Thesis equivalent (M.H.A.)--University of Michigan, 1970. / "HA 752-753."

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 1980. / Title from title page screen, viewed Feb. 15, 2005. Dissertation Committee: J.H. McGrath (chair), John McCarthy, Rodney Riegle, John Brickell, Clayton Thomas. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-97) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis equivalent (M.H.A.)--University of Michigan, 1970. / "HA 752-753."

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1990.

This thesis contains a short biography of Stahl together with an account of his experimental researches in chemistry and of his general theoretical ideas. The part played by him in the development and elaboration of the phlogiston theory has been discussed. This was the first comprehensive chemical theory and one which gained almost universal acceptance for half a century, and an endeavour has been made to describe the experimental evidence on which it was based, a point hitherto little realised, and to explain the reasons for its general adoption. Various isolated researches have been investigated which show Stahl to have been a careful and accurate experimentalist over a wide range of subjects. A bibliography of Stahl chemical works is appended.

The manuscripts British Library, Sloane MS 2593, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. e.1, and St John’s College, Cambridge, MS S.54 are compact collections of song lyrics written during the fifteenth century, largely without notation. My thesis seeks to develop responsive ways of reading these anthologies and uses the manuscripts to illumine the creative processes that produced and circulated their songs. I integrate attention to song lyrics within the material books and exploration of wider textual networks. As many of the anthologies’ texts are in carol form, a combination of refrain parts and stanzas, the books provide an opportunity to examine the form’s identity and significance within fifteenth-century English songwriting. The thesis is in three parts and the first introduces critical approaches to the manuscripts and the carol, followed by an examination of the books and their contexts, especially manuscripts with which the anthologies have textual connections. The central section investigates the songs’ production and circulation by examining textual networks, how the anthologies were written, how the songs may have been performed, and the role of memory in shaping the songs and anthologies. The final part explores women’s role in the songs, the range of forms used, and the centrality of the many imagined voices and performances within the texts. This is the first extended study focused upon these three sources, which as anthologies offer insight into ways songs were shared and organised. I investigate the role of short collections and booklets in the construction of longer anthologies, and the possibility of an especially productive song culture within fifteenth-century East Anglia. Rather than repeating assertions familiar from earlier studies of carols that the anthologies’ songs are either popular or clerical productions, I suggest how the anthologies engage with communal performance cultures and participate in varied song traditions, from liturgy to lullaby.

Computational Grids are evolving into a global, service-oriented architecture – a universal platform for delivering future computational services to a range of applications of varying complexity and resource requirements. The thesis focuses on developing a new scheduling model for general-purpose, utility clusters based on the concept of user requested job completion deadlines. In such a system, a user would be able to request each job to finish by a certain deadline, and possibly to a certain monetary cost. Implementing deadline scheduling is dependent on the ability to predict the execution time of each queued job, and on an adaptive scheduling algorithm able to use those predictions to maximise deadline adherence. The thesis proposes novel solutions to these two problems and documents their implementation in a largely autonomous and self-managing way. The starting point of the work is an extensive analysis of a representative Grid workload revealing consistent workflow patterns, usage cycles and correlations between the execution times of jobs and its properties commonly collected by the Grid middleware for accounting purposes. An automated approach is proposed to identify these dependencies and use them to partition the highly variable workload into subsets of more consistent and predictable behaviour. A range of time-series forecasting models, applied in this context for the first time, were used to model the job execution times as a function of their historical behaviour and associated properties. Based on the resulting predictions of job runtimes a novel scheduling algorithm is able to estimate the latest job start time necessary to meet the requested deadline and sort the queue accordingly to minimise the amount of deadline overrun. The testing of the proposed approach was done using the actual job trace collected from a production Grid facility. The best performing execution time predictor (the auto-regressive moving average method) coupled to workload partitioning based on three simultaneous job properties returned the median absolute percentage error centroid of only 4.75%. This level of prediction accuracy enabled the proposed deadline scheduling method to reduce the average deadline overrun time ten-fold compared to the benchmark batch scheduler. Overall, the thesis demonstrates that deadline scheduling of computational jobs on the Grid is achievable using statistical forecasting of job execution times based on historical information. The proposed approach is easily implementable, substantially self-managing and better matched to the human workflow making it well suited for implementation in the utility Grids of the future.

Elderly patients make up a disproportionately high proportion of emergency department visits and represent a high-risk sub group for urosepsis. As a component of the geriatric syndrome, acutely ill patients will often present to triage lacking the cardinal signs and symptoms of infection. Further research is necessary to describe geriatric urosepsis and provide a foundation for education for emergency department providers and triage staff. A retrospective, descriptive approach was utilized to examine geriatric patients age 50 years and over who presented to the emergency department with clinically validated urinary tract infection and sepsis. Geriatric age sub-groups as well as discharge mortality was used to compare the clinical and demographic features present with advancing age and urosepsis. Patients meeting urosepsis diagnosis criteria between June 2005 and June 2010 at a community hospital were queried and 270 of these met inclusion criteria. A significant difference in means between younger geriatric age groups (50-64 years) versus older groups (65-74, 75-84, and 85 and over) was observed with regard to presenting symptoms of acute change in mental status, dysuria, chills/ rigors, and nausea/ vomiting. Clinical variables also varied between age groups to include platelets, neutrophils, blood urea nitrogen, initial triage temperature, triage heart rate, highest obtained emergency department temperature and heart rate. On average there also existed significant difference in age, hospital length of stay, body mass index, blood urea nitrogen, creatinine, albumin, triage temperature, and highest temperature.

There is evidence that older Canadians have a higher incidence of presenting to the emergency department (ED) than any other age group. These visits may be made more complex if individuals are also cognitively impaired or have dementia. The purpose of this study was to explore ED nurses’ experiences of caring for adults with dementia in the ED. Using an interpretive descriptive approach, 12 registered nurses working in different EDs in an urban setting in Western Canada were interviewed about these experiences. Using the thematic analysis process described by Braun and Clarke, four themes were identified: 1) not a priority; 2) not the right place; 3) get them in, get them out; and 4) getting it wrong. The nurses identified that challenges in the care of persons with dementia in the ED are created by the fast-paced and chaotic environment of the ED, staffing, issues with disposition, and safety concerns. Suggestions for improving the care of persons with dementia were provided by the nurses. / October 2016

The federal administrative structure has undergone many changes as a result of governmental reorganizations. In analyzing one of these various reorganizations, the author was convinced that though there were many reasons for change, the plans were based on some set ideas, congenial to the efficient working of governmental machinery. This study will demonstrate how the principles of public administration are employed and emphasized in the reorganization plans.