Digital Commons Network^™

Computing Topological Dynamics From Time Series, Mark. Wess

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

The topological entropy of a continuous map quantifies the amount of chaos observed in the map. In this dissertation we present computational methods which enable us to compute topological entropy for given time series data generated from a continuous map with a transitive attractor. A triangulation is constructed in order to approximate the attractor and to construct a multivalued map that approximates the dynamics of the linear interpolant on the triangulation. The methods utilize simplicial homology and in particular the Lefschetz Fixed Point Theorem to establish the existence of periodic orbits for the linear interpolant. A semiconjugacy is formed with …

Efficient Resource Discovery Technique In A Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Ravi Thanawala

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

This thesis describes a resource discovery technique in mobile ad hoc networks. Resource discovery is technique to search data in among the mobile nodes in the network. The highly dynamic nature of the infrastructure-less ad hoc networks poses new challenges in resource discovery, thus there is a need to for an optimized resource discovery technique. Efficient resource discovery algorithm discovers the resources in a mobile ad-hoc network in an optimized way. As there is no pre-established infrastructure in the network, every node takes its decision in forwarding resources and every node dynamically ranks these resources before disseminating them in the …

Exploring Barriers To Education For Native American Indians, Enid. Conley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

This qualitative storytelling and exploratory research design investigated the barriers, enhancers, and coping strategies to education experienced by adult Native American Indians from various Native American Indian Nations. In addition, differences between the sexes, Native American Nations, and/or languages spoken, and/or participation in cultural activities regarding barriers, enhancers, and coping strategies of Native American Indians were examined. The study with 23 adult Native American participants revealed a main theme of identity both passive and aggressive that permeated all of the thematic areas: barriers, enhancers, and coping strategies. The barriers ranged from reinventing the Native American Indian to language barriers caused …

Factors Affecting Retention In A Community College's Welfare-To-Work Programs, Veronica Woodward Pino

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

This study examined the perceptions held by former and current welfare-to-work participants of factors that contributed to the retention, persistence, attrition and/or completion of welfare-to-work training programs at a community college. Using the lived experiences and voices of former or current welfare-to-work participants and a qualitative research design, the researcher examined the following research questions: (a) What factors during the training impacted the movement of participants from welfare-to-work? (b) How did these factors enhance or serve as barriers to the movement of participants from welfare-to-work? This study was presented as a heuristic study of 12 former welfare participants who have …

Frankenstein, Science Fiction, And The Poetry Of Science, Peter Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

While Frankenstein has recently received criticism weighted heavily in politics, gender, and feminist studies, what gets overlooked in these discussions is that Mary Shelley's novel remains a story about science--not about empirical science, necessarily, but about abstract science. As science fiction, Frankenstein incorporates fictional science to posit truths about the human experience. Shelley's metaphor for the novel, ''my hideous progeny," reminds readers to respect the uncertain elements in invention in the arts and sciences. The problem for Frankenstein that I address has to do with an uncertainty of the terms, "science'' and "science fiction ,'' which results in further uncertainty …

First-Principles Study Of Metastable Phases And Structural Anomalies Of Fe, Al, Zn, And Cd Under Pressure, Florin. Apostol

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

Stable and metastable phases of Fe and Al and structural anomalies of Zn and Cd have been studied by epitaxial Bain path (EBP) and minimum path (MNP) first-principles procedures, based on finding equilibrium structures from minimizing the Gibbs free energy G with respect to structure at a given hydrostatic pressure p and temperature T . The main accomplishments are as follows. (1) This dissertation illustrates the effectiveness of the MNP procedure for finding stable and metastable phases of an element by studying four Bravais phases of Fe including body-centered tetragonal (bct), body-centered cubic (bcc), face-centered cubic (fcc) and rhombohedral (rh) …

Foreign Market Opportunity Analysis, Shirley Ye Sheng

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

Foreign-market opportunity analysis is the most frequent objective of international marketing research (Czinkota and Ronkainen 2007). The importance of foreign market opportunity assessment has been well noticed by both marketing managers and scholars. However, a foreign market opportunity analysis model based on theory that goes beyond aggregate demand is still lacking. This dissertation proposes a new model by combining marketing-based Overall Market Opportunity Index (OMOI) scheme with the economic-based gravity model of international trade. Hypotheses were tested as well as the usefulness of OMOI/Gravity Hybrid Model through three separate models with empirical analyses structured as follows. The first model extends …

Florida Student Progression Policies And Their Effect On Student Achievement, Marielena P. Wright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

This study investigated the varied district student progression policies from 9th to lOth grade and their effect on the district-level achievement of the high schools as measured by six categories of FCA T achievement consistent with those that comprise district grades during the 2005-2006 academic year. In Florida, the state assessment policy and the resulting rewards and sanctions policy, known as the Florida A+ Plan, are uniformly defined across districts while the state student progression policy simply provides guidelines for districts to follow. This results in varied student progression policies in the 67 school districts within the state. A quantitative …

Fuzzycuda, Joel Gibson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

Natural matte extraction is a difficult and generally unsolved problem. Generating a matte from a nonuniform background traditionally requires a tediously hand drawn matte. This thesis studies recent methods requiring the user to place only modest scribbles identifying the foreground and the background. This research demonstrates a new GPU-based implementation of the recently introduced Fuzzy- Matte algorithm. Interactive matte extraction was achieved on a CUDA enabled G80 graphics processor. Experimental results demonstrate improved performance over the previous CPU based version. In depth analysis of experimental data from the GPU and the CPU implementations are provided. The design challenges of porting …

Hierarchical Resource Selection And Movement Of Two Wading Bird Species With Divergent Foraging Strategies In The Everglades, James M. Beerens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

Seasonal variation in food availability is one of the primary limitations to avian populations, particularly during the breeding season. However, the behavioral responses between species may differ based on foraging strategies. I examined the influence of food availability on landscape-level habitat selection, patch-level habitat selection, and movements of two wading bird species with divergent foraging strategies, the Great Egret and White Ibis. On a landscape scale, there appeared to be a relationship among resource availability, the temporal scale of the independent variable, and whether the response was similar or different between species. At the patch level, results demonstrated a relationship …

Integrating Multi-User Scheduling With Retransmission Diversity Over Wireless Links, Irena Li

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

Research presented in this thesis develops a mainly theoretical basis and computer models for enhancing the throughput of multi-user wireless communication networks. The cross-layer combination of an adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) scheme at the physical layer and the use of automatic repeat request (ARQ) retransmi ssions at the data link layer is integrated into a scheduling framework for multi-user networks. Scheduling algorithms incorporating retransmission diversity are derived for three cases of typical network traffic: best-effort, non-realtime, and realtime. For each case, numeric computer si mulations of wireless communications over Nakagami-m block fading channels are developed to examine the effectiveness …

Limiting Interpretive Possibilities In Beckett And Calvina, Paul Ardoin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

Advances in literary studies have expanded the multitude of interpretations possible of a single work, perhaps too far. Positive progress from here requires constructing a way to avoid the chaos of an interpretive free- for-all without reverting to the debunked, totali zing systems of old. Limiting Interpretive Possibilities finds in Italo Calvina's If on a winter's night a traveler and Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable the model for a combinatorial literature that respects the key, inalienable elements of author, reader, work, and universe. Any reading that fits into this framework is a "possible" interpretation of the work, …

More Than "Just A Hunch", Sheela Celeste Dominguez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

The rise in popularity of the female sleuth television programs makes it important to explore representations of gender and knowledge. This investigation analyzes interpretations of intuition in the television sleuth genre and relevant paratexts, examines gendered public and private spheres and raises broader questions about gendered knowledge in the series Medium, Crossing Jordan, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Veronica Mars, Monk, The Profiler and True Calling. Rooted in feminist cultural studies, historical and sociological analysis, television and film theory and work on the detective genre, this investigation establishes common frames, or filters, through which the television sleuth genre represents intuition …

Algebraic And Combinatorial Aspects Of Group Factorizations, Vladimir. Bozovic

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

The aim of this work is to investigate some algebraic and combinatorial aspects of group factorizations. The main contribution of this dissertation is a set of new results regarding factorization of groups, with emphasis on the nonabelian case. We introduce a novel technique for factorization of groups, the so-called free mappings, a powerful tool for factorization of a wide class of abelian and non-abelian groups. By applying a certain group action on the blocks of a factorization, a number of combinatorial and computational problems were noted and studied. In particular, we analyze the case of the group Aut(Zn) acting on …

A Study Of The Relationships Among Leadership, Culture, And Student Achievement In Catholic Schools, Sonia Rodriguez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

This study explores the relationship among leadership style, school work culture, and student achievement in Catholic elementary schools. The relationships (a) between the leader style and student achievement, (b) between the school's work culture and student achievement, and (c) among leaders' styles, school work culture, student achievement and contextual factors were explored. A descriptive design, primarily quantitative and correlational in nature, was employed. It was concluded that school leadership had an indirect effect on student achievement in parochial schools in Florida. Furthermore, school work culture (school planning, program development, staff development, and assessment) directly impacted student achievement. The contextual variables …

Adhesive Effects In Dental Restoration, Raul. Vargas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

The dental field shows proliferation in the market of new adhesives. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the mechanical properties on total restoration, based on the manufacturer's technical specifications, experimental and mechanical test results. The optimal dentist's selection will be when the most appropriate adhesive can be chosen for one specific restoration, avoiding wasted time, material and exposure to marginal infections with a failure restoration. This research was developed in stages. The first step is the study of the tooth morphological information. Following, there is the structure identification type and the chemical composition of six different pure adhesives. …

An Alternative Enlightenment: The Moral Philosophy Of Jeanne Marie Le Prince De Beaumont (1711-1780), Margaret P. Schaller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

The ceuvre of Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, the public intellectual whose pedagogical journals and epistolary novels were routinely shelved in private eighteenthcentury libraries alongside the works of the period's most famous philosophes, today remains virtually unknown. Beyond the scant available studies limited to her pedagogy and fairy tales, it is time to explore the theoretical aspects of those and other of her texts as significant alternatives to traditional Enlightenment discourse as epitomized in the contemporary philosophes. Through her personal roles of governess to British and French aristocracy, editor of a French-language periodical featuring such contributors as Voltaire and …

An Empirical Study Of Performance Metrics For Classifier Evaluation In Machine Learning, Stefan Bruhns

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

A variety of classifiers for solving classification problems is available from the domain of machine learning. Commonly used classifiers include support vector machines, decision trees and neural networks. These classifiers can be configured by modifying internal parameters. The large number of available classifiers and the different configuration possibilities result in a large number of combinatiorrs of classifier and configuration settings, leaving the practitioner with the problem of evaluating the performance of different classifiers. This problem can be solved by using performance metrics. However, the large number of available metrics causes difficulty in deciding which metrics to use and when comparing …

Artificial Intelligence Based Electrical Impedance Tomography For Local Tissue, Manasa Rao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

This research aims at proposing the use of Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), a non-invasive technique that makes it possible to measure two or three dimensional impedance of living local tissue in a human body which is applied for medical diagnosis of diseases. In order to achieve this, electrodes are attached to the part of human body and an image of the conductivity or permittivity of living tissue is deduced from surface electrodes. In this thesis we have worked towards alleviating drawbacks of EIT such as estimating parameters by incorporating it in an electrode structure and determining a solution to spatial …

Beyond Fidelity, Steven M. Urdegar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

This study explored how contextual factors influenced the effect of educational practices on student reading achievement and describes an alternative means of assessing educational programs under conditions of multiple-treatment interference and innovation diffusion. Over 1,500 reading teachers at 69 elementary schools within a large diverse district completed surveys regarding multiple aspects of the reading program, actions of their reading leaders, and instructional program coherence at their schools. Nearly 13,000 students in grades 2 through 5 were assigned to those teachers. Factor analyses were used to separately identify patterns within survey items that measured educational practices, leadership actions, and instructional program …

Collabortive Filtering Using Machine Learning And Statistical Techniques, Xiaoyuan. Su

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

Collaborative filtering (CF), a very successful recommender system, is one of the applications of data mining for incomplete data. The main objective of CF is to make accurate recommendations from highly sparse user rating data. My contributions to this research topic include proposing the frameworks of imputation-boosted collaborative filtering (IBCF) and imputed neighborhood based collaborative filtering (INCF). We also proposed a model-based CF technique, TAN-ELR CF, and two hybrid CF algorithms, sequential mixture CF and joint mixture CF. Empirical results show that our proposed CF algorithms have very good predictive performances. In the investigation of applying imputation techniques in mining …

Community College And University Experiences Of High School Dual Enrollment Students, Laura A. Heath

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

The purpose of this study was to examine academic and social experiences of students who participated in a two-year intensive dual enrollment program housed on a community college campus. The academic experiences were examined through an analysis of community college and university data for 275 dually enrolled students and a comparison group of 258 traditional community college transfer students. An independent test of means was used to compare dual enrollment students to traditional community college transfer students. The findings were significant and found that dually enrolled students had higher community college GPAs, higher associate's and bachelor's degree completion rates, and …

Comparison Of Multimedia Technology Instruction On The Achievement Of U.S. Educated And Non-U.S. Educated Community College Geography Students, Edmar Bernardes Da-Silva

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

This study compares the achievement in three multimedia instructed World Geography classes between two groups of community college students: those students who were U.S. educated (from primary to secondary schools) and those students who were educated outside of the U.S. (from primary to secondary schools). The research was conducted using three World Geography (GEA 2000) classes at a community college in South Florida, between August 2007 and December 2007. The selected students were divided into two groups: one of U.S. educated students and one of non-U.S. educated students, all of whom volunteered their participation at the beginning of the course. …

Comparison Of Pixel Based And Object Based Vegetation Community Classification In The Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, Dorianne M. Barone

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2000 - 2009

Pixel based and object based vegetation community classification methods were performed using 30 meter spatial resolution Landsat satellite imagery of the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge (Refuge), a remnant of the northern Everglades. Supervised classification procedures using maximum likelihood and parallelepiped algorithms were used to produce thematic maps with the following vegetation communities : wet prairie, sawgrass, cattail, tree island, brush, aquatic/open water. Spectral data, as well as NDVI, texture and principal component data were used to produce vegetation community classification maps. The accuracy levels of the thematic maps produced were calculated and compared to one another. The …

Dunya, Marianne Wesson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Spectrum Policy Reform And The Next Frontier Of Property Rights, Philip J. Weiser, Dale N. Hatfield

Publications

The scarcity of wireless spectrum reflects a costly failure of regulation. In practice, large swaths of spectrum are vastly underused or used for low value activities, but the regulatory system prevents innovative users from gaining access to such spectrum through marketplace transactions. In calling for the propertyzing of swaths of spectrum as a replacement for the current command-and-control system, many scholars have wrongfully assumed the simplicity of how such a regime would work in practice. In short, many scholars suggest that spectrum property rights can easily borrow key principles from trespass law, reasoning that since property rights work well for …

The Effects Of Program Model And Language On Science Taks Scores Among Fifth Graders, Stephanie Leigh Zelenak

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

THE EFFECTS OF PROGRAM MODEL AND LANGUAGE ON SCIENCE TAKS SCORES AMONG FIFTH GRADERS

This study examined the conditions of learning allowing students in one classroom to succeed on the fifth grade science TAKS test whereas students in other classrooms on the same campus do not succeed. It focused on the relationship of program models, specifically as it pertains to the influence of language within the content area of science and student performance on the fifth grade science TAKS scores.

To compare the academic achievement, as measured by the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test, in grade five …

The Use And Interpretation Of The Batería Iii With U.S. Bilinguals, Julie Esparza Brown

Dissertations and Theses

Within each classroom, many children excel academically while others struggle. Some students' difficulties are such that they require placement into educational programs different from grade level core and perhaps delivered outside of general education classrooms. For many, special education programs are the lifeline to reach their innate potential. For others misplaced into special education, their opportunities may be truncated. For the past 40 years (Dunn, 1968), disproportionate representation of minority children in some disability categories has been a problem. Educators commonly ask "Is a child's difficulties due to language differences or a learning disability?" One key area of confusion relates …

Lead Concentration Of Soils In Sorby Hills Area Of Proposed M2 Irrigation Area, East Kimberley, Edward (Ted) Arnold Griffin, Noel R. Schoknecht, Ross Brennan, Jane Speijers, Dave Allen, Mike Freeman

Resource management technical reports

No abstract provided.

Climate Change, Vulnerability And Adaptation For South-West Western Australia: Phase One Of Action 5.5, Western Australian Greenhouse Strategy, Luke Morgan, Jo Anne Molin, Ross George, Richard Mckellar, Janet Conte

Bulletins 4000 -

This report outlines preliminary findings about the impacts of climate changes that occurred during 1975 to 2005 on the South West’s people, its economy and natural ecosystems. The report focuses on vulnerability and adaptation, identifying useful pointers for future work, particularly in relation to how well the community, stakeholders and decision-makers understand climate change as an issue and a threat.