Digital Commons Network^™

Modern In St. Louis: 1930'S Architects And Their Clients, Mary Reid Brunstrom

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

The long decade between the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the entry of the US into World War 11 in 1941 is notable in the history of architecture in St. Louis because modernist trends first appeared during the period. This thesis examines these early appearances. Some three decades bad elapsed since the Viennese architect, Otto Wagner (1841-1918) in 1896 had coined the term "modern architecture" in his book of the same name, in which he argued for fresh architectural responses to the rapidly changing conditions of the machine age. 1 1n St. Louis, architectural works that even now appear …

Exploring Disability And Poverty In Nepal: An Application Of The Capability Approach, Patricia Welch Saleeby

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

The primary purpose of this dissertation is to examine the relationships between disability and poverty in Nepal. Linkages between disability, poverty, and deprivation are explored to develop an in-depth understanding of these relationships, to recommend strategies for intervention, and ultimately to improve the situations of individuals and their families experiencing disability and poverty. Since traditional poverty measures such as income and consumption do not fully capture the multi-dimensional construct of poverty, a capability approach was used to further an understanding of the relationships between disability and deprivation at individual and household levels and to address three research questions. What are …

Energy Aware Design And Analysis For Synchronous And Asynchronous Circuits, Jia Di

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

Power dissipation has become a major concern for IC designers. Various low power design techniques have been developed for synchronous circuits. Asynchronous circuits, however. have gained more interests recently due to their benefits in lower noise, easy timing control, etc. But few publications on energy reduction techniques for asynchronous logic are available.

Power awareness indicates the ability of the system power to scale with changing conditions and quality requirements. Scalability is an important figure-of-merit since it allows the end user to implement operational policy. just like the user of mobile multimedia equipment needs to select between better quality and longer …

Topology And Control Investigation For Low-Voltage High-Current Isolated Dc-Dc Converters, Hong Mao

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

High conversion efficiency and fast transient response at high switching frequency are the two main challenges for low-voltage high-current DC-DC converters, which are the motivations of the dissertation work.

To reduce the switching power loss, soft switching is a desirable technique to keep power loss under control at high switching frequencies. A Duty-Cycle-Shift (DCS) concept is proposed for half-bridge DC-DC converters to reduce switching loss. The concept of this new control scheme is shifting one of the two symmetric PWM driving signals close to the other, such that ZVS can be achieved for the lagging switch due to the shortened …

The Effect Of Using A Read Aloud Nonfiction Picture Book To Strengthen Fifth Grade Students' Comprehension Of Science Content, Jana Robertson Hammond

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine whether a read- aloud nonfiction picture books would increase fifth grade students' science comprehension as measured by a criterion reference test.

Four questions guided the research in this study:

1. What are the benefits of reading aloud to fifth grade students?

2. According to the Fry Readability graph, what is the readability of the Harcourt textbook used in fifth grade and the readability of the nonfiction picture books chosen for this study?

3. Does the use of a read aloud nonfiction picture book increase fifth grade students' comprehension versus a round-robin instruction …

Plasma Levels Of Vitamins A And E In Marine Turtles (Chelonia Mydas And Caretta Caretta), Karen Patricia Frutchey

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

Insight into blood values for free-ranging populations of chelonians is very incomplete. A better understanding of marine turtle ecological physiology is necessary for population health assessments and conservation management plans. Vitamins A and E are fat-soluble compounds required by vertebrates. Vitamin A is required for growth, differentiation and integrity of epithelial tissue, bone remodeling, reproduction and vision. Vitamin E is a constituent of cell membranes where it is an antioxidant and free radical scavenger. Both nutrients are required for reproduction and immune system function. I determined concentrations of vitamins A and E in plasma of blood samples from Caretta caretta …

Optical Wave Propagation Through Non-Kolmogorov Atmospheric Turbulence, Paul Anthony Liptack

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

The effect of atmospheric turbulence on an optical wave can seriously degrade the reliability of an optical communication link. One atmospheric effect is scintillation, which is caused by index of refraction fluctuations. Several observations of atmospheric turbulence statistics suggest a modest change in the power law behavior of Kolmogorov' s power spectral density model. The corresponding index of refraction fluctuations are assumed to have spatial power spectra that obey power laws that deviate somewhat from the classical - 11/3 power law. The purpose of this study is to develop analytical models for scintillation and other wave propagation statistics based on …

The Effect Of The 2000 Election On Low-Income African American Voters, Barbara Compton Abney

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

This research answers the question, "What impact did the 2000 election have on low-income African American voters and how will it affect turnout in future elections?"

The analysis focuses on the predominantly black, low-income community of Parramore and examine issues of efficacy related to the 2000 presidential election and beyond. The analysis consists of survey distributed through various community service agencies and conducted door-to-door in Parramore. Respondents were asked a series of questions related to past voter participation, trust in government, the fairness of the 2000 election and perceived future participation. The responses of the survey were compiled into a …

On The Design And Performance Of Cognitive Packets Over Wired Networks And Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Marino Ricardo Lent

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studied cognitive packet networks (CPN) which build networked learning systems that support adaptive, quality of service-driven routing of packets in wired networks and in wireless, mobile ad hoc networks.

The first part of this study completed the design of the CPN algorithm for wired systems by revisiting the decision making procedure employed by smart packets in the former initiative. To conduct evaluation studies, this work proposed two implementation architectures, both of which were integrated into the Linus 2.4 kernel.

The second part of this dissertation extended CPN to ad hoc networks by introducing mechanisms to handle node mobility …

Online Giving And University Development, Peter A. Trakas

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the profile of the potential online donor to a small, private, liberal arts institution. Attitudes towards online giving were studied between participants who donated online and those who did not. Additionally respondents of differing class years were compared to determine which age groups were more likely to donate over the Internet. A total of 576 surveys were returned for an effective response rate of 38%. Collected data were entered into an SPSS database. The data revealed most respondents had been using the Internet for over 5 years, and accessed the Internet almost everyday. Data also revealed that …

Larger-First Partial Parsing, Sebastian Alexander Van Delden

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

Larger-first partial parsing is a primarily top-down approach to partial parsing that is opposite to current easy-first, or primarily bottom-up, strategies. A rich partial tree structure is captured by an algorithm that assigns a hierarchy of structural tags to each of the input tokens in a sentence. Part-of-speech tags are first assigned to the words in a sentence by a part-of-speech tagger. A cascade of Deterministic Finite State Automata then uses this part-of-speech information to identify syntactic relations primarily in a descending order of their size. The cascade is divided into four specialized sections: (1) a Comma Network, which identifies …

A Planar Laser-Induced Fluorescence Study On The Effects Of Unsteadiness And Fuel Lewis Number In Hydrogen Laminar Diffusion Flames, Marcos Chaos

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

Studies on the effect of transport properties coupled with the interaction of fluid dynamics and combustion in acoustically forced laminar hydrogen jet diffusion flames have been performed using the planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) technique. These unsteady diffusion flames are of particular interest because they are reproducible turbulent-like events that can be investigated to gain insight into turbulent combustion. Results reported herein add to the ongoing effort of understanding the complex transport processes taking place in the flames encountered in most modern heat-producing and power-producing devices.

Fuel transport properties (i .e. fuel Lewis number, LeF) were varied by fuel dilution with …

Antenna-Coupled Infrared Focal Plane Array, Francisco Javier Gonzalez

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation a new type of infrared focal plan array (IR FPA) was investigated, consisting of antenna-coupled microbolometer fabricated using electron-beam lithography. Four different antenna designs were experimentally demonstrated at 10-micron wavelength: dipole, bowtie, square-spiral, and log-periodic. The main differences between these antenna types were their bandwidth, collection area, angular reception pattern, and polarization. To provide pixel collection areas commensurate with typical IR FPA requirements, two configurations were investigated: a two-dimensional serpentine interconnection of individual IR antennas, and a Fresnel-zone-plate (FZP) coupled to a single-element antenna. Optimum spacing conditions for the two-dimensional interconnect were developed. Increased sensitivity was demonstrated …

Video Categorization Using Semantics And Semiotics, Zeeshan Rasheed

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

There is a great need to automatically segment, categorize, and annotate video data, and to develop efficient tools for browsing and searching. We believe that the categorization of videos can be achieved by exploring the concepts and meanings of the videos. This task requires bridging the gap between low-level content and high-level concepts (or semantics). Once a relationship is established between the low-level computable features of the video and its semantics, the user would be able to navigate through videos through the use of concepts and ideas (for example, a user could extract only those scenes in an action film …

It's All In The Rhetoric: Using Affective Design To Change Users' Perceptions Of Online Help, Robert C. Stultz

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the role of affective design in online help systems. The thesis begins with a discussion of the current research related to online help systems and the rhetorical nature of technical communication. The thesis then provides a heuristic evaluation of two versions of procedural discourse for Microsoft Word 2000. Based on an analysis of the heuristic evaluation, five recommendations are given for improving the affective design of online help systems. The thesis concludes with a proposed usability test and consideration of a related area of study.

A Study Of High School Students' Perceptions Of Their Safety In School, Christina L. Testani Cafiero

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

This study was designed to investigate the factors that contributed to high school students' sense of security at school, and what these students perceived as measures that if put in place, would increase their feelings of security. The focus was the relationship between students' perceptions of safety at school and their own opinions of school and their experiences at school.

The study was conducted in the School District of Osceola County, Florida. The population of this study was comprised of all students enrolled in the public high schools in the School District of Osceola County. The sample for the study …

The Efficacy Of Affirmations On Anxiety Reduction, Christine Marie Karper

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

Anxiety disorders are among the most prevalent forms of mental illness. There is a great need to acquire techniques which effectively and rapidly treat anxiety. The purpose of this study was to determine if the use of affirmations aids in the reduction of anxiety. In addition, this study examined if the use of affirmations combined with relaxation music aids in the reduction of anxiety and examined if the use of relaxation music alone aids in the reduction of anxiety.

An experimental research design was used in this study. Three treatment groups were investigated and one control group. Each treatment group …

Design And Analysis Of Class Ab Rf Power Amplifier For Wireless Communication Applications, Mohamed El-Dakroury

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

The Power Amplifier is the most power-consulting block among the building blocks of RF transceivers. It is still a difficult problem to design power amplifiers, especially for linear, low voltage operation. Until now power amplifiers for wireless applications is being produced almost in GaAs processes with some exceptions in LDMOS, Si BJT, and SiGe HBT. The submicron CMOS processes for power amplifiers are under research focus since CMOS offers integration for power amplifier with rest of the transceivers blocks due to its high yield. Also CMOS process is cheap.

This thesis report details the design process of a class AB …

Information On The Assembly Line : A Review Of Information Design And Its Implications For Technical Communicators, Jason Nichols

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

Technological advances have made endless amounts of information on nearly every subject easily accessible, while at the same time fostering an economic climate conducive to international trade and partnerships. The challenge for companies then becomes one of figuring out how best to manage and use this mass of information, a task complicated by the increasingly global nature of business that requires products to be tailored to more specialized user groups in a wider array of formats and in different languages. Hence the emergence of information design, a field that technical communicators would do well to associate themselves with. Information design …

Legacy To The People: Community And The Orange County Regional History Center, Robert L. Beatty Ii

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

The development and birth of the Orange County Regional History Center is perhaps unlike any other local history museum in the United States. Its story is worth telling because of its long gestation, the difficulties in bringing this center to life, and the goals of the people who made it possible. All of these elements are a vital part of the history of Orange County, Florida and should not be overlooked.

In this light, this thesis will discuss more fully three topics in relation to the creation of the new History Center. First, it will look at the American museum …

The Magical And The Mundane: Individualism, Corporate Identity, And Postmodern Pastiche In The Detective Novels Of Haruki Murakami, Diana Lynn Garland

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

In Murakami's detective novels, pop culture references, irony, and hard-boiled genre conventions combine with magic realist prose to articulate the search for individual identity in a Japanese milieu structured by traditional communal values. At the same time, Murakami's work remains grounded in Japanese literary tradition, and he sees himself very much as a product of modern Japan. The thesis traces the blending of these diverse tendencies in three of Murakami’s most popular novels: A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Dance, Dance, Dance.

The Introduction provides an overview of the product, …

A Survey Of The Mammals Of The Archie Carr And Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuges, Joseph S. Weidlich

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT This summarizes a study conducted on the Archie Carr (ACNWR) and Pelican Island (PINWR) National Wildlife Refuges located on the barrier island complex of southern Brevard and northern Indian River counties, Florida. Major objectives of this study were designed to 1) survey the mammals of the ACNWR and PINWR, 2) perform a small mammal population demographic study in coastal scrub and maritime hammock habitats, and 3) document a population monitoring project of Peromyscus po/ionotus niveiventris in northern Indian River County at Treasure Shores Park, within ACNWR Segment 4. A total of7,279 trap nights was compiled during the survey portion …

High Frequency Communication System Modeling And Performance Enhancement, Employing Novel Adaptive Dsp Techniques, Murad M. Qahwash

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

High Frequency (HF) communication has been shown to be a useful communication technique from the very beginning of World War I and it accelerated during World War II. This is attributed to its simplicity, ability to provide near globe connectivity at low power without repeaters, moderate cost, and ease of proliferation [1]. In fact, the HF communication system utilizes the ionosphere [2][3][4] to refract the skywave signals to a distant receiver. This ionospheric channel has some disadvantages. First, it is a non-stationary channel as the HF frequency propagation is a function of the sun spot activities, solar winds, and diurnal …

Individuals With Disabilities Education Act Amendments Of 1997 And Implications For School-Based Administrators, Connie Woods Collins

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to review historical legislation relevant to the education of individuals with disabilities, examine the 1997 Amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Act and related case law, and to create a knowledge base from which school-based professionals can make legally sound policy and planning decisions and reduce liability for noncompliance with the applicable laws and regulations pertaining to the 1997 Amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. In addition, the study provided insight into the law and increased the comfort levels of school-based personnel who deal with exceptional students, thereby increasing the likelihood of …

Three Surveys On Adult Esol Pronunciation: Teachers, Students, Textbooks, Hortensia Louro Bernal

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

This study used three instruments to examine the current state of the teaching of ESOL pronunciation. These instruments included a survey of 62 teachers, another survey of 508 ESOL students, and a comparative study of ten pronunciation textbooks in widespread use since 1990. The purpose of the study was to characterize the teaching of pronunciation at present through the voices of the teachers, the opinions of the students, and the content of the textbooks. The study also identified the approaches and types of activities being proposed by the experts and recommended additional activities as well as a rationale for their …

New Architecture For Heterogeneous Real-Time Simulation, Mandar Anil Mathure

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates a new architecture for modeling and simulating complex distributed real-time systems. Modeling adequately a large distributed real time system may involve, due to its complexity, several different theoretical vehicles such as queuing theory, finite state machines, and others. Currently there are no software tools, which would offer combining such heterogeneous features into a single comprehensive simulation environment.

This study involves integrating 3 tools, SES/workbench, an offline simulator using queuing theory as its modeling discipline, ObjecTime as a real-time simulator based on finite state machines as its modeling discipline, and VxWorks real-time kernel used for free modeling in …

Techniques And Applications Of Quantum And Classical Statistical Mechanics, Fredrick N. Michael

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

Mesoscopic and nano-scale physics describe systems whose dimensions are intermediate between microscopic and macroscopic. Devices manufactured in this size range require the rethinking of electron transport physics. A powerful approach to modeling the nonlinear current-voltage characteristics observed at these scales is the non-equilibrium Green’s functions method of Schwinger, Keldysh, and Craig. In this thesis this approach is used to describe the mesoscopic conductor and spin-dependent transport in ferromagnetic metal-insulator-ferromagnetic metal and ferromagnetic metal-conductor-ferro-magnetic metal junctions. The formalism is also adapted to obtain analytical expressions for the resistance in the integer quantum Hall regime. Also presented is a new formulation of …

Is There A Difference In Learning Styles Of Honors Versus Non-Honors Students As Assessed By The Geft?, Debra Lee Hollister

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

A Unified Approach To Dynamic Modeling Of High Switching Frequency Pwm Converters, Christopher J. Iannello

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation will present the development of a unified approach for dynamic modeling of the PWM and soft-switching power converters. Dynamic modeling of non-linear power converters is very important for the design and stability of their closed loop control. While the use of equivalent circuits is often preferred due to simulation efficiency issues, no unified and widely applicable method for the formulation of these equivalents exists.

A review of conventional modeling technique via the method of state-space averaging will be carried out. Complete development of the averaged, equivalent circuit models for the nonlinear power switch/diode combination in modem power converters …

Design And Applications Of Volume Holographic Optical Elements, Steven C. Dunn

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

Volume gratings were studied both theoretically and experimentally in order to design and analyze practical volume holographic optical elements. The diffraction of finite (Gaussian) beams by transmission gratings is investigated. A closed form solution for the off-Bragg profiles is obtained, and the distortion in the resulting profiles is analyzed. Criteria for when the finiteness of the beam has a minimal effect on the angular selectivity response are given. A model is developed to investigate the cross talk in multiplexed gratings Experimental verification in LiNb0₃ and PTR glass is demonstrated. The diffraction efficiency and output profiles of finite beams diffracted …