Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / This thesis presents a Markov model, which, given an indirect fire weapon system's parameters, yields measures of the weapon's effectiveness in providing fire support to a maneuver element. These parameters may be determined for a variety of different scenarios. Any indirect fire weapon system may be a candidate for evaluation. This model may be used in comparing alternative weapon systems for the role of direct support of a Marine Corps infantry battalion. The issue of light gun vs. heavy gun was the impetus for the study. The thesis also provides insight into the tactic of frequently moving an indirect fire weapon to avoid enemy detection, and possible subsequent attack. / http://archive.org/details/markovmodelforme00guzi / Captain, United States Marine Corps

Resilience refers to the capacity to quickly return to normal levels of functioning in the face of adversity. This capacity has previously been linked to social support. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of social networks in the association between resilience and social anxiety in a clinical group with social anxiety disorder (n = 41) and a control group of university students (n = 40). The results showed that controls were significantly more resilient than the clinical group. Controls had significantly larger, more diverse and active social networks than the clinical group. Resilience was negatively associated with social anxiety in both groups. In the clinical group, there was a significant partial mediation effect of resilience on social anxiety through the size of the social network, a x b = –0.33, 95% CI [–0.718, –0.111]. Potential clinical applications of these results were discussed.

Transport infrastructure constitutes one of the key factors to a country’s economic growth. Investment in new transport infrastructure might cause potential environmental impacts, and if a project has several alternative corridors open for suggestion then each alternative corridor will have a different impact on the environment. The European Commission has stated that the natural resources are important to the quality of life. Therefore, the efficient use of resources will be a key towards meeting future climate change and reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This implies that in an evergrowing global society the resource efficiency as well as the choice of transport infrastructure corridor becomes even more important to consider. The aim of this research project was to contribute to early transport infrastructure planning by the development of methods for and implementation of easy understandable geological criteria and models for decision support. Moreover, the intention was to assess how geological information can be developed and extracted from existing spatial data and coupled with other areas of interest, such as ecology and life cycle assessment. It has previously been established that geological information plays an important role in transport infrastructure planning, as the geological characteristics of the proposed area as well as the possibilities of material use influences the project. Therefore, in order to couple geological information for early transport infrastructure planning, four studies (Paper I-IV) were undertaken where methods were developed and tested for the inclusion of geological information. The first study (Paper I) demonstate how optional road corridors could be evaluated using geological information of soil thickness, soil type and rock outcrops, bedrock quality and slope in combination with ecological information. The second study (Paper II) shows how geological information of soil thickness and stratigraphy can be combined with life cycle assessments (LCA) to assess the corresponding greenhouse gas emission and energy use for the proposed road corridors. The difficulty of using expert knowledge for susceptibility assessment of natural hazards, i.e. flooding, landslide and debris flow, for early transport infrastructure planning was presented in the third study (Paper III). In this study the expert knowledge was used in a multi-criteria analysis where the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was chosen as a decision rule. This decision rule was compared to the decision rule weighted linear combination (WLC) using two different schemes of weighting. In all the mentioned studies the importance of soil thickness information was highlighted. Therefore, the fourth and final study (Paper IV) presented a new methodology for modelling the soil thickness in areas where data is sparse. A simplified regolith model (SRM) was developed in order to estimate the regolith thickness, i.e. soil thickness, for previously glaciate terrain with a high frequency of rock outcrops. SRM was based on a digital elevation model (DEM) and an optimized search algorithm. The methods developed in order to couple geological information with other areas of interest is a tentative step towards an earlier geo-environmental planning process. However, the methods need to be tested in other areas with different geological conditions. The combination of geological information in GIS with MCA enabled the integration of knowledge for decision making; it also allowed influencing the importance between various aspects of geological information as well as the importance between geological information and other fields of interest, such as ecology, through the selected weighting schemes. The results showed that synergies exist between ecology and geology, where important geological considerations could also have positive effects on ecological consideration. Soil thickness was very important for GHG emission and energy whereas stratigraphical knowledge had a minor influence. When using expert knowledge the consistency in the expert judgements also needs to be considered. It was shown that experts tended to be inconsistent in their judgements, and that some consistency could be reached if the judgements were aggregated instead of used separately. The results also showed that the developed SRM had relatively accurate results for data sparse areas, and that this model could be used in several projects where the knowledge of soil thickness is important but lacking. It was concluded that geological information should be considered. By using GIS and MCA it is possible to evaluate different aspects of geological information in order to improve decision making. / Environmental assessment of road geology and ecology in a system perspective

Online social support is reported to be used by a number of people to obtain social interaction and exchange communication as a way to buffer stressful situations. Breastfeeding women experience a significant change in their lives and routine which a number of women find it stressful for various reasons. Research shows that breastfeeding women use the Internet to obtain support, however little is known about how breastfeeding women use online social support and their perceptions, concerns and expectations about using it. An interpretive approach using qualitative methods was adopted in this research to obtain and analyse the data acquired through interviews and observations. The framework proposed by the Social Cognitive theory was used to conduct this research and to provide insights into online social support in a breastfeeding peer support context. The results in this research indicate that in spite of face-to-face interventions being favoured, online social support is perceived as a helpful alternative support with the potential to positively influence breastfeeding self-efficacy. A number of similar characteristics of face-to-face support were found to be present in online social support, such as emotional and informational support, empathy and empowerment. Online social support was perceived as offering additional features to traditional support including convenience of use, connection with peers and supporters at any time of the day, and the opportunity to express emotions and issues textually. Certain concerns were also associated to using online social support to support breastfeeding women, which need to be taken into consideration by providers of online social support. These included the need for training volunteers in this type of media, confidentiality and trustworthiness of the information available online and issues related to digital divide. These findings are useful to further the understanding of the implications of online social support in self-efficacy and the associated outcomes. Policy makers, social scientists and breastfeeding support organisations can use the findings in this research to develop future breastfeeding promotion strategies and interventions. Ultimately, breastfeeding women benefit from the findings of this research, through the implementation of online social support interventions addressing the issues raised in this research. These women will consequently have access to more services and applications, as well as engage with volunteers or clinicians trained to fulfil their needs over an alternative channel.

Disputes between patients and providers regarding life-sustaining medical treatment (LSMT) are universal across all U.S. states, yet policies regarding these disputes differ significantly. This dissertation determines that all 50 states have advance directive laws that protect a patient’s right to refuse LSMT even when a healthcare provider objects, yet only some states have policies that protect the patient’s right to choose to continue LSMT when a healthcare provider objects (a dispute known as medical futility). Some states have pro-patient laws that protect the patient’s right to make the final decision, while other states have enacted pro-provider medical futility policies that explicitly grant the provider authority to remove LSMT against the patient’s wishes. Finally, in one state, the law delegates the final decision to a third-party: institutional healthcare ethics committees. This dissertation studies the innovation and adoption of these 17 state medical futility policies, examining the theory that values determine both whether the state adopts a medical futility policy as well as what type of medical futility policy a state will adopt- as the policy actors that represent these values: policy entrepreneurs and interest groups. A comparative case study of successful third-party policy adoption in Texas contrasted against a failed effort in Idaho could not affirm the necessity of policy entrepreneurs for policy adoption but did affirm the necessity of interest group consensus and the role of values. Furthermore, quantitative analysis failed to offer statistically-significant evidence of value indicators, but did suggest that government ideology and political party affiliation may potentially become indicators of the type of medical futility policy that states choose to adopt.

Despite socioeconomic disadvantages, less acculturated Mexican Americans tend to exhibit better mental health than their more acculturated counterparts. However, in the case of older Mexican American adults, research has demonstrated the opposite to be true (Gonzalez, Haan, & Hinton, 2001). A variable of interest potentially responsible for this difference is social support. Thus, the current study proposed to investigate the mediation and moderation effects that social support has on the relationship between acculturation and depression in older Mexican American adults age 60 or older. Data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) was analyzed. Results showed that the mediating effect of contact with one’s children (-.109*) and the moderating effect of total social support and contact with one’s children (-.127*; -.103*) were statistically significant in the relationship between acculturation and depression. Although these effects are small they may still hold important implications for better understanding this population.

This dissertation focuses on the novel learning strategy based on geometric support vector machines to address the difficulties of processing immense data set. Support vector machines find the hyper-plane that maximizes the margin between two classes, and the decision boundary is represented with a few training samples it becomes a favorable choice for incremental learning. The dissertation presents a novel method Geometric Incremental Support Vector Machines (GISVMs) to address both efficiency and accuracy issues in handling massive data sets. In GISVM, skin of convex hulls is defined and an efficient method is designed to find the best skin approximation given available examples. The set of extreme points are found by recursively searching along the direction defined by a pair of known extreme points. By identifying the skin of the convex hulls, the incremental learning will only employ a much smaller number of samples with comparable or even better accuracy. When additional samples are provided, they will be used together with the skin of the convex hull constructed from previous dataset. This results in a small number of instances used in incremental steps of the training process. Based on the experimental results with synthetic data sets, public benchmark data sets from UCI and endoscopy videos, it is evident that the GISVM achieved satisfactory classifiers that closely model the underlying data distribution. GISVM improves the performance in sensitivity in the incremental steps, significantly reduced the demand for memory space, and demonstrates the ability of recovery from temporary performance degradation.

In the study of team-based organizations most of the research has focus on the internal make-up and structure of teams. Recently there has been more interest in the effects that environment has on teams. With this new focus Support Systems in organizations have become an area of interest. Examining the perceptions of workers with respect to support systems of organizations could give insight into performance. This study specifically examines the interaction between a team's shared perception of the support in their environment and the level of support in their environment. The interaction between the two does seem to have a strong relationship with perceived performance. How do the two concepts interact, and what does this mean for organizational designers? Both questions are discussed.

This study investigates the perceptions surrounding the role Virginia elementary school principals play in supporting the induction of new teachers. Attention is given to the type of the principal’s support, the frequency of support, and the perceived importance assigned that support. Because the Virginia Department of Education has encouraged the use of one of three specific models of induction (the ETS Pathwise model, Fairfax Virginia’s Great Beginnings model, or the New Teacher Center “Santa Cruz” model) or a locally, research-based model, additional attention is placed on the impact training and experience in one of these models has and the degree to which varying levels of that training influences those perceptions. In this non-experimental, comparative study, a census of new teachers and principals throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia was conducted, using an adaptation of an instrument developed by Gurule-Gonzales (1995). Follow-up telephone interviews were conducted to confirm findings from the survey. Results indicate there are statistically significant differences in some principal and new teacher perceptions of the Virginia elementary principals’ role in supporting programs of induction. These are found more often in the perceptions regarding frequency than regarding importance. Statistically significant differences were found among principals’ perceptions of certain categories of support when considering the amount of training and the type of induction program utilized. While statistically significant differences in teachers’ perceptions could not be determined because of the small n, there appear to be practical differences based upon the type of induction program and the amount of new teacher program training. There are a number of implications resulting from this study. New teachers need to be integrated into the life of the school, and programs of induction should be certain to include the careful pairing of mentors with new teachers. Frequent observation and feedback by the principal are necessary to support new teachers. Principals must maintain a frequent presence throughout the work with the new teachers and must be more transparent regarding support efforts. The type of program and the amount of training provided principals and new teachers alike are also critical aspects of induction.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / This thesis explores the Bahrain Defense Force (BDF) needs for a decision support system in the area of analyzing, establishing and maintaining the organizational structures of BDF units. It also identifies the BDF measures that must be taken to qualify a certain unit structure. Subsequently, the thesis designs and develops a specific DSS prototype that can aid BDF decision makers and planners perspectives in this area. Creating this prototype has involved three different layers to be investigated: the data, the models and the user interfaces. The data layer consists of a Microsoft Access database application that houses BDF Units, Manpower, Vehicles, Weapons, Salaries, and Jobs information. The model layer consists of two Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that contain Infantry Battalion and enhanced Armor Battalion HR optimization models. The UI layer consists of user controls, input/output forms, queries, reports, and visualization aids (i.e. charts and pivot tables). These interfaces were developed using MS Access capabilities. Consequently, the BDF-DSS is an integration of database and optimization technology using widely available desktop tools. The general benefits of this DSS are reduced costs for data gathering, computation, and data presentation, and added value resulting from investigating more alternatives, doing more sophisticated analyses of alternatives, using better methods of comparing alternatives, and making quicker and better decisions. / Bahrain Defense Force author. / Major, Bahrain Defense Force