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Master of Science / Department of Horticulture and Natural Resources / Eleni Pliakoni / Intensive specialty crop production within high tunnel systems in the central U.S. has greatly expanded. High tunnel systems, used primarily to protect specialty crops from harsh environmental conditions, improve marketability, and extend fruiting season. High tunnel day-neutral strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa) production in Kansas may by limited due to the high summer temperatures. Evaporative cooling within a high tunnel is a novel technique meant to cool the plant temperature during the hottest months of production. Currently, evaporative cooling is implemented in the early stages during the heavy bloom period. Spring-planted day-neutral strawberry production within high tunnels could provide growers with enhanced yields and marketability, improved storage quality, and late-season prices. This study identifies the optimum cultivars in a plasticulture, high tunnel system with the use of evaporative cooling in regards to yield, quality, storage life, and consumer opinion. The trial was conducted at the Kansas State University Olathe Horticulture Research and Extension Center (OHREC) during 2014 and 2015. Six commercially-available cultivars were evaluated: ‘Albion’, ‘Evie 2’, ‘Monterey’, ‘Portola’, ‘San Andreas’, and ‘Seascape’. Mature fruit (90-100% red) were harvested twice a week and four harvests were evaluated for at harvest and postharvest quality throughout each production year. Storage life was monitored every 24hrs by respiration rate, moisture content and overall visual quality, using a scale from 5 (excellent) to 1 (very poor). Physical and organoleptic quality measurements (texture and color, and soluble solids and titratable acidity) were evaluated every two days throughout storage, and nutritional quality (total phenolic and antioxidant availability) was evaluated at harvest. Our results indicate that ‘Portola’ had the highest yields in 2014 and 2015 at 1.33 lbs/plant and 1.12 lbs/plant, respectively. At harvest, the soluble solids content (°Brix) was highest with ‘Monterey’ and ‘Albion’ (P < 0.0001), while ‘San Andreas’, ‘Monterey’, ‘Portola’, and ‘Albion’ retained firm texture (force(g)) (P ≤ 0.0001). All cultivars maintained their overall visual quality until day 8, with the exception of ‘Evie 2’ and ‘Seascape’. Furthermore, the four cultivars maintained visual quality and had lower respiration rates and moisture content loss (P < 0.001, P < 0.0001, P < 0.05). Throughout storage, ‘Seascape’ had a high respiration rate (P < 0.0001) and low overall visual quality (P < 0.01). Moisture content loss (%) throughout 2014 storage life was less than in 2015 (P < 0.0001) and ‘San Andreas’ and ‘Monterey’ had the least moisture loss throughout both production seasons (P < 0.01). In our trials, evaporative cooling did not affect yield or the incidence of disease. However, the use of evaporative cooling resulted in lower total phenolic levels in both production years (P < 0.0001), and higher respiration rates during storage, as observed in 2015 (P ≤ 0.01). Because of significant year-to-year differences in berry weight (lbs/plant) and size (oz/fruit), further studies are needed to identify the weather effect and best management practices in the region. In Kansas, growing day-neutral strawberries in a high tunnel has potential based on yield and quality of the fruit that we evaluated.

Thesis (MTech (Physical Sciences))--Peninsula Technikon, Cape Town, 1999. / Wet deposition of toxic trace metals is the dominant mode of deposition in terrestrial ecosystems and contributes very significantly to their pollution burden. Wet deposited metals are dissolved in rainwater. They reach the vegatation in a form most favourable for uptake. Reliable analysis of toxic trace metals in rainwater is important in order to determine the impact they make on the environment. In this study, trace metals in rainwater and in dry deposition (as a control measure), have been analysed over a period of a year. These metals include cadmium, copper, cobalt, lead, nickel and zinc. The rainwater was filtered, acidified to pH2 and irradiated with UV-light. Dry deposition samples, were digested by heating in nitric acid before analysis. Differential-pulse anodic stripping voltammetry was used to determine cadmium, lead and zinc. Copper was determined by adsorptive cathodic stripping at pH7 after complexation with catechol. Cobalt and nickel were measured at pH9 by adsorptive cathodic stripping after formation of their dimethylglyoximes. Sampling was done on a daily basis from April 1996 to March 1997, on the campus of the Peninsula Technikon. The samples were collected over a 24-hour period. The total average concentration for the metals was 16.11 flg/dm3 for rainwater and 427flg/dm3 for dry deposition. Meteorological factors such as wind speed, humidity and temperature affect the distribution of pollutants and thus the trace metal levels. The levels of the metallic pollutants were thus evaluated against meteorological data. Differential-pulse stripping voltammetry is shown to be applicable for heavy metal analysis of rainwater.

Recent reports suggest that measuring the objective quality is very essential towards the success of colonoscopy. Several quality indicators (i.e. metrics) proposed in recent studies are implemented in software systems that compute real-time quality scores for routine screening colonoscopy. Most quality metrics are derived based on various temporal events occurred during the colonoscopy procedure. The location of the phase boundary between the insertion and the withdrawal phases and the amount of circumferential inspection are two such important temporal events. These two temporal events can be determined by analyzing various camera motions of the colonoscope. This dissertation put forward a novel method to estimate X, Y and Z directional motions of the colonoscope using motion vector templates. Since abnormalities of a WCE or a colonoscopy video can be found in a small number of frames (around 5% out of total frames), it is very helpful if a computer system can decide whether a frame has any mucosal abnormalities. Also, the number of detected abnormal lesions during a procedure is used as a quality indicator. Majority of the existing abnormal detection methods focus on detecting only one type of abnormality or the overall accuracies are somewhat low if the method tries to detect multiple abnormalities. Most abnormalities in endoscopy images have unique textures which are clearly distinguishable from normal textures. In this dissertation a new method is proposed that achieves the objective of detecting multiple abnormalities with a higher accuracy using a multi-texture analysis technique. The multi-texture analysis method is designed by representing WCE and colonoscopy image textures as textons.

Na Geodésia, quando se deseja determinar coordenadas com exatidão e precisão, faz-se uso do posicionamento relativo. Esta técnica consiste no emprego de dois ou mais receptores GPS onde um receptor permanece sobre um ou mais pontos de coordenadas conhecidas (base) e um ou mais receptores (rover) são colocados sobre os pontos a serem determinados. Para auxiliar e aumentar a produtividade dos usuários que utilizam o posicionamento relativo foram criados os Sistemas de Controle Ativo (SCA), que permitem ao usuário empregar apenas um receptor para realizar o posicionamento relativo, desde que dados coletados simultaneamente de uma estação contínua, pertencente a uma rede ativa, estejam disponíveis. No Brasil, a rede ativa, gerenciada pelo IBGE, é materializada pela RBMC - Rede Brasileira de Monitoramento Contínuo do Sistema GPS. Os dados de 24 estações distribuídas por todo o território nacional são coletados ininterruptamente e disponibilizados para os usuários. Devido ao grande aumento da utilização das redes de monitoramento contínuo, é de suma importância que as observáveis das estações passem por um controle de qualidade, assegurando confiabilidade aos dados coletados. Neste trabalho é apresentada uma análise detalhada dos indicativos de qualidade dos dados da estação NEIA (Cananéia/SP), pertencente a RBMC, referente ao período compreendido entre janeiro de 2002 e abril de 2006, bem como da variação temporal de suas coordenadas (latitude, longitude e altura geométrica), quando comparadas com as coordenadas fiduciais da estação. Estas análises foram realizadas com base nos resultados de processamento obtidos com o uso dos seguintes programas: TEQC, BERNESE V. 5.0 e pelo serviço de processamento on-line AUSPOS. / In Geodesy, when the determination of coordinates with great accuracy and precision is desired, relative positioning is used. This technique consists of the use of the two or more receivers, where a receiver is placed on a station of known coordinates (base) and one or more remote receivers (rover) is placed on the stations to be determines. To help and increase the productivity of the users that use relative positioning, had been created the Control Active Systems (SCA), that allow the use of only one receiver by the user to carry out the relative positioning, provided that the data collected simultaneously from a continuous station of an active network is available. In Brazil, the active network is materialized by the RBMC - Brazilian Network of Continuous Monitoring of GPS, managed by the IBGE. Data of 24 stations distributed throughout the country is collected uninterruptedly and made available for the users. Due to the great increase of the use of the networks of continuous monitoring, it is of high importance that the observations pass through a quality control, assuring trustworthiness to the collected data. In this work is presented a detailed analysis of the data quality of station NEIA (Cananéia/São Paulo State/Brazil), belonging to the RBMC, referring to the period between January 2002 and May 2006, and the secular variation of its coordinates (latitude, longitude and geometric height), when compared with the fiducials coordinates of this station. These analyses had been carried out based on the results obtained by the processing with the following softwares: TEQC, BERNESE V. 5.0 and the AUSPOS on-line processing service.

The purpose of this study is to study the effect of water quality and quantity of raw water on advanced and conventional treatment processes. We are using data of water quality and quantity to investigate difference of quality of treated water in water treatment plant. Finally we compared items of ware quality ( turbidity, free residual chlorine, total hardness, conductivity, pH, NH3-N) whether passed the Taiwan¡¦s national standard of drinking water or not. We are hoping the treated drinking water will all fit the goal of high quality. Results show that high variation of turbidity was found from May to October in every year. The high turbidity was frequently occurred from 9.9% (2008) to 39.5% (2010). It indicated the worsen trend of water quality of raw water is increased yearly. In all monitoring items of water quality, turbidity, conductivity, NH3-N was greatly influenced in seasons from June to September. The rest items had no significant affect by season¡¦s variation. The removal efficiency in items of water quality of advanced and conventional WTP we found there were high value at hardness and TDS with 49.3% and 43.3% respectively. These items, water quality of treated water (such as turbidity, free residual chlorine, total hardness, conductivity, pH, NH3-N), were all pass the current drinking standard in Taiwan ( i.e., turbidity¡Õ2NTU¡BTDS¡Õ500mg/L¡B6.0¡ÕpH¡Õ8.5¡B0.2mg/L¡Õfree residual chlorine¡Õ1.0mg/L¡BNH3-N¡Õ0.1mg/L ).

To improve product quality and reduce cost, batch production is often implemented in many exible manufacturing systems. However, the current literature does not provide any method to analyze the quality performance in a flexible manufacturing system with batch production. In this research, we present an analytical method with closed-form formula to evaluate the quality performance in such systems. Based on the model, we discover and investigate monotonic and non-monotonic properties in quality to provide practical guidance for operation management. To improve product quality, we introduce the notions of quality improvability with respect to product sequencing. In addition, we develop the indicators for quality improvability based on the data available on the factory floor rather than complicated calculations. We define the bottleneck sequence and bottleneck transition as the ones that impede quality in the strongest manner, investigate the sensitivity of quality performance with respect to sequences and transitions, and propose quality bottleneck sequence and transition indicators based on the measured data. Finally, we provide a case study at an automotive paint shop to show how this method is applied to improve paint quality. Moreover, we explore a potential application to reduce energy consumption and atmospheric emissions at automotive paint shops. By selecting appropriate batch and sequence policies, the paint quality can be improved and repaints can be reduced so that less material and energy will be consumed, and less atmospheric emissions will be generated. It is shown that such scheduling and control method can lead to significant energy savings and emission reduction with no extra investment nor changes to existing painting processes. The successful development of such method would open up a new area in manufacturing systems research and contribute to establish a solid foundation for an integrated study on productivity, quality and exibility. In addition, it will provide production engineers and operation managers a quantitative tool for continuous improvement on product quality in flexible manufacturing environment

Accompanied by the cultural development to an information society and knowledge economy and driven by the rapid growth of the World Wide Web and decreasing prices for technology and disk space, the world\'s knowledge is evolving fast, and humans are challenged with keeping up. Despite all efforts on data structuring, a large part of this human knowledge is still hidden behind the ambiguities and fuzziness of natural language. Especially domain language poses new challenges by having specific syntax, terminology and morphology. Companies willing to exploit the information contained in such corpora are often required to build specialized systems instead of being able to rely on off the shelf software libraries and data resources. The engineering of language processing systems is however cumbersome, and the creation of language resources, annotation of training data and composition of modules is often enough rather an art than a science. The scientific field of Language Engineering aims at providing reliable information, approaches and guidelines of how to design, implement, test and evaluate language processing systems. Language engineering architectures have been a subject of scientific work for the last two decades and aim at building universal systems of easily reusable components. Although current systems offer comprehensive features and rely on an architectural sound basis, there is still little documentation about how to actually build an information extraction application. Selection of modules, methods and resources for a distinct usecase requires a detailed understanding of state of the art technology, application demands and characteristics of the input text. The main assumption underlying this work is the thesis that a new application can only occasionally be created by reusing standard components from different repositories. This work recapitulates existing literature about language resources, processing resources and language engineering architectures to derive a theory about how to engineer a new system for information extraction from a (domain) corpus. This thesis was initiated by the Daimler AG to prepare and analyze unstructured information as a basis for corporate quality analysis. It is therefore concerned with language engineering in the area of Information Extraction, which targets the detection and extraction of specific facts from textual data. While other work in the field of information extraction is mainly concerned with the extraction of location or person names, this work deals with automotive components, failure symptoms, corrective measures and their relations in arbitrary arity. The ideas presented in this work will be applied, evaluated and demonstrated on a real world application dealing with quality analysis on automotive domain language. To achieve this goal, the underlying corpus is examined and scientifically characterized, algorithms are picked with respect to the derived requirements and evaluated where necessary. The system comprises language identification, tokenization, spelling correction, part of speech tagging, syntax parsing and a final relation extraction step. The extracted information is used as an input to data mining methods such as an early warning system and a graph based visualization for interactive root cause analysis. It is finally investigated how the unstructured data facilitates those quality analysis methods in comparison to structured data. The acceptance of these text based methods in the company\'s processes further proofs the usefulness of the created information extraction system.

Na Geodésia, quando se deseja determinar coordenadas com exatidão e precisão, faz-se uso do posicionamento relativo. Esta técnica consiste no emprego de dois ou mais receptores GPS onde um receptor permanece sobre um ou mais pontos de coordenadas conhecidas (base) e um ou mais receptores (rover) são colocados sobre os pontos a serem determinados. Para auxiliar e aumentar a produtividade dos usuários que utilizam o posicionamento relativo foram criados os Sistemas de Controle Ativo (SCA), que permitem ao usuário empregar apenas um receptor para realizar o posicionamento relativo, desde que dados coletados simultaneamente de uma estação contínua, pertencente a uma rede ativa, estejam disponíveis. No Brasil, a rede ativa, gerenciada pelo IBGE, é materializada pela RBMC - Rede Brasileira de Monitoramento Contínuo do Sistema GPS. Os dados de 24 estações distribuídas por todo o território nacional são coletados ininterruptamente e disponibilizados para os usuários. Devido ao grande aumento da utilização das redes de monitoramento contínuo, é de suma importância que as observáveis das estações passem por um controle de qualidade, assegurando confiabilidade aos dados coletados. Neste trabalho é apresentada uma análise detalhada dos indicativos de qualidade dos dados da estação NEIA (Cananéia/SP), pertencente a RBMC, referente ao período compreendido entre janeiro de 2002 e abril de 2006, bem como da variação temporal de suas coordenadas (latitude, longitude e altura geométrica), quando comparadas com as coordenadas fiduciais da estação. Estas análises foram realizadas com base nos resultados de processamento obtidos com o uso dos seguintes programas: TEQC, BERNESE V. 5.0 e pelo serviço de processamento on-line AUSPOS. / In Geodesy, when the determination of coordinates with great accuracy and precision is desired, relative positioning is used. This technique consists of the use of the two or more receivers, where a receiver is placed on a station of known coordinates (base) and one or more remote receivers (rover) is placed on the stations to be determines. To help and increase the productivity of the users that use relative positioning, had been created the Control Active Systems (SCA), that allow the use of only one receiver by the user to carry out the relative positioning, provided that the data collected simultaneously from a continuous station of an active network is available. In Brazil, the active network is materialized by the RBMC - Brazilian Network of Continuous Monitoring of GPS, managed by the IBGE. Data of 24 stations distributed throughout the country is collected uninterruptedly and made available for the users. Due to the great increase of the use of the networks of continuous monitoring, it is of high importance that the observations pass through a quality control, assuring trustworthiness to the collected data. In this work is presented a detailed analysis of the data quality of station NEIA (Cananéia/São Paulo State/Brazil), belonging to the RBMC, referring to the period between January 2002 and May 2006, and the secular variation of its coordinates (latitude, longitude and geometric height), when compared with the fiducials coordinates of this station. These analyses had been carried out based on the results obtained by the processing with the following softwares: TEQC, BERNESE V. 5.0 and the AUSPOS on-line processing service.

Submitted by Mario BC (mario@bc.ufrpe.br) on 2016-05-16T13:01:10Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Ghena Catarina Carneiro de Vale.pdf: 1998545 bytes, checksum: 082584366f66c744ff064b17ffc1be49 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-05-16T13:01:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ghena Catarina Carneiro de Vale.pdf: 1998545 bytes, checksum: 082584366f66c744ff064b17ffc1be49 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-02-29 / A foodstuff product that is always present in the meals of Brazilians, especially in the Northeast of Brazil, manioc flour is considered a complete meal. Nowadays, the production scenario of the handmade table flour as found in street fairs and public markets, has being loosing territory and replaced by the industrialized product mainly found in big reatailers. In order to analyze the attributes and service quality presented by rural producers of table flour in the region of Pernambuco’s forest zone, the SERVQUAL tool was used to model an exploratory research through a random quality analysis considering the opinion of producers of the forest zone and consumers in the metropolitan area. Thus, the gaps found within the perceptions of table flour producers and consumers of table and industrialized flour were identified, verifying the impact on the quality of the services present in the market and identifying the critical dimensions that should be developed in an action plan to increase the level of product quality for the table flour compared to its industrial competitors. / Um produto do gênero alimentício que está sempre presente nas refeições dos brasileiros, e principalmente dos nordestinos, a farinha de mandioca é considerada um alimento completo. Nos dias atuais, o cenário produtivo da farinha de mandioca de mesa, tal como encontrada em feiras livres e mercados, foi sendo substituído pelo da farinha de mandioca industrializada, comercializada em sua grande maioria por supermercados. Com a finalidade de analisar os atributos da qualidade do serviço apresentada pelos produtores rurais da farinha de mesa na região da zona da mata pernambucana, utilizou-se o modelo SERVQUAL, em uma pesquisa exploratória por meio de uma análise aleatória da qualidade, considerando opiniões de produtores da zona da mata e consumidores na região metropolitana. Assim, foram identificadas as lacunas presentes nas percepções dos produtores da farinha de mesa e consumidores do produto de mesa e industrializado, verificando os impactos na qualidade dos serviços presentes na comercialização e identificando as dimensões críticas que devem ser desenvolvidas, num plano de ação para aumentar o nível da qualidade do serviço frente aos concorrentes.