MBA Professional Report / The purpose of this MBA Project is to review existing policy of the Federal Energy Management Program under the purview of National Renewal Energy Laboratory (NREL) for Energy Savings Performance Contracts (ESPCs). This project will assess the ability for the Department of Defense to incorporate emerging technologies in alternative energy to supplement or replace existing power sources for DoD installations within the current Energy Savings Performance Contract policy. To do this the project will review previous and existing Energy Savings Performance Contracts. Further, this project will conduct a cost-benefit analysis of conventional power versus emerging photovoltaic energy for the Army’s Fort Bliss in El Paso, TX. The project will also analyze energy demands based on a new force alignment at Fort Bliss in accordance with the recent Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) findings. The project will review current Energy Performance Contract Policy and recommend changes to allow for the use of emerging alternative energy technologies.

Research regarding the potential value of using a personal construct psychology (PCP) framework to explore recovery in psychosis has been minimal. Mental health policy guidelines (Shepherd et al., 2008) recommend that recovery in mental health is an important area that needs further research. This study aims to further understanding of recovery in service users with psychosis, by examining personal constructs elicited from participants, in contrast to the researcher supplying constructs (Bell and McGorry, 1992). Further, it attempts to define the degree of recovery using the Recovery Assessment Scale (RAS, Corrigan et al., 1999). Thirty two adults from the NHS and voluntary sector participated in the study; each completed a repertory grid (Kelly, 1955). The RAS enabled recovery to be defined by splitting the sample, and comparisons made between low to moderate and high recovery groups. The main findings of the study show that participants in the high recovery group showed less differentiation between their different selves; greater self-esteem; an experienced sense of control over their environment; a higher degree of quality and quantity of support; and a higher degree of hope and goal setting than participants in the low to moderate recovery group. In addition, content analysis (Landfield, 1971) of current self constructs showed that participants in high recovery construed themselves as being more self-sufficient, more active socially, and displayed higher tenderness compared to those in low to moderate recovery. Findings show how repertory grid methods can be applied clinically in order to help with case assessment and formulation, and help facilitate individually tailored therapeutic interventions to enhance recovery. For example, self differentiation findings suggest that to help an individual move towards a higher degree of recovery involves firstly loosening, and then tightening up their construing system. Secondly, self-esteem measures enabled identification of personal goals to strive towards in terms of an individual’s conception of their current and ideal self, and thus steps to take to progress toward recovery. Thirdly, the Pawn and Origin Scale (Westbrook and Viney, 1980) highlighted the degree of control over one’s external and internal world, thus highlighting areas that could be worked on to progress toward higher recovery. Clinical interventions addressing implicative dilemmas were also identified as enabling a change in behaviour, and therefore movement toward recovery. Limitations of the study are discussed, including using HICLAS (De Boeck, 1992) to measure self elaboration in recovery; and future research outlined, including exploring recovery in psychosis through a longitudinal study, and sampling across different mental health populations.

The aim of this study was to examine how trauma may affect the development of psychosis. Previous research in the field of Personal Construct Theory has found that people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia have a poorly elaborated self-concept. This study investigated whether there may be a relationship between trauma and self-elaboration in people who have experienced psychosis. It was hypothesised that more severe trauma in childhood would lead to lower self-elaboration, greater conflict in the self concept and lower elaboration of self when experiencing a traumatic life event in childhood. It was also hypothesised that people would see themselves as less like other people if they had experienced more severe trauma. A sample of 21 people who had experienced psychosis completed repertory grids. The grids included elements of self at different times in one’s life, self in different life events and other people. When childhood sexual abuse was the main grouping variable, the high trauma group had lower self-elaboration, saw themselves as more different to other people and had greater conflict in their self-concept. The findings of the study were discussed in relation to childhood abuse and its impact on self-construction. Limitations of the study were also discussed and related to future research on the relationships between self-concept, trauma and psychosis.

Despite extensive research into the impact of brain injury on individuals and their adult relatives, much less is know about the impact of parental brain injury on child relatives. The aim of the study was to identify if there was a relationship between changes in how children construed themselves and their parents following the brain injury and adjustment, and to identify if there was a relationship between structure of the child’s construct system and level of adjustment. There were four hypotheses to be tested. Hypothesis one predicted that larger changes in how young people construe themselves and significant others following parental brain injury compared to how they were construed prior to parental brain injury would be associated with poorer adjustment. Hypothesis two predicted that more structured ‘before acquired brain injury’ constructs in comparison to the structure of ‘after acquired brain injury’ constructs would be associated with poorer adjustment. Hypothesis three predicted that more superordinate ‘before acquired brain injury’ constructs in comparison to ‘after acquired brain injury’ constructs would be associated with poorer adjustment. Hypothesis four predicted that tighter construing would be associated with better adjustment following parental brain injury. There were 10 participants in the study aged 10-17 who had a parent with a brain injury. Each participant completed a repertory grid and the Personality Inventory for Youth, a measure of adjustment. It was found that larger distances between how children construed themselves or their parents currently compared to how they were construed pre-injury were related to poorer adjustment. There was also found to be a relationship between relative intensity of the post-brain injury construct system and some aspects of adjustment. There was no significant relationship between adjustment and relative superordinancy of post-injury constructs or adjustment and tightness of construing. Future research is indicated to verify the findings of this study, and to explore possible interventions for young people experiencing poor adjustment following parental brain injury.

National Health Service (NHS) statistics show that 4000 people in the United Kingdom are receiving help for gender concerns (DH, 2008). Research has highlighted the importance of romantic relationships during early adulthood and an association with mental health (Fincham and Cui, 2011). The experience of romantic relationships among transgender people in ‘emerging adulthood’ (Arnett, 2000, 2006) is an under-researched area. The decision making process concerning, and construal of, romantic relationships among this group have yet to be investigated using Personal Construct Theory (PCT). This study uses qualitative and quantitative methods of inquiry from PCT to investigate the experiences of transgender people encountering romantic relationships. Overarching themes emerging from the participants in this study were of identity validation through romantic relationships, having a bi-gendered lens of the world, facilitating greater understanding in society, and learning from past relationships. Participants’ experiences are analysed individually, as well as as a group. Clinical significance of this, limitations and future research are also discussed.

This research explores the leadership constructs of global leaders and Chinese managers in multi-national corporations (MNCs) in order to understand whether their constructs are misaligned, and if so, in what ways. To address these questions, data was gathered via repertory grid test interviews with 31 global leaders and 59 Chinese managers in six MNCs’ China organizations. Analysis subsequently revealed that global leaders rely upon twelve key constructs to define global leadership capability and potential. These are: creative, drive to improve, communication skill, collaborative style, charisma, professional knowledge and experience, visionary, cross culture, flexibility, confidence, team development and emotional intelligence. Crucially however, half of the global leaders’ key constructs were not identified as important to Chinese managers; furthermore, most of the missing constructs resonate with charismatic and transformational leadership characteristics, indicating a gap between the two groups’ leadership concepts. Subsequently, both groups of leaders’ leadership constructs were compared with their respective companies’ Leadership Competency Frameworks. The results again revealed gaps, suggesting reliance upon headquarter-developed leadership frameworks to communicate leadership expectations and develop local leaders is either deficient, or inappropriate. The global leaders and Chinese managers’ perspectives on Chinese managers’ career barriers were also explored, with the evidence indicating that perceptions of both groups are influenced by their own cultural assumptions. As the global leaders’ perspectives aligned with their own leadership constructs but Chinese managers were not aware of the importance of those constructs, it seems to support the contention that a bias may exist when global leaders evaluate Chinese managers’ leadership capability and potential.

The overall aim of the thesis has been to introduce Personal Mobile Grids (PMGrids) as a novel paradigm in grid computing that scales grid infrastructures to mobile devices and extends grid entities to individual personal users. In this thesis, architectural designs as well as simulation models for PM-Grids are developed. The core of any grid system is its resource scheduler. However, virtually all current conventional grid schedulers do not address the non-clairvoyant scheduling problem, where job information is not available before the end of execution. Therefore, this thesis proposes a honeybee inspired resource scheduling heuristic for PM-Grids (HoPe) incorporating a radical approach to grid resource scheduling to tackle this problem. A detailed design and implementation of HoPe with a decentralised self-management and adaptive policy are initiated. Among the other main contributions are a comprehensive taxonomy of grid systems as well as a detailed analysis of the honeybee colony and its nectar acquisition process (NAP), from the resource scheduling perspective, which have not been presented in any previous work, to the best of our knowledge. PM-Grid designs and HoPe implementation were evaluated thoroughly through a strictly controlled empirical evaluation framework with a well-established heuristic in high throughput computing, the opportunistic scheduling heuristic (OSH), as a benchmark algorithm. Comparisons with optimal values and worst bounds are conducted to gain a clear insight into HoPe behaviour, in terms of stability, throughput, turnaround time and speedup, under different running conditions of number of jobs and grid scales. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of HoPe performance where it has successfully maintained optimum stability and throughput in more than 95% of the experiments, with HoPe achieving three times better than the OSH under extremely heavy loads. Regarding the turnaround time and speedup, HoPe has effectively achieved less than 50% of the turnaround time incurred by the OSH, while doubling its speedup in more than 60% of the experiments. These results indicate the potential of both PM-Grids and HoPe in realising futuristic grid visions. Therefore considering the deployment of PM-Grids in real life scenarios and the utilisation of HoPe in other parallel processing and high throughput computing systems are recommended.

The malicious host problem is challenging in distributed systems such as grids and clouds. Rival organisations may share the same physical infrastructure. Administrators might deliberately or accidentally compromise users' data. The thesis concerns the development of a security architecture that allows users to place a high degree of trust in remote systems to process their data securely. The problem is tackled through a new security layer that ensures users' data can only be accessed within a trusted execution environment. Access to encrypted programs and data is authorised by a key management service using trusted computing attestation. Strong data integrity and confidentiality protection on remote hosts is provided by the job security manager virtual machine. The trusted grid architecture supports the enforcement of digital rights management controls. Subgrids allow users to define a strong trusted boundary for delegated grid jobs. Recipient keys enforce a trusted return path for job results to help users create secure grid workflows. Mandatory access controls allow stakeholders to mandate the software that is available to grid users. A key goal of the new architecture is backwards compatibility with existing grid infrastructure and data. This is achieved using a novel virtualisation architecture where the security layer is pushed down to the remote host, so it does not need to be pre-installed by the service provider. A new attestation scheme, called origin attestation, supports the execution of unmodified, legacy grid jobs. These features will ease the transition to a trusted grid and help make it practical for deployment on a global scale.

Analysis of functional connectivity of simultaneously recorded multiple spike trains is one of the major issues in the neuroscience. The progress of the statistical methods to the analysis of functional connectivity of multiple spike trains is relatively slow. In this thesis two statistical techniques are presented to the analysis of functional connectivity of multiple spike trains. The first method is known as the modified correlation grid (MCG). This method is based on the calculation of cross-correlation function of all possible pair-wise spike trains. The second technique is known as the Cox method. This method is based on the modulated renewal process (MRP). The original paper on the application of the Cox method (Borisyuk et al., 1985) to neuroscience data was used to analyse only pairs and triplets of spike trains. This method is further developed in this thesis to support simultaneously recorded of any possible set of multiple spike trains. A probabilistic model is developed to test the Cox method. This probabilistic model is based on the MRP. Due to the common probabilistic basis of the probabilistic model and the Cox method, the probabilistic model is a convenient technique to test the Cox method. A new technique based on a pair-wise analysis of Cox method known as the Cox metric is presented to find the groups of coupled spike trains. Another new technique known as motif analysis is introduced which is useful in identifying interconnections among the spike trains. This technique is based on the triplet-wise analysis of the Cox method. All these methods are applied to several sets of spike trains generated by the Enhanced Leaky and Integrate Fire (ELIF) model. The results suggest that these methods are successful for analysing functional connectivity of simultaneously recorded multiple spike trains. These methods are also applied to an experimental data recorded from cat’s visual cortex. The connection matrix derived from the experimental data by the Cox method is further applied to the graph theoretical methods.

Interface tracking methods for segregated flows such as breaking ocean waves are an important tool in marine engineering. With the development in marine renewable devices increasing and a multitude of other marine flow problems that benefit from the possibility of simulation on computer, the need for accurate free surface solvers capable of solving wave simulations has never been greater. An important component of successfully simulating segregated flow of any type is accurately tracking the position of the separating interface between fluids. It is desirable to represent the interface as a sharp, smooth, continuous entity in simulations. Popular Eulerian interface tracking methods appropriate for segregated flows such as the Marker and Cell Method (MAC) and the Volume of Fluid (VOF) were considered. However these methods have drawbacks with smearing of the interface and high computational costs in 3D simulations being among the most prevalent. This PhD project uses a level set method to implicitly represent an interface. The level set method is a signed distance function capable of both sharp and smooth representations of a free surface. It was found, over time, that the level set function ceases to represent a signed distance due to interaction of local velocity fields. This affects the accuracy to which the level set can represent a fluid interface, leading to mass loss. An advection solver, the Cubic Interpolated Polynomial (CIP) method, is presented and tested for its ability to transport a level set interface around a numerical domain in 2D. An advection problem of the level set function demonstrates the mass loss that can befall the method. To combat this, a process known as reinitialisation can be used to re-distance the level set function between time-steps, maintaining better accuracy. The goal of this PhD project is to present a new numerical gradient approximation that allows for the extension of the reinitialisation method to unstructured numerical grids. A particular focus is the Cartesian cut cell grid method. It allows geometric boundaries of arbitrary complexity to be cut from a regular Cartesian grid, allowing for flexible high quality grid generation with low computational cost. A reinitialisation routine using 1st order gradient approximation is implemented and demonstrated with 1D and 2D test problems. An additional area-conserving constraint is introduced to improve accuracy further. From the results, 1st order gradient approximation is shown to be inadequate for improving the accuracy of the level set method. To obtain higher accuracy and the potential for use on unstructured grids a novel gradient approximation based on a slope limited least squares method, suitable for level set reinitialisation, is developed. The new gradient scheme shows a significant improvement in accuracy when compared with level set reinitialisation methods using a lower order gradient approximation on a structured grid. A short study is conducted to find the optimal parameters for running 2D level set interface tracking and the new reinitialisation method. The details of the steps required to implement the current method on a Cartesian cut cell grid are discussed. Finally, suggestions for future work using the methods demonstrated in the thesis are presented.