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A preconcentration procedure has been developed which at one and the same time raises the concentration of the two groups of elements, AS, Au, Cu, Os, Pb, Pd, Pt and Rh and As, Sb, Se, So, To and T1, in many natural materials above the detection limits of the spark-source mass spectrometric technique and separates them from interfering matrix elements. The technique involves the cementation of the elements from solution on amalgamated aluminium powder which can be pelleted directly to form the electrode for spark source mass spectrometric analysis. Through the use of wet oxidative digestions and oxygen flaskcombustion oxidation procedures in conjunction with the cementation procedure the above elements have been determined in a number of biological, geological and environmental samples.

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<p> In contemporary American society, the nonprofit board is accountable for ensuring that an organization has sufficient resources to carry out its mission. Filling the gap between demands for services and the resources to meet them is often a struggle for small, local nonprofit organizations. This hermeneutic phenomenological study examined how board members of small, local nonprofits in the focal community perceive organizational effectiveness. Understanding the nature of nonprofit organization effectiveness according to board members contributes to understanding how those accountable meet their organizational objectives. A review of the literature revealed that nonprofit effectiveness involves the action of contributing and the motivation behind the action, both of which are associated with trust and reciprocity. Guided by social constructivism, this study employed a qualitative analysis of repeated iterations of semiotic data from board members (<i>n</i> = 30) and text analysis of organizational mission statements (<i>n</i> = 21), generating thick descriptions of the board members' understanding of effectiveness. Findings were derived from successive coding iterations starting with the raw data, through locating text related to specific codes, to verifying relationships among codes, and incorporating researcher reflection. The analysis revealed that strategies focused on developing reciprocity and mitigating mistrust among board members contribute to board members' perceiving their organizations as effectively achieving their objectives. The study's findings support positive social change by informing social scientists and members of local nonprofit boards of the perceived gap between services demands and the resources to meet them among board members.</p>

There is no abstract available for this dissertation.

<p> This study examines the legal barriers of those engaged in identity loan face when filing for workers' compensation. Farm workers are among the most marginalized groups of unauthorized migrants laborers. Those workers engaged in identity loan are further exploited because of their precarious employment status. Identity loan is a when a worker borrows another persons Social Security Number in order to be employed. When that individual is injured on the job they do not file a workers' compensation claim because fear of employer retaliation, exposure to the government and misinformation. Everyone in California has a right to workers' compensation no matter his or her legal or employment status. Workers' compensation attorneys were interviewed to understand the obstructions farm workers' using identity loan are up against when filing for workers' compensation. Proof of identity and misinformation are among the most substantial barriers to successfully filing a workers' compensation claim.</p>

Graphs, as mathematical objects, play a dominant role in the study of network modeling, VLSI design, data structures, parallel computation, process scheduling and in a variety of other areas of computer science. Hypercubes are one of the preferred architectures for parallel computation, and a study of some properties of the hypercubes motivated this thesis.The concept of super line graphs, introduced by Bagga at el, generalizes the notion of line graphs. In this thesis several graph theoretic properties of super line graphs of hypercubes are studied. In particular the super line graphs of index two of hypercubes are investigated and some exact results and precise characterizations are found. / Department of Computer Science

Lagrangian potential flow methods are a promising alternative to mainstream wind turbine aerodynamics tools such as blade element momentum methods and grid-based computation fluid dynamics approaches. Potential flow methods are relatively easy to setup and robust with respect to geometry. With the advent of numerical techniques such as the fast multipole method, potential flow methods can be made computationally fast. Viscous core modelling has led to improvements in accuracy and numerical robustness. A C++ programming library employing Prandtl-Weissinger lifting line wing models and tailorable potential flow wake models has been developed under the name LibAero. The library offers steady-state, periodic, and unsteady flow simulators that can be used interchangeably with wake models. (Periodic and unsteady simulation are still under development and validation.) Wake models are constructed from potential flow elements such as vortex particles, laments, and sheets. Fast multipole method, symmetry modelling, multigrid method, and relaxation iteration are utilized to accelerate the computation of element-by-element interactions. The computational performance is assessed and the numerical results are validated against wind tunnel experimental data from the MEXICO Project and the Tj reborg wind turbine. The results of steady-state simulations with respect to a variety of numerical options and rotor blade designs are presented and conclusions are drawn. / Graduate

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