Fall Semester 2010

ii Dedicata ̆ mamei mele, Ana Plămădeală, din tot sufletul Acknowledgments The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the help and support of the following people. I am sincerely grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Rosenberger, for clearly defining, and allowing me to work on, the problems addressed in this thesis. I appreciate his guidance through the development of the solutions, while giving me the independence to work on my own. I thank him for the chance to give my first talk at a statistics conference and for exposing me to the research community in statistics. I thank him for trusting my ability to grow despite my many weaknesses and shortcomings as a statistics student. I am immensely appreciative to Dr. Sutton for teaching me statistics and for having to endure many senseless answers in my homeworks and exams during my beginning years at GMU. He has influenced the way I think not only by being m