purpose of this study was to develop an understanding of how the implementation of school-based management, through the first three …

Faculty Perceptions Of Dean Transitions: Does Trust Matter? An Interpretive Case Study Of Organizational Trust And Organizational Culture, Rebecca L. Woolston Edd

Dissertations

This study looked for factors that might have influenced faculty perceptions of new deans at a professional school in the western part of the United States. More specifically, the study explored the question of how organizational trust may have influenced perceptions of new deans and faculty willingness to trust new deans. A single case study used guided interviews as data for the interpretive analysis. The study sought to provide insight into the phenomenon of dean transitions. The study also endeavored to add new dimensions to current conceptualizations of organizational trust and culture by highlighting a previously underexplored but potentially relevant …