Digital Commons Network^™

A Lateral Comb Drive On Pmma By Hot Embossing Technique, Yongjun Zhao

Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of this work is to fabricate a laterally driven comb drive on low-cost poly-methyl-meth-acrylate (PMMA) by hot embossing technology.

An electrostatic comb drive is one of the most important components in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). A comb drive can work as both a sensor and an actuator. Varieties of comb drives have been developed on silicon and poly-silicon materials.

Hot embossing of polymers is a promising alternative to traditional silicon processes due to cost-reduction. It fulfills the demand for low-cost methods for high volume production of micro-components and micro-systems. The raw materials of polymer are relatively inexpensive. For the …

Antecedents Of Salesperson Effectiveness And Efficiency Performance: A Data Envelopment Analysis, Xueming Luo

Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of this dissertation was to (1) measure salesperson efficiency; (2) investigate both personal and organizational factors that determine salesperson efficiency; and (3) investigate both personal and organizational factors that determine salesperson effectiveness. Salesperson efficiency was assessed by data envelopment analysis (DEA). Two different DEA models were employed in order to increase the reliability of the efficiency results. Antecedents of salesperson efficiency and effectiveness were tested using Tobit regression analysis and ordinary least square regression analysis, respectively. These antecedents include not only personal level variables such as working smart, working hard, learning goal orientation, and performance goal orientation, but …

The Effects Of Instruction Utilizing The Arts On The Academic Achievement Of Fourth-Grade Students, Elizabeth Fallin Manning

Doctoral Dissertations

In this day of accountability, members of state government agencies are looking for ways to increase student achievement, especially in the area of high stakes testing. Louisiana's accountability program has yielded state curriculum standards which identify the content that should be taught by specific grade levels. Teachers are now charged with the responsibility of finding methods to teach these standards. With all of the attention to these academic standards, what is the role of the arts? The Louisiana Institute for Education in the Arts (LAIEA) suggests that the arts are the tools with which to teach these academic standards. This …

Testing The Effectiveness Of Deregulation In The Electric Utility Industry: A Market-Based Approach, Manfen Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

In this paper, I investigate one stated purpose of deregulation in the electric utility industry—to make utility operations more responsive to news releases, a proxy for market forces. My premise is that utilities providing electricity to highly deregulated states will be more responsive to market forces than those providing electricity to non-deregulated states. I employ intraday data from April to June 2001, the year after deregulation, and from 1994, the year before deregulation. I also employ the Brown-Forsythe-Modified Levene (BFL) test to determine the volatility differences between days with released news and days without released news. The results of BFL …

The Effect Of School Size, Socioeconomic Status, And Grade -Level Configuration On Academic Achievement In Louisiana Public Schools, Scarlet L. Chopin

Doctoral Dissertations

The national emphasis on continually improving education for all students coupled with accountability requires educators and policymakers to identify and implement effective schooling structures and strategies. In this study, the researcher examined the relationship among school size, socioeconomic status of students, the interaction of school size and socioeconomic status (SES), grade-level configuration, and academic achievement in Louisiana. An extensive data set representing 1362 public PK–12 schools was analyzed at the 4th, 8th, and 10th grade levels. The construct of schooling as a production process was used as a theoretical model wherein the education production function was used to describe the …

The Influence Of Teacher Attitude About Professional Development, Master's Degree Training, And Teacher Certification On School Performance Scores In Selected Louisiana Parishes, Kay Lynn Tettleton

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship among three independent variables: teacher attitudes about professional development, earning a master's degree, and teacher certification on School Performance Scores. Independent variables included teacher attitude about professional development, proportion of teachers with masters' degrees, and proportion of certified and uncertified teachers. The researcher used a correlational design to test the hypothesized relationships among these three independent variables and school and district School Performance Scores. A ten item self-report instrument was constructed to assess teacher attitudes about professional development in the school or district. This instrument, Teacher Perception of Professional Development …

Vertical Polymer Tunneling Sensor Platform By Hot Embossing Technique, Jing Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent development in microfabrication technology has brought much attention to the development of miniaturized, inexpensive and high-accuracy MEMS devices and microsystems. The ultimate goal of our project is to develop a versatile, three-dimensional, high precision sensor platform, which can be used for displacement, velocity or acceleration measurement. The first step, on which this dissertation is based, is to fabricate a one-dimensional (parallel with the Z axis) tunneling sensor, which in turn can be developed into two- and three-dimensional sensor platforms through structural and functional integration.

Since the invention of mini-structured high-sensitivity silicon-based tunneling sensor in 1993, the synthesis and fabrication …

Machine Learning Approaches For Determining Effective Seeds For K -Means Algorithm, Kaveephong Lertwachara

Doctoral Dissertations

In this study, I investigate and conduct an experiment on two-stage clustering procedures, hybrid models in simulated environments where conditions such as collinearity problems and cluster structures are controlled, and in real-life problems where conditions are not controlled. The first hybrid model (NK) is an integration between a neural network (NN) and the k-means algorithm (KM) where NN screens seeds and passes them to KM. The second hybrid (GK) uses a genetic algorithm (GA) instead of the neural network. Both NN and GA used in this study are in their simplest-possible forms.

In the simulated data sets, I investigate two …

Understanding Wavelet Analysis And Filters For Engineering Applications, Chethan Bangalore Parameswariah

Doctoral Dissertations

Wavelets are signal-processing tools that have been of interest due to their characteristics and properties. Clear understanding of wavelets and their properties are a key to successful applications. Many theoretical and application-oriented papers have been written. Yet the choice of a right wavelet for a given application is an ongoing quest that has not been satisfactorily answered. This research has successfully identified certain issues, and an effort has been made to provide an understanding of wavelets by studying the wavelet filters in terms of their pole-zero and magnitude-phase characteristics. The magnitude characteristics of these filters have flat responses in both …

A Study Of The Implementation Of Character Education, Learning Environment, And School Performance Scores In Selected Parishes In Louisiana, Cynthia Ford Pilcher

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate two sets of relationships: the relationship between character education and learning environment, and the relationship between character education and School Performance Scores in 17 elementary schools located in five public school districts in northeast Louisiana. Principal and teacher (K–6) respondents completed a 15-item questionnaire designed to measure their perceptions of the level of implementation of character education in the school setting and a 15-item questionnaire assessing perception of the learning environment. Data from surveys completed by school personnel were gathered to allow analyses by school, grade level taught, number of years experience, …

Study Of Energy Sampling Weights In The Dø Detector Using Multiparameter Fitting Method, Qun Yu

Doctoral Dissertations

The DØ calorimeter at Fermilab is a sampling calorimeter measuring the energy of particles produced in high energy proton-antiproton collisions. A set of accurate sampling weights is of significant importance to DØ research activity. The objective of this work was to obtain a set of optimized sampling weights for the DØ central calorimeter, the Inter-Cryostat Detector (ICD), the Central Calorimeter Massless Gap (CCMG), and the End Calorimeter Massless Gap (ECMG).

The foundation of the optimization method is that, in high energy physics, the ratio of energy E and the corresponding momentum P of a particle is approximately 1, in units …

Design And Fabrication Of A Microscale Joule -Thomson Refrigerator, Lionel Gamini Hewavitharana

Doctoral Dissertations

A simple thermodynamic, heat transfer, and fluid flow model was developed for microscale Joule-Thomson refrigerators (JT devices). For a given geometry, the model predicted that the cooling capacity of the refrigerator increased with the inlet refrigerant pressure. The effectiveness of the JT device also increased with the inlet pressure, and the heat exchanger channel length. At a constant inlet pressure, the effectiveness, and the refrigeration capacity of a given JT device increased as the aspect ratio of heat exchanger channels was increased. For nitrogen refrigerant, the model predicted that it was possible to obtain approximately 250 mW of refrigeration capacity …

Microreactor System With Immobilized Enzyme On Polydimethylsiloxane (Pdms) Polymers, Zonghuan Lu

Doctoral Dissertations

Microsystems, specifically microreactors, open the gate to new, improved analytical techniques while offering many advantages for a large number of applications in chemical engineering, pharmacy, medicine, and biotechnology. This study explored the feasibility of fabrication of microreactors using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as a support for enzyme immobilization. Urease enzyme was used for catalyzing the conversion of urea to ammonia.

PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) is a silicone-based elastomeric polymer. Traditional micromanufacturing technology was employed for reactor mold fabrication. The mold was fabricated based on photolithography techniques, and SU-8 photoresist was used to construct reactor structure templates. The resulting silicon-wafer based reactor molds were then …

“All Hayll, All Hayll, Both Blithe And Glad” : Direct Address In Early English Drama, 1400-1585, Michelle M. Butler '90

Doctoral Dissertations

"Now will I praise those godly men,

our ancestors, each in his own time...

All these were glorious in their time,

each illustrious in his day.

Some of them have left behind a name

and men recount their praiseworthy deeds " (Sirach 44: I. 7-8)

Direct address is widely acknowledged as a fundamental technique in early English, particularly medieval, drama. The observation that early English drama does not have the convention of the ‘fourth wall,’ and frequently speaks directly to and interacts with the audience would not be news to scholars o f this drama; many have mentioned it. A.R. …

Free Solution Electrophoresis Measurements And Their Theoretical Relationships To Net Protein Valence, Jennifer A. Durant

Doctoral Dissertations

Biochemical solutions are composed to a large degree of charged molecules (proteins, DNA, dissolved salts, etc) which can interact and therefore exert a force on each other. Analytical determination of the valence of biological macro-ions contributes to our understanding of the forces involved in both intra- and inter-molecular interactions. This dissertation uses two free solution techniques, membrane confined electrophoresis (MCE) and capillary electrophoresis (CE), to study valence in the context of a series of charge mutants of T4 lysozyme and RNase Sa. The use of these mutants allows attribution of the changes in electrophoretic behavior entirely to changes in charge. …

The Effects Of Providing Mathematical Problem -Posing Experiences For K--8 Pre-Service Teachers: Investigating Teachers' Beliefs And Characteristics Of Posed Problems, Todd August Grundmeier

Doctoral Dissertations

This study incorporated problem posing into a mathematics content course for preservice elementary and middle school teachers by extending George Polya's (1957) problem solving heuristic to include problem re-formulation and by having participants pose problems from sets of given information. The course provided pre-service teachers with a new mathematical perspective and this research examined participants' problem posing, beliefs about mathematics, and beliefs about the teaching and learning of mathematics.

Study participants were enrolled in a mathematics content course for pre-service teachers at the University of New Hampshire. There were twenty students in the course and nineteen agreed to be participants …

Design And In Situ Testing Of A Piezometer System To Measure Earthquake -Induced Pore -Pressure Changes, Robert Farrell

Doctoral Dissertations

Pore pressure changes have been measured in fine sand deposits that are known to have liquefied during earthquakes. Some of the measured signals have not been similar to what was expected during earthquake-induced liquefaction. Using artificially generated signals, several investigators have attempted to determine if existing piezometer fields designed to measure earthquake induced pore pressure changes are operating correctly. The signals generated during one investigation were not similar to those expected from an earthquake. In another investigation, while the generated signals were similar to ones expected from an earthquake, the results were not reproducible; the generated signals damaged the aquifer …

Satellite Indices Of Fluvial Influence In Coastal Waters, Joseph E. Salisbury Ii.

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation a suite of satellite, discharge and in-situ measurements is used to explore the spatio-temporal distribution of terrestrial constituents in coastal environments. The covariance between riverine delivery of optically active constituents and the corresponding optical variability in neighboring coastal waters for the Mississippi and Orinoco Rivers is documented. From this work, satellite-based indices of fluvial influence (IFI), are developed which contain information on the spatial extent of riverine constituents in coastal waters. The IFI is defined as the correlation between time series of riverine discharge and an ocean color satellite-derived property in the region proximal to a river's …

Living The Stereotype: Connections Between Male Behavior And Male Images, Andrew Paul Smiler

Doctoral Dissertations

This project examined some linkages and discrepancies between theories that describe the acquisition of gender typical attributes in childhood with theories that describe the maintenance of those attributes in adulthood. This perspective included the idea that there are several well known ways of enacting masculinity, related to well known stereotypes (e.g., jock, business, sensitive new age guy), and highlighted within sex variability. Because a distinction between biological sex and gender was made, the sample was not restricted to males despite focusing on the masculine. One focus of the project was the consistency with which an individual enacts a particular stereotypical …

Knowledge, Inquiry, Action: Teacher Collaboration At Prospect Center's Summer Institute, Karen Hendrickson Woolf

Doctoral Dissertations

This two-year study describes the work of approximately thirty educators, kindergarten/post-secondary, who attend the Summer Institute on Descriptive Inquiry and November Conference under the auspices of The Prospect Archive and Center for Education and Research in North Bennington, Vermont. The purpose of this study is to portray the experience of collaborative inquiry using Prospect Center's descriptive processes.

Teacher network groups generally center around specific content areas such as language arts or science. In contrast, Prospect Center is an independent national network of educators committed to guided observation and disciplined description as a grounding for teaching practice and inquiry. Generated by …

Wavelet Analysis Of Ulf Magnetospheric Waves, Edward Scott Brennison

Doctoral Dissertations

Wavelet analysis is used to analyze magnetometer data and is compared to the traditional spectrogram technique, in particular, with respect to structured Pc 1--2 emissions. This results in the conclusion that the frequency modulation evident in Pearl pulsations is not continuous, but is comprised of waves localized in both time and space whose overall structure produces the stripe-like patterns. Utilizing information from the Multi-Resolution Analysis in conjunction with traditional spectrogram techniques this paper is the first to show clear signal power relationships between Pc 1--2 and Pc3 waves and also between Pc 1--2 and Pc 5 waves as detected on …

In-Situ Study Of The Influence Of Additives On The Growth Behavior Of Copper Electrodeposits On Copper Single Crystal, Aiwen Wu

Doctoral Dissertations

Trace organic additives are known to be essential in obtaining desired metal electrodeposits in the microelectronic industry, however, fundamental design principles for their use and a scientific understanding of their interaction during electrodeposition is lacking. In the present study we investigated electrodeposition of copper on the Cu(100) surface in air-saturated or dearated acid-sulfate plating solutions containing several combinations of chloride and additives benzotriazole (BTA) and 3-mercapto propane sulfonic acid (MPSA) under galvanostatic pulse-current conditions. The electrodeposition process was followed using in-situ atomic force microscopy (AFM). AFM images were quantitatively analyzed by pattern-recognition and scaling procedures.

In the absence of additives, …

A Wavelet-Based Cmac For Enhanced Multidimensional Learning, Brian P. Kirk

Doctoral Dissertations

The CMAC (Cerebellar Model Articulation Controller) neural network has been successfully used in control systems and other applications for many years. The network structure is modular and associative, allowing for rapid learning convergence with an ease of implementation in either hardware or software. The rate of convergence of the network is determined largely by the choice of the receptive field shape and the generalization parameter. This research contains a rigorous analysis of the rate of convergence with the standard CMAC, as well as the rate of convergence of networks using other receptive field shape. The effects of decimation from state-space …

Bedrock Geology Of The Seacoast Region Of New Hampshire, United States, Jose Cruz Escamilla-Casas

Doctoral Dissertations

The seacoast region of New Hampshire is underlain by two lithotectonic belts: the Rye Complex (RC), and the eastern portion of the Merrimack Group (MG). The Rye Formation and the Breakfast Hill member constitute the RC; the Kittery, Eliot, and Berwick Formations, the MG. The stratigraphic order interpreted in this study places the Kittery Formation transitionally above the Eliot, and identifies the contact between the Berwick and the Eliot Formations as a fault.

Study of folds using a variant of the Fourier series analysis indicates that the degree of asymmetry and shape of folds in the MG and the RC …

The Central New England Sea Breeze Study, Samuel T K Miller

Doctoral Dissertations

The synoptic and mesoscale environments conducive to the formation of sea breezes were examined, as well as the spatial and temporal evolution of sea-breeze circulations, gravity currents, and fronts along the central New England coast. Sea breeze events were defined as occurring when the observed surface wind direction began the day outside the southeast quadrant, shifted to southeast by afternoon, then shifted back out of the southeast quadrant in the evening, driven by mesoscale, insolation-induced cross-shore temperature gradients.

The meso-alpha (200--2000 km) sea-breeze forcing in the study area was defined as a combination of the cross-shore potential temperature gradient (deltatheta/deltax) …

Vocational Science And The Politics Of Independence: The Boston Marine Society, 1754--1812, Matthew Gaston Mckenzie

Doctoral Dissertations

Between 1754 and 1812 the Boston Marine Society developed vocational scientific practices adapted from day-to-day work routines to expand the navigational knowledge of New England's coastlines. For this reason, the Marine Society's navigational work suggests important parallels with the history of colonial science in other areas during the late eighteenth century. Notwithstanding most other studies in the history of American science, the Boston Marine Society indicates that colonial Boston shipmasters were not dependent upon learned societies for their navigational research needs. Rather, they adapted their mutual aid society and developed methodologies to collect navigational observations, analyze them for reliability and …

Active Disturbance Cancellation In Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Using Neural Networks, John C. Canfield

Doctoral Dissertations

A proposal for the use of a time delay CMAC neural network for disturbance cancellation in nonlinear dynamical systems is presented. Appropriate modifications to the CMAC training algorithm are derived which allow convergent adaptation for a variety of secondary signal paths. Analytical bounds on the maximum learning gain are presented which guarantee convergence of the algorithm and provide insight into the necessary reduction in learning gain as a function of the system parameters. Effectiveness of the algorithm is evaluated through mathematical analysis, simulation studies, and experimental application of the technique on an acoustic duct laboratory model.

The Principal's Role In Promoting Success For Culturally And Linguistically Diverse Students: A Participatory Research Study, Maria Norma Martinez

Doctoral Dissertations

We need to understand more fully what facilitates success in schools with diverse populations. Through participatory research, the voices of school principals who are responsive to the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students were recorded and analyzed to provide insights on the practices that promote the school success of culturally and linguistically diverse students. Using a dialogic retrospective, the participants had the opportunity to engage, individually and collectively, in reflection and dialogue to identify common themes that emerged in their important work as school leaders and as advocates for diverse students.

Predictor Variables Of Performance On The Louisiana Educational Assessment Program For The 21st Century, June Adeline Thomas

Doctoral Dissertations

Using the Student Characteristics: Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) composite national percentile scores, repeating fourth grade, spring third grade Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) scores, socioeconomic status, race, gender, and preschool attendance and the School Characteristics: teacher degree level, teacher experience, teacher professional development, and school Title I status, this study employed a stepwise multiple regression analysis to determine the best predictors of fourth grade scores on the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program for the 21st Century (LEAP 21). Students must pass the English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics portions of this test to be promoted to fifth grade. Having previously …

An Empirical Analysis Of The Effect Of The Need For Closure On Materiality Thresholds Of Auditors, Cynthia M. Daily

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to identify the strengths of a specific motivator for judgment and decision-making, referred to as “need for closure” and determine how the strength of that motivator affects materiality judgments of auditors.

The extent to which auditors seek and process information prior to forming a judgment can have important consequences in the conduct of an audit. In this regard, psychology researchers have identified a personality characteristic—a motive for judgment and decision making—that influences the decision making process. This motive, referred to as the need for closure, pertains to the desire of individuals to clear …