Factors influencing university performance of associate in arts graduates transferring to the state university system

The purpose of this study was to examine the factorsbehind the failure rates of Associate in Arts (AA)graduates from Miami-Dade Community College (M-DCC) transferring to the Florida State University System (SUS). In M-DCC's largest disciplines, the university failure rate was 13% for Business & Management, 13% for Computer Science, and 14% for Engineering. Hypotheses tested were: Hypothesis 1 (H1): The lower division (LD) overall cumulative GPA and/or the LD major field GPA for AA graduates are predictive of the SUS GPA for the Business Management, Computer Science, and Engineering disciplines. Hypothesis 2 (H2): Demographic variables (age, race, gender) are predictive of performance at the university among M-DCC AA graduates in Engineering, Business & Management, and Computer Science. Hypothesis 3 (H3): Administrative variables (CLAST -College Level Academic Skills Test subtests) are predictive of university performance (GPA) for the Business/Management, Engineering, and Computer Science disciplines. Hypothesis 4 (H4): LD curriculum variables (course credits, course quality points) are predictive of SUS performance for the Engineering, Business/Management and Computer Science disciplines. Multiple Regression was the inferential procedureselected for predictions. Descriptive statistics weregenerated on the predictors. Results for H1 identified the LD GPA as the most significant variable in accounting for the variability of the university GPA for the Business & Management, Computer Science, and Engineering disciplines. For H2, no significant results were obtained for theage and gender variables, but the ethnic subgroups indicated significance at the .0001 level. However, differentials in GPA may not have been due directly to the race factor but, rather, to curriculum choices and performance outcomes while in the LD. The CLAST computation variable (H3) was a significant predictor of the SUS GPA. This is most likely due to the mathematics structure pervasive in these disciplines. For H4, there were two curriculum variables significant in explaining the variability of the university GPA (number of required critical major credits completed and quality of the student's performance for these credits). Descriptive statistics on the predictors indicated that 78% of those failing in the State University System had a LD major GPA (calculated with the critical required university credits earned and quality points of these credits) of less than 3.0; and 83% of those failing at the university had an overall community college GPA of less than 3.0.

On the Mediterranean conveyor belt system

The Mediterranean Sea is a semi-enclosed sea, connected to the Atlantic Ocean through the Gibraltar Strait and subdivided in two different regions by the Sicily Strait. The geographical extension of the basin, the surface heat flux, and the water inflow from the Gibraltar Strait are some of the basic factors determining its horizontal and vertical circulation. In the Mediterranean strong salinity and temperature zonal gradients contribute to maintain the zonal-vertical circulation, while meridional-vertical cells are equally forced by winds and deep water mass formation in three regions, the Gulf of Lyon, the southern Adriatic and the Cretan Sea areas. The objective of this thesis is to study how these cells combine together to form the Mediterranean conveyor belt system. This has never been attempted before so the conclusions are necessarily preliminary. In the first part we discuss the vertical zonal and meridional circulation by reconstructing the Wust Mediterranean vertical salinity and temperature structures in an attempt to evaluate the water mass structure consistent with modern data. Our results confirm that Wust depicted vertical circulation from scarce data is reproduced by the past 27 years observations. The structure of both meridional and zonal circulations was discussed using velocity vertical streamfunctions with two different methods. The first one, eulerian, allowed us to observe vertical structures that were already reported in the literature. Recent studies in the Atlantic Ocean have shown that gyres and eddies have an important influence in the isopycnal vertical circulation. This is called the residual circulation which was computed in this study for the first time. A possible interpretation of horizontal connection between the meridional and zonal cells was discussed using horizontal streamfunction. In the last part of the thesis we have been developing an idealized numerical model to study the vertical circulation in the Mediterranean.

Linking high-frequency DOC dynamics to the age of connected water sources

Copyright 2016. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Domain-specific question answering system : an application to the construction sector

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

American Manna: Religious Responses to the American Industrial Food System

“American Manna: Religious Responses to the American Industrial Food System” is an investigation of the religious complexity present in religious food reform movements. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at four field sites. These field sites are a Jewish organic vegetable farm where the farmers begin their days with meditation, a Christian raw vegan diet center run by Messianic Jews, a Christian family that raises their cattle on pastures and sends them to a halal processing plant for slaughter, and a Jewish farm where Christian and Buddhist farm staff helped to implement shmita, the biblical agricultural sabbatical year.

The religious people of America do not exist in neatly bound silos, so in my research I move with the religious people to the spaces that are less clearly defined as “Christian” or “Jewish.” I study religious food reformers within the framework of what I have termed “free-range religion” because they organize in groups outside the traditional religious organizational structures. My argument regarding free-range religion has three parts. I show that (1) perceived injustices within the American industrial food system have motivated some religious people to take action; (2) that when they do, they direct their efforts against the American food industry, and tend to do so outside traditional religious institutions; and finally, (3) in creating alternatives to the American food industry, religious people engage in inter-religious and extra-religious activism.

Chapter 1 serves as the introduction, literature review, and methodology overview. Chapter 2 focuses on the food-centered Judaism at the Adamah Environmental Fellowship at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, CT. In Chapter 3, I discuss the Hallelujah Diet as prescriptive literature and as it is put into practice at the Hallelujah Diet Retreat Center in Lake Lure, NC. Chapter 4 follows cows as they move from the grassy hills of Baldwin Family Farms in Yanceyville, NC to the meat counter at Whole Foods Markets. In Chapter 5, I consider the shmita year, the biblical agricultural sabbatical practice that was reimagined and implemented at Pearlstone Center in Baltimore, MD during 2014-2015. Chapter 6 will conclude this dissertation with a discussion of where religious food reform has been, where it is now, and a glimpse of what the future holds.

Domain-specific question answering system : an application to the construction sector

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Global distributions of diazotrophs Gamma-A nifH genes abundance - Depth integrated values computed from a collection of source datasets - Contribution to the MAREDAT World Ocean Atlas of Plankton Functional Types

The MAREDAT atlas covers 11 types of plankton, ranging in size from bacteria to jellyfish. Together, these plankton groups determine the health and productivity of the global ocean and play a vital role in the global carbon cycle. Working within a uniform and consistent spatial and depth grid (map) of the global ocean, the researchers compiled thousands and tens of thousands of data points to identify regions of plankton abundance and scarcity as well as areas of data abundance and scarcity. At many of the grid points, the MAREDAT team accomplished the difficult conversion from abundance (numbers of organisms) to biomass (carbon mass of organisms). The MAREDAT atlas provides an unprecedented global data set for ecological and biochemical analysis and modeling as well as a clear mandate for compiling additional existing data and for focusing future data gathering efforts on key groups in key areas of the ocean. The present data set presents depth integrated values of diazotrophs Gamma-A nifH genes abundance, computed from a collection of source data sets.

Global distributions of diazotrophs abundance, biomass and nitrogen fixation rates - Collection of source datasets - Contribution to the MAREDAT World Ocean Atlas of Plankton Functional Types

The MAREDAT atlas covers 11 types of plankton, ranging in size from bacteria to jellyfish. Together, these plankton groups determine the health and productivity of the global ocean and play a vital role in the global carbon cycle. Working within a uniform and consistent spatial and depth grid (map) of the global ocean, the researchers compiled thousands and tens of thousands of data points to identify regions of plankton abundance and scarcity as well as areas of data abundance and scarcity. At many of the grid points, the MAREDAT team accomplished the difficult conversion from abundance (numbers of organisms) to biomass (carbon mass of organisms). The MAREDAT atlas provides an unprecedented global data set for ecological and biochemical analysis and modeling as well as a clear mandate for compiling additional existing data and for focusing future data gathering efforts on key groups in key areas of the ocean. The present collection presents the original data sets used to compile Global distributions of diazotrophs abundance, biomass and nitrogen fixation rates

Global distributions of diazotrophs abundance and biomass - Depth integrated values computed from a collection of source datasets - Contribution to the MAREDAT World Ocean Atlas of Plankton Functional Types

The MAREDAT atlas covers 11 types of plankton, ranging in size from bacteria to jellyfish. Together, these plankton groups determine the health and productivity of the global ocean and play a vital role in the global carbon cycle. Working within a uniform and consistent spatial and depth grid (map) of the global ocean, the researchers compiled thousands and tens of thousands of data points to identify regions of plankton abundance and scarcity as well as areas of data abundance and scarcity. At many of the grid points, the MAREDAT team accomplished the difficult conversion from abundance (numbers of organisms) to biomass (carbon mass of organisms). The MAREDAT atlas provides an unprecedented global data set for ecological and biochemical analysis and modeling as well as a clear mandate for compiling additional existing data and for focusing future data gathering efforts on key groups in key areas of the ocean. The present data set presents depth integrated values of diazotrophs abundance and biomass, computed from a collection of source data sets.

Global distributions of diazotrophs nitrogen fixation rates - Depth integrated values computed from a collection of source datasets - Contribution to the MAREDAT World Ocean Atlas of Plankton Functional Types

The MAREDAT atlas covers 11 types of plankton, ranging in size from bacteria to jellyfish. Together, these plankton groups determine the health and productivity of the global ocean and play a vital role in the global carbon cycle. Working within a uniform and consistent spatial and depth grid (map) of the global ocean, the researchers compiled thousands and tens of thousands of data points to identify regions of plankton abundance and scarcity as well as areas of data abundance and scarcity. At many of the grid points, the MAREDAT team accomplished the difficult conversion from abundance (numbers of organisms) to biomass (carbon mass of organisms). The MAREDAT atlas provides an unprecedented global data set for ecological and biochemical analysis and modeling as well as a clear mandate for compiling additional existing data and for focusing future data gathering efforts on key groups in key areas of the ocean. The present data set presents depth integrated values of diazotrophs nitrogen fixation rates, computed from a collection of source data sets.

Global distributions of diazotrophs abundance, biomass and nitrogen fixation rates - Gridded data product (NetCDF) - Contribution to the MAREDAT World Ocean Atlas of Plankton Functional Types

The MAREDAT atlas covers 11 types of plankton, ranging in size from bacteria to jellyfish. Together, these plankton groups determine the health and productivity of the global ocean and play a vital role in the global carbon cycle. Working within a uniform and consistent spatial and depth grid (map) of the global ocean, the researchers compiled thousands and tens of thousands of data points to identify regions of plankton abundance and scarcity as well as areas of data abundance and scarcity. At many of the grid points, the MAREDAT team accomplished the difficult conversion from abundance (numbers of organisms) to biomass (carbon mass of organisms). The MAREDAT atlas provides an unprecedented global data set for ecological and biochemical analysis and modeling as well as a clear mandate for compiling additional existing data and for focusing future data gathering efforts on key groups in key areas of the ocean. This is a gridded data product about diazotrophic organisms . There are 6 variables. Each variable is gridded on a dimension of 360 (longitude) * 180 (latitude) * 33 (depth) * 12 (month). The first group of 3 variables are: (1) number of biomass observations, (2) biomass, and (3) special nifH-gene-based biomass. The second group of 3 variables is same as the first group except that it only grids non-zero data. We have constructed a database on diazotrophic organisms in the global pelagic upper ocean by compiling more than 11,000 direct field measurements including 3 sub-databases: (1) nitrogen fixation rates, (2) cyanobacterial diazotroph abundances from cell counts and (3) cyanobacterial diazotroph abundances from qPCR assays targeting nifH genes. Biomass conversion factors are estimated based on cell sizes to convert abundance data to diazotrophic biomass. Data are assigned to 3 groups including Trichodesmium, unicellular diazotrophic cyanobacteria (group A, B and C when applicable) and heterocystous cyanobacteria (Richelia and Calothrix). Total nitrogen fixation rates and diazotrophic biomass are calculated by summing the values from all the groups. Some of nitrogen fixation rates are whole seawater measurements and are used as total nitrogen fixation rates. Both volumetric and depth-integrated values were reported. Depth-integrated values are also calculated for those vertical profiles with values at 3 or more depths.

A County Response to the IDOT Study to Determine Alternative Primary and Secondary Road System Sizes, 1982

This response is prepared to provide the public and its elected representatives with certain information which we believe to be of importance in selecting the size and type of highway network to be supported by the people of Iowa.

A Comparative Study: China’s Water Pollutants Discharge Permit System with Reference to the National Pollutants Discharge Elimination System of the United States of America

China's water pollution control law stipulates the Water Pollution Discharge Permit (WPDP) institution and authorizes the State Council to draft the regulations for its implementation and enforcement. However, until today, national regulations have not been established and the permitting system has been operating according to provincial regulations. in contrast to USA, the effluents permit system has been operated for more than 40 years and received relatively successful results. The CWA/NPDES experience offers a valuable reference for China’s water permit system.