Architecture Commons^™

An Evaluation Of Public Open Space In Downtown Lincoln, Nebraska, Karl Dietrich

Community and Regional Planning Program: Student Projects and Theses

Public open space provides many benefits to a downtown area. Among the benefits are economic growth, social connectivity, health, and helping to create an identity for a city. As many cities continue to sprawl outwards, it is important that their downtown areas create a sense of place so that businesses and people stay and visit. Public open spaces can help provide that much needed sense of place. This study examines whether the “public space index” designed by Vikas Mehta (2014) is effective at evaluating public open spaces. This was done by using four public open spaces (Foundation Garden, Tower Square ...

Web-Based Archaeology And Collaborative Research, Fabrizio Galeazzi, Heather Richards-Rissetto

Anthropology Faculty Publications

While digital technologies have been part of archaeology for more than fifty years, archaeologists still look for more efficient methodologies to integrate digital practices of fieldwork recording with data management, analysis, and ultimately interpretation.This Special Issue of the Journal of Field Archaeology gathers international scholars affiliated with universities, organizations, and commercial enterprises working in the field of Digital Archaeology. Our goal is to offer a discussion to the international academic community and practitioners. While the approach is interdisciplinary, our primary audience remains readers interested in web technology and collaborative platforms in archaeology

The Future Is Now Science Club, Shane Stan

Honors Expanded Learning Clubs

The Future is Now! What will our planet look like in 10, 20, 50, or even 100 years? Where will we live, what will we eat, how will we travel? Believe it or not, in the coming decades, many ideas that were once science fiction will come through to realization. With this, many of the discoveries and technologies making all of this happen are being developed right now as we go about our daily lives.

In this club, appropriately titled, The Future Is Now Science Club, students will be inspired to think larger about the present world they live in ...

Rural Sense: Value, Heritage, And Sensory Landscapes: Developing A Design-Oriented Approach To Mapping For Healthier Landscapes, Judith Van Der Elst, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Lily Díaz-Kommonen

Anthropology Faculty Publications

Landscape design needs a novel value system centred on human experience of the landscape rather than simply on economic value. Design-oriented research allows us to shift the focus from mechanistic paradigms towards new sensemaking approaches that value both the sensual and the cognitive in human experience. To move in this direction, we investigate cultural and natural aspects of sensory experience in rural landscapes, arguing that: (1) rural (non-urban) regions offer diverse sensory experiences for optimising human health; and (2) spatial interconnectedness between rural and urban areas means that healthy rural regions are critical for urban development. Our key argument is ...

Measuring Landscape Performance: Case Study Investigation, Hannah Michelle Lopresto, Brandon Zambrano, Catherine De Almeida

UCARE Research Products

Participating in the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s 2018 Case Study Investigation has been an incredibly informative experience for our research team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We are eager to shine a spotlight on the landscape performance of two Great Plains projects: P Street Corridor, a revitalized downtown streetscape in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Tom Hanafan River’s Edge Park, a waterfront redevelopment in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Working on the post-occupancy study of both projects has been extremely beneficial in understanding how reclaiming underutilized sites can create high-performing landscapes. Both are public projects in urban settings with primary goals of transforming ...

Analyzing The Impact Of Incentive Programs On Retention Of Family Practice Providers In Rural Nebraska, Andrew J. Pedley

Community and Regional Planning Program: Professional Projects

Rural populations in Nebraska are generally older, less affluent and suffer from more chronic diseases than their urban counterparts. To address these disparities, the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services Office of Rural Health oversees incentive programs that compensate providers for costs associated with education in exchange for time worked in shortage areas. This report examines the impact that these incentive programs have on the retention of family medicine providers in Nebraska using survival analysis methodologies. The findings of this report indicate a positive correlation between participation in incentive programs and workforce retention of family medicine providers.

Advisor: Yunwoo ...

Force-Driven Weave Patterns For Shell Structures In Architectural Design, Khaled Amir Benaida

Theses from the Architecture Program

The use of lightweight carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP) in the discipline of architecture opens new possibilities for the construction of architectural components. CFRP has been explored mainly in engineering fields, such as aeronautics, automotive, ballistic and marine engineering. CFRP has also been explored in the discipline of architecture in the construction of shell structures because of its high strength-to-weight ratio and low-cost. There is, however, limited research on how structural analysis can be used to inform weave patterns for shell structures using CFRP.

Further, previous research in the field has not performed physical structural tests to validate which force ...

Seventy-Five North Developments: A Holistic Approach To Improving Northeast Omaha, Fabiola Alikpokou

Community and Regional Planning Program: Student Projects and Theses

The concentration of public housing in high-poverty neighborhoods has many negative impacts; it limits educational opportunities for kids, leads to increased crime, causes poor health outcomes, hinders wealth building, and decreases investments (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2013). Northeast Omaha exhibits many of these issues. North Omaha is not only home to many of the city's minority persons, but also home to one of the most impoverished Black communities in the United States (Cordes, Gonzalez, & Grace, 2011). The Omaha-Council Bluffs area was ranked 14 for the highest African-American poverty rate out of 100 most populous metro ...

Recycled Substrates: Plant Biomass And Plant Cover Correlation, Richard K. Sutton

Landscape Architecture Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

Green roofs extend roof membrane life and reduce waste to landfills. However, green roof costs must be reduced if their benefits are to accrue more widely. Use of recycled materials may reduce costs and also keep those materials out of landfills. Some work has been done on use of local recycled materials for green roof substrates, but none describe the characteristics, proportions and results of using an entire suite of blended recycled materials in admixtures (i.e., mixtures of very different materials) such as crumb rubber (CR), crushed used brick (CB) and compost (CPT) in concert with greens grade sand ...

A Case Study On The Design Of Safe Spaces In Hospitals Vulnerable To Tornadoes In Central Us, Lucy Owusua Ampaw - Asiedu

Architectural Engineering -- Dissertations and Student Research

In the wake of recent disasters happening around the world such as the earthquake in Italy (January 2017); hurricanes in the United States (U.S.) (September 2016 and 2017); and compounding disasters in Haiti (September 2010 and 2016); to our best knowledge, never has the world seen the need to work on preemptive rather than reactionary measures to address this issue. Tornadoes are natural hazards that commonly occur in mid-western and central states of the U.S. Tornadoes, like all natural hazards, are very destructive and result in massive destruction to building structures, causing billions of dollars in damage and ...

A Spatiotemporal Analysis To Identify Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities In Nebraska, Sangho Lee

Community and Regional Planning Program: Student Projects and Theses

This study aims to identify the geographic locations of “naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs)” and whether there were spatiotemporal patterns of naturally occurring retirement communities in Nebraska for the time periods of 2000 to 2010, and to 2015. As the American population continues to age, older people generally prefer to live in their own homes for later years of life, instead of moving into assisted living. These demands have resulted in the increase of elderly populations who are “aging in place”. Nevertheless, there have been few spatiotemporal analyses about the distribution patterns of elderly households in terms of NORCs for ...

Challenging The Norm Of Minimums: A Case Study Of Ada Design Standards On The University Of Nebraska-Lincoln Campus, Emily Drummy

Interior Design Program: Theses

In the United States, over 30 million people have difficulties climbing stairs and require the use of a walker, cane, or wheelchair to move around (United States Census Bureau, 2012). All people interact with the built environment around them, including the some thirty million who deal with physical difficulties. While some can navigate the space around them easily, others have more difficulty due to certain barriers. Often, interior environments are designed with the able bodied in mind, not accommodating properly for the disabled even in the most basic of ways. Despite the introduction of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA ...

Development Of A Model To Predict The Likelihood Of Complaints Due To Assorted Tone-In-Noise Combinations, Joonhee Lee, Lily M. Wang

Architectural Engineering -- Faculty Publications

This paper develops a model to predict if listeners would be likely to complain due to annoyance when exposed to a certain noise signal with a prominent tone, such as those commonly produced by heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems. Twenty participants completed digit span tasks while exposed in a controlled lab to noise signals with differing levels of tones, ranging from 125 to 1000 Hz, and overall loudness. After completing the digit span tasks under each noise signal, from which task accuracy and speed of completion were captured, subjects were asked to rate level of annoyance and indicate the likelihood ...

Road Diet Feasibility Analysis For Nebraska, Brandon L. Purintun

Civil Engineering Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research

Many rural towns and cities throughout Nebraska have experienced consistent population decline over the past 50 years, and the highway system once built to accommodate hoped-for growth is not serving the population as well as it could. These towns and cities would benefit from implementing a road diet conversion on their main highways. Within rural communities, road diets are an increasingly popular method of improving safety along major arterials through the reduction of excess capacity in favor of increasing refuge areas for turning vehicles. A typical application might be the restriping of a four-lane undivided highway into a three-lane highway ...

Effects Of Reverberation Conditions And Physical Versus Virtual Source Placement On Localization In Virtual Sound Environments, Anna Catton

Architectural Engineering -- Dissertations and Student Research

Sound field synthesis systems vary in number and arrangement of loudspeakers and methods used to generate virtual sound environments to study human hearing perception. While previous work has evaluated the accuracy with which these systems physically reproduce room acoustic conditions, less is known on assessing subjective perception of those conditions, such as how well such systems preserve source localization. This work quantifies the accuracy and precision of perceived localization from a multi-channel sound field synthesis system at Boys Town National Research Hospital, which used 24 physical loudspeakers and vector-based amplitude panning to generate sound fields. Short bursts of broadband speech-shaped ...

Wetland Conservation Effects Result In Enhanced Playa Functionality In The Rainwater Basin, Nebraska, Hong Zhang

Community and Regional Planning Program: Student Projects and Theses

This study assessed the functionality level of wetland hydrology, hydrophyte and soil conditions, and then identified the restorable potential of conserved playas. The distribution of hydrology and hydrophyte were geospatially examined through annual tracking the quantity and quality of wetlands on historical hydric soil footprints under different conservation programs in the Rainwater Basin (RWB) in Nebraska, USA during 2004-2015. The results show that the historical hydric soil footprints with the conservation programs had significantly higher functionality of ponded water and hydrophyte than non-conserved wetlands. The yearly average of ponded water areas within footprints varies at 12.59% for the Waterfowl ...

The Historic Preservation Program In Lincoln, Nebraska And Nomination Of The South Bottoms Neighborhood As A Landmark District In Lincoln, Nebraska, Benjamin Callahan

Community and Regional Planning Program: Student Projects and Theses

Across the nation, thousands of historic properties are preserved, protected, and visited each year. These historic properties and historic preservation programs work to highlight historically significant places, by not only recognizing the past, but also by working to protect the significant sites into the future so they will continue to serve as reminders and examples of the historical events that have made it notable. Currently, the Historic Preservation Program in Lincoln, Nebraska recognizes over 1,400 properties as Local Landmark Sites or Districts within Lancaster County. Through this locally organized program, these properties receive a greater level of protection and ...

An Application Of Economics & Environmental Planning: The Impacts Of Variable Rate Irrigation Technology On Net Farm Income, Hannah Jones, Zhenghong Tang, Karina Schoengold, Yunwoo Nam, Dana Varner

Community and Regional Planning Program: Professional Projects

Restoring playa wetlands back into predominantly agricultural landscapes has been a pressing issue for decades. The Nebraska Rainwater Basin Joint Venture (RWBJV) and its partners represent a wide variety of private and public groups who are offering solutions to this problem, while helping farmers maximize net farm income. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln partnered with the RWBJV on a project to determine how Variable Rate Irrigation (VRI) technology would impact the profitability of farm management operations, while allowing the preservation of adjacent wetland areas. This study conducted an economic analysis that compared net farm income for producers that had participated in ...

Analyses Of Crowd-Sourced Sound Levels Of Restaurants And Bars In New York City, Gregory S. Farber, Lily M. Wang

Architectural Engineering -- Faculty Publications

For several decades, there has been a significant need to better educate the public about noise pollution. A small number of small-scale studies have focused on the sound levels of restaurants and their impact on health and hearing. There have also been an increasing number of media articles stating that eating and drinking venues are getting increasingly loud making it more difficult for people to connect with others in conversation. This study reports on an exploratory large-scale noise survey of sound levels of 2,376 restaurants and bars in New York City using a novel smart-phone application and categorized them ...

Assessing Hazard Vulnerability, Habitat Conservation, And Restoration For The Enhancement Ofmainland China’S Coastal Resilience, Muhammad Sajjad, Yangfan Li, Zhenghong Tang, Ling Cao, Xiaoping Liu

Community and Regional Planning Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

Worldwide, humans are facing high risks from natural hazards, especially in coastal regions with high population densities. Rising sea levels due to global warming are making coastal communities’ infrastructure vulnerable to natural disasters. The present study aims to provide a coupling approach of vulnerability and resilience through restoration and conservation of lost or degraded coastal natural habitats to reclamation under different climate change scenarios. The integrated valuation of ecosystems and tradeoffs model is used to assess the current and future vulnerability of coastal communities. The model employed is based on seven different biogeophysical variables to calculate a natural hazard index ...

Impact Of Owners’ Early Decisions On Project Performance And Dispute Occurrence In Public Highway Projects, Sogand Hasanzadeh, Behzad Esmaeili, Ghada M. Gad, Douglas D. Gransberg

Architectural Engineering -- Faculty Publications

Disputes are common in the construction industry and lead to unnecessary cost and schedule overruns in projects. It is commonly believed that owners’ early decisions regarding the selection of delivery methods, procurement methods, and contract types impact the frequency and severity of project disputes; however, no previous study has empirically tested this hypothesis, particularly in highway public projects. Therefore, this study empirically investigated the impact of owners’ early decisions regarding project organization (i.e., delivery methods, procurement, and contract types) on performance measures (e.g., cost and schedule growth), specifically dispute performance metrics (e.g., frequency and severity of disputes ...

Simultaneous Electrical And Mechanical Resonance Drive For Large Signal Amplification Of Micro Resonators, M. H. Hasan, Fadi M. Alsaleem, N. Jaber, M. A. A. Hafiz, M. I. Younis

Architectural Engineering -- Faculty Publications

Achieving large signal-noise ratio using low levels of excitation signal is key requirement for practical applications of micro and nano electromechanical resonators. In this work, we introduce the double electromechanical resonance drive concept to achieve an order-of-magnitude dynamic signal amplification in micro resonators. The concept relies on simultaneously activating the micro-resonator mechanical and electrical resonance frequencies. We report an input voltage amplification up to 15 times for a micro-resonator when its electrical resonance is tuned to match the mechanical resonance that leads to dynamic signal amplification in air (Quality factor enhancement). Furthermore, using a multi-frequency excitation technique, input voltage and ...

Mapping Quality Of Life In Nebraska: Population Distribution By Race, Ethnicity, And Age, Sarah Taylor, Maria Rosario T. De Guzman, Grant Daily, Rodrigo Cantarero, Soo-Young Hong, Aileen S. Garcia, Jeong-Kyun Choi, Yan Xia

Mapping Quality of Life in Nebraska

KEY POINTS

This section details key points from the data on racial, ethnic, and age groups across Nebraska.

RACIAL AND ETHNIC MINORITIES IN NEBRASKA

• The proportions of Nebraska’s racial and ethnic minority populations tend to be smaller by 4% (i.e., Asian) to 8% (i.e., Black or African American, Hispanic/Latino) than those of the US, except for the Hawaiian and Pacific Islander and American Indian and Alaska Native populations (i.e., smaller only by 0.1% to 0.2%).

• Nebraska’s urban areas, which comprise 73.1% of the Nebraska population, have higher numbers of racial and ...

Mapping Quality Of Life In Nebraska: Migration Rates, Aileen S. Garcia, Rodrigo Cantarero, Grant Daily, Maria Rosario T. De Guzman, Jeong-Kyun Choi, Soo-Young Hong, Sarah Taylor

Mapping Quality of Life in Nebraska

KEY POINTS AND IMPLICATIONS

Nebraska is a state that is not often viewed as affected significantly by mobility and migration. As a state, the net migration rate of 1.1 from 2015 to 2016 is fairly low compared to others like Florida (16.0) or Nevada (14.4). However, data from this report suggests that there is, in fact, substantial movement of people moving in and moving out; as well as pockets within the state where there is higher than average influx of both domestic and international migrants.

In general, migration trends in the state mirror national trends of “rural ...

Harmonics Elimination In Three Phase Cascade H-Bridge Multilevel Inverter Using Virtual Stage Pwm, Amro Quedan

Architectural Engineering -- Dissertations and Student Research

The multilevel inverters are one of the great solutions that are proposed to satisfy the demand for high-power application and the significant integration of renewable energy. The conversion process from DC to AC must be done at high efficiency to decrease the energy loss and to ensure the electric grid power quality. The Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) is the most important feature that indicates the efficiency of the conversion process. In this research, due to the advantages of the cascade H-bridge inverter over other topologies, it has been used with the virtual stage PWM technique to investigate two different methods ...

Impacts Of Active School Design On Schooltime Sedentary Behavior And Physical Activity: A Pilot Natural Experiment, Jeri Brittin, Leah Frerichs, John R. Sirard, Nancy M. Wells, Beth M. Myers, Jeanette Garcia, Dina Sorensen, Matthew J. Trowbridge, Terry Huang

Interior Design Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

Background Children spend a significant portion of their days in sedentary behavior (SB) and on average fail to engage in adequate physical activity (PA). The school built environment may influence SB and PA, but research is limited. This natural experiment evaluated whether an elementary school designed to promote movement impacted students' school-time SB and PA.

Methods Accelerometers measured SB and PA at pre and post time-points in an intervention group who moved to the new school (n = 21) and in a comparison group experiencing no school environmental change (n = 20). Difference-in-difference (DD) analysis examined SB and PA outcomes in these ...

Analyzing Communities In Black America: How Urban And Regional Planners Can Plan For Prosperous Black Communities, Tatiana Height

Community and Regional Planning Program: Student Projects and Theses

The black community in the United States has evolved out of a unique set of circumstances which have led to few black neighborhoods being able to prosper. Considering the negative influences on the black community such as wide-spread discrimination, mass incarceration, concentrations of poverty, and poor housing quality this community requires unique considerations to prosper. Given that only 10% of urban and regional planners are black, this research is meant to be a guide for urban and regional planners at large to plan in such a way that allows black communities to thrive. The results of this research indicate that ...

Evaluating Mobile-Based Citizen Science In Increasing Citizen Participants In Environmental Management, Wenqi Ou

Community and Regional Planning Program: Student Projects and Theses

Mobile-based citizen science as thriving citizen education tool increases the non-expert citizen involvement in the scientific world by encouraging the public upload nature observation to assist scientific research while learning scientific knowledge. Mobile-base citizen science as social media has potential to facilitate citizen engagement in the environmental management. Based on the conceptual framework of citizen science incorporation with environmental management, large users in the program foster the citizen involvement in the environmental management. Research here applies SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threats) analysis to evaluate mobile based citizen science regarding data management, citizen participation, and partnership. It revealed the current status ...

Influence Of Street Trees On Roadway User Safety, Maggie Harthoorn

Community and Regional Planning Program: Student Projects and Theses

This thesis aims to understand trends of trees in transportation planning and to determine if street trees have a negative or positive influence on crash frequency and severity. As roadways become more walkable and livable, they become safer. Street trees are a vital component of this trend. Planners must understand the impacts of trees on roadway user safety as they work to reduce crash risk. Although spatial analysis suggests there may be a negative relationship between trees and crash frequency, correlation models find a significant correlation between trees and crash severity, but no significant correlation between trees and crash frequency ...

Housing Availability, Accessibility And Affordability For Nebraska's Rural Aging Populations, Jordan G. Grummert Rasmussen

Community and Regional Planning Program: Student Projects and Theses

Rural America and the nation as a whole has entered a phase of significant demographic change, as the number of Americans over the age of 65 is estimated to double by 2050. Nebraska counties and the state are, too, experiencing this shift in the age demographic. As the population ages, consideration must be given to the housing options for older adults, specifically those who reside and wish to remain in rural areas.

While broad consideration is given to either population aging or housing in rural areas, there is limited county level analysis adjoining these demographic and housing realities. This study ...