During the 1990’s the world witnessed a crime drop throughout all categories of crime. Many researchers have sought to seek an explanation for this drop; however, there has been a lack of concrete findings to fully explain this phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to explore a further reasoning as to why this drop occurred, specifically throughout the United States. An unexplored factor to explain this phenomenon is the increase of household computer ownership during the 1990’s. During this decade, household computers and the internet became prevalent throughout the nation. This study utilized secondary data from the Uniform Crime Report and the United States Current Population survey, with support from routines activities theory, to answer the research question to find if there was a correlation between household computer use and the crime drop. The results for this study found that there was a positive correlation between household computer ownership, household internet ownership, and all realms of crime. With this, it is important to note that the social trend of household computer ownership is not the only reasoning for this phenomenon.

Thesis (M. Dev.) -- University of the North, 2003 / Refer to document

The interception and redirection of rainfall by vegetation has implications for many fields such as remote sensing of soil moisture, satellite observation of rainfall, and the modeling of runoff, climate, and soil erosion. Although the modeling of rainfall partitioning by forests has received attention in the past, partitioning caused by crops has been overlooked. The present work proposes a two front experimental and computational methodology to comprehensively study rainfall interception and partitioning by the maize canopy. In the experimental stage, we deployed two compact weather stations, two optical disdrometers, and five tipping bucket rain gauges. Two of the tipping bucket rain gauges were modified to measure throughfall while two were adapted to measure stemflow. The first optical disdrometer allowed for inspection of the unmodified drop-size and velocity distributions, whereas the second disdrometer measured the corresponding distributions under the canopy. This indicates that the outcome of the interaction between the hydrometeors and the canopy depends on the drop diameter. In the computational stage, we created a model that uses drop-size and velocity distributions as well as a three-dimensional digital canopy to simulate the movement of raindrops on the surfaces of leaves. Our model considers interception, redirection, retention, coalescence, breakup, and re-interception of drops to calculate the stemflow, throughfall, and equivalent height of precipitation stored on plants for a given storm. Moreover, the throughfall results are presented as two-dimensional matrices, where each term corresponds to the accumulated volume of drops that dripped at a given location. This allows insight into the spatial distribution of throughfall beneath the foliage. Finally, we examine the way in which the maize canopy modifies the drop-size distribution by recalculating the drop velocity based on the raindrop's size and detachment height and by storing the counts of drops in diameter-velocity classes that are consistent with the classes used by disdrometers in the experimental study.

Abstract available in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.

No description available.

The dropped objects are identified as one of the top ten causes of fatalities and serious injuries in the oil and gas industry. It is of importance to understand dynamics of dropped objects under water in order to accurately predict the motion of dropped objects and protect the underwater structures and facilities from being damaged. In this thesis, we study nondimensionalization of dynamic equations of dropped cylindrical objects. Nondimensionalization helps to reduce the number of free parameters, identify the relative size of effects of parameters, and gain a deeper insight of the essential nature of dynamics of dropped cylindrical objects under water. The resulting simulations of dimensionless trajectory confirms that drop angle, trailing edge and drag coefficient have the significant effects on dynamics of trajectories and landing location of dropped cylindrical objects under water.

Since the 16th century, educators have endeavored to find a way to teach the masses of young people the fundamentals necessary for a good life. Protestant reformers “…advocated that education should be universal, compulsory, free…”

Dresher reported that today there is an increased and growing interest among the lay population as well as among educators in the appreciation of the drop-out problem of the public schools of the United States. Some educators believe that one of the most important issues facing education today is the problem of determining ways by which the high school pupil might be encouraged to finish his secondary trainings.

The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a correlation between students' perception of corrective feedback and retention in online classes. A total of 134 community college students were enrolled in six online classes taught by three full-time instructors. The research questions addressed were as follows: RQ1. How are the students' perception of corrective feedback and student retention related? RQ2. Are students who attend course orientation meetings more likely to complete the course? RQ3. Are students who attend distance learning technical workshops more likely to complete the course? RQ4. Are students who have taken other online classes more likely to complete the course? RQ5. How are the students' perceived computer skills and student retention related? An exit survey was administered to gather quantitative data, which was then analyzed using Pearson's Phi Coefficient and Spearman's Rank Order Correlation. The study failed to indicate a sign significant relationship between (a) attending course orientation and retention, (b) attending technical workshops and retention, (c) prior online experience and retention, and (d) students' perception of computer experience and retention. The data indicates a significant relationship between students' perception of corrective feedback and retention. It is important to note that despite every attempt to solicit students who dropped the course, the students who dropped tended not to return the survey. Therefore, the sample did not accurately represent the population. As a result of the sampling error, there is little variability in the dependent measure; thus, the results have the potential of being biased. Based on the research finding for this study, educators would benefit from research studies that focus on the following: (a) exploring procedural changes (i.e. increasing the number of useable surveys, increasing the number of respondents, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the data validation process, and increasing the generalizability of the study, (b) exploring student perception of quality, timeliness and consistency of corrective feedback, and (c) conducting individual case studies with online students.

The modern day tourists do not want to deal with the hassle of using a large number of travel guides and paper maps while travelling. They would prefer to be able to access required information via their mobile phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). We realise that the delivered information may be originally available in numerous information formats. To support the administrator of the tourist guides the programme is required to help sorting information from these different sources and to help inserting them into a system. Our goal with this project is to develop a software support for processing information import via a graphical user interface, to support the administrator in identifying and extracting the appropriate sight information from various resources. The interface also helps in transferring and storing the structured and unstructured data into the TIP database.