Background: The average hours per week of full-time employees have decreased since 1870, however, stayed at 40 hours per week for a long time. Now, in the early 21st century, there is a new interest of lowering the weekly hours even more. The reasoning behind the new interest is because it has been proven to increase a variety of benefits, both on an organizational and individual level.   Research Problem: Even though there is an increased interest for Reduced Working Hours per week globally, the existing research mainly focuses on the employees' side where Work-Life Balance and other benefits is highlighted. We find little research and documentation of the potential differences it entails for managers; therefore, it seems to be of lower interest to document the managers side of the phenomenon. Here we find a lack of research and a gap that needs further attention.   Research Purpose: The purpose of this study is to fill the research gap by identifying the managerial practices and strategies when reducing the weekly working hours within an organization. Thus, with the intention to create a framework for future managers to be able to make use of when implementing this strategy.   Research Question: How do different managerial practices and strategies facilitate the implementation of Managerial Innovation of Reduced Working Hours effectively for better Work-Life Balance?   Research Method: This study is done with a qualitative and inductive approach. Since our research is of this form, a relativistic ontological approach was used together with the epistemological assumptions of constructionism. We conducted a multiple case study to investigate the managerial practices that changed or had the most impact on the implementation of Reduced Working Hours. This is done in combination with grounded theory, where the aim is to develop theory that is grounded in our data.   Conclusion: Our findings show that certain practices had increased impact on the facilitation of Reduced Working Hours but the managerial focus shifts depending on the stage of implementation. We created a framework with the managerial practices that are most important during each stage of the implementation. First, planning is essential in the Pre-implementation stage with gathering knowledge and inspiration and having meetings to prepare before implementing Reduced Working Hours. The second stage, During-implementation presented manage as the essential focus. With guiding, communicating, and involving as the key practices. Lastly, in the Post-implementation stage, managers need to iterate. This is done by collecting feedback, revising the information to improve processes and practices.

I investigated percent coverage, plant height, species richness, and woody stem density in plant communities in ten study plots during spring and fall (2010-2012) within 3 different treatments (continual mowings, one fall mowing, and one fall mowing with native wildflower seeds) on highway 25 right-of-way in Oktibbeha and Winston counties, Mississippi. I recorded 277 plant species including native and non-native forbs, legumes, grasses, rushes/sedges, and woody plants. Non-native agronomic grasses exhibited greatest coverage greater than 90 percent occurring in all treatments. Percent coverage of plants less than 0.46m height category exceeded 100 while, greater than 0.46m plant height categories averaged 55 percent. Woody stem density ranged from 7,772 year 1 to 10,025 stems/hectare year 2. I detected no significant differences in plant height or woody stems among treatments. One mowing per year retained agronomic plant cover for erosion control and annual cost savings up to 75 percent for roadside maintenance.

This work proposes a new method for using reduced order models in lieu of high fidelity analysis during the sensitivity analysis step of gradient based design optimization. The method offers a reduction in the computational cost of finite difference based sensitivity analysis in that context. The method relies on interpolating reduced order models which are based on proper orthogonal decomposition. The interpolation process is performed using radial basis functions and Grassmann manifold projection. It does not require additional high fidelity analyses to interpolate a reduced order model for new points in the design space. The interpolated models are used specifically for points in the finite difference stencil during sensitivity analysis. The proposed method is applied to an airfoil shape optimization (ASO) problem and a transport wing optimization (TWO) problem. The errors associated with the reduced order models themselves as well as the gradients calculated from them are evaluated. The effects of the method on the overall optimization path, computation times, and function counts are also examined. The ASO results indicate that the proposed scheme is a viable method for reducing the computational cost of these optimizations. They also indicate that the adaptive step is an effective method of improving interpolated gradient accuracy. The TWO results indicate that the interpolation accuracy can have a strong impact on optimization search direction.

In a variance component model,(Formula presented.), Pukelsheim (1981) proved that the non-negative and unbiased estimation of the variance components σ(Formula presented.), j=1, …, c, entails a transformation of the original model to Q(Formula presented.) (called Q-reduced model). The maximum likelihood (ML) approach based on the likelihood of Q(Formula presented.) (denoted Q-ML) is considered and applied to an incomplete block design (IBD) model. The Q-ML estimators of variance components and are shown to be more efficient in the mean squared error sense than the non-negative MINQUE’s (minimum norm quadratic unbiased estimators) in the IBD. The effect of using Q-ML estimators of the variance components to estimate the variance ratio in the combined estimator of the treatment contrast is also considered.

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The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of school library access on student reading comprehension as measured by the Easy CBM universal screener test. The population consisted of 5th and 6th grade students enrolled in one intermediate school in an urban school system in East Tennessee. Data were analyzed for the population of the 2016-2017 academic school year. Specifically, this study considered the impact of school library access on students who qualify for free or reduced meals. A quantitative study was used to find correlations and differences in the reading comprehension data and library checkout data for fifth and sixth grade students who do or do not qualify for free or reduced meals in an urban East Tennessee school district. A quasi-experimental design was selected because preexisting data were collected on 1,003 fifth and sixth grade students enrolled and assessed during the 2016 – 2017 school year. The reading comprehension levels from the Easy CBM universal screener were collected for each of the students in the study. The number of class library visits for each student’s language arts teacher as well as the total checkout numbers for each student were also collected for each student in the study. The results of the study indicated a significant positive correlation in the number of checkouts and class library visits for all students. Results also indicated a significant positive correlation in the number of checkouts for students who qualify for free and reduced meals when these students are taken to the library as part of their language arts instructional block. Additional results of the study indicated a significant positive correlation between the number of books checked out and reading comprehension scores when all students are considered. There was significant difference in the number of books checked out by students who did not qualify for free or reduced meals, with those students checking out approximately one more book than students who do qualify for free or reduced meals. Finally, results of the study indicate a significant difference in reading comprehension scores for student who students who do not qualify for free or reduced meals and students who do qualify. Students who do not qualify for free or reduced meals scored significantly higher than students who do qualify.

An efficient solution method for evaluating radiative transport in a foam layer is a valuable tool for predicting the properties of the layer. Two different solution methods have been investigated. First, a reverse Monte Carlo (RMC) simulation has been developed. In the RMC simulation photon bundles are traced backwards from a detector to the source where they were emitted. The RMC method takes advantage of time reflection symmetry, allowing the photons to be traced backwards in the same manner they are tracked in a standard forward Monte Carlo scheme. Second, a reduced order model based on the singular value decomposition (ROM) has been developed. ROM uses solutions of the reflectance-time profiles found for specific values of the governing parameters to form a solution basis that can be used to generate the profile for any arbitrary values of the parameter set. The governing parameters that were used in this study include the foam layer thickness, the asymmetry parameter, and the scattering coefficient. Layer thicknesses between 4 cm and 20 cm were considered. Values of the asymmetry parameter varied between 0.2 and .08, while the scattering coefficient ranged from 2800 m-1 to 14000 m-1. Ten blind test cases with parameters chosen randomly from these ranges were run and compared to an established forward Monte Carlo (FMC) solution to determine the accuracy and efficiency of both methods. For both RMC and ROM methods the agreement with FMC is good. The average difference in areas under the curves relative to the FMC curve for the ten cases of RMC is 7.1% and for ROM is 7.6%. One of the ten cases causes ROM to extrapolate outside of its data set. If this case is excluded the average error for the remaining nine cases is 5.3%. While the efficiency of RMC for this case is not much greater than that of FMC, it is advantageous in that a solution over a specified time range can be found, as opposed to the FMC where the entire profile must be found. ROM is a very efficient solution method. After a library of solutions is developed, a separated solution with different parameters can be found essentially in real-time. Because of the efficiency of this ROM it is a very promising solution technique for property analysis using inverse methods.

Current Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs) have enormous server-side bandwidth requirements. The costs of providing this bandwidth is in turn passed on to the consumer in the form of high monthly subscription fees. Prior work has primarily focused on distributing this bandwidth using peer-to-peer architectures, but these architectures have difficulty preventing cheating, overwhelming low resource peers, and maintaining consistent game state. We have developed a hybrid game architecture that combines client-server and peer-to-peer technologies to prevent cheating, maintain centralized and consistent game state, significantly reduce central server bandwidth, and prevent lower capacity players from being overwhelmed. By dramatically reducing the bandwidth needed to host a game without introducing additional liabilities, our hybrid architecture reduces the costs associated with that bandwidth and allows MMOG developers to reduce the cost of monthly subscription fees. In addition, because the central server will need less bandwidth per player, a single server is able to support considerably more concurrent players. Our experiments show that bandwidth can be reduced by up to 95% and a single server can support a game twice as large.

There is significant interest in reducing the frictional resistance that occurs along a surface in contact with a liquid. A novel approach to reducing the frictional resistance across a liquid-solid interface is the use of superhydrophobic surfaces. superhydrophobic surfaces are created in this work by the use of micro-fabrication techniques where systematic roughness is fabricated on a substrate surface which is subsequently treated with a hydrophobic coating. This work reports an experimental study of superhydrophobic surfaces used to reduce drag in both laminar and turbulent channel flows. In the laminar flow regime reductions in frictional resistance greater than 55% were measured in microchannels consisting of superhydrophobic walls. The reduction in frictional resistance for laminar flow in microchannels with superhydrophobic walls was shown to be dependent on the rib/cavity orientation, with greater reduction achieved when the ribs/cavities were aligned parallel with the direction of the flow. Also, the ratio of the cavity width to the combined rib/cavity pitch and the ratio of the combined rib/cavity pitch to the microchannel hydraulic diameter exercise influence on the frictional resistance. The condition when the flowing liquid was allowed to completely "wet" the cavities was also explored. Generalized expressions enabling prediction of the classical friction factor-Reynolds number product as a function of the relevant governing parameters were also developed. The influence of superhydrophobic surfaces in turbulent flow was explored in macrochannels using particle imaging velocimetry (PIV). For the turbulent flow regime the time-averaged velocity profiles revealed no discernible slip velocity at the superhydrophobic wall. However, the results did show that the superhydrophobic surfaces exhibits an influence on the streamwise and wall-normal turbulence intensities, the turbulent shear stress, the total shear stress distributions, and the turbulence production in the channel. From the total shear stress distributions in the channel the coefficient of friction at the channel walls was determined. The results showed that for the superhydrophobic surface with ribs and cavities oriented parallel to the flow direction a reduction in the coefficient of friction as high as 16% was achieved compared to a smooth wall channel. Superhydrophobic surfaces with ribs and cavities oriented transverse to the flow direction showed a modest increase in the coefficient of friction. Differential pressure measurements in the turbulent flow channel were also acquired and used to calculate the channel average friction factor.

In this paper our goal is to describe how to find the growth of Thompson's group F with generators a and b. Also, by studying elements through pipe systems, we describe how adding a third generator c affects geodesic length. We model the growth of Thompson's group F by producing a grammar for reduced pairs of trees based on Blake Fordham's tree structure. Then we change this grammar into a system of equations that describes the growth of Thompson's group F and simplify. To complete our second goal, we present and discuss a computer program that has led to some discoveries about how generators affect the pipe systems. We were able to find the growth function as a system of 11 equations for generators a and b.