The purpose of the study was to examine relationships which existed between selected demographics and college grade point averages “GPAs” for dislocated workers and non dislocated workers enrolled in career-technical courses at a rural community college. The variables included in the study are age, gender, and marital status. The study also reports identified educational goals of dislocated workers as well as the perceived enhancements and barriers to achieving the goals. This study was conducted to assist workforce investment network “WIN” personnel and college counselors in the advisement of dislocated workers interested in the pursuit of career-technical training. A survey research design was used to collect data from first semester career-technical students within a program at East Central Community College in Decatur, MS. An instrument designed by the researcher utilized three demographic items and three open-ended questions to collect the data within a two-week period. A total of 274 surveys were collected. The data were analyzed through the use of descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings of the study indicated the variables of age and gender were shown to have significant relationships with college GPA. Dislocated workers were found to be older, female, and to maintain a higher GPA than non-dislocated worker students. Responses to the open-ended questions revealed that the majority of dislocated workers stated graduation to be a primary goal. Enhancements included support from family and financial aid, most commonly in the form of Workforce Investment Act “WIA” funding. Dislocated workers responded that personal finances and time management skills were the most difficult barriers to overcome in regards to meeting educational goals.

The master’s thesis focuses on creating an application for scanner control through WIA interface. This aplication is used for reading capillary during electrical separation methods in analytic chemistry. Scanned pictures of capillary are possible to process using online application for detection of significant zones within experiment. Offline detection of a set of scanned pictures is also possible. These applications have been created in LabVIEW environment made by National Instruments.

Wave dissipation was previously investigated intensively in the frequency domain, in which the dissipation of waves is described as attenuation of pressure pulse decay with respect to the frequency or harmonics. In this thesis, wave dissipation, including decay of pressure pulse, peak of wave intensity and wave energy, is investigated in the time domain using wave intensity analysis (WIA). Wave intensity analysis benefits to this research in several aspects including: 1) WIA allows for wave dissipation investigated in the time domain; 2) WIA does not make any assumptions about the tube's wall non-linearity and the analysis takes into account the effects of the vessel's wall viscoelastic properties, convective, frictional effects and fluid viscosity; 3) WIA offers a technique (separation) to study wave dissipation in one direction whilst taking into account the effect of reflections from the opposite direction; 4) The physical meaning of wave intensity provides a convenient method to study the dissipation of energy carried by the waves along flexible tubes. In this research, it is found that the degree of dissipation in flexible tube were not only affected by the mechanical properties of the wall property and viscosity of liquid but also by the other factors including initial pressure and pumping speed of piston as well as direction of wave in relation to direction of flow. Also an new technique to separate waves into forward and backward directions only using diameter and velocity might potentially be used to separate the waves in both directions non-invasively based on the non-invasive measurement of diameter (wall movement) available.

Workforce development programs designed to provide individuals with the skills necessary to gain employment have been in existance for over 80 years. The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) was a federal workforce development program that ran from 2000 to 2014. The WIA provided three main programs: youth, adult, and dislocated worker. The focus of this research was to evaluate the individual services in the adult and dislocated worker programs in the Western Kentucky Workforce Investment Area and identify the most effective service in each program. The adult and dislocated worker programs each offered three tiered services: core, intensive, and training. Individuals entered the core service and progressed until employment was obtained or they exited the programs. The services were evaluated based on the success and failure rates of the outcomes using the reported data retrieved from the Workforce Investment Act Standardized Record Data (WIASRD) database. The number of participants were counted in each service as well as the number of individuals that were employed and not employed after exiting the programs. Individuals employed after exiting the program, were counted as successful outcomes. Individuals that were not employed after exiting the program were counted as unsuccessful outcomes. The study found evidence that the training service was the most effective service in both the adult and dislocated worker programs.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:55:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 IvanovitchMDS_TESE_Capa_ate_pag78.pdf: 3947167 bytes, checksum: ce8af4212a09f9d5cf62d132879a91d3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-01-21 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / Ensuring the dependability requirements is essential for the industrial applications since faults may cause failures whose consequences result in economic losses, environmental damage or hurting people. Therefore, faced from the relevance of topic, this thesis proposes a methodology for the dependability evaluation of industrial wireless networks (WirelessHART, ISA100.11a, WIA-PA) on early design phase. However, the proposal can be easily adapted to maintenance and expansion stages of network. The proposal uses graph theory and fault tree formalism to create automatically an analytical model from a given wireless industrial network topology, where the dependability can be evaluated. The evaluation metrics supported are the reliability, availability, MTTF (mean time to failure), importance measures of devices, redundancy aspects and common cause failures. It must be emphasized that the proposal is independent of any tool to evaluate quantitatively the target metrics. However, due to validation issues it was used a tool widely accepted on academy for this purpose (SHARPE). In addition, an algorithm to generate the minimal cut sets, originally applied on graph theory, was adapted to fault tree formalism to guarantee the scalability of methodology in wireless industrial network environments (< 100 devices). Finally, the proposed methodology was validate from typical scenarios found in industrial environments, as star, line, cluster and mesh topologies. It was also evaluated scenarios with common cause failures and best practices to guide the design of an industrial wireless network. For guarantee scalability requirements, it was analyzed the performance of methodology in different scenarios where the results shown the applicability of proposal for networks typically found in industrial environments / Garantir os requisitos de dependabilidade ? fundamental para as aplica??es industriais, onde falhas podem conduzir a defeitos cujas consequ?ncias impactam em preju?zos econ?micos e principalmente danos ambientais e riscos aos operadores. Assim, diante da relev?ncia do tema, esta tese prop?em uma metodologia para an?lise da dependabilidade de redes industriais sem fio (WirelessHART, ISA100.11a, WIA-PA) ainda na fase de projeto. Entretanto, a proposta pode ser facilmente estendida para as fases de manuten??o e expans?o da rede. A proposta utiliza a teoria de grafos e o formalismo de ?rvores de Falhas para criar automaticamente um modelo anal?tico a partir de uma dada topologia de rede industrial sem fio, onde a dependabilidade possa ser avaliada. As m?tricas de avalia??o suportadas compreendem confiabilidade, disponibilidade e MTTF (tempo m?dio para falha) da rede, como tamb?m medidas de import?ncia dos dispositivos, aspectos de redund?ncia e defeitos em modo comum. Ressalta-se que a proposta independe de qualquer ferramenta para analisar quantitativamente as m?tricas visadas. Contudo, para prop?sito de valida??o da proposta utilizou-se uma ferramenta amplamente aceita na academia para esse fim (SHARPE). Adicionalmente, um algoritmo para gera??o dos cortes m?nimos originalmente aplicado na teoria de grafos foi adaptado para o formalismo das ?rvores de Falhas com o objetivo de garantir escalabilidade da metodologia ?s redes industriais sem fio (< 100 dispositivos). Finalmente, a metodologia proposta foi validada a partir de cen?rios t?picos encontrados em ambientes industriais, como topologias estrela, linha, cluster e mesh. Foram tamb?m avaliados cen?rios com defeitos em modo comum e um conjunto de pol?ticas a serem seguidas na cria??o de uma rede industrial sem fio. Para garantir aspectos de escalabilidade, uma an?lise de desempenho foi conduzida, onde pode-se observar a aplicabilidade da metodologia para as redes tipicamente encontradas em ambientes industriais

The purpose of this master's thesis is creation of a system capable of sharing scanners over computer network. The target scanner interfaces are TWAIN and WIA on Microsoft Windows operating system, and SANE on GNU/Linux. C++ programming language, Boost libraries and Qt framework were used to implement the programming part of this work. Several smaller helper libraries were implemented that are useful even outside this work, most notably TWAIN++ framework. The resulting system enables the user to share scanners over network, and scan using any of the aforementioned interfaces.