2003 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost I would like to thank Dr. Steve Detweiler, Professor of Physics at the University of Florida, who was my advisor during my graduate studies. He has always been very supportive of my work, very willing to help and extremely patient with me. I feel very lucky to have worked with him during the past 5 years. I would also like to thank Dr. Bernard Whiting for...

Feel lonely? What about reading books? Book is one of the greatest friends to accompany while in your lonely time. When you have no friends and activities somewhere and sometimes, reading book can be a great choice. This is not only for spending the time, it will increase the knowledge. Of course the b=benefits to take will relate to what kind of book that you are reading. And now, we will conc...

We present two redesigns to robustify backstepping control laws against dynamic uncertainties at the input of the plant. In the first redesign we construct a passivating control law from a CLF obtained by backstepping. The second redesign is a simplification of the first, useful for high order systems. We also compare the stability margins of the two main versions of backstepping: cancelation a...

The ease of Android applications repackaging and proliferation of application clones in Google Play and other markets call for new effective techniques to detect repackaged code and combat distribution of cloned applications. Today all existing techniques for repackaging detection are based on code similarity or feature (e.g., permission set) similarity evaluation. We propose a new approach to ...

The author reviews a series of predictions made more than two decades ago regarding nursing and nursing administration. These concerned the work of nursing, the workers involved in nursing, the environment surrounding practice, and the nurse's role. While many of the forecasts were right on target, others fell short of the mark; both are discussed in light of the challenges facing nurse adminis...