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Time perception is a fundamental aspect of consciousness related to mental health. One cognitive state related to time perception is mind wandering (MW), defined as having thoughts unrelated to the current task. Little research has directly assessed the relationship between these two constructs, despite the overlap in clinical significance and the shared importance of attention for healthy functioning. In the present study, I addressed this by having a sample of 40 adults in the United States complete an online sustained attention to response task remotely while answering thought probes related to thought type and time perception. Multilevel modeling results indicated that cognitive factors were related to the judgements of passage of time (JOPOTs; the feeling that time is passing quickly or slowly) while they had little relation to the estimated duration or the accuracy of those estimations. Specifically, JOPOTs were related to attention to task and emotional valence, and the addition of MW, intentionality, and fixed/dynamic thoughts to the models explained additional variance. Duration estimations and JOPOTs were unrelated to each other, suggesting JOPOTs and duration estimations have different relationships to cognitive factors and should be studied as separate constructs. Additionally, results suggested that the heavy use of dichotomization in the MW literature should be shifted in favor of conceptualizing attention to task as a continuous variable. The difference in effects of MW on estimation durations and JOPOTs specifically is novel finding. This is the first study to evaluate the relationship between MW and both duration estimations and JOPOTs, thus it may advance mechanistic and phenomenological understanding of MW which could in turn inform clinical theories of time perception in disorders including ADHD and depression.

The aim of this research is to re-consider the discipline of landscape architecture that I practice and know. To consider an aspect of design method or process that is new to my way of working. THrough the critical reflection of past projects, the notion of time, emergence, and the non-instant landscape, has become the focus of this research. How to design for something that can't appear instant or complete at its inception. What approach is taken to respond to the potential changes of the landscape over time? What strategies can be developed to design on very large sites within limited budgets? The Canberra Arboretum project has become the virtualtesting ground for this design research. Exploring ways to design and develop forests the 205-hectare site that anticipate and respond to the emergent effects of time.

Thesis ()--University of Delaware, 2007. / Principal faculty advisor: Robert G. Hunsperger, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Includes bibliographical references.

First, we study hard real-time scheduling problems where each task is defined by a four tuple (r, c, p, d): r being its release time, c computation time, p period, and d deadline. The question is whether all tasks can meet their deadlines on one processor. If not, how many processors are needed? For the one-processor problem, we prove two sufficient conditions for a (restricted) periodic task set to meet deadlines. The two conditions can be applied to both preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling, in sharp contrast to earlier results. If a periodic task set can meet deadlines under any algorithm which does not idle the processor as long as there are tasks ready to execute, it must satisfy our second condition. We also prove a necessary condition for a periodic task set to meet deadlines under any scheduling algorithm. We present a method for transforming a sporadic task to an equivalent periodic task. The transformation method is optimal with respect to non-preemptive scheduling. With this method, all results on scheduling periodic task sets can be applied to sets of both periodic and sporadic tasks. For the scheduling problem in distributed memory systems, we propose various heuristic algorithms which try to use as few processors as possible to meet deadlines. Although our algorithms are non-preemptive, our simulation results show that they can outperform the heuristic algorithms based on the famous preemptive rate monotonic algorithm in terms of the number of used processors and processor utilization rate. Second, we describe a hard real-time software development environment, called HaRTS, which consists of a design tool and a scheduling tool. The design tool supports a hierarchical design diagram which combines the control and data flow of a hard real-time application. The design diagram is quite intuitive, and yet it can be automatically translated into Ada��� code and analyzed for scheduleability. The scheduling tool schedules precedence-constrained periodic task sets and simulates the task execution with highly animated user interfaces, which goes beyond the traditional way of examining a schedule as a static Gantt chart. / Graduation date: 1994

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed December 4, 2006). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 251-260).

Time of concentration parameter is defined very loosely in literature and it is calculated rather subjectively in practice (Akan 1986). The situation becomes adverse as the terrain slope approaches zero; because the slope generally appears in the denominator of any formula for time of concentration, this time goes to infinity as the slope goes to zero. The variables affecting this time parameter on flat terrains have been studied through plot scale field experiments. It has been found that the antecedent moisture and rainfall rate control this parameter. Some of the existing time of concentration methods have been compared, and it is found that all the empirical models compared under predict this time parameter. This under prediction can be attributed first to the differing concepts of time of concentration previous researchers have modeled, secondly to the absence of any accounting for the initial moisture content in their respective equations and thirdly to the watersheds where these models have been calibrated. At lower time of concentrations, Izzard-based model predictions show some results close to the observed values. A methodology to determine the plot scale surface undulations has been developed to estimate the depression storage. Regression equations have been derived based upon the experiments to determine the overland flow times on a flat plot of 30 feet length with uniform rainfall intensity. The application of these equations on other lengths cannot be ascertained. Equations for the hydrograph slope on flat terrains have been determined for bare clay and grass plots.

The exponential model of Bloomfield (1973) is becoming increasingly important due to its recent applications to long memory time series. However, this model has received little consideration in the context of short memory time series. Furthermore, there has been very little attempt at using the EXP model as a model to analyze observed time series data. This dissertation research is largely focused on developing new methods to improve the utility and robustness of the EXP model. Specifically, a new nonparametric method of parameter estimation is developed using wavelets. The advantage of this method is that, for many spectra, the resulting parameter estimates are less susceptible to biases associated with methods of parameter estimation based directly on the raw periodogram. Additionally, several methods are developed for the validation of spectral models. These methods test the hypothesis that the estimated model provides a whitening transformation of the spectrum; this is equivalent to the time domain notion of producing a model whose residuals behave like the residuals of white noise. The results of simulation and real data analysis are presented to illustrate these methods.

In these studies we evaluated specific environmental stimuli relevant to Salmonella virulence and physiology in the gastrointestinal tract of chickens. Results from Salmonella growth in steady state, glucose-limiting continuous culture (CC) indicated that the optimal growth condition was observed between 0.05 h-1 and 0.27 h-1 dilution rates (D). Cell protein concentrations increased proportionally with an increase in D at each steady state, but after D 0.27 h-1 there was a reduction in the cell protein concentrations as the D increased. Genetic responses generally indicated that the lowest D exhibited highest hilA relative expression. Relatively higher expression of hilA was largely observed at low D (low glucose) (0.0125 h-1, 0.025 h-1, 0.05 h-1). Salmonella incubated in CC at different pH shifts demonstrated that cell protein concentration, glucose utilization, Yield ATP and Acetate:Propionate ratios were influenced by an increase in pH (6.14 to 7.41). These parameters increased and decreased consistently with a corresponding increase and decrease in pH. Polymerase chain reaction-based denaturant gradient gel electrophoresis showed that the overall amplicon band patterns of microbial similarity have demonstrated that hens molted with Alfalfa (ALC+) diet were similar to the Full-Fed (FF+) treatment group. Additional, FF+ and ALC+ treatment groups exhibited a higher percentage similarity coefficient (>90%) than the feed deprived treatment group. Fermentation response from cecal inocula on feed substrates revealed that alfalfa based samples yielded consistently higher short chain fatty acid levels when compared to other feed substrates. Salmonella Enteritidis (SE) colonization in liver, spleen and ovaries was significantly (P < 0.05) higher in FW+ hens compared to ALC+ and FF+ treatments groups. A 4-fold (log10 1.29) reduction in SE colonization for ALC+ hens compared to feed withdrawal hens (FW+) (log10 5.12) SE colonization was observed. Relative expression of hilA in all treatment groups was significantly (P < 0.05) higher in FW+ compared to FF+ and ALC+ groups. hilA expression in FW+ hens was 3.2-, 4.2-, and 1.9-fold higher for Days 6, 11 and 12 respectively, when compared with to ALC+ hens. These results suggest that Salmonella virulence in the gastrointestinal ecology of chickens could be impacted by a combination of low nutrients availability and pH shifts.