The major purpose of this study was to determine if there was
relationship between the power of the influence techniques used by
teacher in a nursery school setting and the response of the children
to these techniques.
The subjects were sixteen nursery school children and two
trained nursery school teachers...
Pattern recognition techniques and their application to a
consumer behavior study are presented. The Local Majority Method
(LOMAME) utilizes a set of prototypes and corrective factors which
undergo a training cycle before being utilized as pattern classifiers.
Its advantages over the Minimum-Distance Method and the Fix
and Hodges Method are...
As program participants integrate new knowledge and understanding into previous standards regarding attitudes or perceptions, these altered standards violate the assumption of consistency inherent to the pretest-posttest method for measuring change over time. If this violation, or response-shift bias, is not controlled results can be misleading, which carries serious implications...
This paper presents an empirical approach for measuring and characterizing the responsiveness of a character to changes in goal. Our approach is based on keeping track of the character's progress towards a frequently changing goal. A "distance-to-goal" function is defined to measure the progress. We then calculate an asymptotic proportion...
In this dissertation, we present a user-in-the-loop method for the design of an interactive motion data structure that benefits from the advantages of both motion graphs and blend-based techniques. Our novel approach automatically analyzes a traditional motion graph built from labeled motion clips. The result is a more condensed, coarser...
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been reported to have motor skill delays and deficits. However, there have been challenges to these findings on whether these deficits are due to lack of movement skills or inaccurate assessment methods. Due to relative strengths in processing visual stimuli as opposed to...
The development of problem-solving behaviors in canines, including persistence, has implications for canine training, welfare, and the human-dog bond. Past research has shown that a variety of factors, including genetics (domestication) and training experience, play a role in a how a canine might behave during a problem-solving task. Less well...
The present study explored the effects of intranasal oxytocin (OT), a naturally occurring hormone, on the behavior of pet dogs in an attachment test. Each dog participated in two testing sessions. On one visit saline was administered nasally and on another OT was administered nasally. Condition order was counterbalanced. Following...
One of the least studied areas of Information Foraging Theory
is diet: the information foragers choose to seek. For
example, do foragers choose solely based on cost, or do
they stubbornly pursue certain diets regardless of cost? Do
their debugging strategies vary with their diets? To investigate
"what" and "how"...
Full dynamic control of physically simulated characters is the holy grail of video
games and other interactive applications. Recent advances in the field have
presented controllers that can handle the balance and fall response after a
collision. This thesis addresses the development of a controller that handles the
response before...
Calcium is important to bone health as well as related to a number of health problems such as osteoporosis, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers. Calcium intake level was far below the Dietary Reference Intake and dairy product consumption was inconsistent with the Daily Dietary Guidelines among adolescents in Taiwan...
Shorebirds display great variation in mating systems and breed in dynamic environments that are increasingly subject to human threats worldwide. In order to adequately assess productivity and demography of shorebird populations, it is important to understand factors that influence patterns of parental care and reproductive success. The Black Oystercatcher (Haematopus...
I measured responses of free-ranging Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus elaphus) to recreational disturbance at Starkey Experimental Forest and Range, Oregon from April to October, 2003 and 2004. Resting, feeding, and travel activities of 13 cow elk were recorded at 5-minute intervals using Actiwatch™ motion sensors. Elk were subjected to four...
The California brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis californicus) is listed as an endangered species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The Recovery Plan for this subspecies outlines the need to "Assure long-term protection of adequate food supplies and essential. . .roosting. . . habitat throughout the range." I investigated the effects...
Jordan has a higher fertility rate (3.8) than the averages of countries similar in income to Jordan (2.2) and compared to the Middle East and North Africa region as a whole (2.8) (WHO, WB, UNICEF, & DHS, 2011). The findings of the 2009 Jordanian Population and Family Health Survey demonstrated...