Digital Commons Network^™

A Systems Approach To Research And Innovation For Food System Transformation, M. Gill, A.C.L. Den Boer, K.P. Kok, Jean Cahill, C. Callenius, P. Caron, Z. Damianova, M.A. Gurinovic, L. Lahteenmaki, T. Lang, A. Lappiere, C. Mango, J. Ryder, R. Sonnino, H. Westhoek, B.J. Regeer, J.E.W. Broerse

Research and Innovation - Other

This policy brief of the European Union (EU) Think Tank – part of the FIT4FOOD2030 Coordination and Support Action (CSA) of the FOOD 2030 initiative – is a response and contribution to growing pleas for a ‘systems approach’ to transform food systems for Food and Nutrition Security (FNS) for present and future generations. This policy brief specifically focusses on the necessity of the adoption of a systems approach to Research and Innovation (R&I) in order to foster the transformation of food systems.

The Oral Writing-Revision Space: Identifying A New And Common Discourse Feature Of Writing Center Consultations, Melody Denny

The Writing Center Journal

No abstract provided.

Addressing The Proton Radius Puzzle Using Qed-Nrqed Effective Field Theory, Steven Patrick Dye

Wayne State University Dissertations

In 2010 the first extraction of the proton charge radius from muonic hydrogen was found to be five standard deviations away from the regular hydrogen value. Seven years later, this proton radius puzzle still persists, and challenges our understanding of the structure of the proton. An effective field theory analysis using Non-Relativistic Quantum Electrody- namics (NRQED) indicates that the muonic hydrogen result can be interpreted as a large, compared to some model estimates, muon-proton spin-independent contact interaction. The muonic hydrogen result can be tested by a muon-proton scattering experiment, MUSE, that is planned at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. …

Surfactants, Thermal And Surface Energy Effects On Emulsions’ Transport Properties: A Study Using Lattice Boltzmann Method, Wessam Falih Hasan

Wayne State University Dissertations

This work aims to provide an efficient Gunstensen LBM based CFD model, capable of solving complex problems related to droplets behavior in shear and parabolic flows.

Thermal conditions determine the outcome of the physical and transport properties of emulsions during their various processing phases. A better understanding of the intricate relationship between thermal, surfactants and hydrodynamics can help in the optimization of these processes during the production of emulsions. To investigate the outcome of coupling thermal, surfactants and hydrodynamics on emulsions behavior, a robust quasi-steady thermal-surfactants numerical scheme is presented and used here. To validate the model, the rheological behavior …

On-Road Remote Sensing Of Automobile Emissions In The Denver Area: Winter 2017, Gary A. Bishop, Molly J. Haugen

Fuel Efficiency Automobile Test Publications

No abstract provided.

On-Road Remote Sensing Of Automobile Emissions In The Tulsa Area: Fall 2017, Gary A. Bishop

Fuel Efficiency Automobile Test Publications

No abstract provided.

Exploring The Effectiveness Of Academic Coaching For Academically At-Risk College Students, Madeline Kyle Capstick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the Academic Coaching for Excellence (ACE) program for academically at-risk students over the course of five academic semesters from Spring 2015 to Spring 2017. The study utilized archival data from 1,440 undergraduate students using a cohort-based, nonequivalent groups post-tests design. The students were on academic warning, meaning they had fallen below a 2.00 GPA in the previous academic semester and were within their first 59 credit hours of college. Results from the study found that full- and part-time students who participated in academic coaching had significant GPA increases, were …

An Analysis Of The Relationship Between Teacher Perception Of Community Support And Involvement At Their School And Student Rates Of Attendance, Graduation And Academic Proficiency, Sandra Hamer Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between educators perceptions of the quality of community support and involvement at their high schools and five longitudinally measured indices of school effectiveness. Given a sample of 248 Tennessee high schools, secondary data derived from the Community Support and Involvement subsection of the Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning (TELL) Questionnaire Survey administered in 2013 were merged with concurrent student attendance, student graduation, and student achievement outcomes archived and made publically available on the Tennessee Department of Education website.After controlling for the impact of student and faculty demographic variables, hierarchical multiple …

Optimal Delivery Of Remedial Mathematics Programs In U.S. Higher Education, Lisa Renee Loden

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Remedial mathematics has been considered the roadblock to obtaining a college degree by students and educators for years. The purpose of this research is to determine the optimal time and delivery method of the three presented (fully module, module with a traditional lecture component, and fully on-line) for teaching remedial mathematics. This is accomplished by comparing pass rates. First, pass rates are compared to determine if there is a statistically significant difference between pass rates in the two models for teaching remedial mathematics (pre-requisite and co-requisite). Next, pass rates are compared to determine if there is a statistically significant difference …

Education On The Inside: Incarcerated Students' Perceptions Of Correctional Education Programs, Stephanie Cage

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The United States has alarmingly high incarceration and recidivism rates. Many of those incarcerated have less education than their general population counterparts. Correctional education programs have a proven ability to reduce incarceration and recidivism rates by helping rehabilitate people. Current research on incarcerated students primarily focuses on the external benefits of correctional education programs such as recidivism. A limited amount of research is represented in the literature on incarcerated students’ perceptions about their academic experiences. The purpose of this study was to explore incarcerated students’ perceptions regarding their correctional education experiences. The study particularly investigated students at a Louisiana correctional …

Multiple Stimuli Responsive Drug Delivery System Based On Magnetic Nanoparticle Embedded Chitosan Microbeads, Ankita Mohapatra

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Direct drug administration has several shortcomings such as low circulation concentration due to rapid flushing by the immune system, non-specificity to target tissue and inefficient delivery to avascular sites. A widely adopted solution to these limitations is to sterically shield the drug from a harsh in vivo environment by encapsulation in a biocompatible, bio-degradable substrate. These Drug Delivery System (DDS) can be localized at the site and release drug gradually until the drug reserve is exhausted. However, the efficiency of this DDS can be further enhanced by designing them to elute drug in response to an external stimulus. This enhancement …

Problems In Extremal Graph Theory, Kamil Popielarz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This dissertation consists of six chapters concerning a variety of topics in extremal graph theory.Chapter 1 is dedicated to the results in the papers with Antnio Giro, Gbor Mszros, and Richard Snyder. We say that a graph is path-pairable if for any pairing of its vertices there exist edge disjoint paths joining the vertices in eachpair. We study the extremal behavior of maximum degree and diameter in some classes of path-pairable graphs. In particular we show that a path-pairable planar graph must have a vertex of linear degree.In Chapter 2 we present a joint work with Antnio Giro and Teeradej …

Simulation Of Strong Ground Motions Using The Stochastic Summation Of Small To Moderate Earthquakes As Green's Functions, Farhad Sedaghati

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Central and eastern North America (CENA) is considered to be a moderately active region, but it suffers from a lack of recorded earthquakes in the magnitude-distance range of engineering interest. In this dissertation, region-specific synthetic strong ground motion time histories are generated using a new and improved stochastic summation of Green's functions method (SSGFM) for CENA. In addition, the synthetics are used to develop ground motion prediction equations (GMPEs) for this region. For simulating large earthquakes, considering the effects of finite-fault rupture such as rupture propagation, asperities, and fault-site geometry (saturation effect) are significant and influential. The SSGFM is a …

Teachers Perceptions Of Implementing M-Learning Using Pedagogical Approaches, James Albert Barnes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Mobile learning (m-learning) has begun its transition from focusing on technology devices to pedagogical approaches that guide the design, development, and implementation of teaching and learning. The trends in the literature have identified pedagogical approaches, professional development and instructional practices that have improved academic achievement with teachers abilities and perceptions as a contributing factor. However, a gap remains about the degree to which teachers effectively integrate and implement m-learning to make a significant impact on teaching and learning. To address this gap, this research was a causal comparative study examining two schools perceptions of implementing m-learning after receiving differing types …

The Relationship Between The Perceived Implementation Of Green's Four-Dimensional Model Of Educational Leadership And Students' Proficiency In Basic Skills, Josie Currie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The purpose of this study is to investigate relationships between elementary-level educators perceptions of their schools implementation of Greens four-dimensional model of educational leadership and the percentage of students proficient in Language Arts and in Mathematics, averaged over three years. Represented by responses to twenty items selected from the 2013 state-wide administration of the Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning survey in Tennessee (TELL Tennessee), school-level means at 1,187 elementary schools were obtained for each of four five-item scales that were intended to measure each dimension of Greens model. Along with a grand mean computed across all twenty items and denoting …

Three Voices, One Goal: A Narrative Study Of High School Facilitators' Experience In A Community Of Practice, Ebony Briggs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Special education and general education teachers must work collaboratively in a single classroom that serves the diverse needs of all children due to federal regulations such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2004. Evidence-based practices that foster collaboration are scarce. The purpose of this narrative inquiry research was to explore the perceptions of a team of educators which consists of a general education teacher, special education teacher, and an administrator on how their experience of participating in a community of practice is beneficial to addressing collaboration needs of team …

Learning From Errors In The Adaptive Mathematics Tutoring System, Jun Xie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Errors are considered to play a crucial role in facilitating self-reflection and knowledge acquisition. Nevertheless, nowadays how students benefit from errors in learning is still open to debate. That is, help is superior to practice for learning from errors or not. The goal of this dissertation is to systematically explore how students use help and practice to learn from errors in ALEKS (i.e. Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces), an adaptive math learning system. Based on the theoretical framework, the learning phase theory, this dissertation defined strategies to learn from errors in three types: help strategy (requesting worked examples in …

Multi-Period Transportation Network Investment Decision-Making Using Link Ranking And An Econometric Framework, Khademul Haque

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Prospective transportation infrastructure projects take numerous years of planning before they are scheduled for construction. Moreover, limited funds are forcing national, regional and local governments to carefully prioritize their investments. Therefore, reliable quantitative tools are needed to help decision-makers choose their investments so that the allocation of available resources is optimized. Prioritization of projects over a multi-period planning horizon is a difficult task given a limited budget and an exhaustive set of possible combinations of when each project will be scheduled for construction. Although multi-period network investment is studied in the literature, its application by public agencies is limited because …

Effect Of Virtual Reality On Motivation And Achievement Of Middle-School Students, Michelle Bowen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The introduction of low-cost hand-held devices has provided K-12 educators with the opportunity to teach using virtual reality (VR). However, the efficacy of VR in K-12 classrooms for teaching and learning has not been established. Therefore, the purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to examine the influence of virtual reality field trips on middle-school students social studies academic achievement and motivation. The district chosen for the study is in a rural, economically depressed county, where generational poverty persists. However, the district has a history of being an early adopter of technology. Participants included 76 seventh-grade students at two middle schools, …

Relations Between Reading Motivation And Reading Skills In Students With A Reading Disability, Jennifer Maria Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The purpose of the present study was to examine the short-term longitudinal relations between two constructs of reading motivation (reading self-concept and value of reading) and two aspects of reading (reading fluency and reading comprehension) in a clinical sample of elementary school students diagnosed with a SLD in reading. Skills in reading fluency and comprehension were assessed by the Gray Oral Reading Tests, Fifth Edition (GORT-5; Wiederholt & Bryant, 2012) and reading motivation was assessed by the Motivation to Read Profile- Revised (MRP-R; Malloy, Marinak, Gambrell, & Mazzoni, 2013). A cross-lag panel analysis was used to examine autoregressive paths (the …

Training Adult Volunteers To Judge In Competitive, Non-Traditional Educational Environments Using Online Learning, Tod Traughber

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to examine the comparative change in reported self-efficacy between an experimental group using an interactive, online instructional module and a control group using a traditional handbook. Three research questions were addressed in the study:1. To what extent does completion of an interactive, online training module, as compared to completion of a training manual, affect the self-efficacy of potential volunteer first-time academic competition judges to fulfill their role as a judge after controlling for initial self-efficacy?2. To what extent does completion of an interactive, online training module, as compared to completion of a training …

Chinese Middle And High School Students' Emotion Regulation: Intrapersonal And Interpersonal Approaches, Hui Zhang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The overall goal of this dissertation was to examine the adaptivenss of eight emotion regulation strategies for Chinese middle and high school students. The adaptiveness was evaluated by using an intrapersonal approach that focused on individual students in Study 1 and by using an interpersonal approach that focused on same-sex best friend dyads in Study 2. By using an intrapersonal approach, Study 1 found that students chose to use developing competencies, redirecting attention, expressive suppression, and seeking social support more often than the other four strategies. Among the eight emotion regulation strategies, developing competencies was the most adaptive and venting …

Cyclic Performance Improvement Of Existing Steel Semi-Rigid Connections Using Post-Tensioning, Sepehr Movaghati

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

A practical retrofitting method for enhancing the inelastic performance of existing semi-rigid steel connections is introduced and verified in this study. The method entails adding high-strength steel strands parallel to the beam, passing them through the column, and anchoring and post-tensioning them properly. To verify the proposed retrofitting system, firstly, a series of semi-rigid bolted connections was experimentally tested under monotonic and cyclic loadings. Then, the post-tensioning system was applied on the connections with the same geometry, and the cyclic responses were studied under different post-tensioning parameters. Following the recommended setup explained in this study, a locally post-tensioned (PT) structural …

Regression Models For Analyzing Clustered Multinomial And Continuous Outcomes Under The Assumption Of Exchangeability, Peter Ogutu Ngutu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

We derive an expression for the joint distribution of exchangeable multinomial randomvariables and continous random variables for the purpose of analyzing clusteredmultinomial and continous data. In the past such clustered discrete and continous datacould be analyzed with the use of quasi-likelihood procedures and generalized estimatingequations to estimate marginal mean response parameters. Recently, the idea ofexchangeability has been introduced to handle such data but research has focusedprimarily on analysis of clustered binary and continous outcomes. In applications to areassuch as developmental toxicity studies, where discrete and contionus measures arerecorded on each fetus, the discrete data may not necessarily be binary. For …

Presenting A Hybrid Processing Mining Framework For Automated Simulation Model Generation, Susan Mckeever, Mohammad Messabah

Conference papers

Recent advances in information technology systems have enabled organizations to store tremendous amounts of business process data. Process mining offers a range of algorithms and methods to analyze and extract metadata for these processes. This paper presents a novel approach to the hybridization of process mining techniques with business process modelling and simulation methods. We present a generic automated end-to-end simulation framework that produces unbiased simulation models using system event logs. A conceptual model and various meta-data are derived from the logs and used to generate the simulation model. We demonstrate the efficacy of our framework using a business process …

Pathways To The Cosmos:The Alignment Of Megalithic Tombs In Ireland And Atlantic Europe, Frank Prendergast, Gabriel Cooney

Articles

Gabriel Cooney and Frank Prendergast present the context of and outline the approach to this one-day conference organised by Archaeology Ireland on behalf of the National Monuments Service at the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the Office of Public Works to mark the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018. The event will take place at Dublin Castle on 15 September 2018.

Survivability Strategies For Emerging Wireless Networks With Data Mining Techniques: A Case Study With Netlogo And Rapidminer, Ivan Garcia-Magarino, Geraldine Gray, Raquel Lacuesta, Jaime Lloret

Articles

Emerging wireless networks have brought Internet and communications to more users and areas. Some of the most relevant emerging wireless technologies are Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, Long-Term Evolution Advanced, and ad hoc and mesh networks. An open challenge is to ensure the reliability and robustness of these networks when individual components fail. The survivability and performance of these networks can be especially relevant when emergencies arise in rural areas, for example supporting communications during a medical emergency. This can be done by anticipating failures and finding alternative solutions. This paper proposes using big data analytics techniques, such as decision …

Generating Diverse And Meaningful Captions: Unsupervised Specificity Optimization For Image Captioning, Annika Lindh, Robert J. Ross, Abhijit Mahalunkar, Giancarlo Salton, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Image Captioning is a task that requires models to acquire a multi-modal understanding of the world and to express this understanding in natural language text. While the state-of-the-art for this task has rapidly improved in terms of n-gram metrics, these models tend to output the same generic captions for similar images. In this work, we address this limitation and train a model that generates more diverse and specific captions through an unsupervised training approach that incorporates a learning signal from an Image Retrieval model. We summarize previous results and improve the state-of-the-art on caption diversity and novelty.

We make our …

On The Structure Of Dense Graphs, And Other Extremal Problems, Richard Snyder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Extremal combinatorics is an area of mathematics populated by problems that are easy to state, yet often difficult to resolve. The typical question in this field is the following: What is the maximum or minimum size of a collection of finite objects (e.g., graphs, finite families of sets) subject to some set of constraints? Despite its apparent simplicity, this question has led to a rather rich body of work. This dissertation consists of several new results in this field.The first two chapters concern structural results for dense graphs, thus justifying the first part of my title. In the first chapter, …

Attaining Scientific Literacy Through A Rhetoric Of Science Composition Pedagogy, Stephen C. Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

For the past sixty years, acquiring scientific literacy has proven to be a daunting task in education, especially for undergraduate nonscience majors. Although some education scholars have recognized the importance and use of arguments to teach science, these pedagogical practices often are aimed at primary school children rather than college students or involve reporting science experiments rather than actually studying or constructing arguments about issues related to science.However, in this dissertation, I contend that educators often neglect a more available tool that not only examines arguments concerning scientific issues but also demonstrates the very heart of scientific literacy: critical thinking. …