Chemical Engineering

Insufficient supply and pathogen safety concerns regarding plasma-derived therapeutic proteins, such as fibrinogen and immunoglobulins, have been the impetus for the development of genetic engineering techniques and separations methods for the economical and safe production of these proteins. This study is concerned with the isolation of these important therapeutics from complex media. Immunoaffinity chromatography has been an important method in the isolation of these products, typically being ...

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

This study had three main purposes: (a) to determine whether there is a linear relationship between international undergraduate (IU) students adaptation and time at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), (b) to examine the effects of IU students combined economic and linguistic backgrounds on their adaptation experience at Virginia Tech, (c) to determine the u-shaped curve models effectiveness in explaining the adaptation experience of IU students from different bac...

Plant Pathology, Physiology and Weed Science

Human Protein C (hPC) is a vitamin K-dependent serine protease that has a critical role in the naturally-occurring anticoagulant pathway. Upon activation of the zymogen by thrombin at the endothelial cell surface, the active form of hPC has anticoagulant activity in hemostasis due to its ability to inactivate factors Va and VIIIa. For biological activity, hPC requires several post-translational modifications including proteolytic cleavage, disulfide bond formation, b-hydroxylation, g-carboxylati...

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

The majority of the research conducted to date on transfer student academic success compares transfer students with first-year freshmen or native students (Belcheir, 1999, 2001; Carlan, 2001; Cohen & Brawer, 1987; Cope & Hannah, 1975; Eimers & Mullen, 1997; Glass & Harrington, 2002; Keeley & House, 1993; Lorentz & Benedict, 1996; Lunneborg & Lunneborg, 1976; Miville & Sedlacek, 1995; Owen, 1991; Pascarella, 1999; Richman, 1979). Of ...

Science and Technology Studies

Photography is inherently technological, based as it is on intricate chemical processes. George Eastman famously created the conventional photographic system, making the technology widely available to a mass market. Using the systems approach, I show how the Eastman Kodak Company consolidated critical photographic technologies through acquisition and research in the beginning of the twentieth century. Once the company achieved predominance in the industry, it set about expanding its markets. How...

Architecture

Architecture is a wonderful world. As a student of architecture, time and time again I am inpressed by its powerful imagines. The more I study and learn, however, the more I question.What is the truth beyond those fantastic imagines?What is the nuture of Architecture?Is there any basic way or process to approach the work of Architecture?With these questions, I begin my thesis project and the process of looking for answers.

Human Development

One of the most painful events in life that an adolescent can face is the loss of someone with whom they had a strong emotional attachment (Harvey, 2002). This loss could be a friend, relative, parent, or any person that was strongly attached to the adolescent. In todays literature, there is a lack of attention given to adolescents, college students in particular who experience loss. This retrospective study consisted of 224 university students who had lost someone during adolescence or preadole...

Veterinary Medical Sciences

Bacillus anthracis is a facultative extracellular bacterial pathogen that causes cutaneous, gastrointestinal or respiratory disease in many vertebrates, including humans. Commercially available anthrax vaccines for immunization of humans are known to provide protection of limited duration and may not protect against the respiratory form of the disease. Commercially available live vaccines for animals have been shown to cause disease in certain species. Brucella abortus is a facultative intracell...

Electrical and Computer Engineering

In the forest products manufacturing industry, recent price increases in the cost of high-quality lumber together with the reduced availability of this resource have forced manufacturers to utilize lower grade hardwood lumber in their manufacturing operations. This use of low quality lumber means that the labor involved in converting this lumber to usable parts is also increased because it takes more time to remove the additional defects that occur in the lower grade material. Simultaneously, la...

Mathematical Physics

This thesis pursues the hints of a categorical delooping that are suggested when enrichmentis iterated. At each stage of successive enrichments, the number of monoidal products decreases and the categorical dimension increases, both by one. This is mirrored by topology. When we consider the loop space of a topological space, we see that paths (or 1--cells) in the original are now points (or objects) in the derived space. There is also automatically a product structure on the points in the derive...

Agricultural and Applied Economics

<p>The dissertation examines advancements in the methods and techniques used in the field of econometrics. These advancements include: (i) a re-examination of the underlying statistical foundations of statistical models with binary dependent variables. (ii) using feed-forward backpropagation artificial neural networks for modeling dichotomous choice processes, and (iii) the estimation of unconditional demand elasticities using the flexible multistage demand system with asymmetric p...

Civil Engineering

<p>This research project investigates individuals resistance to change brought about by new information technology implementation in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. By understanding how individual participants resist and adapt to change, their resistance can be better accommodated by the organization in the adoption of new information technology within the AEC industry. This enables researchers and practitioners to understand how new technologies sho...

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

<html><head><title>James Stemple Abstract</title><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"></head><body><p class=MsoNormal style= text-indent:.5in;line-height:150% ><spanstyle= mso-bidi-font-weight:bold >High quality effective leadership for high schools is critical due to the social, political, and economic pressures plac...

Human Development

Childrens relationships with their childcare teachers and its effects on their subsequent behaviors, attachments, and outcomes have been an interest in the last two or three decades primarily due to the significant increase of young children in full-time childcare. Attachment Theory, and its identifying behaviors in children categorized by the Strange Situation or the Attachment Q-Sort, has been the main focus of previous research. The purpose of my study, using an ethnographic approach, was to ...

Electrical and Computer Engineering

It is perceived that Moores Law will prevail at least for the next decade with the continuous advancement of processing technologies for integrated circuits. According to Intels roadmap, over one billion transistors will be integrated in one processor by the year 2010; the processors clock speed will approach 15 GHz; the core static currents will increase up to 200 A; the dynamic current slew rate will rise up to 250 A/ns; and the core voltage will decrease to 0.8 V. The rapid advancement of pro...

Chemistry

<p>The neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) inhibitor 7-nitroindazole (7-NI) protects against the neurotoxicity of MPTP in a mouse model of neurodegeneration. Since 7-NI also inhibits the monoamine oxidase-B (MAO-B) catalyzed bioactivation of MPTP, the role of nNOS inhibition as a mediator of 7-NIs neuroprotective properties have been challenged. In order to examine in greater detail the neuroprotective effects of indazolyl derivatives, the synthesis of water soluble indazolyltetr...

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

An Illustration of the Work Lives of Experienced Teachers of Students with Emotional and/or Behavioral Disorders at the Middle School LevelSusan T. Myers(ABSTRACT)The purpose of this qualitative study is to illustrate how experienced teachers of students with emotional and/or behavioral disorders (EB/D) working in middle school settings conduct their work. In the current context of public education, the work of teaching students with EB/D is considered stressful and undesirable by many individua...

Chemistry

(ABSTRACT)Cyanate ester thermosetting resins are a novel family of materials for high technology and aerospace applications. The high glass transition temperatures available from cured cyanate ester networks and subsequently, their resistances to corrosive materials make these resins attractive for harsh environmental applications. These features of cyanate ester resins presented a threefold opportunity for investigation, namely: 1) establish a characterization technique for the long term mechan...

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

The multi-case analysis utilized in this study describes how specially-designed instruction is being used to ensure that secondary students with disabilities have access to the general curriculum and are participating and progressing within it. Bronfenbrenners (1976) systemic model that presents interacting sub-systems in a series of nested educational environments was used as a guide for exploration. Case study schools included two high schools that serve partially suburban and partially rural ...

Public Administration/Public Affairs

The Ideal of Public Service: The Reality of the RhetoricAnn Elizabeth SimeoneAbstractThe purpose of this study is to discuss the ideal of public service, what it is and what it should be and how it has evolved in American history. I am concerned that the ideal of public service, a guiding principle for public administrators and government, has been diminished by the emphasis in American public administration on economy, efficiency, and effectiveness. If public sector leaders, such as presidents,...

Animal and Poultry Sciences

A rapid growth phase often occurs with the onset of spring in the young horse. This coincides with changes in day length, temperature, and progesterone concentrations. The change in growth, from slow to rapid in young horses has been associated with various forms of developmental orthopedic disease. The objective of this study was to distinguish associations between progesterone concentrations and other physiological and environmental measures from birth through 16 mo in young Thoroughbreds. Gro...

Environmental Design and Planning

The purpose of this study was to discover the various meanings that the Pulaski Theatre held for the residents of Pulaski and the theatres social importance to the town. The following research objectives directed this study: 1) to document the theatres history from the time it was built in 1911 until the present day, 2) to uncover memories or feelings associated with the theatre, and 3) to determine if design features of the theatre building influenced those feelings/memories. In documenting the...

Civil Engineering

Performance based contracting in the transportation arena is a rather recently implemented concept which has a few number of applications in the United States up to date. Nonetheless, the US Department of Transportation has vigorously promoted (by issuing memorandums to be distributed to the Highway Agencies and State Departments of Transportation) the conversion of traditional contracts to performance based contracts to reach a goal of 80% of the service contracts and actions being performance ...

Mining and Minerals Engineering

The continuing trend toward larger longwall mining systems has resulted in the utilization of higher system voltages. The increase in system voltage levels has caused the industry to face complexities not experienced with the lower-voltage systems. One such complexity arises from the larger system capacitance that results from the outby configuration commonly used on 4,160-V longwall power systems. Simulations show that during a line-to-ground fault, the larger system capacitance can cause a sit...

Civil Engineering

The Critical Path Method (CPM) is a widely used tool throughout the construction industry. Since its creation, the use and application of the Critical Path Method has grown tremendously. Up to date, three studies have been performed on how Engineering News Records (ENR) Top 400 Contractor use CPM. The first study was performed by Edward Davis in 1974 and the second was performed by Amir Tavakoli and Roger Riachi in 1990. This paper is a summary of the third survey, which took place in 2003. The ...

Mathematics

We examine the effect of lane preference on a quasi one-dimensional three-state driven lattice gas, consisting of holes and positive and negative particles, and periodic boundary conditions in the longitudinal direction. Particles move via particle-hole and, with a lesser rate, particle-particle exchanges; the species are driven in opposite directions along the lattice, each preferring one of the lanes with a given probability, <I>p</I>. The model can be interpreted a...

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

WHAT MAKES A SUCCESSFUL COLLEGE OR UNIVERSITY PROGRAMMING BOARD?: STANDARDS OF PRACTICE FOR PROGRAMMING BOARDSbyMegan Alene PageDr. Joan B. Hirt, ChairEducational Leadership and Policy StudiesABSTRACTThe purpose of this study was to seek an understanding of the characteristics of successful college and university programming boards (CUPBs). Specifically, I explored the organization and management; human, financial, and facility resource; campus and community relationship; program; mission; asses...

Counselor Education

ASSESSING PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS FOR MASTERS LEVEL CACREP COUNSELING PROGRAMS: EVALUATION OF PERSONAL-EMOTIONAL CHARACTERISTICS<p>by<p>Juliann Smith, LPC, NCC<p>Committee Chair: Nancy Bodenhorn<p>Counselor Education<p>(ABSTRACT)<p>The purpose of this study consisted of three main components: 1) to identify effective counselor characteristics in the literature; 2) to describe existing admission requirements of couns...

Architecture

Can architecture live in the passage of real time and memory? It has occured to me that movement must not be limited to action (horizontal and vertical.) For instance, the movement of people, light or objects are not the only consideration. In fact I have overlooked passive motion. Perhaps a design could link both passive and active motion as the design element. The independent African American Filmmaker creates a cinematic experience that lives in layers of time. In the end the film is sustaine...

Human Development

In recent years, research has focused on childrens transitions from preschool into kindergarten. Parents, teachers, and schools recognize the importance of the transition from preschool into kindergarten and its possible influence on childrens adjustment and long term school success. However, as the philosophies and policies of kindergarten have emerged and evolved, so have the views of parents and teachers regarding children entering kindergarten. Research shows parents and teachers have confli...

Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences

Tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea Schreb.) and alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) have many desirable forage attributes, are grown extensively throughout the USA, and combined form a productive pasture mixture. The objective of this research was to develop recommended management practices for alfalfa-tall fescue mixtures and compare livestock performance, forage quality, and productivity of this mixture to N-fertilized endophyte-free tall fescue. Forty-eight Angus or Angus crossbred steers were rotatio...

Marketing

The focus of this research is to examine the impact of emotional intelligence on consumer decision making. Several research goals are presented: 1) to develop and test a practical domain-specific scale of emotional ability, 2) to identify the influence of emotional ability on behavioral individual and group level performance in a consumer context, 3) and to identify how performance is further influenced by cognitive ability, cognitive and emotional confidence and calibration between perceived (i...

Psychology

The performance of the Wagner Assessment Test (WAT; Wagner & Harvey, in press) when administered using computer adaptive testing (CAT) methods was examined using the original 103-item WAT pool and an expanded 263-item pool. Although previous research (e.g., Wagner & Harvey, in press) has shown that the WAT outperforms the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA; Watson & Glaser, 1980) in terms of test information, standard error, and susceptibility to successful ...

English

Although Paul Hamilton Hayne was the acknowledged poet laureate of the South at the time of his death in 1886, he and his poetry have virtually disappeared from the recent American literary histories and anthologies. Even the literary histories and anthologies of Southern literature tend to down play his role as a man of letters and poet of consequence. This diminution of Haynes literary reputation has taken place despite the respect for his poetry and criticism that came from leading poets and ...

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (UMTS) is the preferred third generation (3G) communication standard for mobile communications and will provide worldwide coverage, a convenient software technology and very high data rate. The high data rate, especially, requires the use of bandwidth-efficient modulation schemes such as Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK). But modulation schemes such as QPSK need, in turn, a very linear power from the output of the transmitter power amplifier in orde...

History

Any attempt to tell the story of federal involvement in the dismantling of Americas formalized systems of racial discrimination that positions the judiciary as the first branch of government to engage in this effort, identifies the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision as the beginning of the civil rights movement, or fails to recognize the centrality of President Harry S. Truman in the narrative of racial equality is in error.Driven by an ever-increasing recognition of the injustices of rac...

Mechanical Engineering

The purpose of this study was to develop injury risk functions for dynamic bending of the human femur in the lateral-to-medial and posterior-to-anterior loading directions. A total of 45 experiments were performed on human cadaver femurs using a dynamic three-point drop test setup. All 45 tests resulted in mid-shaft femur fractures with comminuted wedge and oblique fractures as the most common fracture patterns. The reaction loads were used to develop the injury criteria given that they represen...

Electrical and Computer Engineering

<p>The use of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for the JPEG2000 image compression standard has sparked interest in the design of fast, efficient hardware implementations of the perfect reconstruction filter bank used for computing the DWT. The accuracy and efficiency with which the filter coefficients are quantized in a multiplierless implementation impacts the image compression and hardware performance of the filter bank. A high precision representation ensures good compressio...

Plant Pathology, Physiology, and Weed Science

Managing turf for high aesthetic value is costly. Such management usually involves mowing, disease prevention, insect control, and weed control. Mowing is the most expensive practice on golf courses and annual bluegrass (Poa annua L) is the most challenging weed problem in professional turf. The plant growth regulators trinexapac-ethyl and paclobutrazol are commonly used in VA for these two costly and challenging jobs. Prohexadione calcium (PC) is an experimental chemical that inhibits the same ...

Electrical and Computer Engineering

The power amplifiers are typically the most power-consuming block in wireless communication systems. Spectrum is expensive, and newer technologies demand transmission of maximum amount of data with minimum spectrum usage. This requires sophisticated modulation techniques, leading to wide, dynamic signals that require linear amplification. Although linear amplification is achievable, it always comes at the expense of efficiency. Most of the modern wireless applications such as WCDMA use non-const...

Architecture

How to create a permanent house for a temporary event?How to provide a comfortable environment in an extreme climate?

Biochemistry

Cyanobacteria of the Nostoc genus are known for the thick, mucilaginous carbohydrate coatings that they produce. In this work, two examples of cyanobacterialglycobiology are considered, each of which involves a cyanobacterium of the Nostoc genus.The first portion of this work details attempts to obtain amino acid sequence information from the enzymes (glycosyltransferases) that are responsible for producing the extracellular polysaccharide (EPS) of Nostoc commune DRH1, ultimately to allow the tr...

Political Science

This thesis explores the possible impact of a postmaterialist value shift on the future ofdemocracy in advanced industrial democratic countries.Research over the past few decades has questioned the responsiveness of representativedemocratic institutions in advanced industrial democracies to individual and communalneeds in society. Radical democratic theorists have called for direct action, structuralreform, and other social and political changes to make democracy stronger. Increasededucation lev...

Biological Systems Engineering

<P>A scarcity of comparable research on the transport of bacteria has forced hydrologic models to assume that bacteria travel as dissolved chemicals. In reality, most bacteria preferentially attach to soil aggregates, and behave very differently from planktonic bacteria. The goal of this research project was to identify and evaluate a laboratory method for partitioning between attached and planktonic bacteria that could be used to improve hydrologic modeling.</P>&...

Forestry

Soil organic carbon represents the largest constituent of the global C pool and carbon budgets are studied by researchers and modelers in C cycling, global climate change, and soil quality studies. Pedon and soil interpretation record databases are used with soil and ecological maps to estimate regional SOC even though these databases are rarely complete for surface litter and mineral subsurface horizons.The first main objective of the project is to improve the ability to produce soil organic ca...

Veterinary Medical Sciences

Recent studies have provided conflicting results in regards to equine intradermal skin testing and its use in defining causative antigens in IgE mediated diseases such as equine recurrent airway obstruction (RAO). This study was divided into two experiments. In the first experiment of this study, the hypothesis tested was normal horses would have minimal variability in the wheals formed by intradermal injection of positive control stimulants. This was evaluated by examining the repeatability of ...

Landscape Architecture

We live in an increasingly urbanized world as people migrate to cities for employment and cultural benefits. Growing and dense urban populations contribute heavily to water pollution and energy waste contributing to global biodiversity extinction. At the same time, contemporary urban areas deliver diminishing returns to residents as cities become cramped, unhealthy, and unattractive. The rooftops of urban buildings offer exciting opportunities for remedying these trends. New rooftop designs high...

Urban Affairs and Planning

Zoning is premised upon the segregation of land uses. Rudimentary zoning ordinances originated in New York around 1916 as a means of separating the lower class fabric markets from the upscale retailers of 5th Avenue nearby, and to reduce density. The Standard Enabling Acts of the 1920s granted governments the broad authority to enact zoning ordinances to reduce population densities in cities for the purposes of health, safety, and well being. The United States Supreme Court upheld this authority...

Psychology

A large-scale intervention, designed to increase healthier fast-food consumption, was evaluated at a national fast-food chain. Participants included fast-food consumers at three separate restaurant locations in southwestern Virginia. Each restaurant received three phases, consisting of fourteen days each. Two of the restaurants were exposed to two conditions, A (Baseline) and B (Intervention), while the other restaurant served as a control. Restaurant 1 received the following phases, with each p...

Teaching and Learning

This study identified the accuracy with which local career and technical education (CTE) administrators perceive the stereotypes of CTE students, teachers, and programs held by Virginia Department of Education administrators. In order to measure the aforementioned meta-accuracy: (a) the stereotypes of CTE students, teachers, and programs held by (VDOE) administrators were determined, (b) the meta-stereotypes of local CTE administrators regarding the stereotypes of CTE programs, students, and tea...