Recent advances in graphics processing units (GPUs) have resulted in massively parallel hardware that is easily programmable and widely available in commodity desktop computer systems. GPUs typically use single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) pipelines to achieve high performance with minimal overhead for control hardware. Scalar threads running the same computing kernel are grouped together into SIMD batches, sometimes referred to as warps. While SIMD is ideally suited for simple programs, recent GPUs include control flow instructions in the GPU instruction set architecture and programs using these instructions may experience reduced performance due to the way branch execution is supported by hardware. One solution is to add a stack to allow different SIMD processing elements to execute distinct program paths after a branch instruction. The occurrence of diverging branch outcomes for different processing elements significantly degrades performance using this approach. In this thesis, we propose dynamic warp formation and scheduling, a mechanism for more efficient SIMD branch execution on GPUs. It dynamically regroups threads into new warps on the fly following the occurrence of diverging branch outcomes. We show that a realistic hardware implementation of this mechanism improves performance by an average of 47% for an estimated area increase of 8%.

Fouling, a problem since the first heat exchanger was created, has been the focus of various studies since the 1970s. In particular, crude oil fouling is a costly and problematic type of heat exchanger fouling that occurs in the preheat train to the atmospheric distillation column in petroleum refineries. Previous experiments have been designed to determine the causes of fouling using less than one gallon of crude oil and accumulating test results within a day. These experiments will be the basis of the Rotating Fouling Unit (RFU) at Heat Transfer Research Inc. (HTRI). The RFU focuses on better controlling the shear stress and heat transfer distribution along the surface of the heated test section by analyzing Taylor-Couette flow experiments and using them as a basis to better predict the flow across the heated surface of the test section in the RFU. Additionally, the equations for Taylor-Couette flow are used to verify the 2D flow simulations of the RFU to ensure the accuracy of the results. The design of the RFU incorporates data acquisition with a variety of measurements that will facilitate automatic and accurate data collection, so the results can be easily compared to previous fouling experiments. The RFU will act as a supplement to the High Temperature Fouling Unit (HTFU) at HTRI, and provide data comparable to that of the HTFU in order to better understand crude oil fouling. Computer simulations can accurately predict the shear stress and heat transfer coefficient along the surface of the test probe and help verify the improvements made to the original batch stirred cell designs.

The technological complexity of the ICU is often focused on saving lives however, it is frequently a place to support the dying. Because of the serious nature of critical illness, patients are unable to communicate their wishes, values and views. Family members are often called upon to communicate the critically ill patients’ wishes and many report feeling burdened with the task. The distress described may lead to difficulty mobilizing coping mechanisms and may affect their ability to make appropriate decisions for their family member’s care. Hence, an in depth understanding of the surrogate’s experience is critical to plan effective interventions and provide anticipatory guidance to support the process of making decisions around end of life care. Objective The purpose of the study is to describe the surrogate decision makers’ appraisals of the demands of decision making for a critically ill adult intensive care unit patient and the coping strategies employed by them during this experience. Method A descriptive study design using a qualitative interviewing approach extracted perceived stressors and coping strategies using systematic, focused thematic analysis guided by Folkman and Lazarus’ Stress and Coping Paradigm. Findings Respondents appraisals identified the following perceived stressors: doubt of self efficacy, unknowns, impingement of real life, and problematic relay of information. The surrogates’ perception of their ability to manage the decision making process required their awareness of the decision making role and magnitude of illness, their need to form partnerships, time to reflect on prior discussions and experience, and their appraisal of the patients’ suffering. Participants described emotion and problem based coping strategies they employed during the task. To emotionally justify their decisions, surrogates’ referred to their understanding of patient wishes and sought solace and comfort from the health care staff. In addition, surrogates used strategies to solve problems encountered including dealing with others, employing strategies to decrease their uncertainty and mobilizing time to process the events unfolding. Conclusions End of life decisions in the intensive care are complex and demanding. A better understanding of the process may guide health care professionals in developing focused interventions to assist surrogates through a painful process. / Thesis (Master, Nursing) -- Queen's University, 2008-04-25 09:29:27.1

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Conventional synthetic voices can synthesise neutral read aloud speech well. But, to make synthetic speech more suitable for a wider range of applications, the voices need to express more than just the word identity. We need to develop voices that can partake in a conversation and express, e.g. agreement, disagreement, hesitation, in a natural and believable manner. In speech synthesis there are currently two dominating frameworks: unit selection and HMM-based speech synthesis. Both frameworks utilise recordings of human speech to build synthetic voices. Despite the fact that the content of the recordings determines the segmental and prosodic phenomena that can be synthesised, surprisingly little research has been made on utilising the corpus to extend the limited behaviour of conventional synthetic voices. In this thesis we will show how natural sounding conversational characteristics can be added to both unit selection and HMM-based synthetic voices, by adding speech from a spontaneous conversation to the voices. We recorded a spontaneous conversation, and by manually transcribing and selecting utterances we obtained approximately two thousand utterances from it. These conversational utterances were rich in conversational speech phenomena, but they lacked the general coverage that allows unit selection and HMM-based synthesis techniques to synthesise high quality speech. Therefore we investigated a number of blending approaches in the synthetic voices, where the conversational utterances were augmented with conventional read aloud speech. The synthetic voices that contained conversational speech were contrasted with conventional voices without conversational speech. The perceptual evaluations showed that the conversational voices were generally perceived by listeners as having a more conversational style than the conventional voices. This conversational style was largely due to the conversational voices’ ability to synthesise utterances that contained conversational speech phenomena in a more natural manner than the conventional voices. Additionally, we conducted an experiment that showed that natural sounding conversational characteristics in synthetic speech can convey pragmatic information, in our case an impression of certainty or uncertainty, about a topic to a listener. The conclusion drawn is that the limited behaviour of conventional synthetic voices can be enriched by utilising conversational speech in both unit selection and HMM-based speech synthesis.

The psychometric properties of this Parental Stressor Scale: Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (PSS:NICU) were assessed, before using the scale to describe stress experienced by parents in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). The extent to which parental stress from the parent-infant relationship in the unit was linked to parenting they received as a child, and adjustment to their couple relationship, was also examined. The sample consisted of 182 mothers and 183 fathers, who were in a cohabitating relationship, of infants from the NICU at Christchurch Women's Hospital. The self-report questionnaires included the PSS:NICU, Parental Bonding Instrument, and the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, and were administered to parents within 2-3 weeks of their infant's birth. This study extends the finding of satisfactory psychometric properties of the PSS:NICU (Franck, Cox, Allen & Winter, 2005; Miles, Funk & Carlson, 1993; Reid & Bramwell, 2003) to this New Zealand sample. Mothers experienced significantly higher stress from the unit compared to fathers (p < .01). A previous finding, for mothers, of the parent-infant relationship being the most stressful aspect of the unit (Franck et al., 2005; Reid & Bramwell, 2003; Shields-Poe & Pinelli, 1997) extends to the New Zealand sample. The most stressful aspect of the unit for fathers was sights and sounds. Lack of evidence was found for associations between parental stress from the parent-infant relationship in the unit and parenting received as a child, or adjustment to their couple relationship. A weak but significant negative correlation was, however, found between stress from the mother-infant relationship and maternal care received in childhood. It is unnecessary to provide all parents with intervention further to what is already being practiced in the unit, as overall low levels of stress were reported. Some parents, however, did find the unit more stressful, and they may benefit from increased intervention.

Characteristics of consumers who used unit pricing were compared to consumers who did not use unit pricing. A numerical rating was developed to aid the researcher in classifying consumers into to extreme groups, "usually" and "seldom". The sample consisted of 50 shoppers who usually and 50 shoppers who seldom used unit pricing. Data was collected at a local supermarket where unit pricing is provided. Of the variables tested, annual family income was not significant (.861); number of individuals shopped for was relatively significant (.283); and age of consumer (.028), occupation of consumer (.067), employment pattern of consumer (.031), education of consumer (.00014), occupation of spouse (.00001), and shopping frequency (.026) were significant.

The views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government. / Determining the best base stationing for military units can be modeled as a capacitated facility location problem with sole sourcing and multiple resource categories. Computational experience suggests that cross decomposition, a unification of Benders Decomposition and Lagrangean relaxation, is superior to other contemporary methods for solving capacitated facility location problems. Recent research extends cross decomposition to pure integer prograrnming problems with explicit application to capacitated facility location problems with sole sourcing; however, this research offers no computational experience. This thesis implements two cross decomposition algorithms for the capacitated facility location problem with sole sourcing and compares these decomposition algorithms with branch and bound methods. For some problems tested, cross decomposition obtains better solutions in less time; however, cross decomposition does not always perform better man branch and bound due to the time required to obtain the cross decomposition bound that is theoretically superior to other decomposition bounds.

Recent advances in graphics processing units (GPUs) have resulted in massively parallel hardware that is easily programmable and widely available in commodity desktop computer systems. GPUs typically use single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) pipelines to achieve high performance with minimal overhead for control hardware. Scalar threads running the same computing kernel are grouped together into SIMD batches, sometimes referred to as warps. While SIMD is ideally suited for simple programs, recent GPUs include control flow instructions in the GPU instruction set architecture and programs using these instructions may experience reduced performance due to the way branch execution is supported by hardware. One solution is to add a stack to allow different SIMD processing elements to execute distinct program paths after a branch instruction. The occurrence of diverging branch outcomes for different processing elements significantly degrades performance using this approach. In this thesis, we propose dynamic warp formation and scheduling, a mechanism for more efficient SIMD branch execution on GPUs. It dynamically regroups threads into new warps on the fly following the occurrence of diverging branch outcomes. We show that a realistic hardware implementation of this mechanism improves performance by an average of 47% for an estimated area increase of 8%.

The psychometric properties of this Parental Stressor Scale: Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (PSS:NICU) were assessed, before using the scale to describe stress experienced by parents in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). The extent to which parental stress from the parent-infant relationship in the unit was linked to parenting they received as a child, and adjustment to their couple relationship, was also examined. The sample consisted of 182 mothers and 183 fathers, who were in a cohabitating relationship, of infants from the NICU at Christchurch Women's Hospital. The self-report questionnaires included the PSS:NICU, Parental Bonding Instrument, and the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, and were administered to parents within 2-3 weeks of their infant's birth. This study extends the finding of satisfactory psychometric properties of the PSS:NICU (Franck, Cox, Allen & Winter, 2005; Miles, Funk & Carlson, 1993; Reid & Bramwell, 2003) to this New Zealand sample. Mothers experienced significantly higher stress from the unit compared to fathers (p < .01). A previous finding, for mothers, of the parent-infant relationship being the most stressful aspect of the unit (Franck et al., 2005; Reid & Bramwell, 2003; Shields-Poe & Pinelli, 1997) extends to the New Zealand sample. The most stressful aspect of the unit for fathers was sights and sounds. Lack of evidence was found for associations between parental stress from the parent-infant relationship in the unit and parenting received as a child, or adjustment to their couple relationship. A weak but significant negative correlation was, however, found between stress from the mother-infant relationship and maternal care received in childhood. It is unnecessary to provide all parents with intervention further to what is already being practiced in the unit, as overall low levels of stress were reported. Some parents, however, did find the unit more stressful, and they may benefit from increased intervention.