This study traced the development of the Equity 2000 Program in the Fort Worth Independent School District from its inception in 1990 to its sixth and final year as an exemplary program for equal access to higher education for minority and underserved youth. Program components included mathematics, counseling, staff development, academic enrichment activities, parent education and higher education linkages. Both primary and secondary sources were evaluated from the perspectives of internal and external criticism. The following conclusions were reached: 1) District policy must change if minority students are going to access algebra and geometry. 2) The lack of involvement of other curriculum areas created primarily a mathematics inservice program. 3) Required inservice was necessary to provide improved and more effective campus and district results. 4) The precollege guidance and counseling component needed integration with the mathematics component. 5) Lack of principals' involvement in the early development of the program contributed to uneven administrative support. 6) There was no definitive strategy for parental inclusion. 7) Funding sources were inadequate to fully implement all parts of the program. 8) There was limited participation of local institutions of higher education. 9) There was a lack of an ongoing, structured evaluation process to document the program's effectiveness. 10) Attitudes and perceptions of minority students and their parents about success in higher level mathematics courses can change over time. 11) The program was costly with limited documentation of the results. 12) Much of the training provided mathematics teachers and guidance counselors should be preservice instruction. The researcher made the following recommendations: conduct a historical study at each Equity site; continue the Summer Mathematics and Guidance Institutes; continue the Saturday Academy and the Algebra/Geometry Readiness Academies; provide outreach efforts to parents; provide precollege information to students and their parents; and provide related teacher and counselor preservice training.

Uniformity of assessments and equity in the taxation of all tangible property within the state has long been the ideal of the people of Utah, yet the history of equalization and assessment is replete with the effective blocking-by pressure groups-of attainment of this ideal. Taxing officials, in genearl, and students of taxation, in particular, have repeatedly pointed out gross inequalities and rank injustices in our assessing system which sould be corrected. but, selfish interest plus ignorance on the part of the taxpayer has permitted these abuses to remain in our taxing system. An accidental, hit-and-miss, guess mehtod of assessing has developed. The taxpayer, not knowing of any system or of the employment of a uniform method, strikes out blindly at the assessor, the tax commission, and the county boards of eequalization, seeking avoidance of his tax burden through underassessments, abatements, or remittances. Thus, to achieve equity in taxation, systematic methods should be substituted for the present methods of guess work. The purpose of this study is, first, to determine whether or not there are major tendencies in the present system of assessing realy property in the state that have resulted in important departures from the intent of the law and no to point out minor variations from the standard of uniformity in assessment. Second, to determine the extent of these variations from this standard, to point out their probable consequences, and to ascertain what progress has been made in equalization and assessment during the past decade. And third, to develop a plan for assessing land which will fit into the present governmental institutions and which embodies certain fundamental principles for the appraisals of land for taxation purposes.

This study investigated pedagogy for Taiwanese students in mainstream Australian secondary school classes. The aim was to explore the construction of pedagogy for these students within the communicative contingencies of both the classroom and the community of talk around the classroom. Accordingly, the study documented and explicated the ways in which teachers adapted geography lessons for Taiwanese students, and further, the fit of teachers' descriptions and explanations of those adaptations within broader school community debate over provision for ethnic minority students. The significance of the study resides in its contribution to educational research, policy and practice in conditions of cultural diversity and formal cultural inclusion. The study's contributions arise from its attention to the forms of teacher-student interaction that are often considered to be a major point of difference between pedagogy in Australia (and other Western nations) and in Chinese (and other Asian) contexts. The focus is on the degree of teacher-directedness or student-centredness, as demonstrated by such factors as rote learning and participation in whole class spoken activities. Review of the current literature indicated that such dispositions may not only be brought to Australian pedagogic contexts by Chinese students, but may also be constructed within these contexts themselves. Analysis of theoretical perspectives on culture and pedagogy that were of high profile in Australia during the 1990s indicated that the investigation of this possibility requires an approach that makes it possible to attend to the structuring of such contexts. Accordingly, this study was conducted from a perspective that made it possible to document and explicate the construction of socialising conditions within the communicative particularities of lessons for Taiwanese students as pedagogic practice enacted in classrooms, and of debate amongst those interested in the education of the students as pedagogic talk within a school community. The theoretical framework of the study drew primarily on Basil Bernstein's sociology of educational knowledge. This perspective provided the fundamental concepts for describing the categorisation of Taiwanese students in the teacher-student interaction of the classroom and in school community talk about such. Analytic concepts developed by researchers concerned with classroom talk were specified in Bernsteinian terms to facilitate the translation between these theoretical objects and the sets of lesson and interview data examined in the study. These concepts made it possible to describe the pedagogic activities of teachers and students, and their constituent social actions, as enacted in the lessons, and as constructed in the interview talk of school community members. The two data sets were produced and analysed by methods derived from the Bernsteinian perspective. The aim was to: i) test the generic and formal Bernsteinian sociology of educational knowledge; and ii) produce findings generalisable to culturally diverse Australian school settings. One of the main findings of the study was that the adaptation of geography lessons for Taiwanese, Chinese, Asian and other ESL students produced a more constrained and teacher-directed form of pedagogy than that which was provided for other students. The other main finding was that the geography teachers described and explained these adaptations by categorising the students as 'reluctant' in whole class spoken activities and 'dependent' in written seatwork activities. Other school community members interested in the education of Taiwanese students evinced substantial agreement in this regard. However, these interviewees constructed the 'reluctant' speech and 'dependent' seatwork of the students from complex collaborative and competitive positions available in professional-academic talk. This pointed to struggles amongst those who would inform the provision of pedagogy for Taiwanese and other Chinese, Asian and ESL students. The study's theoretical significance resides, in part, in its capacity to describe the moment-by-moment classroom interaction of Taiwanese students without pre-empting the empirical salience of categories of cultural identity. Rather, attention is focused on the ways that students are categorised according to their capacity to undertake particular communicative interactions, categorisations in which cultural identity is not necessarily made overtly salient. In this way the study refined and tested the Bernsteinian model of classroom practice, while also locating analytic tools for describing classroom talk within broader relations of social power and control. Methodologically, the study's significance arises from its capacity to generate descriptions of the particularity of classroom practice, and talk about such, as pedagogic practice and talk. For policymakers the study points to the professional-academic discourses that need to be made available to teachers if they are to engage in the conversations about pedagogy that are central to emergent, second-wave conceptions of cultural equity in the state of Queensland where the study was conducted. For practitioners questions arise from the possibility that the dispositions of Taiwanese and other Chinese, Asian and ESL students to teacher-directed forms of pedagogy may be constructed in Australian contexts. These pertain to the desirability of the outcomes of adaptations undertaken in the name of cultural equity, in addition to the implications of teachers' own professional-academic socialisation for debates over 'who' should get 'what' pedagogic provision. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the utility of the study's perspective and findings given current developments in the racial and cultural politics of Australian educational institutions.

While the focus of this work is on turbo equalization, there is also an examination of equalization techniques including MMSE linear and DFE equalizers and Precoding. The losses and capacity associated with the ISI channel are also examined. Iterative decoding of concatenated codes is briefly reviewed and the MAP algorithm is explained.

Optimal decision directed equalization techniques for time dispersive communication channels are often too complex to implement. This thesis considers reduced complexity decision directed equalization that lowers complexity demands yet retains close to optimal performance. The first part of this dissertation consists of three reduced complexity algorithms based on the Viterbi Algorithm (VA) which are: the Parallel Trellis VA (PTVA); Time Reverse Reduced State Sequence Estimation (TR-RSSE); and Forward-Backward State Sequence Detection (FBSSD). The second part of the thesis considers structural modifications of the Decision Feedback Equalizer (DFE), which is a special derivative of the VA, specifically, optimal vector quantization for fractionally spaced DFEs, and extended stability regions for baud spaced DFEs using passivity analysis are investigated.¶ For a special class of sparse channels the VA can be decomposed over a number of independent parallel trellises. This decomposition will be called the Parallel Trellis Viterbi Algorithm and can have lower complexity than the VA yet it retains optimal performance. By relaxing strict sparseness constraints on the channel a sub-optimal approach is proposed which keeps complexity low and obtains good performance.¶ Reduced State Sequence Estimation (RSSE) is a popular technique to reduce complexity. However, its deficiency can be the inability to adequately equalize non-minimum phase channels. For channels that have energy peaks in the tail of the impulse response (post-cursor dominant) RSSE's complexity must be close to the VA or performance will be poor. Using a property of the VA which makes it invariant to channel reversal, TR-RSSE is proposed to extend application of RSSE to post-cursor dominant channels.¶ To further extend the class of channels suitable for RSSE type processing, FBSSD is suggested. This uses a two pass processing method, and is suited to channels that have low energy pre and post-cursor. The first pass generates preliminary estimates used in the second pass to aid the decision process. FBSSD can range from RSSE to TR-RSSE depending on parameter settings.¶ The DFE is obtained when the complexity of RSSE is minimized. Two characterizing properties of the DFE, which are addressed in this thesis, are feedback and quantization. A novel fractionally spaced (FS) DFE structure is presented which allows the quantizer to be generalized relative to the quantizer used in conventional FS-DFEs. The quantizer can be designed according to a maximum a posteriori criterion which takes into account a priori statistical knowledge of error occurrences. A radically different quantizer can be obtained using this technique which can result in significant performance improvements.¶ Due to the feedback nature of the DFE a form of stability can be considered. After a decision error occurs, a stable DFE will, after some finite time and in the absence of noise, operate error free. Passivity analysis provides sufficient conditions to determine a class of channels which insures a DFE will be stable. Under conditions of short channels and small modulation alphabets, it is proposed that conventional passivity analysis can be extended to account for varying operator gains, leading to weaker sufficient conditions for stability (larger class of channels).

This thesis investigates the design and the analysis of acoustic signal processing algorithms in reverberant rooms. Reverberation poses a major challenge to acoustic signal processing problems. It degrades speech intelligibility and causes many acoustic algorithms that process sound to perform poorly. Current solutions to the reverberation problem frequently only work in lightly reverberant environments. There is need to improve the reverberant performance of acoustic algorithms.¶ The approach of this thesis is to explore how the intrinsic properties of reverberation can be exploited to improve acoustic signal processing algorithms. A general approach to soundfield modelling using statistical room acoustics is applied to analyze the reverberant performance of several acoustic algorithms. A model of the underlying structure of reverberation is incorporated to create a new method of soundfield reproduction.¶ Several outcomes resulting from this approach are: (i) a study of how more sound capture with directional microphones and beamformers can improve the robustness of acoustic equalization, (ii) an assessment of the extent to which source tracking can improve accuracy of source localization, (iii) a new method of soundfield reproduction for reverberant rooms, based upon a parametrization of the acoustic transfer function and (iv) a study of beamforming to directional sources, specifically exploiting the directionality of human speech.¶ The approach to soundfield modelling has permitted a study of algorithm performance on important parameters of the room acoustics and the algorithm design. The performance of acoustic equalization and source tracking have been found to depend not only on the levels of reverberation but also on the correlation of pressure between points in reverberant soundfields. This correlation can be increased by sound capture with directional capture devices. Work on soundfield reproduction has shown that, though reverberation significantly degrades the performance of conventional techniques, by accounting for the reverberation it is possible to design reproduction methods that function well in reverberant environments.

<p>In this thesis, a single carrier ATSC DTV baseband transmitter, part of the receiver(including channel estimator and channel equalizer), were modeled. Since multi-pathinduced ISI (inter symbol interference) is the most significant impact on theperformance of single carrier DTV reception, modeling and implementation of singlecarrier channel estimator and channel equalizer have been the focus of the thesis. Westarted with the investigation of channel estimation methods. Afterwards, severalchannel estimators and equalizers were modeled and the performance of each channelequalization methods in different scenarios was evaluated. Our results show that thefrequency domain equalizer can achieve low computing cost and handle long delaypaths. Another important issue to be considered in block equalization is Inter-BlockInterference (IBI). The impact of IBI was investigated via behavior modeling. In lastpart of our thesis, two methods for IBI cancellation are compared and the proposal forhardware implementation was given.</p>

<p>To properly display digital X-ray images for visual diagnosis, a proper display range needs to be identified. This can be difficult when the image contains collimators or large background areas which can dominate the histograms. Also, when there are both underexposed and overexposed areas in the image it is difficult to display these properly at the same time. The purpose of this thesis is to find a way to solve these problems. A few different approaches are evaluated to find their strengths and weaknesses. Based on Local Histogram Equalization, a new method is developed to put various constraints on the mapping. These include alternative ways to perform the histogram calculations and how to define the local histograms. The new method also includes collimator detection and background suppression to keep irrelevant parts of the image out of the calculations. Results show that the new method enables proper display of both underexposed and overexposed areas in the image simultaneously while maintaining the natural look of the image. More testing is required to find appropriate parameters for various image types.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D. in Leadership and Policy Studies)--Vanderbilt University, May 2007. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

The paper is based on an individual life-cycle model, which describes the purely economic components of human capital. The present value of human capital is determined by all future income flows, which at the same time constitute the individual as well as the total tax base of a nation. Therefore, the income of the productive population determines the total tax revenue, which is spent for public goods (including education) and transfers (for poverty reduction). The efficient design of the education system (by private and public education investments) determines the quality of the human capital stock as well as the future gross income flows. The costs of public goods and the transfer expenditures have to be financed from the total tax revenue, which also affects the individual tax burden via the specific tax bases and tax rates. Especially the redistribution of income is connected with serious disincentives, influencing the preferences for work and leisure as well as for consumption and saving. An efficient tax and transfer system being accompanied by an education system financed in public private partnership, which treats equally labor and capital income, sets positive incentives for the formation of human, financial, and real capital. An important prerequisite for a sustainable growth process is the efficient design of the social security system, being based on the family as well as a collective risk equalization scheme. If that system is diminishing absolute poverty in an appropriate time period by transfers and vocational education measures for the grown-up as well as high quality primary, secondary and tertiary education programs for the children, the transfer expenditure would decrease and the tax bases (income and consumption) increase, lowering the burden on the productive population. For the first time, this micro model presented in this paper pools all the relevant variables for development within a simple life-cycle model, which can also be used for a powerful analysis of the current failures in existing tax and transfer schemes and fruitful empirical investigations. Hence, an efficient tax and transfer scheme strongly contributes to an improved national position in the global competition.