Digital Commons Network^™

Teacher Retention: What Motivates Highly Qualified Urban Teachers To Stay?, Orlando B. Milligan

Theses and Dissertations

This applied dissertation was designed to provide insight into what motivates highly qualified teachers to remain in urban schools. Research has shown that the single most important factor in a child’s education is the teacher. Consequently, the issues related to teacher recruitment and retention rank as serious problems facing urban schools and the achievement of their children.

The purpose of this study was to examine what motivates highly qualified teachers to remain in urban schools and to identify factors that may contribute to the retention and recruitment of an urban teaching corps. This study also sought to determine if there …

Mining Diversity On Social Media Networks, Lu Liu, Feida Zhu, Meng Jiang, Jiawei Han, Lifeng Sun, Shiqiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The fast development of multimedia technology and increasing availability of network bandwidth has given rise to an abundance of network data as a result of all the ever-booming social media and social websites in recent years, e.g., Flickr, Youtube, MySpace, Facebook, etc. Social network analysis has therefore become a critical problem attracting enthusiasm from both academia and industry. However, an important measure that captures a participant’s diversity in the network has been largely neglected in previous studies. Namely, diversity characterizes how diverse a given node connects with its peers. In this paper, we give a comprehensive study of this concept. …

Differences In Immune Defense Evasion Of Selected Inbred Lines Of Heterorhabditis Bacteriophora In Two White Grub Species, Ruisheng An, Marcio Voss, Ganpati B. Jagdale, Parwinder Grewal

School of Earth, Environmental, & Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

We determined virulence of seven Heterorhabditis bacteriophora strain GPS11 inbred lines possessing superior infective juvenile longevity, and heat and ultra violet radiation tolerance against white grubs Popillia japonica and Cyclocephala borealis. At 1 and 2 weeks after treatment, inbred line A2 was significantly more virulent towards P. japonica compared to the parent strain GPS11 and inbred lines A7, A8, A12 and A21; and line A2 caused significantly higher C. borealis mortality than lines A6 and A12. Penetration, encapsulation and survival of two inbred lines, A2 and A12, that showed the highest and lowest virulence against both grub species were then …

Iron(Iii) Tosylate Catalyzed Acylation Of Alcohols, Phenols, And Aldehydes, Ram Mohan, Neil Baldwin, Anna Nord, Brendan O’Donnell

Scholarship

Iron(III) p-toluenesulfonate (tosylate) is an efficient catalyst for acetylation of alcohols, phenols, and aldehydes. The acetylation of 1° and 2° alcohols, diols, and phenols proceeded smoothly with 2.0 mol % of catalyst. However, the reaction worked well with only a few 3° alcohols. The methodology was also applicable to the synthesis of a few benzoate esters but required the use of 5.0 mol % catalyst. Aldehydes could also be converted into the corresponding 1,1-diesters (acylals) under the reaction conditions. Iron(III) tosylate is an inexpensive, and easy to handle, commercially available catalyst.

A Discovery-Oriented Approach To Solid-Phase Peptide Synthesis, Brian Brennan, Matthew Bockman, Christopher Miedema

Scholarship

In this discovery-oriented laboratory experiment, students use solid-phase synthesis techniques to construct a dipeptide containing an unknown amino acid. Following synthesis and cleavage from the polymeric support, electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry is employed to identify the unknown amino acid that was used in the peptide coupling. This experiment, performed in two, 3-h laboratory periods, provides an opportunity for students to learn the technique of solid-phase peptide synthesis and to critically evaluate data that they generate in the laboratory. The experiment is suitable for second-semester organic chemistry students as they learn methods for the formation of amide bonds or upper-level biochemistry students …

Determining The Feasibility Of Universal Access To Bus Transportation For Illinois Wesleyan University Students, Liz Kuehn '13

Outstanding Senior Seminar Papers

In a car-based society, transportation has both environmental and economic implications. However, public transportation, and programs like Universal Access that promote public transportation by providing ‘fare free’ access to specific groups in the community, can offer low cost, sustainable alternatives to car-based transportation. The basic concept behind Universal Access is that a community group contracts with the local public transit system to provide unlimited access to public transportation for individuals within the group at a negotiated cost to the group (Toor et. al 2004). The purpose of this study is to determine the feasibility of creating a Universal Access program …

Mounting A Windows Software Raid As A Virtual Disk, Daniel N. Ducharme

Open Access Master's Theses

When an investigator attempts to bring a write blocked Windows dynamic disk online, Windows will refuse to mount it. This forces investigators to use the few tools that have built-in support for dealing with the RAID or to image the partition, and then mount the image. While imaging did not use to be an issue, with the rising sizes of disks available at low cost, it is becoming prohibitively expensive to image every software RAID. The solution is to mount the RAID through the use of a driver as a virtual disk.

The research was conducted by first analysing the …

Performance Prediction Of Pavements With Cold In-Place Recycling Asphalt Mixtures, Max Benjamin Müller

Open Access Master's Theses

The pavement rehabilitation and reconstruction method with Cold In-Place Recycling (CIR) is an alternative that can effectively conserve materials and energy, preserve the environment and reduce the cost. An attempt was made to predict the performance, particularly low-temperature cracking resistance characteristics of CIR mixtures prepared with the mix design procedure developed at the University of Rhode Island (URI) for the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The mix design procedure was developed to reduce wide variations in CIR mixture production and to develop a nation-wide standard.

This standard was applied to a Rhode Island (RI) reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) to produce CIR …

New Perspective On Passively Quenched Single Photon Avalanche Diodes: Effect Of Feedback On Impact Ionization, David A. Ramirez, Majeed M. Hayat, Graham J. Rees, Xudong Jiang, Mark A. Itzler

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) are primary devices in photon counting systems used in quantum cryptography, time resolved spectroscopy and photon counting optical communication. SPADs convert each photo-generated electron hole pair to a measurable current via an avalanche of impact ionizations. In this paper, a stochastically self-regulating avalanche model for passively quenched SPADs is presented. The model predicts, in qualitative agreement with experiments, three important phenomena that traditional models are unable to predict. These are: (1) an oscillatory behavior of the persistent avalanche current; (2) an exponential (memoryless) decay of the probability density function of the stochastic quenching time of the …

Geometry Of Partial Differential Equations, Paul Bracken

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

The study of partial differential equations has been the object of much investigation and seen a great many advances recently. This is primarily due to the fact that certain classes of these equations fall under the category of being integrable. These kinds of equations have many useful properties such as the existence of Lax pairs, Backlund transformations, explicit solutions and the existence of a correspondence with geometric manifolds. There have also been many applications of solutions to these equations in the study of solitons and other objects which have seen applications in physics. It is the objective here to study …

Characterizations Of Logistic Distribution Through Order Statistics With Independent Exponential Shifts, M. Ahsanullah, George Yanev, Constantin Onica

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

Distributional properties of logistic order statistics subject to independent exponential one-sided and two-sided shifts are established. Utilizing these properties, we extend several known results and obtain new characterizations of the logistic distribution.

Law Schools As Knowledge Centers In The Digital Age, Vern R. Walker, A. J. Durwin, Philip H. Hwang, Keith Langlais, Mycroft Boyd

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This article first defines the general concept of a "knowledge center," and then demonstrates that research laboratories in the sciences provide a concrete example of that concept. This article then applies both the general concept of a "knowledge center" and the scientific research paradigm to legal education in the digital age. Since the information explosion, which occurred as a result of widespread access to the Internet and the World Wide Web, law schools have increasingly employed online tools to disseminate their traditional knowledge products. Being a knowledge center in the digital age, however, also involves re-conceptualizing the forms of useful …

Working With Families: Theory And Practice Hand-In-Hand, Anne Fitzpatrick

Posters

Final year students of the DIT BA Early Childhood Education (ECE) programme worked with the home visitors from the NCI’s Early Learning Initiative - Parent Child Home Programme – to review the content of the guide sheets they use with parents. A Professional Design Practice MA student designed a new template for the guide sheets, for her major project.

Applied Energy Systems: Hydrostatic Fluid Power Transmission And Flow In Pipes, Jim Mcgovern

Book/Book Chapters

This is an intentionally compact textbook or set of notes for a module addressing basic Fluid Mechanics for incompressible fluids within the context of Applied Energy Systems. Rather than attempting to cover Fluid Mechanics in a very broad and general way, two practical areas are selected in the use of fluids: hydrostatic power transmission systems and the flow of fluids through pipes and fittings. This allows the two areas to be presented in some detail, but also allows them to be sample application areas that would enable learners to put the principles of fluid mechanics into context, while developing their …

An Improved Flood Forecasting Model Of The Blue Nile River In Sudan, Gamal Abdo, Ahmed Nasr

Articles

Reliable flood predictions with a reasonable lead time in the Blue Nile River in Sudan are vitally important to avoid catastrophic damages due to flooding of this river and the main River Nile. A HEC-RAS model was initially applied to the Blue Nile by representing the river as a single reach. The resulting original model was subsequently improved by including the two tributaries of the river, Rahad and Dindir, and also the two existing reservoirs, Rosaries and Sinnar, to the model. The original and the improved models were calibrated using 1988 flood data for the period from June to September …

Testing Irreducibility Of Trinomials Over Gf(2), Steven Hayman

Honors Projects

The focus of this paper is testing the irreducibility of polynomials over finite fields. In particular there is an emphasis on testing trinomials over the finite field GF(2). We also prove a the probability of a trinomial satisfying Swan's theorem is asymptotically 5/8 as n goes to infinity.

A Note On Horner's Method, Tian-Xiao He, P. J.-S. Shiue

Scholarship

Here we present an application of Horner's method in evaluating the sequence of Stirling numbers of the second kind. Based on the method, we also give an e_cient way to calculate the diference sequence and divided diference sequence of a polynomial, which can be applied in the Newton interpolation. Finally, we survey all of the results in Proposition 1.4.

Eulerian Polynomials And B-Splines, Tian-Xiao He

Scholarship

Here presented is the interrelationship between Eulerian polynomials, Eulerian fractions and Euler-Frobenius polynomials, Euler-Frobenius fractions, B-splines, respectively. The properties of Eulerian polynomials and Eulerian fractions and their applications in B-spline interpolation and evaluation of Riemann-zeta function values at odd integers are given. The relation between Eulerian numbers and B-spline values at knot points are also discussed.

Using Quest3d To Develop Ves: A Tool For Enhancing Electrical Safety And Design In The Built Environment, Martin Barrett, Jonathan Blackledge

Conference papers

This paper presents a novel desktop virtual reality model titled Virtual Electrical Services (VES), developed to enhance electrical safety and design in the built environment. The model developed using Quest3D has the potential to be used as an industry design tool or as an educational tool for third level students and represents a significant watershed in how electrical services engineers can potentially design buildings and interpret their design decisions. A description of the software development process of the virtual reality model is presented along with the applications that were developed within the model. Based on the early implementation of this …

Targeting Cell Nuclei For The Automation Of Raman Spectroscopy In Cytology, Jonathan Blackledge, Dmitri Dubovitskiy, Fiona Lyng

Conference papers

Biological cell analysis has, and is still, an important aspect in medical research and clinical diagnosis. Although cytologists routinely undertake a diagnosis using optical mi-croscopy, human factors make this routine unreliable especially when it involves many consecutive tasks that are monotonous, time consuming and focus on pattern matching tasks where the patterns concerned are not always entirely clear and/or do not necessarily belong to a well defined class. Raman Spectroscopy provides the potential to generate a fundamental representation on the status of cellular conditions through the characteristics of a Raman spectrum generated by the back-scatter of a laser pulse incident …

Distributed Formal Concept Analysis Algorithms Based On An Iterative Mapreduce Framework, Ruairí De Fréin, Biao Xu, Eric Robson, Mícheál Ó Fóghlú

Conference papers

While many existing formal concept analysis algorithms are efficient, they are typically unsuitable for distributed implementation. Taking the MapReduce (MR) framework as our inspiration we introduce a distributed approach for performing formal concept mining. Our method has its novelty in that we use a light-weight MapReduce runtime called Twister which is better suited to iterative algorithms than recent distributed approaches. First, we describe the theoretical foundations underpinning our distributed formal concept analysis approach. Second, we provide a representative exemplar of how a classic centralized algorithm can be implemented in a distributed fashion using our methodology: we modify Ganter’s classic algorithm …

Using Tpack As A Framework To Understand Teacher Candidates’ Technology Integration Decisions, Charles R. Graham, J. Borup, N. B. Smith

Faculty Publications

This research uses the technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) framework as a lens for understanding howteacher candidates make decisions about the use of information and communication technology in their teaching. Pre- and post-treatment assessments required elementary teacher candidates at Brigham Young University to articulate how and why they would integrate technology in three content teaching design tasks. Researchers identified themes from student rationales that mapped to the TPACK constructs. Rationales simultaneously supported subcategories of knowledge that could be helpful to other researchers trying to understand and measure TPACK. The research showed significant student growth in the use of rationales …

Development Of A Robotic Platform For Upper Limb Rehabilitation, Stephen Curran, Nigel Kent, David Kennedy, James Conlon

Conference Papers

The aim of this project is to develop a rehabilitation robot intended for use in a non-specialised or domestic setting. Robots have been shown to have a positive effect on limb rehabilitation and developing rehabilitation robots for use outside of specialist rehabilitation centres could be beneficial in terms of access to, intensity and cost of treatment. The device is intended for the rehabilitation of the shoulder/elbow region of the upper limbs. The design requirements for such a device mean that it must be low cost, portable, robust and have a detailed focus on safety. Other areas of interest pertaining to …

Publication Benchmarking Data Based On Faculty Promoted At The Top 75 Us Accounting Research Institutions, Steven M. Glover, Douglas F. Prawitt, Scott L. Summers, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

The primary purpose of this study is to update the Glover et al. (2006) publication benchmarking study by providing benchmarking statistics of faculty promoted to associate and/or full professor from 2004 to 2009. We also extend Glover et al. (2006) by examining new benchmarking metrics and by investigating publication productivity differences between studies. Our results indicate that, on average, faculty promoted from 2004 to 2009 had more publications in leading accounting journals at the time of promotion than faculty promoted from 1995 to 2003. We explore possible explanations for the increase in publication productivity. We find that increases in the …

The Effects Of Preventive And Detective Controls On Employee Performance And Motivation, Margaret H. Christ, Scott A. Emett, Scott L. Summers, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

We examine how two attributes of preventive and detective controls affect employee performance and employee motivation. Specifically, we examine how the extent to which controls (1) restrict employees’ autonomy, and (2) provide more or less timely feedback impacts employees’ performance and intrinsic motivation. These characteristics are the defining differences between preventive and detective controls in that preventive controls restrict employee autonomy relative to detective controls and preventive controls always provide immediate feedback; whereas, detective controls can provide either immediate feedback or delayed feedback. We conduct an experiment to examine how and why these two types of formal controls impact employees’ …

Bayesian Model Selection For Beta Autoregressive Processes, Roberto Casarin, L Dalla Valle, Fabrizio Leisen

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Coastal Defence Evaluation: An Sprc Approach, Dominic E. Reeve, Jose M. Horrillo-Caraballo, Andrew Fox, Dave Simmonds, Sum H. Kwan, Shunqi Pan, Deborah Greaves

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

In this paper, we show how the methodology based on the Source-Pathway-Receptor-Consequence (SPRC) approach can be used to identify the risks of flooding and erosion. The methodology is applied to the Teign Estuary in Devon, UK to define the linkages between physical loads (waves, tides), sea defences, areas liable to flooding and the impacts of flooding.

Editorial Of E-Book On Action And Language Integration, A Cangelosi

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

Increasing theoretical and experimental research on action and language processing in humans and animals clearly demonstrates the strict interaction and co-dependence between language and action. This has been extensively demonstrated in neuroscientific investigations (e.g., Rizzolatti and Arbib, 1998; Cappa and Perani, 2003; Pulvermuller, 2003), psychology experiments (e.g., Glenberg and Kaschak, 2002; Pecher and Zwaan, 2005; Barsalou, 2008), evolutionary psychology (e.g., Corballis, 2002), and computational modeling (e.g., Cangelosi and Parisi, 2004; Massera et al., 2007; Cangelosi, 2010). All these studies have important implication both for the understanding of the action basis of cognition in natural and artificial cognitive systems, as well …

The Professional Doctorate: Developing And Enacting Professional Learning Across Multiple Sites Of Learning, Nick Pratt, Michael Tedder, Peter Kelly, R Boyask

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences

The research aimed to: - investigate the way in which EdD participants engage with, construct and enact new professional knowledge across a range of contexts; - better understand the significant relationships involved in this process – between people, sites and resources; - disseminate this new understanding within the pedagogic research arena.

Emergent Auditory Feature Tuning In A Real-Time Neuromorphic Vlsi System., Sadique Sheik, Martin Coath, Giacomo Indiveri, Susan L. Denham, Thomas Wennekers, Elisabetta Chicca

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

Many sounds of ecological importance, such as communication calls, are characterized by time-varying spectra. However, most neuromorphic auditory models to date have focused on distinguishing mainly static patterns, under the assumption that dynamic patterns can be learned as sequences of static ones. In contrast, the emergence of dynamic feature sensitivity through exposure to formative stimuli has been recently modeled in a network of spiking neurons based on the thalamo-cortical architecture. The proposed network models the effect of lateral and recurrent connections between cortical layers, distance-dependent axonal transmission delays, and learning in the form of Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), which …