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Title: Enhancing motivation to exercise for obese participants in exergames : testing partner characteristics as a moderator of the Kohler effect
Creator: Beckles, Joelle A.
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACTENHANCING MOTIVATION TO EXERCISE FOR OBESE PARTICIPANTS IN EXERGAMES: TESTING PARTNER CHARACTERISTICS AS A MODERATOR OF THE KÖHLER EFFECTByJoelle A Beckles This thesis examined the effects of playing an exergame that involved abdominal strength exercises (with a virtually-presented partner) on exercise motivational effort. Specifically, this research explored whether exercise duration could be increased using the Köhler motivation gain principles (based on the group dynamics...
Show moreABSTRACTENHANCING MOTIVATION TO EXERCISE FOR OBESE PARTICIPANTS IN EXERGAMES: TESTING PARTNER CHARACTERISTICS AS A MODERATOR OF THE KÖHLER EFFECTByJoelle A Beckles This thesis examined the effects of playing an exergame that involved abdominal strength exercises (with a virtually-presented partner) on exercise motivational effort. Specifically, this research explored whether exercise duration could be increased using the Köhler motivation gain principles (based on the group dynamics principles of upward social comparison and indispensability) with a lighter versus same weight virtually-presented partner in an obese community sample (BMI > 30). Participants were community adults (N = 35; Mage = 46; SD = 17.34 years) who completed the first block of three isometric abdominal exercises alone. After resting, participants completed the second block either alone (Control), with a lighter weight, or with a same weight partner. Partners were actually confederates recorded earlier and presented virtually as live, from another lab. Exercise persistence, self-efficacy beliefs, enjoyment, and perceived exertion were recorded. Results showed that mean persistence was greater for participants in the lighter weight condition (24.45 sec) than for those in the control condition (-9.92 sec), but not for participants in the similar weight condition (15.64 sec). There were no differences across conditions in self-efficacy, enjoyment, or perceived exertion.
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Title: Enhancing marketing innovation through marketing knowledge transfer : an investigation of strategic alliances
Creator: Hanvanich, Sangphet
Date: 2002
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Enhancing item pool utilization when designing multistage computerized adaptive tests
Creator: Yang, Lihong
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In recent years, the multistage adaptive test (MST) has gained increasing popularity in the field of educational measurement and operational testing. MST refers to a test in which pre-constructed sets of items are administered adaptively and are scored as a unit (Hendrickson, 2007). As a special case of Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT), a MST program needs the following components: an item response theory (IRT) model or non-IRT-based alternatives; an item pool design; module assembly;...
Show moreIn recent years, the multistage adaptive test (MST) has gained increasing popularity in the field of educational measurement and operational testing. MST refers to a test in which pre-constructed sets of items are administered adaptively and are scored as a unit (Hendrickson, 2007). As a special case of Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT), a MST program needs the following components: an item response theory (IRT) model or non-IRT-based alternatives; an item pool design; module assembly; ability estimation; routing algorithm; and scoring (Yan et al., 2014). A significant amount of research has been conducted on components like module assembly, ability estimation, routing and scoring, but few studies have addressed the component of item pool design. An item pool is defined as consisting of a maximal number of combinations of items that meet all content specifications for a test and provide sufficient item information for estimation at a series of ability levels (van der Linden et al., 2006). An item pool design is very important because any successful MST assembly is inseparable from an optimal item pool that provides sufficient and high-quality items (Luecht & Nungester, 1998). Reckase (2003, 2010) developed the p-optimality method to design optimal item pools using the unidimensional Rasch model in CAT, and it has been proved to be efficient for different item types and IRT models. The present study extended this method to MST context in supporting and developing different MST panel designs under different test configurations. The study compared the performance of the MST assembled under the most popularly studied panel designs in the literature, such as 1-2, 1-3, 1-2-2, and 1-2-3. A combination of short, medium and long tests with different routing test proportions were used to build up different tests. Using one of the most popularly investigated IRT models, the Rasch model, simulated optimal item pools were generated with and without practical constraints of exposure control. A total number of 72 optimal items pools were generated and the measurement accuracy was evaluated by an overall sample and conditional sample using various statistical measures. The p-optimality method was also applied in an operational MST licensure test to see if it is feasible in supporting test assembly and achieving sufficient measurement accuracy in practice. Results showed that the different MST panel designs achieved sufficient measurement accuracy by using the items from the optimal item pools built with the p-optimality method. The same was true with the operational item pool. Measurement accuracy was related to test length, but not so much to the routing test proportions. Exposure control affected the item pool size, but the distributions of the item parameters and item pool characteristics for all the MST panel designs were similar under the two conditions. The item pool sizes under the exposure control conditions were several times larger than those under no exposure control, depending on the types of MST panel designs and routing test proportions. The results from this study provide information for how to enhance item pool utilization when designing multistage computerized adaptive tests, facilitating the MST assembly process, and improving the scoring accuracy.
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Title: Enhancing innovation capability through successful inter-firm collaborations : two essays on R & D alliances
Creator: Xu, Shichun
Date: 2007
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Enhancing high-gain-observer performance in the presence of measurement noise
Creator: Ball, Alexis A.
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: High-gain observers are a prevalent and an important topic in state estimation and output feedback control of nonlinear systems. In the absence of measurement noise, this technique robustly estimates the derivatives of the output while achieving fast convergence. Moreover, for a sufficiently fast observer and a globally bounded controller, the high-gain observer is able to recover the system performance achieved under state feedback control.However, in the presence of measurement noise, a...
Show moreHigh-gain observers are a prevalent and an important topic in state estimation and output feedback control of nonlinear systems. In the absence of measurement noise, this technique robustly estimates the derivatives of the output while achieving fast convergence. Moreover, for a sufficiently fast observer and a globally bounded controller, the high-gain observer is able to recover the system performance achieved under state feedback control.However, in the presence of measurement noise, a tradeoff exists between the measurement noise sensitivity and the speed of state reconstruction. As the observer gain is increased, the bandwidth of the observer is extended. As the bandwidth increases, the high-gain observer asymptotically approaches the behavior of a differentiator,exacerbating the presence of measurement noise.This dissertation addresses the challenging performance issues that arise when implementing high-gain observers in the presence of measurement noise. In particular, we focus on the tradeoff between fast state reconstruction, minimizing the bound on the steady-state estimation error, and rejecting the model uncertainty. The observerdesign and analysis is approached through three major thrust areas: observer structure, tracking performance and filtering.
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Title: Enhancing graphical literacy skills in the high school science classroom via authentic, intensive data collection and graphical representation exposure
Creator: Palmeri, Anthony
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACTENHANCING GRAPHICAL LITERACY SKILLS IN THE HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE CLASSROOM VIA AUTHENTIC, INTENSIVE DATA COLLECTION AND GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATION EXPOSUREByAnthony Palmeri This research project was developed to provide extensive practice and exposure to data collection and data representation in a high school science classroom. The student population engaged in this study included 40 high school sophomores enrolled in two microbiology classes. Laboratory investigations and activities...
Show moreABSTRACTENHANCING GRAPHICAL LITERACY SKILLS IN THE HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE CLASSROOM VIA AUTHENTIC, INTENSIVE DATA COLLECTION AND GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATION EXPOSUREByAnthony Palmeri This research project was developed to provide extensive practice and exposure to data collection and data representation in a high school science classroom. The student population engaged in this study included 40 high school sophomores enrolled in two microbiology classes. Laboratory investigations and activities were deliberately designed to include quantitative data collection that necessitated organization and graphical representation. These activities were embedded into the curriculum and conducted in conjunction with the normal and expected course content, rather than as a separate entity. It was expected that routine practice with graph construction and interpretation would result in improved competency when graphing data and proficiency in analyzing graphs. To objectively test the effectiveness in achieving this goal, a pre-test and post-test that included graph construction, interpretation, interpolation, extrapolation, and analysis was administered. Based on the results of a paired T-Test, graphical literacy was significantly enhanced by extensive practice and exposure to data representation.
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Title: Enhancing firm innovation performance through strategic management of new product development
Creator: Zhao, Yushan
Date: 2001
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Enhancing equity in the midst of drought : the Botswana approach
Creator: Holm, John D., 1938-
Date: 1988
Collection: Journal of Social Development in Africa
Description: In Africa the typical social consequence of drought is an accordion effect in which wealth and income shrink drastically. The poor suffer most severely as their mortality rate rises. Their plight then prompts dramatic increases in international aid. Moving this relief to those in need, however, is usually extremely slow, as indigenous elites and the head of the aid organisations struggle over their relative roles in decision-making. This article examines how a veritable welfare state has...
Show moreIn Africa the typical social consequence of drought is an accordion effect in which wealth and income shrink drastically. The poor suffer most severely as their mortality rate rises. Their plight then prompts dramatic increases in international aid. Moving this relief to those in need, however, is usually extremely slow, as indigenous elites and the head of the aid organisations struggle over their relative roles in decision-making. This article examines how a veritable welfare state has emerged from one of Botswana's most severe droughts and why this deviation from the typical African syndrome has taken place.
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Title: Enhancing e-commerce performance : product return and online customer review perspectives
Creator: Zhang, Yufei
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "E-commerce has grown to become one of the most commonly used shopping channels by customers and firms, especially in the retail sector. However, e-commerce faces critical challenges, such as high product return rates and struggles to optimize the effectiveness of marketing mix. My dissertation uses two essays to tackle the above two challenges in an effort to enhance the performance of e-commerce. Essay 1, via two studies, examines the antecedents and consequences of product returns in e...
Show more"E-commerce has grown to become one of the most commonly used shopping channels by customers and firms, especially in the retail sector. However, e-commerce faces critical challenges, such as high product return rates and struggles to optimize the effectiveness of marketing mix. My dissertation uses two essays to tackle the above two challenges in an effort to enhance the performance of e-commerce. Essay 1, via two studies, examines the antecedents and consequences of product returns in e-commerce from the perspectives of channel coordination (coordinating mobile channels and traditional online channels) and customer learning. Study 1, analyzing two large-scale transaction-level datasets from two companies in different categories indicates that the use of the mobile channel can lessen e-commerce return rates, especially for highly promoted products, but increase the return rates of high-priced products, compared to traditional online channel use. Study 2 finds that for product categories requiring much (little) learning from customers, return experiences reduce (enhance) customers' future purchases. As a result, this essay offers actionable channel coordination strategies to firms by analyzing why people return their online purchases and what roles the channels play in driving returns. In this process, we offer answers to questions such as what products ought to be presented on what channels, to manage returns more efficiently. More importantly, this essay also brings attention to managers that they need to understand the nature of returns objectively; namely, returns can be good or bad and that they are better off in applying the corresponding strategies to cope with their returns. Essay 2 aims to enhance marketing efforts' effectiveness by leveraging online customer reviews (OCRs) in e-commerce. Drawing on anchor and adjustment theory, and using two studies via differing research methods, we propose that the relationships between OCRs and marketing efforts are dynamic and non-linear, which helps capture the complexity of consumers' decision making. Study 1 develops an information-varying effect model to depict the dynamic and non-linear relationships between OCR volume and a company's 4Ps marketing efforts in influencing product sales. Study 2 uncovers why the impacts of companies' marketing efforts vary over levels of OCRs using a lab experiment. Briefly, the findings show that the impact of a price discount is positive, with a diminishing trend as OCR volume increases, to the extent that at medium and high volumes of OCR, discounts no longer impact customer confidence, which ultimately drives purchase intentions. In conclusion, essay 2 provides the most holistic insight into how a wide range of marketing tactics can impact sales in the presence of customer reviews. These results demonstrate not only significant contingencies on the effectiveness of marketing efforts on consumer spending but a comprehension of why the influences of marketing efforts are reduced as OCR availability increases. Neither of these aspects have been captured in prior research on OCRs. The consequence is that managers should not develop strategies based on static models but should dynamically update marketing allocations as more OCR information becomes available."--Pages ii-iii.
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Title: Enhancing characterization of the decision-making architecture of parents responsible for the vaccination status of their school-aged children : exploring the epidemiological utility of assessing healthism, trust, and social identity in northern lower ...
Creator: Dutkiewicz, Daniel Gene, II
Date: 2020
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Decision-making characteristics of heterogeneous subgroups of parents have been defined by parental levels of trust in medical authorities and healthism (or heath agency) expressed in medical encounters. Integrating social identity constructs into this framework can clarify how vaccination-related inconvenience can nudge parents with low healthism/low trust decision-making orientations (for simplicity's sake, these parents are labeled here as "agnostics") toward vaccination; how conventional ...
Show moreDecision-making characteristics of heterogeneous subgroups of parents have been defined by parental levels of trust in medical authorities and healthism (or heath agency) expressed in medical encounters. Integrating social identity constructs into this framework can clarify how vaccination-related inconvenience can nudge parents with low healthism/low trust decision-making orientations (for simplicity's sake, these parents are labeled here as "agnostics") toward vaccination; how conventional (vaccine) waiver education can provoke social identity threat in parents with high healthism/low trust decision-making orientations (more simply labeled here as "activists"); and how new interventions can be developed to reduce bias and increase trust between activist parents who file waivers for their school-aged children and public health professionals. This study investigated 3 primary hypotheses: 1) A mini assessment based on healthism/trust measures could accurately classify activist and agnostic parents; 2) Activist parents, compared to agnostic parents, excel at promoting healthier non-vaccination related behaviors in their school-aged children; and 3) Activist parents, compared to agnostic parents, exhibit greater sensitivity to the role of social encouragement and support, but less sensitivity to vaccination-related inconvenience. This study employed a cross-sectional design. Parents were recruited from two health departments in northern lower Michigan with elevated waiver rates, and the final study sample was comprised of 26 parents who fully vaccinated their child entering 7th grade and 25 parents who filed waivers for their child entering 7th grade. Parents completed survey questions about healthy behaviors and the role of trust, healthism, inconvenience, and social encouragement/support in their vaccination-related decision making. In unadjusted analyses, activist parents, compared to the fully vaccinating parents, exhibited significantly higher mean healthy behavior scores (65.17 v. 62.54; p-value = 0.101) and higher mean scores on a sub-scale that indicated higher physical activity (16.68 v. 15.42; p-value = 0.07). However, in adjusted analyses, these associations disappeared; male parents remained significantly associated with lower healthy behavior scores (p-value = 0.0084) and lower physical activity sub-scores (p-value = 0.0510). In adjusted and unadjusted analyses, the fully vaccinating parents, compared to the activist parents, exhibited significantly higher mean scores on several inconvenience sensitivity measures and on the social encouragement sensitivity measure (which is a surprise finding). To reduce bias and increase trust between activist parents and waiver educators in Michigan, consideration should be given to better aligning mandatory waiver education with social identity theory, which can be accomplished by more systematically inducing a common ingroup identity based on "playing on the same team." In addition, to avoid inadvertently provoking stereotype threat for female activist parents and to improve intergroup relations, waiver educators could adopt a new messaging strategy that affirms the unique subgroup identity of female activist parents, which can be accomplished by emphasizing that female activist and female fully-vaccinating parents, compared to their male counterparts, appear to excel at promoting non vaccination-related health behaviors in their school-aged children.
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Title: Enhancing automated fault discovery and analysis
Creator: DeMott, Jared
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Creating quality software is difficult. Likewise, offensive researchers look to penetrate quality software. Both parties benefit from a scalable bug hunting framework. Once bugs are found, an equally expensive task is debugging. To debug faults, analysts must identify statements involved in the failures and select suspicious code regions that might contain the fault. Traditionally, this tedious task is performed manually. An automated technique to locate the true source of the failure is...
Show moreCreating quality software is difficult. Likewise, offensive researchers look to penetrate quality software. Both parties benefit from a scalable bug hunting framework. Once bugs are found, an equally expensive task is debugging. To debug faults, analysts must identify statements involved in the failures and select suspicious code regions that might contain the fault. Traditionally, this tedious task is performed manually. An automated technique to locate the true source of the failure is called fault localization. The thesis of this research is that an automated process to find software bugs and quickly localize the root cause of the failure is possible by improving upon existing techniques. This research is most interested in bugs that lead to security vulnerabilities. These bugs are high value to offensive researchers, and to the typical software test engineer. In particular, memory corruption bugs characterized via an application crash is the subset of all bugs focused on in this work. Existing distributed testing frameworks do not integrate with fault localization tools. Also, existing fault localization tools fail to localize certain difficult bugs. The overall goal of this research is to: (1) Build a dynamic testing framework powerful enough to find new bugs in commercial software. (2) Integrate an existing fault localization technique into the framework that can operate on code without the requirement of having the source code or pre-generated test cases. (3) Create a novel fault localization algorithm that better operates on difficult to localize flaws. (4) Test the improvement on benchmark and real-world code. Those objectives were achieved and empirical studies were conducted to verify the goals of this research. The constructed distributed bug hunting and analysis platform is called ClusterFuzz. The enhanced fault localization process is called Execution Mining. Test results show the novel fault localization algorithm to be an important improvement, and to be more effective than prior approaches. This research also achieved ancillary goals: visualizing fault localization in a new environment; assembly basic blocks for fully compiled code. A pipeline approach to finding and categorizing bugs paves the way for future work in the areas of automated vulnerability discovery, triage, and exploitation.
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Title: Enhancing achievement through intervention : how conscientiousness and cognitive ability impact responses to goal setting and implementation intentions interventions
Creator: Corker, Katherine S.
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Developing effective educational interventions is an important goal for educators and researchers alike. Previous research has found associations between performance in academic settings and characteristics such as Conscientiousness and cognitive ability. However, these dispositional characteristics tend to be stable and might be difficult to influence without considerable effort. The current research therefore investigated the efficacy of two interventions that attempted to influence lower...
Show moreDeveloping effective educational interventions is an important goal for educators and researchers alike. Previous research has found associations between performance in academic settings and characteristics such as Conscientiousness and cognitive ability. However, these dispositional characteristics tend to be stable and might be difficult to influence without considerable effort. The current research therefore investigated the efficacy of two interventions that attempted to influence lower level constructs that are closer to the performance outcomes. Studies 1a and 1b tested an implementation intentions intervention in two samples (participants at a large Midwestern university and Mechanical Turk workers). The results of these studies showed that merely reminding students to complete their homework was more effective at inducing homework completion than reminding participants to complete it while also having them set implementation intentions to do so. Study 2 tested a boundary goal setting intervention that asked participants to raise their lower boundaries for success in their introductory psychology class, either in conjunction with an implementation intention or not. The results of Study 2 found little indication that raising boundary goals impacted performance in the course independent of the level at which the goals were initially set. Furthermore, setting implementation intentions actually decreased performance levels. There was little evidence that either Conscientiousness or cognitive ability moderated reactions to the interventions across all studies. Overall, the results of the two studies suggest that interventions that attempt to influence lower level variables such as strategies and goals have promise for promoting achievement in academic contexts. The results add to the literature on the effectiveness of reminders for helping to overcome barriers to the initiation of goal-directed behavior.
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Title: Enhancer and middle T control of age- and organ-specific polyomavirus replication in the mouse
Creator: Martin, Larry Gregory
Date: 1994
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Enhancement of the cracking resistance and toughness characteristics of concrete with recycled synthetic inclusion
Creator: Eldarwish, Aly I.
Date: 1994
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Enhancement of soil aggregation by the combined influences of soil wetting and drying and root-microbial associations
Creator: Sissoko, Fagaye
Date: 1997
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Enhancement of site specific anaerobic reductive dechlorination of polychlorinated biphenyls
Creator: Zwiernik, Matthew John
Date: 1998
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Enhancement of recombinant adenovirus vector vaccine efficacy by innate immune modulation
Creator: Quiroga, Dionisia Marie
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In the field of vaccine development, there is a clear need for novel, effective platforms and adjuvants that can elicit robust, multifaceted adaptive immune responses to antigenic targets. Unfortunately, many methods investigated thus far are either too toxic or too weak to induce a substantial response against difficult targets, such as tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) or antigens from highly-mutagenic pathogens. In this dissertation, we explore the use of recombinant adenovirus serotype 5 ...
Show moreIn the field of vaccine development, there is a clear need for novel, effective platforms and adjuvants that can elicit robust, multifaceted adaptive immune responses to antigenic targets. Unfortunately, many methods investigated thus far are either too toxic or too weak to induce a substantial response against difficult targets, such as tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) or antigens from highly-mutagenic pathogens. In this dissertation, we explore the use of recombinant adenovirus serotype 5 (rAd5) platforms as vaccine vectors and the ability of innate immunostimulants to act as concurrently-administered adjuvants. First, we investigated how different variations of rAd5 vectors may promote altered innate immune signaling, and downstream, improved transgene memory responses. rAd5 vectors are strong vaccine candidates due to their intrinsic immunogenicity and potent transgene expression, however, widespread pre-existing Ad5 immunity has been considered a developmental barrier to the use of traditional, first-generation (Ad5[E1-]) vectors. Recently published studies have revealed that additionally E2b-deleted rAd5 (Ad5[E1-,E2b-]) vectors circumvent anti-Ad5 immunity to induce stronger transgene-specific memory responses than Ad5[E1-] vectors, yet it is unknown why these vector differences exist. Therefore, we decided to compare Ad5[E1-] and Ad5[E1-,E2b-] vector-induced innate immune responses by using human peripheral mononuclear cell (hPBMC) samples from multiple donors. We found that Ad5[E1-,E2b-] vectors trigger higher levels of pro-inflammatory cytokine secretion and Th1-dominant gene expression; yet lowered amounts of Ad viral-derived gene expression, independent of the donors' pre-existing anti-Ad5 adaptive responses. These results suggest that Ad5[E1-,E2b-], in contrast to Ad5[E1-], vaccines do not promote activities that suppress innate immune signaling, revealing a novel way they may produce superior efficacy and safety profiles, regardless of previous Ad5 immunity.Next, we investigated if and how a recombinant profilin-like immunostimulant derived from the Eimeria tenella protozoan (rEA) may promote innate immunity during rAd5-mediated vaccination. Upon finding that rEA could trigger activation of multiple types of hematopoietic immune cells in a MyD88-dependent, but TRIF-inhibitory, manner; we created a rAd5 vector expressing rEA to test its ability to enhance CMI responses against co-injected vaccine targets. rEA is an attractive vaccine candidate due to previous clinical investigations showing it to be a safe, immunogenic agent with the ability to trigger Th1-predominant responses in vivo. Subsequently, we investigated if an rEA-expressing rAd5 (rAd5-rEA) could promote and/or alter cytotoxic memory responses towards CEA, a colorectal cancer-related TAA. We found that the addition of rAd5-rEA to an Ad-based CEA vaccine (rAd5-CEA) induced a dose-dependent increase in the potency of anti-CEA T cell and B cell responses, elevated the number of CMI- and IgG-recognized CEA-specific epitopes, and enhanced in vivo CEA-targeted cell killing, suggesting that co-injection of rAd5-rEA with a TAA-directed vaccine can substantially boost and broaden the TAA-specific memory response. Finally, we briefly discuss the use of an rAd5 expressing endoplasmic reticulum aminopeptidase 1 (ERAP1) and how different polymorphisms of this gene may promote innate immune and cellular stress signaling. Overall, these dissertation findings address how best the features of rAd5-based vectors can be utilized as vaccine models and how modulation of innate immunity can be used to direct and foster vaccine-promoting long-term memory responses.
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