Effective interventions are imperative for students who are at-risk for academic failure. Response to Intervention (RTI), a service delivery framework, is gaining momentum in schools as it aims to provide effective and appropriate interventions of varying degrees. Frequently used in the form of a three-tier process, RTI addresses academic and behavioral deficits for students first at a school-wide level; next, at an individualized level; and finally, at a more intense individualized level. This study examined the effects of video self-modeling (VSM) as a Tier 2 RTI for two students in general education classrooms. Both students exhibited low rates of on-task behavior and were considered at-risk for academic failure. The first participant received intervention prior to his general education first grade math lesson. The second participant received intervention prior to his general education sixth grade writing lesson. The results of the study indicate that this method of intervention has potential. In spite of uncontrollable confounding variables, both participants' average on-task behavior minimally increased (by 6 and 3 percentage points respectively) over the course of intervention. Neither student was referred for Tier 3 interventions nor was classified as having a disability. Video self-modeling as a Tier 2 intervention may provide substantial instruction for students with learning deficits, thus reducing the number of individuals referred for special education services.

A single-subject-multiple-baseline-across-behaviors design was used to examine the effects of using Systematic and Engaging Early Literacy (SEEL) instruction to help Tier 3 kindergarten students learn to read CVC words. Four students designated as Tier 3 by their teachers participated in the study. They were grouped into two dyads and received SEEL instruction focusing on specific word reading targets for approximately 20 minutes four days per week over a seven-week time period. The instruction included meaningful, interactive activities and incorporated high levels of play, multiple exposures to the target, explicit instruction, and student-teacher conversational exchanges. Baseline assessment data were collected prior to the application of the intervention for each of the targets and assessment data continued to be collected after each intervention session. All students learned to read the target words and three of the students generalized their learning to other targets. A moderate to large effect size of 0.54 was obtained using Cohen's r value. The need for adequate exposure to targets and time to practice was highlighted, along with the value of revisiting targets and addressing individual student's needs when working in small groups.

A simple method was developed for detection and differentiation of five Tier 1 bacterial agents, including Bacillus anthracis, Francisella tularensis, Yersinia pestis, Burkholderia pseudomallei and Burkholderia mallei as well as their closely related near neighbors by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Generally, different classes of compounds can be used as biomarkers for biowarfare agent detection, including nucleic acids (i.e., DNA or RNA), proteins (i.e., antibodies), carbohydrates (i.e., sugars), lipopolysaccharides, lipids (i.e., fatty acids) and small molecules. One-step thermochemolysis (TCM) was developed to provide GC-MS detectable biomarker signatures, including sugars, fatty acids and small molecules. Solid phase micro-extraction (SPME) was used for biomarker extraction, concentration and introduction into the GC-MS. Statistical algorithms were constructed using a combination of biomarkers for the five agents, which were robust against different growth conditions (medium and temperature). A general GC-MS temperature program was developed for all five Tier 1 bacteria. The total analysis time, including TCM, SPME extraction and GC-MS, is approximately 40 min. The total-ion chromatograms are very different for the five species. The final goal of this research was to develop an accurate, fast, simple, robust and automated method for field application. Therefore, an automated sample preparation system was designed, constructed and tested. The system automatically controls the movement of sample vials from one position to another, crimping of septum caps onto the vials, precise delivery of reagents and TCM reaction times and temperatures. The specific operations of introduction of sample vials, SPME sampling, injection into the GC-MS system and ejection of used vials from the system were performed manually in this study, although they can be integrated into the automated system. Manual SPME sampling is performed by following visual and audible signal prompts for inserting the fiber into and retracting it from the sampling port. A rotating carousel design allows for simultaneous sample collection, reaction, biomarker extraction and analysis of sequential samples. Bacillus species were used to test this autoreactor, and 96% of the samples were correctly identified using a statistical algorithm. This research applies not only to the rapid identification of Tier 1 agents after a biological attack, but should also benefit clinical diagnosis, which is essential to effective treatment.

The dissertation is a study to determine which program, Reading First or Bay State Reading Initiative, will demonstrate the greatest gains in reading for students in grades K-3 using a 3-Tier Reading Model. The findings from this study are intended to provide pertinent information on which best practices work in increasing student achievement for reading. Education reform continues to be a hot topic at all levels within the United States. With the spending of billions of federals, state and local dollars, the persistent talk of accountability is ongoing. Since NCLB inception, the year 2014 when all students need to reach proficiency in statewide standardized tests in mathematics and reading, continues to be a threatening time period. With each state setting its own definition and determination of what proficiency is, it is measured by the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). This AYP measurement will determine each school’s progress incrementally until it reaches 100% in 2014. 48% of all schools in Massachusetts failed to make their AYP in 2004. It is predicted that by 2014, 90% of schools in Massachusetts will not reach its APY obligation (MassPartners for Public Schools, 2005). With the pursuit of reaching AYP, the search is still on for what best practices work in increasing student achievement. This study utilizes a mixed method research design; including quantitative analysis of the reading scores, a qualitative analysis of teacher and administrator perspective on the effectiveness vii of each program and a financial cost-effectiveness comparison of the two programs. The quantitative research design includes comparing DIBELS and GRADE results of two elementary schools for students in grades K – 3 each of which uses a different reading program. School A uses the Houghton Mifflin Reading Series for their core reading curriculum while School B uses Scott Foresman Reading Street. In addition to comparing the aggregate scores of each school to each other, a number of sub-groups will also be compared. These groups will include low income students (students who receive free and reduced lunch), students with limited English proficiency (LEP), and special education students. Mean comparisons will be utilized to identify which program produces the best results. In order to identify strengthens and weaknesses of each approach a questionnaire will be utilize to obtain this information from teachers and the administrators who took part in implementing both programs. In these times of tight budgets and difficult decisions on how to meet the needs of all students it is imperative that cost effectiveness is examined between the two programs. Which of these two programs will provide the greatest gain? How much will that gain cost? Which program will reap the best results for the least amount of money?

Fashion apparel industry has been connected to detrimental social consequences, particularly in developing countries. In this case, tier one suppliers are in a unique position to play a critical role in addressing these concerns because they are the key in between brand and rest tiers and can apply sustainable practices that promote ethical/responsible production as tire one suppliers are conduction their production operation with the help of a huge human force. By collaborating with first/tier one suppliers to prioritize social sustainability, fashion apparel firms can strike a balance between their own ambitions, social goals and, while also reducing the dangers of exploitation and unfavorable publicity.

In the last decade, the landscape of storage hardware and software has changed considerably. Storage hardware has diversified from hard disk drives and solid state drives to include persistent memory (PMEM) devices such as phase change memory (PCM) and Flash-backed DRAM. On the software side, the increasing adoption of cloud services for building and deploying consumer and enterprise applications is driving the use of cloud storage services. Cloud providers have responded by providing a plethora of choices of storage services, each of which have unique performance characteristics and pricing. We argue this variety represents an opportunity for modern storage systems, and it can be leveraged to improve operational costs of the systems. We propose that storage tiering is an effective technique for balancing operational or de- ployment costs and performance in such modern storage systems. We demonstrate this via three key techniques. First, THMCache, which leverages tiering to conserve the lifetime of PMEM devices, hence saving hardware upgrade costs. Second, CAST, which leverages tiering between multiple types of cloud storage to deliver higher utility (i.e. performance per unit of cost) for cloud tenants. Third, we propose a dynamic pricing scheme for cloud storage services, which leverages tiering to increase the cloud provider's profit or offset their management costs. / Master of Science

Recently, there has been a massive growth in the number of mobile users and their traffic. The data traffic volume almost doubles every year. Mobile users are currently running multiple applications that require higher bandwidth which makes users so limited to the service providers' resources. Increasing the utilization of the existing spectrum can significantly improve network capacity, data rates and user experience. Spectrum sharing enables wireless systems to harvest under-utilized swathes of spectrum, which would vastly increase the efficiency of spectrum usage. Making more spectrum available can provide significant gain in mobile broadband capacity only if those resources can be aggregated efficiently with the existing commercial mobile system resources. Carrier aggregation (CA) is one of the most distinct features of 4G systems including Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-Advanced). In this dissertation, a resource allocation with carrier aggregation framework is proposed to allocate multiple carriers resources optimally among users with elastic and inelastic traffic in cellular networks. We use utility proportional fairness allocation policy, where the fairness among users is in utility percentage of the application running on the user equipment (UE). A resource allocation (RA) with CA is proposed to allocate single or multiple carriers resources optimally among users subscribing for mobile services. Each user is guaranteed a minimum quality of service (QoS) that varies based on the user's application type. In addition, a resource allocation with user discrimination framework is proposed to allocate single or multiple carriers resources among users running multiple applications. Furthermore, an application-aware resource block (RB) scheduling with CA is proposed to assign RBs of multiple component carriers to users' applications based on a utility proportional fairness scheduling policy. We believe that secure spectrum auctions can revolutionize the spectrum utilization of cellular networks and satisfy the ever increasing demand for resources. Therefore, a framework for multi-tier dynamic spectrum sharing system is proposed to provide an efficient sharing of spectrum with commercial wireless system providers (WSPs) with an emphasis on federal spectrum sharing. The proposed spectrum sharing system (SSS) provides an efficient usage of spectrum resources, manages intra-WSP and inter-WSP interference and provides essential level of security, privacy, and obfuscation to enable the most efficient and reliable usage of the shared spectrum. It features an intermediate spectrum auctioneer responsible for allocating resources to commercial WSPs' base stations (BS)s by running secure spectrum auctions. In order to insure truthfulness in the proposed spectrum auction, an optimal bidding mechanism is proposed to enable BSs (bidders) to determine their true bidding values. We also present a resource allocation based on CA approach to determine the BS's optimal aggregated rate allocated to each UE from both the BS's permanent resources and winning auctioned spectrum resources. / Ph. D.

對於兩岸交流日益頻繁，本文提出一命題假設，認為「兩岸城市交流管理，臺灣政府尚未建立有效府際關係（intergovernmental relations）管理模式」。 本文透過以臺灣東部二線城市花蓮為研究對象，設定2011 至 2015 年為研究範圍，並以國際關係理論中的庶民現實主義觀點及新多邊主義及為研究途徑，佐以文獻探討、歷史資料蒐集、內容分析和個案深度訪談等方法, 以了解(1)臺灣中央政府赴陸城市外交管理模式與地方六都赴陸城市外交理念？ (2)花蓮地方政府、特色產業與民間組織如何運用兩岸城市外交，達成增加「柔性實力」（soft power）與大都會競爭？(3)其特殊突圍模式？期望此研究提供考察臺灣政府如何進行管理，以達成有效適時性、突破性的府際關係決策參考，洞察臺灣城市兩岸外交發展和局限性。 本研究發現，臺灣政府針對兩岸城市外交實質上並無建構完善整合管理及分權機制，使兩岸交流中央業務單位間各自為政，地方政府參與大陸事務迫於自立，彼此的互信度不高，溝通不良是府際運作關係的主要特徵，因此地方政府時常擁有自己桌面下的議程，成為爭鬥式各自為政型地方政府（coming apart and contentious local government）。 本文總結認為，唯有建構一個有效、突破性全臺城市外交兩岸交流藍圖，才有可能解決此一弊病，以「兩岸和平交流，城市分權治理」為主、「城市柔性實力，兩岸跨域發展」為輔，除了城市官方外交居於中心位置，民間公共外交更是最穩固的基礎，因此，才可望能讓臺灣的城市外交打頭陣，讓臺灣走出國際社會。 / In cross-strait exchanges, the central government plays the dominant role, while the role of local governments still misfunctioned. This paper examines the unique breakthrough of Taiwan local government on cross-strait city exchanges and the lack management of Taiwan central government on the issue. It arises the following question: For Hualian, a resourcelss second-tier city and located in remote eastern-part of Taiwan, its local government has brought considerable economic benefits through cross-strait exchanges; while it might also demage Taiwan national security and long-term development of cross-strait exchanges. What is the cause of this contradiction? The intergovernmental contradiction between central and local government is for reason that the central government in Taiwan is reluctant to the management on cross-strait exchanges between cities. This paper found that the conservative management of cross-strait city exchanges is featured that the lack of central coordination mechanism, local initatives and the intermediary support for local NGOs. As for Haulien, located in remote area with inufficiant subsidies from the central government, the strengtheness of Haulien ccompetitiveness serves as the priority for its urgent need on reconstruction and economic regeneration,. That is to say, Hualian seeks economic benefits in the cross-strait exchanges is synonymous with the trend of enterprising city governance in the era of globalization. In other words, it also features that in the context of cross-strait relationship, Hualian is forced to participate in independently due to the lack of intergovernmental mutual trust and poor communication and leads to Hualien local different agenda under the table, being a coming contentious government. This paper concludes that the management on cross-strait city exchanges may be difficult to completely dominant by the central or the locals alone, the whole conepts also relies on share responsibility except for centralization and decentralization. This concepts of new management may initates the local government to actively expand its interests, but not braggering the role of local government on the both side. While the central government should open the channel for the locals, especially the dispute of Six-cities in Taiwan has caused great challenges for domestic city governance in order to avoid intergovernmental tension on the topic of cross-strait city exchanges. In conclusion, it is suggested that local government can effectively play a mediating role between the central government and local non-governmental organizations on both sides of political or grass roots level exchanges for the sustainable development of cross-strait city exchanges.

Multi-tier cellular networks have led to a paradigm shift in the deployment of base stations (BSs) where macrocell BSs are overlaid with smaller and lower power BSs such as microcells, picocells, and femtocells. Stochastic geometry has been proven to be an effective tool to capture such heterogeneity and uncertainties in deployment of cellular BSs. In stochastic geometry, random spatial models are used to model multi-tier cellular networks where the locations of BSs is each tier is assumed to be drawn from a point process with the appropriate spatial density. This thesis proposes stochastic geometry-based approaches to analyze, model, and optimize multi-tier cellular networks under several setups and technologies. First, I propose a novel location-aware cross-tier cooperation scheme that aim at improving the performance of users with low signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). Second, I study the performance of cognitive device-to-device (D2D) communication in multi-channel downlink-uplink cellular network with energy harvesting. For the coexistence between cellular and D2D transmissions, I propose a spectrum access policy for cellular BSs to avoid using D2D channels when possible. Third, I investigate the feasibility of energy harvesting from ambient RF interference in multi-tier uplink cellular networks. For this setup, I capture randomness in the network topology and the battery dynamics. Fourth, I extend multi-tier uplink cellular networks to consider the case when users do not necessarily associate with the nearest BS (i.e., flexible cell association). Finally, I compare between different cell association criteria including coupled and decoupled cell association for uplink and downlink transmissions in multi-tier full-duplex cellular networks. For all network setups, I use stochastic geometry to derive simple and closed-form expressions to evaluate the performance in terms of several metrics, e.g., outage probability, mean rate, transmission probability, success probability, and load per BS. I also highlight main tradeoffs in different networks and provide guidelines to optimize different performance metrics by carefully tuning fundamental network design parameters. / February 2017

Esta dissertação analisa o recurso ordinário constitucional, espécie recursal autônoma e heterogênea, em Processo Civil. Apenas dois tribunais superiores, o Supremo Tribunal Federal e o Superior Tribunal de Justiça, possuem competência para julgar esse recurso. Inicia conceituando recurso e duplo grau de jurisdição, bem como apontando as semelhanças e as diferenças entre esses dois institutos jurídicos processuais. Em seguida, define o critério de classificação dos recursos entre ordinários em sentido amplo e extraordinários em sentido amplo no ordenamento jurídico brasileiro, para apontar em qual categoria se enquadra o recurso ordinário constitucional. Verifica a origem histórica do recurso ordinário constitucional, com enfoque na sua disciplina pelas Constituições Federais do Brasil republicano, para que identifique quais são os motivos pelos quais essa espécie recursal existe e deve ou não ser mantida atualmente. Define cada uma das hipóteses de cabimento do recurso ordinário constitucional, priorizando a definição daquelas interessantes para o Processo Civil. Delineia os aspectos procedimentais desse recurso (requisitos de admissibilidade, efeitos devolutivo e suspensivo, procedimento perante o juízo a quo e perante o juízo ad quem, possibilidade da sua interposição adesiva e cabimento de embargos infringentes e de embargos de divergência). Aponta as funções dos tribunais superiores brasileiros, comparando-as com as funções e com os recursos de competência de Cortes Constitucionais e de tribunais superiores estrangeiros. Conclui pela necessidade de manutenção do recurso ordinário constitucional no ordenamento jurídico brasileiro, com algumas alterações das hipóteses de cabimento. / This dissertation analyses the recurso ordinário constitucional, a heterogenic and autonomous kind of appeal, in its Civil Procedure forms. Only two superior courts, the Supremo Tribunal Federal (the Brazilian Supreme Court) and the Superior Tribunal de Justiça (the Brazilian Federal Court of Appeals) can judge that kind of appeal. It starts conceptualizing what is an appeal and what is a two-tier judicial exam, as well as their resemblances and differences. It follows defining the standard on how to classify the appeals between ordinary and extraordinary in the Brazilian law, so the recurso ordinário constitucional can be appointed to a category. It verifies the historical origin of that kind of appeal, with special focus on its constitutional discipline, since Brazil has being a republic, so it is possible to identify the reasons why that kind of appeal exists and should or should not be maintained nowadays. It defines each one of the cases that the recurso ordinário constitucional can be interposed, prioritizing the ones regarding Civil Procedure. It outlines the procedural aspects of that kind of appeal (its admissibility requirements, its staying and non-staying effects, its procedure before the judex a quo and the judex ad quem, the possibility of that kind of appeal being adhesive, and the acceptance of the embargos infringentes and the embargos de divergência, two different kinds of appeal). It points out the scopes of the Brazilian superior courts, comparing them to the scopes and the appeals judged by foreign Constitutional Courts and superior courts. It concludes that the recurso ordinário constitucional should remain on the Brazilian law, with some modifications regarding the cases it can be interposed.