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The use of family, friends, and neighbors ("kith and kin") as caregivers for young children is a common practice in many cultural minority and impoverished communities in the U.S. Such caregivers often serve as trusted, familiar, affordable, and accessible sources of care, however, the quality of such "informal" child care is often questioned. This, I contend, is a consequence of the application of narrow constructs of quality derived from the values, practices, and experiences of the dominant class and culture.This dissertation details the roles that kith and kin caregivers fill in the White Mountain Apache community in east-central Arizona, and the functions such caregiving performs. Being in the care of kith and kin is important in giving children a sense of "place" within their extended family and the community. It teaches them their relations as well as the role and importance of family and community and reciprocity, and builds and reinforces family and community networks. It places children in the hands of grandmothers and other individuals with high cultural capital, hence providing a space, time, and opportunity for cultural learning. Kith and kin caregiving thus assists in the preservation of Apache language and culture by providing not only a context for cultural transmission and access to those with the greatest cultural knowledge and linguistic competence, but also by reinforcing a pedagogical role central to Apache culture and emphasizing the importance of family.While important, such functions of kith and kin care are ones not easily accounted for in existing constructions of quality. In order for standards of quality to have any meaning or utility in cultural minority communities, I argue that we need to encourage the development and utilization of culture and context specific definitions of caregiving quality and the inclusion of community standards. Constructs of quality must also speak to the well-being of children in their own communities and cultures. For Native communities, the incorporation of Native culture and language into child care programming and settings is essential to the health, maintenance, and cultural survival of these communities.

Thesis (M.S.- Hydrology and Water Resources)--University of Arizona. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 245-249).

Η παρούσα διπλωματική εργασία πραγματεύεται τον σχεδιασμό και την υλοποίηση συστήματος για ηλεκτρονικές προμήθειες. Ως ηλεκτρονική προμήθεια ορίζεται η διαδικασία με την οποία ένας φορέας προμηθεύεται τις υπηρεσίες και τα αγαθά που τον ενδιαφέρουν με την χρήση σύγχρονων διαδικτυακών και υπολογιστικών υπηρεσιών. Ο φορέας που μελετάται εδώ είναι ένα νοσοκομείο. Οι ηλεκτρονικές προμήθειες είναι ένα είδος ηλεκτρονικού εμπορίου, συνεπώς πρώτα γίνεται μία θεωρητική ανάλυση του ηλεκτρονικού εμπορίου και έπειτα των ηλεκτρονικών προμηθειών. Εν συνεχεία παρατίθεται η υλοποίηση ενός συστήματος ηλεκτρονικών προμηθειών, δηλαδή η σύσταση ενός ιστότοπου, ο οποίος περιέχει όλες τις απαραίτητες λειτουργίες για τη δημιουργία και διεξαγωγή ηλεκτρονικών διαγωνισμών. Στο σύστημα αυτό που δημιουργήθηκε υπάρχουν δύο κύρια είδη χρηστών, οι απλοί χρήστες και οι διαχειριστές. Οι απλοί χρήστες μπορούν να δουν τους ενεργούς διαγωνισμούς και να υποβάλουν προσφορά σε όσους διαγωνισμούς τους ενδιαφέρουν. Οι διαχειριστές διευθύνουν τον ιστότοπο και είναι υπεύθυνοι για την προκήρυξη και διεξαγωγή των διαγωνισμών. Επίσης, ευθύνη των διαχειριστών είναι η αξιολόγηση των προσφορών που έχουν γίνει στους διαγωνισμούς και με βάση κριτήρια όπως το ποσό προσφοράς και η ημερομηνία παράδοσης των προϊόντων συνυπολογίζεται η προτιμότερη προσφορά. Για την δημιουργία του ιστότοπου χρησιμοποιήθηκαν μόνο Open Source εργαλεία. Συγκεκριμένα για τη δημιουργία δυναμικών ιστοσελίδων χρησιμοποιήθηκαν οι γλώσσες HTML, PHP και JavaScript, για την δημιουργία και διαχείριση της βάσης δεδομένων η γλώσσα MySQL και για το στήσιμο ενός εικονικού διακομιστή στον οποίο θα τρέχει ο ιστότοπος χρησιμοποιήθηκε ο εξυπηρετητής παγκόσμιου ιστού Apache. / This thesis discusses the design and implementation of an e-procurement system. E-procurement is defined as the process by which an entity procures services and goods that are of interest by using modern computing and internet services. The organization studied here is a hospital. Electronic procurement is a type of electronic commerce, thus a theoretical analysis of e-commerce and e-procurement is made. The implementation of an electronic procurement system is then presented specifically about the establishment of a website that contains all the necessary functions for creating and conducting electronic contests. The created system has mainly two kinds of users, ordinary users and administrators. Ordinary users can see the active contests and bid to those who are interested in. Administrators manage the site and are responsible for creating and conducting contests. Also, they have the responsibility of evaluating the offers made, and based on criteria such as the bid amount and the delivery date of products they conclude to the preferred bid. To create the site only Open Source tools were used. Specifically for creating dynamic web pages, HTML, PHP and JavaScript languages were used. In order to create and manage the database, MySQL language was used and setting up a virtual server that will run the site was implemented by the web server Apache.

abstract: Continuous advancements in biomedical research have resulted in the production of vast amounts of scientific data and literature discussing them. The ultimate goal of computational biology is to translate these large amounts of data into actual knowledge of the complex biological processes and accurate life science models. The ability to rapidly and effectively survey the literature is necessary for the creation of large scale models of the relationships among biomedical entities as well as hypothesis generation to guide biomedical research. To reduce the effort and time spent in performing these activities, an intelligent search system is required. Even though many systems aid in navigating through this wide collection of documents, the vastness and depth of this information overload can be overwhelming. An automated extraction system coupled with a cognitive search and navigation service over these document collections would not only save time and effort, but also facilitate discovery of the unknown information implicitly conveyed in the texts. This thesis presents the different approaches used for large scale biomedical named entity recognition, and the challenges faced in each. It also proposes BioEve: an integrative framework to fuse a faceted search with information extraction to provide a search service that addresses the user's desire for "completeness" of the query results, not just the top-ranked ones. This information extraction system enables discovery of important semantic relationships between entities such as genes, diseases, drugs, and cell lines and events from biomedical text on MEDLINE, which is the largest publicly available database of the world's biomedical journal literature. It is an innovative search and discovery service that makes it easier to search/navigate and discover knowledge hidden in life sciences literature. To demonstrate the utility of this system, this thesis also details a prototype enterprise quality search and discovery service that helps researchers with a guided step-by-step query refinement, by suggesting concepts enriched in intermediate results, and thereby facilitating the "discover more as you search" paradigm. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2010

abstract: This thesis research attempts to observe, measure and visualize the communication patterns among developers of an open source community and analyze how this can be inferred in terms of progress of that open source project. Here I attempted to analyze the Ubuntu open source project's email data (9 subproject log archives over a period of five years) and focused on drawing more precise metrics from different perspectives of the communication data. Also, I attempted to overcome the scalability issue by using Apache Pig libraries, which run on a MapReduce framework based Hadoop Cluster. I described four metrics based on which I observed and analyzed the data and also presented the results which show the required patterns and anomalies to better understand and infer the communication. Also described the usage experience with Pig Latin (scripting language of Apache Pig Libraries) for this research and how they brought the feature of scalability, simplicity, and visibility in this data intensive research work. These approaches are useful in project monitoring, to augment human observation and reporting, in social network analysis, to track individual contributions. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2011