Narrative causal understanding is related to a variety of school-related skills such as reading comprehension, and memory. Previous research shows a developmental trend in the ability to use and understand causal connections that begins at age 4...
City planning--Psychological aspects; City planning--Citizen participation
This dissertation examines the impact of complexity and familiarity on visual preference for two content domains defined as Neo-Traditional and Modern. This research has five main themes: (1) To determine if there is a method for community design...
A hyper basis function network (HyperBF) is a generalized radial basis function network (RBF) where the activation function is a radial function of a weighted distance. The local weighting of the distance accounts for the variation in local scaling...
Teacher effectiveness; Mathematics teachers; Mathematics--Study and teaching (Secondary)--Evaluation
This study explored the predictive relationships of teacher efficacy, teacher knowledge, and teacher practices with student achievement. More specifically, secondary mathematics teachers' efficacy beliefs, geometry knowledge for teaching, and the...
Swarm Intelligence (SI) techniques were inspired by bee swarms, ant colonies, and most
recently, bird flocks. Flock-based Swarm Intelligence (FSI) has several unique features, namely
decentralized control, collaborative learning, high exploration...
High-throughput sequencing has provided a myriad of genetic data for thousands of organisms. Computational analysis of one data type, expressed sequence tags (ESTs) yields insight into gene expression, alternative splicing, tissue specificity gene...
Indians of North America--British Columbia; Literacy--British Columbia--Case studies
This dissertation examines the literacy practices of a group of First Nations women who live in British Columbia and whose jobs entail the production and dissemination of texts which reflect the local, Carrier, culture. In this qualitative study of...
This study defines a new approach for building a Web Services based infrastructure for distributed data mining applications. The proposed architecture provides a roadmap for "autonomic" functionality of the infrastructure hiding the...
The topic of this dissertation is the automation of the process of extracting understandable patterns and rules from data. An unprecedented amount of data is available to anyone with a computer connected to the Internet. The disciplines of Data...
Radio frequency allocation--Mathematics; Wireless communication systems--Mathematical models; Frequency spectra--Mathematical models
Multidimensional frequency estimation is a classic signal processing problem that has versatile applications in sensor array processing and wireless communications. Eigenvalue-based two-dimensional (2-D) and N -dimensional ( N -D) frequency...
A connected matching in a graph is a set of disjoint edges such that, for any pair of these edges, there is another edge of the graph incident to both of them. This dissertation investigates two problems related to finding large connected matchings...
The area of Knowledge discovery and data mining is growing rapidly. Feature Discretization is a crucial issue in Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), or Data Mining because most data sets used in real world applications have features with...
Few previous studies have compared microbial communities in subterranean and surface environments. Chemical analyses used to characterize the surface and cave microbial environments indicated limited exchange between surface and subsurface waters....
Rhetoric--Study and teaching (Higher); Academic writing--Study and teaching--Social aspects
Scholars in rhetoric and composition have heralded a new way of thinking about writing, referring to the change as a paradigm shift (Hairston, Young) or naming the new direction a "social turn" in rhetoric and composition (Bizzell,...
Trucking--Management; Freight and freightage--Cost control; Freight and freightage--Planning
Freight imbalance is a problem that negatively affects drivers and carriers within the truckload trucking industry. One result of this problem is that the industry experiences high annual driver turnover, exceeding 130% annually. The turnover can...
Many conflicting reports have been given in the literature concerning the effect of various factors on the rate of reversal of figure and ground in reversible perspective.
Flugel (7, 8) suggested that changes in eye movement increased the number of...
New products--Management; Consumer satisfaction; Marketing--Management
A constant flow of innovative products which meets the needs of customers and therefore is a monetary success for the inventing organization is important for the long term success of organizations, especially in modem dynamic markets. As resources...
Background: Emerging circulatory support devices that operate in counterpulsation to the native heart require synchronized timing of device ejection and filling on a beat-to-beat basis with the native heart using a patient's ECG. Surface leads are...
Various vision tasks are usually confronted by appearance variations due to changes of illumination. For instance, in a recognition system, it has been shown that the variability in human face appearance is owed to changes to lighting conditions...
Introduction: Autism is a complex developmental disability that typically appears during
the first three years of life, and is the result of a neurological disorder that affects the
normal functioning of the brain, impacting development in the...
