The present study investigated age differences in implicit memory for positive, negative and neutral words. We also explored how cognitive control and time of testing influence emotional memory. Participants completed a one-back picture comparison task with superimposed distracting emotional and neutral words. Memory for distracting words was tested using an implicit memory test and cognitive control by a flanker task. Priming was significant for negative but not for positive and neutral words. Memory for distracting negative words was greater at non-optimal times of day for young adults but similar across the day for older adults. A high level of cognitive control was related to greater priming for negative words in young adults and lower priming in older adults. Priming for neutral words was enhanced in high cognitive control participants when stimuli contained emotional words that were relevant to one’s goals, implicating the use of emotion regulation at an unconscious level.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: A. Daniel Hill. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University

abstract: For a sensor array, part of its elements may fail to work due to hardware failures. Then the missing data may distort in the beam pattern or decrease the accuracy of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. Therefore, considerable research has been conducted to develop algorithms that can estimate the missing signal information. On the other hand, through those algorithms, array elements can also be selectively turned off while the missed information can be successfully recovered, which will save power consumption and hardware cost. Conventional approaches focusing on array element failures are mainly based on interpolation or sequential learning algorithm. Both of them rely heavily on some prior knowledge such as the information of the failures or a training dataset without missing data. In addition, since most of the existing approaches are developed for DOA estimation, their recovery target is usually the co-variance matrix but not the signal matrix. In this thesis, a new signal recovery method based on matrix completion (MC) theory is introduced. It aims to directly refill the absent entries in the signal matrix without any prior knowledge. We proposed a novel overlapping reshaping method to satisfy the applying conditions of MC algorithms. Compared to other existing MC based approaches, our proposed method can provide us higher probability of successful recovery. The thesis describes the principle of the algorithms and analyzes the performance of this method. A few application examples with simulation results are also provided. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Electrical Engineering 2016

Context. SE is a growing field in both academia and industry, online SE education becomes more and more prevalent recent years. Massive Open Online Courses, as an emerging type of open educational resource, provide SE courses a much wider development space. But on the other hand, MOOCs limit SE courses because its low completion rate. Game elements are used to address this issue, but the impact of game elements on completion rate of specific MOOCs and SE courses in MOOCs are not clear. It is necessary to find whether and how game elements could help students finish SE courses. Explore the method and idea of improving SE courses in MOOCs through game elements. Objectives. In this study authors investigate what game elements are applied in SE courses in MOOCs platforms, evaluate the impact of MOOCs game elements on SE courses completion situation. Based on the analysis and summary of the data and result, propose suggestion to improve SE courses. Methods. Authors conduct a systematic literature to find the game elements used in SE courses in MOOCs. Conducting the survey to get the data of the MOOCs game elements on completion situation in general and data of survey is analyzed by mathematical statistics. The interview is used to find how the game elements of MOOC and SE education simulation impact on learning SE courses on MOOCs by inductive content analysis. Results. In systematic literature review, 23 studies are selected from 358 papers of six databases. Forty-one responses of questionnaires are received and twenty interviewees take part in this study. Authors find that game elements have been applied in MOOCs in various ways and research results about effort of game elements are positive. In this study, the results of analyzing the received data in survey show that there is no significant impact of game elements on course completion rate. The interview shows that specific game element is necessary for students finishing their courses and some game elements are not well designed in students’ perspective. Two specific suggestions to improve SE courses are proposed according to survey and interview result. Conclusions. This research collects data through SLR, survey and interview, and evaluates the impact of game elements on SE course completion situation through analysis, comparison and summary. The result is helpful to people who design and develop the game elements in MOOCs platform. Focusing on the character of SE education and SE courses, some suggestion of designing and modifying the game elements are provided. This enables the game elements designer to target designing and arranging game elements better.

In this thesis, we establish a general and type independent theory for the existence and regularity of generalized solutions of large classes of systems of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). In this regard, our point of departure is the Order Completion Method. The spaces of generalized functions to which the solutions of such systems of PDEs belong are constructed as the completions of suitable uniform convergence spaces of normal lower semi-continuous functions. It is shown that large classes of systems of nonlinear PDEs admit generalized solutions in the mentioned spaces of generalized functions. Furthermore, the generalized solutions that we construct satisfy a blanket regularity property, in the sense that such solutions may be assimilated with usual normal lower semi-continuous functions. These fundamental existence and regularity results are obtain as applications of basic topological processes, namely, the completion of uniform convergence spaces, and elementary properties of real valued continuous functions. In particular, those techniques from functional analysis which are customary in the study of nonlinear PDEs are not used at all. The mentioned sophisticated methods of functional analysis are used only to obtain additional regularity properties of the generalized solutions of systems of nonlinear PDEs, and are thus relegated to a secondary role. Over and above the mentioned blanket regularity of the solutions, it is shown that for a large class of equations, the generalized solutions are in fact usual classical solutions of the respective system of equations everywhere except on a closed, nowhere dense subset of the domain of definition of the system of equations. This result is obtained under minimal assumptions on the smoothness of the equations, and is an application of convenient compactness theorems for sets of sufficiently smooth functions with respect to suitable topologies on spaces of such functions. As an application of the existence and regularity results presented here, we obtain for the first time in the literature an extension of the celebrated Cauchy-Kovalevskaia Theorem, on its own general and type independent grounds, to equations that are not analytic. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Mathematics and Applied Mathematics / unrestricted

abstract: I conduct a series of analyses aimed at assessing equity in selective American colleges over a 20+ year time frame. My main measures of equity are enrollment and completion in selective colleges, which I disaggregate by race/ethnicity. After creating an institutional-level panel data set with variables on college revenues and expenses, tuition, institutional control, and affirmative action case law decisions, I estimate a Generalized Least Squares (GLS) model with institutional level random fixed effects to identify factors associated with enrollment and degree completion for white and non-white students at selective United States colleges. My results suggest that affirmative action case law is associated with changes in enrollment and degree completion rates of white and non-white student alike. Increasing equity for non-white students does not compromise equity for white students. There was a statistically significant relationship between federal spending, enrollment, and degree completion for non-white students. When selective colleges increased tuition, instructional costs, academic support services expenditures, and student support services, Asian American/Pacific Islander students were likely to see enrollment and degree completion declines. Degree completion and enrollment differences were observed for Asian American/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and white students at public, private and for-profit colleges. In the years after the Adams and Hopwood court decisions, equity for non-white students declined at selective colleges. Enrollment and degree completion for non-white students increased following Grutter, Gratz, Coalition, and Fisher decisions. Enrollment of white students increased following Fordice and Hopwood. Degree completion for white students increased post Coalition and decreased post Fisher. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2020

One longstanding challenge in the field of robotics has been the robust and reliable grasping of objects of unknown shape. Part of that challenge lies in reconstructing the object’s shape using only limited observations. Most approaches use either visual or tactile information to reconstruct the shape, having to face issues resulting from the limitations of the chosen modality. This thesis tries to combine the strengths of visual and tactile observations by taking the result from an existing visual approach and refining that result through sparse tactile glances. The existing approach produces potential shape hypotheses in voxel space which get combined into one final shape. This thesis takes that final shape and determines voxels of interest using either entropy or variance. These voxels will be targeted by the exploration, providing information about these voxels. This information will be used to assign weights to the original hypotheses in order for the combined shape to better fit the observations. All explorations are simulated and evaluated in MATLAB. The resulting shapes are evaluated based on their Jaccard Index with the ground truth model. The algorithm leads to improvements in the Jaccard Index, but not to drastically different looking shapes.

The purpose of this study was to determine the significance of certain factors relating to successful completion of the program by students in the Doctor of Education program at North Texas State University. Specifically, these factors were determined by a screening of judgments of North Texas State University graduates who had successfully completed the program, students engaged in the program, and from analysis of the factors derived from student records and research in related studies.