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...
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...
Recent advances in high throughput methodologies offer researchers the ability to understand complex systems via high dimensional and multi-relational data. One example is the realm of molecular biology where disparate data (such as gene sequence,...
Self-control in children; Crime and race; Parent and teenager; Teenagers--Family relationships
This study seeks to examine whether racial disparities in offending can be explained through self-control theory. The study utilized longitudinal responses of a nationally representative sample of 1700 adolescents. Parenting and self-control...
Phase II clinical trial are generally single arm trial where a homogeneity assumption is placed on the response. In practice, this assumption may be violated resulting in a heterogeneous response. This heterogeneous or overdispersed response can be...
A common research interest in medical, biological, and engineering research is determining whether certain independent variables are correlated with the survival or failure times. Standard statistical techniques cannot usually be applied for...
English language--Study and teaching--Foreign speakers; English language--Study and teaching (Elementary school); Parent-teacher relationships; Home and school; Academic achievement
This dissertation study examined the relationships between school support (i.e.,
student services and family outreach), parental school involvement, and academic and
social-emotional outcomes for children who are English Language Learners...
To manage large image databases, Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) emerged as a new research subject. CBIR involves the development of automated methods to use visual features in searching and retrieving. Unfortunately, the performance of most...
Computers and music have shared a rich history since the 1950s. Many languages and standards have been built around music. Yet even before the advent of the computer, music shared algorithmic ideas with mathematics which brought about many new...
In the United States substance abuse takes a toll that is costly in both economic and human terms. In 2005 we paid 467.7 billion dollars to address the consequences of substance abuse, and each year we have lost an estimated 537,000 of our fellows...
Right-wing extremists--Germany; Political culture--Germany; Germany--Politics and government--1990-; Voting--Germany
Despite twenty years of political reunification Germany remains a politically, socially, and economically divided country. This has fuelled inequalities, which are used by extreme political parties to garner votes from citizens who have become...
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...
Senile dementia; Nursing home patients--Mental health; Anxiety in old age; Depression in old age
Dementia, depression, and anxiety are the most common psychiatric disorders among long-term care residents and, because dementia is associated with behavioral problems that can be difficult to manage, the growing number of long-term care residents...
Motivation (Psychology); Psychology and religion; Faith--Psychology
Religious motivation is a construct that has been the focus of decades of research. The "Religious Orientation Scale" (ROS) and variations of it, including the "Age Universal Intrinsic-Extrinsic Scale-12" (AUIES-12), are the...
The purpose of this dissertation was to describe the development and validation of the Sorokin Psycho-Social Love Inventory (SPSLI) and the testing of a Predictor Model of love actions for people who experienced divorce. The SPSLI is based on five...
Mishaps in prenatal development can influence mammary gland development
and, ultimately, affect susceptibility to factors that cause breast cancer. This research was
based on the underlying hypothesis that maternal dietary composition during...
African American men--Social conditions; Crime and race; Peer pressure
The initial goals of this study include locating and identifying the taxonomic groups mentioned in Moffitt's (1993) (i.e. life-course persistent offenders, adolescent-limited offenders) using data from the National Longitudinal Survey 1997...
An ensemble consists of a set of individual predictors whose predictions are combined. Generally, different classification and regression models tend to work well for different types of data and also, it is usually not know which algorithm will be...
Purpose: To evaluate baseline and 3 different image enhancements for the detection of landmarks and overall perceived quality in photostimuable phosphor cephalograms. Methods: DenOptix images of 48 patients (plus 12 repeats) were presented randomly...
