Cochlear dead regions (DRs) are areas in the cochlea where inner hair cells and/or neurones are functioning so poorly that a sound that causes peak basilar membrane motion in that region is more efficiently detected via off-frequency listening. The Threshold Equalising Noise (TEN) test is a clinical test procedure for detecting DRs. Psychophysical Tuning Curves (PTCs) can be used to identify the boundary frequency of the DR although the clinical importance of doing this has yet to be determined. Some studies have suggested that the reduction of amplification well inside the DR may be beneficial; however, other studies have been unable to replicate these findings in a more typical clinical population. Three studies were completed in order to:1. determine the prevalence of DRs in a clinical sample of the UK adult population,2. investigate repeatability, agreement and clinical feasibility of the TEN-test and fast PTCs in a clinical setting, and 3. determine the benefit of high-frequency amplification in ears with and without DRs, when listening to nonsense syllable speech material in quiet and babble. In the first study, 343 hearing-impaired adults were tested for DRs using the TEN-test. In total, 36% (95% confidence interval 31-41) of these adults had a DR in at least one ear, but frequently at 4 kHz only. Only 3% (1-5) of participants had a DR spanning more than three consecutive frequencies. These findings suggest that DRs usually only span 1 or 2 clinically-relevant frequencies. In the second study, the TEN-test was completed on 70 ears at frequencies between 0.5 and 4 kHz. Fast PTCs were measured on 20 ears at ≥ 2 frequencies. The TEN-test and fast PTCs were highly repeatable on retest (97% and 100%, respectively). There was 87% agreement between the two procedures in terms of the presence of off-frequency listening, with the TEN-test less likely to detect a DR than fast PTCs. Compared to the TEN-test, fast PTCs had a 10% lower ‘conclusive finding’ rate and the test duration was typically 40 minutes longer. Therefore, the TEN-test is more clinically acceptable, but it may underestimate the extent of a DR because of its inability to precisely identify the boundary frequency. In the third study, 18 ears with a high-frequency DR and 18 matched ears without a DR were tested. Vowel-Consonant-Vowel (VCV) stimuli were presented in quiet and babble when listening with an unfiltered and three low-pass filtered hearing aid settings. Best performance was obtained in the unfiltered condition; however the DR group performed significantly poorer than the controls in babble. There was no evidence to support reducing amplification in ears with a DR. However, participants with DRs may benefit from counseling about the limitations of listening in noise. In summary, DRs are relatively prevalent in hearing-impaired adults and can be diagnosed most efficiently in a clinical setting using the TEN-test. However, DRs are often restricted to a narrow frequency range and, in the typical adult clinical population, there is no evidence to support deviating from prescription targets.

This thesis deals with the development of a conceptually new tester for evaluation of car chassis damping. The tester will work on the basis of tracking of the body attenuation at the points of the silencers after crossing the obstacles. The kinematic motion parameters will be scanned using an inertial measurement unit.

In this thesis, we study the unit root tests which includes the ADF, PP and KPSS tests, the long memory tests such as the R/S and GPH tests, and the applications of these methods in high frequency financial data analysis. The software SPLUS was adopted to analyze data and correction of the SPLUS program in unit tests are also proposed. To apply these two test methods in high frequency data, we quoted the library, HFlibrary designed by Yan and Zivot in 2003 for preliminary data analysis and propose a new library HFanalysis, which can be used in correcting high frequency data (excluding N.A. value, sorting transactions and retrieve a certain time of transactions), obtaining equi-distanced time intervals and testing for unit root and long memory properties. In additions, we apply this proposed library to simulate the power of traditional unit root methods such as the ADF test and long memory test method such as the R/S and to perform an empirical study. Finally, we explore the power of the ADF for testing data simulated from a threshold unit root model and simulate the percentiles of the null distribution of the following threshold unit root tests: WALD, LM, LR and W£f.

When analyzing ecological data, one considers traditional multivariate techniques to be unsuitable. The use of dissimilarity coefficients and distance matrices is a way, how to solve this problem. In this work we present some of these coefficients and distance-based tests: Mantel test, several versions of ANOSIM and MRPP tests and distance-based test for homogeneity of multivariate dispersions. We focus on relationships among these tests and illustrate the use with an example. We also discuss the difficulties of interpretation of the results of these tests.

Many cutting-edge computer and electronic products are powered by advanced Systems-on-Chip (SoC). Advanced SoCs encompass superb performance together with large number of functions. This is achieved by efficient integration of huge number of transistors. Such very large scale integration is enabled by a core-based design paradigm as well as deep-submicron and 3D-stacked-IC technologies. These technologies are susceptible to reliability and testing complications caused by thermal issues. Three crucial thermal issues related to temperature variations, temperature gradients, and temperature cycling are addressed in this thesis. Existing test scheduling techniques rely on temperature simulations to generate schedules that meet thermal constraints such as overheating prevention. The difference between the simulated temperatures and the actual temperatures is called temperature error. This error, for past technologies, is negligible. However, advanced SoCs experience large errors due to large process variations. Such large errors have costly consequences, such as overheating, and must be taken care of. This thesis presents an adaptive approach to generate test schedules that handle such temperature errors. Advanced SoCs manufactured as 3D stacked ICs experience large temperature gradients. Temperature gradients accelerate certain early-life defect mechanisms. These mechanisms can be artificially accelerated using gradient-based, burn-in like, operations so that the defects are detected before shipping. Moreover, temperature gradients exacerbate some delay-related defects. In order to detect such defects, testing must be performed when appropriate temperature-gradients are enforced. A schedule-based technique that enforces the temperature-gradients for burn-in like operations is proposed in this thesis. This technique is further developed to support testing for delay-related defects while appropriate gradients are enforced. The last thermal issue addressed by this thesis is related to temperature cycling. Temperature cycling test procedures are usually applied to safety-critical applications to detect cycling-related early-life failures. Such failures affect advanced SoCs, particularly through-silicon-via structures in 3D-stacked-ICs. An efficient schedule-based cycling-test technique that combines cycling acceleration with testing is proposed in this thesis. The proposed technique fits into existing 3D testing procedures and does not require temperature chambers. Therefore, the overall cycling acceleration and testing cost can be drastically reduced. All the proposed techniques have been implemented and evaluated with extensive experiments based on ITC’02 benchmarks as well as a number of 3D stacked ICs. Experiments show that the proposed techniques work effectively and reduce the costs, in particular the costs related to addressing thermal issues and early-life failures. We have also developed a fast temperature simulation technique based on a closed-form solution for the temperature equations. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed simulation technique reduces the schedule generation time by more than half.

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The number of aircraft parameters used in flight-testing has constantly increased over the years and there is no sign that situation will change in the near future. On the contrary, in modern, software-driven, digital avionic systems, all sorts of parameters circulate through digital buses and can be transferred to on-board data acquisition systems more easily than those converted from traditional analog transducers, facilitating the request for more and more parameters to be acquired, processed, visualized, stored and retrieved at any given time. The constant unbalance between what parameter quantity engineers believe to be “sufficient” for developing and troubleshooting systems in a new aircraft, which tends to grow with aircraft complexity, and the associated cost of instrumenting a test prototype accordingly, which tends to grow beyond budget limits, pushes for new creative ways of handling both tendencies without compromising the ease of performing an engineering analysis directly from flight test data. This paper presents an alternative for handling large collections of flight test parameters through a relational approach, particularly in two important scenarios: the very basic creation and administration of the traditional “Flight Test Parameter List” and the transmission of selected data over a telemetry link for visualization in a Ground Station.

Problem Statement: Nowadays, multiple choice (MC) tests are very common, and replace many constructed response (CR) tests. However, literature reveals that there is no consensus whether both test formats are equally suitable for measuring students' ability or knowledge. This might be due to the fact that neither the type of MC question nor the scoring rule used when comparing test formats are mentioned. Hence, educators do not have any guidelines which test format or scoring rule is appropriate. Purpose of Study: The study focuses on the comparison of CR and MC tests. More precisely, short answer questions are contrasted to equivalent MC questions with multiple responses which are graded with three different scoring rules. Research Methods: An experiment was conducted based on three instruments: A CR and a MC test using a similar stem to assure that the questions are of an equivalent level of difficulty. This procedure enables the comparison of the scores students gained in the two forms of examination. Additionally, a questionnaire was handed out for further insights into students' learning strategy, test preference, motivation, and demographics. In contrast to previous studies the present study applies the many-facet Rasch measurement approach for analyzing data which allows improving the reliability of an assessment and applying small datasets. Findings: Results indicate that CR tests are equal to MC tests with multiple responses if Number Correct (NC) scoring is used. An explanation seems straight forward since the grader of the CR tests did not penalize wrong answers and rewarded partially correct answers. This means that s/he uses the same logic as NC scoring. All other scoring methods such as the All or-Nothing or University-Specific rule neither reward partial knowledge nor penalize guessing. Therefore, these methods are found to be stricter than NC scoring or CR tests and cannot be used interchangeably. Conclusions: CR tests can be replaced by MC tests with multiple responses if NC scoring is used, due to the fact that the multiple response format measures more complex thinking skills than conventional MC questions. Hence, educators can take advantage of low grading costs, consistent grading, no scoring biases, and greater coverage of the syllabus while students benefit from timely feedback. (authors' abstract)

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International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / With the technological evolution of flying equipment, computing and store capacity we need to have a new view of the methods of acquisition, storage and archiving data.

ITC/USA 2015 Conference Proceedings / The Fifty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2015 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / A new advanced 2.4 meter telemetry tracking antenna system allows for successful autotracking of high dynamic targets. The system is designed to work at C, S, and L bands. One of these systems at L/S-band was recently implemented and tested in the field. The testing included tracking aircraft during maneuvers such as rolls, spins, and antenna tower fly-by at high rates of speed. This paper examines test results and some of the features of the new system that allow for continuous tracking.