User's guide: Nimbus-7 Earth radiation budget narrow-field-of-view products. Scene radiance tape products, sorting into angular bins products, and maximum likelihood cloud estimation products

The archived Earth radiation budget (ERB) products produced from the Nimbus-7 ERB narrow field-of-view scanner are described. The principal products are broadband outgoing longwave radiation (4.5 to 50 microns), reflected solar radiation (0.2 to 4.8 microns), and the net radiation. Daily and monthly averages are presented on a fixed global equal area (500 sq km), grid for the period May 1979 to May 1980. Two independent algorithms are used to estimate the outgoing fluxes from the observed radiances. The algorithms are described and the results compared. The products are divided into three subsets: the Scene Radiance Tapes (SRT) contain the calibrated radiances; the Sorting into Angular Bins (SAB) tape contains the SAB produced shortwave, longwave, and net radiation products; and the Maximum Likelihood Cloud Estimation (MLCE) tapes contain the MLCE products. The tape formats are described in detail

The Effects of a Systematic Tier 2 Intervention on Kindergartners\u27 Dibels Benchmarks

This study investigated the effects of teaching prescriptive and teacher-guided decoding lessons to kindergarten students in need of Tier 2 interventions in the Georgia Response to Intervention protocol based on DIBELS curriculum-based measurements. A causal-comparative design was used to examine spring 2018 DIBELS benchmarks scores of kindergarten students in a large rural school district in northwest Georgia. Students in the treatment group received Tier 2 intervention following a newer curricula termed Differentiated Reading Instruction (DRI) from the manual How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction (2017). Students in the control group received a similar commercially-based intervention. The curriculum-based measurement, DIBELS, served as the assessment for the research study. A one-way MANOVA was initiated to analyze archival data from spring 2018 DIBELS benchmark scores. The analysis indicated that there was not a statistically significant difference between the scores of the students in the linear combination of the dependent variables based on the scores of students who participated in the treatment compared to the control group. Therefore, the researcher failed to reject the null hypothesis. Limitations, implications, and further suggestions for research are considered

Design of an Integrated Silicon Carbide Nonlinear-carrier PWM Controller for Boost Converter Applications

Power electronics consisting of a switch mode power supply with feedback control have a great number of applications, including many that require extreme environment capability, such as the aerospace and automotive industries. Silicon carbide (SiC) is a common material in which power devices are created for use in switch mode power supplies, such as boost converters, giving those power supplies extremely high temperature capabilities. To truly realize the temperature capabilities of SiC in power supplies, an integrated SiC converter has been designed that is also high-temperature capable. Herein, the properties of SiC integrate circuit (IC) processes are discussed and nonlinear-carrier (NLC) control is proposed as a controller topology that can work within the design challenges presented by SiC. A boost converter with an NLC controller is demonstrated in simulation with circuit blocks built entirely from SiC IC models

Turning Adversaries into Partners: Lessons from the Columbia, the Mekong, and International Rivers Between Nepal and India [abstract]

2 pages

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationDemographic factors influence the intensity and duration of conflicts and collective violence is more common where there are high numbers of young men to older men, and where there are more marriageable men to women. The notion that young, unmarried men are more likely than other cohorts to be unattached risk-takers explains these findings. This dissertation investigates whether these same demographic factors increase the likelihood a country will produce suicide attackers. Information on individual attackers was assembled from three earlier studies and corroborated using LexisNexis searches of major world news publications. Personal information, including age, sex, and country of origin, was collected for 1,208 individual suicide attackers who acted between 1981 and 2007. This information was then used to create a second dataset to make comparisons between countries and regions that produced suicide attackers and those that did not. Thirty-three of the 219 countries and regions analyzed produced suicide attackers, and those that did had higher numbers of marriageable men to women, higher polygyny rates, higher percentages of Muslims in their populations, and larger populations overall. Counter to the hypothesis, countries with higher numbers of young men to old were less likely to produce suicide attackers. It may be that the older men in polygynous societies create an even greater scarcity of marriageable women, making it more difficult for young men to marry. Faced with relatively few reproductive and perhaps other alternatives, these young men are more prone to become suicide attackers