This study examined the meaning of effective teaching and instructional flexibility at the post secondary level to see where instructional flexibility fits into the frame of effective teaching. Five hundred college students and fifteen instructors participated in this study. Student participants shared their perceptions of instructional flexibility and effective teaching through open-ended questions using an online survey. Instructor participants shared their concepts of both constructs through one-on-one interviews. Given that the focus of this study was on the perceptions of college instructors and students of what effective teaching and flexibility in teaching encompass, all collected data were analyzed using a grounded theory approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). The emergent model of effective teaching and instructional flexibility comprised four themes: (a) teaching for the progress of learning; (b) a teacher’s role as the “human” persona; (c) teaching to bridge the gap from facts to understanding; (d) a teacher’s role as content expert. These four themes could be seen as representing the concept of instructional flexibility (Themes 1 and 2), and the concept of effective teaching (Themes 3 and 4) at the postsecondary level. Results indicated that a flexible teacher was portrayed as someone who was responsive and attentive to the needs of individual students whereas an effective teacher was described as someone who was successful in helping students understand important course concepts. Further, results showed that instructional flexibility was considered to be an important component of effective teaching both by college students and instructors. Regarding the association between teaching effectiveness and instructional flexibility, metacognitive teaching played an important role as an overlapping component of both constructs. / text

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) capture and sequestration (CCS) at fossil-fueled power plants is a critical technology for CO₂ emissions mitigation during the transition to a sustainable energy system. Post-combustion amine scrubbing is a relatively mature CO₂ capture technology, but barriers to implementation include high capital costs and energy requirements that reduce net power output by 20-30%. Capture energy requirements are typically assumed constant, but work investigates whether flexibly operating amine scrubbing systems in response to electricity market conditions can add value to CO₂ capture facilities while maintaining environmental benefits. Two versatile optimization models have been created to study the electricity system implications of flexible CO₂ capture. One model assesses the value of flexible capture at a single facility in response to volatile electricity prices, while the other represents a full electricity system to study the ability of flexible capture to meet electricity demand and reliability (ancillary) service requirements. Price-responsive flexible CO₂ capture has limited value at market conditions that justify CO₂ capture investments. Solvent storage can add value for price arbitrage by allowing flexible operation without additional CO₂ emissions, but only with favorable capital costs. The primary advantage of flexible CO₂ capture is an increased ability to provide grid reliability services and improve grid resiliency at minimum and maximum electricity demand. Flexibility mitigates capacity shortages because capture energy requirements need not be replaced, and variable capture at low demand helps respond to intermittent renewable generation. / text

There have been fewer studies performed to understand real-world software-testing practice than for other areas of software engineering, such as software requirements, design and development. In particular, surprisingly little is known about global software-testing practices---the practice of outsourcing testing activities to a company offshore---which is currently a large industry and is continuing to grow rapidly. Hence, it is important to study this practice. Moreover, research and anecdotal records provide evidence suggesting that cultural factors greatly impact aspects of the global software-engineering practice (e.g., quality and productivity). The evidence indicates that culture appears to have a greater influence on global software-engineering practice than originally envisioned. Thus, it is important to understand culture's influence particularly on the global-software testing practice. Most of the global software practice studies have used the cultural-dimensions (e.g., Hofstede's dimensions) approach to understand culture’s influence on this practice. However, such dimensional perspectives of culture significantly limit the meaning of culture. Hence, it is important to study culture's influence on global software-testing practice by adopting a non-dimensional perspective of culture so that hidden cultural facets can be identified and uncovered. In this dissertation research, I conducted three ethnographically-informed studies at different Indian vendor organizations, who provided software-testing services to their respective clients in a global setting, to better understand what and how cultural factors influence the global software-testing practice. I used the “culture as models” perspective, adapted from the cultural anthropologist Bradd Shore, to analyze the data from these studies. The dissertation provides a detailed description of the study design, the data analysis, and the insights that emerged from the study. The study provided insights into four embedded cultural models that have emerged from this practice---Agreement, Trust, Flexibility, and Global Software Delivery Cultural Models -- which are described and discussed in detail. This dissertation makes the following contributions. First, it describes a framework that facilitates conducting culture-based studies in the global software- engineering domain. Second, it exposes significant cultural models that are embodied in the specific global software-testing practices investigated to better understand the affordances and clashes of cultural facets of such practices more widely. Third, it presents a ``thick description'' of the role and interplay of these cultural facets in the global software-testing practices investigated. Finally, based on the study insights, the dissertation provides implications for practice and future research.

DNA bending plays a vital role in numerous cellular activities such as transcription, viral packaging, and nucleosome formation. Therefore, understanding the physics of DNA bending at the length scales relevant to these processes is one of the main keys to the quantitative description of life. However, previous studies provide a divided picture on how DNA should be modeled in strong bending condition relevant to biology. My thesis is devoted to answering how far an elastic rod model can be applied to DNA. We consider several subtle features that could potentially lead to the break-down of the worm-like chain model, such as local bendedness of the sequence and large bending angles. We used single-molecule Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer to track looping and unlooping of single DNA molecules in real time. We compared the measured looping and unlooping rates with theoretical predictions of the worm-like chain model. We found that the intrinsic curvature of the sequence affects the looping propensity of short DNA and an extended worm-like chain model including the helical parameters of individual base pairs could adequately explain our measurements. For DNA with random sequence and negligible curvature, we discovered that the worm-like chain model could explain the stability of small DNA loops only down to a critical loop size. Below the critical loop size, the bending stress stored in the DNA loop became less sensitive to loop size, indicative of softened dsDNA. The critical loop size is sensitive to salt condition, especially to magnesium at mM concentrations. This finding enabled us to explain several contrasting results in the past and shed new light on the energetics of DNA bending.

The primary purpose of the present study was to determine the acute hemodynamic responses to twenty-three select yoga postures in advanced and novice yoga practitioners. Additionally, we sought to determine if trunk flexibility is related to arterial stiffness. Using a cross-sectional study design, 37 apparently healthy adults (26 females and 11 males; 22-71 years old) were divided into two groups according to level of yoga experience. Beat-to-beat measures of blood pressure, stroke volume, cardiac work-load, cardiac output, and total peripheral resistance were measured using a finger plethysmograph during the yoga routine. Baseline measures of trunk flexibility (sit-and-reach scores and inclinometer measurements) and arterial stiffness (carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity) were also compared. Yoga postures elicited significant increases in heart rate, blood pressure and cardiac output (P<0.05) for both groups. There was no difference in blood pressure responses between the two groups throughout the yoga testing session. Lumbar flexion, as measured by an inclinometer, was significantly (P<0.01) and inversely associated with cfPWV (r=-0.52). / text

In a world economy where globalization reaches almost every corner, the need for a company to attain flexibility has acquired tremendous importance to remain competitive and profitable. This Thesis would present the importance of flexibility in times of uncertain conditions (natural and socio-economic), it would present an analysis of the struggle of Toyota Motors Manufacturing Texas and one of its on-site suppliers Futaba Industrial Texas “FIT” to attain Manufacturing Flexibility through different economic crisis and a natural disaster presenting its strategies to mitigate economic losses and cope with the turbulent environment by developing robust systems. / text

Melting point finds applications in chemical identification, purification and in the calculation of a number of other physicochemical properties such as vapor pressure and aqueous solubility. Despite the availability of enormous amounts of experimental data, no generally applicable methods have been developed to estimate the melting point of a compound from its chemical structure. A quick estimation of melting point can be a useful tool in the design of new chemical entities.In this dissertation, a simple means of estimating the melting points for a large variety of pharmaceutically and environmentally relevant organic compounds is developed. Melting points are predicted from the separate calculation of the enthalpy and entropy of melting directly from the chemical structure. The entropy of melting is calculated using a semi-empirical equation based on only two non-additive molecular parameters. This equation is validated and refined using a large collection of experimental entropy of melting values. The enthalpy of melting is calculated by additive group contributions.Melting points are estimated from the ratio of the enthalpy of melting and the entropy of melting. All of the methods and group contributions developed in this study are compatible with the UPPER (Unified Physical Property Estimating Relationships) scheme. The predicted melting points are compared to experimental melting points for over 2200 organic compounds collected from the literature. The average absolute error in melting point prediction is 30.1 °. This is a very reasonable estimate considering the size and diversity of the dataset used in this study.

I have examined acclimatization models in pre-school. My emphasis is on the shorter acclimatization models. To begin pre-school is a big change, not only for small children, for the whole family as well. It is important to get a good acclimatization in pre-school, and one of the things it takes to achieve that is to interact with the parents. The reason why I chose this subject was because we have not studied much literature about this subject during our education to become pre-school teachers. I have intervjued five pedagogues about their experiences of the short acclimatization model. My aim is to find out why the pedagogues choose to apply the brief model. My questions are following: What are the benefits with the short acclimatization model? How do the pedagogues experience the parents participation during the acclimatization? How are the flexibility on the number of days wich the acclimatization is calculate to go on? When I was studing the results of my intervjues I come to the conclusion that having a good relationship with the parents is very important. Childrens security and needs, and the pedagogues responsibility are all parts of eachother and have to exist because the acclimatization of the children are going to be as good as possible.

This paper describes and analyzes how individuals and organizations that operate in careers in communications and marketing deal with the search for employees / employers, and how recruiting managers and recruitment consultants are working to create a match between the parties. The study was conducted on behalf of a recruitment agency that offers services in recruiting and staffing for organizations in communication and marketing. The empirical material consists of ten qualitative interviews from three different perspectives on the labor market, recruitment consultants, managers and employees. The interviews were analyzed from sociological and social psychological theories of organizations and individuals opportunities and strategies in today's western labor market. Conclusions that emerged are that organizations need for decreased amount of tied assets provides increased need for temporary employments. To plan and manage the strategic HR operation in the flexible organizations, with more temporary employments and decentralized structures, it has become important to increase factors of control. This generally applies to the entire recruitment process but also for potential employees. Employees increasingly aim to move on to new jobs in new organizations require that organizations develop strong employer brands. Unless employees have incentive to stay in the organization it is a risk of competence losses and the loss of control over HR work. Also people who are looking for jobs use strategies such as marketing to get a job. The study indicates a shift in responsibility for the search from organization to job applicant. A further trend is that today's leaders are looking for new employees with the "right" personality. Job applicant adjusts their self-presentation to their perception of what the employer considers to be a suitable personality in general, but also towards the specific job and organization and thus makes it matchable.

In the area of process safety, many efforts have focused on studying methods to prevent the transition of the state of the system from a normal state to an upset and/or catastrophic state, but many unexpected changes are unavoidable, and even under good risk management incidents still occur. The aim of this work is to propose the principles and factors that contribute to the resilience of the chemical process, and to develop a systematic approach to evaluate the resilience of chemical processes in design aspects. Based on the analysis of transition of the system states, the top-level factors that contribute to Resilience were developed, including Design, Detection Potential, Emergency Response Planning, Human, and Safety Management. The evaluation framework to identify the Resilience Design Index is developed by means of the multifactor model approach. The research was then focused on developing complete subfactors of the top-level Design factor. The sub-factors include Inherent Safety, Flexibility, and Controllability. The proposed framework to calculate the Inherent Safety index takes into account all the aspects of process safety design via many sub-indices. Indices of Flexibility and Controllability sub-factors were developed from implementations of well-known methodologies in process design and process control, respectively. Then, the top-level Design index was evaluated by combining the indices of the sub-factors with weight factors, which were derived from Analytical Hierarchical Process approach. A case study to compare the resilience levels of two ethylene production designs demonstrated the proposed approaches and gave insights on process resilience of the designs.