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Perceptions Of A Middle School Reconfiguration: A Descriptive Case Study, Karen Billingsley Lasker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to follow 1 principal's journey to assist the district in its reconfiguration goals, and help the school change through deep examination of district personnel's and parents' perceptions of the change process. This was done by acknowledging distinctions and differences between junior high schools, the current middle school, and the new middle school, delineated by current middle school-reform research. This study explored issues regarding the policies, personnel, decision-making strategies, timelines, and organizational structures of the new middle school.

The reconfiguration resulted in rezoning attendance zones, reconstructing the new high school, raising the new …

Trait Differences In Gender In Technology Use And Study Habits Of Rural Community College Students, Phillip Marc Wilson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose for conducting the study was to explore the trait differences by gender of the study habits and technology use patterns of rural community college students. Significant research and data presently exists at the university level specific to study habits and technology use, but little research had been conducted targeting those topics in a rural community college setting.

The following questions guided the research:

1. What were the study habits of rural community college students?

2. How did rural community college students use technology?

3. Were there significant differences, by gender, in the study habits of rural community college …

Predictors Of Academic Success For The National Board Dental Hygiene Examination And The Southern Regional Testing Agency Clinical Exam, Melissa Gail Efurd

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose for conducting this study was to investigate and describe the relationship between applicant criteria for a dental hygiene program and subsequent outcomes on credentialing exams: the National Board Dental Hygiene Exam and the Southern Regional Testing Agency clinical exam. Because admission criteria play a crucial role in applicant selection, choosing students, that will successfully complete the program as well as the necessary credentialing exams, is a particularly crucial task for admission committees. The study had three elements. First, it investigated the relationship between the variables of age, undergraduate GPA and scores from the Psychological Services Bureau Health Occupations …

Witch Hazel Advent, The Story Of An Ozark Poet, Sarah Moore Chyrchel

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this Master's thesis project was to document the life of my maternal step-grandfather, John Ross Rule, in a visually compelling manner. Using equipment provided by the Lemke Department of Journalism at the University of Arkansas, I shot and edited a half hour long documentary film comprised of interviews and footage of John at his home near Winslow, Arkansas. John is a talented poet, and segments of his poetry are woven throughout the film.

The inspiration for this project is deeply rooted in place: the remote farmstead in the Boston Mountains of northwestern Arkansas that my grandparents called …

Race Bias In The Diagnosis Of Schizophrenia, Rose M. Fernandez

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Characterization Of Novel Extracellular Matrix (Ecm) Proteins (Mgp And Lumican) And Their Implications In Vascular Development, Angiogenesis, And Cancer, Bikram Sharma

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Traitorous Texting: Addressing The Methodological Issue Of Arousal In Romantic Jealousy Research, Rachel Rasley

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Spiritual Flow: The Influence Of Religious Experience On Psychological Well-Being, Christian H. Monson

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Common Ownership And Equality Of Autonomy, Anna Di Robilant

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, common ownership has enjoyed unprecedented favour among policy-makers and citizens in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Conservation land trusts, affordable-housing co-operatives, community gardens, and neighborhood-managed parks are spreading throughout major cities. Normatively, these common-ownership regimes are seen as yielding a variety of benefits, such as a communitarian ethos in the efficient use of scarce resources, or greater freedom to interact and create in new ways. The design of common-ownership regimes, however, requires difficult trade-offs. Most importantly, successful achievement of the goals of common-ownership regimes requires the limitation of individual co-owners’ ability to freely use the common …

What Makes Finzi Finzi? The Convergence Of Style And Struggle In The Life Of Gerald Finzi And In His Set Before And After Summer, Op. 16, Trevor Dangerfield Smith

Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is two-fold: to discuss the nationalistic characteristics in Gerald Finzi’s life and in his mature compositional style, and to discuss both the beliefs he held and the struggles he faced during his life, and how these themes are integrated into his work for voice and piano Before and after Summer, op. 16.

Before and after Summer was not conceived as a cycle, but its songs are tied together by similar poetic themes and emotional impact, so despite the fact they were composed as individual entities they form a coherent collection from beginning to end. …

Unnecessary Evil: An Examination Of Abu Ghraib Torture Photographs As Postcolonial Resistance Rhetoric, Patrick Gerhardt Richey

Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the rhetorical nature of visual artifacts in a postcolonial context. In order to examine the nature of visual artifacts as a form of resistance against static ideologies and prevailing power structures, the author uses both media and cultural artifacts created in response to photographs taken of abused prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Correctional Facility. The dissertation adds to scholarly knowledge of communication by addressing the intersections of iconographic visual communication and postcolonial resistance rhetoric. The dissertation provides a scholarly review of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, as well as of literature explicating …

The Relationship Between Perceptions Of School Climate And Student Achievement In Schools That Use Jostens' Renaissance Programs, Amy Yarborough Coyne

Dissertations

Each school has unique attributes and a personality that gives the school a distinct climate. Psychological qualities that schools possess might include trust, collaboration, cooperation, teaching attributes, expectations, community involvement, and engagement (Rhodes, Camic, Milburn, & Lowe, 2009). Given information regarding school climate, relationship needs, and motivation, the purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of teachers involved in change and improvement processes and to determine whether academic change was related to the use of programs such as Jostens’ Renaissance.

The participants of this study consisted of 242 faculty and staff from five public schools from three separate …

Determining The Individual, Organizational, And Community Level Outcomes Of A Community Leadership Development Program As Perceived By The Program Alumni, Susan Johnston Bush

Dissertations

The need for community leaders is increasing while the supply of community leaders is decreasing, leaving a gap in community leadership. Community leadership development programs (CLDP) are the most common approach to leadership development, yet the effects of CLDPs are rarely determined. In order to sustain programs that develop potential community leaders, program outcomes at the individual, organizational, and community levels must be identified.

This exploratory, non-experimental quantitative study used Black’s (2006) Leadership Program Outcomes Measure (LPOM) to determine CLDP alumni’s perceptions of the individual, organizational, and community level outcomes associated with participation in the CLDP; to describe the socio-demographic …

America Reads-Mississippi Future Teacher Corps: A Study Of Program Completers' Perception Of Factors Influencing The Decision To Become And Remain Classroom Teachers, Deborah Green Moore

Dissertations

Despite the number of programs in Mississippi that focus on developing and training teachers, the State continues to face a critical teacher shortage. This non-experimental, ex-post facto, quantitative study investigated the America Reads- Mississippi (ARM) Future Teacher Corps (FTC) program, an AmeriCorps program in Mississippi with a mission to improve the reading skills of students, encourage public awareness, support literacy, and help increase the number of certified teachers in Mississippi. FTC, a sub-corps of ARM, was created in 2007 to address teacher shortages through structured community education and teacher-specific training, with the goal of increasing the number of certified teachers …

The Effectiveness Of A District-Wide Training Initiative On Determining Preparedness Of Educational Leaders In A Large, Southeastern Louisiana School System, Jeanne Bordelon Wagner

Dissertations

A nationwide shortage of qualified, experienced applicants to fill the roles of educational leaders has led to a hiring crisis among school districts across America. The diminishing pool of applicants, accompanied by a high turnover rate of practicing administrators and increasing accountability demands, has revealed the importance of recruitment and retention of educational leaders. As the roles of school administrators are constantly evolving and increasing in complexity, recruiting skillfully trained personnel proficient in all dimensions of school leadership is a catalyst for increasing student achievement and for reducing principal attrition rates. The purpose of this research was to reveal perceived …

An Examination Of Mississippi Public School Teachers' Perceptions Of The Effectiveness Of Their Professional Development Experiences In Raising Student Achievement, Daniel Martin Rushing

Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to provide insight into the elements needed to produce a high quality professional development program for teachers. The researcher sought to determine possible factors that had a significant relationship to Mississippi public school teachers’ perceptions of the effectiveness of their professional development experiences in raising student achievement. Furthermore, the researcher wanted to identify possible inequities with professional development opportunities for teachers in Mississippi. It is the hope of the researcher to highlight the characteristics of effective professional learning defined by research that would kindle a desire in classroom teachers to advance their skill levels …

Openline Newsletter, December 2012, Civil Service Council

OpenLine Newsletter

A monthly newsletter for Civil Service employees, Volume XXXVII, Number 6, December 2012.

Numerical Simulation Of Particle-Driven Gravity Currents, Sangdo An, Pierre Y. Julien, Subhas K. Venayagamoorthy

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Particle-driven gravity currents frequently occur in nature, for instance as turbidity currents in reservoirs. They are produced by the buoyant forces between fluids of different density and can introduce sediments and pollutants into water bodies. In this study, the propagation dynamics of gravity currents is investigated using the FLOW-3D computational fluid dynamics code. The performance of the numerical model using two different turbulence closure schemes namely the renormalization group (RNG) k-ε scheme in a Reynold-averaged Navier-Stokes framework (RANS) and the large-eddy simulation (LES) technique using the Smagorinsky scheme, were compared with laboratory experiments. The numerical simulations focus on two different …

Influencing Factors On The Dynamic Properties Of Organobentonites, Bate Bate, Susan Burns

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The dynamic responses of soils are important engineering properties, especially for soils with high organic contents, because these soils can underlie critical support structures such as highway bridges or levees. Consequently, the initial tangent shear modulus (Gmax), secant shear modulus ratio (G/Gmax), and damping ratio (D) are important parameters in evaluating the dynamic soil behavior for soils subjected to earthquake, wind, waves, traffic, and equipment vibration. in this study, these dynamic properties of organ bentonites were quantified experimentally using resonant column tests. the results from this study were evaluated in terms of the effect of shear strain, organic content, and …

Effect Of Scc Mixture Composition On Thixotropy And Formwork Pressure, A. F. Omran, Kamal H. Khayat, Y. M. Elaguab

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

High lateral pressure exerted on formwork systems by self-consolidating concrete (SCC) is one of the hindrances for using such highly flowable concrete in cast-in-place applications. Self-consolidating concrete is a complex system that can be made using a wide range of mixture proportioning and often incorporated various chemical admixtures and supplementary cementitious materials. the investigation of the effect of each material ingredient independently on lateral pressure of SCC is not a simple task. in this study, thixotropy is rather used to assess the effect of various mixture parameters on formwork pressure. Thixotropy is determined by the evaluation of the structural buildup …

Accurate And Efficient Computation Of Power Plane Pair Inductance, Liang Li, Albert E. Ruehli, Jun Fan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The computation of the power-plane inductance for multiple ports is an important part of the PDN design. in this paper, we present an efficient approach for the inductance computation. Since this PEEC approach is based on partial inductance computations, vias and other discontinuities can accurately be taken into account. Speed-up techniques are employed like the faster decay of the coupling due to the symmetry, sparsification and simplification of the partial mutual inductance evaluation. Also, an approximate rectangular mesh reduction method is introduced which allows a local increase in mesh density. © 2012 IEEE.

A Low Complexity Algorithm For Linear Precoder Design With Finite Alphabet Inputs, Mingxi Wang, Yahong Rosa Zheng, Chengshan Xiao, Weiliang Zeng

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A low complexity precoding method is proposed for practical multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. based on the two-step optimal precoder design algorithm that maximizes the lower bound of the mutual information with finite-alphabet inputs, the proposed method simplifies the precoder design by fixing the right singular vectors of the precoder matrix to be the modulation diversity matrix, eliminating the iterative optimization between the two steps, and discretizing the search space of the power allocation vector. the modulation diversity matrices are designed for different modulations, which outperform the existing maximum diversity for BPSK and 8PSK inputs. for a 4x4 channel, the computational …

Linear Mimo Precoding In Multi-Antenna Wiretap Channels For Finite-Alphabet Data, Yongpeng Wu, Chengshan Xiao, Zhi Ding, Xiqi Gao, Shi Jin

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, we investigate the secrecy rate of finite alphabet communications over multiple-input, multiple-output, multiple-antenna eavesdropper (MIMOME) systems. Traditional precoder designs at the transmitter for achieving secrecy capacity (maximum secrecy rate) for MIMOME systems are developed according to the assumption of Gaussian input signals. Such designs may risk substantial secrecy rate loss when Gaussian inputs are replaced by practical finite alphabet inputs. to address this issue, we propose a linear precoding design to directly maximize the secrecy rate for MIMOME systems under the constraint of finite alphabet input. Exploiting convex optimization and matrix calculus, we present necessary conditions required …

Linear Precoding Of Finite Alphabet Signals In Multi-Antenna Broadcast Channels, Yongpeng Wu, Mingxi Wang, Chengshan Xiao, Zhi Ding, Xiqi Gao

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

We investigate the design of linear transmit precoding for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channels (BC) with finite alphabet input signals. We derive an explicit expression for the achievable rate region of the MIMO BC with discrete constellation inputs, which is generally applicable to cases involving arbitrary user number and arbitrary antenna configurations. for the case where all the users employ the same modulation scheme, we further present a weighted sum rate upper-bound of the MIMO BC with identical transmit precoding matrices. the resulting bound demonstrates a serious performance loss due to multi-user interference for MIMO BC with finite alphabet inputs …

On The Diversity Gain Region Of The Z-Interference Channels, Mohamed S. Nafea, Karim G. Seddik, Mohammed Nafie, Hesham El Gamal

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this work, we analyze the diversity gain region (DGR) of the single-antenna Rayleigh fading Z-Interference channel (ZIC). More specifically, we characterize the achievable DGR of the fixed-power split Han-Kobayashi (HK) approach under these assumptions. Our characterization comes in a closed form and demonstrates that the HK scheme with only a common message is a singular case, which achieves the best DGR among all HK schemes for certain multiplexing gains. Finally, we show that generalized time sharing, with variable rate and power assignments for the common and private messages, does not improve the achievable DGR. © 2012 IEEE.

Features For Automated Tongue Image Shape Classification, Tayo Obafemi-Ajayi, Ratchadaporn Kanawong, Dong Xu, Shao Li, Ye Duan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Inspection of the tongue is a key component in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Chinese medical practitioners diagnose the health status of a patient based on observation of the color, shape, and texture characteristics of the tongue. The condition of the tongue can objectively reflect the presence of certain diseases and aid in the differentiation of syndromes, prognosis of disease and establishment of treatment methods. Tongue shape is a very important feature in tongue diagnosis. A different tongue shape other than ellipse could indicate presence of certain pathologies. In this paper, we propose a novel set of features, based on shape geometry …

Wide Area Monitoring Of Rotor Angle Based On Synchrophasor Measurements, P. K. Olulope, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, K. A. Folly

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The concept of phasor is designed for steady state and phasor measurement unit (PMU) is based on this concept. Measuring rotor angle therefore during transient has become a challenging task. This paper investigates the possibility of using data from PMU to estimate the internal variables of synchronous generator such as rotor angle of large power system during transient disturbance. the rotor angle is estimated from synchro phasor such as phasor voltage and current as well as their angles. the proposed method is implemented on IEEE 68 bus system. © 2012 IEEE.

Efficiency Optimization Of A Sensorless V/F Control Method For Pmsm, Seyed Hesam Jafari, Keith Corzine, Jing Huang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a V/f control for permanent magnet synchronous machines which focuses on optimization by minimizing the d-axis current in order to reduce the motor losses and supplied input power. the proposed sensor less method only needs machine terminal signals and does not require any additional motor parameter measurements. Minimization of the d-axis current is accomplished through computed reactive power. © 2012 IEEE.

Colorimetric Oxygen Imaging And Quantification With Easily Accessible Optical Devices, Satya Achanta, Sanghan Park, Chang-Soo Kim

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Optical oxygen imaging is essential in monitoring two-dimensional analysis of oxygen distribution. Two easily accessible optical devices were used for oxygen analysis to demonstrate the feasibility of an innovatively simple method. a light panel screen with light-emitting diode (LED) backlight was used as a light source to excite a luminophore film responsive to oxygen. Meso-scale fluidic sensor platform was prepared using porphyrin complex (PtOEP) as the luminophore embedded within ethyl cellulose (EC) polymer matrix. Green LED light uniformly displayed from the light panel excited the luminophore film to exhibit two-dimensional luminescence distribution corresponding to wet gaseous oxygen. a color camera …

On Interference-Aware Precoding For Multi-Antenna Channels With Finite-Alphabet Inputs, Weiliang Zeng, Chengshan Xiao, Jianhua Lu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper investigates the interference-aware linear precoder design with finite-alphabet inputs. It maximizes the mutual information between the transmitter and intended receiver while controlling the interference power caused to unintended receivers. for this nonconcave problem, this work proposes a global optimization approach, which is based on two key observations: 1) the interference-aware precoding problem can be reformulated to the problem minimizing a function with bilinear terms over the intersection of multiple co-centered ellipsoids; 2) these bilinear terms can be relaxed by their convex and concave envelopes. in this way, the global optimal solution is obtained by solving a sequence of …