Background: Educational centers have higher standards for controlling noise pollution as it has been shown that noise pollution is a major cause of discomfort for teachers and students. Noise pollution reduces concentration, interferes in the conversation, and leads to dropouts and lower grades especially in mathematics. The present study aimed to evaluate noise pollution in the schools ...

The dynamics of power distribution between longitudinal modes of a multimode semiconductor laser subjected to external optical feedback is experimentally analyzed in the low-frequency fluctuation regime. Power dropouts in the total light intensity are invariably accompanied by sudden activations of several longitudinal modes. These activations are seen not to be simultaneous to the dropouts, bu...

In this study, I used a life-table approach to estimate how much hypothetical reductions in pregnancy-related dropouts would help close the gender gap in educational attainment. Using the schooling histories of 6,686 pupils, I partitioned Cameroon's gender gap in education into "pregnancy-related" and "non-pregnancy-related" components and simulated the impact of reductions in pregnancy-related...

Program graduation, even after controlling for length of stay, may predict for improved outcomes in some substance abuse treatment settings. We investigated the role of program graduation by comparing social outcomes and inpatient utilization the years before and after treatment among graduates and dropouts of a Veterans Administration substance abuse intensive outpatient program. At enrollment...

People who drop out of high school fare worse in many aspects of life. We analyze the relationship between dropping out of high school and the probability of contracting a sexually transmitted infection (STI). Previous studies on the relationship between dropout status and sexual outcomes have not empirically addressed unobserved heterogeneity at the individual level. Using fixed effects estima...

This paper considers the problem of H∞ state feedback control for networked nonlinear systems under unreliable communication links with packet dropouts. The nonlinear plant in this paper is described by a Takagi–Sugeno (T–S) fuzzy model. The packet dropouts in both sensor-to-controller (S/C) and controller-to-actuator (C/A) channels are considered, which are modeled by Bernoulli processes. A ne...

This study examined the relationship between communication patterns and retention among families (n=18) receiving family therapy. Those that attended 12 sessions were labeled completers (n=6), 4-8 sessions were middle dropouts (n=6), and 1-3 sessions were early dropouts (n=6). Audiotape recordings of the first therapy session were transcribed. The content (positive or negative) and total percen...

We study the dynamics of a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser operating near threshold and with isotropic optical feedback, using a model developed by San Miguel, Feng, and Moloney @Phys. Rev. A 52, 1728 ~1995!#. The model couples the polarization state of the electric field to the semiconductor medium by including the magnetic sublevels of the conduction and valence bands in the quantum we...

We investigate a networked control architecture for LTI plant models with a scalar input. Communication from controller to actuator is over an unreliable network which introduces packet dropouts. To achieve robustness against dropouts, we adopt a packetized predictive control paradigm wherein each control packet transmitted contains tentative future plant input values. The novelty of our approa...