Technological innovations

Western Palm Beach County, FL is characterized by thick deposits organic soils at shallow depths. Because of their high void ratio and compressibility, these soils undergo large primary consolidation followed by extended periods of secondary compression causing excessive premature structural distress. Although soil stabilization has been largely used with remarkable results in soft, expansive and non-organic soils, limited research and practice exist in the implementation with highly organic soils. The main motivation of this research was to investigate the effects of cement stabilization on the compressibility behavior of organic rich soils, and develop mix design criteria for optimum cement contents necessary to induce the desired engineering behavior. This optimized mix design may provide guidelines for Deep Mixing Methods in organic soils.

Disruption-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are the networks comprised of a set of wireless nodes, and they experience unstable connectivity and frequent connection disruption because of the limitations of radio range, power, network density, device failure, and noise. DTNs are characterized by their lack of infrastructure, device limitation, and intermittent connectivity. Such characteristics make conventional wireless network routing protocols fail, as they are designed with the assumption the network stays connected. Thus, routing in DTNs becomes a challenging problem, due to the temporal scheduling element in a dynamic topology. One of the solutions is prediction-based, where nodes mobility is estimated with a history of observations. Then, the decision of forwarding messages during data delivery can be made with that predicted information. Current prediction-based routing protocols can be divided into two sub-categories in terms of that whether they are probability related: probabilistic and non-probabilistic. This dissertation focuses on the probabilistic prediction-based (PPB) routing schemes in DTNs. We find that most of these protocols are designed for a specified topology or scenario. So almost every protocol has some drawbacks when applied to a different scenario. Because every scenario has its own particular features, there could hardly exist a universal protocol which can suit all of the DTN scenarios. Based on the above motivation, we investigate and divide the current DTNs scenarios into three categories: Voronoi-based, landmark-based, and random moving DTNs. For each category, we design and implement a corresponding PPB routing protocol for either basic routing or a specified application with considering its unique features.

This research addresses communication reliability in the highly constrained wireless sensor networks environment. We propose a cross-layer, reliable wireless sensor protocol design. The protocol benefits from the body of research in the two areas of wireless sensors reliability research and wireless sensors energy conservation research. The protocol introduces a new energy saving technique that considers reliability as a design parameter and constraint. The protocol also introduces a new back-off algorithm that dynamically adjusts to the data messages reliability needs. Other cross-layer techniques that the protocol introduces are dynamic MAC retry limit and dynamic transmission power setting that is also based on the messages reliability requirements. Cross layer design is defined as the interaction between the different stack layers with the goal of improving performance. It has been used in ad hoc wireless systems to improve throughput, latency, and quality of service (QoS). The improvements gained in performance come at a price. This includes decreased architecture modularity and designs may be hard to debug, maintain or upgrade. Cross-layer design is valuable for wireless sensor networks due to the severe resource constraints. The proposed protocol uses cross-layer design as a performance and energy optimization technique. Nevertheless, the protocol avoids introducing layer interdependencies by preserving the stack architecture and optimizes the overall system energy and reliability performance by information sharing. The information is embedded as flags in the data and control messages that are moving through the stack. Each layer reads these flags and adjusts its performance and handling of the message accordingly. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated using simulation modeling. The reference protocol used for evaluation is APTEEN.

High school biology classes traditionally follow a lecture format to disseminate content and new terminology. With the inclusive practices of No Child Left Behind, the Common Core State Standards, and end-of-course exam requirement for high school diplomas, classes include a large range of achievement levels and abilities. Teachers assume, often incorrectly, that students come to class prepared to listen and take notes. In a standard diploma, high school biology class in a separate school for students with emotional and behavioral disorders, five students participated in a single-subject, alternating treatment design study that compared the use of regular pens and digital pens to take notes during 21 lecture sessions. Behavior measures were threefold between the two interventions: (a) quantity of notes taken per minute during lectures, (b) quantity of notes or notations taken during review pauses, and (c) percent of correct responses on the daily comprehension quizzes. ... However, the differences were minor, and recommendations are made for specific training in note-taking, the pause strategy, and digital pen fluency which may produce different results for both note-taking and quiz scores.

In recent years, a plethora of wireless applications such as Bluetooth and Ultra-wide band (UWB) radio have emerged. This drastic increase has overly congested the spectrum. So, new networks such as cognitive radios that can solve the spectrum congestion have emerged. But in such networks, interference is introduced at the physical layer. We study and develop an interference model capable of capturing the intrinsic characteristics of the coexistence of such wireless applications. We investigate the effect of interference using device isolation probability or outage probability in presence Rayleigh and Nakagami-m fading at the physical layer and the impact of lognormal shadowing. We assume that the devices are either deterministically placed or randomly distributed according to a Poisson point process. We derive explicit expressions for the isolation probability and outage probability that give insight into how these channel impairments affect communication in these applications. We use computer simulations to validate our analytical results.

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite, which is used by major Internet applications such as World Wide Web, email, remote administration and file transfer. TCP implements scalable and distributed end-to-end congestion control algorithms to share network resources among competing users. TCP was originally designed primarily for wired networks, and it has performed remarkably well as the Internet scaled up by six orders of magnitude in the past decade. However, many studies have shown that the unmodified standard TCP performs poorly in networks with large bandwidth-delay products and/or lossy wireless links. In this thesis, we analyze the problems TCP exhibits in the wireless communication environment, and develop joint TCP congestion control and wireless-link scheduling schemes for mobile applications. ... Different from the existing solutions, the proposed schemes can be asynchronously implemented without message passing among network nodes; thus they are readily deployable with current infrastructure. Moreover, global convergence/stability of the proposed schemes to optimal equilibrium is established using the Lyapunov method in the network fluid model. Simulation results are provided to evaluate the proposed schemes in practical networks.

This qualitative research study explores the relationship between reducing uncertainty and assigning source credibility in the context of social media sites (SMS) and examines the effect of uncertainty reduction within the social media environment on the development of relationships between journalists and their sources. For this study, interviews were conducted with professional journalists to determine whether uncertainty was reduced and credibility was established with sources via SMS (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) and what theoretical strategies journalists used to reduce their uncertainty. The study also aims to determine if correlations exist between a reporter's age, beat, and/or personal adoption of SMS and the reporter's usage of SMS for source development. The interviews were conducted with 15 journalists of The Palm Beach Post (West Palm Beach, Florida), using a standardized interview protocol. Subjects were asked to voluntarily participate in a face-to-face interview with the researcher. Reporters were selected based upon their gender and cultural ethnicity, which was representative of the newsroom demographics of The Palm Beach Post at that time. This research aims to contribute to the uncertainty reduction theory in the realm of computer-mediated communications, specifically with regard to the use of SMS in forming and maintaining journalist-source relationships.

The design and construction of a tri-cable, planar robotic device for use in neurophysical rehabilitation is presented. The criteria for this system are based primarily on marketability factors, rather than ideal models or mathematical outcomes. The device is designed to be low cost and sufficiently safe for a somewhat disabled individual to use unsupervised at home, as well as in a therapist's office. The key features are the use of a barrier that inhibits the user from coming into contact with the cables as well as a "break-away" joystick that the user utilizes to perform the rehabilitation tasks. In addition, this device is portable, aesthetically acceptable and easy to operate. Other uses of this system include sports therapy, virtual reality and teleoperation of remote devices.

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) affects one in every 110 children. Medical and educational research have demonstrated that ASD children's social skills and adaptation can be much improved, provided that interventions are early and intensive enough. The advancement of computer technologies and their ubiquitous penetration in people's life make them widely available to support intensive sociocognitive rehabilitation. Additionally, computer interactions are a natural choice for people with autism who value lawful and "systematizing" tools. A number of computer-aided approaches have been developed, showing effectiveness and generalization, but little quantitative research was conducted to identify the critical factors of engaging and improving the child's interest and performance. This thesis designs an adaptive computer interaction system, called Ying, which detects learning patterns in children with ASD and explores the computer interactive possibilities. The system tailors its content based on periodic performance assessments that offer a more effective learning path for children with ASD.

Exclusive bus lanes and the Transit Signal Priority are often not effective in saturated peak-traffic conditions. An alternative way of providing priority for transit can be queue jumpers, which allows buses to bypass and then cut out in front of waiting queue by getting an early green signal. Utah Transit authority deployed Bus Rapid Transit system at Salt Lake County, Utah along W 3500 S. This research evaluates the impacts of queue jumpers with TSP on Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and private vehicular traffic. Four VISSIM models were developed for analysis : Basic scenario, no TSP with queue jumpers, TSP with no queue jumbers, and TSP with queue jumpers. In TQ scenario travel time was reduced between 13.2-19.82% with respect to basic scenario. At the same time, travel time of private traffic increased very little 0.38-3.28%. Two TSP strategies : green extension and red truncation are implemented in this research work.