The specific problem confronted by this dissertation research is this: Do college students who are quite decided about their vocational choices have more developed and implemented self-concepts than do college students who are quite undecided about their vocational choices? If the decided students have more developed and implemented self-concepts than the undecided students, it can be logically reasoned that the developing and implementing of the self-concept is essential in the vocational choice process of college students. The purpose of this study is to resolve the problem concerning the possible self-conceptual differences between highly decided and highly undecided college students.

In large-scale civil structures, a limited number of sensors are placed to monitor the health of civil structures to reduce maintenance, communication and energy costs. In this thesis, the problem of optimal sensor location placement to infer the health of civil structures is explored. First, a comparative study of approaches from the fields of control engineering and civil engineering is conducted . The widely used civil engineering approaches such as effective independence (EI) and modal assurance criterion (MAC) have limitations because of the negligence of modes and damping parameters. On the other hand, control engineering approaches consider the entire system dynamics using impulse response-type sensor measurement data. Such inference can be formulated as an estimation problem, with the dynamics formulated as a second-order differential equation. The comparative study suggests that damping dynamics play significant impact to the selection of best sensor location---the civil engineering approaches that neglect the damping dynamics lead to very different sensor locations from those of the control engineering approaches. In the second part of the thesis, an initial attempt to directly connect the topological graph of the structure (that defines the damping and stiffness matrices) and the second-order dynamics is conducted.

Weekly African-American newspaper from Colorado Springs, Colorado that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.

Weekly African-American newspaper from Denver, Colorado that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.

Weekly African-American newspaper from Colorado Springs, Colorado that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.