USF completed a research study in 2005, which prioritized the replacement of 85 deteriorating composite precast deck panel bridges. This thesis re-evaluates the original recommendations in the wake of failures of two of these bridges in 2007. Since funding will not allow all identified bridges to be replaced, it was necessary to determine the most effective repair methods. To assess USF’s recommendations, a forensic study was undertaken in which the most current inspection and work program documents on the two failed bridges were reviewed and FDOT personnel interviewed. The best repair procedures were determined by reviewing repair plans, specifications, reports and site visits. The study found the two bridges that failed had been correctly prioritized by USF (No. 1 of 18 and No. 8 of 15). A new, accelerated repair method encompassing complete bay replacement was developed in a pilot project funded by the Florida Department of Transportation.

This thesis concerns the study of time reversal and plane-wave decomposition in various geophysical applications. Time reversal is a key step in seismic interferometry, reverse time migration and full waveform inversion. The plane-wave transform, also known as the tau-p transform or slant-stack, can separate waves based on their ray parameters or their emergence angles at the surface. I propose a new approach to retrieve virtual full-wave seismic responses from crosscorrelating recorded seismic data in the plane-wave domain. Unlike a traditional approach where the correlogram is obtained from crosscorrelating recorded data, which contains the full range of ray parameters, this method directly chooses common ray parameters to cancel overlapping ray paths. Thus, it can sometime avoid spurious arrivals when the acquisition requirement of seismic interferometry is not strictly met. I demonstrate the method with synthetic examples and an ocean bottom seismometer data example. I show a multi-scale application of plane-wave based full waveform inversion (FWI) with the aid of frequency domain forward modeling. FWI uses the two-way wave-equation to produce high-resolution velocity models for seismic imaging. This technique is implemented by an adjoint-state approach, which viii involves a time-reversal propagation of the residual wavefield at receivers, similar to seismic interferometry. With a plane-wave transformed gather, we can decompose the data by ray parameters and iteratively update the velocity model with selected ray parameters. This encoding approach can significantly reduce the number of shots and receivers required in gradient and Hessian calculations. Borrowing the idea of minimizing different data residual norms in FWI, I study the effect of different scaling methods to the receiver wavefield in the reverse time migration. I show that this type of scaling is able to significantly suppress outliers compared to conventional algorithms. I also show that scaling by its absolute norm generally produces better results than other approaches. I propose a robust stochastic time-lapse seismic inversion strategy with an application of monitoring Cranfield CO2 injection site. This workflow involves two steps. The first step is the baseline inversion using a hybrid starting model that combines a fractal prior and the low-frequency prior from well log data. The second step is to use a double-difference inversion scheme to focus on the local areas where time-lapse changes have occurred. Synthetic data and field data show the effectiveness of this method. / text

Health Canada recommends exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) until 6 months followed by introducing iron-rich complementary foods (CFs) such as iron-fortified cereal and meat to prevent iron deficiency (ID). There is a concern that consumption of CFs with high iron dose may predispose infants to inflammation through reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation in their intestinal tract. The nutrient intake from these recommended first CFs had not been assessed in terms of meeting the daily requirements. Therefore the aim of this study was to assess if the recommended CFs are safe from a free radical and inflammatory perspective and to assess these CFs in relation to socio-demographic characteristics, feeding patterns, nutrient intake, iron status and growth. Eighty-seven EBF infants were randomly assigned to receive one of the following: iron-fortified cereal (Cer), iron-fortified cereal with fruit (Cer+Fr), meat (M). Urine and stool samples were collected before and after introduction of CFs to assess the following markers: urinary F2-Isoprostanes, fecal ROS, fecal iron and fecal calprotectin. Blood was collected from 18 infants to measure iron parameters. Socio-demographic characteristics and feeding patterns were obtained using questionnaires. Nutrient intake was collected using 3-day dietary records. There are maternal factors that were associated with selected feeding patterns. Nutrient intake was only adequate when provided by both breast milk and CFs. Plasma ferritin decreased over time in all groups (p = 0.04). Infants in M group had lower fecal iron than infants in Cer and Cer+Fr groups (p < 0.001, p = 0.014, respectively). An increase in fecal ROS formation (p < 0.002) after the introduction of CFs was observed. There are maternal socio-demographic factors such as lower parity and lower BMI that need to be targeted in the future to optimize feeding time, type and frequency. Infants with EBF may be at risk of developing ID despite the provision of iron-rich CFs. Untargeted iron fortification may result in untoward effects including ROS generation in the infant’s intestinal tract. In future, if these findings are further confirmed in EBF and formula-fed infants, reconsidering the strategies of iron fortifications to both meet infants’ requirements and minimizing oxidative stress maybe warranted. / October 2015

The purpose of this study was to explore leadership effectiveness from the perspectives of the Full Range Leadership Model and Cognitive Style Theory within the framework of understanding both followers and leaders as individual's attitudes to leadership effectiveness. Leadership effectiveness was measured using newly developed self-report instrument, the Leadership Effectiveness Questionnaire (LEQ) with three scales of effectiveness as suggested by Yukl (2002), which were: 1) aims, 2) followers' attitude towards the leader and, 3) group processes. The Full Range leadership approaches were measured using Bass & Avolio's (1997) Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) Form 5X-Short, whilst cognitive style was gathered by using Allinson & Hayes's (1996) Cognitive Style Index (CSI). A two stage (questionnaire survey followed by semi structured interviews) mixed method study was undertaken. Questionnaire data was gathered from 331 followers and 172 leaders in Malaysian Government-Linked Companies, and 10 leaders involved in the interviews. Findings from the survey suggest that a transformational approach was correlated significantly and positively with effectiveness. Intuitive Cognitive Style also correlated significantly with leadership effectiveness. Findings from the semistructured interviews identified a few more characteristics of an effective leadership such as balance and appreciative, whilst new dimensions of cognitive style identified such as rational and holistic.

As many of the founding full-time community college faculty began to retire, colleges across the nation intensified their full-time faculty recruitment and retention efforts. They began to replace the retiring full-time faculty with the new generation faculty cohort. The purpose of this study was to understand the role that a comprehensive orientation program played in the socialization process of new community college faculty. Additionally, the study examined the choice of orientation tactics used to socialize the new faculty. Relying on the reported socialization experiences of seven full-time faculty members from six of the seven colleges that comprised a community college district, the study explored how an orientation program facilitated their adjustment process. Finally, the researcher sought to identify ways to improve full-time community college faculty socialization experience. Most of the faculty in this study, although having no specific training to teach at the community college, were able to build relationships outside their individual colleges, acquired new skills, and gained access to valuable district resources, as a result of their participation in a yearlong comprehensive orientation program. Three significant findings resulted from this study. The first major significant finding of this study was that the incorporation of a social apparatus, such as the “retreat” into an orientation program, facilitated group cohesion and identity among the new faculty. The social structure of the retreat provided new faculty with an opportunity to connect with one another at an emotional level. They were able to expand their social networks beyond their immediate colleges. A second significant finding was that faculty became more confident and comfortable in their teaching roles as a result of the skills they acquired following their completion of the comprehensive orientation program. The monthly sessions, which were held every 4th Friday provided the faculty the opportunity to acquire and develop new skills to effectively discharge their responsibilities. The third major finding of this study was that because faculty had access to district resources, to develop their skills, they became more closely tied to their institutions. Finally, recommendations are made to improve new faculty socialization experience during their adjustment process. / text

Wireless services have become an indispensable part of our social, economic, and everyday activities. They have facilitated and continue to facilitate rapid access to information and have created a highly-interconnected web of users who are untethered to particular locations. In fact, it is expected that in the very near future, the number of users that access the Internet through their mobile devices will surpass those access the Internet from the fixed infrastructure. Aside from mobile Internet access, wireless technologies enable many critical applications such as emergency response, healthcare and implantable medical devices, industrial automation, tactical communications, transportation networks, smart grids, smart homes, navigation, and weather services. The proliferation and wealth of wireless applications has created a soaring demand for ubiquitous broadband wireless access. This demand is further fueled by the richness of the information accessed by users. Low-bit rate voice communications and text have been replaced with graphics, high-definition video, multi-player gaming, and social networking. Meeting the growing traffic demand poses many challenges due to the spectrum scarcity, the cost of deploying additional infrastructure, and the coexistence of several competing technologies. These challenges can be addressed by developing novel wireless technologies, which can efficiently and securely manage multi-user access to the wireless medium. The multi-user access problem deals with the sharing of the wireless resource among contending users in an efficient, secure, and scalable manner. To alleviate contention and interference among the multiple users, contemporary wireless technologies divide the available spectrum to orthogonal frequency bands (channels). The availability of multiple channels has been demonstrated to substantially improve the performance and reliability of wireless networks by alleviating contention and interference. Multi-channel networks, whether cellular, sensor, mesh, cognitive radio, or heterogeneous ones, can potentially achieve higher throughput and lower delay compared to single-channel networks. However, the gains from the existence of orthogonal channels are contingent upon the efficient and secure coordination of channel access. Typically, this coordination is implemented at the medium access control (MAC) layer using a multi-channel MAC (MMAC) protocol. MMAC protocols are significantly more sophisticated than their single-channel counterparts, due to the additional operations of destination discovery, contention management across channels, and load balancing. A significant body of research has been devoted to designing MMAC protocols. The majority of solutions negotiate channel assignment every few packet transmissions on a default control channel. This design has several critical limitations. First, it incurs significant overhead due to the use of in-band or out-of-band control channels. Second, from a security standpoint, operating over a default control channel constitutes a single point of failure. A DoS attack on the control channel(s) would render all channels inoperable. Moreover, MMAC protocols are vulnerable to misbehavior from malicious users who aim at monopolizing the network resources, or degrading the overall network performance. In this dissertation, we improve the security and spectral efficiency of channel access mechanisms in multi-channel wireless networks. In particular, we are concerned with MAC-layer misbehavior in multi-channel wireless networks. We show that selfish users can manipulate MAC-layer protocol parameters to gain an unfair share of network resources, while remaining undetected. We identify possible misbehavior at the MAC-layer, evaluate their impact on network performance, and develop corresponding detection and mitigation schemes that practically eliminate the misbehavior gains. We extend our misbehavior analysis to MAC protocols specifically designed for opportunistic access in cognitive radio networks. Such protocols implement additional tasks such as cooperative spectrum sensing and spectrum management. We then discuss corresponding countermeasures for detecting and mitigating these misbehavior. We further design a low-overhead multi-channel access protocol that enables the distributed coordination of channel access over orthogonal channels for devices using a single transceiver. Compared with prior art, our protocol eliminates inband and out-of-band control signaling, increases spatial channel reuse, and thus achieves significant higher throughput and lowers delay. Furthermore, we investigate DoS attacks launched against the channel access mechanism. We focus on reactive jamming attacks and show that most MMAC protocols are vulnerable to low-effort jamming due to the utilization of a default control channel. We extend our proposed MMAC protocol to combat jamming by implementing cryptographic interleaving at the PHY-layer, random channel switching, and switching according to cryptographically protected channel priority lists. Our results demonstrate that under high load conditions, the new protocol maintains communications despite the jammer's effort. Extensive simulations and experiments are conducted to evaluate the impact of the considered misbehaviors on network performance, and verify the validity of the proposed mechanisms.

Through a full factorial design experiment, the effects of time between worts, wort aeration and yeast dosage in production of a pale lager beer were examined in the beer process at Spendrups Bryggeri AB. The aim was to learn how different parameters may affect the yeast fermentation performance during beer production. Response variables used were the concentrations of ethyl acetate and isoamyl acetate, free amino nitrogen (FAN) degradation and change in extract. A statistical analysis showed that the concentration of ethyl acetate is dependent on yeast dosage and the interaction between time between worts and aeration while the isoamyl acetate concentration is dependent on yeast dosage and time between worts. No parameters are statistically significant for FAN degradation while the change in extract is dependent on the yeast dosage. Due to botched runs, mostly because of aeration problems, it was not possible to verify theoretical parameter values and responses. Since the aeration was not properly performed, the management of the aeration control should be further investigated. Ester analysis and analysis of FAN were performed as worts entered and exited horizontal fermentation tanks. An additional analysis of ester content was also performed as the early stage beer was transferred into lagering tanks. Cell viability as well as extract, pH and tank temperature was measured daily to verify the state of fermentation. Statistical calculations showed that when using NucleoCounter YC-100, there is no significant difference between analysis made of samples homogenized by a magnetic stirrer and samples shaken by hand.

Abstract Plant cells contain plastids, organelles dedicated to performing specific biochemical processes including photosynthesis, starch and oil biosynthesis. Fatty acid biosynthesis in oil seeds occurs in one type of plastid termed the leucoplast. Anabolic metabolism in leucoplasts includes the production of fatty acids and amino acids that depend on the availability of reductants such as NADPH. NADPH can be generated in plastid by glucose 6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PDH) which is the chief control enzyme and first step in the Oxidative Pentose Phosphate Pathway (OPPP). G6PDH catalyses the reaction of NADP+ and glucose 6-phosphate to NADPH and 6-phosphogluconate. At least two compartment-specific isoforms of G6PDH exist in plants, a cytosolic and a plastidic form. In this study, castor oil seed (COS) (Ricinus communis L.) was used as a model enzyme system for the ongoing study of oil biosynthesis in plants. This is the first ever report of the full-length clone of the plastidic isoform of G6PDH being isolated from a castor cDNA library using polyclonal potato plastidic G6PDH antiserum. The full-length cDNA was sequenced and compared to other G6PDH genes from higher plants, the castor sequence reveals conserved regions and conserved cysteine residues similar to other higher plant G6PDH. Over expression of the recombinant cleaved fusion protein in an E. coli expression system from the isolation of the cDNA clone shows it is enzymatically active, stable and unlike other plastid G6PDH’s dithiothreitol insensitive. In fact this G6PDH shows increased activation in the presence of dithiothreitol. Initial kinetic characteristics shows that it behaves in a similar fashion enzymatically when compared to other higher plant chloroplast G6PDH. The gene sequence and initial kinetic findings for castor G6PDH concur with other higher plant, non-photosynthetic, plastidic isoforms. / Thesis (Master, Biology) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-19 13:41:54.584

Peterson, Park, and Seligman (2005) have proposed that individuals seek to increase their well-being through three behavioural orientations; via pleasure, meaning, and engagement. The current study investigated how orientations to happiness influenced the pursuit and experience of daily activities using an experience sampling methodology (ESM). Daily activities were experienced as a blend of both hedonic and eudaimonic characteristics. Dominant orientation to happiness did not predict engaging in different daily activities. Trait orientations to happiness had some influence on the momentary experience of behaviour. Those scoring highest on all three orientations to happiness also rated their daily activities highest on momentary pleasure, meaning, engagement, and happiness. The results suggest that increasing all three orientations is a pathway to the full life and a balanced well-being portfolio.

Membrane process including microfiltration (MF), ultrafiltration (UF), nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO) have provided numerous successful applications ranging from drinking water purification, wastewater treatment, to material recovery. The addition of functional moiety in the membranes pores allows such membranes to be used in challenging areas including tunable separations, toxic metal capture, and catalysis. In this work, polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) MF membrane was functionalized with temperature responsive (poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), PNIPAAm) and pH responsive (polyacrylic acid, PAA) polymers. It’s revealed that the permeation of various molecules (water, salt and dextran) through the membrane can be thermally or pH controlled. The introduction of PAA as a polyelectrolyte offers an excellent platform for the immobilization of metal nanoparticles (NPs) applied for degradation of toxic chlorinated organics with significantly increased longevity and stability. The advantage of using temperature and pH responsive polymers/hydrogels also includes the high reactivity and effectiveness in dechlorination. Further advancement on the PVDF functionalization involved the alkaline treatment to create partially defluorinated membrane (Def-PVDF) with conjugated double bounds allowing for the covalent attachment of different polymers. The PAA-Def-PVDF membrane shows pH responsive behavior on both the hydraulic permeability and solute retention. The sponge-like PVDF (SPVDF) membranes by phase inversion were developed through casting PVDF solution on polyester backing. The SPVDF membrane was demonstrated to have 4 times more surface area than commercial PVDF MF membrane, allowing for enhanced nanoparticles loading for chloro-organics degradation. The advanced functionalization method and process were also validated to be able to be scaled-up through the evaluation of full-scale functionalized membrane provided by Ultura Inc. California, USA. Nanofiltration (NF) between UF and RO presents selectivity controlled by both steric and electrostatic repulsions, which are widely used to reject charged species, particularly multivalent ions. In this work, selective permeation of CaCl2 and high sucrose retention are obtained through the modification of nanofiltration membranes with lower charge compared to commercial nanofiltration membrane. The membrane module also shows high stability with constant water permeability in a long-term (two months) test. Extended Nernst-Planck equation were further used to evaluate the experimental results and it fits well.