Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York Medical College, 1996. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-73).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1967. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Anim.Sc) - University of Queensland, 2005. / Includes bibliography.

OBJECTIVES: (1) to investigate trends in non-traumatic dental visits (NTDV) to hospital-based emergency departments (ED) in Rhode Island (RI) and to compare them with those for other ambulatory sensitive care conditions (ACSC); (2) to examine the effect of expansion of Medicaid coverage on the rate NTDV to ED; (3) and to examine community-level factors associated with NTDVs. METHODS: Data for ED visits in 2005–2014 were obtained from RI hospital discharge data and annual population estimates from the U.S.Census Bureau, and were used to calculate annual visit rates. Medicaid enrollment report for the calendar years 2013 and 2014 were used to calculate monthly enrollment and an interrupted time series analysis was used to examine the effect of expansion of Medicaid coverage on visit rates. Zip code was used as a unit of analysis for community-level factor analysis, 2010 data. A negative binomial regression model with log link was performed. RESULTS: From January 2005 to December 2014, the annual average number of ED NTDV was 7440, accounting for 1.4–2.1% of all ED visits each year, there was a slight but not statistically significant decrease in the NTDV rate between 2005 and 2014. Visits for asthma also declined slightly, but the decrease was statistically significant. There were statistically significant increases in ED visit rates for diabetes and back pain. The NTDV rate increased by 34.8/100,000 enrollees per month immediately and significantly after expansion, amounting to more than 1000 additional ED visits. ED visits for asthma and back pain declined immediately after the expansion of coverage, but not significantly so. Community-level factors associated with NTDVs were higher level of poverty and communities with younger population (more individuals aged 20–34 years) which had significantly higher ED NTDV rates. CONCLUSION: RI NTDVs slightly declined, but still accounts for around 1.6% of ED visits. Medicaid expansion under the ACA, caused an immediate increase in NTDVs to ED, that might be attributed to the increased number of Medicaid enrollees, with no change in the workforce. Among community-level factors, high poverty level and high percent of young population had the highest impact on visit rates. / 2019-09-26T00:00:00Z

Orientador: Carlos de Oliveira Paiva Santos / Coorientador: Humberto Gomes Ferraz / Banca: Gabriel Lima Barros Araujo / Banca: João Cardoso de Lima / Banca: Ariel Gomez Gonzalez / Banca: Anderson Andre Felix / Resumo: Medicamentos de liberação controlada (MLC) vêm ganhando destaque no mercado farmacêutico nacional e internacional pelos seus mais diversos benefícios, principalmente por manter a atividade do princípio ativo (PA) no organismo em uma faixa constante de eficiência. Dentre os sistemas MLC estão as dispersões sólidas amorfas (DSA), que possuem como componentes o fármaco e a matriz polimérica. Devido à complexidade da estrutura de liberação destas dispersões, são necessárias técnicas e metodologias analíticas mais sofisticadas para o controle e qualidade da formulação final. A técnica de espalhamento total de raios X (ETRX) e o método Pair Distribution Function (PDF) vêm sendo utilizados no estudo de materiais com estrutura com ordem de curto e intermediário alcance, incluindo fármacos amorfos e nanocristalinos, além de dispersões sólidas fármaco/polímero, sendo possível fazer a distinção entre as fases a nível intra e intermoleculares, o que representa as potencialidades do ETRX e o PDF para a caracterização estrutural de materiais. Nesse contexto, desenvolveu-se a análise estrutural das DSA's do cloridrato de Verapamil e resina poliuretânica derivada do óleo de mamona por meio das técnicas RMN, FTIR e difração de raios X convencional. Por meio dessas análises criou-se o embasamento necessário para aplicar o ETRX e método PDF e avaliar as potencialidades no estudo de sistemas complexos, como os que foram objetos de análise neste trabalho. Os resultados mostraram que fármaco e res... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Controlled-Release Drugs (CRD) have increasingly been chased by the national and international pharmaceutical market because their different benefits, mostly by it can keep the activity of the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) in the body in a continuous range of efficiency. Among others, CRD systems are the amorphous solid state dispersions, which have API and polymer matrix as components of the systems. Due to complexity of the release structure of these dispersions, sophisticated analytical techniques and methodologies are required for the control and quality of the final formulation. The X-ray total scattering technique (XRTS) and the Pair Distribution Function (PDF) method have been used to study materials with short- and intermediaterange order structure, including amorphous and nanocrystalline drugs, as well as drug/polymer solid dispersions, making it possible to discriminate between phases at intra and intermolecular levels, which represents the potentialities of the XRTS and the PDF for the structural characterization of materials. In this context, the present work has developed the structural analysis of the amorphous solid dispersions of Verapamil Hydrochloride and polyurethane resin derived from castor oil using NMR, infrared spectroscopy and conventional X-ray diffraction techniques. Through this initial analysis, it was possible to create the necessary basis for the application of XRTS and PDF method and evaluate its potential to study complex systems, suc... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Doutor

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF Abdulaziz M. AlNowiser, for the Master of Science degree in Computer Science, presented on November 1, 2013, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: TOWARD ENERGY-EFFICIENT SCHEDULING USING WEIGHTED ROUND- ROBIN AND VM REUSE MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Michelle M. Zhu In recent years, the rapid evolving Cloud Computing technologies multiply challenges such as minimizing power consumption and meeting Quality-of-Services (QoS) requirements in the presence of heavy workloads from a large number of users using shared computing resources. Powering a middle-sized data center normally consumes 80,000kW power every year and computer servers consume around .5% of the global power [1]. Statistics for 5000 production servers over a six-month period show that only 10-50% of the total capacity has been effectively used, and a large portion of the resources is actually wasted. In order to address the skyrocket energy cost from the high level resource management aspect, we propose an energy efficient job scheduling approach based on a modified version of Weighted Round Robin scheduler that incorporates VMs reuse and live VM migration without compromising the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The Weighted Round Robin scheduler can monitor the running VMs status for possible VM sharing for job consolidation or migration. In addition, the VMs utilization rate is observed to start live migration from the over-utilizing Processing Element (PE) to under-utilized PEs or to the hibernated PEs by sending WOL (Wake-On-LAN) signal to activate them. The simulation experiments are conducted under the CloudReports environment based on open source CloudSim simulator. The comparisons with other similar scheduling algorithms demonstrate that our enhanced Weighted Round Robin algorithm (EWRR) can achieve considerable better performance in terms of energy consumption and resource utilization rate.

This study is an investigation of how experiences of discrimination, self-efficacy, and the associated outcome expectations influence health care utilization of young college students. The relationships tested were informed by Andersen’s Behavioral Model of Health Services Use (Andersen, 2008), the most widely used model to understand and predict health care utilization. Andersen proposed that health care utilization is influenced by predisposing (i.e., personal characteristics), enabling (i.e., income, insurance), and need (i.e., perception of illness) factors. However, his model has been criticized for not taking in consideration social factors and oversimplifying the role of ethnicity as a predictor (Bradley et al., 2002). The purpose of this study is to expand the explanatory power of Andersen’s model, by including psychosocial variables (e.g., discrimination, self-efficacy). One hundred and eighty-five students completed a 20 minute online survey, which included measures of experiences of discrimination, outcome expectations, self-efficacy, attitudes, and demographic variables. Results indicated that self-efficacy to communicate with physicians was a significant predictor of health care utilization, although experiences of discrimination were not. The effects of discrimination on health care utilization were further found to be mediated by self-efficacy to communicate with physicians. The present study's finding provided support for the inclusion of psychosocial variables (i.e., self-efficacy) in Andersen's model to increase its explanatory power.

The technology push by Moore's law brings a paradigm shift in the adaption of many core systems which replace high frequency superscalar processors with many simpler ones. On the software side, in order to utilize the available computational power, applications are following the high performance parallel/multi-threading model. Thus, many-core systems raise the challenges of resource allocation and fragmentation making necessary ecient run-time resource management techniques. In this thesis, we propose SPA, a Simple Pool Architecture for managing resource allocation in many-core systems. The proposed framework follows a distributed approach in which cores are organized into clusters and multiple clusters form a pool. Clusters are created based on system's characteristics and the allocation of cores is performed in a distributed manner so as to increase resource utilization and reduce fragmentation. Specifically, SPA is responsible (i) to generate the pool-based structure and organize cores into clusters depending on the NoC architecture; (ii) to serve, at run-time, the needs of multithreaded applications, in terms or processing cores; and (iii) to allocate resources in order to take advantage of spatial features, shared resources and reduce fragmentation. Experimental results show that SPA produces on average 15% better application response time while waiting time is reduced by 45% on average compared to other state-of-art methodologies.

The three primary purposes of this study were to (1) acquire knowledge of parents’ psychological experiences obtaining a diagnosis and accessing services for their child with ASD by examining the actual situation, as lived through and experienced by the parents, (2) gain knowledge of the meaning of advocacy and empowerment from parents who are living these experiences, and (3) derive possible implications for enhancing services provided by mental health professionals, service providers, and policy-makers to parents of children with autism. I utilized a sequential transformative integrated design, drawing data in Wave II of a larger, on-going investigation examining child, family, and community variables associated with early identification and treatment of autism spectrum disorders in the Pacific Northwest. I conducted a descriptive exploratory analysis to describe all participants from Wave II with respect to measures of sociodemographic variables, parental satisfaction with services, family empowerment, and reported relationships among these variables. Next, I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with six participants identifying as low-income and/or ethnic minorities to explore their experiences throughout the process of obtaining a diagnosis and accessing services for their child with ASD. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. Data were analyzed using a phenomenological reduction and integrated with quantitative results. Constituent elements of the parent experiences included, but were not limited to: a desire and/or appreciation for sources of support and information regarding services; engaging in ongoing research and networking to learn about services; a need to be the expert on their child; and fear regarding availability of future services and child’s future after parents die. Constituent elements of empowerment and advocacy showed that these were conceptually and experientially related to one another, such that advocacy functioned as a behavioral manifestation of empowerment for parents in this study. Findings contribute to the literature on family experiences with the diagnostic and service utilization processes for ASD. Findings are discussed in regards to recommendations and implications for mental health professionals, service providers, and policy-makers working towards fostering more supportive and equitable diagnostic and service utilization pathways for these families.