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Impact Of Study Abroad To Nazi Concentration Camps: Perceptions Of Interpreting Students On Identity-Building, Sherry Shaw, E. Lynn Jacobowitz, Kaitlynn Himmelreich

Journal of Interpretation

This study focuses on the perceptions of post-secondary interpreting students who traveled to concentration camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland) and Schloss Hartheim (Austria). The historical context of spoken language interpreters in concentration camps, eugenics in the Deaf community, and extermination of people with disabilities underpin the study’s mixed-methods design, incorporating social identity and transformative learning theories to explore professional identity development. A Deaf, Jewish moderator-participant facilitated four focus groups using photo elicitation to foster narratives. Participants ranked photos and value statements to reveal identity components that most impacted them. A grounded theory approach to analysis revealed four themes triangulated with survey data: …

The Personal And Professional Impact Of Covid-19 On School Counselors: An Exploratory Study., Taryn Akgul, Jessica Brown, Lisa Karch

The Interactive Journal of Global Leadership and Learning

School Counselors historically have faced multiple challenges that impact their lives personally and professionally. Due to numerous and competing demands, school counselors are likely to experience a plethora of stressors including role conflict, high student to school counselor ratios, minimal support, and increasing mental health needs of students. The COVID 19 pandemic exacerbated these challenges by changing and adding to the responsibilities of school counselors, reducing access to appropriate support systems, and increasing students’ needs for counseling services. This qualitative, exploratory study utilized phenomenological inquiry to examine the impact of these challenges on school counselors’ personal and professional lives. The …

Identifying Key Success Indicators In Student Letters For Reinstatement From Suspension, Angela Bowlus, Jamaica Delmar

The Interactive Journal of Global Leadership and Learning

Retaining and graduating students continues to be an issue that higher education institutions are longing to solve, especially for the growing non-traditional student body whose list of competing priorities continues to grow. As academic suspension hinders persistence, this article examines a key aspect of the reinstatement from suspension process for students: the letter of appeal. The narrative provided is impacted by how the writer expresses their acknowledgment of what went wrong and what changes will be made to ensure administrators of future success, it too is impacted by the interpretation of the institutional decision maker. By reviewing a sample of …

Factors That Affect The Rate Of Preterm Birth: An Examination Of The Inter-Related Impacts Of Social Determinants, Behavior And Physical Health Status, Krystal Michelle Hunter

Dissertations

The work seeks to examine the factors that have significant relationships to the rate of preterm birth (PTB) along with its cost to society.

There are four papers within this work. This purpose of the first paper is to measure the impact that healthy behaviors have on the rate of PTB when modeled with other factors like household demographics, community deprivation, chronic disease and mental health. This work finds that positive health behaviors has a negative relationship with PTB. The interaction between body mass index (BMI) and social class and its relationship to PTB is examined in the second paper. …

Exposing And Fixing Causes Of Inconsistency And Nondeterminism In Clustering Implementations, Xin Yin

Dissertations

Cluster analysis aka Clustering is used in myriad applications, including high-stakes domains, by millions of users. Clustering users should be able to assume that clustering implementations are correct, reliable, and for a given algorithm, interchangeable. Based on observations in a wide-range of real-world clustering implementations, this dissertation challenges the aforementioned assumptions.

This dissertation introduces an approach named SmokeOut that uses differential clustering to show that clustering implementations suffer from nondeterminism and inconsistency: on a given input dataset and using a given clustering algorithm, clustering outcomes and accuracy vary widely between (1) successive runs of the same toolkit, i.e., nondeterminism, and …

Crash Injury Severity Prediction With Artificial Neural Networks, Rima Abisaad

Dissertations

Motor vehicle crashes are one of our nation's most serious social, economic and health issues. They are the leading cause of death among children and young adults, killing approximately 1.35 million people each year. Providing a safe and efficient transportation system is the primary goal of transportation engineering and planning. To help reduce traffic fatalities and injuries on roadways, crash prediction models are used to forecast the injury severity of potential crashes and apply precautionary countermeasures accordingly. Most of these models are reactive as they use historical crash data to categorize crash-related factors. Recently, advancements have been made in developing …

Model Checks For Two-Sample Location-Scale, Atefeh Javidialsaadi

Dissertations

Two-sample location-scale refers to a model that permits a pair of standardized random variables to have a common distribution. This means that if X₁ and X₂ are two random variables with means µ₁ and µ₂ and standard deviations ?₁ and ?₂, then (X₁ - µ₁)/?₁ and (X₂ - µ₂)/?₂ have some common unspecified standard or base distribution F₀. Function-based hypothesis testing for these models refers to formal tests that would help determine whether or not two samples may have come from some location-scale …

On Performance Optimization And Prediction Of Parallel Computing Frameworks In Big Data Systems, Haifa Alquwaiee

Dissertations

A wide spectrum of big data applications in science, engineering, and industry generate large datasets, which must be managed and processed in a timely and reliable manner for knowledge discovery. These tasks are now commonly executed in big data computing systems exemplified by Hadoop based on parallel processing and distributed storage and management. For example, many companies and research institutions have developed and deployed big data systems on top of NoSQL databases such as HBase and MongoDB, and parallel computing frameworks such as MapReduce and Spark, to ensure timely data analyses and efficient result delivery for decision making and business …

Machine Learning Techniques For Network Analysis, Irfan Lateef

Dissertations

The network's size and the traffic on it are both increasing exponentially, making it difficult to look at its behavior holistically and address challenges by looking at link level behavior. It is possible that there are casual relationships between links of a network that are not directly connected and which may not be obvious to observe. The goal of this dissertation is to study and characterize the behavior of the entire network by using eigensubspace based techniques and apply them to network traffic engineering applications.

A new method that uses the joint time-frequency interpretation of eigensubspace representation for network statistics …

Coherent Control Of Dispersive Waves, Jimmie Adriazola

Dissertations

This dissertation addresses some of the various issues which can arise when posing and solving optimization problems constrained by dispersive physics. Considered here are four technologically relevant experiments, each having their own unique challenges and physical settings including ultra-cold quantum fluids trapped by an external field, paraxial light propagation through a gradient index of refraction, light propagation in periodic photonic crystals, and surface gravity water waves over shallow and variable seabeds. In each of these settings, the physics can be modeled by dispersive wave equations, and the technological objective is to design the external trapping fields or propagation media such …

Private And Federated Deep Learning: System, Theory, And Applications For Social Good, Han Hu

Dissertations

During the past decade, drug abuse continues to accelerate towards becoming the most severe public health problem in the United States. The ability to detect drug­abuse risk behavior at a population scale, such as among the population of Twitter users, can help to monitor the trend of drug­abuse incidents. However, traditional methods do not effectively detect drug­abuse risk behavior in tweets, mainly due to the sparsity of such tweets and the noisy nature of tweets. In the first part of this dissertation work, the task of classifying tweets as containing drug­abuse risk behavior or not, is studied. Millions of public …

Improving Programming Learners’ Experience Through Interactive Computer Tutor Based Moocs, Ruiqi Shen

Dissertations

With the large demand for technology workers all around the world, more people are learning programming. Studies show that human tutoring is the most effective way to learn for novice programmers. However, problems such as the inaccessibility to physical classes, prohibitive costs, and the lack of educators may limit students' opportunities to learn from these resources. Additionally, because programming is a skill requiring continuous practice and immediate feedback, simply listening to lectures may not be sufficient to learn effectively. This increases the inconvenience of learners who use online learning tools such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

In recent years, …

Iii-Nitride Nanostructures: Photonics And Memory Device Applications, Barsha Jain

Dissertations

III-nitride materials are extensively studied for various applications. Particularly, III-nitride-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have become the major component of the current solid-state lighting (SSL) technology. Current III-nitride-based phosphor-free white color LEDs (White LEDs) require an electron blocking layer (EBL) between the device active region and p-GaN to control the electron overflow from the active region, which has been identified as one of the primary reasons to adversely affect the hole injection process. In this dissertation, the effect of electronically coupled quantum well (QW) is investigated to reduce electron overflow in the InGaN/GaN dot-in-a-wire phosphor-free white LEDs and to improve the …

Hydrophobically Modified Isosorbide Dimethacrylates As Biomaterials For Bisphenol A Free Dental Fillings, Bilal Marie

Dissertations

Amalgam and Bisphenol A glycerolate dimethacrylate (BisGMA) are the main dental filling materials in use today. Because of the negative perception of amalgam and its lower esthetic appeal, as well as the desire to replace the endocrine disruptor Bisphenol A, which is the building block of BisGMA, there has been a critical need to search for safer alternatives to these dental filling materials.

Isosorbide is a sugar-based molecule generally recognized as safe. It has been extensively studied as a replacement to the Bisphenol A core in various materials. However, isosorbide is extremely hygroscopic, and water uptake in dental fillings causes …

Ecological Restoration Parks In Xi’An, China: An Evolving Type, Han Yan

Dissertations

This dissertation examines four urban ecological restoration projects used as public spaces in the city of Xi'an, China. The overall goal is to understand the social and ecological implications of the site features at both design and planning scale and define what is ecological restoration in China's urban context. The result of the research shows that the top-down planning initiatives approach for establishing ecological restoration sites in urban areas that meet the need for more public open space in addition to restoring healthy urban ecological systems is very different from the definition of what is traditionally understood as "ecological restoration". …

A Vacuum-Driven Distillation Technology Of Aqueous Solutions And Mixtures, Guo Guangyu

Dissertations

Distillation of aqueous solutions and aqueous mixtures has vast industrial applications, including desalination, wastewater treatment, and fruit juice concentration. Currently, two major distillation technologies are adopted in the industry, membrane separation and thermal distillation. However, both of them face certain inevitable drawbacks. Membrane separation has disadvantages as relying on high-grade energy, requiring membrane, fouling problem, narrow treatment range, limited scalability, and vibrating and noisy operating conditions. Traditional thermal distillation technologies can avoid above concerns but has other shortcomings, such as relatively low energy efficiency and yield rate, complicated and bulky system structure, and scaling problem.

This project proposes an innovative …

On Resource-Efficiency And Performance Optimization In Big Data Computing And Networking Using Machine Learning, Wuji Liu

Dissertations

Due to the rapid transition from traditional experiment-based approaches to large-scale, computational intensive simulations, next-generation scientific applications typically involve complex numerical modeling and extreme-scale simulations. Such model-based simulations oftentimes generate colossal amounts of data, which must be transferred over high-performance network (HPN) infrastructures to remote sites and analyzed against experimental or observation data on high-performance computing (HPC) facility. Optimizing the performance of both data transfer in HPN and simulation-based model development on HPC is critical to enabling and accelerating knowledge discovery and scientific innovation. However, such processes generally involve an enormous set of attributes including domain-specific model parameters, network transport …

Electro-Chemo-Mechanics Of The Interfaces In 2d-3d Heterostructure Electrodes, Vidushi Sharma

Dissertations

Unique heterostructure electrodes comprising two-dimensional (2D) materials and bulk three dimensional (3D) high-performance active electrodes are recently synthesized and experimentally tested for their electrochemical performance in metal-ion batteries. Such electrodes exhibit long cycle life while they also retain high-capacity inherent to the active electrode. The role of 2D material is to provide a supportive mesh that allows buffer space for volume expansions upon ion intercalation in the active material and establishes a continuous electronic contact. Therefore, the binding strength between both materials is crucial for the success of such electrodes. Furthermore, battery cycles may bring about phase transformations in the …

Experimental And Computational Studies Of Functionalized Carbon Nanotubes For Use In Energy Storage Devices And Membranes, Emine S. Karaman

Dissertations

Electrolytes with good interfacial stability are a crucial component of any electrochemical device. The development of novel gel polymer electrolytes (GEs) with good interface stability and better manufacturability is important for the development of the next generation electrochemical devices. Gel electrolytes are hybrid electrolyte materials, combining benefits of both liquid and solid systems. Compared with liquid and solid electrolytes, GEs open new design opportunities and do not require rigorous encapsulation methods. In this dissertation, studies on functionalized carbon nanotubes (fCNTs) and graphene oxide (GO) doped polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) based gel electrolytes (GEs) are reported. The ionic conductivity and mechanical strength …

A Practical Approach To Automated Software Correctness Enhancement, Aleksandr Zakharchenko

Dissertations

To repair an incorrect program does not mean to make it correct; it only means to make it more-correct, in some sense, than it is. In the absence of a concept of relative correctness, i.e. the property of a program to be more-correct than another with respect to a specification, the discipline of program repair has resorted to various approximations of absolute (traditional) correctness, with varying degrees of success. This shortcoming is concealed by the fact that most program repair tools are tested on basic cases, whence making them absolutely correct is not clearly distinguishable from making them relatively more-correct. …

Parameter Estimation And Inference Of Spatial Autoregressive Model By Stochastic Gradient Descent, Gan Luan

Dissertations

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular iterative method for model parameter estimation in large-scale data and online learning settings since it goes through the data in only one pass. While SGD has been well studied for independent data, its application to spatially-correlated data largely remains unexplored. This dissertation develops SGD-based parameter estimation and statistical inference algorithms for the spatial autoregressive (SAR) model, a common model for spatial lattice data.

This research contains three parts. (I) The first part concerns SGD estimation and inference for the SAR mean regression model. A new SGD algorithm based on maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) …

Developing An E-Module Of Making Edmodo-Based Hosanna Moda System Bustier To Improve Learning Independence And Learning Achievement, Lestari Rochmatun Choirunnisya', Putu Sudira

Jurnal Pendidikan Vokasi

This study aims to: 1.) Develop an Edmodo-based e-module for making Hosanna Moda system bustier to increase independence and achievement in learning custom-made clothing; 2.) Describe the feasibility of the developed e-module; and 3.) Reveal the effectiveness of the developed e-module in increasing student learning independence and learning achievement. This research is development research, which was carried out on grade XII students of Fashion, State Vocational High School 3 Magelang. The product trial consisted of a validity test by three experts, a small-scale trial involving 12 students, a large-scale trial involving 24 students, and an effectiveness test involving one control …

Development Of Air Conditioner Split R32 Trainer Learning Media In Cooling And Air Conditioning Engineering Courses, Fitria Wahyu Ningsih, Ilham Akbar Darmawan, Mohammad Fatkhurrokhman

Jurnal Pendidikan Vokasi

This study aims to develop learning media for AC Split R32 in the subject of refrigeration and air conditioning engineering. The method used Research and Development (R&D), the model of research used is Successive Approximation Models 1 (SAM). The model goes through iteration 1 (Evaluate 1, Design 1, Develop 1), iteration 2 (Evaluate 2, Design 2, Develop 2), and iteration 3 (Evaluate 3, and product implementation). The data collection method uses instruments in the form of observations, interviews, literature studies, and questionnaires that use a Likert scale for measurement the instrument. Based on the research analysis results, media trainers get …

National Standards Of Education Affect The Employment Opportunities Of Vocational High School Graduates, Eka Hendi Andriansyah, Putri Ulfa Kamalia

Jurnal Pendidikan Vokasi

This study aims to find out the National Standard of Education indicators that are the most dominant in influencing vocational schools, especially in producing the expected outcomes. The research is aimed at vocational schools in the field of economics and finance in the city of Surabaya. The data collection includes NSE assessment data from BAN-SM and employment opportunities from 22 schools. The object of further research is processed with the WARP PLS program. The study results found that there is a variable signification between the National Standard of Education on Employment Opportunities of Vocational School Graduates. Positive influence indicates that …

Transformation Of Health Communication Literacy In The Pandemic Era, K. Y.S. Putri, Deddy Mulyana, S Bekti Istiyanto, Linda Zakiah, Rayni Delya Hafni

Informasi

Indonesian public health communication literacy is the education center for the government and related institutions. The formulation of this research problem is how to model health communication literacy in communities in tourism areas in Indonesia. The research objective was to determine the health communication literacy model in the community in tourism areas in Indonesia. The concept used in this research is new media literacy and health communication and audience attitudes. Several previous studies support this research. The method used is quantitative by distributing questionnaires to respondents. The result of the research is that health communication literacy on social media in …

Evaluation Of The Implementation Of Interactive Video-Based Online Learning In Practical Courses Using The Cipp Model, Sudaryono Sudaryono

Jurnal Penelitian dan Evaluasi Pendidikan

This study aims to examine the evaluation of the implementation of interactive video-based online learning for the 2020/2021 academic year at Raharja University, Tangerang City, Banten. The research design uses a quantitative approach. Techniques Data collection is done through questionnaires, interviews, and documentation studies. The item instrument validation was carried out using the validity and reliability test of the data with consistent results (0.880>0.60). The study involved 103 participants employing a descriptive data analysis technique using the CIPP evaluation model. The findings show that the average score for all aspects is 80.55%, in the very good category. First, the …

Performance Evaluation Of Entrepreneurship Teachers In Accounting Vocational Program, Irena Puspitaningratri, Nur Hidayanto Pancoro Setyo Putro

Jurnal Pendidikan Vokasi

This study aimed to discover the teachers' performance of the PKK Accounting Expertise Program at State SMK 1 Samigaluh based on primary duties. This study was an evaluation using the discrepancy evaluation model. The study subjects were PKK teachers of State SMK 1 Samigaluh. Information sources for the study were the headmaster, six colleagues, and 52 students. The instruments used were questionnaires, assessment sheets, and documentation sheets. The headmaster presented an excellent assessment of the PKK subject teachers of 92.81. In contrast to the headmaster, colleagues and students presented good assessments of the PKK subject teachers. According to colleagues, the …

Embedding Content And Language Integrated Learning (Clil) Into English For Specific Purposes Curriculum For Vocational High School, Hertati Mukadimah, Wening Sahayu

Jurnal Pendidikan Vokasi

English is agreed upon as the standard language of communication throughout the world, including Indonesia. With this, teaching and learning English should be an integral part of the national education system in Indonesia because of the importance of English globally. One of the curricula in Indonesia that focuses on teaching English for Vocational High Schools (VHS) is English for Specific Purposes (ESP), where students learn English according to their needs and fields of interest. With the existence of this ESP as well as a variety of teaching methods and approaches, there is one approach that is considered truly effective in …

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Jurnal Pendidikan Vokasi

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Validity Of Critical Thinking Skills Instrument On Prospective Mathematics Teachers, Ayu Faradillah, Sabila Adlina

Jurnal Penelitian dan Evaluasi Pendidikan

This study aims to describe the process of validity of critical thinking skills on prospective mathematics teachers. This research used a quantitative approach with a survey method. Data were collected from 245 prospective mathematics teachers from 19 Mathematics education study programs at 19 higher education institutions in Indonesia. The data were collected using a questionnaire given via Google Form and analyzed by the Rasch Model analysis using Winstep software and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) using JASP. The results show that the instrument of critical thinking skills with indicators such as open-mindedness, inquisitiveness, systematicity, truth-seeking, analyticity, and self-confidence is valid and …