ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Instrumentation Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL) has been developed to be a neutral language that is focused on the description and control of instrumentation systems and networks. This paper describes the various instrumentation configuration management tools we have designed that make use of IHAL’s neutral specification of instrumentation networks. We discuss the features currently present in prototypes as well as future enhancements.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Telemetry format descriptions and engineering unit conversion calibrations are generated in an assortment of formats and numbering systems on various media. Usually this information comes to the central telemetry receiving/processing system from multiple sources, fragmented and disjointed. As present day flight tests require more and more telemetry parameters to be instrumented and processed, standardization and automation for handling this ever increasing amount of information becomes more and more critical. In response to this need, the Telemetry Definition and Processing (TDAP) system has been developed by the Air Force Development Test Center (AFDTC) Eglin AFB, Florida. TDAP standardizes the format of information required to convert PCM data and MIL-STD-1553 Bus data into engineering units. This includes both the format of the data files and the software necessary to display, output, and extract subsets of data. These standardized files are electronically available for TDAP users to review/update and are then used to automatically set up telemetry acquisition systems. This paper describes how TDAP is used to standardize the development and operational test community’s telemetry data reduction process, both real-time and post-test.

Despite decades of research aiming to ameliorate the difficulties of creating software, programming still remains an error-prone task. Much work in Computer Science deals with the problem of specification, or writing the right program, rather than the complementary problem of implementation, or writing the program right. However, many desirable software properties (such as portability) are obtained via adherence to coding standards, and therefore fall outside the remit of formal specification and automatic verification. Moreover, code inspections and manual detection of standards violations are time consuming. To address these issues, this thesis describes Exstatic, a novel framework for the static detection of coding standards violations. Unlike many other static checkers Exstatic can be used to examine code in a variety of languages, including program code, in-line documentation, markup languages and so on. This means that checkable coding standards adhered to by a particular project or institution can be handled by a single tool. Consequently, a major challenge in the design of Exstatic has been to invent a way of representing code from a variety of source languages. Therefore, this thesis describes ICODE, which is an intermediate language suitable for representing code from a number of different programming paradigms. To substantiate the claim that ICODE is a universal intermediate language, a proof strategy has been developed: for a number of different programming paradigms (imperative, declarative, etc.), a proof is constructed to show that semantics-preserving translation exists from an exemplar language (such as IMP or PCF) to ICODE. The usefulness of Exstatic has been demonstrated by the implementation of a number of static analysers for different languages. This includes a checker for technical documentation written in Javadoc which validates documents against the Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) Coding Conventions and a checker for HTML pages against a site-specifc standard. A third system is targeted at a variant of the Python language, written by the author, called python-csp, based on Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes.

Past literature has indicated that jury instructions are not written in ways that result in optimal juror comprehension, and can be improved through various ways of simplification. Prototypes of the insanity defense have also been found to influence juror decision-making. Additionally, individual factors such as attitudes toward and myth endorsement of the insanity defense can influence verdict. The following study explored these effects of jury instruction format, insanity defense consistency, and participant factors on jury understanding and decision-making. Three hundred and eighty jury eligible community members were recruited online for this study. Participants were first asked questions pertaining to attitudes and myths about the insanity defense. Afterwards, each participant read one of two vignettes (an insanity defense consistent case and an insanity defense inconsistent case), and then read one of three jury instructions (traditional, simplified, or flow-chart versions). The participants then reached individual verdicts and answered factual questions about the insanity defense and their perceptions on the defendant. Results indicated that simplified instructions increased participant knowledge over the traditional and flow-chart instructions, but did not influence verdict selection overall. Consistency, myth endorsement, attitudes, and perceptions of the defendant were also all found to contribute to the verdict. These results contribute to the current research on comprehension of jury instructions, especially in the context of an insanity defense case, and may provide additional information for attorneys to consider during the voir dire process.

This study investigated the effects of test length (10, 20 and 30 items), scoring schema (proportion of dichotomous ad polytomous scoring) and item analysis model (IRT and Rasch) on the ability estimates, test information levels and optimization criteria of mixed item format tests. Polytomous item responses to 30 items for 1000 examinees were simulated using the generalized partial-credit model and SAS software. Portions of the data were re-coded dichotomously over 11 structured proportions to create 33 sets of test responses including mixed item format tests. MULTILOG software was used to calculate the examinee ability estimates, standard errors, item and test information, reliability and fit indices. A comparison of IRT and Rasch item analysis procedures was made using SPSS software across ability estimates and standard errors of ability estimates using a 3 x 11 x 2 fixed factorial ANOVA. Effect sizes and power were reported for each procedure. Scheffe post hoc procedures were conducted on significant factos. Test information was analyzed and compared across the range of ability levels for all 66-design combinations. The results indicated that both test length and the proportion of items scored polytomously had a significant impact on the amount of test information produced by mixed item format tests. Generally, tests with 100% of the items scored polytomously produced the highest overall information. This seemed to be especially true for examinees with lower ability estimates. Optimality comparisons were made between IRT and Rasch procedures based on standard error rates for the ability estimates, marginal reliabilities and fit indices (-2LL). The only significant differences reported involved the standard error rates for both the IRT and Rasch procedures. This result must be viewed in light of the fact that the effect size reported was negligible. Optimality was found to be highest when longer tests and higher proportions of polytomous scoring were applied. Some indications were given that IRT procedures may produce slightly improved results in gathering available test information. Overall, significant differences were not found between the IRT and Rasch procedures when analyzing the mixed item format tests. Further research should be conducted in the areas of test difficulty, examinee test scores, and automated partial-credit scoring along with a comparison to other traditional psychometric measures and how they address challenges related to the mixed item format tests.

This dissertation examines organic food marketing from three aspects: household demand for organic food, household choice of retail formats accounting for preference organic food preference, and farmers’ joint adoption of organic farming and direct marketing methods. In Chapter Two, given the fast growth of private label milk and organic milk in the U.S., we estimate a censored demand system to study the demand relations among types of milk differentiated by brand types and organic status, using recent Nielsen Homescan data. We find that sociodemographic factors still play important roles in a household choice of milk types, and fluid milk is an inferior good. Moreover, as income increases, households are more likely to shift from buying conventional milk to organic milk and from private label conventional milk to branded conventional milk, as indicated by the asymmetric cross price elasticities. In Chapter Three, we examine whether households’ preference for organic food can affect their retail format choices for their grocery shopping trips. We model households’ choices of five major retail format with a conditional logit model, also using the Nielsen Homescan data. Our main findings are that regular organic user households are more likely to patronage organic specialty stores and discount stores, but less likely to shop in warehouse clubs. Price, consumer loyalty, and household shopping behavior also affects household retail format choice. In Chapter Four, we examine the relation between farmers’ adoption of organic farming and direct marketing, given their similar objectives in satisfying consumer demand and increasing farm income. We model farmers’ adoption of the two practices with a bivariate simultaneous linear probability model using data from USDA Agricultural Resource Management Survey. Our main finding is that the farmers’ adoption of organic farming decreases their probability of adopting direct marketing, whereas the reverse effect is insignificant. Also, organic farming is found to improve gross farm income.

This paper describes the file format of the climate data container used by the DELPHIN, THERAKLES and NANDRAD simulation programs. The climate data container format holds a binary representation of annual and continuous climatic data needed for hygrothermal transport and building energy simulation models. The content of the C6B-Format is roughly equivalent to the epw-climate data format.

The current study assessed the effects of two teaching stimulus presentations, i.e. picture to word and word to word, used to teach second language vocabulary to college students. It also evaluated the emergence of untaught relations when picture to word and word to word were used separately as a teaching strategy. The findings showed picture to word training resulted in more untaught relations. Several aspects such time allotted for online quizzes, experimental and teaching arrangements and vocabulary complexity were suggested for future research.

There are at least 21 dendro-data formats used in dendrochronology laboratories around the world. Many of these formats are read by a limited number of programs, thereby inhibiting collaboration, limiting critical review of analyses, and risking the long-term accessibility of datasets. Some of the older formats are supported by a single program and are falling into disuse, opening the risk for data to become obsolete and unreadable. These formats also have a variety of flaws, including but not limited to no accurate method for denoting measuring units, little or no metadata support, lack of support for variables other than whole ring widths (e.g. earlywood/latewood widths, ratios and density). The proposed long-term solution is the adoption of a universal data standard such as the Tree-Ring Data Standard (TRiDaS). In the short and medium term, however, a tool is required that is capable of converting not only back and forth to this standard, but between any of the existing formats in use today. Such a tool is also required to provide continued access to data archived in obscure formats. This paper describes TRiCYCLE, a new application that does just this. TRiCYCLE is an open-source, cross-platform, desktop application for the conversion of the most commonly used data formats. Two open source Java libraries upon which TRiCYCLE depends are also described. These libraries can be used by developers to implement support for all data formats within their own applications.

Television static represents the absence of a legible image and the presence of something iconic and disturbing - a sinister abstraction. These repeating rhythms also occur in the Hail Mary prayer, in the houses in my neighborhood, in large crowds, and in my mother's crotchet patterns. The unsettling aspect of repetitive mark making in my drawings mirrors in part my psychotherapy, in which the past is revived over and over, as well as the idea of penance absorbed through my Catholic background.Since moving away from Mexico I have been using imagery related to the United States: rivers, mountains, and landscapes. But in the final drawings this subject matter remains distant to me; I connect to the work only through making marks on paper. On one level, specificity is important: which river? or which mountain?, but another kind of connection is made when the images cease to be legible. As information accumulates on the surface, I am interested in a purely visual and phenomenological effect that briefly defies the emotional nature of my source material.