Development of distributed generation infrastructure for microgrid connectivity to operational power systems

Distributed Generation (DG) from alternate sources and smart grid technologies represent good solutions for the increase in energy demands. Employment of these DG assets requires solutions for the new technical challenges that are accompanied by the integration and interconnection into operational power systems. A DG infrastructure comprised of alternate energy sources in addition to conventional sources, is developed as a test bed. The test bed is operated by synchronizing, wind, photovoltaic, fuel cell, micro generator and energy storage assets, in addition to standard AC generators. Connectivity of these DG assets is tested for viability and for their operational characteristics. The control and communication layers for dynamic operations are developed to improve the connectivity of alternates to the power system. A real time application for the operation of alternate sources in microgrids is developed. Multi agent approach is utilized to improve stability and sequences of actions for black start are implemented. Experiments for control and stability issues related to dynamic operation under load conditions have been conducted and verified.

Design and development of an enzyme-linked biosensor for detection and quantification of phosphate species

The objective of this study is to design and development of an enzyme-linked biosensor for detection and quantification of phosphate species. Various concentrations of phosphate species were tested and completed for this study. Phosphate is one of the vital nutrients for all living organisms. Phosphate compounds can be found in nature (e.g., water sediments), and they often exist in aninorganic form. The amount of phosphates in the environment strongly influences the operations of living organisms. Excess amount of phosphate in the environment causes eutrophication which in turn causes oxygen deficit for the other living organisms. Fish die and degradation of habitat in the water occurs as a result of eutrophication. In contrast, low phosphate concentration causes death of vegetation since plants utilize the inorganic phosphate for photosynthesis, respiration, and regulation of enzymes. Therefore, the phosphate quantity in lakes and rivers must be monitored. Result demonstrated that phosphate species could be detected in various organisms via enzyme-linked biosensor in this research.

The social development strategy of the shiites in Lebanon

This study examines what many scholars have neglected to investigate when addressing post Civil War issues in Lebanon. Most studies have addressed political issues surrounding activities of Shiite movements, such as Harakat Amal or Hizb Allah, while socioeconomic issues have been neglected. Imam Musa Sadr challenged the power of traditional Shiite leaders by creating official Shiites institutions and movements like Amal. The Iranian Revolution and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 sparked the creation of Hizb Allah which, not only struggled against its foes, but also provided social services to the Shiites. This development program has been central in creating political legitimacy for Hizb Allah, regardless of its military situation, which suggests that socioeconomic development can transform a militia into a legitimate actor on the Lebanese political scene. The survivability of Shiite parties is therefore tantamount to not only their military might, but also to their social involvement.

Development of microsatellite markers in Cannabis Sativa for fingerprinting and genetic relatedness analyses

Microsatellite markers were developed for Cannabis sativa L. (marijuana) to estimate the level of polymorphism, usefulness for DNA typing (genotype identification), and to measure the genetic relationships between the different plants. Twelve different oligonucleotide probes were used to screen an enriched microsatellite library of Cannabis sativa in which 49% of the clones contained microsatellite sequences. Characterization of microsatellite loci in Cannabis revealed that GA/CT was the most abundant class of isolated microsatellites representing 50% overall. Eleven polymorphic SSR markers were developed, derived from dinucleotide motifs and eight from trinucleotide motifs. A total of 52 alleles were detected averaging 4.7 alleles/locus. The expected heterozygosity of the eleven loci ranged between 0.368 and 0.710 and the common probability of identical genotypes was 1.8 x 107. The loci identified 27 unique profiles of the 41 Cannabis samples. The eleven microsatellite markers developed in this study were found to be useful for DNA fingerprinting and for assessing genetic relationships in Cannabis.

A model of self-transformative identity development in troubled adolescent youth

Within the Stage II program evaluation of the Miami Youth Development Project's (YDP) Changing Lives Program (CLP), this study evaluated CLP intervention effectiveness in promoting positive change in emotion-focused identity exploration (i.e. feelings of personal expressiveness; PE) and a "negative" symptom of identity development (i.e. identity distress; ID) as a first step toward the investigation of a self-transformative model of identity development in adolescent youth. Using structural equation modeling techniques, this study found that participation in the CLP is associated with positive changes in PE (path = .841, p < .002), but not changes in ID. Increase in ID scores was found to be associated with increases in PE (path = .229, p < .002), as well. Intervention effects were not moderated by age/stage, gender, or ethnicity, though differences were found in the degree to which participating subgroups (African- American/Hispanic, male/female, 14-16 years old/17-19 years old) experience change in PE and ID. Findings also suggest that moderate levels of ID may not be deleterious to identity exploration and may be associated with active exploration.

A method for enhancing digital information displayed to computer users with visual refractive errors via spatial and spectral processing

This research pursued the conceptualization, implementation, and verification of a system that enhances digital information displayed on an LCD panel to users with visual refractive errors. The target user groups for this system are individuals who have moderate to severe visual aberrations for which conventional means of compensation, such as glasses or contact lenses, does not improve their vision. This research is based on a priori knowledge of the user's visual aberration, as measured by a wavefront analyzer. With this information it is possible to generate images that, when displayed to this user, will counteract his/her visual aberration. The method described in this dissertation advances the development of techniques for providing such compensation by integrating spatial information in the image as a means to eliminate some of the shortcomings inherent in using display devices such as monitors or LCD panels. Additionally, physiological considerations are discussed and integrated into the method for providing said compensation. In order to provide a realistic sense of the performance of the methods described, they were tested by mathematical simulation in software, as well as by using a single-lens high resolution CCD camera that models an aberrated eye, and finally with human subjects having various forms of visual aberrations. Experiments were conducted on these systems and the data collected from these experiments was evaluated using statistical analysis. The experimental results revealed that the pre-compensation method resulted in a statistically significant improvement in vision for all of the systems. Although significant, the improvement was not as large as expected for the human subject tests. Further analysis suggest that even under the controlled conditions employed for testing with human subjects, the characterization of the eye may be changing. This would require real-time monitoring of relevant variables (e.g. pupil diameter) and continuous adjustment in the pre-compensation process to yield maximum viewing enhancement.

Museum of urban development and headquarters for the planning/preservation department of the city of Miami Beach.

The objective of this research and thesis was to develop a program and project in the context of the Historic Art Deco District in Miami Beach. This project intended to analyze the chronological history of the urban development of the Art Deco District, its geographical, political and socio-cultural conditions as well as the evolution and different architectonic typologies of the area. In order to understand the issues involved in design in a historic context, this research addressed and analyzed several architectonic interventions within various historic places. This research concluded with the design of a public facility located at Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, consisting of a Museum of Urban Development and Headquarters for the Planning/Preservation Department of the City of Miami Beach. The project proposal and thesis, addresses architectonic and theoretical issues specific to design in an historic area.

International tourism and socio-economic development in the Caribbean : are they compatible?

Plagued with poverty, the countries of the Caribbean have grappled for years with numerous development models. As in many Third World countries, tourism has been used as an economic development strategy. Criticisms of the tourism industry have frequently been severe. So much that during the formation of the Caribbean Basin Initiative, the tourism industry was intentionally avoided and other industries favored. One of the most critical questions asked of tourism is whether or not the economic gains of the industry are worth the detrimental social, political and environmental effects on the host country. It is the objective of this thesis to examine the relationship between international tourism and socio-economic development in the Caribbean, and to determine whether or not the deficiencies of the industry prevent it from being a beneficial development tool.

Analysis and comparison of the moral development of students required to graduate with an ethics course

Accounting students become practitioners facing ethical decision-making challenges that can be subject to various interpretations; hence, the profession is concerned with the appropriateness of their decisions. Moral development of these students has implications for a profession under legal challenges, negative publicity, and government scrutiny. Accounting students moral development has been studied by examining their responses to moral questions in Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT), their professional attitudes on Hall's Professionalism Scale Dimensions, and their ethical orientation-based professional commitment and ethical sensitivity. This study extended research in accounting ethics and moral development by examining students in a college where an ethics course is a requirement for graduation. Knowledge of differences in the moral development of accounting students may alert practitioners and educators to potential problems resulting from a lack of ethical understanding as measured by moral development levels. If student moral development levels differ by major, and accounting majors have lower levels than other students, the conclusion may be that this difference is a causative factor for the alleged acts of malfeasance in the profession that may result in malpractice suits. The current study compared 205 accounting, business, and nonbusiness students from a private university. In addition to academic major and completion of an ethics course, the other independent variable was academic level. Gender and age were tested as control variables and Rest's DIT score was the dependent variable. The primary analysis was a 2x3x3 ANOVA with post hoc tests for results with significant p-value of less than 0.05. The results of this study reveal that students who take an ethics course appear to have a higher level of moral development (p=0.013), as measured by the (DIT), than students at the same academic level who have not taken an ethics course. In addition, a statistically significant difference (p=0.034) exists between freshmen who took an ethics class and juniors who did not take an ethics class. For every analysis except one, the lower class year with an ethics class had a higher level of moral development than the higher class year without an ethics class. These results appear to show that ethics education in particular has a greater effect on the level of moral development than education in general. Findings based on the gender specific analyses appear to show that males and females respond differently to the effects of taking an ethics class. The male students do not appear to increase their moral development level after taking an ethics course (p=0.693) but male levels of moral development differ significantly (p=0.003) by major. Female levels of moral development appear to increase after taking an ethics course (p=0.002). However, they do not differ according to major (p=0.0 97). These findings indicate that accounting students should be required to have a class in ethics as part of their college curriculum. Students with an ethics class have a significantly higher level of moral development. The challenges facing the profession at the current time indicate that public confidence in the reports of client corporations has eroded and one way to restore this confidence could be to require ethics training of future accountants.

Optimal kernel development for real-time communications

The purpose of this research is to develop an optimal kernel which would be used in a real-time engineering and communications system. Since the application is a real-time system, relevant real-time issues are studied in conjunction with kernel related issues. The emphasis of the research is the development of a kernel which would not only adhere to the criteria of a real-time environment, namely determinism and performance, but also provide the flexibility and portability associated with non-real-time environments. The essence of the research is to study how the features found in non-real-time systems could be applied to the real-time system in order to generate an optimal kernel which would provide flexibility and architecture independence while maintaining the performance needed by most of the engineering applications. Traditionally, development of real-time kernels has been done using assembly language. By utilizing the powerful constructs of the C language, a real-time kernel was developed which addressed the goals of flexibility and portability while still meeting the real-time criteria. The implementation of the kernel is carried out using the powerful 68010/20/30/40 microprocessor based systems.

Quality of student involvement and college contribution toward development of traditional and nontraditional undergraduate students

Nontraditional students differ from traditional students on characteristics such as age, employment status, marital status, and parental status. The quality of a student's experience is important as it relates to his or her transformation and is a reflection of the quality of the college. Using theory of involvement as a framework, the purpose of this study was to test if there were differences between traditional and nontraditional undergraduate students in their ratings of quality of college involvement (academic, co-curricular, student interactions, and faculty interactions) and perceptions of college contribution toward development (intellectual, personal, social, and career). A two part survey was distributed to a random cluster sample of sophomore and higher level undergraduate classes equaling 400 undergraduate students. Results of a 2 X 4 repeated measures ANOVA indicated that traditional students rated quality for co-curricular involvement and student involvement significantly higher than nontraditional students. Both traditional and nontraditional students had similar ratings of college contribution toward development. There were different patterns of correlations between involvement and development. Traditional students' ratings of academic and student involvement were more highly correlated with development than were the ratings of nontraditional students. However, nontraditional students' ratings of academic and faculty involvement were more highly correlated with development. When testing for differences in correlations between quality of involvement and college contribution toward development, the largest observed differences were quality of student involvement and college contribution toward personal and social development. Although not significantly different, traditional students had stronger correlations between those factors than did the nontraditional students. This research demonstrates the importance of using social role when defining student type. It contributes to involvement theory by explaining how traditional and nontraditional students differ in their ratings of quality of involvement. Further, it identifies different patterns of correlations between ratings of quality of involvement and college contribution toward development for the two types of students. While traditional students may need a more rounded college experience that includes more social and co-curricular experiences, nontraditional students use the classroom as their stage for learning.

The utility of an integrated qualitative/quantitative data analytic strategy (IQ-DAS) to evaluate the impact of youth development interventions on positive qualitative change in the life course

This study reports one of the first controlled studies to examine the impact of a school based positive youth development program (Lerner, Fisher, & Weinberg, 2000) on promoting qualitative change in life course experiences as a positive intervention outcome. The study built on a recently proposed relational developmental methodological metanarrative (Overton, 1998) and advances in use of qualitative research methods (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). The study investigated the use the Life Course Interview (Clausen, 1998) and an integrated qualitative and quantitative data analytic strategy (IQDAS) to provide empirical documentation of the impact the Changing Lives Program on qualitative change in positive identity in a multicultural population of troubled youth in an alternative public high school. The psychosocial life course intervention approach used in this study draws its developmental framework from both psychosocial developmental theory (Erikson, 1968) and life course theory (Elder, 1998) and its intervention strategies from the transformative pedagogy of Freire's (1983/1970). Using the 22 participants in the Intervention Condition and the 10 participants in the Control Condition, RMANOVAs found significantly more positive qualitative change in personal identity for program participants relative to the non-intervention control condition. In addition, the 2X2X2X3 mixed design RMANOVA in which Time (pre, post) was the repeated factor and Condition (Intervention versus Control), Gender, and Ethnicity the between group factors, also found significant interactions for the Time by Gender and Time by Ethnicity. Moreover, the directionality of the basic pattern of change was positive for participants of both genders and all three ethnic groups. The pattern of the moderation effects also indicated a marked tendency for participants in the intervention group to characterize their sense of self as more secure and less negative at the end of the their first semester in the intervention, that was stable across both genders and all three ethnicities. The basic differential pattern of an increase in the intervention condition of a positive characterization of sense of self relative to both pre test and relative to the directionality of the movement of the non-intervention controls, was stable across both genders and all three ethnic groups.

Design and Development of Geographical Information System (GIS) Map for Nuclear Waste Streams

A nuclear waste stream is the complete flow of waste material from origin to treatment facility to final disposal. The objective of this study was to design and develop a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) module using Google Application Programming Interface (API) for better visualization of nuclear waste streams that will identify and display various nuclear waste stream parameters. A proper display of parameters would enable managers at Department of Energy waste sites to visualize information for proper planning of waste transport. The study also developed an algorithm using quadratic Bézier curve to make the map more understandable and usable. Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and Microsoft SQL Server 2012 were used for the implementation of the project. The study has shown that the combination of several technologies can successfully provide dynamic mapping functionality. Future work should explore various Google Maps API functionalities to further enhance the visualization of nuclear waste streams.

Mother-Infant Reciprocity and the Development of Joint Attention in 12 Month Old Infants

Social contingency is the ability to connect social stimuli, such as those behaviors performed by oneself and those performed by others. Detecting social contingencies occurs by means of reciprocity through shared experiences with others. Reciprocity denotes a circumstance in which two individuals participate in a collaborative exchange, and is distinguished from an event in which two individuals engage in separate, unrelated activities. Specifically, reciprocity incorporates joint attention (JA), which occurs when two individuals simultaneously and visually attend to the same item. JA is facilitated by gazing and pointing, whereby one individual initiates the action and the second individual follows suit by, for example, gaze-following. However, little is known about the role the mother may play in the development of JA. The purpose of our study was to investigate social contingency between mothers and infants engaging in dyadic interactions. Thirty-three 12-month-old typically developing infants (M = 12.2, SD = .19; N = 19 males) were filmed for 10 minutes during free play with their mothers and toys provided by an experimenter. Reciprocity was measured by coding mother-infant interactions when a precise chain of events occurred: (1) mother initiated a bid by introducing a toy/activity or request to the infant, (2) infant accepted the bid/request by engaging in play with the given toy/activity, and (3) mother persisted by continuing to engage in play with said toy/activity. We computed a Pearson Correlation to assess the relation between the mothers’ initiations of JA and their infants’ responses to JA. We found a moderately positive correlation between the two variables (r= 0.37, p<.05). Our findings suggest that reciprocity, an important component of social relationships, during parent-infant dyads may serve as a scaffold for joint attention abilities, which have been linked to social and language development.

Metrópole digital: o jovem aprendiz na educação tecnológica

This thesis was elaborated in the scenario of Digital Metropolis Institute (IMD) – a supplementary unit at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in the training of personnel with technical and higher level courses whose technical level training is associated with a process of digital inclusion, with the purpose of attracting young people to this area, with emphasis on Software and Hardware Development. It aims to investigate the cognitive change of young apprentice on technological education and his/her entrance into the labor market, through the formation and the social inclusion proposed by the Instituto Metrópole Digital; understanding the juvenile subjectivity production through the Instituto Metrópole Digital’s education by performance in the labor market; recognizing the Brazilian professional qualification public policies for youth and identifying the role of Tutoring in the learning process during the course of formation of the young apprentice of the technological education proposed by the Instituto Metrópole Digital.The clipping of the object of investigation was the process of cognitive change and constitution of subjectivity of the young apprentice in information technology (IT) in the IMD. It was searched support in theory Freireana as proposal that problematizes the policies and the process of formation and professional qualification, in the perspective of a citizen and liberating consciousness. By qualitative and ethnographic nature, descriptive-explanatory, it counts with the participation of young people, high school students from public and private schools, aged between 15 and 18 years. There are strong aspects: a cognitive change on the young apprentice of technological education onto overdrive high school as the student of the Instituto Metrópole Digital; it happened the social integration for those who remain in the course, both in the neighborhood where they reside and at school where he attended high school, the young man is recognized and becomes reference to other young, favoring him a life projection which when the activities of mentoring is learning motivator, it exerts a positive influence to the young on the continuity of studies, it provides intellectual and institutional affiliation and continuity in the investments to the academic life for a better insertion in the labor market, which refers to the modification of the life project-invest in academic training, in exchange for a technical job in the labor market. There are weak aspects: the absence of professor in the course, in his most important role, which involves awareness of his/her condition in action, in explicit position that the professional practice constitutes as this constitution requires reciprocity of its students and the context in which it operates; fragile formation of mentoring, absence of dialogues in the classroom that favors the formation of subject learning, mainly in guiding action, mediator of the young; There is a lack of methodological proposal to develop real projects on the labor market with problem solving and collaborative learning. It considers that without converting information into knowledge cannot discern clearly enough that there is no direct causal relationship between Professional and technological Education and the level of employability of the young worker certificate. It suggests to the evasion: a greater knowledge of the reality of the student of the Institute Metropolis Digital; better knowledge of youth and their expectations of life project; the Tutoring will be Teacher-tutor; investing in employability conditions effective the young into the labor market.