Digital Commons Network^™

Neiman Marcus Chicken Coops: Exploring Class And Identity Through Backyard Chicken Keeping And The Contemporary Food Movement, Traci D. Joseph

Masters Theses

This paper is a case study of a proposed backyard chicken ordinance for Grand Rapids, Michigan. The study is viewed in light of social movement theory, specifically new social movement theory, to determine if events surrounding and leading up to the debate can be labeled as a social movement. A key finding is a culture of consumption as a common thread throughout the debate. The poultry industry pushed for continued consumption of its products with an agenda of fear regarding disease and improper handling. Proponents countered with a discussion on an ethic of care for the birds. Ultimately, this rejection …

Elementary Art And Writing, Mary A. Beningo

Masters Theses

The problem that I researched in today’s art education world is how to correlate elementary art curricula with writing curricula. To investigate this issue I field tested a curriculum module that reflects the contemporary issues of writing in art education. The curriculum module under investigation has been designed to correlate my 5^th grade fine arts curriculum with the homeroom teacher’s 5^th grade language arts curriculum.

During this study I worked with 56 fifth grade students and incorporated four writing projects into their fine arts curriculum: a Character Exploration project, a Black-out poetry project, a surrealistic textured paper collage …

An Implementation Of Controller Area Network Bus Analyzer Using Microblaze And Petalinux, Tung-Hsun Tsou

Masters Theses

This paper presents a controller area network (CAN) monitor system created in a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board, which is Xilinx SP605. The goals of this research are to let the system demonstrate a reliable CAN bus monitor system, and to show the Xilinx MicroBlaze and PetaLinux design flow. This system can be used to observe the CAN bus messages by means of C program and embedded Linux environment.

A Xilinx MicroBlaze soft processor is used to read CAN information from the external CAN bus controller, Microchip MCP2515. Two implementations, a stand-alone system and a Linux system, are built to …

Activated Carbon Preconditioning To Reduce Contaminant Leaching In Cement-Based Stabilization Of Soils, Renee Elizabeth Crane

Masters Theses

Powdered activated carbon (PAC) is often added with cement to enhance the stabilization and solidification (S/S) of materials contaminated with organic compounds. Adsorption of organic contaminants onto PAC can reduce leaching of organic contaminants. Simultaneous addition of PAC and cement reduces soil handling costs, but cement hydration reactions coat PAC with Ca(OH)2 before contaminants can be adsorbed onto PAC. Laboratory studies were done on four aged, contaminated soils from manufactured gas plant sites to compare the performance of S/S treatment with simultaneous addition of PAC and cement vs. cement addition after preconditioning with PAC to enhance contaminant adsorption. Performance was …

An Orchid In The Land Of Technology: Embodied Presence In A Mediatized World, Kevin Dodd

Masters Theses

This thesis applies the Aesthetic philosophy of John Dewey to the current discourse about mediatization and performance in an effort to explain how a Deweyan conception of embodied aesthetic experience can contribute to meaningful experience and human flourishing in a mediatized culture. The relationship between live presence and technological mediatization is often characterized as oppositional. Through an explication of the process of mediatization and manifestations of presence, this relationship can instead be viewed as reciprocal. An overview of Dewey's theories of experience and aesthetics refutes dualistic thinking and demonstrates how faculties of perception can be engaged and our capacity for …

Surface Complexation Modeling Of Cr(Vi) Absorption On Mineral Assemblages, Ann M. Gilchrist

Masters Theses

Hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI)) is a waste product of many anthropogenic processes. Because it is highly mobile, the improper disposal of Cr(VI) has caused widespread contamination. Because reduction and adsorption reactions may reduce the bioavailability and mobility of Cr(VI) in environmental systems, a better understanding of Cr(VI) adsorption behavior will improve remediation efforts.

Subsurfaces and soils are heterogeneous, however most studies focus on single sorbate/sorbent interactions to develop surface complexation models (SCM) for prediction of heavy metal adsorption. Theoretically, combining the SCMsdeveloped for single sorbate/sorbent systems should yield accurate predictions of adsorption in more complex systems (i.e., the component additivity approach …

A Comparative Study Of The Apocalyptic Kingdom Of God In Second Temple Jewish Literature And The Teachings Of Jesus In Matthew, Jeremiah Stallman

Masters Theses

The apocalyptic kingdom of God is a common theme in Second Temple Jewish literature. This kingdom is often presented differently in the various literary works of this era. This first chapter of this thesis considers the various aspects of the kingdom in relation to God's coming judgment and the coming messiah who is often seen as the one bringing judgment and setting up the kingdom of God. The second chapter elaborates upon Jesus' teachings about the apocalyptic kingdom of God and compares and contrasts them with the teachings of the kingdom in His day as understood through the Second Temple …

An Exploration Of The Impact That Postmodernism Has On Competition In Sport, Shara Crow

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact that postmodernism has on competition in sport. Previous studies compartmentalized social thought and competition in sport. This study appreciates that the two are connected, and it is through this connectedness that the impact emerges. By describing, finding, and analyzing relationships through text as well as notating text iteratively, it was found through a postmodernist critical awareness to meta-narratives that sport is expressed in two main themes: (a) identity (b) and hierarchy/authority. Moreover, both of these themes are interrelated to social interaction. These findings indicate that social interpretation impacts the complex …

Closer To Nature: Exploring Environmental Summer Camp Experience Through Ethnographic Fiction, Courtney Morgan Schofield

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the experiences of counselors and campers at environmentally-themed summer camps through the medium of ethnographic fiction. Research was conducted by examining the experiences and influences of two separate summer camps, the Midwest Nature Center Camp and Midwest Zoo Camp. Drawing on traditional ethnographic research methods, I explore the environmental messages emphasized during camp, the myriad of relationships individuals have with nature, and the impact of gender on the summer camp experience. Yet, while this thesis is based on ethnographic research, an emphasis is placed on the presentation of the information. By examining the way anthropology has been …

A Preliminary Study Of The Articulatory And Acoustic Features Of Forward And Backward Tone Placement In Singing, Krista Wyllys

Masters Theses

A variety of terms exist for describing tone quality in singing, and voice scientists, voice therapists, teachers of singing, and students of singing use different terms to describe the same sound. One aspect of tone quality is tone placement. Teachers of singing often rely on imagery and imitation to elicit correct tone placement from students of singing. More concrete data about what produces forward and backward tone placement could supplement singing teachers’ current practice of using imagery and imitation to elicit a desirable tone quality. This study examined forward and backward tone placement to determine the articulatory gestures and acoustic …

A Quantitative Analysis Of Collegiate Athletic Involvement And Academic Achievement Among Sport Management Students, Christopher Amos

Masters Theses

Within the last several decades, more attention has been focused on the academic success of college athletes. It has been documented from several studies that high school athletes perform better academically than their non-athlete peers (American Sports Institute, 1995; Brand, 2007; Dilley-Knoles, Burnett, & Peak, 2010; Foltz, 1992; Fox, Barr-Anderson, Neumark-Sztainer, & Wall, 2010; Slear, 2005). However, at the collegiate level, this heightened academic achievement trend among student-athletes is not so clear. Lapchick often releases data regarding graduation rates among a select group of highly achieving teams in certain sports but not much exists in the way of a comparison …

A New Kind Of National: Modified String Quartet Practices In Post-Soviet Eurasia, Adam Taylor Lenz

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the practices of string quartet modification implemented by three post-Soviet Eurasian composers: Franghiz Ali-Zadeh (Azerbaijan), Vache Sharafyan (Armenia), and Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky (Uzbekistan). After an introduction to the geography of the region and the biographies of the composers, their works containing modified string quartet configurations are examined within three distinct modification practices. These practices consist of the addition of outside instruments, the addition of electronic components, and the alteration of performance practice. The evaluation of these techniques is carried out through musical analysis and examination of cultural context. After each work has been examined, the body of works …

Use Of A Gateway In-Street Sign Treatment To Increase Yielding To Pedestrians At Crosswalks, Miles K. Bennett

Masters Theses

An important goal to reduce the number of collisions between motorists and pedestrians is to increase motorist’s yielding right-of-way to pedestrians in crosswalks. The current study addresses this goal. A Gateway installation of instreet signs (one in-street sign installed between the two travel lanes in each direction and one on both edges of the roadway in each direction) was evaluated on multilane roads. The first experiment compared the efficacy of adding multiple in-street signs used in a gateway configuration with a single sign between the two travel lanes in each direction. The second experiment compared the in-street sign gateway treatment …

Change And Continuity: Euro-American And Native American Settlement Patterns In The St. Joseph River Valley, Allison M. Kohley

Masters Theses

In recent years there has been a particular interest in the fur trade and colonialism through identification and investigation of Fort St. Joseph. This fort was an 18th century French trading post in the St. Joseph River valley located in southwestern Michigan and northwestern Indiana. This study expands our current understanding of the change and continuity of the Euro- American and Native American settlement patterns in the valley during the periods immediately prior to, during, and after the abandonment of Fort St. Joseph through the use of geographic information systems (GIS) and statistical analyses.

The Geology Of The South Antelope Pass Area Of The Southern Peloncillo Mountains, Hidalgo County, New Mexico, John A. Yellich

Masters Theses

Volcanic activity during the middle and late Tertiary has been recorded in the mountain ranges of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico and the two provinces of prominent volcanic activity, the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Mogollon Plateau, dominantly rhyolitic in composition, are connected by the Peloncillo Range. The predominant rock chemistry of the south Antelope Pass area is “rhyolitic”; however, lava rock types dominate over welded tuff rock types of the two provinces. There is a limited pre-Tertiary rock record of limestones and sandstones in the northeastern part of the study area. The rest of the study area …

Expression Of The Chemokine Receptor, Cxcr4, And Its Ligand, Sdf-1, Are Increased In Purkinje Cells Of The Multiple System Atrophy Cerebellum, Megan Welter

Masters Theses

Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) is a sporadic, neurodegenerative disease that consists of three conditions: autonomic dysfunction, Parkinsonism and cerebellar ataxia. Our lab conducted an Affymetrix global gene expression analysis using pons tissue of MSA patients to determine genes that are differentially expressed when compared to non- MSA controls. This study identified upregulated genes, including the C-X-C chemokine receptor type 4, CXCR4, to which stromal cell-derived factor-I (SDF-1) is the natural ligand. The CXCR4/SDF-1 signaling pair has been sho.wn to play multiple roles in the brain, such as inducing neuronal apoptosis and promoting leukocyte recruitment during inflammation. The MSA cerebellum presents …

Functional Annotation, Transcriptional Characterization And Enzymatic Contributions Of Essential Amino Acid Biosynthesis-Related Genes, Teresa J. Clark

Masters Theses

In plants, essential amino acid biosynthesis predominantly or exclusively occurs in the plastid. The plastid in the heterokont alga Nannochloropsis oceanica is surrounded by four membranes, which add great complexity to intracellular trafficking and communication. N. oceanica genes in essential amino acid biosynthesis were functionally annotated. The biosynthesis pathways resemble the pathways in Arabidopsis thaliana, but the gene content seems to be simpler in N. oceanica.

In addition, two A. thaliana mutants with loss-of-function mutations in the aspartate kinase-homoserine dehydrogenase 2 (AK-HSDH2) gene were characterized. These ak-hsdh2 mutants demonstrate unexpected accumulation of aspartate-derived amino acids (ADAAs), particularly threonine, in …

Executive Functions And Social Interactions: Developing Social Scenarios, Mackenzie Waite

Masters Theses

The aim of this study was to develop a series of vignettes to form the basis for an assessment of executive functions (EFs) for 9 – 12 year old children. Although EFs are necessary for effective social communication and positive social interactions, currently, most EF assessments focus on impersonal activities. Little research exists that incorporates real-time processing using ecologically valid social scenarios. The current study aims to develop realistic scenarios that children could encounter in daily life. Ethnographic interviews were conducted with six participants, who worked in a school with 9-12 year old children, to gain their perspective on social …

Explicit Teacher-Implemented Phoneme Awareness Instruction: Preschool Effects, Heather M. Osterhouse

Masters Theses

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the impact of explicit, concentrated, teacher-implemented phonological awareness instruction for ―at risk‖ 4- year-olds. Early childhood educators were trained to implement a 10-week program delivered for 20-minute sessions, four times a week, in their classrooms. The program focused on phonological awareness beginning at the level of letter-sound knowledge and advancing to blending and segmenting constituent phonemes in words. Pre- to post-treatment comparisons of phonological awareness and letter knowledge skills indicated that children in the experimental group made significant gains in comparison to the control group in phoneme blending and letter knowledge. …

Traversing Bourgeois Spaces: How A First-Generation College Student Makes Sense Of The Academy, Tabatha L. Roberts

Masters Theses

This thesis presents an autoethnographic interrogation of the intersections of identity for a first-generation college student (FGC) in the process of becoming an FGC PhD graduate/student. It explores the intersections of social class and power and how both concepts are embedded in educational practices, specifically through interpersonal relationships of teacher/student, and within institutions of higher education. Through the theoretical lenses of co-cultural theory and critical communication pedagogy, and the methodologies of autoethnography and the sensemaking paradigmatic framework it is possible to see how I interrogate my positionality as a working-class first-generation college graduate/student in the context of higher education institutions, …

A Discursive Analysis Of A Pregnancy Center: How Pregnant Women Are Encouraged To Develop A Sense Of Self-Worth And Emotional Wellbeing Through The Use Of Rhetoric And Imagery, Jessica Postma

Masters Theses

This study presents and alternative approach to how pregnancy is interpreted in western society and how settings such as a pregnancy center both challenges and reinforces these social standards. The promotion of abstinence, the aversion to abortion, notions of truth and morality, religious narratives, and the standard of care are all integral components to this analysis of pregnancy, language, and culture.

Master’S And Doctoral Theses On Second Language Writing: A Survey Of The Emerging Voices In China, Yue Chen

Masters Theses

Graduate students in China have addressed concerns about second language writing (SLW) in their theses and dissertations since 2000, but their voices are not represented in the current SLW literature. The present study aimed to investigate resident Chinese graduate students’ research in the field of SLW. The author reviewed the abstracts of all master’s theses and PhD dissertations on SLW completed in Chinese Universities between the year 2003 and 2012. The abstracts were collected from China Doctoral Dissertations Full-text Database and China Master’s Theses Full-text Database. Each abstract was coded for major topic, research type, and target population. The coded …

Spatial Factors Impacting Non-Motorized Exposures And Crash Risks, Farhad Abasahl

Masters Theses

This research investigates spatial factors, that impact non-motorized exposures and crashes, and examines the relationship between exposure at signalized intersections and crash frequencies involving pedestrians and bicycles at a census tract level. The four Michigan cities of Ann Arbor, East Lansing, Flint and Grand Rapids are examined. After completing an extensive literature review to provide a list of required data, 92 intersections are selected from the four cities to collect pedestrian and bicyclist counts. Five-year crash records, special attractions, non-motorized facilities and transportation infrastructure data for the four cities are gathered for the four cities. This data are later mapped …

The Effectiveness Of The New Town Policy In Managing Growth And Congestion In Mega Cities: A Case Study Of Lagos, Nigeria New Town Policy, Abolaji Samson Olanipekun

Masters Theses

One of the major challenges facing municipal governments of megacities in developing countries is shortage of urban infrastructures relative to population growth. Because cities play important role in the economic development of every nation, problems confronting them require proactive policy measures by the government. One such mega city is Lagos, Nigeria. From 1962 to 2006, the population of Lagos grew from 1,135,805 to 17.5 million. Crammed on a 2200 square kilometer land area of which 18.9%, Lagos population is projected to reach 20.5 million by 2015, an explosion largely driven by the non-regulatory internal migration system. The result of this …

Data Storage Alternatives For A Gridded Crop Disease Risk Forecasting System, Paul J. Roehsner

Masters Theses

Three separate storage technologies able to serve gridded data were selected for comparison of performance in terms of providing speed and expandability to a crop disease forecasting system. The three storage technologies chosen were PostgreSQL (a relational database management system), MongoDB (NoSQL system), and netCDF files. Speed tests were performed for each by running two different crop disease risk forecasting models requiring data of different spatiotemporal resolutions. Multiple trials were done using different storage hardware. Systems were then qualitatively compared for expandability by noting the process involved in adding successive crop disease forecasting models.

It was found that due to …

Use Of A Specific Alpha7 Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptor Agonist Can Prevent Loss Of Retinal Ganglion Cells In An In Vivo Rat Glaucoma Model, David Mata

Masters Theses

Acetylcholine (ACh) has been shown to have a neuroprotective effect against glutamate-induced excitotoxicity in cultured retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) through activation of α7 nicotinic ACh receptors (nAChRs). In this study, the neuroprotective effects of the α7 nAChR agonist, PNU-282987, were investigated using an in vivo model of glaucoma in adult Long Evans rats. Hypertonic saline injections were used to induce a glaucoma model. After one month, retinas were removed, flat mounted, fixed and labeled with an antibody against Thy 1.1 to label RGCs and fluorescently tagged for visualization. Eye drop application of PNU-282987 resulted in neuroprotection against RGC loss in …

Theoretical Modeling Of Near-Threshold Shape Resonance Behaviour In Photodetachment Experiments, Laurentiu Dan Dumitriu

Masters Theses

This thesis attempts to better understand the results obtained from photodetachment experiments of Fe-, made by the Western Michigan University experimental atomic physics group at the Advanced Light Source (ALS), Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory.

After a relevant description of the quantum mechanics and theoretical atomic physics concepts and formulas involved in this subject, a physically realistic model, based on the square well potential, is developed. Based on this model, the theoretical photodetachment cross section is computed in order to reproduce the qualitative behavior of the experimental photodetachment cross section measured at ALS.

This development, involving programming in Fortran and numerical …

Gis-Based Flood Analysis For Adequate Flood Mitigation In An Unplanned Urban Area; The Case Of Pikine Dagoudane In Dakar County, Senegal, Sokhna Helene Diop

Masters Theses

Since 1989, Pikine Dagoudane, in the suburbs of Dakar City has faced several flooding events, resulting in economic loss, environmental degradation and severe disturbance of the social life of the residents. The mitigation programs implemented have not appeared to provide any relief since 2000. Review of the existing literature on the crisis has revealed that the general scale of the studies, and the insufficient attention to some of the major factors could be accounted for such little efficiency. This thesis applies a different approach, based on a small area and focusing mainly on topographic characteristics, to provide a better understanding …

No Greater Love: Recognition, Transformation, And Friendship In The Harry Potter Series, Stephen Parish

Masters Theses

Nobody today doubts the momentous influence the Harry Potter series has had on a generation of readers. Many scholars and critics assume Harry's place amongst other great works of children's literature, and indeed the series has brought about a revival in children's literature scholarship. Despite this popularity, many critics question the series' aesthetics, its attention to moral demeanor. Therefore, what element exists in Harry Potter that could enforce its aesthetic quality? Based on a rhetorical reading of the texts, my thesis upholds the aesthetic nature of the books through an analysis of the trio's friendship and and its impact on …

Life Inside The Spectacle: David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, And Storytelling In The Age Of Entertainment, John Hawkins

Masters Theses

This project explores George Saunders's In Persuasion Nation and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as interventionary literature. The thesis asserts that the two works confront the problems of isolation and dehumanization created by entertainment-based consumerism; they do so by depicting satirically exaggerated consumer societies and placing well-developed, sympathetic characters in those settings. The thesis includes a consideration of Jameson and deBord's theories of spectacle and Wallace's stated concerns with postmodern irony as an ineffective form of critique.