Athletic shoes; Foot--Wounds and injuries--Prevention
The purpose of this investigation was to determine if cycling shoes made with stiff material cause an increase in peak plantar stress over shoes with less stiff material. Shoe stiffness measurements were collected under controlled conditions and in...
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...
The Combinatorial Nullstellensatz can be used to solve certain problems in combinatorics. However, one of the major complications in using the Combinatorial Nullstellensatz is ensuring that there exists a nonzero monomial. This dissertation looks...
Most industrial countries face with some form of housing problems. As a result, each state has adopted a variety of housing policies. Policy methods of government authorities in meeting the housing gap and addressing the low income families'...
Heart--Diseases--Diagnosis; Diagnostic imaging; Magnetic resonance imaging; Imaging systems in medicine
Many cardiac diseases, such as myocardial ischemia, secondary to coronary artery disease, may be identified and localized through the analysis of cardiac deformations. Early efforts for quantifying ventricular wall motion used surgical implantation...
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...
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...
This dissertation is composed of three essays in which I examine the influence of formal institutions on entrepreneurs and new firms. In the first essay, "The Influence of Institutions on the Likelihood of Self-Employment: A Multilevel...
This thesis will present various methods of trajectory generation for various types of mobile robots. Then it will progress to evaluating Robot Operating Systems (ROS’s) that can be used to control and simulate mobile robots, and it will explain...
This dissertation represented an examination of the interrelationships between psychological gender (i.e., masculinity, femininity, androgyny, and undifferentiated), biological gender (i.e., male and female), gender role conflict, self-esteem, and...
Social work education--International cooperation; Social service--Cross-cultural studies
With an increasing awareness of a global-local reality, social work research and theorizing on globalization is limited but growing. From a multinational perspective, the purpose of this dissertation was to contribute to the emerging professional...
Due to the overwhelming increase in open source code, off-the-shelf software packages, third party and vendor codes, along with the ease of getting information about hacking network security systems and attacking the well known holes in security...
An investigation was made into the relative costs of excavation retention by two systems: conventional soldier pile-wale-tieback support, and support by soil nailing. The investigation included design of excavation supports by the two...
A k-term quasi-progression of diameter d is a sequence {Xl,... ,xk} for which there exists a positive integer l such that l < Xi-Xi-1 < l+d, for all i = 2, ... ,k. Quasi-progressions may be thought of as arithmetic progressions with a certain...
Public health surveillance; Social networks--Health aspects; Information storage and retrieval systems--Public health
Early information is crucial for policy makers and public health officials responsible for protecting the public from the virulent spread of contagious diseases. Current indicators of the spread of contagious outbreaks lag behind the actual spread...
The purpose of this study was to examine common algebra-related misconceptions and errors of middle school students. In recent years, success in Algebra I is often considered the mathematics gateway to graduation from high school and success...
The current study examined how Disclosure, Stereotype Disconfirming Information, and Stereotype Disconfirming Information and Disclosure Combined) influences an individual's stigma (stereotype endorsement, emotional reactions, and discrimination)...
Algebra--Study and teaching (Elementary); Mathematical ability; Learning, Psychology of
The current study explored the impact that algebra knowledge in 1st and 2nd grade can have in growth and achievement in mathematics through 5th grade. Previous studies have shown the positive impact of teaching algebra in middle school (e.g. Smith,...
Bioinformatics; Breast--Cancer--Treatment; Medical care--Data processing
Statistical models have been the first choice for comparative effectiveness in clinical research. Though effective, these models are limited when the data to be analyzed do not fit the assumed distributions; which is mostly the case when the study...
Residential buildings account for a large portion of total energy consumption in the United States. Residential energy usage can be dramatically reduced by improving the efficiency of building envelope systems. One such method is to incorporate...
