Digital Commons Network^™

The Relationship Between Interorganizational Collaboration And The Perception Of School-Business Partnership Effectiveness In West Virginia., Julie Marie Norman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

School-business partnerships have proliferated in response to public outcry for education reform, yet little evidence exists to support that these collaborations are effective. The purpose of this study is to determine if a significant relationship exists between the factors influencing collaboration and school-business partnership effectiveness in West Virginia. This investigation was accomplished through survey research procedures using a questionnaire developed by the researcher upon careful review of the literature. Quantitative research was conducted on the perceptions of public school principals in West Virginia with regard to their school-business partnerships' effectiveness and the existence of environmental, organizational, and group interaction factors …

Suffolk University Beacon Yearbook, 2001, Suffolk University

Undergraduate Yearbooks

No abstract provided.

Language Support For Morton-Order Matrices, David S. Wise, Gregory A. Alexander, Jeremy D. Frens

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

The uniform representation of 2-dimensional arrays serially in Morton order (or Ee Cyrillic sign order) supports both their iterative scan with cartesian indices and their divide-and-conquer manipulation as quaternary trees. This data structure is important because it relaxes serious problems of locality and latency, and the tree helps to schedule multi-processing. Results here show how it facilitates algorithms that avoid cache misses and page faults at all levels in hierarchical memory, independently of a specific runtime environment. We have built a rudimentary C-to-C translator that implements matrices in Morton-order from source that presumes a row-major implementation. Early performance from LAPACK's …

2001-2002 Just The Facts, University Of San Diego

USD Fact Books (1985- )

No abstract provided.

Full Potential Linear Muffin-Tin Orbital Modeling Of Zinc-Selenide And Zinc-Magnesium-Selenide Alloy., Yaxiang Yang

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In this dissertation, we used ab-initio full potential linear muffin-tin orbital (FP-LMTO) method to study native defects, chlorine and nitrogen doping, and chromium incorporation issues in ZnSe and ZnMgSe alloys. The method we used and the results we obtained are discussed in details. In chapter 1, an introduction to recent studies in ZnSe was given. The methodology was discussed at chapter 2. In chapter 3, we studied lattice relaxation around native defects in ZnSe and formation energies for these native defects. Our results were compared with other theoretical results. In chapter 4, chlorine doping in ZnSe and ZnMgSe alloys are …

Some Limit Theorems For Szego Polynomials, Michael Joseph Arciero

Open Access Dissertations

We investigate a variety of convergence phenomena for measures on the unit circle associated with certain discrete time stationary stochastic processes, and for the class of Szego polynomials orthogonal with respect to such measures.

Szego polynomials, which form the basis of autoregressive (AR) methods in spectral analysis, are not uniquely defined when the degree is less than the number of points on which the spectral measure is supported; that is, when the spectral measure corresponds to a sum of complex sinusoids, the number of which is less than the degree. We consider the asymptotic behavior of Szego polynomials of fixed …

Gender Roles And Science Beliefs And Their Relationship To Science Interest, Judith Jean Paolucci

Open Access Dissertations

This study investigated adolescents' views about the nature of science (NOS) and conceptions of their gender identities, and revealed whether these conceptions and views are related to their science interest. Participants were 566 high school students enrolled in chemistry courses at three high schools in a New England state. A questionnaire was used to assess participants' science interest, gender role perceptions, and views about science, as well as to provide background and math and science achievement data. The study found that while student scores of NOS understanding did not differ by gender, some significant differences were noted on the student …

The Relationship Between Teachers' Theoretical Orientations To Reading And Their Verbal Feedback To Students During Oral Reading, Kathleen A. Swann

Open Access Dissertations

This study examined the link between theory and practice as evidenced in the relationship between teachers' beliefs and the decisions they make during instruction. It is embedded within research on teacher change during times of educational reform (Cuban, 1993; Darling-Hammond, 1997; Sarason, 1996) and in reading theory (Shannon, 1992). The specific role of belief in the change process is unclear (Guskey, 1986; Richardson, 1990). Beliefs were explored through the construct of theoretical orientation (blend of teachers' beliefs and knowledge) to reading. Decisions were observed through the verbal feedback teachers gave during oral reading instruction. The study was designed to triangulate …

Traces Of Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing And The Reproduction Of Knowledge(S), Richard Kenneth Van Dyke

Open Access Dissertations

Through analysis of eighteenth-century travel writing and eighteenth-century attempts to discover a reliable metaphysical knowledge, this study reveals foundational instability in the European Enlightenment knowledge project and thus makes a call for a more nuanced approach to eighteenth-century textuality than late twentieth-century discourse theorists usually allow. Discourse theorists often construct an enlightenment defined exclusively by progressive endpoints of social order, narrative control, and epistemological fixity, which lead to practices of domination over self-determined Others. Yet, through a focus on the metaphysical inquiries of George Berkeley and David Hume, a different picture of the eighteenth-century knowledge project emerges. For Berkeley and …

Study Of Particle Deposition In Human Airway Models, Guosen Yue

Open Access Dissertations

In this dissertation, the deposition of particles in human airway models is studied. The dissertation consists of three parts: In the first part, an analytical model of particle nasal airway deposition by diffusion considering effects of both laminar and turbulent flows is proposed. It appears in the literature that neither laminar nor turbulent analytical models alone works well for the entire range of diffusion parameters. A simplified turbulent particle diffusion equation is first developed and then a new combined turbulent/laminar diffusion model is proposed. The results predicted from the new model show improved accuracy when compared with available experimental data …

Adaptation Of Closed Form Regularization Parameters With Prior Information To The Radial Basis Function Neural Network For High Frequency Financial Time Series, Nina Kajiji

Open Access Dissertations

The research presented in this dissertation offers an extension to the classic Broomhead and Lowe Radial Basis Function artificial neural network (RBF ANN) algorithm [1]. The algorithm is extended by incorporating the concepts of Tikhonov's Regularization theory [2] in the form of ridge regression with prior information matrix. Although, the concepts of Ridge Regression introduced by Hoerl & Kennard [3] and the concepts of prior-information matrix introduced by Swindel [4] are not new, their joint implementation in a RBF ANN has not been investigated prior to this research. The objective of this extension is to produce a more accurate system …

Indium Tin Oxide Thin Film Strain Gages For Use At Elevated Temperatures, Qing Luo

Open Access Dissertations

A robust ceramic thin film strain gage based on indium-tin-oxide (ITO) has been developed for static and dynamic strain measurements in advanced propulsion systems at temperatures up to 1400°C. These thin film sensors are ideally suited for in-situ strain measurement in harsh environments such as those encountered in the hot sections of gas turbine engines. A novel self-compensation scheme was developed using thin film platinum resistors placed in series with the active strain element (ITO) to minimize the thermal effect of strain or apparent strain. A mathematical model as well as design rules were developed for the self-compensated circuitry using …

Using Jpeg2000 Compressed Images For Foveated Texture Mapping In Limited Memory Environments, Timothy Michael Henry

Open Access Dissertations

Despite advances in hardware technology and software rendering algorithms, there remain several limitations that force design trade-offs in virtual environments and visualization systems, such as the decision between increased level of detail, scene rendering time and the storage size of an object or virtual world. If an application involves the Internet or another restricted bandwidth transmission environment, the amount of data necessary to communicate a high level of detail becomes an even more critical parameter. Texture mapping and light mapping are used to increase the realism of a scene without increasing the geometric complexity. The cost for these methods is …

Efficiency Issues In The Financial Services Industry Worldwide, Shih-Ching Jeng

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation consists of four essays on the input/output efficiency studies. Using one of the methods in frontier analysis--data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Malmquist analysis, our papers examine the efficiency performances of financial institutions in three countries, Japan, U.S. and Taiwan. Our first essay investigates the effect of ownership structure and agency costs on the efficiency of keiretsu and independent insurers in Japanese non-life insurance industry. The second essay examines the relationship between mergers and acquisitions, efficiency, and scale economies in the U.S. thrift industry in 1990s. The third essay examines the efficiency of city and regional banks in Japanese …

Numerical Modeling Of Estuarine Transport, Water Quality, And The Impact Of Shrimp Mariculture In The Rio Chone Estuary, Ecuador, Diana Lynn Stram

Open Access Dissertations

The Rio Chone estuary in Ecuador has been heavily impacted by a range of anthropogenic impacts, particularly the conversion of mangrove forests to shrimp mariculture ponds. The combination of seasonal river flow, climate forcing and the influx of highly saline pond effluents have created a slow circulation regime in the estuary, especially during the dry season when the estuary can undergo a salinity inversion from mouth to head. Both shrimp production and water quality in the estuary have declined, specifically in the upper regions of the estuary where low dissolved oxygen is often a problem. A combined physical and biological …

Rational Functions Whose Zeros And Poles Are Constrained By Conditions Arising In Control, Rebecca L. Sparks

Open Access Dissertations

We shall study three different, yet related mathematical problems. The first is given as follows. Beta problem. Given β > 0, determine if there exists a rational function H which has no poles in [special characters omitted] so that the rational function [special characters omitted]has no zeros and no poles in [special characters omitted]. This problem in an equivalent form has been studied by Blondel, et al., and its statement can be found in, Open Problems in Mathematical Systems and Control Theory. Previous work on this problem has yielded that there exists β* such that if β < β*, then no solution to the Beta Problem exists. Furthermore, it has been shown that 10−5 < β* < [special characters omitted]. In this dissertation we improve upon the upper bound on β*. We prove that β* ≤ 7 − 4[special characters omitted] ≈ 0.0718 by constructing a solution to a limiting case of the Beta Problem. The Beta Problem is a special ease of the following problem. Avoidance problem. Given a rational function [special characters omitted], and given nonnegative integers n and m, determine if there exists a rational function [special characters omitted] such that[special characters omitted] An algorithm is proposed to construct numerical solutions to the Avoidance Problem by solving an optimization problem. Numerical Experience is reported. By solving the Avoidance Problem, one also solves the simultaneous stabilization problem of control theory. It is well known that "[the] simultaneous stabilization problem is recognized as one of the hard open problems in linear systems theory." With the proposed algorithm, it is possible to construct solutions to the simultaneous stabilization problem when they exist. The third problem to be studied is an interpolation problem. Interpolation problem. Given z1, … , zk ∈ [special characters omitted] with zℓ ≠zj for ℓ ≠j, w1, … , wk ∈ [special characters omitted], wℓ ≠0 for all ℓ = 1, … , k and nonnegative integers n, m, determine if there exist polynomials P and Q such that [special characters omitted] An algorithm is proposed to obtain numerical solutions to the Interpolation Problem by solving an optimization problem. Numerical experience is reported, and properties of solutions to the optimization problem are proved.

An Exploration Of Critical Thinking And Processing In Cardiac Nurses' Practice, Nancy Phoenix Bittner

Open Access Dissertations

The need and demand for critical thinking in cardiac nursing and practice in general is well documented in the nursing literature. However, little attention has been given to solidifying a definition or describing critical thinking as it occurs in practice. In an initial fieldwork project of one experienced nurse in a cardiac rehabilitation setting, an eight-phase process (reference point, congruency check, active questioning, additional gathering, cueing congruency, weighing and selection, action and follow-up/self-evaluation) was identified. It involved both mental and behavioral activities and prompted the renaming of critical thinking to critical processing, as a more encompassing label. The aim of …

Development Of Materials For The Rapid Manufacture Of Die Cast Tooling, Peter Jason Hardro

Open Access Dissertations

The focus of this research is to develop a material composition that can be processed by rapid prototyping (RP) in order to produce tooling for the die casting process. Where these rapidly produced tools will be superior to traditional tooling production methods by offering one or more of the following advantages: reduced tooling cost, shortened tooling creation time, reduced man-hours for tool creation, increased tool life, and shortened die casting cycle time. By utilizing RP's additive build process and vast material selection, there was a prospect that die cast tooling may be produced quicker and with superior material properties. To …

Some Results On Tree Tolerance Representations, Mary Ann Saadi

Open Access Dissertations

Consider a simple undirected graph G = ( V, E). A family of subtrees, {Sv} v∈V, of a host tree H is called a t-subtree representation of G provided uv ∈ E if and only if |V(Su) ∩ V(Sv)| ≥ t. An ( H, t)-representation of G is a t-subtree representation of G with fixed host tree H. In this dissertation we will consider (Hm, t)-representations for cycles and trees, where Hm is the host tree with exactly one node v, of degree three and exactly three leaves, each with distance m from v. We denote the set of (Hm, …

Algorithms For Series Coefficients, Jun Zhang

Open Access Dissertations

The expansion of Taylor series is a very old topic in both pure and applied mathematics. It plays a crucial role in fundamental theory and applications. Computer algebra systems provide an interactive environment to assist in solving many mathematical problems. This work focuses on the development of techniques and algorithms for determining the coefficients in the Taylor expansion of a function. Our goal is to provide a set of procedures that can be implemented with these systems. In this work, by comparing coefficients and taking derivatives, we develop some new methods called exact methods. We introduce transform methods, which is …

Cadmium Toxicity And Random Motility Studies Using Marine Dinoflagellates, Edwin Li

Open Access Dissertations

The marine biota is exposed to heavy metal residues of industrial and agricultural processes. The effects of these metals on phytoplankton are of particular interest because they represent the first link in the food chain and are able to transfer the metal to higher trophic levels. Members of the phytoplankton population include the diverse community of flagellated unicellular, mostly photosynthetic, microorganisms called dinoflagellates. The effects of cadmium (Cd) on the growth of two marine dinoflagellates Scrippsiella narragansettensis and Heterocapsa triquetra were measured under different medium composition. To investigate the role of metal speciation, experiments were carried out in media prepared …

Transfer Function Model For An Oxy-Fuel-Fired Batch Tank., James Robert Rhodes

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Oxy-fuel combustion is an alternative method for melting glass that has recently become increasingly attractive as one way for the glass industry to improve its energy efficiency and reduce its environmental impacts. Research, however, is still needed to better appreciate the advantages that oxy-fuel combustion offers to the users of the batch tanks. Efforts have been underway by the WVU Projects with Industry Program to identify the parameters that govern the combustion and control behavior of an oxy-fuel fired batch tank. The two primary goals of this thesis are to develop a transfer function model for the oxy-fuel fired batch …

Enjoying A Bad Life: Short Fiction Drawn From Disorder., Kate Green Van Sant

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

My own cultural background is somewhat confused, and I inherited from my late father many strange and suspicious stories that can never be corroborated. This allowance for ambiguity also reminded me of my fondness for the labyrinths and forking paths of Borges, and I realized that this duality was probably closely related to my travels between cultural frontiers and my frequent passages between mania and depression. The narrator struggles for independence and emotional stability with humor, attempting to pull order, both creative and practical, from her disorder. Her success is to be judged not as much in her accomplishments as …

A Computational Study Of Mixing In A Liquid Jet Impinging On An Immiscible Liquid Layer., Sherif Mohamed Kandil

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Droplet formation is a phenomenon that has great significance in multiphase flows, and it takes place in many natural and man-made applications. The application of interest in this study is the turbulent mixing of Diesel fuel and seawater during the refueling process of naval ships outfitted with compensated fuel ballast tanks (CFBT). Several phenomena take place in fuel tanks that cause turbulent mixing and thus droplet formation. These phenomena include, among other phenomena, a stratified shear flow of two immiscible fluids of different densities, and a densely buoyant vertical jet flow of a higher density fluid impinging on a quiescent …

Mechanotransduction In Bone: Passive And Load-Induced Fluid Transport In Rat Femora., Bixia Li

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The capacity of bone tissue to alter its mass and structure in response to mechanical demands has long been recognized but the mechanisms involved remained poorly understood. Load-induced interstitial fluid flow has been postulated to provide a mechanism for transduction of the mechanical signals to the cellular level to activate bone adaptation. This research is to investigate experimentally the effects of mechanical loading on fluid flow in bone by introducing stain/tracer. Rat femurs were used to test the passive diffusion and mechanical transport properties of the stain in bone. It was found that fluorescein is compatible with an animal model …

A Simulation And Analysis Toolbox For Power Systems And Genetic Algorithm-Based Damping Controller Design., Amer Hasanovic

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Due to the recent deregulation, difficulty in acquiring rights-of-way to build new transmission lines, and steady increase in power demand, maintaining power system stability becomes evermore difficult and very challenging problem. Implementation of new equipment based on the latest technologies and proper controller design become essential for improvement of transient and oscillatory stability margins. To be able to develop and test these new devices and their controls it is necessary to have simulation package that allows accurate modeling of all power system components. Simulation environment has to be modular enough to allow frequent additions of new components without compromising overall …

An Intelligent System's Approach To Reservoir Characterization In Cotton Valley., Mofazzal Hossan Bhuiyan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Reservoir characterization in the Cotton Valley formation has always been a challenge for the Engineers, Geologist and Geophysists because of its heterogeneity as well as for the fact that well logs and reservoir characteristics are non-correlatable from well to well. This study introduces a new technique to characterize the cotton valley reservoir. Synthetic magnetic resonance imaging logs (MRI) provide information about reservoir characteristics such as effective porosity, fluid saturation and rock permeability more accurately than conventional wireline logs. The fuzzy C- mean analysis tool is utilized to group well logs together based on similarity criteria of the reservoir formation and …

A Non-Invasive Technique For Monitoring Miotic Eye Responses., Ahmed M. El-Sherbeeny

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The eye is a very sensitive organ of the human body, and is subject to many hazards that may cause disorders such as miosis. Thus non-costly, non-invasive, safe methods for pupil assessment and monitoring are of the essence. Proposed is a simple eye scanning mechanism that periodically reports whether the pupil has experienced miosis or dilatation due to an external illumination source. The process uses a Clanguage program to control the image-grabbing process, as well as determining the pupil constriction/dilation conditions. The program focuses on dynamically isolating the pupil by producing a threshold for it that varies with the measured …

The Range Of The Iterated Matrix Adjoint Operator, Tze-Jang Chen, Jenn-Tsann Lin, C. H. Cooke

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

The following inverse problem is considered: for a given n × n real matrix B, does there exist a real matrix A such that where the classical adjoint operation is intended? The rank of B and the number of applications of the adjoint operator determine the character of this general inverse problem for the iterated adjoint operator. Thus, for given B, the question of interest is whether or not B lies in the range of the iterated matrix adjoint operator. Maple V R5 is used as an aid to obtain results indicated here. (©) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. …

Slope Control In Western Boundary Currents, Sang-Ki Lee, J. L. Pelegri, John Kroll

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

An analytic solution is presented for the steady-state depth-averaged western boundary current flowing over the continental slope by combining three highly idealized models: the Stommel model, the Munk model, and the arrested topographic wave model. The main vorticity balance over the slope is between planetary vorticity advection and the slope-induced bottom stress torque, which is proportional to rv(h^-1)_x where r is the Rayleigh friction coefficient, h is the water depth, and v is the meridional velocity. This slope-induced torque provides the necessary source of vorticity for poleward flow over the slope, its simple interpretation being …