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This research aims to study the consumer perception, acceptance and adoption of menstrual underwear as it provides a sustainable option to the current feminine hygiene management solutions widely used in the consumer market in the U.S. In addition to the functional and utilitarian aspect of the underwear, I further delve into studying the social psychological effect the usage of the underwear (i.e., hedonic) has on consumer adoption. A longitudinal, qualitative study employing a three-step approach was conducted. The findings suggest that participants have never heard of menstrual underwear and did not fully understand the phenomenon. Contradicting responses between subject's attitudes and behavior towards the environment were revealed although, menstrual underwear had a positive psychological effect on the participants. Overall, menstrual underwear was most accepted amongst participants in the study.

This study evaluates three different ways of structuring a software library for an object-oriented system. The traditional class/subclass tree (CIS) is used as well as two methods from the mental model literature: hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) of sorting data and modal block clustering (MBC) of attribute rating data (Shurtleff, Jenkins, and Sams, 1988; Tullis, 1985). Also examined in this context are two software metrics: depth-in- inheritance-tree (D IT) and response-for-class (RFC) (Lei, 1991, 1993). These two metrics had been found by Lei to correlate with the ease of maintenance of software. It was conjectured that they might also be useful in the study of mental model methods for software. Finally, student and professional programmers are explicitly compared. There has been much debate on the applicability of software-related data generated from student subjects but little research on the topic. The results indicate that subject performance with the MBC representation was worse than with the CIS representation. Also found was that performance with the HCA representation was not sufficiently better to justify the effort involved in creating the new representation. Student programmers were found in this study to be no worse than professional programmers and thus appear to be acceptable substitutes for professional programmers in a class-based search task. This study's results indicate that student response time to locate a class could be used as the lower boundary for professional programmer class locating time. The student error rates, however, could be used as the upper boundary for professional programmer error rate performance in class locating tasks. A "middle" problem was also found. Classes 1n the middle of a library representation proved to be more difficult to locate as measured by time and error rate. Finally, a higher RFC was found to increase search time for a class when it was in the middle of a library representation. A higher RFC also reduced programmer reusability ratings of a class and the programmer's confidence in the reusability rating. / Ph. D.

While several approaches exist for modeling goals and business processes in organizations, the relationships between these two views are often not well defined. This inhibits the effective reuse of available knowledge in models. This thesis aims to address this issue through the introduction of a Goal-oriented Pattern Family (GoPF) framework that helps constructing business process models from organization goals while expanding these goals, establishing traceability relationships between the goal and process views, and improving reusability. Methods for extracting domain knowledge as patterns, which are composed of goal model building blocks, process model building blocks, and their relationships, and for maintaining the patterns over time are also presented. The GoPF framework provides the infrastructure for defining pattern families, i.e., collections of related patterns for particular domains. The foundation of GoPF is formalized as a profile of the User Requirements Notation, a standard modeling language that supports goals, scenarios, and links between them. A method for the use of GoPF is defined and then illustrated through a case study that targets the improvement of patient safety in healthcare organizations. The framework and the extraction/maintenance methods are also validated against another case study involving aviation security in a regulatory environment. The GoPF framework is expected to have a positive impact on the scientific community through the formalization, evolution, and reuse of patterns in domain-specific business domains. From an industrial viewpoint, this framework will also help intermediary organizations (such as consulting firms) who are required to repeatedly create and document goal and process models for other organizations in their business domain.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / This thesis builds upon work previously done in the development of the Computer Aided Prototyping System (CAPS) and the Prototype System Description Language (PSDL), and presents a conceptual design for the Software Base Management System (SBMS) component of CAPS. The SBMS is the most critical component of CAPS as it will coordinate the retrieval and integration of Ada software modules. A robust SBMS that enables a software system designer to successfully retrieve reusable Ada components will expedite the prototype development process and enhance designer productivity. Implementation of the conceptual design will be the basis for further work in this area. (Ada is a registered trademark of the United States Government, Ada Joint Program Office.) / http://archive.org/details/conceptualdesign00gali / Lieutenant Commander, United States Navy

Actuellement, les fabricants sont soumis à une pression économique importante et à une concurrence internationale accrue due à la globalisation des marchés. Pour réussir, les fabricants doivent être capables de répondre rapidement aux changements de la demande en adaptant leurs systèmes de production. Cette adaptation aux changements peut être réalisée à travers multiples reconfigurations du système de production.Les travaux présentés dans ce mémoire portent sur l'élaboration des méthodes de recherche opérationnelle permettant d'accompagner le décideur lors de la reconfiguration d'une ligne de transfert ou d'assemblage. Ce problème apparaît lorsqu'un nouveau produit doit être fabriqué par une ligne existante ou lorsqu'il y a eu des changements dans les caractéristiques du produit. Par conséquent, il devient nécessaire de modifier la configuration du système de production tout en minimisant les coûts induits. Ces coûts sont évalués différemment pour les systèmes automatisésou manuels. Dans le premier cas, qui correspond au cas des lignes de transfert, pour limiter les investissements, il est souhaitable de réutiliser au maximum les équipements existants à condition que les contraintes techniques et technologiques soient respectées. Dans le cas des lignes manuelles qui sont représentées dans notre étude par les lignes d'assemblage, l'objectif est de minimiser les coûts liés à l'apprentissage des opérateurs causés par la réaffectation de leurs tâches.Les méthodes de résolution exactes basées sur la modélisation mathématique et la programmation linéaire en nombre mixtes ainsi qu'une méthode de type goal programming sont développées dans ce travail pour argumenter la prise de décisions lors de la reconfiguration des lignes de production. Les méthodes proposées ont été testées avec succès sur des échantillons de problèmes proches des cas industriels et ont montré leur efficacité. / Global competition causes fluctuations in product demand and requires more frequent modifications of product characteristics. As a consequence, the production systems have to be frequently adapted to new production requirements.This work develops new combinatorial optimization methods for supporting decision makers at the reconfiguration stage considered for transfer and assembly lines. If new products have to be manufactured at the line or existing products are modified, then the line has to be reconfigured in order to meet new production requirements. In highly automated lines, as the transfer lines, the reconfiguration problem is focused on the readjustment of the equipment. To reduce the investment costs, the decision makers aim to reuse the available equipment as much as possible. The existence of compatibility constraints between new operations to be performed and existing facilities makes the reconfiguration problem hard and combinatorial.In manual assembly lines also studied in this thesis, the reconfiguration problem mostly concerns the reassignment of tasks to workers ant the minimization of the cost of retraining operators.The developed methods are based on the mathematical modelling and mixed integer programming, a goal programming approach is designed as well. These methods were successfully tested on a dataset of problem instances close to real industrial problems. The obtained results show the effectiveness and the efficiency of the solution methods proposed.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-22T17:27:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 nairana.pdf: 3545066 bytes, checksum: 35c600e465d07026126b2457f532b9b9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-02-21 / Language Learning Objects (LLO) have gradually gained more space in the teaching and learning of languages due to their low cost, their ease of adaptation and their reusability. Concerning the inclusion policy of the Ministry of Education, which foresees the inclusion of deaf students in the same learning environment of hearings, it is observed that the Portuguese Language (PL) teacher, in this situation, is faced with the difficulty of having to teach this language as a mother tongue to hearing students and as a foreign language to deaf students. Based on this problem, this study aimed to investigate the use of a LLO for the teaching of PL to deaf and hearing students through the creation of a LLO geared to hearings and its repurposing to deaf students. Furthermore, the study intended to reflect about the reusability and repurposability of LLO to see if, after repurposing, the result is a new LLO or the same LLO adapted. To achieve these objectives, this thesis used two data collections: 1) the application of a questionnaire for deaf high school students of a public school in Pelotas, Southern Brazil, and their PL teacher aiming to get their opinion about which aspects should be taken into account in the adaptation process of the LLO for deaf students; 2) the use of a LLO with five hearing students of the 1st year of high school and the use of a repurposed LLO with four deaf students of the same school year. For the second data collection, the following instruments were used: Camtasia Studio 8, annotated observation, online Google Docs forms and a digital camera. After analyzing the data, it was concluded that the LLO can collaborate with PL teaching in inclusive classrooms as long as adjustments consistent with the linguistic reality of deaf students are made and deaf and hearing students‟ preferences are taken into account in the elaboration of the LLO / Os Objetos de Aprendizagem de Línguas (OAL) têm gradativamente conquistado mais espaço no ensino e aprendizagem de línguas devido ao seu baixo custo, à sua facilidade para adaptação e à sua reusabilidade. Considerando a política de inclusão do Ministério da Educação, a qual prevê a inserção de estudantes surdos no mesmo ambiente de ensino de ouvintes, observa-se que o professor de Língua Portuguesa (LP), nessa situação, se depara com a dificuldade de ter que ensinar essa língua como Língua Materna aos alunos ouvintes e como Língua Estrangeira aos alunos surdos. Partindo desse contexto, o presente trabalho teve por objetivo investigar o uso de um OAL para o ensino de LP a alunos ouvintes e surdos por meio da criação de um OAL voltado aos ouvintes e do seu redirecionamento a alunos surdos. Além disso, pretendeu-se refletir sobre a reusabilidade e redirecionamento de OAL para constatar se, após um redirecionamento, tem-se um mesmo OAL adaptado ou um novo. Para atingir tais objetivos, esta dissertação contou com duas coletas de dados: 1) aplicação de um questionário aos alunos surdos do Ensino Médio de uma escola pública de Pelotas-RS e à sua professora de LP visando a obter sua opinião sobre quais aspectos deveriam ser levados em consideração no processo de adaptação de OAL a alunos surdos; 2) utilização de um OAL com cinco alunas ouvintes do 1° ano do Ensino Médio e de um OAL redirecionado com quatro alunos surdos do mesmo ano escolar. Para a segunda coleta de dados, utilizou-se o aplicativo Camtasia Studio 8, observação anotada, formulários online do Google Docs e filmagem por meio de câmera digital. Após a análise dos dados, concluiu-se que os OAL podem colaborar com o ensino de LP em turmas inclusivas desde que sejam feitas as adaptações condizentes com a realidade linguística dos alunos surdos e que sejam levadas em consideração as preferências dos alunos surdos e ouvintes na elaboração do OAL

One of the difficulties of Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) [1] in reusing pre-existing components is the need to adapt these components to work within the desired target systems [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Third-party or in-house Commercial Off-the-shelf (COTS) components may not always have the required exact functionality demanded by the builders of the target system, so these systems have to be either modified [2, 3, 4, 5, 6] or adapted to provide this required functionality. Modifying these components may not be always practically possible. In this thesis, we propose an infrastructure that supports the active interface adaptation technique [3, 8, 9, 10]. This infrastructure directly addresses the problem of effectively packaging components for third-party use, adaptation, and deployment. Doing so we support both component designers and third party application builders. Further we evaluate our approach using several adaptations over the case studies.

While several approaches exist for modeling goals and business processes in organizations, the relationships between these two views are often not well defined. This inhibits the effective reuse of available knowledge in models. This thesis aims to address this issue through the introduction of a Goal-oriented Pattern Family (GoPF) framework that helps constructing business process models from organization goals while expanding these goals, establishing traceability relationships between the goal and process views, and improving reusability. Methods for extracting domain knowledge as patterns, which are composed of goal model building blocks, process model building blocks, and their relationships, and for maintaining the patterns over time are also presented. The GoPF framework provides the infrastructure for defining pattern families, i.e., collections of related patterns for particular domains. The foundation of GoPF is formalized as a profile of the User Requirements Notation, a standard modeling language that supports goals, scenarios, and links between them. A method for the use of GoPF is defined and then illustrated through a case study that targets the improvement of patient safety in healthcare organizations. The framework and the extraction/maintenance methods are also validated against another case study involving aviation security in a regulatory environment. The GoPF framework is expected to have a positive impact on the scientific community through the formalization, evolution, and reuse of patterns in domain-specific business domains. From an industrial viewpoint, this framework will also help intermediary organizations (such as consulting firms) who are required to repeatedly create and document goal and process models for other organizations in their business domain.

published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy