Digital Commons Network^™

Improving Reading Instruction Through Staff Development At Putnam County Elementary School, Kirk D. Mallette

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

The problem addressed was low reading achievement for Grade 2 students at Putnam County Elementary School. Reading comprehension and vocabulary skills were not being demonstrated by Grade 2 students to a satisfactory level according to the test data. Teachers in the school expressed frustration about how to help students achieve higher levels. One variable that impacts reading achievement is teacher instruction. This study addresses that variable.

The intervention was a staff development training program to help Grade 2 teachers at Putnam County Elementary School learn to implement a balanced approach to literacy through guided reading and guided writing. The quasi-experimental …

A Plan For The Development, Implementation, And Evaluation Of A Global Entrepreneurship Adult Credit Program At Suffolk County Community College, Dorothy J. Laffin

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

During an environmental scan Suffolk County Community College’s (SCCC) business faculty determined that employed, adult learners, seeking part-time, flexible academic schedules, were unable to enroll in the limited, traditionally delivered course offerings in entrepreneurship and international business. In order to meet the identified learning need, this project was designed to develop a curriculum plan for an innovative, credit-bearing, international business program for adult students engaged in a variety of small business activities. Additionally, proposed steps for implementing and evaluating the program were included in the project.

The Global Entrepreneurship Program plan was developed around the answers to six research questions. …

Mapping Function To Failure Mode During Component Development, Irem Y. Tumer, Robert B. Stone

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

When designing aerospace systems, it is essential to provide crucial failure information for failure prevention. Failure modes and effect types of analyses and prior engineering knowledge and experience are commonly used to determine the potential modes of failures a product might encounter during its lifetime. When new products are being considered and designed, this knowledge and information is expanded upon to help designers extrapolate based on their similarity with existing products and the potential design tradeoffs. in this work, we aim to enhance this process by providing design-aid tools which derive similarities between functionality and failure modes. Specifically, this paper …

A Study To Determine Which Class Setting And Delivery Method Would Lead To Improved Test Scores In The Computer Information Systems (Cis) Firm At Bethel High School, Deborah G. Vines

OTS Master's Level Projects & Papers

To answer this problem the following hypothesis was established: There will be a significant difference in CIS Firm students' performance on tests that are taught in a didactic structure when compared to students taught in the simulated-office environment.

A Relationship Between Grades Earned By Sixth Grade Core Science Students And Their End Of Year Grades, Denise Wilda Padrick

OTS Master's Level Projects & Papers

To solve this problem, the following hypothesis was tested: 1. A relationship does not exist between sixth grade level academic grades earned at the end of a first nine weeks grading period and the year end grades.

Selectivity And Metaplasticity In A Unified Calcium-Dependent Model, Luk C. Yeung, Brian S. Blais, Leon N. Cooper, Harel Z. Shouval

Science and Technology Department Faculty Journal Articles

A unified, biophysically motivated Calcium-Dependent Learning model has been shown to account for various rate-based and spike time-dependent paradigms for inducing synaptic plasticity. Here, we investigate the properties of this model for a multi-synapse neuron that receives inputs with different spike-train statistics. In addition, we present a physiological form of metaplasticity, an activity-driven regulation mechanism, that is essential for the robustness of the model. A neuron thus implemented develops stable and selective receptive fields, given various input statistics

Teaching Energy Balance Using Round Numbers: A Quantitative Approach To The Greenhouse Effect And Global Warming, Brian S. Blais

Science and Technology Department Faculty Journal Articles

The idea of energy balance used to explain the greenhouse effect and global warming is often confusing for students, primarily because the standard quantitative analysis uses many constants and units. A "round" unit method is presented, which maintains the quantitative aspects of the standard analysis, but is much more intuitive for students.

Aircraft Landing Gear Simulation And Control, Sanoopkumar Ambalaparambil

Theses

The focus of this work is the development of a Multi-degree Of Freedom (MOF) model for simulation and control of the landing performances of the SAE Heavy Lift Airplane model built by the Aerodynamics design team of RIT. From dynamic considerations, the landing gear performance has two areas of interest: a) behavior during touchdown impact, and b) response to excitation induced by track roughness during taxi, take-off and later part of the landing runs. As the problem at hand is highly nonlinear and complex, initially a simplified 1-dof model of the same aircraft is derived and analyzed using Lagrange's equations …

A Comparison Of Dual Heuristic Programming (Dhp) And Neural Network Based Stochastic Optimization Approach On Collective Robotic Search Problem, Nian Zhang, Donald C. Wunsch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

An important application of mobile robots is searching a region to locate the origin of a specific phenomenon. A variety of optimization algorithms can be employed to locate the target source, which has the maximum intensity of the distribution of some detected function. We propose two neural network algorithms: stochastic optimization algorithm and dual heuristic programming (DHP) to solve the collective robotic search problem. Experiments were carried out to investigate the effect of noise and the number of robots on the task performance, as well as the expenses. The experimental results showed that the performance of the dual heuristic programming …

Adaptive-Critic-Based Optimal Neurocontrol For Synchronous Generators In A Power System Using Mlp/Rbf Neural Networks, Jung-Wook Park, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Ronald G. Harley

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a novel optimal neurocontroller that replaces the conventional controller (CONVC), which consists of the automatic voltage regulator and turbine governor, to control a synchronous generator in a power system using a multilayer perceptron neural network (MLPN) and a radial basis function neural network (RBFN). The heuristic dynamic programming (HDP) based on the adaptive critic design technique is used for the design of the neurocontroller. The performance of the MLPN-based HDP neurocontroller (MHDPC) is compared with the RBFN-based HDP neurocontroller (RHDPC) for small as well as large disturbances to a power system, and they are in turn compared …

The Subcircuit Extraction Problem, Nian Zhang, Donald C. Wunsch, Frank Harary

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The steady down scaling of CMOS device dimensions has been the main stimulus to the growth of microelectronics and computer aided very large scale integration (VLSI) design. But the more an integrated circuit (IC) is scaled, the higher its packing density becomes. The increasing size of chips, measured in either area or number of transistors, and the waste of the large capital investment involved in fabricating and testing circuits that do not work, make layout analysis and verification an important part of physical design automation. The most efficient way to overcome these difficulties is to identify a related collection of …

Monte Carlo Analysis Of Gan-Based Gunn Oscillators For Microwave Power Generation, R. P. Joshi, V. Sridhara, P. Shah, R. D. Del Rosario

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Monte Carlo studies of transferred electron oscillators based on bulk wurtzite GaN are presented. Two structures have been examined: (i) devices with the conventional single notch structure, and (ii) repetitive structures with serial segments to fashion a "multiple domain" device. Wurtzite material has been chosen because of the higher drift velocity and because analytical expressions for the band structure have recently become available. Performance parameters of interest such as the operating frequency, output power, and conversion efficiency are calculated. Variations due to changes in temperature, biasing voltage, and device length are also included. It is shown that multidomain Gunn diodes …

A Discrete-Time Model For Spatio-Temporally Correlated Mimo Wssus Multipath Channels, Chengshan Xiao, Jingxian Wu, Sang-Yick Leong, Y. Rosa Zheng, Khaled Ben Letaief

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, a statistical discrete-time model is proposed for simulating wideband MIMO channels which experience spatially and temporally correlated, widesense stationary uncorrelated scattering (WSSUS) multipath Rayleigh fading. A new method is also presented to efficiently generate the correlated MIMO channel coefficients, which can be used for accurate simulation of physical continuous-time MIMO channel. The statistic accuracy of the discrete-time MIMO channel model is rigorously verified through theoretical analysis and extensive simulations in different criteria.

A Study Of The Probe Induced Disturbances On The Near-Field Measurement, Jin Shi, Richard E. Dubroff, Kevin P. Slattery, Masahiro Yamaguchi, K.-I. Arai

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Numerical simulations were used to investigate the disturbance introduced by placing a small magnetic loop probe in the near field of a driven loop. In the absence of the loop probe, the numerical simulations were compared with an approximate closed-form analytical expression for the magnetic field produced by the driven loop. The agreement between the approximate analytical results and the simulation was good. The next set of simulations was based on a physical model that included the probe and showed that the probe does exert an effect on the field being measured. Examples of these simulations and their implications on …

A Hydrogeological Approach To Transboundary Ground Water Resources And International Law, Gabriel Eckstein, Yoram Eckstein

Faculty Scholarship

Ground water resources have long been the neglected stepchild of water law. While agreements focusing on transboundary rivers and lakes have been relatively common, there is a paucity of treaties and international norms squarely addressing shared ground water resources. As a result, the rules governing the use, management, and conservation of transboundary ground waters is unclear at best.

This dearth is, in large part, the result of a deficit of scientific understanding among legislators, policymakers, and the judiciary. This is evidenced in many international and domestic laws and policies that have little or no scientific underpinning. Accordingly, there is a …

Intelligent Strain Sensing On A Smart Composite Wing Using Extrinsic Fabry-Perot Interferometric Sensors And Neural Networks, Kakkattukuzhy M. Isaac, Donald C. Wunsch, Steve Eugene Watkins, Rohit Dua, V. M. Eller

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Strain prediction at various locations on a smart composite wing can provide useful information on its aerodynamic condition. The smart wing consisted of a glass/epoxy composite beam with three extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometric (EFPI) sensors mounted at three different locations near the wing root. Strain acting on the three sensors at different air speeds and angles-of-attack were experimentally obtained in a closed circuit wind tunnel under normal conditions of operation. A function mapping the angle of attack and air speed to the strains on the three sensors was simulated using feedforward neural networks trained using a backpropagation training algorithm. This mapping …

Neuro Emission Controller For Minimizing Cyclic Dispersion In Spark Ignition Engines, Pingan He, Jagannathan Sarangapani

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel neural network (NN) controller is developed to control spark ignition (SI) engines at extreme lean conditions. The purpose of neurocontroller is to reduce the cyclic dispersion at lean operation even when the engine dynamics are unknown. The stability analysis of the closed-loop control system is given and the boundedness of all signals is ensured. Results demonstrate that the cyclic dispersion is reduced significantly using the proposed controller. The neuro controller can also be extended to minimize engine emissions with high EGR levels, where similar complex cyclic dynamics are observed. Further, the proposed approach can be applied to control …

Over-Distention Operation Of Cascaded Multilevel Inverters, X. Kou, Keith Corzine, M. W. Wielebski

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Established research has shown that cascaded multilevel inverters can provide more voltage vectors per number of active semiconductors compared to typical multilevel converters. This feature is significant for increasing the drive performance as well as reducing the drive complexity and losses. When two inverters are cascaded, the maximum number of effective levels (or maximal distention operation) is the product of the number of levels of the individual inverters. It is possible to operate the cascaded inverter beyond maximum distention. The over-distention operation is desirable since it effectively increases the number of voltage levels in spite of some missing switching levels. …

Probabilistic Neural Networks For Multi-Class Tissue Discrimination With Gene Expression Data, Rui Xu, Donald C. Wunsch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

With the emergence and rapid advancement of DNA microarray technologies, construction of gene expression profiles for different cancer types has already become a promising means for cancer diagnosis and treatment. Most previous research has focused on binary classification. Here, we use a probabilistic neural network (PNN) for multi-classification of cancer data. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the PNN in addressing gene expression data.

Rate-Based End-To-End Congestion Control Of Multimedia Traffic In Packet Switched Networks, Mingsheng Peng, S. R. Subramanya, Jagannathan Sarangapani

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper proposes an explicit rate-based end-to-end congestion control mechanism to alleviate congestion of multimedia traffic in packet switched networks such as the Internet. The congestion is controlled by adjusting the transmission rates of the sources in response to the feedback information from destination such as the buffer occupancy, packet arrival rate and service rate at the outgoing link, so that a desired quality of service (QoS) can be met. The QoS is defined in terms of packet loss ratio, transmission delay, power, and network utilization. Comparison studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme over New-Reno TCP (a variant …

Variability And Relationships Among 12-Hour Ivdmd, Starch, Oil, Protein, And Physical Characteristics Of 16 Sorghum Conversion Lines, Jeffrey F. Pedersen, Kenneth D. Kofoid

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

A factor frequently identified as a key to understanding sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] feed value to ruminant animals is rate of starch digestion. Recent research in corn (Zea mays L.) has established a strong ability to predict rumen starch degradation from grain physical and chemical parameters. It was therefore important to determine whether similar relationships could be established in sorghum. The objectives of this study were to determine: 1) range of variation for 12-hour in vitro dry matter disappearance (IVDMD), chemical, and physical grain quality parameters among 16 sorghum conversion lines; and 2) to establish the strength …

Electrochemical And Hydrodynamic Interferences On The Performance Of An Oxygen Microsensor With Built-In Electrochemical Microactuator, Chang-Soo Kim, Chae-Hyang Lee

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

An in situ self-diagnostic technique for a dissolved oxygen microsensor is proposed in an effort to devise an intelligent microsensor system with an integrated electro-chemical actuation electrode. With a built-in platinum microelectrode that surrounds the microsensor, two kinds of microenvironments (oxygen-saturated or oxygen-depleted phases) can be created by water electrolysis depending on the polarity. The functionality of the microsensor can be checked during these microenvironment phases. The polarographic oxygen microsensor is fabricated on a flexible polyimide substrate (Kapton/sup ©/) and the influences of electrochemical and hydrodynamic conditions on the sensor responses have been investigated.

Growing Corn In A Computer: The Hybrid Hybrid-Maize Simulation Model And Its Application To Production Agriculture, Achim R. Dobermann, Haishun Yang

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

Outline

Yield potential and yield gaps

To achieve yield potential of an environment

Hybrid Hybrid-Maize model

Hybrid Hybrid-Maize validation

Potential applications

EI Lincoln, NE: 2003 Yields

What determines spatial variation in corn yield potential in Nebraska?

Simulated attainable corn yields in different regions of Nebraska

To achieve full climatic site yield potential, management requires:

Optimal management: gain in season length

Corn yield potential in 2003

Potential applications

Summary

Outlook

Plasma Interaction With Microbes, M. Laroussi, D. A. Mendis, M. Rosenberg

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The germicidal effects of a non-equilibrium atmospheric pressure plasma generated by a novel resistive barrier discharge on representatives of the two classes of bacteria (Gram-negative and Gram-positive) are discussed. The plasma exposure, while being lethal to both bacterial classes, also produced gross structural damage in the Gram-negative E. coli while none was observed in the more structurally robust Gram-positive Bacillus subtilis. An electrophysical process involving the role of the electrostatic tension on a charged body in a plasma is invoked to explain both observations. Since the efficacy of this electrophysical process depends not only on the tensile strength of …

Study Of A Growth Instability Of Γ-In[Sub 2]Se[Sub 3], C. Amory, J. C. Bernede, S. Marsillac

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

γ-In[sub 2]Se[sub 3] thin film are deposited for various substrate temperatures in the range of 523–673 K. This study shows that at 573 and 673 K the thin films are well crystallized with grains aligned along the c axis. Between these temperatures, a domain of instability appears where the γ-In[sub 2]Se[sub 3] thin films have a randomly orientation and the c-lattice parameter increases. The presence of the metastable phase κ-In[sub 2]Se[sub 3], during the growth, can explain the existence of this domain of instability. The insertion of Zn during the preparation process allows us to stabilize the phase κ at …

Electron Bernstein Wave-X-O Mode Conversion And Electron Cyclotron Emission In Mast, Josef Preinhaelter, Pavol Pavlo, Vladimir Shevchenko, Martin Valovic, Linda L. Vahala, George Vahala

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Electron cyclotron emission (ECE) from overdense plasmas can only occur due to electron Bernstein waves (EBW) mode converting near the upper hybrid region to an electromagnetic wave. Experimental data of ECE observations on MAST are studied and compared with EBW-X-O mode conversion modeling results.

Query-Based Learning For Aerospace Applications, Donald C. Wunsch, Emad W. Saad, J. J. Choi, J. L. Vian

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Models of real-world applications often include a large number of parameters with a wide dynamic range, which contributes to the difficulties of neural network training. Creating the training data set for such applications becomes costly, if not impossible. In order to overcome the challenge, one can employ an active learning technique known as query-based learning (QBL) to add performance-critical data to the training set during the learning phase, thereby efficiently improving the overall learning/generalization. The performance-critical data can be obtained using an inverse mapping called network inversion (discrete network inversion and continuous network inversion) followed by oracle query. This paper …

Optical Properties Of Materials For 157 Nm Lithography, Anatoly Bourov

Theses

A survey of optical properties of sputtered materials in the spectral range of 145 nm to 800 nm has been performed. The optical constants n and k have been measured using ellipsometric techniques. Four combination materials have been created with the properties suitable for application in Attenuated Phase Shift Mask (APSM) manufacturing. The four combination materials have also been characterized, with the results presented.

A Two-Step Approach Bayesian Network Model Selection, Michael John Kane

Theses

It is often desirable to show relationships between unstructured, potentially related data elements, or features, composing a knowledge database (KD). By understanding the interaction between these elements, we may gain insight into the underlying process from which the KD is derived, and as a result, we can often model the process. Bayesian Belief Networks (BBN) in particular, are adept at modeling knowledge databases for two reasons. The first is that BBNs give a structural representation of data elements through a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This ability may make BBNs invaluable in areas such as data mining, where statistical relationships between …

Minimum Inhibitory Concentrations Of Two Common Food Phenolic Compounds And Their Effect On The Microbial Ecology Of Swine Feces In Vitro, Jennifer I. Zaffarano

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Feeding sub-therapeutic levels of antibiotics to livestock has been associated withdevelopment and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria. The present experiment was conductedto investigate the effect of antibiotic alternatives (caffeic acid, chlorogenic acid, and carbadox)on the microbial ecology of swine feces in vitro.Minimum inhibitory concentrations of caffeic and chlorogenic acids were determined forseveral pathogens using macrobroth and agar dilution techniques. Gram-negative bacteria werenot inhibited. Caffeic acid inhibited four Staphylococcus aureus strains at 200 ppm or less, andtwo Clostridium perfringens strains at 300 ppm. Chlorogenic acid inhibited all S. aureus strainsat 500 ppm, and one C. perfringens strain at 400 ppm.Effects of …