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The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression To Redemption, Tyler R. Tichelaar

Dissertations

The Gothic wanderer of British fiction originated during the French Revolution. During the nineteenth century, the figure evolved from one of transgression into a symbol of redemption. While Romantic poets created wanderer figures to celebrate rebellion, Gothic novelists utilized the wanderer figure to explore the psychology of transgression. The Gothic interpreted the French Revolution as a transgression against God and His ordained institutions. The wanderer figure expressed the anxieties of the revolutionary period and the attempt to imagine a political world not based upon monarchy. Gothic novelists also questioned what effects the French Revolution might have upon England. The overthrow …

The Dynamics Of Unskilled Wages: Analyses Of Earnings Instability And Trends In The Low-Skill Labor Market In The United States, Michael Mamo

Dissertations

This dissertation is an econometric analysis of the earnings trends and instability for less-skilled workers during the 1970s through the 1990s. The study is divided into two major sections, dealing, respectively, with a longitudinal study of earnings instability and a time-series analysis of the trends in less-skilled wages.

In the first section, the empirical autocovariance structure of earnings is parameterized and estimated using the generalized method o f moments (GMM). The analysis of longitudinal earnings data indicates that unskilled earnings had become unstable during most o f the sample period particularly during the 1980s, despite the long economic expansion that …

Whatever Shines: Poems, Kathleen Mcgookey

Dissertations

The poems in my manuscript can be divided into two groups: poems in verse and prose poems. The majority are prose poems. Though I did not set out to write in the prose poem form, I’ve become more and more attracted to it, eventually seeking what Baudelaire sought when he wrote the poems in Le Spleen de Paris, a poetic prose "musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough and shocking enough to adapt itself to lyrical movements of the soul, undulations of the reverie, sudden leaps of conscience." Charles Simic believes prose poems contain a tension between the lyric impulse …

Attitudes And Perceptions Of Michigan School Administrators Toward Female Administrators, Dorothy J. Vanderjagt

Dissertations

There is a shortage of females in educational administration. Women represent a majority of teachers, yet men occupy most administrative positions. The purpose of this study was to determine attitudes of selected Michigan school administrators toward women as managers. This study was intended to create an awareness of the perceptions administrators hold toward women as leaders and investigate attitudes that may be accountable for the disparity of women leaders in education.

Two research questions were studied: (1) Do the attitudes of male administrators toward women as school managers differ from the attitudes of female administrators toward women as school managers? …

Saint Venus (With Critical Introduction), Allegra Shevahn Blake

Dissertations

A manuscript of poems by the author/ candidate is prefaced by a critical introduction that discusses both the positive and the difficult aspects of translating poetry from another language (in this instance, Swedish). The critical introduction explores how, in translating the work of others, a poet's own work is affected . The author/candidate then examines the transformation her own poetry has undergone, noting the differences between her "pre -translation" and "post-translation" poems.

Public Policy: Affirmative Action, Social Equity, And Employment Patterns In Michigan's Construction Industry 1966-1997, Henry Joseph Bowers

Dissertations

Affirmative action public policy did not experience much debate when it was put in place during the late 1960’s. However, the debate is occurring in the 1990s. Its merits are being weighed and there are movements locally to eliminate affirmative action policy.

The Michigan construction industry is the focus of this study. This study examined not only these employment outcome benefits, but also outlines the outcome benefit trends over thirty-one years for national employment and employment in the state of Michigan with an emphasis on the construction industry. Details regarding white-collar and blue-collar occupational grouping trends as well as unemployment …

An Investigation Into Relationships Between Alternative Assessment And Pre-Service Elementary Teachers’ Beliefs About Mathematics, David Charles Coffey

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine how including alternative assessments in a reform-based mathematics course affects pre-service teachers’ mathematical beliefs. A single section of a mathematics course designed for elementary education majors that employed three different alternative assessments was the setting for the study.

A pre- and post-belief survey completed by students enrolled in the section under study represented the first level of data collection and analysis. The results of the pre-belief survey guided the selection of seven informants from the section and provided belief statements for the informants to verify during subsequent interviews. Based on the data …

Rainbow Ramsey Numbers, Linda Eroh

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Affective Responses To Television Newscasts: Have You Heard The News?, Jessica Purtan Harrell

Dissertations

This study examined the impact o f television news viewing on affective responses in viewers. Participants watched a 10-minute newscast that contained only negative, only positive, or both negative and positive news stories at either 8:00 a.m. or 6:00 p.m. Negative news viewers showed elevations in anxiety and negative affect, while positive news viewers showed decreases in anxiety and negative affect. Watching a combined newscast resulted in no mood changes. Affective changes caused by watching the news were not maintained 3 hours after viewing, and morning versus evening viewing had no impact on mood responses to that news. While news …

Mitigating The Defects Of Pluralism: Interest Group Coalitions Before The Supreme Court, Jason Frederick Jagemann

Dissertations

This project examines interest group coalitional activity before the Supreme Court in affirmative action cases between 1971 and 1995. First, I address the characteristics and dynamics of amicus participants over time. Second, I examine the extent to which organizations with a smaller base of resources, in terms of staff and the number of years that organizations have been on the scene, engage in coalitional activity. I find that organizations with smaller staffs are more likely to participate in coalitions, and, contrary to my expectations, organizations that have been on the scene longer are more likely to engage in coalitional activity. …

A Comparison Of Beginning And Advanced Counselor Education Students On The Health Locus Of Control Scale, Christina Minger

Dissertations

Traditional counselor training incorporates a combination of didactic and experiential learning. Through this process of learning, counseling students have the opportunity to develop principles of self-learning and self-awareness leading them to counseling self-efficacy. Through this self-development, students may make choices pertaining to their health. By examining the health locus of control in beginning counselors, not only were the student counselors’ historical view of health-related issues examined, but their current perceptions of external and internal coping devices were also investigated. The Health Locus of Control Scale (HLCS) was developed to provide more sensitive predictions of the relationship between internality and health …

Utah Jazz, A Novel, Darren Defrain

Dissertations

This novel concerns a young Mormon who has fallen away from his religion and his family and juxtaposes his struggles with his faith, belief and heritage with those of a drifter deliberately distancing himself from a much darker past. The novel is also acutely interested in place and landscape as powerful originations of any contemporary sense of paradise and perdition we may hang onto.

The episodic setting of the novel, in conjunction with the narrator’s story, concurrently traces the National Basketball Association’s Utah Jazz’s 1996 play-off appearance. The novel uses this setting to examine the ways in which the basketball …

Study Of Architecture And Protocols For Reliable Multicasting In Packet Switching Networks, Shiwen Chen

Dissertations

Group multicast protocols have been challenged to provide scalable solutions that meet the following requirements: (i) reliable delivery from different sources to all destinations within a multicast group; (ii) congestion control among multiple asynchronous sources. Although it is mainly a transport layer task, reliable group multicasting depends on routing architectures as well.

This dissertation covers issues of both network and transport layers. Two routing architectures, tree and ring, are surveyed with a comparative study of their routing costs and impact to upper layer performances. Correspondingly, two generic transport protocol models are established for performance study. The tree-based protocol is rate-based …

Intermodal Transit System Coordination With Dynamic Vehicle Dispatching, Md. Shoaib Chowdhury

Dissertations

In most urban areas where transit demand is spread widely, passengers may be served by an intermodal transit system, consisting of a rail transit line (or a bus rapid transit route) and a numbers of feeder routes connecting at different transfer stations. In such a system, passengers may need one or more transfers to complete their journey. Therefore, scheduling vehicles operating in the system with special attention to reduce transfer time can contribute significantly service quality improvements. In this study two models, one for coordination of a general intermodal. transit system and another for dynamic dispatching of vehicles on coordinated …

Multimedia Modeling Of Organic Contaminants In The Passaic River Watershed, Lansana Coulibaly

Dissertations

A dynamic fate and transport multimedia environmental model was developed and applied to assess the release of five priority contaminants in the Passaic River Watershed, including: napthalene, toluene, trichloroethylene, 1-1-1 trichloroethane and xylene. The model uses the current releases of contaminants as well as cross-boundary advection to determine the fate and environmental distribution of these chemicals in the watershed. The model was developed using a dynamic fugacity approach in order to allow for scenario analysis such as source reductions and no-action alternatives. This modeling effort is expected to achieve a comprehensive assessment of contaminants not only in the proximity of …

Time Domain Measurement Of The Nonlinear Refractive Index In Optical Fibers And Semiconductor Film, Hernando Garcia

Dissertations

A new technique to measure the nonlinear refractive index n₂ in optical fibers and semiconductor films has been developed. It is based on the time delay two-beam coupling of very intense picosecond laser pulses that have been self-phase modulated in the nonlinear optical medium. The two beams are coupled in a slow responding medium that is sensitive to time dependent phase distortions. We determine that the amount of phase distortion experienced by the pulse is proportional to the nonlinear refractive index of the medium, This time domain approach can also be applied to optical fiber amplifiers in the presence …

Genetically Evolved Dynamic Control For Quadruped Walking, Giorgio Grasso

Dissertations

The aim of this dissertation is to show that dynamic control of quadruped locomotion is achievable through the use of genetically evolved central pattern generators. This strategy is tested both in simulation and on a walking robot. The design of the walker has been chosen to be statically unstable, so that during motion less than three supporting feet may be in contact with the ground.

The control strategy adopted is capable of propelling the artificial walker at a forward locomotion speed of ~1.5 Km/h on rugged terrain and provides for stability of motion. The learning of walking, based on simulated …

The Impact And Fate Of Aqueous Sodium Nitrate On Hydrocarbon Flames, Ann Marie Flynn

Dissertations

This study examined the impact and fate of sodium (fed as an aqueous nitrate solution) in fuel-rich methane/air and methane/methyl chloride/air flames as a function of equivalence ratios that experienced diffusion of air from the surroundings. The flames were stabilized on a slotted, uncooled burner. The data set was divided into profiles of relative sodium atom concentrations, temperatures, and selected stable species concentrations. The flames were simulated using a modified version of the Sandia FORTRAN program for modeling steady laminar one-dimensional premixed flames complete with detailed mechanisms. The results showed that maximum sodium atom concentration in the flame is decreased …

Modeling, Design And Fabrication Of Thin-Film Microcrystalline Silicon Solar Cells, Wei Chen

Dissertations

The modeling, design and fabrication of low-cost thin-film microcrystalline silicon(µcSi) solar cells is studied in this thesis. The cell, considered in this investigation, utilizes low-cost glass as the substrate and microcrystalline Si (µc-Si) as the active layer. A comprehensive refractive index (n) and extinction coefficient (k) model of silicon as function of doping, temperature and wavelength is developed to assist the optical design of the cell. In order to obtain acceptable short circuit current density (Jsc) from the cell, it is found that the thickness of the silicon thin film should be more than 10µm. To get the best light …

A Meta-Semantic Language For Smart Component-Adapters, Leon K. Jololian

Dissertations

The issues confronting the software development community today are significantly different from the problems it faced only a decade ago. Advances in software development tools and technologies during the last two decades have greatly enhanced the ability to leverage large amounts of software for creating new applications through the reuse of software libraries and application frameworks. The problems facing organizations today are increasingly focused around systems integration and the creation of information flows.

Software modeling based on the assembly of reusable components to support software development has not been successfully implemented on a wide scale. Several models for reusable software …

Endotoxin Removal From Protein Solutions By Immobilized Metal Ion Affinity Chromatography, Yun Kang

Dissertations

In the biotechnology/pharmaceutical industry, the removal of endotoxins from final protein product has always been a challenge. A novel method for endotoxin removal from protein solutions, immobilized metal (ion) affinity chromatography (IMAC) has been developed in this study. Fe³⁺ was charged to a chelating gel that contains iminodiacetic acid (IDA). The IDA- Fe³⁺ IMAC column was exploited to remove endotoxin from protein solutions. This method involves the adsorption of the endotoxin on IMAC column. More than 99% endotoxin is removed and protein yield is higher than 90%. IDA-Fe³⁺ IMAC has proved to be an economical and efficient …

Active Feedback Control Of A Wake Flow Via Forced Oscillations Based On A Reduced Model, Fu Li

Dissertations

As it is well known, the flow past a cylinder consists of a symmetric recirculation bubble of vortices at small Reynolds numbers. As Reynolds number increases, the bubble becomes unstable and develops into a Karman vortex street of alternating vortices. This instability is responsible for the occurrence of large amplitude oscillations in the lift and an increase in the mean drag. It was previously shown by numerical simulation that the mechanism driving the bubble instability is well mimicked by Foppl's four dimensional potential flow model where the bubble is represented by a saddle point. In this work, we design two …

Video Traffic Modeling And Delivery, Hai Liu

Dissertations

Video is becoming a major component of the network traffic, and thus there has been a great interest to model video traffic. It is known that video traffic possesses short range dependence (SRD) and long range dependence (LRD) properties, which can drastically affect network performance. By decomposing a video sequence into three parts, according to its motion activity, Markov-modulated self-similar process model is first proposed to capture autocorrelation function (ACF) characteristics of MPEG video traffic. Furthermore, generalized Beta distribution is proposed to model the probability density functions (PDFs) of MPEG video traffic.

It is observed that the ACF of MPEG …

Fluidization And Soot Filtration In A Rotating Fluidized Bed, Gui-Hua Qian

Dissertations

A horizontal rotating fluidized bed (RFB) has been investigated for the removal of soot from diesel engine exhaust. This requires necessitating an understanding of the nature of fluidization, particle mixing and filtration in the RFB.

In an RFB, particles are subject to a centrifugal force which can be much larger than the force of gravity. Therefore the Geldart classification for conventional fluidized beds must be modified for rotating fluidized beds. A theoretical analysis shows that group A particles (minimum bubbling velocity U_mb > minimum fluidization velocity U_mf can shift to group B U_mb = U_mf and group …

Virtual Reality Based Creation Of Concept Model Designs For Cad Systems, Bilal Yehya Maiteh

Dissertations

This work introduces a novel method to overcome most of the drawbacks in traditional methods for creating design models. The main innovation is the use of virtual tools to simulate the natural physical environment in which freeform. Design models are created by experienced designers. Namely, the model is created in a virtual environment by carving a work piece with tools that simulate NC milling cutters.

Algorithms have been developed to support the approach, in which the design model is created in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment and selection and manipulation of tools can be performed in the virtual space. The …

Investigation Of The Baroreflex Of The Rat : Steady State And Dynamic Features, Xiaorui Tang

Dissertations

The baroreflex is one of the most important feedback systems in the body to maintain blood pressure variation within the homeostatic range. In this dissertation, the important features of the carotid and aortic baroreflexes have been extensively investigated on ventilated, central nervous system intact, neuromuscular blocked (NMB) rats using different control system and signal processing tools. Studies have demonstrated that sinoaortic denervation (SAD) caused substantial increases in the blood pressure variability. Comparing the pre- and post-SAD blood pressure spectra, there was a significant increase of power in the very low frequency region (0.00195 -0.2 Hz), and a significant decrease of …

Component-Based Software Engineering, Zhiyuan Wang

Dissertations

To solve the problems coming with the current software development methodologies, component-based software engineering has caught many researchers' attention recently. In component-based software engineering, a software system is considered as a set of software components assembled together instead of as a set of functions from the traditional perspective. Software components can be bought from third party vendors as off-the-shelf components and be assembled together.

Component-based software engineering, though very promising, needs to solve several core issues before it becomes a mature software development strategy. The goal of this dissertation is to establish an infrastructure for component-based software development. The author …

Rapid Tooling By Integration Of Solid Freedom Fabrication And Electrodepostion, Bo Yang

Dissertations

Rapid tooling (RT) techniques based on solid freeform fabrication (SFF) are being studied worldwide to speed up the design-production cycle and thus keep manufacturers at a competitive edge. This dissertation presents a novel rapid tooling process that integrates SFF with electrodeposition to produce molds, dies, and electrical discharge machining (EDM) electrodes rapidly, accurately and cost effectively. Experimental investigation, thermornechanical modeling and analysis, as well as case studies reveal that integration of electroforming with solid freeform fabrication is a viable way for metal tool making.

The major research tasks and results of this dissertation study are as follows:

• Rapid electroforming tooling …

Laminar Viscous Resuspension In Two-Dimensional Channels, Wenyue Yin

Dissertations

The laminar viscous resuspension of sphere particles in two-dimensional channel with gravity and electrostatic effects is studied numerically. The constitutive equation for particles include the shear-induced diffusion flux, gravitational sedimentation flux and electro-static diffusion flux. In addition the continuity equation and the momentum equations for incompressible flow are solved for developing flow using finite element method.

The parameters in this study are ratio of particle diameter to channel height d/h, Reynolds number Re, Froude number Fr, uniform inlet particle volume fraction Φ₀, and electrostatic parameter Q. The numerical simulation included d/h from 0.03 to 0.12, Re from 5 …

An Integrated Membrane-Based Chromatographic Process For Biomolecule Isolation And Purification, Xiaoping Dai

Dissertations

Biomolecules obtained from fermentation and cell-culture processes are present in low concentrations in a complex medium/broth. For intracellular products, cells are first harvested. Subsequently, cell lysis and homogenization are undertaken to produce a homogenate. The biomolecules are next separated from the cell debris by lysate clarification. For extracellular products, the biomolecules are separated from the whole cells by clarification. The overall yield is reduced with each additional step. As the cost of bioseparation process accounts for 50-80% of the final product cost, innovations in and improvement of bio-downstream processing are greatly needed.

In this research, a cyclic process integrating a …