Since the industrial revolution, work and family have been viewed as separate spheres, with women relegated to the family sphere. With the advent of women into the paid labor force, few studies have considered the potentially complex context of women's work and family experiences. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of family structure, occupational status, and workplace relationships on women workers' perceptions of stress. The sample for this study included 379 women dental assistants and hygienists who responded to mailed questionnaires sent to the dental offices where they worked. The dependent variables used in this analysis were mental stress, physical stress, and four social stress items. Analysis of variance was performed for the family structure groups on physical, mental, and social stress items. Single parents and parents in general were especially stressed in terms of financial stress and marital stress. The second series of analyses included t-tests on stress by occupation. Dental assistants had more financial stress than hygienists. Hygienists had more mental stress than assistants. Workplace relationships were assessed in the full regression models. Frequency of talking with fellow workers was strongly and positively associated with financial problems. The full regression models supported the findings in earlier analyses that tensions from children and financial problems were associated with the presence of children in the home. The findings in this study suggest that for women workers, work and family do not occupy separate spheres. Women workers think about family matters at the workplace and discuss them with their other women workers. Further research needs to focus on women workers, especially those in traditionally female occupations, and the work and family connections for these workers. / Graduation date: 1992

The engine torque is an important control signal. This signal is disturbed by the devices mounted on the belt. To better be able to estimate the torque signal, this work aims to model the auxiliary devices'influence on the crankshaft torque. Physical models have been developed for the air conditioning compressor, the alternator and the power steering pump. If these models are to be used in control unit function development and testing, they have to be fast enough to run on a hardware-in-the-loop simulator in real time. The models have been simplified to meet these demands. The compressor model has a good physical basis, but the validity of the control mechanism is uncertain. The alternator model has been tested against a real electronic control unit in a hardware-in-the-loop simulator, and tests show good results. Validation against measurements is however necessary to confirm the results. The power steering pump model also has a good physical basis, but it is argued that a simple model relating the macro input-output power could be more valuable for control unit function development.

Marine shipping industry is the biggest economy of the global logistics, the cost that the vessel runs includes: personnel's salary, insurance, shipping administration expense, port charges, maintenance and fuel, etc.. Among them port charges and fuel are estimated can probably take 70% of the total operating cost, and the proportion of the fuel cost may be up to 50%. So the fuel cost is a main reason for influencing the operation performance of shipping. Because the international oil price runs high in recent years, besides designing the optimization with ship type, vessel technology and development move towards the innovative study and application of the power-saving technology, in order to reduce the operating cost. In addition, in shipping management, it is main directions to move towards maximization of ship and energy-conservation to reduce the expenditure of the cost. Until high oil price and the whole world might face economic depression unfavorable factor, the motive force of shipping is unable to store, unable to reuse, so how to popularize energy-conserving actuating device and relevant environmental protection assists the energy-saving equipment, trader to boat last economic benefits greatest and how effective management energy and last greatest benefit, study the focal point for this thesis. This thesis is in Professor Zhang Yu-Shan's guidance, starts from the operating cost of shipping, discusses shipping machines and impact on operating cost of auxiliary energy- saving equipment, investigate of the shipping business to analyze and prove it. To feedback my experiences engaged in the relevant trade of the past 20 years.

In the wheelchair family, a manual wheelchair is most commonly used by the lower-limb disabled, while its manual mode creates the lowest mechanical effi-ciency and the highest rate of upper-limb injury. Electric wheelchairs on the market are much more labor-saved; however, with their drive systems mostly combining with the bodies of the wheelchair, electric wheelchairs appear to be bulky and are not easily-carried. While in a limited space, on a short-distance moving, or in/off the elevator, electric wheelchairs cannot be practicably switched to manual ones. Thus, this text aims to develop a switchable dou-ble-action manual/electric wheelchair with an auxiliary driving wheel, expect-ing to increase the mechanical efficiency and not to enlarge the body of the wheelchair; the module-disassembled drive system is intended for the conven-ience of carrying. Besides, in order to keep both the manual and the electric functions, the caster contains a set of separable orientation control system, while enables the caster to be switched in both the modes of 360-degree rotation and of being controlled by the user. In this way, the use of the wheelchair would be-come much more multiple-choice.

Prehistoric Sardinia is best known for its Bronze Age Nuragic culture which lasted from the mid-2nd millennium until the early 1st millennium. The Iron Age and later prehistory of the island are often subsumed into discourses that emphasise the colonising Phoenicians (8th-6th centuries BC) and Carthaginians (6th-2nd centuries BC). In the north of the island the local communities, being neither part of the Bronze Age Nuragic culture nor of the colonized world of the south, are seen in relation to foreign communities rather than from local perspectives. This thesis uses postcolonial theoretical frameworks of island identity, consumption and materiality to examine the local/foreign interactions that take place in north Sardinia in the period between 900 – 200 BC. The main focus is to set the interrelationships between the local Sardinian communities and the Phoenician, Etruscan, Greek and Carthaginian traders and settlers who frequented the shores in a context that emphasises local and indigenous agency. At the same time this topic provides an opportunity to re-examine the scholarship that has led to north Sardinia being overlooked. This thesis covers a long time period and the project is divided geographically between three different zones of north Sardinia (the north-west, the central-east and the Olbia area) and chronologically between the 9th- 7th centuries, the 7th – 5th centuries and the 4th-2nd centuries BC. The data set includes the archaeological material from 51 north Sardinian sites that contain evidence of local/foreign interactions during these periods. Using this data a few well excavated sites are studied in greater detail to examine and question the models of acculturation and resistance that form the traditional perspectives of scholars working in the north. For example, the presence or lack of foreign material culture on indigenous sites has often been understood from the perspective that desire for foreign goods was natural. This approach overemphasises the role that foreign communities had in contact situations and at the same time underemphasises the agency and choices of the local inhabitants. Indeed an examination of the data shows how local practices continued and that the foreign presence had a limited impact. One of my aims in this thesis is to avoid a dualistic position which sets the local communities against foreign ones; in fact local/foreign interactions can result in the creation of ‘hybrid’ products, practices and communities and I explore how far we can see the hybridization of north Sardinian communities in the different phases of the 1st millennium through the material culture that informed their actions. A second aim is to explore what types of changes took place in north Sardinian identities through the types of objects they consumed. Some of the larger Iron Age sites were sanctuaries and thus I examine how far local communities used ritual as a way of mediating the exchanges between them and foreign people through their selection of the material culture. Thirdly, this thesis approaches the social identities of the Sardinians using a bottom-up approach to the interactions. This allows me to compare the different ways in which local communities experienced foreign contacts and culture over a broad period and the evidence illuminates the variety of ways that island identities were developed in the various regions of north Sardinia.

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The estimation of low income proportions plays an important role in comparisons of poverty in different countries. In most countries, the stability of the society and the development of economics depend on the estimation of low income proportions. An accurate estimation of a low income proportion has a crucial role for the development of the natural economy and the improvement of people's living standards. In this thesis, the Jackknife empirical likelihood method is employed to construct confidence intervals for a low income proportion when the observed data had missing values. Comprehensive simulation studies are conducted to compare the relative performances of two Jackknife empirical likelihood based confidence intervals for low income proportions in terms of coverage probability. A real data example is used to illustrate the application of the proposed methods.

Modern superscalar pipelines have tremendous capacity to consume the instruction stream. This has been possible owing to improvements in process technology, technology scaling and microarchitectural design improvements that allow programs to speculate past control and data dependencies in the superscalar architecture. However, the speed of the memory subsystem lags behind due to physical constraints in bringing in huge amounts of data to the processor core. Cache hierarchies have subdued the impact of this speed gap; however, there is much that can be still done in improving microarchitecture. Data prefetching techniques bring in memory content significantly before the instruction stream actually witnesses demand misses. However, a majority of the techniques proposed so far depend upon an initial demand miss that initiates a stream of previously identified prefetches. In this thesis, we propose a novel prefetching algorithm, which leverages branch prediction to facilitate deep memory system speculation. The branch predictor directed lookahead mechanism builds a speculative control flow path for the instruction stream about to be fetched by the main superscalar pipeline. Prefetches are generated along this speculative path from a condensed representation of the memory instructions, leveraging register index based correlation. The technique integrates eloquently with the main pipeline's branch predictor to filter out prefetches along invalid speculative paths. Impact of the prefetching scheme is analyzed using out- of-order model of the Gem5 cycle accurate simulator. Evaluation shows that on a set of 13 memory intensive SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks, our prefetching technique improves performance by an average of 5.6% over the baseline out-of-order processor.

The aim of this study is to investigate how the modal auxiliaries will and shall and the semi-modal BE going to are used to express futurity by individuals whose first language is Swedish. The study is corpus based, and the corpora used in this study consist of Swedish newspapers in English (SWENC) and material from blogs which are written in English by Swedes (BESC). These are compared with the press sub-corpora in F-LOB (the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English) and Frown (the Freiburg-Brown corpus of American English), which represent British and American varieties of English. The method is quantitative and the results are mainly presented in frequencies. The results show that all of the modals are used in SWENC and BESC. The core modal will is the most frequently used modal in all of the corpora and sub-corpora. The semi-modal BE going to is most frequently used in BESC and the second core modal shall is most frequent in SWENC. However, qualitative examination of shall revealed that the writers in SWENC use the modal differently from how it is used in F-LOB Press. This study shows evidence of variation in use of the modals which express futurity. The fact that the semi-modal BE going to exists in the Swedish material indicates that the process of grammaticalization continues in the Swedish form of English.

In this thesis, I/O signal recognizers, called VIRTUALBLOCKS, are synthesized to interface with a SYSTEM UNDER TEST (SUT). Methods for automated synthesis of virtualblocks allow us to simulate environment interfaces with SUT and also perform fault detection on SUT. Such methods must be able to recognize incoming sequences of signals from SUT, and upon the signal recognition determine the proper outgoing sequences of signals to SUT. We characterize our systems into four distinctive systems: system under test, AUXILIARY SYSTEM, controller and external environment. The auxiliary system is represented as a form of condition system Petri net (virtualblocks) and interacts with SUT along with the interaction among the controller and the external environment. Fault detection is performed by subsystems called DETECTBLOCKS synthesized from the virtualblocks. We present construction procedures for virtualblocks andamp; detectblocks and discuss the notion of LEGALITY and DETECTABILITY. Finally, we illustrate our approach using a model of a scanner control unit.