Digital Commons Network^™

Gmpac - The Generic Message Processing And Communications Framework, Eoin Barry

Theses

The Generic Message Processing and Communications Framework (GMPAC), is an extensible, communications architecture, which is concerned processing various message types. The GMPAC framework is designed around the java NIO API. It receives in various messages over a socket, decomposes them and extracts the payload. It then passes a message back to the sender in the same format as the received message. GMPAC uses xml files to define message formats, and decodes and decodes the messages using information contained in these definitions. This project was developed for Altobridge Tralee, meeting a set of requirements set out by them. This report provides …

Motivational Gifts: Do They Really Shape Our Personalities?, Nichole R. Nichols

Theses

This culminating project will focus on the study of Motivational Gifts found in the New Testament of Romans namely, Perceiver, Server, Teacher, Exhorter, Giver, Administrator and Compassion. These gifts highly influence one's personality.

Research has shown an increase in interest in spiritual gifts in the last decade in church ministries. However a literature review reveals that no existing instruments have developed testing for Motivational Gifts that does not focus on biblical principles.

Though many books explore motivational gifts from different perspectives including church growth, awareness, discovery, use, self-assessment, and personal growth, the motivational gift tests commercially available today are worded …

The Great Becoming, Sara L. Blackwell

Theses

Few questions stir as much curiosity and controversy as the question of how and why did man evolve. This culminating project strives to explore that issue creatively. Using a combination of religious overtones, myths and legends, and imagination, this project strives to be an original creation myth- a piece of fiction that answers how civilization, as we know it today, began. The story bas not been written to replace commonly accepted religious beliefs. Rather, it has been written to complement them, to question them, and to explore the very beginnings of religion itself.

The introduction to this project focuses on …

Nurses, My Family, & Elvis, Cristle Coleman-Griwach

Theses

This collection of sh01t stories will focus primarily on nurses from the turn of the last century to the present. Some of the stories are fiction and some are based on experiences of nurses I have known. There two stories unrelated to nursing, one is about bow my father helped launch Elvis Presley's career, the other is about my family.

The goal of the collection is to illustrate the different roles and personalities or nurses. The first story, "A Feather in Her Bonnet" is set in the early nineteen-hundreds. A seemingly innocent feathered bonnet on the head or a frumpy …

Guardianship And Severely Chronically Mentally Ill Adults: A Measure Of Advantages And Disadvantageous In A Pair-Matched Records Review, James H. Hoerchler

Theses

This thesis examined adults with chronic severe mental illness and the use of legal guardianship executed to protect them from harming themselves or others, while attempting to improve their overall quality of life.

The earliest manifestation of mental health law appeared in the Roman Empire. The Romans established the legal use of surrogates to handle the property and commercial affairs of disabled citizens. By the sixteenth century England had developed standards of supervision by which a guardian might supervise a disabled person. The first guardianship recorded in America was decided under English law in 1637 in Jamestown, Virginia (Goldstein, Alan …

Nurses, My Family & Elvis, Cristle Coleman-Griwach

Theses

This collection of short stories will focus primarily on nurses from the turn of the last century to the present. Some of the stories are fiction and some are based on experiences of nurses I have known. There two stories unrelated to nursing, one is about how my father helped launch El vis Presley's career, the other is about my family.

The goal of the collection is to illustrate the different roles and personalities of nurses. The first story, "A Feather in Her Bonnet" is set in the early nineteen-hundreds. A seemingly innocent feathered bonnet on the head of a …

A Study Of Indian Culture As A Basis For Design, Evevon L. Little

Theses

This thesis will focus on the historical background of Indian-American culture. One key objective is to create a contemporary garment based on the knowledge of Indian traditional clothing.

Research has contributed to gaining knowledge about a continents regional inspirations and understanding how the environment plays a role in many lifestyles. The author sought to gain familiarity with many phases of Indian culture from regional textiles to cuisine.

Today, western influences of India are becoming more contemporary. American designers are mixing the vibrant embroidered textiles of India into their work. Not only is fashion of India popular, their crafts and arts …

A Baseline Assessment Of Environmental, Health, And Safety Aspects And Impacts Associated With Lithographic And Digital Printing Operations Performed Under Ideal Work Conditions, Sachin Kadam

Theses

This work examined various environmental, health, and safety aspects of two comparable printing technologies i.e. offset lithographic and electrophotographic digital printing, and evaluated their impacts on the environment and health & safety of the workers. It also studied the environmental behavior of these technologies with respect to print volume, and provides information to print manufacturers on the same so that they can use this information while deciding on technological selection. An effort has been made to bring attention of the print manufacturers towards the key environmental, health, and safety issues that will help them understand the importance of pollution prevention …

A Guide To The Management & Operation Of A Chinese Restaurant In The United States, Wen-Chiung Huang

Theses

Before writing this thesis, the reason I choose for the issue of management and operation of Chinese restaurant is not because so much mass communication was related. It is the idea of the restaurant business how it to be created by using media or people's words of mouth. It is difficult to start a new business in the foreign country. Restaurant business does the same. In the early a late age of immigration, people realized only work hard can made a better life for themselves and their next generation. They started have their own business, created job opportunity even contributed …

Everyday Seeds To Grow On: Writings For Children, Cindy A. Miller

Theses

The poems that comprise the following project were created for the pleasure and enjoyment of both children and adults. Th.is master's project for the MFA in writing is the result of a lifelong interest in children's literature. The majority of the work consists of my own stories in poetic form. The reader will notice many of the prominent elements found in poetry, such as visual imagery, rhythmic patterns, and rhyme. These characteristics are most obvious in "The Garden of Gigglings," writings created with picture book formats in mind. This section contains mostly funny stories whose humor can be emphasized through …

Computer Vision-Based Monitoring Of Abrasive Loading During Wood Machining, Bhavin S. Vora

Theses

Surface quality is an important characteristic commonly assessed in wooden products. Sanding relies on coated abrasives as tooling for both dimensioning and surface finishing but their performance is dependent on chip loading and grit wear. Traditionally, the useful life of abrasive belts in sanding operation has been manually assessed. This type of inspection is highly subjective and dependent upon individual expertise, consequently leading to under utilization or over utilization of the abrasive. This, in turn, affects the production costs and quality of the product. In this work, an intelligent classification method that determines the optimal replacement policy for a belt …

Guiding Object Recognition: A Shape Model With Co-Activation Networks, Timothy Lebo

Theses

The goal of image understanding research is to develop techniques to automatically extract meaningful information from a population of images. This abstract goal manifests itself in a variety of application domains. Video understanding is a natural extension of image understanding. Many video understanding algorithms apply static-image algorithms to successive frames to identify patterns of consistency. This consumes a significant amount of irrelevant computation and may have erroneous results because static algorithms are not designed to indicate corresponding pixel locations between frames. Video is more than a collection of images, it is an ordered collection of images that exhibits temporal coherence, …

Grouping Related Attributes, Santosh Dawara

Theses

Grouping objects that are described by attributes, or clustering is a central notion in data mining. On the other hand, similarity or relationships between attributes themselves is equally important but relatively unexplored. Such groups of attributes are also known as directories, concept hierarchies or topics depending on the underlying data domain. The similarities between the two problems of grouping objects and attributes might suggest that traditional clustering techniques are applicable. This thesis argues that traditional clustering techniques fail to adequately capture the solution we seek. It also explores domain-independent techniques for grouping attributes. The notion of similarity between attributes and …

Sediment Transport In Rivers And Estuaries, John Clancy

Theses

The processes of erosion, transportation and sedimentation in rivers and estuaries have fascinated researchers for centuries. These processes have been active throughout geological time and have shaped the present landscape. To effectively study these processes analysis needs to be carried out at catchment scale level. Cork Harbour and its tributaries including the River Lee, the Owenabue River, the Glashaboy River, the Owennacurra River, and the Dungoumey River are analysed for the processes of sediment transport within their catchments and systems, and particularly river sediment loadings.

This thesis includes a literature review of the properties of sediment, river and estuary related …

A 10-Bit 100msample/S Pipeline Analog- To-Digital Converter In Cmos, Pieter Berkelaar

Theses

High speed, medium resolution ADC’s, are required for many applications, including wireless receivers, ultrasound systems, wireline interfaces, cameras and camcorders. Low power dissipation is important, particularly for portable equipment where battery life must be maximised. The pipeline ADC architecture is particularly suited to such applications. Its strength comes from the manner in which it performs a conversion, distributing the work in time and amongst successive stages. These stages operate concurrently, maintaining high throughput. Each stage is made up of a fully differential switched capacitor sample-and- hold amplifier and some other circuitry. Designing these circuits to operate at l00MHz is extremely …

Exploring Marine Biotoxins Using Analytical Techniques Based On Mass Spectrometry, Mónica Fernández Amandi

Theses

The impact of phycotoxins on human and animal health is of important concern for worldwide authorities and the scientific community. Domoic acid (DA) is a neurotoxin produced by phytoplankton {Pseudonitzchia spp.). It enters the food chain through the consumption of shellfish that feed on toxic diatoms. DA has been responsible for several outbreaks affecting humans and animals all around the world. Yessotoxin (YTX) is produced by dinoflagellate species {Protoceratiuni reticulatum) which are globally distributed. Its toxicity is low when ingested orally. However, the co-extraction of YTX with diarrhetic shellfish poisoning (DSP) toxins, derives false positives when the mouse bioassay is …

Revising And Unifying The Use Case Textual And Graphical Worlds, Pierre Metz

Theses

This thesis traces the evolution of use cases and use case relationships from the initial suggestion by Jacobson et al. in OOSE until today. This tracing reveals that there are two distinct streams of development, as referred in this thesis to as the “textual world” and the “graphical world”: the textual world being literature concentrating on textual use case properties, i.e. use case writing techniques and use case templates. The second stream that has been developed in parallel with the use case template progression is UML, i.e. Unified Modeling Language, which defines the standard for the use case diagram notation …

Characterisation, Modelling And Performance Evaluation Of Cmos Integrated Rf-Mems Multielectrode Tunable Capacitor, Zbigniew Olszewski

Theses

The circuits used in telecommunications are made of two types of components; active integrated circuits that have continuously been improved together with the evolution of the Si technology and off-chip and on-chip passive components. The latter did not profit from much development and now constitute the bottleneck for further integration of RF (Radio Frequency) integrated circuits. MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) is rapidly emerging as an enabling technology to yield a new generation of high performance components to replace off-chip (not integrated) and on-chip (poor performance) counterparts. The RF components (RF-MEMS) that can be fabricated with MEMS technology are mainly the resonator, …

Automated Control Of Led-Based Illumination Using Image Analysis Metrics, Stephen Mills

Theses

This project discusses a microprocessor controlled illumination system that covers the visible spectrum. It uses multiple discrete wavelength LEDs. Spatial and spectral illumination profiles are achieved by controlling LED currents with an array of voltage controlled current sources. A highly efficient polycarbonate holographic diffuser is used to improve the uniformity of the distribution. System design is underpinned by accurate characterisation and modelling of the LEDs used.

Image analysis techniques are then used to parameterise the recorded scene and to provide a figure of merit for the quality of the illumination. Several functions such as contrast, low/high saturation, average brightness and …

Dredging And Dredge Disposal And Reuse In Ireland, Séamus Sutton

Theses

Dredging involves raising material from a river or estuary bed to the surface and transporting it some distance for disposal or reuse. It may be required to improve navigational access, to allow for port development or for mining aggregates.

This thesis includes a literature review and a detailed study of the dredging industry in Ireland. This study is partly based on a nationwide survey undertaken on dredging and dredge disposal and reuse, the results of which are included in a dredging database created for this project. All the main stakeholders in the industry were invited to complete questionnaire forms for …

Elucidation Of The Mass Spectral Fragmentation Pathways Of Cyclic Hepatopeptides Microcystins, Paloma Muniz Ortea

Theses

The most frequently found cyanobacterial toxins in blooms from fresh and brackish waters are the cyclic peptide microcystins (MCs) and nodularin family. These toxins cause fatal poisonings of agricultural livestock, wild animals, birds and fish on a worldwide basis. The involvement of these toxins in human health problems has also been inferred in several countries and their presence in drinking water sources is of interest to the drinking water industry.

One of the biggest problems in the analysis of MCs is the lack of commercially available standards to be used for the identification and characterisation of these cyanobacterial toxins. One …

Controller Design And Web-Based Simulation For A Pasteurisation Process, Luis Torres

Theses

The basic PID controller remains the most commonly used automatic feedback control technique in industry. Many tuning techniques exist for this controller and the use of tuning rules remains very popular, both in industry and academia. This thesis is concerned with the practical evaluation of a selected number of PID tuning rules. The rules were to be evaluated on an industrial pilot-scale milk pasteurisation process. However, most of these rules could not be tested on the real plant as the industrial distributed control system was quite inflexible and did not permit many of the more advanced PID structures e.g. two-degree …

Family Friendly / Work Life Balance Policies: Perspectives Of Irish Employers And Employees, Caroline Williams

Theses

This study assesses the emergence of family friendly / work life balance arrangements within Irish organisations in view of changing conditions on the labour market, particularly with the increased participation of women. It incorporates the experiences, opinions and commentaries of both Human Resource representatives responsible for the implementation of such practices, and employees availing of them in a broad spectrum of public and private sector organisations.

This research addresses the perceived explicit and implicit barriers, such as organisational size, location and culture which challenge employers and employees in terms of alternative working arrangements. It illustrates the significance of introducing and …

Multispectral Camera Control And High Speed Image Transfer Using Lossless Hardware Compression, Padraig Ryan

Theses

This work provides extensions of a standard D-Cam/Firewire digital camera platform for use within a multispectral imaging setting and includes real-time lossless image compression targeted at the re-configurable environment of an FPGA. The control and image acquisition structures specific to multispectral systems are detailed with respect to an embedded firmware solution, complementary host PC software driver routines, and camera hardware control infrastructures. The augmentation of the standards based implementation is discussed without compromising compliance with underlying specifications. The mandate for image data acquisition includes glue logic to efficiently transmit data via a high-speed communications pipe, IEEE - 1394 in this …

An Investigation Into The Role Of Social Marketing In Preventing Adolescent Drinking., Cian Long

Theses

In recent years, there has been increased concern about the level of alcohol abuse by Irish teenagers. Countless studies have shown that underage drinking is now becoming an epidemic. Up to 100 million young people around the globe are alcohol dependent and another 400 million drink to excess. Research has shown that early onset of alcohol use can lead to alcohol dependency, violence, absenteeism, crime and subsequent health problems. It is estimated that alcohol related problems cost the Irish economy €2.65 billion in 2003. Unfortunately, this alcohol problem is not going to vanish or disappear. Alcohol has become Ireland’s number …

A Case For Constructivism In Workplace Education : Substantiated With The Design, Development, Implementation And Evaluation Of A Collaborative And Resource-Based Web Learning Environment, Carmel Burke

Theses

This thesis addresses the role of constructivism in workplace education, where organisations are currently going through a time of great change. The study starts with questioning the suitability of information and communication technology in current web based learning in the workplace. Organisations increasingly require professionals to possess knowledge in a dynamic way in order to deal with change and just-in-time demands. The research is firmly anchored in learning theories as they apply to workplace education and particularly as they apply to collaborative and resource-based web learning. An extensive literature review is produced in order to establish a theoretical starting point …

A Framework Of Best Practice For Community Based Tourism Inititives, Cornelius O'Sullivan

Theses

This study commences with a detailed analysis of the tourism industry from a global perspective charting its inception through the time of the Persian, Assyrian, Greek, Egyptian & Roman empires to the present elimate, surpassed then by adherence to future predictions. The study then moves to examine the Irish tourism product by acknowledging the individuals who have pioneered & continue to survey its development. The study in response to its principle aim of creating a Framework of Best Practice for Community Based Tourism Initiatives identifies, discusses & evaluates in detail four core fundamental building blocks for such initiatives. These four …

Towards A Best Practice Framework : The Case Of Institutes Of Technology Campus Incubators, Mary Fenton

Theses

Campus incubators catalyse campus enterprise development by encouraging Third Level “spin offs”, commercialisation of research and facilitating “spin-in” enterprises. They provide academic staff, graduates and “spin-in” entrepreneurs with a range of support services including space, advice, training, mentoring and networking opportunities. The real value of a campus incubator location for clients is their association with a reputable Third level Institute and access to the Institute’s resources namely academic staff, embedded knowledge, manager’s expertise and enterprise netvyorks. The researcher explored literature on campus and business incubators and identified a lacuna of research on campus incubation, particularly within Irish Higher Education Institutes. …

Robust Colour Segmentation Under Dynamic Lighting Conditions, Noreen Mary Looney

Theses

Traditionally, the issue of colour constancy has limited the success of colour image segmentation algorithms. Numerous methods exist to achieve colour constancy for different applications. The principal contribution of this thesis is the investigation of a suitable technique for the problem of robust colour based object detection.

Appropriate colour models are investigated and analysed in order to assess their ability to enhance the isolation process. Models that possess suitable colour constancy characteristics are chosen for use with image segmentation algorithms. Reviews of existing sur\'eys of image segmentation algorithms are appraised for the emergence of a suitable colour image segmentation technique. …

A Blueprint For Physical Activity Promotion In A Small Urban Town (Mallow, Co. Cork), Elaine Mary Dennehy

Theses

This research project aims to establish current levels of participation in physical activity amongst the adult population of the Mallow Urban District Council (UDC) area. Using an adaptation of The Scottish Physical Activity Questionnaire (SPAQ) (Lowther et al, 1999) used by the Health Education Bureau for Scotland (HEBS) an attempt will be made to establish the respondents’ readiness for change in relation to physical activity participation. This research methodology is new to Ireland but has been used successfully by the HEBS, (Lowther et al, 1999).

The objectives of this work are to:

1. Establish current levels of participation in physical …