Economics

Over the last twenty years or so the Dynamic Volatility literature has produced a wealth of univariateand multivariate GARCH type models. While the univariate models have been relativelysuccessful in empirical studies, they suffer from a number ofweaknesses, such as unverifiable parameterrestrictions, existence of moment conditions and the retention of Normality. These problemsare naturally more acute in the multivariate GARCH type models, which in addition have theproblem of overparameterizatio...

Human Development

Despite negative perceptions of therapy, Black Americans are seeking therapy. I interviewed 8 Black clients about their experience of MFT. I used the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI; Sellers, Rowley, Chavous, Shelton, & Smith, 1997) to assess their racial identity.Most participants thought it was strange for Blacks to seek therapy. Yet, these participants found the strength to seek therapy to protect their family and individual well-being. Participants found support fr...

Electrical Engineering

A POWER CONDITIONING SYSTEM FOR SUPERCONDUCTIVEMAGNETIC ENERGY STORAGE BASED ON MULTI-LEVELVOLTAGE SOURCE CONVERTERbyDong-Ho LeeFred C. Lee, Chairman(Abstract)A new power conditioning system (PCS) forsuperconductive magnetic energy storage (SMES)is developed and its prototype test system isbuilt and tested. The PCS uses IGBTs forhigh-speed PWM operation and has a multi-levelchopper-VSC structure. The prototype test systemhas three-level that can handle up to 250-kVAwith a 1800-V DC link, a 200-A...

Psychology

Infants of various ages across the first postnatal year have shown behavioral preferences (i.e., more attention) to visual displays when looking resulted in the presentation of Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) compared to Adult-Directed Speech (ADS). Although IDS differs from ADS on a variety of measures, most research has focused on various pitch characteristics (i.e., IDS is higher in absolute pitch and more variable in pitch across utterance length). Work from our lab has found that when the pitc...

Plant Pathology, Physiology, and Weed Science

Integrated weed management involves the utilization of weed biology principles to develop effective and economical control strategies. This research involved investigations of herbicide-based weed management programs in potato (<i>Solanum tuberosum</i> L.) and winter wheat (<i>Triticum aestivum</i> L.) as well as investigations of the biological characteristics of smooth pigweed (<i>Amaranthus hybridus</i>), a tr...

Electrical and Computer Engineering

The Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite signals provide not only traditional radionavigation service but inexpensive and convenient radio beacons for signal propagation studies on ionosphere and atmosphere. This thesis describes the development and testing of a specialized GPS sensor which measures, plots and records real-time high-resolution L1 (1575.42MHz) GPS signal strength at a data rate of up to 10Hz. The instrument is based on an open architecture GPS receiver development kit that c...

Chemistry

Polymers containing poly(1,3-cyclohexadiene) were synthesized using a novel pre-formed initiator comprised of an alkyllithium and a tertiary diamine. The use of a pre-formed intiator at moderate temperatures (25

Food Science and Technology

Odor detection thresholds of hexanal, 2-heptenal, 2-pentanone, and 2,4-nonadienal were determined in spring water, high temperature short time (HTST) 2% fat milk, and extended shelf life soymilk. The efficacy of odor scavengers beta-cyclodextrin, D-sorbitol, and nylon 6 in removing these odors was also determined. The odor thresholds of the different odor and media combinations were as follows: hexanal in spring water, milk, and soymilk were 585, 339, and 536 ppb respectively; 2-heptenal in spri...

Electrical and Computer Engineering

<p>The last decade has seen the scope of digital library usage extend from data warehousing and other common library services to building quality collections of electronic resources and providing web-based information retrieval mechanisms for distributed learning. This is clear from the number of ongoing research initiatives aiming to provide dynamic learning environments.</p><p>A major task in providing learning environments is to define a resource mode...

Entomology

Both alfalfa weevil, <i>Hypera postica</i> (Gyllenhal), (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), and potato leafhopper, <i>Empoasca fabae</i> (Harris), (Homoptera: Cicadellidae), remain key pests of alfalfa in Virginia. Commercial varieties of potato leafhopper-resistant (or glandular-haired) alfalfa were released in the mid-1990s, but the impact of alfalfa weevil on these varieties has not been well documented. In 1999, two large-scale field experimen...

Chemical Engineering

Poly(urethane)s and poly(urethane-urea)s (PUU) are nearly ubiquitous, having been in existence since before the Second World War. Spandex, a poly(urethane-urea) elastomeric fiber, is found in nearly all articles of apparel as well as in an increasing array of other consumer items. The technology and chemistry of spandex is largely unchanged since its inception in the late 1950s, with the majority of spandex employing poly(tetramethylene ether glycol) as soft segments. Recent developments in cata...

Veterinary Medical Sciences

The present study examined adverse effects of sunlight exposure (mimicked by intradermal cis-urocanic acid, cUCA) on local and systemic immune responses, with or without co-exposure to the immunotoxic insecticide permethrin. A single exposure to cUCA caused diminished splenic macrophage phagocytosis that was persistent up to 30 days post-exposure. Five-day exposure to cUCA subtly increased splenocyte proliferation in response to the T cell mitogen Concanavalin A. Four-week exposure to cUCA cause...

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

The traditional role of Americas principals is changing. The educational reform movement defines principals as instructional leaders responsible for creating professional learning communities in which learning and quality instruction are priorities. National standards for school leaders include the use of data as a resource for instructional leadership. Additionally, new principals are entering the field rapidly. Previous research on the use of data by principals is twenty years or older. This s...

Political Science

I define the Taiwan issue as the tense relationship between mainland China and Taiwan since 1949. The tension used to arise from the belligerency between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. In the past decade, Taiwan increasingly sought to define its own national identity and international status, but faced diplomatic and military pressures from mainland China, which has insisted that Taiwan is part of China. The relationship between mainland China and Taiwan has been one of the most...

Philosophy

In his Outlines of Skepticism, Sextus Empiricus claims that the Pyrrhonian Skeptic can live without holding beliefs. According to the Rustic interpretation of this claim, Sextus holds that the Skeptic lives without beliefs of any kind. According to the Urbane interpretation, Sextus claim concerns only a restricted category of beliefs. I discuss each interpretation in the context of Sextus broader philosophical stance, and argue for an Urbane interpretation. On this view, Pyrrhonism represents a ...

Economics

This dissertation examines aspects of both the consumer (the "give") and the server (the "take") sides of restaurant tipping. On the consumer side, I address both why, and how much, people tip in restaurants. I also examine a policy issue related to the recent Supreme Court decision in United States v. Fior d Italia. These issues are addressed via a combination of theoretical, empirical, and experimental analysis.On the server side, I use survey data collected from several re...

Agricultural and Applied Economics

A simulation model analyzes cost effectiveness of remote facility monitoring for risk reduction in rural water supply systems by performing a break-even analysis that compares operating costs with manual and remote monitoring.<p>Water system operating cost includes the value of water loss (i.e., realized risk) resulting from operating excursions which are inversely related to mechanical reliability. Reliability is controlled by facility monitoring that identifies excursions enablin...

Environmental Engineering

Lakes and reservoirs exhibit a number of mixing and transport mechanisms. Understanding the transport is crucial to understanding and predicting constituent and density structures. Transport in waterbodies can be natural, such as seiche-induced boundary mixing or advectively-driven inflows. Hypolimnetic oxygenation using bubble-plumes also leads to enhanced mixing. Whether natural or plume-induced, increased mixing will alter the waterbody properties. Conversely, the density structure affects th...

Biology

Tumor-distal immune suppression promotes tumor growth by preventing the recruitment of leukocytes to the tumor-proximal microenvironment. Tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-a is both secreted by and expressed on the cell-surface (mTNF-a) of macrophages. When stimulated with LPS, tumor-burdened host (TBH) macrophages secrete more TNF-a than normal host (NH) macrophages. In this study, I showed that mTNF-a is elevated both in freshly isolated and stimulated TBH macrophages. Additionally, I analyzed the e...

Electrical and Computer Engineering

<p align=justifiy>In recent years, the demand for compact handheld communication devices has grown significantly. Devices having internal antennas have appeared to fill this need. Antenna size is a major factor that limits device miniaturization. In the past few years, new designs based on the microstrip antennas (MSA) and planar inverted-F antennas have been used for handheld wireless devices because these antennas have low-profile geometry and can be embedded into the devices.&am...

Veterinary Medical Sciences

TITLEDEVELOPMENT AND RESOLUTION OF PULMONARY ARTERIAL HYPERTENSION IN RAO HORSESRobert B. MartinCraig Thatcher, LACS Chairman(ABSTRACT)Equine recurrent airway obstruction (RAO) is associated with airway inflammation and bronchoconstriction in clinically affected horses. Horses demonstrating severe pulmonary compromise develop concurrent secondary pulmonary hypertension. The development of pulmonary hypertension is well documented in RAO affected horses, however, it is not known how rapidly incre...

Environmental Design and Planning

<p>This research proposes a new site analysis methodology in the form of an integrated framework. The framework separates the site analysis process into different models, incorporates each model, and considers the interaction between them. The most important models are the environmental models (climate, geology, hydrology, topography, and vegetation models), social-cultural models, economic models, and infrastructure models. Each model also contains several important factors.&l...

History

In 1902, in an effort to reestablish what they saw as whites natural right to control government rule over blacks, the delegates to Virginias Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902 declared the new constitution law that they felt reflected the true opinion of the people of Virginia. This thesis argues that while Virginias 1902 Constitution increased the political power of whites and decreased that of black Virginians, the reasons why they needed the document in the first place highlights an impo...

Wood Science and Forest Products

Species Dependence of pMDI/Wood AdhesionbyMichael J. MalmbergWood Science and Forest ProductsABSTRACTPolymeric methylenebis(phenylisocyanate) (pMDI) has increasingly been used in the wood particulate composite industry. Wood composites, especially oriented strand board (OSB) are made with many variations of wood species. Little research has been done to investigate how pMDI adhesion has been affected by species.The present is divided into two parts. First, mode I fracture mechanics and surface f...

Statistics

Multivariate control charts are used to monitor a process when more than one quality variable associated with the process is being observed. The multivariate exponentially weighted moving average (MEWMA) control chart is one of the most commonly recommended tools for multivariate process monitoring. The standard practice, when using the MEWMA control chart, is to take samples of fixed size at regular sampling intervals for each variable. In the first part of this dissertation, MEWMA control char...

Mechanical Engineering

Microwave heating is implemented in various fields such as drying, material processing, and chemical reactors.M icrowaves offer several advantages over conventional heating methods: 1) microwaves deposit heat directly in the material without convection or radiation, 2) microwave heating is easy and efficient to implement, and 3) microwave processes can be controlled.In order to understand how to use microwaves more efficiently, we must understand how they affect the material with which they inte...

Public Administration/Public Affairs

This dissertation explores the pragmatic implications of judicial rhetoric found in a 1988 Supreme Court decision, i.e., this is a dissertation about public administration using constitutional law to illuminate an administrative question. My viewpoint is a legal/constitutional one which uses the law as pedagogue to inform public administration and to offer a useful message for the public administration practitioner. That message deals with a legal/constitutional distinction between publicness an...

Career and Technical Education

The purpose of this study was to investigate the decisions and perceptions of Lane Companys dislocated workforce regarding retraining and reemployment programs funded by the Minnie and B.B. Lane Foundation (MBL Foundation), Virginia Employment Commission (VEC), both organizations, or neither organization. Thirteen Lane Company dislocated workers were interviewed utilizing an open-ended questionnaire. The results of this study indicated that the retraining and reemployment needs of Lane Companys ...

Management

This research examined the validity of the 2-factor (e.g., Button, Mathieu, and Zajac, 1996) and 3-factor (e.g., VandeWalle, 1997) models of goal orientation. These models differ in specifying the dimensionality, measurement, and nomological network for learning goal orientation and performance goal orientation constructs. This study specifically tested the factorial and nomological validity of each model of goal orientation. The factorial validity was examined through a series of nested models ...

Animal and Poultry Sciences

Autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity is related to body weight regulation. Based on the hypothesis that Most Obesities kNown Are Low In Sympathetic Activity (MONA LISA), it has been suggested that most obese subjects and animals have low sympathetic nervous system activity. Leptin, leptin receptor, and ghrelin genes influence the ANS regulation of body weight and food intake. The aim of this study was to investigate whether there are differences in leptin, the leptin receptor, or ghrelin regu...

Electrical and Computer Engineering

A systematic and versatile method to derive accurate and efficient Circuit Oriented Large Signal Average Models (COLSAMs) that approximate the slow dynamics manifold of the moving average values of the relevant state variables for Pulse-Width Modulated (PWM) dc to dc and three-phase to dc power converters is developed. These COLSAMs can cover continuous conduction mode (CCM) as well as discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) of operation and they are over one order of magnitude cheaper, computation ...

Architecture

Every place on earth has a voice. This voice resonates from the shaping events that have long passed and the current conditions that continue to give each place its individual character. The voice continually evolves as the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth leaves its trace. This voice in its endless variety of forms expresses the beauty that is inherent within each and every location on earth.The potential of architecture is the translation of this voice into human terms and the formal declara...

Teaching and Learning

<html><head><title>Richard S. Druggish</title><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"></head><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">This qualitative study focused on the need for culturally responsive teachingwithin the southern Appalachian cultural setting. The specific components of thisapproach to teaching were based on resea...

Architecture

As the topic for my master s thesis, I wanted to challenge myself with a project to which I have a personal connection and use my experience for designing. At 13 years old, I went ot a competitive sport boarding school for 5 years. This time left me with a very distinctive and also some negative impressions. The complex was made out of a couple, by a narrow hallway connected, buildings. On one hand a very practical concept, that shortend commuting intensively around the complex, but on the other...

Landscape Architecture

The built environment should facilitate a meaningful experience for a user by intellectually engaging their perceptual and cognitive abilities. In 1983, Howard Gardner published his cognitive theory of multiple intelligences. Gardner theorizes that human intelligence is not one single capacity, but is comprised of multiple capacities. Many teachers use the multiple intelligences theory as a tool to reach a larger number of students by engaging their unique learning styles. The theory of multiple...

Mechanical Engineering

The determination of an aircrafts mass properties is critical during its conceptual design phase. Obtaining reliable mass property information early in the design of an aircraft can prevent design mistakes that can be extremely costly further along in the development process.<p>In this thesis, several methods are presented in order to automatically calculate the mass properties of aircraft structural components and fuel stored in tanks. The first method set forth calculates the mas...

Electrical and Computer Engineering

The tremendous advancement in VLSI technologies in the past decade has fueled the need for intricate tradeoffs among speed, power dissipation and area. With gigahertz range microprocessors becoming commonplace, it is a typical design requirement to push the speed to its extreme while minimizing power dissipation and die area. Multipliers are critical components of many computational intensive circuits such as real time signal processing and arithmetic systems. The increasing demand in speed for ...

Electrical and Computer Engineering

In the early 1990s, with the boom of the Internet and the advancements in telecommunications, the demand for high-speed communications systems has reached every corner of the world in forms such as, phone exchanges, the internet servers, routers, and all other types of telecommunication systems. These communication systems demand more data computing, storage, and retrieval capabilities at higher speeds, these demands place a great strain on the power system. To lessen this strain, the existing p...

Architecture

Inspired by writings on creativity and by Howard Gardner s theory of multiple intelligences, I conducted a series of ten "exercises"each of them a guided visualization followed by an opportunity to produce artwith nine- and ten-year-old students. The visualizations, which were designed to encourage the students to explore some of the many ways our minds have of knowing and learning, began with a simple relaxation exercise and proceeded to more challenging exercises involving, for insta...

Mechanical Engineering

The research presented in this thesis investigates the mechanical properties of candidate materials that could be used as a skin for a morphing wing. A morphing wing is defined as a wing that changes shape. Although engineers have been designing different morphing wing configurations, there has been limited research investigating materials that could be used as a skin for a morphing wing. Specifically, after investigating the different morphing wing abilities engineers at Virginia Tech are desig...

Architecture

"Construction is the art of making a meaningful whole out of many parts. Buildings are witnesses to the human ability to construct concrete things. I believe that the real core of all architectural work lies in the art of construction. At the point in time when concrete materials are assembled and erected, the architecture we have been looking for becomes part of the real world." -Peter ZumthorThe human experience of construction is the subject of this thesis. Through study of the mate...

Industrial and Systems Engineering

As an increasingly powerful, interactive, and dynamic medium for sharing information, the World Wide Web (Web) has found many educational applications. Because of educational benefits for both learners and educators, Web-based courses and programs have increasingly been developed and implemented by many academic institutions, organizations, and companiesworldwide (Aggarwal & Brento, 2000). This study, however, asserts that many of the developmental approaches lack three important conside...

Engineering Science and Mechanics

The mechanical properties of unaged and aged constituent materials for solid oxide fuel cells were evaluated using microindentation, plate tensile, four-point bend, ball on ring and pressure on ring tests. The Vickers hardness of the anode, interconnect and electrolyte was determined before and after 1000 hours aging at 1000 oC in air. The fracture toughness KIC was found for the electrolyte materials. Finite element analysis (FEA) was validated and used to calculate the stress distribution and ...

Architecture

A house designed for island living, incorporating climate and culture into building design.

Science and Technology Studies

Langdon Winner s article "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" (1986) has become a classic piece within Science and Technology Studies. While Winner was certainly not the first to consider the inherently political qualities of technology, his article has assumed the role of a touchstone for both supporters and critics of the idea that artifacts embody political and social relationships. In the chapters that follow, I shall try to answer Winner and his critics, by studying a particular technolo...

Architecture

Can we create an architecture that is to be savored and experienced as beautiful and meaningful over and over again? Yes! I call it contented Architecture. This Architecture is not just about a space, but the art of space.Art is the application or exhibition of skills, aesthetic principles, and creative imagination in the production of the beautiful and the meaningful. Art will appeal to different senses. There is the art of cooking with the wonderful tastes and smells. There is the art of music...

Sociology

The Common, the Contradictory and the Idiosyncratic: Signposts from aQualitative Exploration into the Structural Factors InfluencingScientific Work in Tsukuba, Japan [1997 2002]<p><p><p><p>John D. Wilkins<p><p><p><p>Abstract<p><p>From the socio-economic turmoil of the 20th century, Japan has repeatedly revealed its resilience. During these trying times, scie...

Psychology

The present study examined the relationship between anxiety and academic achievement in a sample of clinic-referred children. Specifically, the study investigated whether anxiety contributed to the prediction of academic achievement above and beyond the influence of IQ. Furthermore, the study explored whether anxiety moderated the already established relationship between IQ and academic achievement. In the present study, the WISC-III Verbal IQ, the RCMAS factors of physiological anxiety (i.e., e...

Science and Technology Studies

This dissertation takes as its starting point some curious historical parallels in research on the heritability of alcoholism from opposite ends of the 20th century, and the underlying continuity in assumptions implicated by these parallels. Rather than review mainstream historical narratives on the origins of genetic research and alcoholism studies, I examine evidence and developments as yet unexplored by scholars. First I examine the origins of recent research models and diagnostic criteria th...

Urban Affairs and Planning

Although decentralization is a common ingredient of the third wave of democracycurrently underway in Latin America, few investigations have been conducted on the tools used to prepare local actors for increased responsibility. This study begins to fill that void. It examines the ability of municipal development plans (MDP) to effectively achieve the goals that underlay their formulation and, consequently, promote decentralization within Guatemala. <p>Over the course of my service i...