Business Commons^™

Component-Based Software Engineering, Zhiyuan Wang

Dissertations

To solve the problems coming with the current software development methodologies, component-based software engineering has caught many researchers' attention recently. In component-based software engineering, a software system is considered as a set of software components assembled together instead of as a set of functions from the traditional perspective. Software components can be bought from third party vendors as off-the-shelf components and be assembled together.

Component-based software engineering, though very promising, needs to solve several core issues before it becomes a mature software development strategy. The goal of this dissertation is to establish an infrastructure for component-based software development. The author …

Applications Of Agent Architectures To Decision Support In Distributed Simulation And Training Systems, Plamen V. Petrov

Dissertations

This work develops the approach and presents the results of a new model for applying intelligent agents to complex distributed interactive simulation for command and control. In the framework of tactical command, control communications, computers and intelligence (C₄I), software agents provide a novel approach for efficient decision support and distributed interactive mission training. An agent-based architecture for decision support is designed, implemented and is applied in a distributed interactive simulation to significantly enhance the command and control training during simulated exercises. The architecture is based on monitoring, evaluation, and advice agents, which cooperate to provide alternatives to the …

Collaborative Software Agents Support For The Texpros Document Management System, Jrtian Lin

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the use of active rules that are embedded in markup documents. Active rules are used in a markup representation by integrating Collaborative Software Agents with TEXPROS (abbreviation for TEXt PROcessing System) [Liu and Ng 1996] to create a powerful distributed document management system. Such markup documents with embedded active rules are called Active Documents. For fast retrieval purposes, when we need to generate a customized Internet folder organization, we first define the Folder Organization Query Language (FO-QL) to solve data categorization problems. FO-QL defines the folder organization query process that automatically retrieves links of documents deposited into …

Institutional Activities In International Higher Education : An Assessment Of Advancement Strategies Used At Selected Small Church-Related Colleges And Universities, Janeric Arne Gustavsson

Dissertations

Problem. Small church-related colleges and universities are experiencing financial difficulties. This study assesses the institutional advancement programs at selected Seventh-day Adventist colleges and universities. The purpose of this examination was to analyze "what is" to determine the present-day process of the advancement function, and what "ought to be." These data will also suggest potential areas for growth and development.

Method . The study uses a non-experimental, descriptive design. To accomplish the purpose of the study, the literature on institutional advancement was reviewed to find a useable framework. The instrument used for this study was the one used in Willmer's …

The Professional Development School : A Descriptive Case Study Of Its History And Development, Denise G. Michaelis

Dissertations

Problem. The development o f school/university partnerships is not a simple process. It requires collaboration between two groups o f professionals who come from different cultures, have developed different forms o f expertise, and operate under different organizational conditions and reward structures (Goodlad, 1990; Stoddart, Winitzky & O ’Keefe, 1992). Throughout much o f the last century, collaboration between schools and universities have often been unsuccessful. In order for Professional Development Schools to be successful in educational reform, it is necessary to focus on defining and delineating the essential characteristics of Professional Development Schools and the process o f their …

Leadership Requirements In The 21st Century : The Perceptions Of Canadian Private Sector Leaders, Samy H. Watson

Dissertations

Problem. Since 1995, with the realization that by 2005 more than 61% of executives in the senior ranks of the Canadian Public Service would be eligible for retirement (La Releve, 1998), the need to recruit and develop competent leaders has become a matter of urgent attention.

Method. Public sector leaders were surveyed by mail-in questionnaires as to their ratings of a set of leadership competencies. Analogue research for private sector leaders, conducted by a colleague, was incorporated for some analysis. A stratified sample of the general public was also surveyed by telephone regarding a subset of the same competencies. …

Case Studies Of Organizational Evaluation In Community Foundations, Joyce Box Brown

Dissertations

Community foundations are classified as public charities (501(c) 3). They derive their funds from many donors rather than a single donor, and the board is made up of representatives from the community served. They are most often established to serve a specific geographic area. This study investigated and described how three different community foundations approach organizational evaluation— choosing proposals to fund, monitoring programs, improving programs, and assessing program impact.

The three community foundations approach evaluation not as a formal system of grant accountabilities, but as a way of systematically gathering information from various constituents for purposes of guiding important decisions. …

Porting The Sisal Functional Language To Distributed-Memory Multiprocessors, Jui-Yuan Ku

Dissertations

Parallel computing is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in recent years. The sizes of application problems continuously increase for solving real-world problems. Distributed-memory multiprocessors have been regarded as a viable architecture of scalable and economical design for building large scale parallel machines. While these parallel machines can provide computational capabilities, programming such large-scale machines is often very difficult due to many practical issues including parallelization, data distribution, workload distribution, and remote memory latency.

This thesis proposes to solve the programmability and performance issues of distributed-memory machines using the Sisal functional language. The programs written in Sisal will be automatically parallelized, scheduled and …

Automatic Document Classification And Extraction System (Adoces), Xuhong Li

Dissertations

Document processing is a critical element of office automation. Document image processing begins from the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) phase with complex processing for document classification and extraction. Document classification is a process that classifies an incoming document into a particular predefined document type. Document extraction is a process that extracts information pertinent to the users from the content of a document and assigns the information as the values of the “logical structure” of the document type. Therefore, after document classification and extraction, a paper document will be represented in its digital form instead of its original image file format, …

A New-Generation Class Of Parallel Architectures And Their Performance Evaluation, Qian Wang

Dissertations

The development of computers with hundreds or thousands of processors and capability for very high performance is absolutely essential for many computation problems, such as weather modeling, fluid dynamics, and aerodynamics. Several interconnection networks have been proposed for parallel computers. Nevertheless, the majority of them are plagued by rather poor topological properties that result in large memory latencies for DSM (Distributed Shared-Memory) computers. On the other hand, scalable networks with very good topological properties are often impossible to build because of their prohibitively high VLSI (e.g., wiring) complexity. Such a network is the generalized hypercube (GH). The GH supports full-connectivity …

The Effects Of A Combination Of Feedback, Goals, And Consequences On The Performance Of Four Small Businesses, Timothy V. Nolan

Dissertations

Performance measurement approaches such as the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) offer a format for attending to a few performance metrics rather than several different performance indicators. While the BSC approach offers a nice format for tracking performance, it does not provide a conceptual framework for improving performance. That framework can be found in Behavioral Systems Analysis. The Total Performance System emphasizes the importance of internal and external feedback in improving performance. Several studies have investigated feedback interventions in organizational settings. The intervention found to be most effective is a combination of feedback, goals, and consequences. The purpose of the current study …

The Field Study Of A Training Transfer Enhancement Process And Its Effect On Transfer Of Training, Andrew W. Bowne

Dissertations

Transfer of training is defined as the degree to which trainees apply, in their jobs, the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they gained in training. Research regarding transfer of training has called training effectiveness into question. For example, Baldwin and Ford (1988) reported average transfer rates typically in the 10% range.

The study tested the effectiveness of particular procedures and tools intended to enhance transfer of training. These transfer enhancing tools were employed by an experimental group of trainees’ supervisors (who received training from the researcher in the application of the tools) before a half-day problem-solving training workshop for their employees …

Relationships Between Leader Characteristics, Planned Change And Organizational Culture In A Dynamic Manufacturing Environment, Matthew Chodkowski

Dissertations

The new economic era has been marked by profound global change. In response, researchers and practitioners have called for a rethinking of the conventional concepts of leadership, change, and organizational culture to improve our competitiveness in this turbulent world market. This study investigated the relationships between leader style, leader behavior, leadership paradigm, leader knowledge of change, organizational culture potency, and planned change efficacy in a manufacturing company implementing a high performance work system change initiative. This study intended to contribute to the reconceptualization of the leadership construct and the explication of the leadership-culture-change linkage.

Six hundred and eighty-nine subjects representing …

The Relationship Between Organizational Culture And The Practice Of Program Evaluation In Human Service Organizations, Lorraine Marais

Dissertations

There are many obstacles for human service organizations in evaluating programs. Some of these barriers are the difficulty in defining human behavior and the change that needs to be evaluated, human service programs that take a long time to show results, agency capacity to do evaluation, and cost (Young, Hollister, Hodgkinson, & Associates, 1993). Another subtle yet powerful influence on the practice of evaluation in nonprofit organizations may be organizational culture (Schein, 1990). If an organization is going to employ self-evaluation, an organizational culture may be needed that will support such efforts. This study was designed to assess the relationship …

The Intelligent Browser For Texpros, Chih-Ying Wang

Dissertations

Browsing is a technique, which helps users to formulate their query and retrieve information in the information retrieval system. This technique provides users with capabilities of understanding their information needs and gaining system knowledge during the course of the browsing and thus it eases the users' burden when issuing queries. The basic components of the browser provides an underlying structure which allows users to navigate and a browsing process controller which provides users with the needed assistance during each browsing session.

In this dissertation, a new infrastructure (OP-Net), transformed from the existing object network is proposed. Each object in the …

The Relationship Of Saudi Managers’ Characteristics And Their Support Of The Transfer Of Training To The Workplace, Khalid M. Alhazmi

Dissertations

Many HRD professionals have pointed out that one of the most important elements for transfer of training to the workplace is management support. However, there is little discussion concerning management characteristics that support the transfer of training to the workplace. The purpose of this study was to investigate management characteristics that inhibit or promote the transfer of training to the workplace and to provide information regarding those characteristics to companies.

This study focused on one main question: Do management characteristics have an effect on management support of the transfer of training to the workplace? To answer this question, a study …

Employability Skills In The Undergraduate Business Curriculum And Job Market Preparedness : Perceptions Of Faculty And Final-Year Students In Five Tertiary Institutions, Patrick Antonio Williams

Dissertations

Problem

For several decades educators, researchers, and employers have expressed concern about the quality of business graduates that are entering the workplace as entry-level professionals. The major concern of these stakeholders is that many students who are leaving tertiary institutions lack the necessary employability skills needed for career success. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate if undergraduate schools of business are adequately preparing their students for the workplace through the incorporation of employability skills throughout the curriculum. To achieve this purpose, the study measured the perceptions of both final-year undergraduate business students and their professors to determine …

The Effect Of Managers' Clarification Of Business Linkage Of Training On Trainees' Transfer Of Training, Elizabeth J. Benanzer

Dissertations

This study investigated the hypotheses that if managers were engaged in specific activities aimed at increasing their understanding of the linkage of employee training to business goals, then they would in turn create a more positive transfer environment, resulting in greater transfer of training received by their employees. Some managers of trainees participated in a workshop in which they used an “impact mapping” procedure to clearly explain the relationship between training of their employees and strategic goals of the business; another group of managers did not receive this impact mapping training. Then, all managers’ employees participated in a supervisory training …

An Integrated Environment For Problem Solving And Program Development, Fadi Pierre Deek

Dissertations

A framework for an integrated problem solving and program development environment that addresses the needs of students learning programming is proposed. Several objectives have been accomplished: defining the tasks required for program development and a literature review to determine the actual difficulties involved in learning those tasks. A comprehensive Study of environments and tools developed to support the learning of problem solving and programming was then performed, covering programming environments, debugging aids, intelligent tutoring systems, and intelligent programming environments. This was followed by a careful analysis and critique of these systems, which uncovered the limitations that have prevented them from …

A Test Of A Rapid Developer Model: Workplace Factors Associated With Learning And Development, James A. Alexander

Dissertations

The speed at which individuals and organizations learn and develop is a vital contributor to organizational change and organizational effectiveness. This study postulated the notion of "rapid developers”, those persons who learn and acquire job competence more quickly than their peers. The purpose of this study was to identify, define, and differentiate the factors associated with "rapid development."

The author constructed a rapid developer model based upon the review of the disciplines of training, performance technology, total quality, organization learning, and organization culture. The model identified and defined the contextual factors that could be expected, based on an understanding of …

Registration Of Apprenticeship Programs And The Turnover Of Skilled Trade Employees, Dennis J. Bona

Dissertations

The primary purpose of the study is to provide empirical evidence that refutes arguments made by employers who resist registering an apprenticeship program because they believe it will increase turnover of their skilled trade employees. To do this, data were collected to test the hypothesis that companies that have a registered apprenticeship program experience less turnover of their skilled trade employees compared to companies that do not. Secondary hypotheses were also developed to compare turnover ratios with union orientation, size, and wage structure of employers to help validate the results and demonstrate alternative explanations for turnover of skilled trade employees. …

Multi-Wavelength Infrared Imaging Computer Systems And Applications, Jun Li

Dissertations

This dissertation presents the development of three computer systems for multi-wavelength thermal imaging.

Two computer systems were developed for the multi-wavelength imaging pyrometers (M-WIPs) that yield non-contact temperature measurements by remotely sensing the surface of objects with unknown wavelength-dependent emissivity. These M-WIP computer systems represent the state-of-art development in remote temperature measurement system based on the multi-wavelength approach. The dissertation research includes M-WIP computer system integration, software development, performance evaluation, and also applications in monitoring and control of temperature distribution of silicon wafers in a rapid thermal process system.

The two M-WIPs are capable of data acquisition, signal processing, system …

High Speed Protocols For Dual Bus And Dual Ring Network Architectures, Yaling Zhou

Dissertations

In this dissertation, two channel access mechanisms providing fair and bandwidth efficient transmission on dual bus and dual ring networks with high bandwidth-latency product are proposed. In addition, two effective priority mechanisms are introduced to meet the throughput and delay requirements of the diverse arrays of applications that future high speed networks must support.

For dual bus architectures, the Buffer Insertion Bandwidth Balancing (BI_BWB) mechanism and the Preemptive priority Bandwidth Balancing (P_BI_BWB) mechanism are proposed. BI_BWB can significantly improve the delay performance of remote stations. It achieves that by providing each station with a shift register into which the station …

Massively Parallel Reasoning In Transitive Relationship Hierarchies, Yugyung Lee

Dissertations

This research focuses on building a parallel knowledge representation and reasoning system for the purpose of making progress in realizing human-like intelligence. To achieve human-like intelligence, it is necessary to model human reasoning processes by programs. Knowledge in the real world is huge in size, complex in structure, and is also constantly changing even in limited domains. Unfortunately, reasoning algorithms are very often intractable, which means that they are too slow for any practical applications. One technique to deal with this problem is to design special-purpose reasoners. Many past Al systems have worked rather nicely for limited problem sizes, but …

Dropping Out Of High School Among African Americans In Benton Harbor, Michigan : A Study Of Its Economic Implications, Dahlia E. Pottinger

Dissertations

Problem

This study examined the economic implications of dropping out of high school for African Americans in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

Methods

The methodology used in this study is a documentary one. Sources relating to the economic implications of dropping out o f high school among African Americans were studied. The United States 1990 Census o f Population, the National Center for Education Statistics, and local publications provided data for the research.

Results

Dropping out o f high school has definite economic implications for dropouts in Benton Harbor. The estimated number of African American dropouts as of 1990 was a total …

Towards Designing A Knowledge-Based Tutoring System : Sql-Tutor As An Example, Gang Zhou

Dissertations

A Knowledge-Based Tutoring System, also sometimes called an Intelligent Tutoring System, is a computer based instructional system that uses artificial intelligence techniques to help people learn some subject. The goal of the system is to provide private tutoring to its students based on their different backgrounds, requests, and interests. The system knows what subject materials it should teach, when and how to teach them, and can diagnose the mistakes made by the students and help them correct the mistakes.

The major objective of this dissertation is to investigate and develop a generic framework upon which we can build a Knowledge-Based …

Pattern Discovery In Sequence Databases : Algorithms And Applications To Dna/Protein Classification, Gung-Wei Chirn

Dissertations

Sequence databases comprise sequence data, which are linear structural descriptions of many natural entities. Approximate pattern discovery in a sequence database can lead to important conclusions or prediction of new phenomena. Traditional database technology is not suitable for accomplishing the task, and new techniques need to be developed.

In this dissertation, we propose several new techniques for discovering patterns in sequence databases. Our techniques incorporate pattern matching algorithms and novel heuristics for discovery and optimization. Experimental results of applying the techniques to both generated data and DNA/proteins show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

We then develop several classifiers using …

Lobbying In The Nonprofit Sector: A Study Of Practice And Values, Larry A. Buzas

Dissertations

Executive directors of nonprofit organizations were interviewed to determine their lobbying practices. Direct lobbying and grassroots lobbying, as defined by P. A. 94-455 were studied. Independent variables include: (a) formal organizational support, (b) organizational affiliation, (c) organizational characteristics, and (d) the executive directors' perceptions and demographic characteristics.

Data were collected during semi-standardized interviews. A random sample of 50 executive directors of nonprofit organizations in Michigan was selected. The research shows that executive directors of nonprofit organizations do lobby policy makers at the local, state, and federal levels using the following techniques: (a) face-to-face visits, individually or with coalitions, including providing …

Marketing Seventh-Day Adventist Higher Education In Southeast Asia, Geoffrey A. Pauner

Dissertations

Problem

There has been a concern by educational leaders of the Adventist church in the Asia Pacific Division that a number of parents of Seventh-day Adventist students choose to educate their children in non-Adventist primary and secondary schools. This study sought to determine if this concern is prevalent in Adventist colleges in Southeast Asia. To find answers to this concern the following questions were posed.

1. What methods do these colleges use to promote or recruit SDA students?

2. How do these colleges attract SDA students?

3. What special programs are in place in the colleges to retain SDA students? …

Visual Pattern Recognition Using Neural Networks, Jenlong Moh

Dissertations

Neural networks have been widely studied in a number of fields, such as neural architectures, neurobiology, statistics of neural network and pattern classification. In the field of pattern classification, neural network models are applied on numerous applications, for instance, character recognition, speech recognition, and object recognition. Among these, character recognition is commonly used to illustrate the feature and classification characteristics of neural networks.

In this dissertation, the theoretical foundations of artificial neural networks are first reviewed and existing neural models are studied. The Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) model is improved to achieve more reasonable classification results. Experiments in applying the …