The purpose of the study was to explore the overall perceptions that resource room teachers had of the required SMART goals, rubric outcome sampling, and the collaborative effort of Personal Program Planning team. This study included a descriptive, embedded single-case study having three sub-units. Each subunit consisted of one resource room teacher who was teaching in a central Saskatchewan urban school division at the elementary level. Each resource room teacher was asked to select one student with a cognitive, behavioural, or multiple disability and a previous PPP document written for him or her (i.e., this is not the students first year of meeting the criteria for Intensive Supports) by that particular resource room teacher. Each resource room teacher participated in three separate focus open-ended interviews designed to explore their perceptions of SMART goals, rubric outcome sampling, and the collaborative nature of the PPP process.<p> Pattern-matching and exploration building were the two analytic techniques used in this study. Numerous themes were identified in the data. The themes present in data collected from at least two of the participants included: the need to be flexible with parents; resource room teachers have large workloads; concern over EAs not being able to attend PPP meetings; the need for rubrics to be discussed within the context of a PPP meeting; the effect of having different knowledge bases and levels of expertise represented in a PPP team; the use of visual aides during the PPP meeting; and working with the dual role of resource room teacher and vice principal.

User interface design is becoming more reliant on user emotional states to improve usability, adapt to the users state, and allow greater expressiveness. Historically, usability has relied on performance metrics for evaluation, but user experience, with an emphasis on aesthetics and emotions, has become recognized as important for improving user interfaces. Research is ongoing into systems that automatically adapt to users states such as expertise or physical impairments and emotions are the next frontier for adaptive user interfaces. Improving the emotional expressiveness of computers adds a missing element that exists in human face-to-face interactions. The first step of incorporating users emotions into usability evaluation, adaptive interfaces, and expressive interfaces is to sense and gather the users emotional responses. Affective computing research has used predictive modeling to determine user emotional states, but studies are usually performed in controlled laboratory settings and lack realism. Field studies can be conducted to improve realism, but there are a number of logistical challenges with field studies: user activity data is difficult to gather, emotional state ground truth is difficult to collect, and relating the two is difficult. In this thesis, we describe a software solution that addresses the logistical issues of conducting affective computing field studies and we also describe an evaluation of the software using a field study. Based on the results of our study, we found that a software solution can reduce the logistical issues of conducting an affective computing field study and we provide some suggestions for future affective computing field studies.

With the increased technological advances of thermal imagers, existing theoretical models are not capable of predicting the advantages of advanced thermal imagers. The advanced thermal imager contains a staring focal plane array, which may be sensitive to multiple spectra, and light enough to be mounted on a rifle. Research was conducted to address portions of these three areas. Psychophysical experiments were conducted to model the impact of insufficient sampling on human observer performance for the identification of military vehicles. An information comparison metric was proposed for the comparison of different spectral images. The impact of dead pixels and thermal imager noise on the comparison metric were measured. A human performance model was then developed to predict a humans ability to identify small handheld objects. The impacts of these models on current and future research were discussed.

Traditional transfer function of integrators have warping effect in high frequency, this isn¡¦t good for make filter circuit. In reference[3] they mention a new transfer function to improve this error, but we found that the design of the previous circuit doesn¡¦t conform to the new transfer function. In this thesis, a different structure of integrator is presented, it use the method of double sampling to realize the modified bilinear transfer function, in addition, we also add a grounded-gate amplifier to decrease the input impedance and dummy switch technique what can reduce the charge injection error, then we use the central circuit to make the second order bandpass filter. The proposed circuit employ Hspice to simulate and design the form of the circuit layout, then use TSMC 0.35£gm CMOS process to make chip. The sampling frequency is 10MHz, the central frequency is 1MHz, and the power consumption is 1.78mW.

Determining which genes are essential for growth of a bacterial organism is an important question to answer as it is useful for the discovery of drugs that inhibit critical biological functions of a pathogen. To evaluate essentiality, biologists often use transposon mutagenesis to disrupt genomic regions within an organism, revealing which genes are able to withstand disruption and are therefore not required for growth. The development of next-generation sequencing technology augments transposon mutagenesis by providing high-resolution sequence data that identifies the exact location of transposon insertions in the genome. Although this high-resolution information has already been used to assess essentiality at a genome-wide scale, no formal statistical model has been developed capable of quantifying significance. This thesis presents a formal Bayesian framework for analyzing sequence information obtained from transposon mutagenesis experiments. Our method assesses the statistical significance of gaps in transposon coverage that are indicative of essential regions through a Gumbel distribution, and utilizes a Metropolis-Hastings sampling procedure to obtain posterior estimates of the probability of essentiality for each gene. We apply our method to libraries of M. tuberculosis transposon mutants, to identify genes essential for growth in vitro, and show concordance with previous essentiality results based on hybridization. Furthermore, we show how our method is capable of identifying essential domains within genes, by detecting significant sub-regions of open-reading frames unable to withstand disruption. We show that several genes involved in PG biosynthesis have essential domains.

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Il campionamento a valanga è considerato un tipo di campionamento non probabilistico, la cui rappresentatività può essere valutata solo sulla base di considerazioni soggettive. D’altro canto esso risulta spesso il solo praticamente utilizzabile nel caso di popolazioni senza lista di campionamento. La tesi si divide in due parti. La prima, teorica, descrive alcuni tentativi proposti in letteratura di ricondurre le forme di campionamento a valanga nell’alveo dei campionamenti probabilistici; tra questi è degno di nota il Respondent Driven Sampling, un disegno campionario che dovrebbe combinare il campionamento a valanga con un modello matematico che pesa le unità estratte in modo da compensare la non casualità dell’estrazione e permettere così l’inferenza statistica. La seconda, empirica, indaga le prestazioni del RDS sia attraverso simulazioni sia con una web-survey su una comunità virtuale in Internet, di cui si conoscono la struttura delle relazioni e alcune caratteristiche demografiche per ogni individuo. Le stime RDS, calcolate a partire dai dati delle simulazioni e della web-survey, sono confrontate con i valori veri della popolazione e le potenziali fonti di distorsione (in particolare quelle relative all’assunzione di reclutamento casuale) sono analizzate. / Populations without sampling frame are inherently hard to sample by conventional sampling designs. Often the only practical methods of obtaining the sample involve following social links from some initially identified respondents to add more research participants to the sample. These kinds of link-tracing designs make the sample liable to various forms of bias and make extremely difficult to generalize the results to the population studied. This thesis is divided into two parts. The first part of the thesis describes some attempts to build a statistical theory of link-tracing designs and illustrates, deeply, the Respondent-Driven Sampling, a link-tracing sampling design that should allow researchers to make, in populations without sampling frame, asymptotically unbiased estimates under certain conditions. The second part of the thesis investigates the performance of RDS by simulating sampling from a virtual community on the Internet, which are available in both the network structure of the population and demographic traits for each individual. In addition to simulations, this thesis tests the RDS by making a web-survey of the same population. RDS estimates from simulations and web-survey are compared to true population values and potential sources of bias (in particular those related to the random recruitment assumption) are discussed.

<p>Signal-integrity degradation from such factors as supply and substrate noise and cross talk between interconnects restricts the performance advances in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI). To avoid this and to keep the signal-integrity, accurate measurements of the on-chip signal must be performed to get an insight in how the physical phenomenon affects the signals. </p><p>High-speed digital signals can be taken off chip, through buffers that add delay. Propagating a signal through buffers restores the signal, which can be good if only information is wanted. But if the waveform is of importance, or if an analog signal should be measured the restoration is unwanted. Analog buffers can be used but they are limited to some hundred MHz. Even if the high-speed signal is taken off chip, the bandwidth of on-chip signals is getting very high, making the use of an external oscilloscope impossible for reliable measurement. Therefore other alternatives must be used. </p><p>In this work, an on-chip measuring circuit is designed, which makes use of the principle of a sampling oscilloscope. Only one sample is taken each period, resulting in an output frequency much lower than the input frequency. A slower signal is easier to take off-chip and it can easily be processed with an ordinary oscilloscope.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 244-246). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-114).