University of Maine Bulletin, 1998-1999 Undergraduate Catalog, Part 4

Part 4 (of 5) of the University of Maine Catalog for 1998-1999. This portion includes pages 332-447, providing a Key to Abbreviations and the Course Descriptions section

University of Maine Undergraduate Catalog for 1994-1995, part 2

This second part (of two) of the catalog for the 1989-90 academic year at the University of Maine includes sections for the College of Natural Resources, Forestry and Agriculture, College of Sciences, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University College, University-wide programs in Canadian studies, honors, an Onward Special Services Program, peace studies, and women\u27s studies, a list of the members of the administration, Board of Trustees, faculty and staff, and an index

A-level performance and the development of Greek culture in the Greek supplementary schools of London: a cost-effectiveness analysis.

This thesis examines the cost-effectiveness of the Greek Supplementary Schools with\ud respect to the two aims they pursue:\ud 1. The good performance of their students in the A-level Modern Greek examination and\ud 2. The maintenance of a 'Greek cultural identity' by their students.\ud In the study I used a random sample of nine schools with 203 students from successive year\ud cohorts. The data was collected through questionnaires, interviews, and group\ud conversations.\ud The ML3 package and the value added method were employed to analyse the factors affecting\ud the A-level results. Discourse analysis with some elements of conversation analysis was\ud used to examine the cultural aim of the schools.\ud The study found that there are differences in the cost-effectiveness of the different Greek\ud Supplementary schools. These differences are mainly due to the student intake (GCSE grade)\ud and to the school type, that is whether it is a church school, a parent's association school or\ud an independent school. The cost of the school appears to have a negative effect on\ud performance, but the effect disappears when the type of school dummy is included.\ud The study also showed that girls do slightly better in the exams than boys and that educated\ud mothers positively influence the performance of students. Also, certain characteristics of\ud the teachers and head teachers as well as factors related to the school organisation and ethos\ud were found to have an effect on the A-level grades.\ud The cultural analysis showed that the school did not appear to be responsible for creating the\ud Greek Identity of students, but developed and reinforced what the family had already given.\ud When the two main types of analysis were brought together, it was found that these two aims\ud are jointly pursued in these schools.\ud The findings of this research will be of use to decision makers in the field of educational\ud provision in the Greek Supplementary Schools. The results show that cost-effectiveness\ud analysis is a useful tool that should be used in school effectiveness studies. The study also\ud shows that in analysing the cost-effectiveness of schools the multi level approach has\ud significant advantages over simple input-output methods

Applications of Convex Optimization Methods in Selected Transceiver Design Problems

Hardware computational capabilities continue to increase dramatically enabling ever more sophisticated signal processing at digital transmitters and receivers. The work presented in this manuscript will cover two similar applications of convex optimization methods to important physical layer signal processing problems. The first work formulates relaxations of the tone injection method for PAPR reduction of linearly precoded systems, including as special cases OFDM, OFDMA, and SC-FDMA. A semi-definite programming approach and a sparse signal recovery-inspired approach are presented. Performance in terms of PAPR reduction and effects on power amplifier efficiency at lower PAPR back-off are given are given for several systems. The second work is a convex joint linear equalization and decoding algorithm that requires fewer pilot symbols than traditional methods for QAM transmissions over multi-path channels. The convex optimization framework developed takes into account both signal constellation and LDPC FEC coding information. The integration of FEC coding constraints applies recent developments in linear programming-based decoding. The BER performance of this algorithm is tested over several simulated channel and system configurations