The Balanced Scorecard: The Key to Effective Strategic Management

The intent of this paper is to define the importance of the balanced scorecard in the strategic management process. The need for the balanced scorecard will be established by explaining the roles of demand shifters, traditional management accounting, Senge’s concept of a learning organization, and the strategic management process. This will involve detailing the stages of the strategic management process and connecting them to the various aspects of creating a balanced scorecard. Ultimately, the goal of the balanced scorecard is to translate the overarching strategy into specific actions that can be implemented throughout the organization. Lastly, other strategic applications of the balanced scorecard will be identified and explained

Development and production of a one act play

A commonly known facet of the traditional western Christian faith is that mankind is created in God\u27s image. The question that immediately follows this is what is God\u27s image? or what does it mean to be made in someone or something\u27s image? This play attempts to explore that question by creating an understandable and humanized caricature of the Christian God. In the author\u27s opinion, what is meant by humanity being made in God\u27s image is that humanity has been granted the power of consciousness, the attribute of individual and self-aware life. Neither the biblical representation of God nor many of his fictionalizations delve into this topic; what does it mean if our similarity to God is our consciousness? By characterizing God as someone who struggles with questions of an existential nature as much as humans do, this play creates a depiction of what it truly means to be conscious and alive and offers its own possible layout of what kind of person the Christian God might be. The entire show was written as a search for the answer to the question who is God? in the hopes for an answer to the question who are we

Identity in Music

Whether consciously or not, every person answers the question, “Who am I?” Every mundane action, every syllable spoken, and even every event that affects someone, contribute to the realization of “who I am.” The answer to this question is always an individual’s identity. Identity helps a person achieve a desired social acceptance or success in a certain field. Much of the same can be said for the identity of a group. Different groups throughout history have constantly been fighting for their place in history. The identity of a group is based on the values that they hold, their ideals, actions, and involvement with society. Each group, whether it is Christians or vegetarians, is assimilated into society. In order for the assimilation to be successful, the values of the group must be either tolerated or accepted by the majority of outsiders. This is usually not a problem; however, when a minority group is trying to find its place in society, there must be a shift in the ideals that are shared by society. Because society’s ideas are constantly shifting, it is clear that there are agents of this change. One of these agents is music. This piece will examine the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s and the gay rights movement to exemplify how music has been used to advance a minority group

Applying modern interpretation techniques to old hydrocarbon fields to find new reserves: A case study in the onshore Gulf of Mexico, U.S.A.

This study shows how the use of modern geological investigative techniques can reopen old, “drained” hydrocarbon fields. Specifically, it looks at the White Castle Field in South Louisiana. This field has pay sections ranging from late Oligocene to late Miocene. The late Oligocene package is underexplored and understudied and contains 3 primary reservoirs (Cib Haz (CH), MW, and MR). This study established the depositional history of these reservoirs. During most of the late Oligocene, the White Castle Salt Dome was located in a minibasin on the continental slope. The CH and MW deposited in this minibasin. The CH is an amalgamation of slumped shelfal limestones, sandstones, and shales deposited during a lowstand systems tract (LST). The MW comprises a shelf-edge delta that is part of a LST. The MR is an incised valley fill located in the continental shelf that was deposited during LST after the minibasin was filled

Computational Study of Laminar Separation Bubble Development over Supersonic Airfoils at Subsonic Speeds

Laminar Separation Bubbles (LSBs) are regions of separated flow that start near the leading edge of an airfoil and reattach further down the airfoil surface. These regions of separation can appear at low angles of attack and can grow significantly as the angle of attack is increased heavily influencing the flow characteristics over the airfoil. Research on this topic is driven by the supersonic business jet industry which has a particular interest in this type of research due to performance requirements in both the subsonic and supersonic flight regimes. This manuscript is focused on the flow developments near the sharp leading edge of supersonic airfoils and their influence on aerodynamic performance at low subsonic speeds. Computational Fluid Dynamics was utilized to show how LSB formation, size, and shape are dependent on the turbulence model chosen and the level of free-stream turbulence present in the flow. Two turbulence models were investigated, the Spalart-Allmaras and the Menter\u27s SST. The LSB modeled by the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model was consistently longer than the LSB modeled by the Menter\u27s SST turbulence model. Both models verified the LSB dependence on the Reynolds and Mach number of the flow

Flower & Song

My work functions as a spiritual and philosophical inquiry, adapting ideas from a broad variety of sources, from the mythic and literary, to the autobiographical. I seek to harmonize paradoxical elements in service of higher knowledge and consciousness. Genealogical explorations of my unusual familial heritage have provided me with a wealth of photographs, religious and cultural motifs, and conceptual material. I view this personal examination as an idiosyncratic path to the universal, the limbs of my family tree branching through time and space to intertwine with the whole of history. Combining both ancient and modern traditions, I create esoteric liminal spaces in my paintings as a means of arriving closer to a truth that unfolds beyond the reach of material reality. I view my task as a mystical one, a divine, even futile, attempt to make work that serves as a vehicle to the other shore of human consciousness

Plant Community Response to Disturbances in Nebraska Sandhills Upland Prairie

Historically, disturbances shaped prairie ecosystems both directly through events like fire and soil moving by animals, as well as indirectly through dynamic rainfall patterns and periodic flux in seed availabilities. We hypothesized that the implementation of several distinct disturbance events in Nebraska Sandhills upland prairie would have measurable effects on plant community composition. We implemented mid-spring fire, soil disturbance in the form of disking, seed addition of native forbs on disked plots, as well as early summer supplemental watering (to mimic minor rainfall events during abnormally dry periods) during 2016 and 2017. Plant community response during the first and second growing season post-disturbance was quantified through measurements of June forb density as well as August percentage cover and herbage mass. In the first season, fire increased the cover of warm-season rhizomatous grasses as well as perennial forbs, such as western ragweed (Ambrosia psilostachya DC.), and reduced the cover of annual forbs and species richness. Fire had positive interactive effects on the cover of warm-season grasses in both seasons and on forb density in the second season. Perennial forb seedling establishment from spring seed addition was poor, possibly due to species-specific dormancy and abnormally dry June conditions. Seed availability did play a minor role on cover of seeded leguminous species, although temporary and year-dependent. Water addition (two 0.64-cm events) and burning, however, improved seeded forb establishment. Disking had generally negative effects on plant cover. Minor water additions had both positive and negative interactive effects on various species, with the underlying drivers of this often unknown. We documented ecological interactions between disturbance events, as fire mediated the negative effect of disking on warm-season grasses and water mediated its negative effect on grasses as a whole. Overall, distinct disturbance events significantly altered plant composition of Sandhills prairie over two growing seasons. Advisor: John A. Guretzk

Sophisticated Batteryless Sensing

Wireless embedded sensing systems have revolutionized scientific, industrial, and consumer applications. Sensors have become a fixture in our daily lives, as well as the scientific and industrial communities by allowing continuous monitoring of people, wildlife, plants, buildings, roads and highways, pipelines, and countless other objects. Recently a new vision for sensing has emerged---known as the Internet-of-Things (IoT)---where trillions of devices invisibly sense, coordinate, and communicate to support our life and well being. However, the sheer scale of the IoT has presented serious problems for current sensing technologies---mainly, the unsustainable maintenance, ecological, and economic costs of recycling or disposing of trillions of batteries. This energy storage bottleneck has prevented massive deployments of tiny sensing devices at the edge of the IoT. This dissertation explores an alternative---leave the batteries behind, and harvest the energy required for sensing tasks from the environment the device is embedded in. These sensors can be made cheaper, smaller, and will last decades longer than their battery powered counterparts, making them a perfect fit for the requirements of the IoT. These sensors can be deployed where battery powered sensors cannot---embedded in concrete, shot into space, or even implanted in animals and people. However, these batteryless sensors may lose power at any point, with no warning, for unpredictable lengths of time. Programming, profiling, debugging, and building applications with these devices pose significant challenges. First, batteryless devices operate in unpredictable environments, where voltages vary and power failures can occur at any time---often devices are in failure for hours. Second, a device\u27s behavior effects the amount of energy they can harvest---meaning small changes in tasks can drastically change harvester efficiency. Third, the programming interfaces of batteryless devices are ill-defined and non- intuitive; most developers have trouble anticipating the problems inherent with an intermittent power supply. Finally, the lack of community, and a standard usable hardware platform have reduced the resources and prototyping ability of the developer. In this dissertation we present solutions to these challenges in the form of a tool for repeatable and realistic experimentation called Ekho, a reconfigurable hardware platform named Flicker, and a language and runtime for timely execution of intermittent programs called Mayfly