The purpose of this study is to investigate the importance of prior information about hydraulic conductivity (K) by Kriging, using point K data and/or residual covariance, on improvements of K estimates at the North Campus Research Site (NCRS). Among many methods that can characterize the mean or detail distribution of hydraulic conductivity (K), the Cooper-Jacob straight line solution, Kriging using point K data, single-well pumping tests inversion and Hydraulic Tomography (HT) have been compared in this study, using the head data collected from 15 cross-hole pumping tests collected at NCRS, where 9 existing wells were installed with packer system and the pressure responses at different intervals in different wells were monitored with transducers. It is found that the HT method, which fuse all the available pumping test data, yields more accurate and consistent results. However, many studies have indicated that the hydraulic data combined with geologic investigation will improve the HT estimates. Thus, in this study, hard data of K obtained by permeameter (227 data points) are brought in using Kriging and combined with HT to yield better estimate K field. Moreover, the validations of unused tests indicate that the estimated K obtained using collected K information makes more accurate predictions.

of the thesis Introduction: This dissertation focuses on socioeconomic status and problems with law of problematic opioid and methamphetamine users. Long-term intensive use of drugs leads not only to health impacts, but also social such as the inability of financial autonomy, indebtedness, unemployment, failure to comply with the respective social roles, fiduciary social functioning, poor housing etc. Great number of users are influenced by the drug in situations such as interpersonal relationship, family functioning and partnerships, there is a change of social status, social isolation or exclusion. Effective interventions and service development should always start with a good knowledge of the situation and needs of the user, who claims the service. Claim: The goal of this thesis is finding socioeconomic status and criminal situation of problematic methamphetamine and opioids users consequently draw recommendations towards services that work with these clients. Methods: Cross-sectional questionnaire study was carried among clients who have started a treatment episode or contacted selected facility type such as a contact centre, psychiatric AT ambulance, therapeutic community, medium-term inpatient treatment or replacement therapy. Recruitment into the study took place from June 2015 until October...

The Higher Education (HE) sector of a country is a key area indicating the progress of cultural, political and social growth and development. Public and social demands as well as technological developments add new challenges for this sector. Consequently, higher education institutions have changed and a more flexible IT infrastructure is required to enable them to adapt efficiently to competitive business challenges. Enterprise application integration (EAI) is a technology that effectively integrates intra- and inter-organizational systems. Firstly a systematic review of the EAI literature was conducted. From this review, it was apparent that there are no theoretical models for EAI adoption and evaluation for higher education. Hence, this research contributes a conceptual model that includes influential factors derived from the literature and combines them with the proposed classification of influential factors for HE to produce an EAI conceptual model for the HE domain. To validate this proposed model empirical research was conducted. Then, the model was tested using a qualitative case study approach by means of three case studies that were conducted at different universities. Exploratory, explanatory and interpretive data analysis phases were implemented to find what is the current EAI process of HE and how these institutions currently work. In addition, these phases were employed to identify the EAI adoption factors in HE. As a result of this analysis the conceptual model was modified because of complementary factors that emerged. Therefore, the main contribution of this research is a comprehensive and novel model for EAI adoption in higher education area. The adoption EAI factors were identified by extracting a number of parameters from the empirical data. Several important factors that influence and assist the adoption of EAI in HE were identified. Hence, an additional contribution is the classification of factors in EAI adoption into technical and social factors which provides a better understanding of these factors. A further contribution is the derivation of a new classification of the EAI external and internal pressure factors. The development of a consistent model for the adoption and evaluation of EAI in HE is based on these factors.

Mental health problems can interfere with a child's ability to succeed in school (Hootman, Houck, & King, 2003) and ultimately increase the risk of family dysfunction, drug abuse, juvenile incarcerations, and school drop out (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2004). Because young children often lack the verbal skills needed to communicate anxieties or fears and because children naturally communicate through the use of play, elementary school counselors realize that play therapy is an appropriate alternative to talk therapy (Landreth, 2002). Although recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of play therapy with elementary school students suffering from conduct disorders (Cochran & Cochran, 1999), autism, obsessive compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, cerebral palsy (Johnson, McLeod, & Fall, 1997), post traumatic stress disorder (Shen & Sink, 2002), and children at risk (Post, 1999), no studies have examined the specifics of how elementary school counselors who utilize play therapy deliver it to their students. The purpose of this study was to examine the use, beliefs, perceived barriers, and methods of play therapy delivery by elementary school counselors. Additionally, this study examined the methods used to overcome barriers to implementing play therapy. While the elementary school counselors surveyed in this study seem to agree that play therapy is useful to their students, and an overwhelming majority use it (78.8%), roughly half had not received any formal play therapy training. Several barriers to implementing play therapy were identified including a lack of time, space, training, resources, and support and/or understanding from parents, teachers, or school administrators. Participants discussed the methods they use to overcome barriers, such as buying their own play therapy materials and educating faculty and parents about the positive effects of play therapy through the use of newsletters, brochures, and bulletin boards. Respondents used over 30 different play therapy techniques; the three most utilized techniques were drawing, board games, and role play. Implications for elementary school counselor practice and training were given, as well as implications for future research.

The learning using privileged information paradigm has allowed support vector machine models to incorporate privileged information, variables available in the training set but not in the test set, to improve predictive ability. The consequent introduction of the knowledge transfer method has enabled a practical application of support vector machine models utilizing privileged information. This thesis describes a modified knowledge transfer method inspired by cross-validation, which unlike the current standard knowledge transfer method does not create the knowledge transfer function and the approximated privileged features used in the support vector machines on the same observations. The modified method, the robust knowledge transfer, is described and evaluated versus the standard knowledge transfer method and is shown to be able to improve the predictive performance of the support vector machines for both binary classification and regression.

O desenvolvimento da tecnologia de tomografia computadorizada (TC) trouxe maiores possibilidades em medicina diagnóstica. É um método não invasivo de se explorar o corpo humano detalhadamente. Com o aumento das aplicações em TC, aumenta a preocupação com as altas taxas de dose administradas quando comparada com outras modalidades de diagnóstico por imagem. A comunidade científica e os fabricantes uniram esforços para alcançar níveis menores de dose possíveis, sem comprometer a qualidade da imagem diagnóstica. O maior e relativamente novo avanço nessa busca para diminuir os níveis de dose é o controle automático de exposição (CAE) em TC. Esses sistemas foram projetados para ponderar a distribuição de dose ao longo do comprimento de varredura e entre pacientes, levando em consideração o tamanho e as diferentes densidades de tecidos irradiados. Baseando-se na geometria de aquisição em TC, os sistemas CAE são altamente complexos. Sendo assim, sua forma de funcionamento ainda não é inteiramente conhecida. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo avaliar o desempenho clínico dos sistemas CAE, suas susceptibilidades ao usuário e, com isso, ajudar na otimização de dose em pacientes. A abordagem utilizada para avaliar os sistemas CAE de três dos maiores fabricantes de TC no Brasil, General Electric, Philips e Toshiba, foi pela extração dos valores de corrente anódica do cabeçalho da sequência de imagens no padrão DICOM, medição e análise do ruído das imagens dessas sequências e a medição da distribuição da dose ao longo do comprimento de varredura nas superfícies e dentro de dois simuladores de paciente de formatos diferentes. A variação da corrente anódica de cada equipamento de TC associada à qualidade da imagem resultante fornece o desempenho do sistema CAE. As medições de distribuição de dose fornecem o perfil de dose resultante da modulação de corrente. Medições com e sem o sistema CAE acionado foram feitas para quantificar a importância em termos de dose desses sistemas. Os resultados obtidos permitem otimizações no uso dos sistemas CAE e, consequentemente, a redução da dose no paciente sem comprometer a qualidade diagnóstica da imagem. / The development of the computed tomography (CT) technology has brought wider possibilities on diagnostic medicine. It is a non-invasive method to see the human body in details. As the CT application increases, it raises the concern about patient dose, because the higher dose levels imparted compared to other diagnostic imaging modalities. The radiology community (radiologists, medical physicists and manufacturer) are working together to find the lowest dose level possible, without compromising the diagnostic image quality. The greatest and relatively new advance to lower the patient dose is the automatic exposure control (AEC) systems in CT. These systems are designed to ponder the dose distribution along the patient scanning and between patients taking into account their sizes and irradiated tissue densities. Based on the CT scanning geometry, the AEC-systems are very complex and their functioning is yet not fully understood. This work aims to evaluate the clinical performance of AEC-systems and their susceptibilities to assist on possible patient dose optimizations. The approach to evaluate the AEC-systems of three of the leading CT manufacturers in Brazil, General Electric, Philips and Toshiba, was the extraction of tube current modulation data from the DICOM standard image sequences, measurement and analysis of the image noise of those image sequences and measurement of the dose distribution along the scan length on the surface and inside of two different phantoms configurations. The tube current modulation of each CT scanner associated to the resulted image quality provides the performance of the AEC-system. The dose distribution measurements provide the dose profile due to the tube current modulation. Dose measurements with the AEC-system ON and OFF were made to quantify the impact of these systems regarding patient dose. The results attained give rise to optimizations on the AEC-systems applications and, by consequence, decreases the patient dose without compromising the diagnostic image quality.

Monitoring academic progress to guide instructional practices is an important role of teachers in a small rural school district in the Southern United States. Teachers in this region were experiencing difficulties using the approved school district model to implement data-driven instruction. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to identify elementary- and middle-level teachers' perceptions about using the Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) model to analyze data in the classroom and use it to inform classroom instruction. Bambrick-Santoyo's principles for effective data-driven instruction was the conceptual framework that guided this study. The research questions were focused on teachers' perceptions of and experiences with the PDSA. A purposeful sampling was used to recruit 8 teachers from Grades 3-9 and their insights were captured through semistructured interviews, reflective journals, and document analyses of data walls. Emergent themes were identified through an open coding process, and trustworthiness was secured through triangulation and member checking. The themes were about using data to assess students, creating lessons, and collaborating with colleagues. The three findings revealed that elementary- and middle-level teachers acknowledge PDSA as an effective tool for guiding student learning, that teachers rely on assessment data, and that teachers need on-going collaborative engagement with their colleagues when using the PDSA. This study has implications for positive social change by providing a structure for improving classroom instructional practices and engaging teachers in more collaborative practices.

<p>We live in a society that is constantly developing and where technology is getting a more major roll. The school is a very important part of our society and should therefore develop in pace with the surrounding society. Having this in our thoughts we decided that our purpose for this case study should be to study the importance of technology in a learning environment for seventh graders in a specific school. To be able to find this out, we have used constructivism and sociocultural perspective on learning. We have gathered our empirical data for the study through participant observations and a focus group interview. We have also taken part of prior researches on the matter of the importance of computer using for the pupils learning. The results that have been presented are contradictory. The conclusion of our case study is that the use of computers is meaningful for the students participating in this case study. However the interest and knowledge of the pedagogue for technology affects the extent of using it in the classroom. Another important factor for the significance of computers in teaching is how the computers are placed in the school and in the classroom.</p> / <p>Vi lever idag i ett ständigt utvecklande samhälle där teknologin får en allt större roll. Skolan är en viktig del av vårt samhälle och borde därmed utvecklas i takt med samhället. Med detta i tankarna har syftet med vår fallstudie varit att undersöka teknikens betydelse i en lärande miljö bland elever i årskurs 7, i en specifik skola. För att kunna ta reda på detta har vi utgått från ett konstruktivistiskt samt ett sociokulturellt perspektiv på lärande. Genom deltagande observationer och en fokusgruppsintervju har vi samlat in empiri till vår studie. Vi har också tagit del av tidigare forskning som behandlar frågan om vad datoranvändningen har för betydelse för elevers lärande. Resultaten som har presenterats är motsägelsefulla. Det resultat vi har fått fram i vårt specifika fall är att datoranvändningen har betydelse men att pedagogens intresse och kunskap inom tekniken påverkar i vilken omfattning den används i undervisningen. En annan viktig faktor för vilken betydelse datorerna får i undervisningen är datorernas placering i skolan.</p>

Production and use of hydraulic ester oil is on the increase worldwide. This becomes a substitute to mineral based hydraulic oil and has drawn more concern because of its more friendly environmental effects. Based on the growing use of hydraulic ester oils in automobiles, transformation of fresh and old hydraulic ester oil was studied in a podsol soil (soil 1) and a clayey soil (soil 2). Functional groups present in the oil and effect of soil types on transformation of the oil were also determined. Replicates of the two soils types were contaminated with fresh or old ester based hydraulic fluid. The oils were recovered from the soil by extraction with acetone. The organic phase was evaporated to dryness, and a small drop of the resulting extract was used for Fourier Transformation Infra Red Spectrometer analysis. The remaining extract was dissolved in hexane and analyzed by gas chromatography. Different intermediate compound patterns were observed in the two studied soils during the transformation studies, which went on for 30 days. Aliphatic-, carbonyl-, aromatic- and ether- groups were the main functional groups present in the tested hydraulic ester oils. Presence or absence of these functional groups distinguishes ester oil from mineral oil.

We live in a society that is constantly developing and where technology is getting a more major roll. The school is a very important part of our society and should therefore develop in pace with the surrounding society. Having this in our thoughts we decided that our purpose for this case study should be to study the importance of technology in a learning environment for seventh graders in a specific school. To be able to find this out, we have used constructivism and sociocultural perspective on learning. We have gathered our empirical data for the study through participant observations and a focus group interview. We have also taken part of prior researches on the matter of the importance of computer using for the pupils learning. The results that have been presented are contradictory. The conclusion of our case study is that the use of computers is meaningful for the students participating in this case study. However the interest and knowledge of the pedagogue for technology affects the extent of using it in the classroom. Another important factor for the significance of computers in teaching is how the computers are placed in the school and in the classroom. / Vi lever idag i ett ständigt utvecklande samhälle där teknologin får en allt större roll. Skolan är en viktig del av vårt samhälle och borde därmed utvecklas i takt med samhället. Med detta i tankarna har syftet med vår fallstudie varit att undersöka teknikens betydelse i en lärande miljö bland elever i årskurs 7, i en specifik skola. För att kunna ta reda på detta har vi utgått från ett konstruktivistiskt samt ett sociokulturellt perspektiv på lärande. Genom deltagande observationer och en fokusgruppsintervju har vi samlat in empiri till vår studie. Vi har också tagit del av tidigare forskning som behandlar frågan om vad datoranvändningen har för betydelse för elevers lärande. Resultaten som har presenterats är motsägelsefulla. Det resultat vi har fått fram i vårt specifika fall är att datoranvändningen har betydelse men att pedagogens intresse och kunskap inom tekniken påverkar i vilken omfattning den används i undervisningen. En annan viktig faktor för vilken betydelse datorerna får i undervisningen är datorernas placering i skolan.