This dissertation investigated the effect of agenda presentations on selling effectiveness. In this context, agendas were salesperson-suggested constraints on the order of selecting or eliminating choice alternatives. A conceptual model compatible with Weitz's Contingency Model of Salesperson Effectiveness was developed and tested. It was hypothesized that the effectiveness of agenda sales presentations is moderated by buyer expertise, the buyer/seller relationship, and the relative competitive strength of the target product. The study used an interactive computer questionnaire which was programmed in the format of sales calls for a simulated copier purchase. Two hundred and forty-eight (248) industrial buyers with actual copier-purchasing responsibility comprised the sample. The simulation included sales calls for both target product and a market leader. The design for this field experiment varied the type of sales presentation (agenda and compensatory), the type of buyer/seller relationship (relational and discrete), and the relative competitive strength (stronger and weaker product) between subjects. Expertise was measured. Counterbalancing the order of the sales presentations allowed for examination of possible order effects. Selling effectiveness was measured by the inclusion of the target product in the buyer’s consideration set, selection of the target product as the buyer's final choice, buyer perceptions of the target product, buyer perceptions of the choice and choice process, and by the buyer's perceptions of the seller. Results support the notion of contingent decision making and Weitz's Contingent Model of Salesperson Effectiveness as evidenced by significant 4- way interactions for 6 of the 8 measures of selling effectiveness. In general, agenda presentations were shown to be more effective for use in getting the target product into the consideration set, improving buyers' perceptions of the seller's expertise, during discrete exchange, and for the weaker of the products. Counter to predictions, agendas were generally more effective when used with experts than novices. Future researchers may find it productive to further explore the effectiveness of agenda sales strategies. Finally, the promising results of this study demonstrate the potential use of this type of simulation for experimental research in sales. / Ph. D.

The goal of this investigation is to provide answers to the following three questions: 1. For the two year college student affairs professional, what are the interpersonal relationship conditions leading to trust of their performance evaluators? 2. How are certain organizational power/status variables, such as professional status differences or demographic characteristics (e.g., gender or ethnicity), related to those trust conditions. 3. Do conditions leading to interpersonal trust differ based on differences in any of these power/status variables? A questionnaire, which includes the Conditions of Trust Inventory (Butler, 1992) and rating measurements for the power/status variables, was administered on site. The sample was derived from a cross section of student affairs professionals employed at every community college in a mid- Atlantic state. A total of 204 subjects responded. All 10 trust condition subscales from the survey instrument were highly intercorrelated. A factor analysis yielded a single factor solution which failed to effectively differentiate, in any meaningful way, differences in either the original 10 variables or to produce any useful factor structure. One-way and two-way ANOVAS were used to compare subjects in rating their evaluators on measures of overall trust on the basis of the power/status categorical variables. The only significant power/status variable (p <.05) was the "positional status level difference." Pearson correlations were used to examine relationships between power/status continuous variables (time duration) and "overall trust." No significant correlations resulted. Last, a regression analysis examined any possible effects the "positional status level difference" variable had on subject ratings of their evaluators on measures of overall trust. In this case, "positional status level difference" was not found to be significant. The findings of this study suggest the following implications for further investigation: 1. A need to examine the relationship of certain organizational culture artifacts, unique to the two year college environment, to measures of trust between student affairs practitioners and their evaluators. 2. A need to develop an effective assessment instrument which is built upon behavioral rather than attitudinal assessments. 3. A need to investigate the phenomenon of interpersonal trust development through a substantive qualitative analysis. 4, The need to examine the relationship of several contextual variables in this study to subordinate motivation and performance. 5. The need to examine certain institutional characteristics (enrollment size, funding structures, governance structures, etc.) as they may relate to varying measures of interpersonal trust between student affairs professionals and their evaluators. 6. The need to consider, for practice, positional status level difference as it relates to span of control management issues. / Ed. D.

The main purpose of this dissertation is to explore and develop better signal modeling (decomposition) methods for nonstationary and/or nonlinear dynamic processes. Localization is the main focus. The characteristics of a nonstationary or nonlinear signal are decomposed onto a set of basis functions, either in the phase space spanned by time-frequency coordinates as Gabor proposed, or in the phase space spanned by a set of derivatives of different degree as defined in physics. To deal with time-varying signals, a Multiresolution Parametric Spectral Estimator (MPSE) is proposed together with its theory, techniques and applications. The resolution study provides the characteristics of windowed Fourier transforms, wavelet transforms, fixed resolution parametric spectral estimators, and the newly developed MPSE. Both the theoretical and the experimental results show that, of the above techniques, MPSE is the best in resolution. Furthermore, with proper a priori knowledge, MPSE can yield better resolution than the lower bound defined by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The application examples demonstrate the great potential of the MPSE method for tracking and analyzing time-varying processes. To deal with the time-varying characteristics caused by linearization of nonlinear processes, the Radial Basis Function Network (RBFN) is proposed for modeling nonlinear processes from a 'local' to a 'global' level. An equal distance sample rule is proposed for constructing the RBEN. Experiments indicate that the RBFN is a promising method for modeling deterministic chaos as well as stochastic processes, be it linear or nonlinear. The 'local' to 'global' approach of the RBEN also provides great potential for structure adaptation and knowledge accumulation. / Ph. D.

This study is concerned with the problem of active structural acoustic control (ASAC) of radiation from elastically supported plates under multiple-frequency excitation. The control is achieved by use of piezoelectric (PZT) actuators. An optimization procedure is developed to find the optimal locations of actuators with which the radiated sound power from the plate is minimized. Also, the optimization of the piezoelectric actuator locations has been conducted for the active control of sound radiation from plates under heavy fluid loading. In this dissertation, two types of approaches have been developed to optimally design the error sensors. One is to design the sensors which can provide information about the radiated sound power. The other is based on the sufficient conditions developed in this work for the error criteria in the linear quadratic optimal control theory. For the second approach, an optimization procedure has been developed to determine the optimal locations of microphone sensors in the sound field or the optimal dimensions and locations of polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) structural sensors applied directly to the plates. Moreover, a series of parametric studies have been conducted to evaluate the sensitivity of the control performance of the optimally designed actuator and sensor systems to the changes in important system parameters, such as the disturbance frequency, the plate support conditions and so on. The results demonstrate that for a plate under a multiple-frequency excitation, if the disturbance has an equal force amplitude for various frequencies, the optimization of the actuator location can be performed at the highest frequency component only. Through the use of a small number of carefully located error sensors, it is possible to achieve global sound attenuation. The optimization procedure provides not only a technique for control system design in practice, but also knowledge about the potential of active structural acoustic control. / Ph. D.

The food service industry consistently hires more people than any other industry in the world. In the United States, a transformed service-oriented economy, the food service industry will continue to increase in size and service. The food service, an extremely competitive industry, has one of the highest rates of failure as compared to other businesses. Because of this high rate of failure, the industry must continue attempting to devise methods of establishing a competitive advantage. One of the most efficient means of staying competitive would be to reduce the amount of turnover and to motivate employees. To reduce employee turnover and to increase employee job satisfaction it is important to ensure that the organizational culture is congruent between managers and workers at all levels. The goal of this study was to extend existing theory concerning the measurability of organizational culture. The sample adopted for this study was institutional food service, specifically in college settings. The four steps used in this study were as follows: (1) A review of the literature described those activities that were closely related to the norms and values of organizational culture. (2) A questionnaire for interviews was developed and perceptions of organizational culture activities were collected. (3) Four hypotheses were stated and the qualitative data was compiled. (4) The hypotheses were tested to determine the relationship between variables. It was determined that there was a relationship between the perceived organizational culture of upper management and the actual overall performance of operating units. The results of the study supported the contention that organizational culture is measurable, in both commercial and institutional food service operations. When there is congruency between the ideals of upper management and operating units, the organization is apt to have greater employee satisfaction. Consequently, the high rate of failure for food service businesses justifies having a very effective way of implementing training activities. Those activities should ensure that the ideals of organizational culture are understood and applied by all levels of the organization. In addition, follow up training should systematically ensure that the expected culture is actively providing a competitive advantage. / Ph. D.

A new method has been developed to study the electromagnetic fields scattered from one-dimensional perfect electric conducting arbitrarily rough surfaces which are planar in the mean. The technique allows for the calculation of the scattered fields in the low grazing angle regime, i.e., when the incident wave propagation vector approaches the horizontal to the mean surface plane, or in any situation which requires large number of current element unknowns, such as when surface length is very large compared to the incident electromagnetic wavelength or when the surface is very rough. The method presented in this work eliminates the matrix storage difficulties previously associated with solving this problem and significantly reduces the computation time, while providing a highly accurate solution over a large range of incident and scattering angles, as well as surface statistics. The technique reformulates the discretized Magnetic Field Integral Equation (MFIE) for the surface current by decomposing the Green's function or propagator matrix appearing in this equation into a sum of a lower and upper triangular matrix. This allows the original equation to be manipulated into a new discretized second kind integral equation, comprised of a new Born or source term and a new kernel, which can then be solved via iteration. We have found that the convergence rate of this new technique is very rapid, where typically only one or two iterations are required, and in most cases the iteration of the new integral equation is not even necessary due to the robust nature of the new Born term. Furthermore, we have never experienced a case in which the method failed to converge to the correct solution. / Ph. D.

This work addresses many problems associated with designing aerodynamic shapes using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes. The investigation focuses in the transonic flow regime where shock waves may have an adverse effect on the convergence of the optimization process. In particular, the interaction of the flow discontinuity with the discrete representation of the design problem may cause the objective function to be non-smooth. Methods for robust optimization of the nonsmooth functions are presented. The dissertation is divided into two parts, The first part investigates a simple model problem involving quasi-one-dimensional flow in a duct. The flow field computation is simple and contains many of the elements present in more complicated fluid flow problems. The optimization involves finding the cross-sectional area distribution of a duct that produces velocities which closely match a targeted velocity distribution containing a shock wave. The objective function which quantifies the difference between the targeted and calculated velocity distribution becomes nonsmooth due to the presence of the shock in the discretized field. Two techniques for derivative-based optimization are offered to resolve the difficulties associated with the non-smoothness of the objective function. The first technique, shock-fitting, involves careful integration of the objective function through the shock wave. The second technique, coordinate straining with shock penalty, uses a coordinate transformation to align the calculated shock with the target and then adds a penalty proportional to the square of the distance between shocks. These techniques are evaluated and tested using several methods to compute the derivatives, including finite-differences, direct and adjoint methods. The above two techniques rely on accurate estimations of the shock position, which may not be available for the general case. In the second part of the dissertation, we present an optimization method to solve the difficult model design problem requiring no information about the shock. The optimization begins with the construction of a response surface that smoothly approximates the objective function. Here the response surface is a least squares polynomial fit to carefully selected design points. By minimizing the response surface we can obtain a first guess for a reasonable design. Optimization may continue in one of two ways. In the first method, we probe a small region of the design space around the minimum and perform another response surface minimization. In the second method we switch to a derivative-based method assuming that in the small region around the minimum the function is smooth. In addition to the one-dimensional duct problem, two other shape design problems involving two-dimensional flow are solved to demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of the response surface method. One involves the inverse design of a bump in a transonic channel flow. The other involves the design of an airfoil for transonic flight. / Ph. D.

The prenatal period is a time of rapid development during which the fetus adapts to a wide range of experiences that may alter the infant’s developmental course. These experiences include exposure to conditions such as maternal stress, disease and the ingestion of a wide range of drugs. While great attention has focused, recently, on the effects of prenatal exposure to such drugs as cocaine and alcohol on newborn behavior, little is known about the effects of prenatal exposure to caffeine. Despite the widespread consumption of caffeine by mothers during pregnancy, recent investigations have suggested that caffeine may indeed function as a physical and behavioral teratogen. In addition to consistent findings of adverse physical outcomes such as prematurity and fetal growth retardation in both animals and humans, adverse effects of maternal caffeine consumption during pregnancy on behavioral development in the fetus have also been suggested by both comparative and human studies. For example, assessment of rodents prenatally exposed to caffeine generally show behavioral patterns of increased activity. Studies with humans using the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS) have shown that maternal caffeine consumption is related to differences in the ability of infants exposed to caffeine to regulate their level of arousal. The purpose of this study was to explore the relation between prenatal exposure to caffeine and newborn regulation of arousal, as measured by variations in neonatal heart rate and behavioral state. The heart rates and behavioral states of 50 healthy, full-term one to two-day-old neonates were assessed every 30 seconds for one hour between feedings. Measures of fetal growth and dysmorphology were also collected for each infant. Mothers were then interviewed about their caffeine consumption during pregnancy. When maternal nicotine and alcohol use during pregnancy were statistically controlled, results showed that infants who were prenatally exposed to higher amounts of caffeine had higher heart rates, both overall and during quiet and active sleep. In addition, these infants had experienced a higher number of obstetrical complications and were more likely to be from a lower socioeconomic background than infants prenatally exposed to smaller amounts of caffeine. These findings suggest that maternal caffeine consumption during pregnancy is related to altered levels of arousal among exposed infants. Since heart rate is an indicator of autonomic nervous system functioning, heavier maternal caffeine consumption during pregnancy may have subtle effects on nervous system (NS) development among exposed infants. These observed behavioral outcomes may, in turn, have long-term consequences for social and cognitive development. / Ph. D.

This study empirically examines the relationship between an ideal health promotion program profile and those actually in existence in the workplace. It is argued that those firms with health promotion programs most clearly matching the ideal profile will perform better than those firms with programs that do not achieve such a match. A hypothesis built on this central proposition is developed and tested based on the Winett, King and Altman (1989) integrative theoretical framework. Using a National Institute of Health (NIH) secondary data base, which originally contained 1,378 firms, this empirical effort generated the actual health promotion program profiles from a subsample of the available firm data. Tests of the hypothesis revealed some performance implications associated with differences in health promotion program designs. It is hypothesized that those firms with health promotion programs containing multiple intervention strategies administered at multiple levels of application would perform at a higher level than those lacking in multilevel design configurations. Findings show that the only consistent positive performance implication for deviations from an ideal health promotion program profile was related to employee participation and to a lesser extent turnover. No significant relationships are found for profit. Consistent with other research efforts, longitudinal analysis may be required to evaluate long-term performance measures such as profit and turnover. This study is the first effort in applying a comprehensive approach to the examination of work-site health promotion effectiveness. Future efforts can now be directed towards longitudinal analysis. / Ph. D.

A pinned column with initial deflection and an internal brace is investigated. The brace is modeled as a translational spring. Axial compressive loads are applied at the brace and the top of the column, and the equilibrium shape of the column is determined. The critical loads for the perfect column are computed analytically for several load combinations. The dynamic response of the column after sudden loss of bracing is analyzed using Galerkin’s method. With the consideration of the effects of the bracing location and the bracing stiffness, the maximum deflection of the column during motion is determined. The contribution of damping effects to the maximum deflection of the column is examined. Damping effects in the Galerkin method are compared to results from the finite element method (based on ABAQUS). The plastic dynamic analysis is carried out using ABAQUS. Both residual stresses and damping effects are considered, and the spread of plasticity during the motion is investigated. The cases studied include equal and unequal spans, and axial loads below and above the load which causes the column to collapse. / Ph. D.