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Function-based assessments and interventions are routinely used in school settings as an effective method to address problem behaviors that impede the learning of the student or others. When function-based interventions are not successful, it is often due to problems with treatment integrity (TI). Using an ABCBC single subject design, this study examined whether function-based teacher supports could improve TI. The results demonstrated that the function-based supports provided to the teacher resulted in higher levels of TI and improvements in student behavioral outcomes. Using function-based intervention concepts to develop teacher intervention support, limitations to the study, and directions for future research are discussed.

Different key performance indicators are used to assess various aspects of a wind turbine (performance, reliability, financial aspects…). Availability metrics mainly, time-based and energy-based availability are the main indicators used to monitor and evaluate turbine’s availability performance today. However, due to significant growth of the share of energy sold into the electricity market as well as different selling structures, a new indicator has been established in order to assess availability performance in terms of revenues rather than time or energy.  This thesis compares energy and revenue-based availabilities of two turbines during 12 months of operational production. A methodology of calculation is suggested based on the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) information model for availability calculation. Time-based availability is calculated first, followed by energy-based, and finally revenue-based availability is derived from revenues as a result of combining energy production and electricity prices and revenue losses from energy losses and electricity prices. Availability metrics are calculated for three different scenarios, pure-market, mix of market and fixed price purchase agreement (PPA), and finally a PPA with a minimum monthly baseload to simulate the impact of volume risk. Results indicate a significant impact caused by the electricity price as well as the specifics of the selling agreement on revenue-based availability. Finding that in such cases, a significant divergence between energy and revenue-based indicators is possible. Limitations associated with the suggested methodology and case studies are presented and discussed.

Teachers in elementary schools have increasingly been required to follow pacing guides, given directives on what curriculum to use, and are provided standardized assessments to measure student learning. Curricula used by elementary teachers rarely address the environmental degradation plaguing the planet. School gardens have been used for over a century by educators as a place to promote students learning about the environment, science, and health. However, few studies have been conducted exploring the ways teachers have been influenced by teaching within school gardens. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to better understand the role of school gardens as a learning place, while exploring the lived experiences of teachers' interactions and experiences within school gardens and ways place-based education influenced teachers' pedagogical approaches and curriculum decisions. The four participants who took part in this study were all elementary school teachers at a Central California school. The guiding research question was stated as: How do school gardens function as learning places? Phenomenological methodology was used to explore the shared experiences teachers had with utilizing the school garden as a learning place. From analysis of interviews, classroom and garden observations, and supplemental curricula used by participants, three themes emerged illuminating ways participants' pedagogy and curriculum decisions had been influenced. Interactions and experiences with school gardens inspired participants to integrate project-based learning and interdisciplinary supplemental curriculum into their lessons. Place-based learning helped to build relationships, and the importance of teachers integrating emotional connections in their instructional practices. By teaching content disciplines using interdisciplinary curricula with lessons taught in the school garden, participants were able to integrate project-based learning activities that increased student responsibilities in the learning process and provided service learning opportunities. Conclusions drawn from the findings were that direct interactions and experiences with elements of place-based learning in a school garden influenced the ways in which participants perceived the purpose of their pedagogical approaches and curriculum decisions. Literature supported these findings and reinforced the influence of lessons in school gardens promoting environmental and health education. Connected with the results of this study, implications for practice and recommendations for future research are also presented.

Covid-19 shed a light on how disparities, influenced by institutional racism and social determinants of health, led to negative healthcare outcomes. This inspired community organizations such as the Black Doctor’s COVID-19 Consortium to take matters into their own hands and play their part in meeting the needs of the community. With evident gaps in healthcare for marginalized communities, I believe that community-based health interventions are an ethical approach to ensure care for marginalized communities. To ensure that a proper intervention is being crafted for these communities, it is important to define what community-based means. This paper explores four models for categorizing community-based: community as setting, target, resource, and agent. While traditional research focuses on the voice of the academic, using Community Based Participatory Research amplifies and recenters the voice of the community, while providing a means to increase their capacity, fostering agency, and promoting solidarity. This paper explores local community-based health interventions in North Philadelphia and emphasizes partnering with the community to determine their needs before creating an intervention. Using community-based interventions to increase access to healthcare for marginalized communities in tandem with existing models of healthcare, follows a utilitarian approach to ensure that the greatest number of individuals can benefit. Community-based health interventions are the most ethical approach to bringing healthcare to marginalized communities. / Urban Bioethics / Accompanied by 1 PDF file: Francois_temple_0225M_171/Step 2 Recall.pdf

Aim: To evaluate Home-based interventions to lower neonatal mortality rates in developing countries. Background: A developing country is a country that is lacking in the services and facilities enjoyed by people in developed countries, such as personally owned automobiles and homes with indoor plumbing and water-carried sewage disposal systems. The difference in resources compared to developed regions, has been evident to the correlation of the increase neonatal mortality rates. Method: An electronic, systematic review of four databases were used to retrieve 209 articles initially, later filtered to 42 articles utilized in this review. The following databases used are as listed: CINAHL Plus with Full Text; APA PsycInfo; Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews; and MEDLINE. Articles had to solely refer to developing regions and neonatal mortality. Key Issues: Developing countries continue to report the highest neonatal mortality rates. The leading etiologies for increased neonatal mortality rates (NMR) differ in these regions compared to developed countries. Causes and factors must be understood to allow for the appropriate interventions to be implemented in the plan of care. Conclusions: Home-based interventions and community care have shown to significantly aid in the reduction of neonatal mortality rates in developing countries. Evidence based studies have also concluded that interventions are often presented in packages. Packages targeting individual households with home-based intervention; packages improving communities with health workers; and packages aiming to strengthen the trust between facilities and communities via referrals and recommendations.

The appropriate framework to capture and share location information with mobile applications enable the development of interfaces and interface techniques that empower users to obtain and share information on the go. As such, the work in this thesis makes two major contributions. First is the SeeVT framework, a locative backbone that uses currently-available data and equipment in the Virginia Tech and Blacksburg VA environments (e.g., wireless signal triangulation, GPS signals) to make available to applications the location of the device in use. Applications built on this framework have available knowledge of the region in which the user's device is located. Second is a set of four applications built on the SeeVT framework: SeeVT – Alumni Edition (a guide for alumni returning to campus, often after lengthy absences), the Newman Project (a library information system for finding books and other library resources), VTAssist (a information sharing system for disabled users), and SeeVT-Art (a guide for users in our local inn and conference center to learn about the art on display). Key in this contribution is our identification and discussion of three interface techniques that emerged from our development efforts: an images-first presentation of information, a lightweight mobile augmented reality style of interaction, and locative content affordances that provide ways to quickly input focused types of information in mobile situations. / Master of Science

Demonstrating strength and agility on virtual and real humanoids has been an important goal in computer graphics and robotics. However, developing physics- based controllers for various agile motor skills requires a tremendous amount of prior knowledge and manual labor due to complex mechanisms of the motor skills. The focus of the dissertation is to develop a set of computational tools to expedite the design process of physics-based controllers that can execute a variety of agile motor skills on virtual and real humanoids. Instead of designing directly controllers real humanoids, this dissertation takes an approach that develops appropriate theories and models in virtual simulation and systematically transfers the solutions to hardware systems. The algorithms and frameworks in this dissertation span various topics from spe- cific physics-based controllers to general learning frameworks. We first present an online algorithm for controlling falling and landing motions of virtual characters. The proposed algorithm is effective and efficient enough to generate falling motions for a wide range of arbitrary initial conditions in real-time. Next, we present a robust falling strategy for real humanoids that can manage a wide range of perturbations by planning the optimal contact sequences. We then introduce an iterative learning framework to easily design various agile motions, which is inspired by human learn- ing techniques. The proposed framework is followed by novel algorithms to efficiently optimize control parameters for the target tasks, especially when they have many constraints or parameterized goals. Finally, we introduce an iterative approach for exporting simulation-optimized control policies to hardware of robots to reduce the number of hardware experiments, that accompany expensive costs and labors.

Master of Public Health / Human Nutrition / Richard R. Rosenkranz / Purpose: Dietary habits are established in childhood and are often maintained into adulthood. Fruit and vegetable consumption contributes to prevention of several chronic diseases, but many children do not meet dietary guidelines for fruit and vegetable intake. In this study, two versions of a theoretically informed, behaviorally oriented nutrition education program were evaluated. Methods: This study used a quasi-experimental design, conducted at a summer camp in northwestern Russia. Data were collected on boys and girls (n=40), aged 8-12y (mean=10.4; SD= 1.0) with mean BMI percentile of 56.7 (SD=26.7), assigned to receive 15 sessions of enhanced nutrition education with skill-training (intervention) or classic nutrition education (comparison); both nutrition education programs were based on Social Cognitive Theory. For the intervention condition, an additional skill-training component included healthy snack preparation activities and games. Data were obtained through previously published questionnaire items and from a menu for snack selection. Independent and paired t-tests were performed to assess differences between groups and across time, respectively. Alpha was set at p < 0.05. Results: Both groups showed statistically significant differences from baseline to post-intervention in nutrition knowledge (p<0.001), healthy eating attitudes towards fruit and vegetable consumption (p=0.001), and healthy eating behavior (snack selection) (p<0.001). No statistically significant differences between time points were found, however, for children’s self-efficacy to eat fruits (p=0.822) or vegetables (p=0.118). There were no differences between intervention and comparison groups for change in nutrition knowledge (p>0.05), attitudes, self-efficacy, or behavior (snack selection). Conclusion: In this study nutrition education, with or without skill training, was associated with improved knowledge, attitudes, and behavior in a Russian camp setting. Therefore, future research should examine the long-term sustainability within different school-aged children’s environments.

Self-adaptivity, characterized by the ability to dynamically adjust behavior at runtime, is a growing trend in the evolution of modern embedded systems. While self-adaptive systems tend to be flexible and autonomous, self-adaptivity may inevitably complicate software design, test and analysis. A strategy for taming the growing software complexity of self-adaptive systems is to partition system behaviors into different operational modes specified at design time. Such a multi-mode system can change behavior by switching between modes at runtime under certain circumstances. Multi-mode systems can benefit from a complementary approach to the software development of complex systems: Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE), which fosters reuse of independently developed software components. However, the state-of-the-art component-based development of multi-mode systems does not take full advantage of CBSE, as reuse of modes at component level is barely addressed. Modes are often treated as system properties, while mode switches are handled by a global mode manager. This centralized mode management entails global information of all components, whereas the global information may be inaccessible in component-based systems. Another potential problem is that a single mode manager does not scale well, particularly at design time,  for a large number of components and modes.   In this thesis we propose a distributed solution to the component-based development of multi-mode systems, aiming for a more efficient and scalable mode management. Our goal is to fully incorporate modes in software component reuse, supporting reuse of multi-mode components, i.e., components able to run in multiple modes. We have developed a generic framework, the Mode-Switch Logic (MSL), which not only supports reuse of multi-mode components but also provides runtime mechanisms for handling mode switch. MSL includes three fundamental elements: (1) a mode-aware component model with the formal specification of reusable multi-mode software components; (2) a mode mapping mechanism for the seamless composition of multi-mode components; and (3) a mode-switch runtime mechanism which is executed by each component in isolation from its functional execution and coordinates the mode switches of different components without the need of global mode information. The mode-switch runtime mechanism has been verified by model checking in conjunction with mathematical proofs. We also provide a mode-switch timing analysis for the runtime mechanism to respect real-time requirements.   MSL is dedicated to the mode aspect of a system irrespective of component execution semantics, thus independent of the choice of component models. We have integrated MSL in the ProCom component model with the extension of support for reuse of multi-mode components and distributed mode-switch handling. Although the distributed mode-switch handling of MSL is more flexible and scalable than the conventional centralized approach, when components are deployed on a single hardware platform and global mode information is available, centralized mode-switch handling is more efficient in terms of runtime overhead and mode-switch time. Hence, MSL is supplemented with a mode transformation technique to enhance runtime mode-switch efficiency by converting the distributed mechanism to a centralized mechanism. MSL together with the mode transformation technique has been implemented in a prototype tool where one can build multi-mode systems by reusing multi-mode components. The applicability of MSL is demonstrated in two proof-of-concept case studies. / ARROWS - Design Techniques for Adaptive Embedded Systems