| The paper presents two hierarchies of canonical AND/EXOR trees, forms and decision diagrams. The rst hierarchy generalizes the Kronecker and Generalized Kronecker representations by introducing new canonical AND/EXOR forms. We propose to call all these new forms and future AND/EXOR forms including KRO and GRM, the Zhegalkin forms 42] to honor the Russian scientist who in 1927 discovered the f...

The objective of this study was to assess differential item functioning (DIF) for passage-based reading testlets across two gender groups using five procedures and then to compare the results across the procedures. The five procedures were: (1) polytomous logistic regression (PLR; Zumbo, 1999), (2) graded response model (GRM; Samejima, 1969, 1997), (3) Mantel-Haenszel (MH; Zwick, Donoghue, & Gr...

Invasive lobular breast cancer (ILC) is an understudied malignancy with distinct clinical, pathological, and molecular features that distinguish it from the more common invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC). Mounting evidence suggests that estrogen receptor-alpha positive (ER+) ILC has a poor response to Tamoxifen (TAM), but the mechanistic drivers of this are undefined. In the current work, we compr...

In the context of the TIMS project, a rapid-prototyping environment for TMN-systems is under development. The information modeling falicility is based on a fully object oriented framework (GDMO / ASN.1 support) extended with relationships (GRM support). Managed Object behaviors are specified thanks to the Behavior Language (BL), which enables both imperative and declarative specifications, in t...

Application monitoring in the grid for parallel applications is hardly supported in recent grid infrastructures. There is a need to visualize the behavior of the program during its execution and to analyze its performance. In this paper the GRM application monitoring tool, the Mercury resource and job monitoring infrastructure and the combination of the two as a grid monitoring tool-set for mes...

Ryegrass single plants, bi-parental family pools, and multi-parental family pools are often genotyped, based on allele-frequencies using genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) assays. GBS assays can be performed at low-coverage depth to reduce costs. However, reducing the coverage depth leads to a higher proportion of missing data, and leads to a reduction in accuracy when identifying the allele-freque...

Water scarcity, inappropriate sanitation and wastewater pollution are critically important global issues. Greywater is a sustainable water source for recycling, so this thesis examined simple, robust, low-cost alternatives for on-site treatment of greywater to irrigation water quality. Laboratory-scale pine bark, activated charcoal and sand filters were evaluated as regards their pollutant remo...

In the local breeds with small population size, one of the most important problems is the increase of inbreeding coefficient (F). High levels of inbreeding lead to reduced genetic diversity and inbreeding depression. The availability of high-density single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays has facilitated the quantification of F by genomic markers in farm animals. Runs of homozygosity (ROH) ...