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Director Methods For High School And Amateur Theatre Implementation, Tyler Leeps Jan 2020

Director Methods For High School And Amateur Theatre Implementation, Tyler Leeps

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

My aim with this thesis is to take college and professional level directing techniques and break them down in a digestible way so new directors can take these techniques and implement them at the high school and community theatre level. I discuss five different approaches to directing theatre with student or amateur actors, each tied to common practices and standards used in professional theatres. My goal is to take theoretical techniques taught at universities and create a practical mindset to implement them on the high school and community theatre level. Spending four years balancing teaching world history with being theatre …

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Everybody Says Don't: An Examination Of Works By Stephen Sondheim In High School Theatre Programs, Matthew Nash-Brown Jan 2020

Everybody Says Don't: An Examination Of Works By Stephen Sondheim In High School Theatre Programs, Matthew Nash-Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The works of Stephen Sondheim are some of the most complex in the musical theatre canon. The storylines are often about adults in tumultuous relationships and the music contains indiscernible melodies and abnormal rhythms. These are works often difficult for even the most experienced performers, let alone any high school student. As a high school theatre teacher, it is important my students are challenged and prepared to tackle any and all theatrical works. I have dissected a number of Sondheim's works in order to find ways to make them more accessible to high school students. While the characters and their …

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Stages Of Color: An Exploration Of Drama Through A Chromatic Lens, John Norton Jan 2020

Stages Of Color: An Exploration Of Drama Through A Chromatic Lens, John Norton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The human eye can see approximately seven million different colors and within this vastly wide spectrum of refracting and reflecting light waves, an almost equal number of connotations have been attached to these various shades and tones. Whether originating from cultural histories, religious traditions, or a myriad of other sources, these associations succeed at quite literally coloring one's view of what is illuminated in front of them, especially when it comes to any and all attached emotional implications. This knowledge raises the question of how does an artist navigate not only the utilization of color in their work, but the …

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Casting As A Pedagogical Practice In Educational Theatre Spaces, Scott Savage Jan 2020

Casting As A Pedagogical Practice In Educational Theatre Spaces, Scott Savage

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Casting might be the most exciting thing in theatre to happen off-stage. Actors, agents, directors, producers, and outside observers are keenly interested in who plays a given part. In a professional space, casting seeks to ask, "Which performer is the best fit for this part?" But what happens when an educational theatre director instead asks, "Which role will best enable the learning of this performer?" This thesis explores the process of casting in an educational theatre space as being distinctly different from casting in a professional theatre space. By examining theoretical underpinnings of casting through literature and reflexive practice, I …

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Parallelized X-Ray Tracing With Gpu Ray-Tracing Engine, Joseph Ulseth Jan 2020

Parallelized X-Ray Tracing With Gpu Ray-Tracing Engine, Joseph Ulseth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

X-ray diffraction tomography (XDT) is used to probe material composition of objects, providing improved contrast between materials compared to conventional transmission based computed tomography (CT). In this work, a small angle approximation to Bragg's Equation of diffraction is coupled with parallelized computing using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate XDT simulations. The approximation gives rise to a simple yet useful proportionality between momentum transfer, radial distance of diffracted signal with respect to incoming beam's location, and depth of material, so that ray tracing may be parallelized. NVIDIA's OptiX ray-tracing engine, a parallelized pipeline for GPUs, is employed to perform XDT …

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Nonlinear Optical Mechanisms In Semiconductors And Enhanced Nonlinearities At Epsilon-Near-Zero, Sepehr Ahmadzadeh Benis Jan 2020

Nonlinear Optical Mechanisms In Semiconductors And Enhanced Nonlinearities At Epsilon-Near-Zero, Sepehr Ahmadzadeh Benis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Light does not interact with itself in linear optical materials. Such interactions occur only in non-linear optical (NLO) materials and typically require high intensity optical beams to be signifi-cant. The ever-increasing role of NLO, where intense light may change the properties of the me-dium, has created a pressing demand to invent materials for achieving more efficient light-light and light-matter interaction due to their potential capacity to augment and possibly replace cur-rent technologies with more efficient devices. There are numerous applications of NLO devices in fundamental science, technology, health, and defense such as all-optical computation and sig-nal processing, ultrashort laser technology, …

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Selective Subtraction: An Extension Of Background Subtraction, Adeel Bhutta Jan 2020

Selective Subtraction: An Extension Of Background Subtraction, Adeel Bhutta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Background subtraction or scene modeling techniques model the background of the scene using the stationarity property and classify the scene into two classes of foreground and background. In doing so, most moving objects become foreground indiscriminately, except for perhaps some waving tree leaves, water ripples, or a water fountain, which are typically "learned" as part of the background using a large training set of video data. Traditional techniques exhibit a number of limitations including inability to model partial background or subtract partial foreground, inflexibility of the model being used, need for large training data and computational inefficiency. In this thesis, …

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Effective Pedagogical Practices In Elementary School Libraries: An Appreciative Inquiry Approach, Maureen Scanlan Jan 2020

Effective Pedagogical Practices In Elementary School Libraries: An Appreciative Inquiry Approach, Maureen Scanlan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

School libraries were designed to provide equitable access to reading and research materials for all students. Over the past few decades, staffing of school libraries has become a controversial topic as school leaders opt to eliminate school librarians due to budget constraints. Consequently, there is staffing variability in school libraries. Research indicates that a school librarian is a critical component of a successful school library program. Despite this, some schools with staffing variability in the school library are finding ways to implement an effective school library media program. This research study examined effective school library pedagogical practices in elementary school …

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Predicting The Persistence Of Traditional And Nontraditional University Undergraduates Using The Psychosociocultural Model, Lauren Maroon Jan 2020

Predicting The Persistence Of Traditional And Nontraditional University Undergraduates Using The Psychosociocultural Model, Lauren Maroon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Nontraditional students are increasingly more common in higher education but have lower persistence rates than their traditional peers. While educational researchers have developed several models to predict college persistence using both cognitive (e.g. entrance exam scores) and noncognitive (e.g. academic motivation) factors, most of these models were created for traditional students. The psychosociocultural (PSC) model was created to better predict academic outcomes specifically for underrepresented students using psychological, social, and cultural factors. However, the PSC model has never been used to study nontraditional students. To address these limitations, this study used the PSC model to predict the persistence of traditional …

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Refining The Data Collection Methodology Of Outdoor Forensic Scenes Involving Scattered Human Remains Using Close-Range Photogrammetry, Megan Mccollum Jan 2020

Refining The Data Collection Methodology Of Outdoor Forensic Scenes Involving Scattered Human Remains Using Close-Range Photogrammetry, Megan Mccollum

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The documentation of outdoor forensic crime scenes involving human remains poses multiple challenges to law enforcement officials documenting the context of the scene. More rigorous protocols for the documentation of these scenes are needed, and recent advances in technology open up the possibility of three-dimensional (3D) documentation of the scene. More commonly used in archaeological contexts, close-range photogrammetry (CRP) creates reliable 3D models through triangulation of overlapping points between multiple photographs. This documentation technique allows for the preservation of the entire 3D context and the virtual manipulation without evidence destruction. However, CRP has only been preliminarily used in the field …

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The Physical Properties Of Asteroids, Leos Pohl Jan 2020

The Physical Properties Of Asteroids, Leos Pohl

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The Small Bodies of the Solar System are leftover material from the formation of planets. Compared with planetary bodies, they have undergone little transformation. Embedded in their physical properties, they provide clues to the conditions and processes that took place since the condensation of the Solar Nebula. Furthermore, asteroids are sources of raw materials that are becoming more costly to obtain from the interior of the Earth. The possibilities of extracting those materials has become a topic of significant interest. In this dissertation, I explore several properties of asteroid material: strength of asteroids, their shielding properties against high energetic particles …

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Workplace Stress And Sleep Quality: The Differential Moderating Effects Of Problem- And Emotion-Focused Coping, Wheeler Nakahara Jan 2020

Workplace Stress And Sleep Quality: The Differential Moderating Effects Of Problem- And Emotion-Focused Coping, Wheeler Nakahara

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Research on coping has provided consistent evidence that emotion-focused coping strategies tend to have negative ramifications for well-being, whereas problem-focused coping strategies tend to promote well-being. However, there is little research that examines how these two types of coping strategies impact stressor-sleep quality relationships. Therefore, the current thesis included two studies that utilized Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) conceptualization of coping as either problem-focused or emotion-focused to test the impact of those coping strategies on stressor-sleep quality relationships. The first study was cross-sectional and investigated the effect of problem-focused and emotion-focused coping on the relationship between workload and sleep quality, and …

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Pixelated Scapegoat: False Connections Between Video Games And Violent Crime In America's Largest Cities, Matthew Segal Jan 2020

Pixelated Scapegoat: False Connections Between Video Games And Violent Crime In America's Largest Cities, Matthew Segal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

For too many years, the public perception of violent crime has been viewed through the warped lens of media representations and reporting of mass killings, the likes of Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Parkland, while ignoring the body counts that rack up year after year in America's own cities. Many pundits and politicians declare cultural decay and glorification of violence in video games as the main reason for mass shootings. However, these same voices fail to take the explanation any further to explain the eruptions of violence that rack up thousands of lives a year in large metropolitan areas. The question …

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Pervasive Spectrum Sharing For Improved Wireless Experience, Mostafizur Rahman Jan 2020

Pervasive Spectrum Sharing For Improved Wireless Experience, Mostafizur Rahman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Spectrum sharing among cellular users has been a promising approach to attain better efficiency in the use of the limited spectral bands. The existing dynamic spectrum access techniques include sharing of the licensed spectrum bands by allowing other 'secondary' users to use the bands if the licensee 'primary' user is idle. This primary-secondary spectrum sharing is limited in terms of design space, and may not be sufficient to meet the ever-increasing demand of connectivity and high signal quality to improve the end-users' wireless experience. The next step to increase spectrum efficiency is to design markets where sharing takes place pervasively …

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A Mixed Method Analysis Of Factors Influencing Success And Failure In Undergraduate Engineering Capstone Design Experiences, Kurt Stresau Jan 2020

A Mixed Method Analysis Of Factors Influencing Success And Failure In Undergraduate Engineering Capstone Design Experiences, Kurt Stresau

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The engineering undergraduate curriculum presents substantial opportunities for improvement. Society is calling for a transformation. As the culminating experience for undergraduate engineering students, capstone design team projects represent a window on the curriculum and a particularly fertile ground for understanding these opportunities. However, the factors that influence success and failure in capstone remains an area of inquiry. The work presented here proposes to help us develop a deeper understanding of these factors. The research presented here uses a mixed methods analysis approach for identifying the critical factors impacting capstone design team success, where success is defined from both student and …

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Seismic Design Optimization Of Steel Structures Using Genetic Algorithm, Tiancheng Wang Jan 2020

Seismic Design Optimization Of Steel Structures Using Genetic Algorithm, Tiancheng Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Current seismic codes do not incorporate a well-established methodology for the selection of passive dampers type and their topological distribution and properties along the height of structures. Achieving the intended performance is made more complicated when structures are subject to extreme events and operate well within their inelastic range. This thesis utilizes a self-organizing genetic algorithm (soGA) with probabilistic gene-by-gene crossover and an adaptive active ground motion subset scheme to efficiently find optimal designs of low-rise steel frames subject to large number of extreme ground motions. Different types of passive dampers were considered, while the steel frames were modeled using …

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Mean Field Optimal Control And Related Problems, Wei Yan Jan 2020

Mean Field Optimal Control And Related Problems, Wei Yan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

It has been decades since the first paper that mean field problems were studied. More and more problems are considered or solved as new methods and new concepts have been developed. In this dissertation, we will present a series of results on (recursive) mean field stochastic optimal control problems. Comparing our results with those in the classical stochastic optimal control theory, there are following significant differences. First, the value function of a mean field optimal control problem is not Markovian any more, even when coefficient functions in the problem are deterministic. Second, the cost functional we considered is induced by …

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First-Year Doctoral Students' Academic Writing Development: The Native- And Nonnative-Speaking Perspectives, Ying Xiong Jan 2020

First-Year Doctoral Students' Academic Writing Development: The Native- And Nonnative-Speaking Perspectives, Ying Xiong

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Academic writing is central to doctoral growth. The purpose of this study was to better understand the similarities and differences between first-year native- and nonnative-speaking doctoral students in terms of academic writing and writer development. Data were collected for two semesters, including observational notes, transcribed audio diaries and interviews, and writing samples from three first-year doctoral students from an applied field of social science. Ethnographic data analysis described how text production and composing processes changed over the first year in relation to social and cultural factors. The first year of the doctoral program was critical to their growth as writers …

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The Effect Of Economic Conditions On The Prevalence Of Abusive Supervisory Behaviors: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis, Xinyue Zhao Jan 2020

The Effect Of Economic Conditions On The Prevalence Of Abusive Supervisory Behaviors: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis, Xinyue Zhao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The antecedents of abusive supervisory behaviors have been largely examined at the individual and organizational level. Hardly any attempts have been made to investigate abusive supervisory behaviors in a context broader than the organization. I try to answer the question "does a recession really unleash abusive supervisory behaviors?" by conducting a cross-temporal meta-analysis to examine the effect of economic conditions on the prevalence of abusive supervisory behaviors. Considering economic conditions as an antecedent to abusive supervisory behaviors provides a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomena. I proposed four reasons to explain how economic conditions affect employee's perception of abusive supervisory …

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Tunable Few- To Many-Cycle Source For High-Order Harmonic Generation And Time-Resolved Spectroscopy, John Beetar Jan 2020

Tunable Few- To Many-Cycle Source For High-Order Harmonic Generation And Time-Resolved Spectroscopy, John Beetar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The temporal confinement of laser light pulses to durations approaching the optical period, and the subsequent conversion of these pulses into extreme ultraviolet and x-ray wavelengths through the process of high-order harmonic generation (HHG), has enabled measurement and control of ultrafast processes spanning picosecond to attosecond timescales. Typically achieved by nonlinear compression of multi-cycle pulses in gas-filled hollow-core fibers, compression to single-and even sub-cycle durations is now becoming routine due to the availability of state-of-the-art Ti:sapphire laser amplifiers outputting millijoule level pulses with pulse durations below ten cycles. Even so, reliance on mJ-level Ti:sapphire lasers has in most cases limited …

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Investigating How First-Year College Students Use Smartphones To Receive Parental Support, Jacob Bonne Jan 2020

Investigating How First-Year College Students Use Smartphones To Receive Parental Support, Jacob Bonne

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The purpose of this study was to understand how first-year undergraduate college students use smartphones to receive parental support. A conceptual framework was implemented to frame the research and focused on first-year college student transitions and development within the context of parental support. A Phenomenological methodology with semi-structured interviews was implemented which explored the phenomenon from both immersive and holistic perspectives. Seven themes emerged from the analysis: decision-making, academic pathways, autonomy, emotional support, access, safety, and preparation. This study provided two recommendations for practice, including to educate students and parents about parental support and to educate parents about specific student …

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Death In The Land Of Flowers: Environment As Enemy In The Second Seminole War, Nicholas Brown Jan 2020

Death In The Land Of Flowers: Environment As Enemy In The Second Seminole War, Nicholas Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This thesis argues that Florida's natural environment was one of the United States Army's most formidable enemies during the Second Seminole War (1835–42), and that environmental factors, more than hostilities from Native peoples themselves, led the United States to abandon the War. Many White soldiers from the North were unprepared to cope with the environmental challenges posed by Florida. In order to build a foundation for this argument, the thesis examines how previous newcomers to Florida dealt with the environment, from the original First Peoples who arrived several thousand years ago, to European explorer/colonizers, to White Americans in the decades …

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Operability And Wave Characterization Of Hydrogen And Oxygen Fed Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine, Robert Burke Jan 2020

Operability And Wave Characterization Of Hydrogen And Oxygen Fed Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine, Robert Burke

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Recently, novel experimental evidence of continuous rotating detonations for gaseous H2/O2 propellants with a rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE) was attained on the 3-inch Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Distribution A RDRE, with the fuel and oxidizer injectors modified for H2/O2 gas propellants. Evident in previous experiments, detonation instabilities arising from upstream deflagration, from recirculation zones, and from insufficient gas mixing challenged resolution of detonation wave behavior from back-end imaging with the available optical equipment. Images were often over-illuminated from both the high amount of deflagration in the plume and the higher density of detonation waves in the annulus coupled …

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3d Localization Of Defects In Facility Inspections, Nicholas Califano Jan 2020

3d Localization Of Defects In Facility Inspections, Nicholas Califano

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Wind tunnels are crucial facilities that support the aerospace industry. However, these facilities are large, complex, and pose unique maintenance and inspection requirements. Manual inspections to identify defects such as cracks, missing fasteners, leaks, and foreign objects are important but labor and schedule intensive. The goal of this thesis is to utilize small Unmanned Aircraft Systems with onboard cameras and computer vision-based analysis to automate the inspection of the interior and exterior of NASA's critical wind tunnel facilities. Missing fasteners are detected as the defect class, and existing fasteners are detected to provide potential future missing fastener sites for preventative …

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On Patching Learning Discrepancies In Neural Network Training, Mohamed Elfeki Jan 2020

On Patching Learning Discrepancies In Neural Network Training, Mohamed Elfeki

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Neural network's ability to model data patterns proved to be immensely useful in a plethora of practical applications. However, using the physical world's data can be problematic since it is often cluttered, crowded with scattered insignificant patterns, contain unusual compositions, and widely infiltrated with biases and imbalances. Consequently, training a neural network to find meaningful patterns in seas of chaotic data points becomes virtually as hard as finding a needle in a haystack. Specifically, attempting to simulate real-world multi-modal noisy distributions with high precision leads the network to learn an ill-informed inference distribution. In this work, we discuss four techniques …

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Investigation Of Recurrent Neural Network Architectures Based Deep Learning For Short-Term Traffic Speed Forecasting, Armando Fandango Jan 2020

Investigation Of Recurrent Neural Network Architectures Based Deep Learning For Short-Term Traffic Speed Forecasting, Armando Fandango

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The availability of large tranches of data and its influence on traffic flow, make the problem of short-term traffic speed prediction very complex in nature. For more than 40 years, various statistical time series forecasting methods have been applied for traffic speed prediction, and in the last 20 years, machine learning-based methods have gained prevalence. However, more recently, recurrent neural network (RNN) based methods have emerged to show better results for traffic speed prediction\cite{tian2015pred, zhao2017lstm,fu2017usin,chen2016long,dai2017deep,dai2019deep, kanestrom2017traf,shao2016traf,jia2017traf}. As the interest in applying RNN models to the traffic speed predictions started to grow, we found some critical and important unanswered questions with …

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Atomic Layer Deposition Of Oxide Materials For Passivated Carrier Selective Contact Solar Cells, Geoffrey Gregory Jan 2020

Atomic Layer Deposition Of Oxide Materials For Passivated Carrier Selective Contact Solar Cells, Geoffrey Gregory

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Silicon-based devices have dominated the industrial solar cell marketplace for several decades, thanks to the low bulk defect concentration and technological relevance of silicon substrates. This has led to an oversupply of dopant-diffused homojunction technologies, which suffer from significant performance losses at the metal-silicon contact interface. In response, the research community has developed carrier-selective heterojunction contacts, which separate the metal from the silicon absorber with heavily-doped silicon layers. These novel contacts provide the same asymmetrical conductivity as the diffused junction in the previous generations of silicon solar cells, but with less processing complexity and greater device performance. Still, the silicon …

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Parametric Investigation And Optimization For Inconel 718 Nickel-Based Superalloy In Laser Powder Bed Fusion, Thinh Huynh Jan 2020

Parametric Investigation And Optimization For Inconel 718 Nickel-Based Superalloy In Laser Powder Bed Fusion, Thinh Huynh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Excellent weldability and high temperature stability make Inconel 718 (IN718) one of the most desired alloys to be produced by additive manufacturing (AM). Within the flourishing field of AM technology, laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a popular prospective candidate capable of fabricating complex and near net-shape engineering components that traditional manufacturing methods cannot accomplish. In this study, the effects of processing parameters on the relative density and microstructure was investigated. Gas atomized IN718 powders were used to fabricate cuboidal specimens via LPBF for metallographic characterization. The specimens were printed with independently varied laser power (125 - 350 W), laser …

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Designing Metal Nanocatalysts And Tuning Their Microenvironment For Gas-Involving Electrocatalysis, Lin Hu Jan 2020

Designing Metal Nanocatalysts And Tuning Their Microenvironment For Gas-Involving Electrocatalysis, Lin Hu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In the development of renewable energy technologies, electrocatalysis plays a central role in energy conversion processes, such as fuel cells and electrochemical fuel synthesis. Development of such technologies relies on the rational design of electrocatalysts as well as understanding their interaction with the working environment. Here we focus on gas-involving electrocatalytic reactions, particularly nitrogen electroreduction to ammonia and formic acid electrooxidation to carbon dioxide. First, to understand the structure-activity relationships for nitrogen electroreduction on Ru, we prepared a series of size-controlled Ru nanoparticles using atomic layer deposition. Both catalytic activity and selectivity for ammonia production on Ru catalysts strongly depend …

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Adachigahara Project: A 3d Iterative Series, James Mitchell Jan 2020

Adachigahara Project: A 3d Iterative Series, James Mitchell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This project tested an aesthetic use of 3D space to create alienation and immersion. It expanded upon it through iteration into other methods of cinematic alienation. To do this the project produced three short films each used the aesthetic of stereoscopic space. Two of the films were tested in conjunction with other methods of alienation while one served as a baseline. The project was able to render the spatial method of alienation and immersion, and found that other methods of alienation had an effect on it. While the project was able to test the use of 3D space to alienate …

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