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When Black Meets White In The Heart Of Worship: A Case-Study Of Musical Changes In A Multiracial Church, Serge Volpe

Masters Theses

The Worldwide Church of God began as a denomination relying on certain Jewish practices and other Euro-centric distinctions to define its' identity. In the New York City area, African-American churchgoers exceeded that of whites; yet church liturgy retained its European-American flavor. When the denomination underwent transformation in the 1990s, many congregants were unable to accept changes, including new musical styles, and reacted in a manner inconsistent with what church leaders had hoped for. This thesis examines what some African-Americans experienced during this period when liturgy changed to include music representative of their culture. Interviews were conducted with African-American churchgoers from …

Geophysical And Remote Sensing Applications For A Better Understanding Of The Structural Controls On Groundwater Flow In The Lucerne Valley, California, Dale R. Dailey

Masters Theses

An integrated study was conducted in the Mojave Basin to investigate the potential role of faults and basement uplifts for groundwater flow in the Mojave Desert. Observations made include: 1) Very Low Frequency (VLF) measurements across mapped (using LIDAR and Geoeye-1 imagery) fault traces showed significant radio field dip angles indicative of presence of shallow sub-vertical, sheet-like conductors; many of the VLF tilt peaks coincided with changes in the magnetic profiles; 2) Vertical Electric Soundings indicate shallow basement west of, and parallel to, the Helendale Fault and deep saturated zones east of the fault/basement outcrop (F/B); and 3) isotopic analyses …

Understanding Wildfire Hazard Vulnerability Of Residents In Teton County, Wyoming, Lucas Kanclerz

Masters Theses

The research examines significant differences in wildfire home protection activities between local and seasonal residents in Teton County, Wyoming. Significant differences of wildfire home protection activities results in hazard vulnerability to a whole community. An extensive literature review establishes the purpose and hypothesis of the research to understand if seasonal residents are creating wildfire hazard vulnerability to local residents. A survey-based methodology using nominal YES/NO questions and ordinal Likert-type scale questions were used to understand residents past wildfire experiences, perceptions on the effectiveness of home protection activities, and if residents actually do these activities. Statistical analysis revealed that seasonal residents …

Attitudes And Perceptions Of Local Residents And Tourists Toward The Protected Area Of Retezat National Park, Romania, Andrea Blanka Szell

Masters Theses

Despite the fact that there has been a significant increase in interest in the sustainable management of protected areas (PAs), many of them still fail to meet conservation goals. Considering that the availability of financial resources and the general public's interest toward environmental conservation play such an important role in the successful performance of PAs, it is of great importance to investigate local residents' and visitors' attitudes and perceptions regarding PAs. This will help gain knowledge of the level of financial and social support they would be willing to give to environmental conservation in PAs. To elicit attitudes and perceptions, …

Prospects For An International Charter "Space And Major Disaster" Remote Sensing Response To Drought Disasters - An Anhui, China Case Study, Joseph Burkhead

Masters Theses

Remote sensing is often leveraged during the response phase of disaster management to improve the situational awareness of decision-makers. The International Charter "Space and Major Disaster" (Charter) provides remote sensing support to non-spacefaring nations facing disasters such as earthquakes, floods and tsunamis. However, the Charter has never activated for a major drought disaster. Since droughts affect over half of the nearly 3 billion people that suffer from natural disasters annually, this study seeks to determine whether satellite remote sensing can be effectively employed according to the intent, capabilities, and limitations of the Charter to benefit officials responding to a major …

Understanding Flight Delays At U.S. Airports In 2010, Using Chicago O'Hare International Airport As A Case Study, Paul Blackwood

Masters Theses

Flight delays are economic, social, and environmental albatross to U.S. businesses and consumers. In 2007 alone, domestic flight delays cost the U.S. aviation industry $40.7 billion (Joint Economic Committee of the House and Senate Report, 2008). These delays involved inconveniences for airlines and passengers, and untold misery for local and state officials. In that same year, delays forced U.S. airlines to consume an extra 740 million gallons of jet fuel (Joint Economic Committee of the House and Senate Report, 2008). The purpose of this study is to understand flight delays at U.S. airports and to determine how key causal factors …

Foreign Direct Investment In Italy 2000-2010: Spatial Patterns And Implications, Enzo Crescentini

Masters Theses

Foreign direct investment (FDI) has long been shown to be an important driver of economic growth as well as a source of knowledge transfer in host countries. Italy, now the tenth largest economy in the world, has a remarkable distribution of FDI characterized by a metropolitan industrial North and what is commonly referred to as an economically unfit or "backwards" South. Given these regional differences, Italy faces many interesting challenges in attracting FDI in the current global economic climate. The nation must attract capital to less-developed regions as well as to the extensive industrial clusters in the North that are …

Flutes, Festivities, And Fragmented Tradition: A Study Of The Meaning Of Music In Otavalo, Brenna C. Halpin

Masters Theses

This thesis consists of an intimate study of the value and meaning of flute music of indigenous musicians in the contemporary world. This is accomplished by interviewing and observing indigenous panpipe and flute musicians in and near the Plaza de Ponchos Market in Otavalo, Ecuador. Collected personal stories, historical accounts, and recordings and analysis of the music all provide insight into the purpose and traditions the music holds. While the musicians attempt to maintain a sense of cultural authenticity, modernization has altered the importance of customs and music as Otavalo moves toward a more commoditized and urbanized community, reflecting ethnic …

A Perception Analysis Of Downtown Residents: The City Of Lansing, Mi. Food Desert In Context, Thomas J. Veldman

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the perceptions of residents inside and outside of a USDA-defined food desert in Lansing, MI related to fresh and frozen produce access. Through an online and paper survey, Lansing-area residents ranked their perceived level of access to fresh produce, their perception of their own health, and reported their general daily intake of fresh produce. Through several statistical analyses, this thesis was able to determine that residents residing within the study area in downtown Lansing had statistically significant variations in their perception of access to fresh and frozen produce, traveled longer to their preferred primary and secondary food …

And Then, He Folds His Patterned Rug: Repressive Reality And The Eternal Soul In Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Cook

Masters Theses

While Vladimir Nabokov has deservedly earned fame as a stylist of the strange, most critics who study his novels approach his absurd and beautiful characters as little more than fractured victims of a wholly subjective reality. Compounding the misunderstanding is the tired debate over whether or not Lolita is literary, pornographic, or some cruel game of cat-and-mouse in which Nabokov seizes control of his readers' sense of morality. However, critics who read Nabokov as nothing more than a manipulative stylist neglect to realize that his characters suffer such absurd distortions of spirit and mind because their environment--the "average" reality of …

Relationships Among Growth, Poverty And Inequality In Developing Countries, Mahlet Getachew Gezahegn

Masters Theses

The relationship among growth, poverty and inequality has been and remains one of the most controversial topics in development economics. Development literature suggests that they are likely to evolve in an interrelated fashion in most countries although their exact path will depend on country circumstances.

The primary objective is to explore relationships among growth, poverty and inequality. The investigation largely follows the approach taken by Lundberg and Squire (2003) who however, examine evolution of only growth and inequality. Suitable modifications to their model are made to achieve a greater understanding of the evolutionary process of the three major variables of …

Trade Openness In North America: The Impacts Of Nafta, Mohammed Dawood

Masters Theses

The objective of this paper is to examine the impacts of the creation of NAFTA on trade openness in the North American region as a whole. We first assess these impacts of on NAFTA on individual member countries- namely, the United States, Canada and Mexico. Then we explore the impacts of NAFTA on North America as a bloc. Towards our goal we develop an empirical model that includes several independent variables to control, among others, for productivity, inflation, capital formation, per capita income, monetary policy and the existence of NAFTA. We collect annual time series data on all variables from …

United Nations Military Interventions And Democracy: Factors For Success, Nathan M. Polak

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the effects of various military planning and target-state variables to determine what influences democratic change within a target state undergoing a United Nations military intervention. The variables found to be significant are further explored and refined in a case study of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). Then, these refined indicators are tested in a comparative case study of the United Nations Interim Mission in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS). Ultimately, it is found that the desire and motivation of contributing states and that the deployments of UN troops in …

Effect Of A Summer Bridge Program On Provisionally Admitted Students' Self-Efficacy, Merry Kathleen Lucas

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

The Anglicization Of Ælfric's "Passio Sancti Eadmundi Regis Et Martyris", Benjamin W. Potmesil

Masters Theses

While depicting Christian saints is certainly not unique to Old English literature, the presence of a hagiographic tradition within its corpus offers a variety of possibilities for academic investigation by editors of Old English texts. Of particular interest is JElfric's "Passio Sancti Eadmundi Regis et Martyris." This hagiography, which focuses upon an Anglo-Saxon king of the ninth century, is acknowledged by JElfric to be a translation of Abbo of Fleury' s Latin account of Edmund's death. Fortunate! y, copies of both JElfric's Old English version and Abbo's Latin original have survived to the modern day. As a result, the modern …

Bridging The Cultural Gap: Using Commonwealth Young Adult Literature In American Secondary Schools, Jennifer Hrejsa-Hudson

Masters Theses

Commonwealth Young Adult Literature (CYAL), or Y AL written in English speaking countries other than America, can help American secondary students become more globally aware while fulfilling many of the Common Core Standards. CY AL offers a variety of literary and multicultural/intercultural opportunities not always available in Ameri-centric YA. In this thesis, prize winning examples of CY AL and intercultural CY AL are analyzed for what cultural knowledge students can gain from reading them. Also included is a discussion about what is lost when American publishers "translate" CYAL into American vernacular. Finally, specific examples are given of how American secondary …

Winning The Un-Winnable In Afghanistan? Counterinsurgency And Ethnic Strife, Joseph P. Bell

Masters Theses

After pursuing military actions in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States adopted a counterinsurgency policy to properly address these conflicts. After implementing this new strategy, it appears that the United States has been able to succeed against the insurgency, while losing more and more ground in Afghanistan. Upon examination, it was determined that the ethnic fractionalization in Afghanistan presented a unique challenge to the counterinsurgency effort that had not been present in Iraq.

The effects of this ethnic fractionalization were then analyzed on local counterinsurgency tactics and the overall nation building strategy in Afghanistan. Local counterinsurgency tactics had largely …

Book Production In The Medieval West Midlands: The Case For Organized Bookmaking, Rashelle Spear

Masters Theses

My thesis project, Book Production in the West Midlands: The Case for Organized Bookmaking, takes into consideration the geographical factors of the medieval manuscripts of the West Midlands in England from the mid-fourteenth to the early fifteenth centuries. The medieval manuscript is an artifact: it is a piece of the past that, if examined carefully, will present a narrative about bookmen, bookmaking practices, and the reading public of a specific period and, in this case, a geographical area.

To discover a more coherent picture of bookmaking and the way books were prepared and received in the West Midlands, I closely …

Defending Tertullian's Orthodoxy: A Study On Third Century Christianity, Kevin Gift

Masters Theses

Scholars have attempted to place Tertullian into two or three distinct schools of thought. Some, such as Pope Benedict XVI, state that Tertullian turned his back on the church. Others, like Andrew McGowan, posit a more complex timeline. McGowan claims Tertullian left the church only to return at a later date. The reason for such speculation was Tertullian's interest in the Montanist, a second to third century heretical group. The goal of this study is to provide sufficient evidence that Tertullian never made the complete move to Montanism and never separated form the church of Carthage. A careful analysis of …

Semiotics, Habitus And Music In The Transmission Of Tibetan Culture In Toronto, John Robertson

Masters Theses

This ethnographic study explores the role of music in cultural transmission in the Tibetan community of Toronto, Canada. Beginning with an integration of Peircian semiotics, Bourdieu's habitus and musical semiosis, I then identify certain non-Tibetan cultural elements being encountered by those in the Toronto community which are potentially creating cognitive structures foreign to those which have their generative principles in pre-exile Tibetan past, and the ways in which Tibetans are transmitting (to varying degrees) cognitive schemata which identify these non-Tibetan elements and protect against their appropriation. After exploring elements which are not Tibetan, I turn to those which are: a …

"Videbantur Gens Effera": Defining And Perceiving Peoples In The Chronicles Of Norman Italy, Jesse Hysell

Masters Theses

The goal of this project is to analyze the ways different cultural groups in Sicily and southern Italy were depicted in a set of historical texts associated with the Norman takeover of those regions in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. To achieve that aim, I consider social vocabulary applied to three distinct peoples (native Italians, Greeks, and Muslims) in five sources written by Amatus of Montecassino, Geoffrey Malaterra, William of Apulia, Alexander of Telese, and Hugo Falcandus. Although recent scholarship has posited that medieval identity was often felt through a "self versus other" or "Christian versus non-Christian" dichotomy, I have …

A Position Of Strength: Arms Dealing As Diplomacy Under The Reagan Administration, William D. Watson

Masters Theses

My thesis is an examination of the Cold War during the 1980s, with a focus on arms dealing and diplomacy under President Ronald Reagan from 1981-1989. I chose to write about three specific case studies based on the unique intersections of American diplomatic goals in relation to geography, the sophistication of weapons technology involved, and geopolitical considerations. The purpose of this thesis is to explain why and how the Reagan administration was able to carry out three separate arms deals, and in turn, how those deals fit into the broader, global Cold War between the United States and the Soviet …

The Great Commissioning: An Exegesis Of Matthew 28:16-20, Ryan Kendall Phelps

Masters Theses

Throughout the history of Christianity, evangelism has been an often-discussed topic. At certain times the discussion has revolved around the question of whether or not there is a command to actively seek out unbelievers for the purpose of evangelism in the Bible that applies to Christians in the world they live in. One of the most common verses cited as a command for evangelism is Matthew 28:18-20, commonly called the "Great Commission." However, some Christians argue that this is a command for discipleship and not evangelism. While it is hard to make a distinction based on this verse alone, Matthew …

An Inquiry Into Contextualized Christian Expression In North India, M. J. Gracin

Masters Theses

The riches of India's ancient and diverse culture are proclaimed from the music that communicates the heart of Bharat Mata - Mother India. This sentiment resounds across the vast geographical area of India in songs from Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians and Bollywood composers. The question of how Christians might express their faith in light of societal, historical and religious amalgamations is the topic of discussion for this project. The inquiry will focus on the music culture of North India, specifically as it is expressed in the city of B_____, Uttar Pradesh. A six week field study was conducted in …

Analysis Of The Dutar Playing Technique Of Abdurehim Heyt, Michael Alan Kee

Masters Theses

Uyghur dutar player Abdurehim Heyt is hailed by many Uyghurs as the Dutar King, referring to his mastery of the instrument. This thesis examines several of Heyt's songs and compares them with songs from three other Uyghur dutar players in an attempt to isolate and define the unique characteristic of Heyt's dutar playing technique that sets him apart from other Uyghur dutar players.

This study presents a brief examination of the concept of music ornamentation as it has developed in the West. The Uyghur concept of music ornamentation - purakh - is then explained and compared with the Western concept …

Sir George Paish: Ambassador Of Free Trade, Jennifer D. Bolan

Masters Theses

Sir George Paish was a noted British economist who earned his title and position. The son of a coachman, he advanced from being a teenage clerk in 1881 to joint editor of The Statist magazine by 1900. One of Paish's earliest contributions to economics was his analysis of British railways by statistically determining load capacities and carrying efficiency, published in The British Railway Position in 1902. He then argued for reform on a Board of Trade committee on railways from 1906-1908.

From 1909-1915, Paish was an independent consultant to Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, who became Prime Minister …

Implementing A Street And Property Identification System: A Case Study Of Accra, Ghana, Grace Akpene Ecklu

Masters Theses

An increasing problem in rapidly growing cities of developing countries is lack of a functional and standardized address system to support management of resources and provision of necessary facilities and services. In Accra, Ghana, previous attempts to develop an address system have been fragmented in nature and largely unsuccessful. This paper examines the reasons why previous attempts have failed and how a physical address system can be successfully implemented within the Ghanaian context. Based on interviews with a City Planner and a sample of residents of Accra, the paper identifies political, administrative, technical and socio-cultural challenges as major gaps which …

Social Media Dialogue: An Analysis Of The Social Media Presence Of Selected Fortune 500 Companies, Philip J. Luca

Masters Theses

This paper investigates the manner in which the companies engage various publics in the realm of social media. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the type of communication Fortune 500 companies use in their social media presence. Analyzing the web sites, Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts of 21 Fortune 500 companies, the present study assesses the dialogic efforts of these companies using Kent and Taylor's (1998) five dialogic principles. Results suggest that the researched companies have an established social media presence. The accounts are developed but not distinctly dialogic. Further research may assess the quality of the …

Nomadic Amdo Tibetan Glu Folk Songs, Wendolyn Craun

Masters Theses

Tibetan glu folk songs are a literary and musical expression historically passed down from generation to generation. This regional study purposes to define the origins, influences, categories, qualities, and significance of nomadic Amdo Tibetan glu folk songs. These topics are explored within the settings of Tibetan culture, history, theory, and current usage. Recordings of twenty-seven glu folk songs accompanied by transcribed text and music offer contemporary examples of this song genre that is quickly disappearing. The ultimate goal of this study is to answer the question: What are the defining characteristics of nomadic Amdo Tibetan glu folk songs?

Longitudinal Evaluation Of A Learning System For Teaching Geographical Information System Within The Context Of A Geotechnical Problem, Aparna Sukhavasi

Masters Theses

"A learning system, to train civil engineering students to apply Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in geotechnical problems, was evaluated over a period of 5 years, hence longitudinal. The system was tested with a series of iterations consisting of usability tests and subsequent modification, which were followed by a series of applied evaluations within the context of class lab sessions. The principal goals of this evaluation were to determine the overall effectiveness of the system and the factors that affected student learning. The first evaluation was conducted in 2004; and included a control group that played a "game" related to the …