There have been many theories about cultural differences found between groups on intelligence test scores. The main debate has been between those in favor of a genetic explanation versus those in favor of a more environmental one. When considering environmental influences, one explanation has been that there could be differential effects due to the assessor. Although there have been several studies that have considered this possibility, the results are inconclusive. The current study attempted to tease apart the assessor effects by focusing on biases in the assessor alone and by eliminating effects from the test taker. The study is an experimental design where participants were randomly assigned a WISC-III protocol of members of different ethnic groups. It was hypothesized that different groups may score these IQ tests differentially depending on the race/ethnicity of the person who was assessed. Results showed that when given identical protocols, participants scored African American protocols lower than Caucasian American protocols in both high and average IQ conditions. Clinical implications of these results are discussed.

The purpose of this study was to provide historical and philosophical information regarding the field of Adult Education from the perspective of 15 African Americans. This studys design utilized the findings from African-American Adult Educators (A-AAE) to add to the depth and breadth of information about Adult Education by engaging participants in reflective dialogue regarding the field and their experiences. This qualitative design used semi-structured interviews to obtain information about the relationships among and influences of major professors and dissertation committees. The study included influences, direct and indirect, as well as influential authors, books, and publications. Adult Education was analyzed by examining the ideological nature and function of African-American modes of thought about the field. Discussion included divergence from ideologies and values of major professors by the A-AAE and the basis for that divergence. Themes emerged from discussions of the accomplishments and disappointments of each participant. Individuals spoke freely about changes and trends in adult education during their careers. Most found influences in communities of their origin, rather than in the academic communities of major professors or dissertation committees. The majority modestly discussed their accomplishments, regretting not having published more. A few discussed global views in the future tense, while most discussed application of Adult Education theory in the present. Without exception, A-AAE spoke both of changes towards diversity and of the long way the field has to go in this direction. Many felt being marginalized provided a different perspective. Major changes included decreased numbers of graduate programs presenting fewer job opportunities and a shift from a male to a female predominated professorate. All valued national organizations, but most felt that they must increase visibility to meet the field’s ever-growing needs in the global political arena. The newest professors must be activists of social change through politics and scholarly research from the platform of the Adult Education professorate. African-American professors are dealing with issues of discrimination in the field of Adult Education by replacing the gatekeepers, and developing more collaborative research, by providing opportunities for people of color to participate in scholarly activities.

Composite magneto-dielectric materials have been investigated over the years because of their potential applications in RF and microwave devices as the dielectric constant and permeability can be individually changed in these materials. In the recent past, there is a renewed interest in systems classified as ferroelectromagnets or multiferroics, which possess simultaneous ferroelectric and magnetic ordering as well as interesting magnetoelastic phenomena. In all these ferrite-ferroelectric materials, the coupling between the permeability (μ) of the magnetically ordered phase and permittivity (e) of the ferroelectric phase make them attractive candidates for multifunctional applications. Ba0.5Sr0.5TiO3 (BSTO) is a ferroelectric with potential applications in tunable filters, antennas, and thin film capacitors. BaFe12O19 (BaF) is a hard ferromagnet with large in-plane anisotropy which makes it promising for use in microwave and RF devices that need permanent magnets for biasing requirements. We have used magnetron sputtering to deposit multilayer films of BSTO and BaF on Al2O3 and heated Si/SiO2. To our knowledge this is the first attempt at combining these technologically important materials in multilayer form. The as-deposited films were amorphous and post-annealing was optimized until distinct BSTO and BaF x-ray peaks could be identified. Surface and images were obtained by atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The multilayer structure and BSTO/BaF interfaces were identified using cross-sectional SEM. Magnetic properties of the multilayer films were measured using a Physical Properties Measurement System (PPMS) by Quantum Design at 10K and 300K over a range of magnetic field (0 < H < 7T). We have attempted to correlate some of the magnetic characteristics with the film microstructure. In addition, we have deposited layers of Fe3O4 nanoparticles onto both bare Si/SiO2 substrates and the surfaces of the multilayers using Langmuir-Blodgett technique. Preliminary images of monolayer Fe3O4 particles reveal some ordering present. We have also used the PPMS to look at the magnetic properties of the particles, both by themselves and deposited onto the multilayers to see what magnetic effects the particles have on ferrite-ferroelectric systems.

High performance multijunction solar cells based on polycrystalline thin films will require a wide bandgap top cell with at least 15% efficiency. With the bottom cell being CIGS which have already demonstrated the required efficiencies, this work aims to study the complete fabrication and performance of Cd1-xZnxTe solar cells with a bandgap of 1.7eV on glass and flexible polyimide substrates. Cd1-xZnxTe films were deposited by RF magnetron co-sputtering with CdTe and ZnTe sources. By varying the composition of Cd1-xZnxTe being deposited the required bandgap of 1.7eV was achieved. The optical and structural properties of the films were studied with optical transmission, SEM and XRD measurements. The films exhibited high optical transmission and pinhole free grain structure. CZT solar cells were fabricated on glass and flexible polyimide substrate and were analyzed by J-V and spectral response measurements. The effect of post deposition treatments and the effect of N2 during sputtering on CZT device performance were studied.

Mobile robots are being used for an increasing array of tasks, from military reconnaissance to planetary exploration to urban search and rescue. As robots are deployed in increasingly complex domains, teams are called upon to perform tasks that exceed the capabilities of any particular robot. Thus, it becomes necessary for robots to cooperate, such that one robot can recruit another to jointly perform a task. Though techniques exist to allocate robots to tasks, either the communication overhead that these techniques require prevents them from scaling up to large teams, or assumptions are made that limit them to simple domains. This dissertation presents a novel emotion-based recruitment approach to the multi-robot task allocation problem. This approach requires less communication bandwidth than comparable methods, enabling it to scale to large team sizes, and making it appropriate for low-power or stealth applications. Affective recruitment is tolerant of unreliable communications channels, and can find better solutions than simple greedy schedulers (based on experimental metrics of the time necessary to complete recruitment and the total number of messages transmitted). Experimental results in a simulated mine-detection task show that affective recruitment succeeds with network failure rates up to 25%, and requires 32% fewer transmissions compared to existing methods on average. Affective recruitment also scales better with team size, requiring up to 61% fewer transmissions than a greedy instantaneous scheduler that has an O(n) communications complexity.

The purpose of this study was to conduct a national survey to examine job satisfaction of community college academic deans as measured by the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) and an Individual Data Sheet (IDS) and to determine if academic deans will pursue the community college presidency in meeting the current leadership crisis. This study assessed the relationship of selected personal characteristics, unit-related characteristics, facets of job satisfaction, and career aspirations of academic deans. Six research questions directed this study. Four hundred community college academic deans were randomly assigned as participants and represented all 50 states. The usable response rate from the 400 participants was 50.5% (n=202) representing all 50 states. Demographic data pertaining to gender, age, ethnicity, degree status, tenure in position, gross annual salary, number of hours worked per week, major responsibilities, size of college, location of college, number of full-time and part-time faculty supervised, number of full-time and part-time staff supervised, and career aspirations were collected through use of the IDS. The 1977 Long-Form MSQ was used to measure general, intrinsic, and extrinsic job satisfaction. Appropriate summary statistics, correlations, and regressions were computed to answer all six-research questions. Community college academic deans were neither dissatisfied nor satisfied with an MSQ sample mean score of 3.828. The findings indicated that 55.5% (n=112) were neither dissatisfied nor satisfied. Only 76 academic deans or 37.5% stated that they were satisfied and three deans or 1.5% were very satisfied. Ten deans or 5% reported being dissatisfied and one or 0.5% dean reported being very dissatisfied. Only 15% or 30 deans reported that they had career aspirations to pursue the community college presidency within the next one to ten years. The results also indicated that those academic deans that do not desire to be a community college president are slightly more satisfied than those deans who want to be a president. The results of the survey indicate that academic deans with the lowest job satisfaction score desired to move along the academic leadership pathway, and the deans that were more satisfied wanted to move in another direction or stay a dean.

These collected stories represent a culling from a portion of work that shares a similar theme of loss--its manifestation, its channeling, by various fictional characters, into the palpable and sensate, into the physical world of the body. They are people, mostly women, who have lost their hold on the world to which they are accustomed, who become entangled in situations where their bearings are skewed, their judgment faulty, their decisions based solely on a physical, most often sexual, attraction that simultaneously depletes a sense of worth, while providing its semblance. The loss stems, at times, as in "Manifold," from beyond the control of the character, from the world of adults who cannot, for their own reasons, handle their own despair. It comes from the unavoidable presence of mental illness, and the inability of the character to perceive, amidst the confusion of change, a stable view. Often, as in "She Fell to Her Knees," there is no reference point upon which to base a way to live. Memory is only a trigger for more loss. The characters' own choices bring about loss in other ways--an abandoned infant, promiscuity, an encounter with a stranger--all choices made in an effort to ease, and which result in compounding precarious situations. Brief solace in sex results in inevitable emptiness. Relationships are sought for the safety of their impermanence. The respite from loneliness is always temporary, and almost always sought with the hope that from the physical will emerge the gift of emotional commitment. The stories seek to reveal, not the histories of the characters, but the maps of their emotional pasts. They attempt to portray the routes from which the women have stumbled, and in this way illuminate the emotional present of each story.

In order to reduce air pollution and reduce the amount of traffic on highways in the western United States, certain states have set up worksite trip reduction programs. Employers in these states must comply with worksite trip reduction laws and submit trip reduction plans to their respective regulatory agency each year. These plans are currently evaluated manually, and are either rejected or accepted by the agency. There are two major flaws in this system; the first is the amount of time required by the agency to review a plan could be a matter of months, and the second is that human reviewers have subjective opinions regarding the effectiveness of plans. The purpose of this thesis is to develop computer models using Radial Basis Function neural networks, with centers built using the k-means clustering algorithm. These networks will be compared against the performance of a commercial neural network-modeling program known as Predict, as well as the traditional method of selecting RBF neurons from the training set.

How has the party affiliation of presidential candidates impacted presidential elections in Ecuador? Historically, how have political party candidates and outsiders performed in elections and how has this changed over the last 20 years of democratic history? This case study attempts to answer fundamental questions about the connections between parties and electablility of presidential candidates. In a country with an inchoate party system and a history of populism, personalist candidates have always had relatively high levels of electoral success. Yet, it would seem that preference for unaligned candidates is increasing. After years of domination by political party candidates, the Ecuadorian people elected two political neophytes to compete in the final round of the 2002 elections. Both campaigned as outsiders, with strong opposition to the party system, and both created personal political parties that served as electoral vehicles. The dependent variable, the success of outsider candidates in the 2002 elections, appears to come from three main independent variables: a history of weak and highly ineffective parties, voter alienation from institutions due to continuing political and economic crises, and a political culture that revolves around personalist and populist presidents. Because of these evident trends, outsiders in Ecuador have found favorable situations for messages of opposition to the political system. In addition, appeals to alienated citizens, based on a personal campaign, have proven successful in Ecuadorian elections. Parties appear to become increasingly irrelevant in the executive sphere. After a brief historical orientation, this thesis discusses the impact of the presidencies of Abdala Bucaram (elected 1996, impeached 1997) and Jamil Mahuad (elected 1998, overthrown 2000) as important background for the 2002 election. The hypothesis is that in 2002, alignment with traditional political parties damaged candidates in the presidential elections. This thesis analyzes the presidential candidates that participated in the 2002 campaign, and concludes that affiliating with a traditional political party was a liability for a presidential candidate in the 2002 elections.

The relationship between intelligence as measured by the Shipley Institute of Living Scale, Coping Processes as measured by the Ways of Coping Scale and resilience as measured by Global Severity Index of the Brief Symptom Inventory, was examined in 88 individuals who had been sexually abused and 88 individuals who had not been sexually abused. The study attempted to assess whether more intelligent individuals and those who used certain coping styles would experience less distress in the face of adversity than individuals with lower levels of intelligence and who used different coping styles. The results indicated that intelligence was not associated with resilience in either the sexually abused or the non-sexually abused group. In the sexually abused group, the coping processes of Confronting, Distancing, Self Controlling, Accepting Responsibility, Escape Avoidance, Planful Problem Solving and Positive Reappraisal were all significantly positively correlated with the GSI. In the non-sexually abused group, however, the coping processes of Self Controlling, Accepting Responsibility and Escape Avoidance were all significantly positively correlated with the GSI. Results of a simultaneous regression indicated that in the sexually abused group, none of the variables that were correlated with resilience accounted for a significant amount of variance in GSI scores. In the sample of individuals who had not been sexually abused, the coping strategy of Escape Avoidance was the only individual predictor accounting for a significant amount of the GSI variance in the model. Possible reasons and implications of these results are discussed.