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The status of emergency and disaster management (EDM) as an academic and professional discipline remains one of the field’s lingering, unresolved questions. A majority of the literature appears to support the claim that emergency management either is, or is in the process of becoming, a recognized academic and professional discipline. The claim’s key belief is that the field possesses a unique body of knowledge, an essential conceptual requirement for disciplinary status. This thesis examines the concept of professional/academic disciplines, as it relates to bodies of knowledge, and more speci...

Adaptive optics (AO) corrects distortions created by atmospheric turbulence and delivers diffraction-limited images on ground-based telescopes. The vastly improved spatial resolution and sensitivity has been utilized for studying everything from the magnetic fields of sunspots upto the internal dynamics of high-redshift galaxies. This thesis about AO science from small and large telescopes is divided into two parts: Robo-AO and magnetar kinematics. In the first part, I discuss the construction and performance of the world’s first fully autonomous visible light AO system, Robo-AO, at the Pal...

Generally, construction of dams is regarded as means of economic progress in many countries. However, major consequences of such projects are the inundation of upstream areas and the resettlement of entire communities in newly built environments where they experience dramatic transformation in their lifestyles. The present study takes the Nubian resettlement experience after the creation of Lake Nasser that submerged their old settlements, along the river Nile. Following their resettlement, the design of the newly-built environment disrupted the Nubian traditional lifestyles and patterns of...

The present study investigated differences on the knowledge and use of collocations between French and Japanese learners with regard to: 1) L1 influence; and 2) combinability and transparency influence. The test materials included four categories of the lexical collocations: 1) verb + noun; 2) delexicalised verb + noun; 3) adjective + noun; and 4) adverb + adjective. The two types of tasks, Multiple Choice Question Tasks and Translation Tasks, were performed, and the learner corpora were also investigated in order to examine whether the learners from different L1 backgrounds demonstrate differ...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential for increasing informal music-making in elementary school culture, and create a model of such music-making. Precedence for this model can be found in the literature of ethnomusicology, educational psychology and learning theory, multicultural music education, and cultural anthropology. Literature from four distinct traditions and contexts of music-making in integrative sociocultural contexts—sub-Saharan African ngoma, and Community Music as manifested in New Orleans second lines, old-time music and dance, and summer camp music-making—w...

This dissertation compares the learning environment of elite military academies in the U.S. and Malaysia, namely the United States Military Academy, New York (West Point) and the Military Academy of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur (MAM). The dissertation began as an investigation of the place of e-learning and simulation technologies in educating future military officers. It was assumed that as modern technologies for war and defence have changed, so too must the military academies accommodate to that – especially in producing the right kind of officers who will lead the defence of the nation. Research...

In 2005, Palla & Baraffe proposed that brown dwarfs and very low mass stars (less than 0.1 solar masses) may be unstable to radial oscillations during the pre-main-sequence deuterium burning phase. With associated oscillation periods of 1-4 hours, this potentially new class of pulsation offers unprecedented opportunities to probe the interiors and evolution of low-mass objects in the 1-15 million year age range. Furthermore, several previous reports of short-period variability have suggested that deuterium-burning pulsation is in fact at work in young clusters. For my dissertation, I develo...

Juvenile firesetting is a complex and dangerous problem. According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) between 2005 and 2009 juvenile firesetters were responsible on average for 56,300 fires annually and, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, over the past twenty years more than half of juvenile arrests have been for arson. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Juvenile Firesetter Intervention Handbook provides risk assessment tools to assess future firesetting involvement. The fire service, because of its role in fire suppression and investigation, is oft...

One of the most important jobs of a project manager is to manage a project’s budget and schedule. These tasks can easily be very difficult to accomplish on projects that are complex, especially since successful project execution relies heavily on people who are expected to perform their roles individually and as a team. One of the most difficult aspects of managing projects is estimating how fast and effectively humans will perform a task; that is, determining how productive workers collectively will be each day, each week, or within any time period during the life of a project. Because projec...

The first generation of children growing up in the 1980s and 1990s with the official diagnosis of ADHD is now completing college and entering the workforce, yet few qualitative research studies examine the experiences of these young adults as they leave the safety of family homes or educational institutions. This study addresses the research question: What are some of the challenging work experiences as described by young adults with ADHD in a structured work environment? Young adults, ages 22- to 28-years-old, from across the USA were interviewed to examine, qualitatively, the types of challe...