For persons with disabilities, access to transportation is necessary for integration into society. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been instrumental in assuring transportation access to individuals with disabilities for purposes of...
Standard regularity assumptions for regression models are not satisfied in segmented regression models with an unknown change point, and consequently standard asymptotic results and inferential methods for confidence estimation are not applicable....
Wind energy conversion systems; Wind power--Technological innovations; Wind power--Research
This thesis proposes a new Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) algorithm employed in Wind Energy Conversion Systems (WECS). One of the major issues discussed in the literature concerning HCS is its inefficiency in detecting the peak power when...
Estimating and analysis of deformation, either rigid or non-rigid, is an active area of research in various medical imaging and computer vision applications. Its importance stems from the inherent inter- and intra-variability in biological and...
Solar energy--Technological innovations; Electric current rectifiers
Solar energy offers a large potential as a source of energy and in light of financial
and ethical reasons, people are looking to harvest it for their energy needs. The
conversion of solar energy to electricity is performed by solar cells. There...
African American college students; Academic achievement--Social aspects; College attendance
The study examined the relationship between African American student engagement and student background variables through the context of institution type. The study focused on the impact of student background variables (mother's level of education,...
In order to satisfy customer expectations, a ground vehicle must be designed to meet a broad range of performance requirements. A satisfactory vehicle design process implements a set of requirements reflecting necessary, but perhaps not sufficient...
Corpus callosum; Diagnostic imaging; Autism--Diagnosis
Early detection of human disease in today’s society can have an enormous impact
on the severity of the disease that is manifested. Disease such as Autism and Dyslexia,
which have no current cure or proven mechanism as to how they develop, can...
Mixed-effects model is an efficient tool for analyzing longitudinal data. The random effects in mixed-effects model can be used to capture the correlations among repeated measurements within a subject. The time points are not fixed and all...
The purpose of this dissertation is to suggest that peace is an idea that changes throughout the history of the west, rather than to show how nations may achieve peace or to define what it is. It begins as a concept the power brokers refer to or...
Images, Photographic--Databases; Image processing--Digital techniques; Data mining; Cluster analysis
The performance of content-based image retrieval systems has proved to be inherently constrained by the used low level features, and cannot give satisfactory results when the user's high level concepts cannot be expressed by low level features. In...
Remote terminal units (RTUs) are perimeter supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices that measure and control actual physical devices. Cyber security was largely ignored in SCADA for many years, and the cyber security issues that now...
College dropouts; Dropout behavior, Prediction of; Prediction of scholastic success
The persistence of second-year college students is gaining attention nationally. Vast resources have been dedicated to the retention of first-year students only to lose them at some point during the second year. Much of the research about the...
The revolution in information technology and the explosion in the use of computing devices in people's everyday activities has forever changed the perspective of the data mining and machine learning fields. The enormous amounts of easily...
Over the last 15 years, researchers have explored the use of piezoresistive microcantilevers/resonators as gas sensors because of their relative ease in fabrication, low production cost, and their ability to detect changes in mass or surface stress...
Cheating (Education); Web-based instruction; College students--Attitudes
This dissertation examined cheating attitudes and behaviors of undergraduates, especially those enrolled in online courses. While cheating is an established problem within the academy, it is also an issue on the job and has been in the spotlight in...
Teacher-student relationships; Abused children--Education; Teachers of problem children; Child psychotherapy--Residential treatment
Although there is a vast body of literature to support multiple positive outcomes related to positive student-teacher relationships, no prior study has investigated student-teacher relationships within the context of a residential treatment center...
Item response theory; Goodness-of-fit tests; Monte Carlo method
Item response theory (IRT) is expanding to diverse research settings, without accompanying access to easily implemented model fit methods. One simple model fit approach involves x2/df ratios. However, its utility is not known across several...
Blood flow--Measurement; Spinal cord--Wounds and injuries
Traumatic injury destroys blood vessels at the injury epicenter and is followed by local
angiogenesis and regional inflammation. Healing from injury depends on vascular health because
blood supply is directly responsible for the health and function...
Rap (Music)--History and criticism; Music trade--United States
This thesis is a historical analysis of the narratives of rap music and their relationship to hegemony. I view the trends outlined in this thesis as a microcosm of large-scale social trends in the world of popular culture. A world dominated and...
