Digital Commons Network^™

An Investigation Into Truancy Reduction Without Increasing The Drop Out Rate, Phillip C. Neff Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this internship was to acquire and enhance through a supervisory experience, the leadership skills necessary for a school administrator. The intern's research project focused on decreasing truancy without increasing drop out rate.

The intern analyzed data collected through the use of a survey. The survey was given to a general population of students which consisted of two different sampling strategies. One sample was a convenience sample of students from the intern's classes, the other sample was judgmental coming from the newly developed Alternative Education Program at Paulsboro High School.

The intern found several interesting correlations associated with …

Hardware Synthesis Of Synchronous Data Flow Models, Matthew R. Koecher

Theses and Dissertations

Synchronous Dataflow (SDF) graphs are a convenient way to represent many signal processing and dataflow operations. Nodes within SDF graphs represent computation while arcs represent dependencies between nodes. Using a graph representation, SDF graphs formally specify a dataflow algorithm without any assumptions on the final implementation. This allows an SDF model to be synthesized into a variety of implementation techniques including both software and hardware.

This thesis presents a technique for generating an abstract hardware representation from SDF models. The techniques presented here operate on SDF models defined structurally within the Ptolemy modeling environment. The behavior of the nodes within …

The Efficiency Of A Long Range Facilities Plan In An Abbott School District, Nancy B. Knarr-Pascoe

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the efficiency of the Long Range Facilities Plan (LRFP) for the Millville School District and sought to determine, through the creation of inventories, the completed and in progress facilities projects, in addition to those that will not be completed by the close of the district's current LRFP. On-going personal communication with the district's facilities coordinator provided continual updates on the status of all facilities projects within the district. In addition, this study examined both the New Jersey Administrative Code (NJAC) (6A:26-8.1) and documentation made available on the New Jersey Department of Education's (NJDOE) School Facilities Web site …

Good Citizens: How Student Council Impacts Socialization Norms At Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School Complex, Darren W. Palmer

Theses and Dissertations

This study sought to learn how peer group behavior patterns among middle school students change for the better with the emergence of a student council. The setting was the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School Complex in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The school had undergone several reconfigurations to the student body in prior years. Since then it has been difficult to maintain a student body culture that was both stable and suitable for substantial academic achievement. This study was organized along the continuum of the academic calendar and interwoven within the customs and routines of the school. It took advantage …

The Impact Of The Closed Circuit Television Program On The Communication Process At The Chelsea Heights School, Stephen Lee Sabatini

Theses and Dissertations

This case study was conducted at the Chelsea Heights School in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The study required implementing a closed circuit television program for the Chelsea Heights School. The purpose of this study was to understand and measure the effectiveness of a closed circuit television program on the communication process and camaraderie at the Chelsea Heights School. The case study was designed to improve communication and camaraderie at the Chelsea Heights School. The program included the Flag Salute, Song of the Month, morning announcements, and special events.

For this case study the researcher used a small convenience sample. The …

Mentoring, Training, And True Induction Of New Teachers, Lea Fitzpatrick

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate an induction program for first year and new teachers that included mentoring, orientation, and training. The subjects in this study were a convenience sample of fourteen new teachers at Oakcrest High School during the 2003-2004 school year. The school was located in Mays Landing, NJ and was one of two schools in the Greater Egg Harbor School District. Surveys were administered to participants both mid-year and at the conclusion of the program. Also at the end, mentor teachers were surveyed regarding their involvement. The quantitative data was analyzed using a …

Query Rewriting For Extracting Data Behind Html Forms, Xueqi Chen

Theses and Dissertations

Much of the information on the Web is stored in specialized searchable databases and can only be accessed by interacting with a form or a series of forms. As a result, enabling automated agents and Web crawlers to interact with form-based interfaces designed primarily for humans is of great value. This thesis describes a system that can fill out Web forms automatically according to a given user query against a global schema for an application domain and, to the extent possible, extract just the relevant data behind these Web forms. Experimental results on two application domains show that the approach …

Retaining Students: Is It For Gaining Or Restraining?, Terence Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate students in Grades 6-8 who were retained in Elementary School and tracked their academic progress since the retention. This study was conducted to determine whether retaining students benefits or hinders their chances of academic success. Once the retained students in Grades 6-8 were identified, the reasons for their retentions (located in the student's personal files) were investigated and recorded. Questionnaires for selected educational professionals in the district revealed whether their opinions on student retentions were unbiased or not. Student questionnaires revealed the retained student's personal perspective on being retained. Student pre and …

Source Level Debugging Of Circuits Synthesized From High Level Language Descriptions, Karl S. Hemmert

Theses and Dissertations

The rapid increase in the density of modern FPGAs has allowed ever increasingly complex designs to be mapped to FPGAs. However, this increase in logic resources is accompanied by an increase in the complexity of describing and verifying the operation of an application. This has prompted the search for new approaches to the design, debug and verification of circuits. The desire to find more effecient approaches to designing these large FPGA circuits has led to the creation of synthesizing compilers that can create hardware from high-level descriptions based on general purpose programming languages. Being able to describe the application at …

The United States Marine Corps Data Collaboration Requirements: Retrieving And Integrating Data From Multiple Databases, Pamela J. Cole

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this research is to develop an information sharing and database integration model and suggest a framework to fully satisfy the United States Marine Corps collaboration requirements as well as its information sharing and database integration needs. This research is exploratory; it focuses on only one initiative: the IT-21 initiative. The IT-21 initiative dictates The Technology for the United States Navy and Marine Corps, 2000-2035: Becoming a 21st Century Force. The IT-21 initiative states that Navy and Marine Corps information infrastructure will be based largely on commercial systems and services, and the Department of the Navy must ensure …

Empowering Marine Corps System Administrators: Taxonomy Of Training, Brian K. Hamilton

Theses and Dissertations

Organizations cannot protect the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of information in today's highly networked systems environment without ensuring that System Administrators are properly trained and meet a minimum standard that is enforced enterprise-wide. Only with this ubiquitous benchmark training, will the System Administrators roles and responsibilities become synchronous to achieving Defense in Depth in the IT realm. The goal of this research is to analyze Marine Corps training methods to identify viable solutions that will produce consistent skill sets and meet requirements set forth in mandates from DoD.

Fast Registration Of Tabular Document Images Using The Fourier-Mellin Transform, Luke Alexander Daysh Hutchison

Theses and Dissertations

Image registration, the process of finding the transformation that best maps one image to another, is an important tool in document image processing. Having properly-aligned microfilm images can help in manual and automated content extraction, zoning, and batch compression of images. An image registration algorithm is presented that quickly identifies the global affine transformation (rotation, scale, translation and/or shear) that maps one tabular document image to another, using the Fourier-Mellin Transform. Each component of the affine transform is recovered independantly from the others, dramatically reducing the parameter space of the problem, and improving upon standard Fourier-Mellin Image Registration (FMIR), which …

Determination Of The Trainability Of Deception Detection Cues, Christopher L. Ford

Theses and Dissertations

The Air Force and the rest of the Department of Defense rely on valid information to make National Security decisions. The veracity of the information used to make those decisions can dramatically affect which course of action our military will take. Therefore, it is important that our leaders be able to recognize if they are being deceived. This study examines the results of training five categories of deception cues to 190 Air Force Officers. The officers were tested to determine their baseline deception detection abilities, then trained on the deception cues, Arousal, Emotion, Cognitive Effort, Communicator Tactics, and Memory Processes, …

The Significance Of Integrated Marketing Communication Techniques In The 21st Century Marketplace, Janice D'Amico Nee

Theses and Dissertations

The primary purpose of this study was to examine integrated marketing communication techniques used to develop successful apparel brands. This author researched existing data and explored the IMC development of three successful brand apparel companies: Nike, Ralph Lauren Polo, and Tommy Hilfiger. The study included the process of building brand identity, including the tenets of brand management and the symbolic process, as well as the significance of brand equity and architecture.

This author conducted a pen and paper quantitative survey to a random sampling of 50 Cumberland County College undergraduate students concerning the influential factors in their choice of brand …

Coordinated Uav Target Assignment Using Distributed Calculation Of Target-Task Tours, David H. Walker

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis addresses the improvement of cooperative task allocation to vehicles in multiple-vehicle, multiple-target scenarios through the use of more effective preplanned tours. Effective allocation of vehicles to targets requires knowledge of both the team objectives and the contributions that individual vehicles can make toward accomplishing team goals. This is primarily an issue of individual vehicle path planning --- determining the path the vehicles will follow to accomplish individual and team goals. Conventional methods plan optimal point-to-point path segments that often result in lengthy and suboptimal tours because the trajectory neither considers future tasks nor the overall path. However, cooperation …

The Perception And Production Of Portuguese Mid-Vowels By Native Speakers Of American English, Richard Ryan Kendall

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the difficulties that beginning and advanced American learners of Portuguese have correctly perceiving and producing the Portuguese mid-vowels {o} and {e}. The beginning learners were enrolled in their second semester of Portuguese and had rudimentary knowledge of Portuguese. The advanced learners had all lived in Brazil for nearly two years and were enrolled in a more advanced Portuguese course.

To test for production, informants were asked to read a group of sentences that contained one hundred occurrences of the Portuguese mid-vowels. Each production occurrence was evaluated as being correct or incorrect by linguistically trained native Brazilians. To …

Body Image And Beliefs About Appearance: Maternal Influences And Resulting Constraints On Leisure Of College-Age Women, Toni Liechty

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between body image, attitudes about appearance, and levels of constrained leisure for college-age women and their mothers. It also examined how the body image concerns of young women are influenced by their mothers'. Thompson and Gray's Body-Image Assessment Scale (BIAS) was used to assess body image while Spangler's Beliefs About Appearance Scale (BAAS) was used to assess the participants' beliefs about appearance. Raymore's hierarchical leisure constraints scale was used to measure levels of leisure constraints. The sample was taken from female students at a private western American university and consisted …

A Team-Based Approach To The Design And Development Of A Customer Service Training Program For Deseret Mutual Benefit Administrators, Donna M. Ure

Theses and Dissertations

This report describes the design and development processes used in creating a customer service training program for Deseret Mutual Benefit Administrators (DMBA) by three Instructional Psychology and Technology graduate students from Brigham Young University (the BYU design team). This paper reviews both the product and the process of developing the product. It also contains a formative evaluation of the product and provides a summative evaluation plan to be utilized by DMBA trainers once the product is fully implemented. The strengths and weaknesses of the training program are critiqued and recommendations for improvement are made. Finally, BYU design team members describe …

Ironic Multiplicity: Fernando's "Pessoas" Suspended In Kierkegaardian Irony, Michelle Pulsipher Hale

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies Søren Kierkegaard's understanding of irony as outlined in his master's thesis, The Concept of Irony, to the literary works of Fernando Pessoa. Recently Kierkegaardian scholarship has opened possibilities for non-traditional interpretation of Kierkegaard's dissertation and pseudonymous "aesthetic" texts by reading them in the ironic tone in which they were written. This paper offers a similar re-reading of the poetic and prose works Pessoa attributes to his heteronyms.

Kierkegaard's presentation of Socrates as irony serves as a model for how Pessoa sustains the heteronymic project by balancing the use of rhetorical irony within the works of the heteronyms …

The Effect Of Wearing Mouthguards On Vo2, Ventilation, And Perceived Exertion At Two Different Exercise Intensities, Jeffrey Scott Hurst

Theses and Dissertations

Objective: To assess the effects of wearing a protective mouthguard during exercise on ventilation and oxygen consumption.
Design and Setting: All participants performed a graded maximal exercise test on a cycle ergometer to determine peak oxygen consumption (VO2peak). Each participant also performed 6 submaximal exercise tests while wearing one of two facemasks (nasal or non-nasal breathing) and one of three mouthguard conditions (no mouthguard, boil and bite, custom-fit). Steady-state VO2, rate of perceived exertion (RPE), and other ventilatory values were measured at 60% and 80% of VO2max during each submaximal exercise test. All 6 submaximal exercise tests were completed within …

The Pueblitos Of Palluche Canyon: An Examination Of The Ethnic Affiliation Of The Pueblito Inhabitants And Results Of Archaeological Survey At La 9073, La 10732 And La 86895, New Mexico, Leslie-Lynne Sinkey

Theses and Dissertations

The small, above-ground masonry structures of northwestern New Mexico called "pueblitos" first came to the attention of anthropologists in over a century ago. In 1920, the noted archaeologist A.V. Kidder hypothesized that these masonry structures might have been built by Puebloan refugees fleeing Spanish reprisals in the wake of the Spanish reconquest of New Mexico after the Pueblo Revolt, and he proposed that this hypothesis be tested. Over the next several decades, however, the hypothesis remained untested, but it became both accepted as established fact and the basis for most anthropological, archaeological, and historical reconstructions of Navajo history and cultural …

The Contextable: Building And Testing An Intelligent, Context-Aware Kitchen Table, Daniel Matthew Hoopes

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to design and evaluate The ContexTable, a context-aware system built into a kitchen table. After establishing the current status of the field of context-aware systems and the hurdles and problems being faced, a functioning prototype system was designed and built. The prototype makes it possible to explore established, untested theory and novel solutions to problems faced in the field.

A Comprehensive Model For Technology Push Product Development, Gregory Loren Bishop

Theses and Dissertations

Successful product development has been a fundamental part of many of today's companies and their continued prosperity depends on continuing to develop new products in the future. There are many models of product development. The two most common classes of development are market pull (MP) and technology push (TP). TP product development differs from MP in that the development begins with a specified technology rather than a specified customer. Because TP development is generally considered more difficult and challenging, most of the product development research has focused on MP development and many researchers and practitioners favor MP development over TP …

Satire's Liminal Space: The Conservative Function Of Eighteenth-Century Satiric Drama, Sheila Ann Morton

Theses and Dissertations

The eighteenth century is famous for producing literary satire, primarily in verse (and later prose) form. However, during this period, a new dramatic form also arose of which satire was the controlling element. And like the writers of prose and verse satires, playwrights of dramatic satire claimed that their primary aim was the correction of moral faults and failings. Of course, they did not always succeed in this aim. History has shown a few, however, to have had a significant impact on the ideas and lives of their audiences. This thesis is an attempt to demonstrate how these satiric dramas …

Transmission Strategies For Wireless Multi-User, Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output Communication Channels, Quentin H. Spencer

Theses and Dissertations

Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO) processing techniques for wireless communication are of interest for next-generation systems because of their potential to dramatically improve capacity in some propagation environments. When used in applications such as wireless LAN and cellular telephony, the MIMO processing methods must be adapted for the situation where a base station is communicating with many users simultaneously. This dissertation focuses on the downlink of such a channel, where the base station and all of the users have antenna arrays. If the transmitter has advance knowledge of the users' channel transfer functions, it can use that information to minimize the interuser …

High-Torque Capacity Compliant Centrifugal Clutches, Ryan G. Weight

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis developed high-torque-capacity floating opposing arm clutches that are manufactured with standard economical manufacturing processes, while maintaining critical performance characteristics. Contact engagement speed and torque capacity models were created for the Hoffco-Comet, floating-opposing-arm (FOA), and floating 1 (F1) clutches. Sensitivity analyses were performed to identify key design parameters. A robust compliant FOA clutch was designed by minimizing the tolerance for both contact engagement speed and torque capacity. The robust design insures that the clutch will operate within the prescribed application constraints. Additional modeling showed that using a layered clutch would significantly tighten the contact engagement speed and torque performance …

Floodplain Risk Analysis Using Flood Probability And Annual Exceedance Probability Maps, Christopher M. Smemoe

Theses and Dissertations

This research presents two approaches to determining the effects of natural variability and model uncertainty on the extents of computed floodplain boundaries. The first approach represents the floodplain boundary as a spatial map of flood probabilities -- with values between 0 and 100%. Instead of representing the floodplain boundary at a certain recurrence interval as a single line, this approach creates a spatial map that shows the probability of flooding at each point in the floodplain. This flood probability map is a useful tool for visualizing the uncertainty of a floodplain boundary. However, engineers are still required to determine a …

Phylogeny Of The Polyneopterous Insects With Emphasis On Plecoptera: Molecular And Morpological Evidence, Matthew Dana Terry

Theses and Dissertations

Polyneoptera is an assemblage of eleven insect orders comprising the "orthopteroid" insects. It includes familiar insects such as grasshoppers, roaches, termites, earwigs and preying mantises; as well as the more obscure web-spinners, angel insects and ice-crawlers. We present a phylogenetic analysis of the polyneopteran orders based on 18S rDNA, 28S rDNA, Histone 3, and a coded morphology matrix for an extensive sampling of taxa. We investigate the use of congruence between separate datasets as an a priori measure of alignment quality. Our results support the paraphyly of Polyneoptera, the monophyly of Dictyoptera, sister taxon relationships between Embiidina + Phasmatodea and …

Effects Of A Tape Cast, Air-Stirrup, And An Air-Stirrup Applied Over A Taped Ankle On Dynamic Ankle Inversion, Justin K. Freeman

Theses and Dissertations

Objective: To compare the tape cast, and an Air-Stirrup/closed basketweave combination to the Air-Stirrup alone with respect to their effects on dynamic ankle inversion.

Design and Setting: This study used a repeated measures design with the independent variables being the exercise bout and the ankle support method (4 levels: no support, Air-Stirrup only, Air-Stirrup/closed basketweave, and tape cast). The 2 dependent variables were total inversion and maximum inversion velocity. Measurements were taken before and after an exercise bout, and all trials were conducted in the university's human performance laboratory.

Subjects: 16 subjects (11 male, 5 female, age 24.3 ± 1.8 …

An Implementation Of A Drill And Practice System To Assist In The Teaching Of Basic Music Theory, Todd C. Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

In order to help a group of introductory-level music students achieve a foundational understanding of music theory, a series of computer-based instructional modules were developed using a system called Technology-Assisted Language Learning (TALL). This system, though primarily intended to be used in developing natural language-based instruction, was designed to be flexible enough to handle a broad range of academic subjects. The design of the instruction was largely accomplished via formative evaluation, where student and expert reviews of prototypes played a significant role. Students reviewed three separate prototypes of the instruction, and experts in instructional design and evaluation were also asked …