The purpose of this study is to implement an intervention designed to develop background knowledge and investigate its effects on science proficiency for students who are at risk for failure. Pretest scores for 130 students were analyzed to identify students with prior knowledge deficits that may put them at risk for failure. Of the 44 students identified, 26 were matched by pretest scores and randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions. Prior to the start of a Human Body systems unit, students in the experimental condition were explicitly taught the function and location of 15 organs of the human body. I analyzed pre-and posttest scores to determine if the instruction had an impact on student recall. This study was conducted using a pre/post experimental design to investigate the effectiveness of using explicit instruction to pre-expose students to content knowledge to help improve student outcomes. Quantitative data was analyzed to determine if student posttest scores for two measures of science proficiency improved significantly as a result of instruction provided during intervention. Study limitations and future directions for research are discussed.

Women with Type II diabetes face unique challenges coping with the physiologic complications of the disease, which can be enhanced or hindered by their perception of their ability to effectively manage their diabetes. The Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ-R) is a tool that evaluates factors influencing patient-provider communication and assesses patient's perception of their health. Guided by the common sense model of self-regulation, this quality improvement project focused on familiarizing health care providers with the IPQ-R and evaluating their receptiveness to implement it with women with Type II diabetes. Seven Primary Care providers participated in an educational in-service that included information regarding the IPQ-R and its implementation in practice. Following the educational in-service, the participants completed a 10-question questionnaire evaluating the in-service and their likelihood of implementing the IPQ-R in their practice with women with Type II diabetes. According to the descriptive analysis of the questionnaires, 71% of the providers indicated that the IPQ-R would assist them when treating women with Type II diabetes and 85% of the provider's felt that the information presented during the in-service would enhance their confidence in using the IPQ-R in practice. The primary barriers to its use in practice were screening time and a lack of support staff. Implications for social change include improved treatment of women with Type II diabetes when using the IPQ-R, improved quality of health care, and enhanced cost effectiveness at the system level for chronic illness management and prevention. The IPQ-R can offer clinicians a reliable method to improve communication and psychosocial support necessary for the successful management of Type II diabetes in women.

Persons with dementia experience impairments in cognitive, behavioral, and functional ability, often leading to long-term care placement. The Enhancing Care Program was developed by the Alzheimer Society of Canada to assist organizations in improving care for this population. Although this program has been implemented in many facilities, the majority have been located in urban settings and there has been limited formal evaluation. Little is known about dementia care in rural facilities, or about how programs are implemented in rural settings. The Enhancing Care Program is based on eleven guidelines that outline best practices for caring for individuals with dementia. With the assistance of a facilitator from the Alzheimer Society, a multi-disciplinary team from the facility assesses their current ability to meet each guideline. In subsequent meetings, the team establishes specific, measurable goals to improve care in targeted areas. The two purposes of this study were to conduct a process evaluation of the Enhancing Care Program and to develop theory relating to the implementation of a program in two rural long-term care facilities. Observations were made over the course of seven months as teams worked through the guidelines and set goals. Focus group interviews consisting of team members took place at the end of the observation period. In addition, individual interviews were conducted with general staff, the facility managers, and the facilitator from the Alzheimer Society. Grounded theory methodology informed the research and analysis process. The theory that emerged, The Process of Building Effective Teams, explains the transition of the participants from collections of individuals to cohesive units that functioned as teams. Five key categories were developed in the theory: trust, respectful and open communication, transformational leadership, creating change collectively, and enhanced team culture. As part of the process evaluation of the Enhancing Care Program, 24 recommendations were made for program improvements.

While advances to the Internet have enabled users to easily interact and exchange information online, they have also created several opportunities for adversaries to prey on users’ private information. Whether the motivation for data collection is commercial, where service providers sell data for marketers, or political, where a government censors, blocks and tracks its people, or even personal, for cyberstalking purposes, there is no doubt that the consequences of personal information leaks can be severe. Low-latency anonymity networks have thus emerged as a solution to allow people to surf the Internet without the fear of revealing their identities or locations. In order to provide anonymity to users, anonymity networks route users’ traffic through several intermediate relays, which causes unavoidable extra delays. However, although these networks have been originally designed to support interactive applications, due to a variety of design weaknesses, these networks offer anonymity at the expense of further intolerable performance costs, which disincentivize users from adopting these systems. In this thesis, we seek to improve the network performance of low-latency anonymity networks while maintaining the anonymity guarantees they provide to users today. As an experimentation platform, we use Tor, the most widely used privacy-preserving network that empowers people with low-latency anonymous online access. Since its introduction in 2003, Tor has successfully evolved to support hundreds of thousands of users using thousands of volunteer-operated routers run all around the world. Incidents of sudden increases in Tor’s usage, coinciding with global political events, confirm the importance of the Tor network for Internet users today. We identify four key contributors to the performance problems in low-latency anonymity networks, exemplified by Tor, that significantly impact the experience of low-latency application users. We first consider the lack of resources problem due to the resource-constrained routers, and propose multipath routing and traffic splitting to increase throughput and improve load balancing. Second, we explore the poor quality of service problem, which is exacerbated by the existence of bandwidth-consuming greedy applications in the network. We propose online traffic classification as a means of enabling quality of service for every traffic class. Next, we investigate the poor transport design problem and propose a new transport layer design for anonymous communication networks which addresses the drawbacks of previous proposals. Finally, we address the problem of the lack of congestion control by proposing an ATM-style credit-based hop-by-hop flow control algorithm which caps the queue sizes and allows all relays to react to congestion in the network. Our experimental results confirm the significant performance benefits that can be obtained using our privacy-preserving approaches.

Persons with dementia experience impairments in cognitive, behavioral, and functional ability, often leading to long-term care placement. The Enhancing Care Program was developed by the Alzheimer Society of Canada to assist organizations in improving care for this population. Although this program has been implemented in many facilities, the majority have been located in urban settings and there has been limited formal evaluation. Little is known about dementia care in rural facilities, or about how programs are implemented in rural settings. The Enhancing Care Program is based on eleven guidelines that outline best practices for caring for individuals with dementia. With the assistance of a facilitator from the Alzheimer Society, a multi-disciplinary team from the facility assesses their current ability to meet each guideline. In subsequent meetings, the team establishes specific, measurable goals to improve care in targeted areas. The two purposes of this study were to conduct a process evaluation of the Enhancing Care Program and to develop theory relating to the implementation of a program in two rural long-term care facilities. Observations were made over the course of seven months as teams worked through the guidelines and set goals. Focus group interviews consisting of team members took place at the end of the observation period. In addition, individual interviews were conducted with general staff, the facility managers, and the facilitator from the Alzheimer Society. Grounded theory methodology informed the research and analysis process. The theory that emerged, The Process of Building Effective Teams, explains the transition of the participants from collections of individuals to cohesive units that functioned as teams. Five key categories were developed in the theory: trust, respectful and open communication, transformational leadership, creating change collectively, and enhanced team culture. As part of the process evaluation of the Enhancing Care Program, 24 recommendations were made for program improvements.

In recent years, the cyberspace had led to significant evolution of information transmission. Indie musician upload their music to StreetVoice and Youtube to display themselves. They also keep good connections with other musicians and fans through Social Network. Consequently, network has been one of the most important environment for musician to create. Whether network is well creativity space for indie musician involves conflicts between its enhancing and inhibiting factors. We use Csikszentmihalyi¡¦s three-pronged systems model and four major regulators:Law, Norms, Market, Architecture in the book of ¡§Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace¡¨ by Lawrence Lessig as the study framework. This research takes qualitative approach with twelve interviewees. All of them are indie musician. Following the data analysing, the results present the life of creativity can been divided into three stage: copy, shadow and create. When people go through the three stages, their knowledge of music will become more rich. Musician can write or sing a song to express what they want and who they are. The results of this analysing, network could bring several enhancing factors Including promotion, grouping, sharing, encouragement and expanding fans. According to the analysis observed that network architecture isn¡¦t robust now. Indie musicians are afraid that law can¡¦t protect their copyright of music on network. In the part of norms, indie musicians want all of their musics on network are perfect. Furthermore, indie musicians don't believe that network could made enough profit to cover their basic expenses.

The fluid flow channels of modern heat exchangers are often equipped with different flow disturbance elements which enhance the convective heat transfer coefficient in each channel. These structural or surface roughness elements induce enhanced flow mixing and convective heat transfer at low Reynolds numbers (500 < Re < 2200) by fluid mixing near the channel walls and increasing the surface area. These elements, however, are accompanied by higher pressure drops in comparison to hollow smooth channels (without inserts). The Run-Around Membrane Energy Exchanger (RAMEE) system is an air-to-air energy recovery system comprised of two remote liquid-to-air membrane energy exchangers (LAMEEs) coupled by a pumped liquid desiccant loop. LAMEEs use semi-permeable membranes that are permeable to water vapor, but impermeable to liquid water. The membranes separate the liquid desiccant from the air flow channels, while still allowing both heat and water vapor transfer. The air channels are equipped with turbulence enhancing inserts which serve dual purposes: (a) to support the adjacent flexible membranes, and (b) to enhance the convective heat and mass transfer. This research experimentally investigates the increase in the air pressure drop and average convective heat transfer coefficient after an air-side insert is installed in a Small-scale wind tunnel for exchanger insert testing (WEIT) facility that is designed to simulate the air channels of a LAMEE and to measure all the properties required to determine the flow friction factor and Nusselt number. Experiments are conducted in the test section under steady state conditions at Reynolds numbers between 900 and 2200 for a channel with and without inserts. The 500-mm-long test section has a rectangular cross section (5 mm wide and 152.4 mm high) and is designed to maintain a specified constant heat flux on each side wall. The flow is laminar and hydrodynamically fully developed at the entrance of the test section and, within the test section, thermal development occurs. Nine different insert panels are tested. Each insert is comprised of several plastic rib spacers, each aligned parallel to the stream-wise direction, and several cross-bars aligned normal to the flow direction. The plastic rib spacers are placed either 30 mm, 20 mm or 10 mm apart, and the distance between the cylindrical bars is either 30 mm, 45 mm, 60 mm or 90 mm. The measured convective heat transfer coefficient and the friction factor have uncertainties that are less than ±7% and ±11%, respectively. It is found that the Nusselt number and friction factor are dependent on the insert geometry and the Reynolds number. An empirical correlation is developed for the inserts to predict Nusselt number and friction factor within an air channel of a LAMEE. The correlations are able to determine the Nusselt number and the friction factor within ±9% and ±20% of the experimental data. Results show the flow insert bar spacing is the most important factor in determining the convective heat transfer improvement. As an application of the experimental data in this thesis, the experimental and the numerical results from a LAMEE which has an insert in each airflow channel are presented. The results show that the insert within the air channel of the LAMEE is able to improve the total effectiveness of the LAMEE by 4% to 15% depending on the insert geometry and air flow Reynolds number and operating inlet conditions for the exchanger.

Unlimited retention of personal information on the web may harm individuals: employers can find youthful indiscretions on social media, and incorrectly low credit scores may haunt individuals for a lifetime. Currently, Europe revives the "right to erasure" as a first step towards a forgetting web. Early technologies implementing oblivion suffer from vulnerabilities and narrowly assume that users require information to be erased after a pre-determined time. But little is known about users' actual oblivion needs. A first study shows that users desire control over disclosed personal information to reduce pre-disclosure privacy concerns, and to delete harmful information after disclosure. In the long run, users have a need for dissociating from obsolete information that represents their past identity. A second study analyses whether oblivion-enhancing technologies (OETs) currently deployed in online services satisfy users' needs. While not all services give users assurance that disclosed information can be erased again, most provide users with some active control. But to manage the increasing volume of personal information stored, users would also require "intelligent" support with oblivion. Intelligent agents that keep track of disclosed information long-term could automatically safeguard users from information relating to a past episode in life surfacing unexpectedly. (authors' abstract)

While advances to the Internet have enabled users to easily interact and exchange information online, they have also created several opportunities for adversaries to prey on users’ private information. Whether the motivation for data collection is commercial, where service providers sell data for marketers, or political, where a government censors, blocks and tracks its people, or even personal, for cyberstalking purposes, there is no doubt that the consequences of personal information leaks can be severe. Low-latency anonymity networks have thus emerged as a solution to allow people to surf the Internet without the fear of revealing their identities or locations. In order to provide anonymity to users, anonymity networks route users’ traffic through several intermediate relays, which causes unavoidable extra delays. However, although these networks have been originally designed to support interactive applications, due to a variety of design weaknesses, these networks offer anonymity at the expense of further intolerable performance costs, which disincentivize users from adopting these systems. In this thesis, we seek to improve the network performance of low-latency anonymity networks while maintaining the anonymity guarantees they provide to users today. As an experimentation platform, we use Tor, the most widely used privacy-preserving network that empowers people with low-latency anonymous online access. Since its introduction in 2003, Tor has successfully evolved to support hundreds of thousands of users using thousands of volunteer-operated routers run all around the world. Incidents of sudden increases in Tor’s usage, coinciding with global political events, confirm the importance of the Tor network for Internet users today. We identify four key contributors to the performance problems in low-latency anonymity networks, exemplified by Tor, that significantly impact the experience of low-latency application users. We first consider the lack of resources problem due to the resource-constrained routers, and propose multipath routing and traffic splitting to increase throughput and improve load balancing. Second, we explore the poor quality of service problem, which is exacerbated by the existence of bandwidth-consuming greedy applications in the network. We propose online traffic classification as a means of enabling quality of service for every traffic class. Next, we investigate the poor transport design problem and propose a new transport layer design for anonymous communication networks which addresses the drawbacks of previous proposals. Finally, we address the problem of the lack of congestion control by proposing an ATM-style credit-based hop-by-hop flow control algorithm which caps the queue sizes and allows all relays to react to congestion in the network. Our experimental results confirm the significant performance benefits that can be obtained using our privacy-preserving approaches.

On the Internet today, users are accustomed to disclosing personal information when accessing a new service. When a user does so, there is rarely a system in place which allows the user to monitor how his or her information is actually shared or used by services. One proposed solution to this problem is to have services perform transparency logging on behalf of users, informing them how their data is processed as processing is taking place. We have recently participated in a collaboration to develop a privacy-preserving secure logging scheme that can be used for the purpose of transparency logging. As part of that collaboration we created a proof of concept implementation. In this thesis, we elaborate on that implementation and integrate it with a minimalistic open source issue-tracking system. We evaluate the amount of work required to integrate the logging system and attempt to identify potential integration problems. Using this issue-tracking system we then design and implement a scenario that demonstrates the value of the logging system to the average user.