This study aims to investigate the important indicators that contribute to happiness among Beijing residence. The residents of Beijing were taken as the target population for the survey. A questionnaire was used as the main statistical instrument to collect the data from the residents in Beijing. In so doing the investigation employs Factor analyses and chi-square analyses as the main statistical tools used for the analyses in this research. The study found that Beijing residents gained greater happiness in the family, interpersonal relationships, and health status. The analysis also shows that generally, the residence of Beijing feels happier and also in terms of gender basis, females in Beijing feel happier as compare to their male counterpart. It will find that gender, age and education are statistically significant when dealing with happiness.

The criteria used to grade college essays have been the subject of research for over three decades. Using quantatative data, this study investigated the differences in essay-grading criteria and essay-grading policy among full-time faculty members who teach English composition in Tennessee's community colleges. This study revealed beliefs about the importance of essay-grading criteria and beliefs about written and unwritten essay-grading policies among those who teach developmental English, college-level English, and those who teach both levels of English. This study hypothesized that there were no differences among the English composition teacher's beliefs about the importance of the twenty essay-grading criteria nor in their beliefs regarding written and unwritten grading policies. Chi-square analysis of the non-parametric data collected during this study indicated statistically significant differences among the English teachers regarding only one of the essay-grading criteria and no statistically significant differences regarding the essay-grading policies.

ABSTRACT The purpose of this research study is to determine if the rate of unintentional injury death in selected medical districts differs significantly among citizen and non-citizen males ages 20-65 living in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A profile of unintentional injury deaths was generated by specific cause for the six medical districts of Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ra’s al-Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm al-Qaiwain managed for the UAE Ministry of Health for the years 2006-2008. During this time period the six medical districts reported a total of 14,101 deaths. Males were found to represent 73.9 per cent of the deaths reported by the six medical districts managed by the UAE Ministry of health for the years 2006-2008. Non –citizen males represented 74.8 per cent of the male fatalities reported by the six medical districts managed by the UAE Ministry of health for the years 2006-2008. Fatality rates for males ages 20-65 were generated and analyzed by citizen status and season of the year. This age group represented 6,141 deaths. In the two medical districts with the highest population (Dubai & Sharjah) unintentional injury deaths represented 77.1% of the total unintentional deaths reported by all the six medical districts managed by the UAE Ministry of Health for the years 2006-2008. A Chi-Square found the rate of fatalities among 20-65 years old male citizens and non-citizens in the six medical districts managed by the UAE Ministry of Health for the years 2006-2008 differed significantly by cause of unintentional injury death. The observed rate of death from accidental falls for non-citizen 20-65 males was found to be higher than expected for male citizens in the same age group. The observed unintentional injury death rate for males ages 20-65 caused by motor vehicle & traffic accidents and for accidental poisoning found the death rate for UAE citizens to be higher than the rate for non-citizens living in the UAE. The results of this study demonstrate the need for the reporting and analysis of unintentional deaths at the medical district level in the UAE by subgroups such as citizen status and age group.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This work presents the development and application of modern data acquisition and analysis techniques for the investigations of equilibrium and kinetic reactions. The analytical technique is known as second order global analysis and a background of this relatively novel approach has been given. The theory behind and characteristics of the computer programs developed analysis as part of this research are described in Chapter Two along with descriptions of the instrumentation and programs developed for the acquisition of both potentiometric and spectrophotometric data. Applications of the developed programs include a potentiometric and spectrophotometric study of the protonation and stability equilibria of a series of polydentate N-donor ligands, as detailed in Chapter Three. The combination of potentiometric and spectrophotometric analysis has been shown to be a powerful analytical tool. Spectrophotometric titrations were also combined with fast stop-flow experiments in order to elucidate the complex reaction mechanisms associated with helicating ligands. The helication of the ligand ‘PepdaH₂’ with copper(II) and nickel(II) is examined in Chapter Four, along with discussions concerning the ability to induce chirality in the helicates from the addition of a chiral counter ion. Investigations into chirality were further continued in Chapter Five where the stereoselectivity of a benzimidazole-based ligand was investigated with circular dichroism titrations. The synthesis and characterisation of the benzimidazole-based ligands are provided, including a study of the ability of the ligands to form higher order complexes as investigated using electrospray mass spectroscopy. Chapter Six provides an in-depth discussion concerning the use of combined glass hydrogen selective electrodes for the determination of equilibrium constants, as this was a major focus of this research. Different calibration techniques are discussed and a description of the internal calibration technique developed is provided along with examples of the advantages of performing internal calibration of the electrode.

The low complexity of IIR adaptive filters (AFs) is specially appealing to realtime applications but some drawbacks have been preventing their widespread use so far. For gradient based IIR AFs, adverse operational conditions cause convergence problems in system identification scenarios: underdamped and clustered poles, undermodelling or non-white input signals lead to error surfaces where the adaptation nearly stops on large plateaus or get stuck at sub-optimal local minima that can not be identified as such a priori. Furthermore, the non-stationarity in the input regressor brought by the filter recursivity and the approximations made by the update rules of the stochastic gradient algorithms constrain the learning step size to small values, causing slow convergence. In this work, we propose IIR performance enhancement strategies based on hybrid combinations of AFs that achieve higher convergence rates than ordinary IIR AFs while keeping the stability. / A baixa complexidade dos filtros adaptativos (FAs) IIR é atrativa para aplicações em tempo real, mas certos inconvenientes têm impedido sua ampla utilização até agora. Para os FAs baseados no gradiente descendente, condições operacionais adversas suscitam problemas de convergência em cenários de identificação de sistemas: pólos subamortecidos ou agrupados, submodelagem ou sinais correlacionados originam superfícies de erro onde a adaptação desacelera em grandes planícies ou para em mínimos locais sub-ótimos que não podem ser identificados como tais a priori. Além disso, a não-estacionaridade do regressor de entrada causada pela recursividade do filtro e as aproximações feitas pelas regras de atualização dos algoritmos de gradiente estocástico restringem o passo de aprendizado a valores pequenos, retardando a convergência. Neste trabalho, propomos estratégias de aprimoramento de desempenho baseadas em combinações híbridas e estáveis de FAs que alcançam taxas de convergências mais altas do que FAs IIR comuns.

The low complexity of IIR adaptive filters (AFs) is specially appealing to realtime applications but some drawbacks have been preventing their widespread use so far. For gradient based IIR AFs, adverse operational conditions cause convergence problems in system identification scenarios: underdamped and clustered poles, undermodelling or non-white input signals lead to error surfaces where the adaptation nearly stops on large plateaus or get stuck at sub-optimal local minima that can not be identified as such a priori. Furthermore, the non-stationarity in the input regressor brought by the filter recursivity and the approximations made by the update rules of the stochastic gradient algorithms constrain the learning step size to small values, causing slow convergence. In this work, we propose IIR performance enhancement strategies based on hybrid combinations of AFs that achieve higher convergence rates than ordinary IIR AFs while keeping the stability. / A baixa complexidade dos filtros adaptativos (FAs) IIR é atrativa para aplicações em tempo real, mas certos inconvenientes têm impedido sua ampla utilização até agora. Para os FAs baseados no gradiente descendente, condições operacionais adversas suscitam problemas de convergência em cenários de identificação de sistemas: pólos subamortecidos ou agrupados, submodelagem ou sinais correlacionados originam superfícies de erro onde a adaptação desacelera em grandes planícies ou para em mínimos locais sub-ótimos que não podem ser identificados como tais a priori. Além disso, a não-estacionaridade do regressor de entrada causada pela recursividade do filtro e as aproximações feitas pelas regras de atualização dos algoritmos de gradiente estocástico restringem o passo de aprendizado a valores pequenos, retardando a convergência. Neste trabalho, propomos estratégias de aprimoramento de desempenho baseadas em combinações híbridas e estáveis de FAs que alcançam taxas de convergências mais altas do que FAs IIR comuns.

AbstractIn the field of Biomedical Optics measurement of tissue optical properties, like absorption, scattering, and reduced scattering coefficient, has gained importance for therapeutic and diagnostic applications. Accuracy in determining the optical properties is of vital importance to quantitatively determine chromophores in tissue.There are different techniques used to quantify tissue chromophores. Reflectance spectroscopy is one of the most common methods to rapidly and accurately characterize the blood amount and oxygen saturation in the microcirculation. With a hyper spectral imaging (HSI) device it is possible to capture images with spectral information that depends both on tissue absorption and scattering. To analyze this data software that accounts for both absorption and scattering event needs to be developed.In this thesis work an HSI algorithm, capable of assessing tissue oxygenation while accounting for both tissue absorption and scattering, is developed. The complete imaging system comprises: a light source, a liquid crystal tunable filter (LCTF), a camera lens, a CCD camera, control units and power supply for light source and filter, and a computer.This work also presents a Graphic processing Unit (GPU) implementation of the developed HSI algorithm, which is found computationally demanding. It is found that the GPU implementation outperforms the Matlab “lsqnonneg” function by the order of 5-7X.At the end, the HSI system and the developed algorithm is evaluated in two experiments. In the first experiment the concentration of chromophores is assessed while occluding the finger tip. In the second experiment the skin is provoked by UV light while checking for Erythema development by analyzing the oxyhemoglobin image at different point of time. In this experiment the melanin concentration change is also checked at different point of time from exposure.It is found that the result matches the theory in the time dependent change of oxyhemoglobin and deoxyhemoglobin. However, the result of melanin does not correspond to the theoretically expected result.