Parent attitudes about underage alcohol use and parent monitoring of the activities of their adolescent children have been found to be directly related to the likelihood of underage alcohol use. Unfortunately, there are relatively few programs or resources available to parents to assist them to reduce their children's potential for early and problematic alcohol involvement. In an effort to address this need, the present project entailed the development and evaluation of a web-based psychoeducational program entitled, Increasing Parental Awareness and Monitoring (iPAM). This online program begins to fill the gap in effective and convenient programming focused on development of parent skills and awareness. The content of the program is based on parenting factors that have been consistently found to correspond to underage alcohol use. The format includes engaging and interactive components that function to promote increased parent knowledge of the problem of underage drinking. In addition, the program is designed to alter permissive or ambivalent attitudes regarding underage alcohol use, and increase parental behaviors that have shown to be effective in reducing youth alcohol involvement. A randomized controlled trial was conducted (n = 34 control; n = 33 experimental) with parents of adolescents in Central Florida who were asked to complete measures before exposure to the program and again approximately one month later. Findings revealed significant differences between the iPAM group and the control group. Specifically, an increase in parent knowledge about underage alcohol use and increased parental monitoring of their adolescent children was revealed. There was also a main effect for time with regard to increased parent-child communication about alcohol. Additionally, while both groups revealed increased communication, the experimental group revealed greater frequency of communication about alcohol although not significantly.

Situations like war, terrorist attacks, fire accidents, floods, storms, etc., which threaten human life and property, demand immediate action to decrease the damage caused by them. A system is needed that predicts the future events based on what has happened and notifies the concerned personnel. The situation could be better understood in less time if the data is represented as colored, shaded and moving images rather than as numbers. Such a system requires a real-time Web-based visualization system with easy and secure access to grid resources, presenting easy-to-read graphics through a simple interface provided by a Web browser, and responding to user actions immediately. The Web and grid environments impose severe performance constraints such as communication time, latency of the network, etc., making it highly difficult to have a highly responsive real-time visualization. This work aims in finding an appropriate design that satisfies the above requirements. It also aims in understanding the limitations of a distributed environment for real-time applications and finding ways to overcome those limitations. A three-tier architecture is proposed, implemented, and tested to find the bottlenecks of the distributed environment. Relevant design principles are applied to a case study eliminating or minimizing the bottlenecks until the case study system satisfies all the requirements. The case study is the Fire-Smoke system, simulating the propagation of fire in the ex-USS Shadwell test area emulating a submarine. This system is re-implemented from a stand-alone system in OpenGL to a real-time Web-based visualization system using Java3D and J2EE technologies.

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