<p>The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a rationale and framework for a systemic praxis for Marriage and Family Therapists (MFTs) that can be utilized to increase possibilities for therapeutic change. In a time in which &ldquo;common factors&rdquo; are valued and MFTs generally consider themselves eclectic or integrative, there is a need for therapists to learn to cultivate a systemic praxis that allows them to effectively &ldquo;juggle&rdquo; all of the elements of and responsibilities inherent in the therapeutic situation. Drawing from cybernetics, systemic theory, and radical constructivism, I develop a systemic praxis for therapists which incorporates systemic ways of perceiving and engaging, improvisation, and Recursive Frame Analysis (Keeney, 1990). I develop a theory regarding the nature, impact, and utilization of what I call &ldquo;systemic sensing&rdquo; and ways of engaging that go beyond adherence to various aspects of therapy models. Systemic Sensing constitutes ways of seeing, hearing, sensing, and intuiting that therapists can utilize to co-create, with their clients, opportunities for therapeutic transformation. </p><p> In this dissertation, I extend Ray Ison&rsquo;s (2010) framework for systemic practice to the practice of marriage and family therapy. Ison (2010) provided a metaphor of the systems practitioner as a juggler. MFTs can improve their practice by learning to juggle Maturana&rsquo;s (2002, 2008) notions of languaging and emotioning, Bateson&rsquo;s (1972; 1979) notion of distinguishing, and Ison&rsquo;s (2010) notion of naming; the practice of and responsibilities inherent in systemic sensing; and the tailoring and contextualizing of the practice of therapy to individual clients and moments in time. </p><p> What is needed in the field of marriage and family therapy is a way of envisioning and practicing therapy that increases possibilities for change. I call for a reformation that will shift the emphasis in marriage and family therapy from model-based training into more holistic, flexible, and systemic interpersonal practices that are based on inspiring therapeutic change and healing. </p>

<p> The United States Department of Defense (DoD) loses billions of dollars annually on cancelled or failed acquisition programs. Several DoD acquisition studies, Office of Management and Budget Studies, Government Accountability Office Reports, as well as other studies highlight the disturbing fact, of a plethora of programs that fail to meet full operational requirement capabilities, and therefore, are eventually cancelled. In these cases, the DoD loses billions of investment dollars without any return. Scholars, program managers, and systems engineers posit that there are a host of factors that influence whether a program is cancelled or allowed to continue. They include, but are not limited to political pressures, cost overruns, schedule overruns, and performance shortfalls. </p><p> The research here aims to add to the body of knowledge of systems engineering, program management, and the factors that influence acquisition program terminations within the United States Department of Defense (DoD). Specifically, this research surveyed the United States DoD acquisition program managers, defense industry program managers, and defense industry consultants, to evaluate and analyze the key program factors that influence DoD acquisition program terminations. The research also conducted a comparison of different attributes that would lead to project failure amongst various groups. This research used relatively important weight calculations and a chi-squared distribution analysis in order to compare the differences between DoD acquisition program managers, defense industry program managers, and defense industry consultants, with regards to the factors that lead to DoD acquisition program terminations. This research aims to further answer several interrelated research questions, in order to identify the factors that have the greatest influence on program and project cancellation from the expert&rsquo;s perspective, and capture any significant differences between DoD program managers, DoD industry personnel, and DoD consultants. The research questions include the following: </p><p> 1) Are there any statistically significant differences between what DoD program managers, DoD industry personnel, and DoD consultants personnel think influence program cancellation? 2) Are there statistically significant differences of the various DoD acquisition program factors between what DoD program managers, DoD industry personnel, and DoD consultants personnel think influence program cancellation? </p><p> An exhaustive literature review identified 11 critical factors that were associated with program management for examination. For this study, the examination and methodology used were the Relative Importance Weight technique, to analyze the attributes and factors. RIW methodology consisted of conducting a survey to identify and evaluate the relative importance of the signi?cant factors influencing program termination. Respondents of this survey included the following groups: 1) DoD program and project managers, 2) DoD Industry personnel, and 3) DoD consultants. The outcomes of this research serve three primary purposes: 1) identify the Relative Importance Weight of DoD acquisition program factors that influence program termination, 2) fulfill a system&rsquo;s engineering and program management&rsquo;s knowledge gap, by understanding and identifying the most critical factors within the unique DoD acquisition program management system, and 3) serve as a spring board for future research for DoD program management. The results of this research indicate that a statistically significant difference does not exist between the three groups with relative importance of 11 program management factors.</p>

<p> According to the U.S. Department of Education, the 2012-2013 national high school completion rate for Latino (75%), African American (73%), American Indian (70%), and limited English proficient (63%) students increased slightly compared to the 2011 national graduation data. While the national trend shows a one percentage point gain in the overall high school graduation rate across all subgroups, the numbers for African Americans, Latinos and other ethnic groups far trail that of their White (87%) and Asian (89%) peers. It is also far more likely that ethnic groups trailing in high school completion rates live in economically disadvantaged communities that are plagued with the disparate effects of poverty, such as single-family households, poor nutrition, and community safety concerns. As a result, there has been an increase in local and national conversations about how to best amend inequitable educational outcomes for these groups of students.</p><p> The conceptual framework for this study is oriented around systems thinking, race, empowerment theory, and community schools and partnerships. More specifically, this study sought to explore systems thinking and opportunities that schools can explore to eradicate the current negative racialized outcomes for African American, Latino, other ethnic minorities, and socially disadvantaged students. The one-year study took place at Roses in Concrete Community School, a newly designed charter school located in Oakland, California.</p><p> Findings suggest that during its first year implementation, the school&rsquo;s leadership team and staff focused primarily on supporting students and families by (a) establishing a foundation of responding to basic needs, (b) partnering with community organizations, universities, and activists to provide additional school and community supports, (c) analyzing the system that produces the current outcomes with the intention of not reproducing inequities, and (d) empowering students and families to have a voice and increase their sense of agency.</p>

<p> Seed exchange networks represent the patterns and processes of seed movement in society, a fundamental component of crop production with major biological and social implications. These networks can furthermore explain patterns in household willingness to experiment with and adopt new and unusual varieties. This body of research focused on common bean (<i>Phaseolus vulagris</i>) seed exchange networks among household producers in western Uganda, where household producers represented over 70% of the population. Among these household producers, nearly all produced beans for either subsistence or commercial purposes and exchanged seeds through social networks.</p><p> This study provided evidence that regional- and community-level seed exchange networks contributed to unique patterns of seed adoption and adoption-related outcomes. Households with different regional- and community-level seed exchange networks had distinct seed management practices and seed security constraints. Adoption, <i>in situ</i> genetic diversity and evidence of landrace replacement varied across households that participated in different seed exchange networks. Finally, the impact of public sector breeding activities on adoption and household market participation also varied across households that participated in different seed exchange networks.</p><p> The study found a unique example among one community-level seed exchange network (Kakindo Sustainable Cooperative) of seed management practices that achieved both diversification and conservation of bean varieties and stimulated participation in local seed markets. The analysis suggests that a households' ability to simultaneously increase diversity of household seed stocks and conserve landraces was accomplished through a combination of conservative management of the more historically predominant Andean varieties and willingness to adopt and experiment with rare Mesoamerican varieties.</p>

<p> Implementation of safety management systems (SMS) in small helicopter entities is not widespread and the variation in different types of missions (segments) in the helicopter industry make this situation very complex.&nbsp; In 2005, industry, government and manufacturers identified as the International Helicopter Safety Team (IHST) set out to reduce the global helicopter accident rates, and SMS implementation was one strategy. What was missing was measuring the effectiveness of SMS as related to incident or accidents (IA), or the relationship of these on operational effectiveness (OE).&nbsp; Small helicopter entities are the most numerous organizations but experience the most IA in this high-risk sector of aviation, and the existence of SMS in these entities is not regulated. Implementing SMS could have a positive effect on OE and IA and this non-experimental study contained a systems theory framework using structural equation modeling (SEM) in a partially mediated model to determine the relationships between three variables.&nbsp; Further, these results support industry initiatives to target the small helicopter segment. This model could also be useful in promoting SMS implementation by justifying the positive effects of SMS integration, and to address the influence of SMS across the industry. Participants included crewmembers of small helicopter entities in the United States. A total of 205 participants were gathered to participate in the study. The findings of the study indicated that (a) safety management systems can predict incidents and accidents; (b) incidents and accidents mediate the relationship between SMS and OE; and (c) incidents and accidents predict operational effectiveness. Future researchers may expand the results of this study by performing aviation-safety-specific research and by identifying operational benefits of the systems approach.</p>

<p> During the past three decades, there has been an abundance of research regarding cardiovascular disease and the pathology responsible for it. The incidence of childhood obesity and dyslipidemia are at the highest in history. Evidence exists demonstrating that arterial changes leading to cardiovascular disease begin in childhood. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), along with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), issued guidelines in 2011 advocating for the screening of all children for dyslipidemia in order to identify children at-risk for development of cardiovascular disease and to implement interventions. The purpose of this synthesis project was to implement an evidence-based quality improvement project to screen lipids in children at the Start Community Clinic (SCC), a rural health clinic in Northeast Louisiana. Statistical Process Control (SPC) was used to evaluate both processes and outcomes. Outcomes measured include the number of children eligible to be screened compared to the number of children screened. Control charts were used to determine the stability and success of the improvement effort in implementing the evidence-based guideline. The guideline implementation using quality management techniques was successful and resulted in lipid screening of 60% of eligible children within the project time frame.</p>

<p>This praxis develops a simulation-based approach to analyzing the overall reliability of complex systems with high degrees of redundancy, time varying event rates, and the potential for common cause failures. This approach is compared to traditional analytic approaches, and is shown to have some advantages, primarily by avoiding some of the simplifying assumptions used in those approaches. </p><p> Several canonical problems are solved using both traditional and simulation-based approaches to elucidate the method, and the method is then applied to more complex problems for which exact analytic solutions are not available. The method is shown to be flexible to both traditional industrial plant reliability problems and to a new class of problems involving the reliability of swarming unmanned vehicles, where there is a high degree of parallelism and dynamic formation of common cause groups. </p><p> The penultimate chapter examines the impact of common cause failures on the reliability of a swarm of unmanned vehicles performing a search mission, and develops a simulation-based approach to modeling the reliability of swarms in the presence of both independent (single vehicle) and common cause (multiple vehicle) failures. The modeling approach is exercised on a sample problem to illustrate how it can be used as part of a system design or search-planning tool for swarming unmanned vehicles. The simulation provides insight on the impact of design decisions that influence overall system reliability; it also provides metrics of success in a search scenario as a function of user-selectable parameters. </p>

<p> Industries have been discovering significant improvements in quality, productivity, and cost by implementing Agile principles during the software development life cycle. However, the Aerospace industry has been slow to adopt Agile to develop safety critical software, primarily because DO-178C has been interpreted as prescribing Waterfall development(VanderLeest &amp; Buter, 2009). This work introduces the advantages of Agile and posits that Agile can meet DO-178C considerations. A literature review conducted, herein, makes the case that Agile is a significantly better approach than Waterfall for software development. Further, the review outlines some of the challenges of Agile in large software development programs but indicates how these challenges can be addressed. This work provides an Agile framework and demonstrates how the framework meets the objectives of DO-178C for safety critical software development. The framework provides alternate approaches to some DO-178C development activities, such as Stages of Involvement. This analysis clearly demonstrates that DO-178C does not require a Waterfall approach and that safety critical software can and should be developed using more modern development approaches such as Agile.</p><p>

abstract: The prospects of commercially available autonomous vehicles are surely tantalizing, however the implementation of these vehicles and their strain on the social dynamics between motorists and pedestrians remains unknown. Questions concerning how autonomous vehicles will communicate safety and intent to pedestrians remain largely unanswered. This study examines the efficacy of various proposed technologies for bridging the communication gap between self-driving cars and pedestrians. Displays utilizing words like “safe” and “danger” seem to be effective in communicating with pedestrians and other road users. Future research should attempt to study different external notification interfaces in real-life settings to more accurately gauge pedestrian responses. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Engineering 2019

<p> Enterprise architecture frameworks (EAFs) have been used to plan and manage large-scale enterprise deployments for more than four decades. EAFs are important tools used by systems engineers and are integral to characterize enterprise information architectures. They are increasingly being used as a proxy for managing entire organizations &ndash; enterprises. Enterprises represent complex, multi-disciplinary, socio-technical systems. They are ubiquitous, and involve and affect a vast number of humans every day. However, as inter-disciplinary tools for the management of the enterprise, there are certain limitations to the efficacy of existing enterprise architecture frameworks. The effective management of enterprises presents significant challenge and opportunity for the systems engineering community. This research discusses the limitations of, and proposes enhancements to, existing EAFs, based on research into extant business management frameworks. An historical perspective is provided on both systems engineering and business enterprise domain frameworks. Research into the common elements of successful business management frameworks confirms the limitations of existing systems engineering frameworks and suggests key additions for enhanced efficacy. The applicability and relevance of enhancing extant enterprise architectures with elements from extant business frameworks is examined. Finally, recommendations are made for enhancements to extant frameworks and suggestions advanced on future research into efficacy. This dissertation concludes with implications of these findings for systems engineers engaged in enterprise architecture and enterprise transformation efforts and a recommendation that systems engineers take a more holistic approach in their enterprise architecture and enterprise transformation efforts.</p>