Voluntary employee turnover destabilizes small retail businesses and is a costly business problem for small retail business owners. Some small retail businesses experience voluntary employee turnover of up to 50% annually. Guided by Herzberg's 2-factor theory, the purpose of this multiple case study was to explore successful strategies used to reduce voluntary employee turnover. The target population consisted of 3 small retail business owners in Kingston, Jamaica. Data were collected from semistructured interviews and member checking, and human resource (HR) manuals containing HR policies and procedures. Data were analyzed into emerging themes using Yin's 5-step method. Based on the analysis of the data, 6 themes emerged. These themes included: employee empowerment and involvement, rewards recognition and incentives, career advancement opportunities, competitive compensation and benefits, tools to perform and, positive interpersonal relationships. These themes were identified as the strategies used to reduce turnover. The analysis of the data from the interviews and HR manuals showed that small retail business owners used these combinations of strategies to reduce voluntary employee turnover by increasing overall job satisfaction among employees. The findings from this study may contribute to positive social change by providing strategies to small retail business owners and HR managers to reduce voluntary employee turnover, increase profits, and improve economic conditions in the communities where they operate.

Alzheimer’s disease is a growing public health concern with the current number afflicted of 5 million in the US expected to triple by 2050. Since there is currently no cure or preventive pharmacological treatment, AD prevention research is now recognized as an important enterprise, with a goal to identify modifiable lifestyle factors that can reduce AD risk or delay its onset. Among these, increased physical activity, healthier food choices, more cognitive stimulation, better sleep quality, stress management, and social engagement have been identified as reasonable targets for behavioral intervention. A smartphone application-based behavioral intervention targeting these six behavioral domains was recently developed and a six-month randomized controlled trial was conducted, both to determine feasibility and compliance with technology usage and to test its efficacy. This study, titled the Gray Matters Study, was conducted in Cache County, Utah, enrolling a sample of 146 middle-aged participants (aged 40 to 64 years) randomized to treatment or control condition. Under the Health Belief Model, individuals who perceive a greater susceptibility to a particular health condition are hypothesized to be more likely to engage in more positive behaviors to reduce disease risk. Following this model, perceived threat of AD (operationalized by fear of AD, family history of AD, and metacognitive concerns) was examined for prediction of behavioral change over the six-month Gray Matters intervention period in these same six behavioral domains. Persons with a moderate level of fear of AD made significantly greater improvements in physical activity than those with low or high levels of fear. Family history was not a significant predictor of health-related behavioral change. However, persons with a moderate level of metacognitive concerns made significantly greater improvements in both physical activity and food quality than those with low or high levels of concerns. This is the first study to examine these psychological constructs related to AD risk and the extent to which they predict health-related behavior change. Future studies should extend the length of follow-up to at least one full year, include a more diverse sample of participants to expand generalizability, and build upon these findings to personalize supportive behavioral change interventions in order to be sensitive to these psychological factors.

Fifteen women and five men participated in a study aimed at devising strategies to reduce the use of physical punishment in New Zealand. The potential problems with the use of physical punishment, the extent of its use in New Zealand, and the likelihood of intergenerational transmission are discussed to justify the aim of the study. The participants were all parents who had been smacked themselves, but who had decided not to smack their own children. Their ages ranged from 28 to 57, and only three had less than some tertiary education. They were from various ethnic backgrounds; fourteen had an occupation other than parenting, and nine were single parents. The participants had broken the intergenerational cycle of physical punishment: they had been smacked themselves but did not smack their own children. All participated in an individual, semi-structured interview, in which their childhood physical punishment, their decision not to smack, the maintenance of that decision, and their use of alternative disciplinary techniques were discussed. Four participated in a focus group, in which the strategies suggested in the interviews were discussed and refined to produce a final list of recommendations. The parents made a conscious decision against smacking, which involved a particular experience that prompted them to consider their disciplinary practices. Negative views of smacking (ineffective, modelling violence, and potential to escalate) were also helpful in making the decision. While maintaining their decision was usually easy, alternative techniques were sometimes hard to use, though effective in the long term. Some had to deal with the effects of deviating from a childrearing norm, particularly in regard to other family members. While many were satisfied that their own children were free from physical punishment, some had actively tried to convince other parents not to use it as well. They recommended strategies aimed at achieving the goals of parent education, raising awareness, reducing strain, and increasing support for parents. They also suggested practical steps that individual parents who were interested in breaking the cycle of physical punishment could take. The limitations and strengths of the study are discussed, as well as the implications for further research. The study demonstrates that parenting without physical punishment is effective, desirable, and achievable, even by parents who were smacked themselves. It presents a number of possible strategies and intermediate goals, for interventions at a national, community, or individual level, which aim to reduce the use of physical punishment.

Finding a product with high quality and reasonable price online is a difficult task due to the fuzzy nature of data and queries. In order to handle the fuzzy problem, a new type-2 fuzzy reasoning based decision support system, the Web Shopping Expert for online users is proposed. In the Web Shopping Expert, an interval type-2 fuzzy logic system is used and a fuzzy output can be obtained using the up-low limit technique, which offers an opportunity to directly employ all the rules and methods of the type-1 fuzzy sets onto the type-2 fuzzy sets. To achieve the best performance the fuzzy inference system is optimized by the least square and numerical method. The key advantages of the least square method are the efficient use of samples and the simplicity of the implementation. The Web Shopping Expert based on the interval type-2 fuzzy inference system provides more reasonable conclusions for online users.

As water infrastructure in urban Ontario strains to meet the demands of a growing population, alternatives to the conventional water supply approach that complement demand management strategies are important to enable more sustainable water use at the household level. The adoption of rainwater harvesting (RWH), for indoor and outdoor uses by single-family households can reduce a households withdrawals on municipal water by 30% if rainwater is used for toilet flushing, laundry and outdoor uses (Despins 2009). The amount of potable water savings because of RWH is influenced by the rate of adoption and the allowed uses of rainwater at the individual household scale. The adoption of RWH systems would lead to reductions in potable water demand, which, in turn would lead to reduced demands on municipal water sources (e.g., groundwater or surface water), and storm water infrastructure resulting in overall reduced ecosystem stress and increased resiliency for climate change adaptation. Greater onsite storm water retention would mimic natural processes and would help reduce excess overland runoff that can result in water contamination. Presently, RWH systems tend to be more accepted and utilized in rural areas. However, there is a history of cistern use in rural and non-rural Waterloo. This history and capacity seems to be largely forgotten or unknown by urban citizens and local government officials. Century houses’ cisterns are often removed or filled in due to: a perceived lack of need, safety concerns and disrepair because of disuse. The increasing popularity of “green” building features and certifications have added some RWH systems for indoor and outdoor use to the urban environment, however, these remain limited instances. Moving RWH forward requires commitment from the Provincial and municipal government. Municipalities’ actions must support the sustainability objectives often referenced in their legislation and policy. This study establishes the drivers of RWH and examines the barriers to practice in the urban environment by examining existing examples and academic literature RWH systems within Canada and internationally. Results from a survey conducted in the City of Waterloo are used to reflect the systems user’s perspective. Interviews with municipal officials and RWH experts further highlight the drivers and barriers to RWH in urban Ontario. Based on the surveys, participants were generally willing to consider adopting RWH systems and a greater use of rainwater in the house, although a lack of information acts as significant barrier. However, Waterloo municipal officials who participated in the interviews described a much less enthusiastic attitude towards RWH. Although barriers identified in this research, including: legislative barriers, risk tolerance, perceptions of water abundance and economic realities shape the willingness to adopt RWH, this study indicates the barriers are surmountable through education and economic signaling.

In this study we set a pitching fluid tank on a floating platform with two vertical springs on both sides to support it. By assuming that the fluid in the tank is un-compressible and in-viscous and that there are no breaking waves existing, we observe the dynamic responses of the fluid in the tank and the interactions between the tank and the floating platform under wave forces. Using numerical simulations to analyze sloshing forces of the fluid and responses of the floating platform, we compute the work of the couple system in different cases and finally get normalizing results to provide for different sizes. The main purpose of this study is to gather wave power into a composite floating platform via the vibration of the floating and the pitching motion of the tank induced by wave forces, to transform the wave power into mechanical energy, and to reduce the angle of the vibration, making the floating platform stable and improving the safety.

Protein-protein interaction networks provide important information about what the biological function of proteins whose roles are unknown might be in a cell. These interaction networks were analyzed by a variety of approaches by running them on a single computer and the roles of the proteins identified were used to predict the function of the proteins unidentified. The functional flow is an approach that takes the network connectivity, distance effect, topology of the network with local and global views into account. With these advantages, that the functional flow produces more accurate results on the prediction of protein functions was presented by the previos conducted researches. However, the application implemented for this approach could not be practically applied on the large and complex network produced for the complex species because of memory limitation. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a new application be implemented on the high computing performance where the application can be scaled on the large data sets. Therefore, Hadoop, one of the open source map/reduce environments, was installed on 18 hosts each of which has eight cores. Method / the first map/reduce job distributes the protein interaction network as a format which allows parallel distributed computing to all the worker nodes, the other map/reduce job generates flows for each known protein function and the role of the proteins unidentified are predicted by accumulating all of these generated flows. It has been observed in the experiments we performed that the application requiring high performance computing can be decomposed into worker nodes efficiently and the application can provide better performance as the resources increase.

Novel broadband designs of patch antennas with an air substrate have been proposed in this dissertation. In the dual-frequency design, the study of single-fed dual-frequency microstrip antenna with a V-shaped slot has been first presented. As for the broadband patch antenna design, antennas with a U-shaped slot or a pair of wide slits can have an operating bandwidth more than 2.0 times that of a conventional one at a given operating frequency. The antenna bandwidth of then can be enhanced about 25%. In the designs of reducing cross-polarization, by using dual capacitive feeds with equal input powers, but with a 180¢X-phase shift, The cross-polarization radiation can be reduce about 10 to 15dB in the H-plane. Finally, A broadband shorted patch antenna fed by an aperture-coupled feed with an H-shaped coupling slot is proposed. By using an air substrate of thickness about 0.07 free-space wavelength of the center operating frequency, the proposed antenna can have an impedance bandwidth of about 26.2%. And the antenna design reduced the antenna size to be 40%~50%of the simple case.

This dissertation is a qualitative case study of a program where binational program established by the University of Texas to lower the Hispanic high school dropout rate in the United States. The Language Learners at the University of Texas at Austin Center for Hispanic Achievement (LUCHA) program is the focus of this dissertation. The LUCHA program serves immigrant Hispanic students who account for 34% of the 45% Hispanic dropout rate reported by NCES. The theoretical framework employed included the theories of cultural and social capital and the theory of caring to answer the following questions: 1) What challenges had to be met in order to initiate and develop the LUCHA program, a binational education program to combat the high dropout rate among Latino immigrants?, and 2) What can be learned from the implementation and practice of the LUCHA program in school districts with almost identical, homogenous population, and different levels of success with the program. Data was collected in Mexico and the United States and included participants involved in the program at different levels ranging form political involvement in Mexico to immigrant students in South Texas Valley school districts where the program started operations in 2006. The researcher was a participant in this study. The innovative ideas developed and instituted to reduce the Hispanic dropout rate included equipping schools with essential/core and English as a Second Language courses produced in Mexico, validating prior high school credits students had from Mexico through a transcript analysis service, obtaining Mexican transcripts for immigrant students who could not deliver them to schools, and diagnostic tests produced in Mexico for immigrant students with interrupted schooling. These services and their delivery were modified and adapted to meet the changing needs and graduation requirements of students and the educational bureaucracy in the U.S. This study brings to light the skills sets, assumptions, and characteristics of people needed to create binational agreements of cooperation. This research suggests that the perception of caring (Noddings, 1984) of educational agents in schools and school districts influences the level of success of the program in schools with almost identical populations. / text

This thesis presents novel ideas and research findings for the Web of Data – a global data space spanning many so-called Linked Open Data sources. Linked Open Data adheres to a set of simple principles to allow easy access and reuse for data published on the Web. Linked Open Data is by now an established concept and many (mostly academic) publishers adopted the principles building a powerful web of structured knowledge available to everybody. However, so far, Linked Open Data does not yet play a significant role among common web technologies that currently facilitate a high-standard Web experience. In this work, we thoroughly discuss the state-of-the-art for Linked Open Data and highlight several shortcomings – some of them we tackle in the main part of this work. First, we propose a novel type of data source meta-information, namely the topics of a dataset. This information could be published with dataset descriptions and support a variety of use cases, such as data source exploration and selection. For the topic retrieval, we present an approach coined Annotated Pattern Percolation (APP), which we evaluate with respect to topics extracted from Wikipedia portals. Second, we contribute to entity linking research by presenting an optimization model for joint entity linking, showing its hardness, and proposing three heuristics implemented in the LINked Data Alignment (LINDA) system. Our first solution can exploit multi-core machines, whereas the second and third approach are designed to run in a distributed shared-nothing environment. We discuss and evaluate the properties of our approaches leading to recommendations which algorithm to use in a specific scenario. The distributed algorithms are among the first of their kind, i.e., approaches for joint entity linking in a distributed fashion. Also, we illustrate that we can tackle the entity linking problem on the very large scale with data comprising more than 100 millions of entity representations from very many sources. Finally, we approach a sub-problem of entity linking, namely the alignment of concepts. We again target a method that looks at the data in its entirety and does not neglect existing relations. Also, this concept alignment method shall execute very fast to serve as a preprocessing for further computations. Our approach, called Holistic Concept Matching (HCM), achieves the required speed through grouping the input by comparing so-called knowledge representations. Within the groups, we perform complex similarity computations, relation conclusions, and detect semantic contradictions. The quality of our result is again evaluated on a large and heterogeneous dataset from the real Web. In summary, this work contributes a set of techniques for enhancing the current state of the Web of Data. All approaches have been tested on large and heterogeneous real-world input. / Die vorliegende Arbeit stellt neue Ideen sowie Forschungsergebnisse für das Web of Data vor. Hierbei handelt es sich um ein globales Netz aus sogenannten Linked Open Data (LOD) Quellen. Diese Datenquellen genügen gewissen Prinzipien, um Nutzern einen leichten Zugriff über das Internet und deren Verwendung zu ermöglichen. LOD ist bereits weit verbreitet und es existiert eine Vielzahl von Daten-Veröffentlichungen entsprechend der LOD Prinzipien. Trotz dessen ist LOD bisher kein fester Baustein des Webs des 21. Jahrhunderts. Die folgende Arbeit erläutert den aktuellen Stand der Forschung und Technik für Linked Open Data und identifiziert dessen Schwächen. Einigen Schwachstellen von LOD widmen wir uns in dem darauf folgenden Hauptteil. Zu Beginn stellen wir neuartige Metadaten für Datenquellen vor – die Themen von Datenquellen (engl. Topics). Solche Themen könnten mit Beschreibungen von Datenquellen veröffentlicht werden und eine Reihe von Anwendungsfällen, wie das Auffinden und Explorieren relevanter Daten, unterstützen. Wir diskutieren unseren Ansatz für die Extraktion dieser Metainformationen – die Annotated Pattern Percolation (APP). Experimentelle Ergebnisse werden mit Themen aus Wikipedia Portalen verglichen. Des Weiteren ergänzen wir den Stand der Forschung für das Auffinden verschiedener Repräsentationen eines Reale-Welt-Objektes (engl. Entity Linking). Für jenes Auffinden werden nicht nur lokale Entscheidungen getroffen, sondern es wird die Gesamtheit der Objektbeziehungen genutzt. Wir diskutieren unser Optimierungsmodel, beweisen dessen Schwere und präsentieren drei Ansätze zur Berechnung einer Lösung. Alle Ansätze wurden im LINked Data Alignment (LINDA) System implementiert. Die erste Methode arbeitet auf einer Maschine, kann jedoch Mehrkern-Prozessoren ausnutzen. Die weiteren Ansätze wurden für Rechnercluster ohne gemeinsamen Speicher entwickelt. Wir evaluieren unsere Ergebnisse auf mehr als 100 Millionen Entitäten und erläutern Vor- sowie Nachteile der jeweiligen Ansätze. Im verbleibenden Teil der Arbeit behandeln wir das Linking von Konzepten – ein Teilproblem des Entity Linking. Unser Ansatz, Holistic Concept Matching (HCM), betrachtet abermals die Gesamtheit der Daten. Wir gruppieren die Eingabe um eine geringe Laufzeit bei der Verarbeitung von mehreren Hunderttausenden Konzepten zu erreichen. Innerhalb der Gruppen berechnen wir komplexe Ähnlichkeiten, und spüren semantische Schlussfolgerungen und Widersprüche auf. Die Qualität des Ergebnisses evaluieren wir ebenfalls auf realen Datenmengen. Zusammenfassend trägt diese Arbeit zum aktuellen Stand der Forschung für das Web of Data bei. Alle diskutierten Techniken wurden mit realen, heterogenen und großen Datenmengen getestet.