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When discriminated IRT procedures have been used to determine preference relations among temporally extended operants, deviations from predictions of the matching law have been found (Hawkes and Shimp, 1974). Using a yoked-control procedure, the present study shows that keypecking in the discriminated IRT procedure has two sources of strength, that arising from the stimulus-reinforcer contingency and that arising from the response-reinforcer contingency Three out of four yoked birds autoshaped to the keylight, and all lead birds showed evidence of control by the keylight under some conditions. As any control of keypecking by the keylight, either discriminated or autoshaped, contributes to deviations from matching, the discriminated IRT procedure does not permit one to draw strong conclusions about preference relations among IRTs.

Parenting practices and discipline practices impact children’s lives in many ways, particularly children’s behaviors and outcomes. Positive parenting practices including authoritative parenting, non-violent discipline practices, and consistency are associated with positive psychological adjustment. Research demonstrates that negative parenting practices including authoritarian and permissive parenting, harsh discipline practices, and inconsistency are related to childhood maladjustment. The current study aimed to examine the relationships among parenting practices, discipline practices, consistency, and emerging adult psychological adjustment. Results indicated that positive parenting, positive discipline, and consistent practices are negatively correlated with emerging adult maladjustment. The current study found no differences between mothers and fathers for parenting practices, discipline practices, or consistency. Lastly, it was found that consistency acts as a partial mediator between parenting and discipline practices and psychological outcome and is a strong predictor of psychological adjustment.

Use of proxy caches in the World Wide Web is beneficial to the end user, network administrator, and server administrator since it reduces the amount of redundant traffic that circulates through the network. In addition, end users get quicker access to documents that are cached. However, the use of proxies introduces additional issues that need to be addressed. In particular, there is growing concern over how to maintain cache consistency and coherency among cached versions of documents. The existing consistency protocols used in the Web are proving to be insufficient to meet the growing needs of the Internet population. For example, too many messages sent over the network are due to caches guessing when their copy is inconsistent. One option is to apply the cache coherence strategies already in use for many other distributed systems, such as parallel computers. However, these methods are not satisfactory for the World Wide Web due to its larger size and more diverse access patterns. Many decisions must be made when exploring World Wide Web coherency, such as whether to provide consistency at the proxy level (client pull) or to allow the server to handle it (server push). What trade offs are inherent for each of these decisions? The relevant usage of any method strongly depends upon the conditions of the network (e.g., document types that are frequently requested or the state of the network load) and the resources available (e.g., disk space and type of cache available). Version 1.1 of HTTP is the first protocol version to give explicit rules for consistency on the Web. Many proposed algorithms require changes to HTTP/1.1. However, this is not necessary to provide a suitable solution. One goal of this dissertation is to study the characteristics of document retrieval and modification to determine their effect on proposed consistency mechanisms. A set of effective consistency policies is identified from the investigation. The main objective of this dissertation is to use these findings to design and implement a consistency algorithm that provides improved performance over the current mechanisms proposed in the literature. Optimistically, we want an algorithm that provides strong consistency. However, we do not want to further degrade the network or cause undue burden on the server to gain this advantage. We propose a system based on the notion of soft-state and based on server push. In this system, the proxy would have some influence on what state information is maintained at the server (spatial consideration) as well as how long to maintain the information (temporal consideration). We perform a benchmark study of the performance of the new algorithm in comparison with existing proposed algorithms. Our results show that the Synchronous Nodes for Consistency (SINC) framework provides an average of 20% control message savings by limiting how much polling occurs with the current Web cache consistency mechanism, Adaptive Client Polling. In addition, the algorithm shows 30% savings on state space overhead at the server by limiting the amount of per-proxy and per-document state information required at the server. / Ph. D.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Gurdip Singh / The objective of this project is to address the problem of data consistency in sensor network applications. An application may involve data being gathered from several sources to be delivered to multiple sinks, resulting in multiple data streams with several sources and sinks for each stream. There may be several inter-stream constraints to be satisfied in order to ensure data consistency. In this report, we model this problem as that of variable sharing between the components in an application, and propose a framework for implementing variable sharing in a distributed sensor network. In this framework, we define the notion of variable sharing in component based systems. We allow the application designer to specify data consistency constraints in an application. Given an application, we implement a tool to identify various types of shared variables in an application. Given the shared variables and the data consistency constraints, we provide an infrastructure to implement the shared variables. This infrastructure has tools to synthesize the code to be deployed on each of the nodes in the physical topology. The infrastructure has been built for the TinyOS platform. We have evaluated the framework using several examples using the TOSSIM simulator.

The main focus of this thesis is to develop full parametric and semiparametric Bayesian inference for data arising from triangular distributions. A natural consequence of working with such distributions is it allows one to consider regression models where the response variable is now the mode of the data distribution. A new family of nonparametric prior distributions is developed for a certain class of convex densities of particular relevance to mode regressions. Triangular distributions arise in several contexts such as geosciences, econometrics, finance, health care management, sociology, reliability engineering, decision and risk analysis, etc. In many fields, experts, typically, have a reasonable idea about the range and most likely values that define a data distribution. Eliciting these quantities is thus, generally, easier than eliciting moments of other commonly known distributions. Using simulated and actual data, applications of triangular distributions, with and without mode regressions, in some of the aforementioned areas are tackled. / text

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Harmonia na geometria de rodovias é a medida sobre o grau de concordância e compatibilidade entre os componentes da geometria da rodovia e o volume de solicitações físicas, ou à habilidade de motoristas. Esse trabalho expõe e discute resultados obtidos durante ações de uma tentativa para mostrar que informações sobre a qualidade de viagens obtidas através de notas fornecidas por avaliadores, levantamento de velocidade de veículos e dados sobre o formato de seções transversais podem ser úteis para o estudo e explicação de conceitos sobre a harmonia na geometria de rodovias vicinais. / Consistency on geometric design is a measure on the degree of concordance and compatibility among characteristics of components of the highway shape and the volume of physical or driver ability requirements. This work shows and discusses the results obtained during an attempt to show that information about the quality of travel obtained through scores from trained observers, vehicles velocities surveys and data from the shape of the highway sections should be useful to the study and explanations of concepts on the secondary highway consistency on geometric design.

Harmonia na geometria de rodovias é a medida sobre o grau de concordância e compatibilidade entre os componentes da geometria da rodovia e o volume de solicitações físicas, ou à habilidade de motoristas. Esse trabalho expõe e discute resultados obtidos durante ações de uma tentativa para mostrar que informações sobre a qualidade de viagens obtidas através de notas fornecidas por avaliadores, levantamento de velocidade de veículos e dados sobre o formato de seções transversais podem ser úteis para o estudo e explicação de conceitos sobre a harmonia na geometria de rodovias vicinais. / Consistency on geometric design is a measure on the degree of concordance and compatibility among characteristics of components of the highway shape and the volume of physical or driver ability requirements. This work shows and discusses the results obtained during an attempt to show that information about the quality of travel obtained through scores from trained observers, vehicles velocities surveys and data from the shape of the highway sections should be useful to the study and explanations of concepts on the secondary highway consistency on geometric design.

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