Digital Commons Network^™

Shareholder Value For Esco, Kelley A. Hullihen

Theses

This thesis will focus on the study and use of Shareholder Value Analysis as a technique to be implemented as a measure for business performance. Using the Al car software to perform the financial modeling for ESCO this thesis will prove that ESCO is undervalued and why. The financial models were built and based upon management's forecast and expectation trends.

Shareholder Value Analysis enables managers to evaluate alternative strategies in terms of changes in corporate value. The approach provides a uniform yardstick, a measuring tool for comparing one business plan to another in order to see which creates the most …

Art As Therapy And Meditation, Julia Ann Harmon Tilden

Theses

Art as Therapy and Meditation by Julia Ann Harmon Tilden explores the therapeutic and meditative qualities of art through a deeply personal and experimental journey during her graduate studies at Lindenwood College. The thesis documents a year marked by personal loss, during which the author turned to her creative practice as a source of emotional healing and introspection. Through a combination of drawing, painting, mixed media, and three-dimensional work, Tilden investigates how art-making can foster emotional expression, spiritual reflection, and psychological relief.

The body of work presented in this thesis includes pastel drawings, abstract paintings, collages, sculptural canvases, and illuminated …

The Effect Of Psychosocial Factors On The Immune Response Of Hiv Infected Individuals As Measured By The Extent Of Relationship With Cd-4 T Cell Count And Physical Symptoms, Richard R. Taylor

Theses

The effect of psychosocial factors on the immune response of HIV infected human subjects was assessed by measuring the degree of relationship to CD-4 T cell count and physical symptoms.

Twenty six participants (22 white and 2 black males) all who had been diagnosed as HIV positive completed a battery of 11 psychological tests and a social and medical history questionnaire. Fifty four psychosocial factors were selected as having the potential to have a significant effect on immune response.

Correlational analyses yielded no strong relationships between the psychosocial factors and CD-4 T cell count or physical symptoms. Moderate associations were …

The Family Dance Model: A Definition And Comparison With The Beavers, Olson, And Mcmaster Models Of Family Functioning, Lyle V. Turnage

Theses

This study explored the hypothesis that married couples have ways of relating to each other which are peculiar to their relationship; and that other couples operate under the same or similar patterns of relating.

"Patterns in family relationships are often referred to as dances." (Lerner, 1990). Dances are determined by the music played, the manner of dress or costume, physical movements, and the tempo or beat (Chujoy & Manchester, 1967). Family dances are also recognized by physical interactions or movements, appearance or dress, and the beat of family messages. The family dance model will use names of dances such as …

An Analysis Of The Consumer's Perception Of Pricing At Save-A-Lot Food Stores, Walter S. Jones

Theses

This study focused on Save-A- Lot retail grocery stores and why consumers shop at these types of stores.

Save- A- Lot stores are limited- assortment retail grocery stores. In todays fast-paced society, with many two-income households, consumers are always on the go. Many shoppers are looking for one- stop shopping capabilities, service departments, and stores that are open late hours. If this is the case, then it would be logical to believe that consumers would not shop at Save-A-Lot stores. Save-A-Lot stores offer very little service, shorter hours than conventional stores, and they claim to only offer the consumer 90% …

A Group Art Therapy Program For Use With Adolescents Who Have Been Victims Of Incest, H. Alec Arnold

Theses

This project represents the development of a manual for the application of art therapy activities in group therapy with adolescents who have been victims of incest. The treatment model presented in the manual is based on the need of incest victims to be able to articulate and abreact the feelings associated with their abuse within the context of a supportive and empathic relationship.

This need serves as the basis for this model for two principal reasons. In the act of incest victims are treated with complete disregard for their feelings and needs. Victims are treated as objects to be used …

Effect Of Low Level Radiation On The Barrier Qualities Of Spunbonded Olefin, Samir A. Sheth

Theses

Medical packages have to meet highly specific criteria over and above other types of packages. Protection of contents from microbial contamination and physical damage is a priority. The permeability to sterilizing gas; retention of properties and appearance after sterilizing radiation; printability and aseptic presentation all have to be present at reasonable cost. The most important is maintenance of sterile integrity. In order to have sterile integrity, the medical package must have high barrier properties. Sterility maintenance is the ability of porous packaging materials to act as barriers to microorganisms. The random non- woven structure of spunbonded olefin creates a highly …

Etrans: A English-Thai Translator, Nuntaporn Warote

Theses

ETRANS is an experimental English-Thai machine translation (MT) system that translates a simple English sentence into a grammatically correct Thai sentence. The entire system is written in C-Prolog, and runs on UNIX systems. The MT strategy taken by ETRANS is an interlingual strategy with a parser for English and a generator for Thai. The parser creates a semantic representation equivalent to the meaning of the English sentence. A generator then interprets the semantic representation into Thai. ETRANS employs frames as a means for representing knowledge, and an augmented transition network (ATN) as the linguistic framework for analyzing and generating sentences.

Assessing How The Catholic Church (At The Parish Level) Meets The Needs Of The Frail, Elderly, And Handicapped In The St. Louis Archdiocese, Joann C. Hermann

Theses

All Catholic churches of the St. Louis Archd1ocese were the focus of a study conducted to examine how the church meets the needs of the frail, elderly, and handicapped on the parish level. A total of 227 parishes were included 1n the survey; of these 138 responded to the questionnaire. A significant relationship between income of the parish and physical structural improvements to accommodate the frail, elderly and/or handicapped was not indicated. A significant difference between the number of male and female volunteers was not found. However, there were significant findings to support the hypothesis that Pastors and the Catholic …

Management Decision Making And Political Viability Criteria In Large Corporate Organizations, Kalman J. Kovach

Theses

This thesis focuses on the magnitude of political viability in managerial decision making in large corporate organizations . Political viability ls defined as perpetuating shrewdness to flourish one's career within an organization.

Recent economic conditions and global competitiveness have forced corporations to examine their traditional managerial roles. As a result, many corporations have totally revamped goals and objectives in an attempt to present a clear and unobstructed vision of their mission.

Over the last decade research done by organizational psychologists, consultants, independent ·think· tanks, and decision experts have bombasted corporations with many management philosophies . Decision making is an integral …

Ms. Pacrat: A Feeling, Thinking Machine, Lorraine D'Ortona

Theses

Since before the time of the first digital computers, the workings of the mind have been compared to that of a machine. With the onset of the discipline of Artificial Intelligence a truly organized attempt has been made to build intelligent machines that model the mind. Many interesting programs have been built, but the legitimacy of their success is a matter of great controversy. None of the AI programs developed so far have come close to the true power and intelligence of the brain. Expert systems, for example, are the most success ful commercial AI programs, and even they have …

The Transportation Of Hazardous Materials, Songsamorn Kongboonma

Theses

Effective January 1, 1991, both international and domestic hazardous materials must be transported according to the shipment required by the United Nation Recommendations (UN Recommendations). This mandate to follow the UN Recommendations has caused a lot of confusions for packers, shippers and shipping agents. Due to the confusion surrounding the use of this document, this thesis provides a basic guideline and complete instructions on how to handle hazardous materials smartly and safely. Not understanding the regulations involved in hazardous material movement could result in much confusion in dealing with these type of materials. These analysis will clarify such areas as …

Findings Of A Comparison Of Five Filing Protocols, R. Elayne Mcfaul

Theses

Filing protocols are essential for the management and dissemination of shared information within computer systems. This is a survey of the current state of the art in filing protocols. Five popular filing protocols were selected and subjected to a rigorous comparison. FTAM, FTP, UNIX rep, XNS Filing, and NFS are compared in the following areas: exported interface, concurrency control, access control, error recovery, and performance. The coverage of background material includes a taxonomy and a brief history of filing protocols.

Astronauts And Xingu: An Exhibition Of Cultural Ideograms, Edward Mineck

Theses

The intention of my thesis is to alter some of American culture's prevailing sentiments on the relationship between: masculine and feminine; visceral and cognitive; natural and technological; as well as altering perceptions of the loci of power in our culture. The thesis exhibition was composed of seventeen gum bichromate assemblages composed of elementary images appropriated from popular media. Each composite piece is a recontextualization of extant representations. I have taken things from their typical or original context and re-presented them in a context that I have selected and directed. The new relationships established among the appropriated component images and the …

Algorithm Animation And Its Application To Artificial Neural Network Learning, Walter Bubie C.

Theses

Algorithm animation is a means of exploring the dynamic behavior of algorithms using computer-generated graphics to represent algorithm data and operations. Research in this field has focused on the architecture of flexible environments for exploring small, complex algorithms for data structure manipulation. This thesis describes a project examining two relatively unexplored aspects of algorithm animation: issues of view design effectiveness and its application to a different type of algorithm, namely back-propagation artificial neural network learning. The work entailed developing a framework for profiling views according to attributes such as symmetry, regularity, complexity, etc. This framework was based on current research …

Bidding A Bridge Hand: A Thesis On Knowledge Acquisition And Application, Gregg Silveira

Theses

Computerizing the game of Bridge has not yet met with much success. The efforts to date have fallen short of any reasonable technical proficiency. The game does appear to be perfectly suited for an expert system, however, since the game can be segmented into three contexts (Bidding, Play of the Hand, and Defense), each context can be described by a set of rules, and a series of inferences can be used to fire those rules. Each of the contexts is reviewed, then Bidding is chosen for further research. This thesis claims that the set of all hands subdivides into 1 …

An Object-Oriented Drawing Package In Smalltalk/V, Sigrid E. Mortensen

Theses

Graphics creation applications tend to fall into two categories: bit-mapped paint packages, and object-oriented drawing packages. Although each interface has its own unique advantages, few vendors have attempted to integrate the two into a single package. Those who have tried have, in fact, poor integration both from the user's perspective and in the underlying mathematical model. In this thesis, I have addressed the issue of integrating bit-mapped and object-oriented interfaces by creating an object-oriented graphics package which provides the user with a consistent interface for creating and manipulating both graphical objects and bit-mapped graphics. The consistency of the interface was …

Hypermanual A Hypermedia Construction And Browsing System In Smalltalk/V Mac, James Tracy Burdick

Theses

The process of locating needed information in a paper document is often frustrating and time consuming. The information may be available but, since the basic access method is often linear, the information is not readily available. Hypermedia systems offer a computer-based mechanism that can simplify the search process and increase the ratio of useful information found to time expended. Such systems also support the creation of alternate views on the same data base of information. This thesis describes some current hypertext systems and the overall structure of the HyperManual system. This system includes both the tools needed to create and …

A Survey And Analysis Of Algorithms For The Detection Of Termination In A Distributed System, Lois Rixner

Theses

This paper looks at algorithms for the detection of termination in a distributed system and analyzes them for effectiveness and efficiency. A survey is done of the published algorithms for distributed termination and each is evaluated. Both centralized distributed systems and fully distributed systems are reviewed. The algorithms are analyzed for the overhead and conclusions are made about the situations in which they can be used, i.e. an operating system, a real-time system, or a user application. An original algorithm is presented for the asynchronous case with first-in-first-out message ordering. It allows any process to initiate detection of termination and …

An Experiment In The Complexity Of Load Balancing Algorithms, Charles Carlino

Theses

Not provided.

Development Of A Selection Model For Package Structural Designs Which Optimize Flexible Manufacturing, Luke Faulstick

Theses

The purpose of this study was to develop a selection model to be used in the design of packages for flexible manufacturing. The model was developed by utilizing the concepts and philosophies of Just-In-Time (JIT), Total Quality Control (TQC), and Design For Assembly (DFA). A case study was used to demonstrate the model. The case study involved the design of a new package for an existing product utilizing the concepts as previously outlined. Reduced part count, use of standard materials, configurations and process, and process flow charting were all key components of the selection model. As flexible manufacturing becomes a …

A Knowledge-Based Approach To Understanding Natural Language, Bernard J. Huber Jr.

Theses

Understanding a natural language requires knowledge about that language as a system of representation. Further, when the task is one of understanding an extended discourse, world knowledge is also required. This thesis explores some of the issues involved in representing both kinds of knowledge, and also makes an effort to arrive at some under standing of the relationship between the two. A part of this exploration involves an examination of some natural language understanding systems which have attempted to deal with extended discourse both in the form of stories and in the form of dialogues. The systems exam ined are …

Electrostatic Discharge - Understanding And Controlling The Phenomenon: A Handbook For Packaging Professionals, Deanna Jacobs

Theses

This thesis is designed to be a handbook on the phenomenon of electrostatic discharge (ESD) and its deleterious effects on electrically-sensitive electronic devices. Packaging and handling of sensitive devices occurs at every step in the assembly of such devices. Once the hardware is designed (and this may include some ESD-protective mechanisms) , it is the packaging of ESD-sensitive devices that determines their ultimate fate: being 100% reliable, being among the "walking wounded," or being completely useless. Electrostatic discharge is a phenomenon experienced in many industries from foods to pharmaceuticals, aerospace to communications, medical packaging to explosives, military to optics, and …

Investigation Of Cell Mapping And Off-Line Programming Within A Flexible Assembly System, Marta Anna Galuga

Theses

This investigation achieves two objectives. The first objective renders every robot on the production floor "alike" via a single robot configuration file. The second objective eliminates the tedious routine of teaching and reteaching robotic locations on-line by an operator or engineer. The functionality of these software solutions is demonstrated using the AdeptOne Scara robot, but the impact of this system is far beyond Adept. The code listings included within this thesis are specific to the AdeptOne controller, but the concepts developed and demonstrated herein may be extended to any sophisticated robot controller and programming language.

Integrated Component-Based Computer Design Modeling System : The Implications Of The Representation Of Control Parameters On The Design Process, Allen D. Jablonski

Theses

The design process is dependent on a clear order of integrating and managing all of the control parameters that impact on a building's design. All component elements of a building must be defined by their: Physical and functional relations; Quantitative and calculable properties; Component and/or system functions. This requires a means of representation to depict a model of a building that can be viewed and interpreted by a variety of interested parties. These parties need different types of representation to address their individual control parameters, as each component instance has specific implications on all of the control parameters.

Representations are …

Wideband Microstrip Antenna Optimization, Amer Muhammad Alsawadi

Theses

An annular ring patch microstrip antenna was investigated numerically from the bandwidth aspect for a satellite link application. The desired portable antenna should occupy the physical volume of a typical briefcase and operate in the 400-500 MHz band. Numerical optimization is carried out using a commercially available computer package (EM, by Sonnet Software Inc.). The parameters optimized include the substrate thickness, feed location along the annular patch antenna and its relative dimensions. The software package was numerically validated for the rectangular patch geometries reported in the open literature. Experimental verification of this work is left to be carried out in …

Implementation Of Object Oriented University Database Using Vodak/Vml-0 Prototype, Abhay V. Bhave

Theses

In recent years object - oriented programming has gained a tremendous popularity in the design and implementation of emerging data - intensive application systems. Object oriented knowledge based approaches have proved to be very powerful vehicle when developing, integrating complex systems.

Using a University database demonstrated here is an object oriented model. This model uses VODAK/VML-0 prototype which was developed by GMD - IPSI, Darmstadt FRG. The Conceptual Schema of this database was done using The Dual Model, but as the current VODAK/VML version does not support dual model, the schema was modified before use. There are 167 classes defined …

An Investigation Of Optoelectronic Integrated Circuit Receiver, Dinar S. Gupte

Theses

This thesis report presents an investigation of an OptoElectronic Integrated receiver Circuit (OEIC). An OEIC on Silicon (Si) substrate is analyzed and simulated as part of this investigation. The OEIC is based on GaAs technology. The advantages of this are its compactness, high speed, low noise and high reliability in light wave communication systems. A higher output signal is required to make such devices suitable for practical applications. This is achieved by the use of a cascode stage. The fabrication techniques of the relevant semiconductor devices have also been discussed.

In light wave communication systems, the region of minimum losses …

Analysis Of Field Distribution Of A Dielectric Resonator And Its Applications, Manohar R. Kamath

Theses

Dielectric resonators (DR) are suitably shaped objects made of high dielectric constant materials like TiO₂, BaO, ZnO, and accessory ingredients, which can function as electrical resonators covering a very wide frequency range upto 40GHz. The physical dimensions of dielectric resonators are in mm range. High dielectric constant material resonators seem to be ideally suited for microwave applications because of their miniature size, low loss, insensitivity to magnetic dc biasing fields, and ability to concentrate large RF magnetic fields in small volumes. However temperature stabilization of dielectric resonators is an important consideration as the center frequency is a function …

Slotted Aloha Protocol For Packet Transmission Via Satellite Link : Throughput Performance Of Continuous Transmission Packet, Solon Karashialis

Theses

The throughput performance of multi-access schemes for data traffic through a satellite channel is analyzed in this paper. Three general schemes are described: channel reservation schemes, random access schemes, and padket reservation schemes. This thesis considers only the random access schemes. Analysis and comparison between ALOHA and Slotted ALOHA are made, but the main emphasis is on satellite channel throughput. A continuous transmission protocol for Slotted ALOHA is suggested in which each ground earth station repeats the transmission of each packet in a number of random repetition slots. The channel is idle when no ground station (GS) is transmitting on …