Digital Commons Network^™

Mimo-Ofdm Communication Systems: Channel Estimation And Wireless Location, Zhongshan Wu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this new information age, high data rate and strong reliability features our wireless communication systems and is becoming the dominant factor for a successful deployment of commercial networks. MIMO-OFDM (multiple input multiple output-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing), a new wireless broadband technology, has gained great popularity for its capability of high rate transmission and its robustness against multi-path fading and other channel impairments. A major challenge to MIMO-OFDM systems is how to obtain the channel state information accurately and promptly for coherent detection of information symbols and channel synchronization. In the first part, this dissertation formulates the channel estimation problem …

Development Of Spanish L2 Competence In A Synchronous Cmc (Chat Room) Environment: The Role Of Visually-Enhanced Recasts In Fostering Grammatical Knowledge And Changes In Communicative Language Use, Francisco Ramon Lluna-Mateu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Taking into consideration some gaps observed in SLA research –noticing, recasts, input enhancement (IE),…– and in CALL/CMC research, a study was conducted among 12 advanced FL Spanish learners to assess whether and how, by communicating with a Spanish native speaker in 5 chat-room sessions, their language competence would develop in the following areas: 1) communication strategies; 2) communicative acts; and 3) grammatical knowledge of verb tense-aspect-mood (TAM) assignation. Subjects were assigned to a specific feedback condition/group (A: +recast, -enhancement; B: +recast, +enhancement; and C: no feedback) under which their TAM errors were treated in the sessions. Few research studies have …

A Generalized Approach For The Control Of Micro-Electromechanical Relays, Mohamed Abdelrahman Younis

LSU Master's Theses

MEMS (Micro-Electromechanical Systems) is an area of research and applications that is becoming increasingly popular. It's mainly concerned with integrating micro-mechanical transducers with micro-electronic circuits on common substrates, traditionally silicon, through micro-fabrication. Instead of traditionally having the transducer and the communicating (or control) circuit as two separate entities, MEMS miniaturizes and combines them on a single chip, giving it several advantages, saving space, money, and increasing the sensitivity and accuracy of the integrated system. A micro-electromechanical relay is a type of MEM devices that is becoming increasingly important in a wide range of industries such as the computer industry, the …

The Other Side Of The Tracks: Railroads, Race, And The Performance Of Unity In Nineteenth-Century American Entertainment, Elissa Sartwell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Nineteenth-century Americans took great pride in the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. This pride was not solely grounded in the knowledge that a grand, technological feat had been accomplished. When placed in its historical context, the celebration surrounding the completion of the railroad suggests a clear and visible statement of unity following a bitter and divisive civil war. The transcontinental railroad of 1869 undeniably unified the States. But any railroad simultaneously unites and divides, for while the tracks serve to link distant locations, they also produce a literal and metaphorical division in the communities through which they …

River, Tidal And Wind Interactions In A Deltaic Estuarine System, Gregg Snedden

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The balance between river and marine influences is important in governing landscape sustainability in river deltas. River- and atmospherically driven sea level variability, sediment loading, and estuary-ocean exchange in the Mississippi River delta are examined in this study. Subtidal estuarine sea level variability in the Breton Sound estuary was driven by a combination of remote atmospheric forcing outside the estuary over the continental shelf and controlled river inputs through a gated diversion structure at the estuary head. The highly-frictional deltaic landscape acted as a low-pass filter to coastal fluctuations near the estuary mouth. When substantial quantities river water were discharged …

Jack Kerouac's Spontaneous Prose: A Performance Genealogy Of The Fiction, Justin Thomas Trudeau

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study analyzes Jack Kerouac’s writing method of spontaneous prose and articulates how the method can be understood as performative writing. Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” On the Road, Visions of Cody, and Doctor Sax are explored to evaluate both the successes and failures of the author’s attempts to break literary boundaries and create a new writing method based upon spontaneous tenets. These three novels, which were written in succession from 1950 to 1953 when Kerouac was in his most productive period, represent both the emergence and dissent of the author’s use of performative writing. To explicate the cultural genesis …

Optical Control Plane: Theory And Algorithms, Stefan Alexandru Pascu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this thesis we propose a novel way to achieve global network information dissemination in which some wavelengths are reserved exclusively for global control information exchange. We study the routing and wavelength assignment problem for the special communication pattern of non-blocking all-to-all broadcast in WDM optical networks. We provide efficient solutions to reduce the number of wavelengths needed for non-blocking all-to-all broadcast, in the absence of wavelength converters, for network information dissemination. We adopt an approach in which we consider all nodes to be tap-and-continue capable thus studying lighttrees rather than lightpaths. To the best of our knowledge, this thesis …

Popular Constitutionalism In The Civil War: A Trial Run, Daniel W. Hamilton

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Tracing Nitrogen In Volcanic And Geothermal Volatiles From The Nicaraguan Volcanic Front, James A. Walker, L.J. Elkins, T.P. Fischer, D.R. Hilton, Z.D. Sharp, S. Mcknight

Faculty Articles, Papers, and Other Scholarship

We report new chemical and isotopic data from 26 volcanic and geothermal gases, vapor condensates, and thermal water samples, collected along the Nicaraguan volcanic front. The samples were analyzed for chemical abundances and stable isotope compositions, with a focus on nitrogen abundances and isotope ratios. These data are used to evaluate samples for volatile contributions from magma, air, air-saturated water, and the crust. Samples devoid of crustal contamination (based upon He isotope composition) but slightly contaminated by air or air-saturated water are corrected using N2/Ar ratios in order to obtain primary magmatic values, composed of contributions from upper mantle and …

Glacial Deposits, Vol. 34, 2005-2006, Department Of Geography-Geology

Glacial Deposits

Newsletter of the Department of Geography-Geology

Designing Switches For Routing In Circuit-Switched Trees, Dinesh Prasad Venkat Rao

LSU Master's Theses

Reconfigurable computing provides a fast and flexible solution for intensive computing processes. Thus, it acts as a bridge between software controlled and hardware based processors. The self–reconfigurable gate array (SRGA) is a reconfigurable architecture that allows fast switching between operations on a reconfigurable device. It consists of a 2-dimensional array of processing elements (PEs) connected using a binary tree structure, called a circuit-switched tree (CST). A CST is a balanced binary tree in which leaves represent processing elements (PE) and internal nodes represent switches. The PEs in the CST communicates with each other by configuring the appropriate switches in the …

How African-American And Hispanics Perceive Their Racial Equality In American Advertising, Denise Michele Pallais

LSU Master's Theses

This study focuses on how African-Americans and Hispanics perceive their racial equality in American advertising. A survey was conducted to find out the African-American and the Hispanic perceptions about how these ethnic groups saw themselves depicted, and the way they are stereotyped by the U.S. media. Overall, the study found that there was no difference between race and the level of perception between these two ethnic groups. However, age appears to be the only demographic variable that affects the African-American and Hispanic perception of discrimination. In addition, the study also exposed that African-Americans are mostly portrayed in the athletic advertising …

Whose Input Counts And Which Paradigm Prevails?: A Content Analysis Of Mass-Mediated Debate On U.S.-China Relations In 1990'S And A Policy Critique On Republican Virtue Of The Policy Tradeoff, Xiaowei Chen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the public opinion-public policy nexus with regard to the making of U.S.-China policy during the Clinton administration (1992-2000). The researcher investigates how the mass media discourse on U.S.-China relations relates to the policy tradeoff between economic interdependence and confrontation on human rights. Particularly, the quantitative study of the media discourse is placed within a Communitarian perspective to determine: (1) whether the policy tradeoff can claim to have the support of public opinion; (2) whether the media discourse originated from the active civic participation; and (3) how the policy tradeoff broke its promise. As a result, the researcher …

An Examination Of The Differential Outcomes Effect When Teaching Discriminations To Children With Autism And Other Developmental Disabilities, Laura Addison

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The differential outcomes effect (DOE) refers to the finding that performance in discrimination training improves when different behaviors produce different reinforcers. In the current study, the effects of two DOE procedures on the acquisition of receptive language skills were compared. Participants were four children with autism and/or developmental delay/speech and language impairment. The children were presented with two toy or food items and asked to give the experimenter the item named. The names consisted of three-letter nonsense syllables. Correct responses were followed by one of the following consequences: (a) The opportunity to manipulate or consume the item to which the …

Factors Influencing The Participation In Environmental Stewardship Programs: A Case Study Of The Agricultural And Forestry Sectors In Louisiana, Carrie Castille Mendoza

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Considerable research has been conducted to evaluate the adoption of agricultural best management practices and their overall impact on improving environmental quality. However, limited studies have been conducted to evaluate the behavioral factors that influence the adoption of these practices in the context of educational programs The goal of this study is to determine the factors that influence farmer conservation behavior that might lead to an increased probability of improving agriculture and forestry watersheds. A conceptual model was developed to identify the: 1) identify landowner participation in watershed conservation projects, and 2) determine the factors influencing agriculture and forestry landowners …

Regarding Pained Sympathy And Sympathy Pains: Morality, And Empathy In The Civil Adjudication Of Pain, Jody L. Madeira

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Essay considers the legal propriety of the empathic responses of jurors to suffering plaintiffs. To that end, Part II first explicates the legal contours of a tension between what is experiential or physical (objective) and what is expressionistic or non-physical (subjective). This tension is a foundational jurisprudential concern in personal injury litigation because the subjective is seen to threaten the rule of law: the perceived primacy of reason and logic. Thus, this tension is also what the parties' attorneys seek to exploit and what the court seeks to constrain. Part III explores why an empathic identification is indeed a …

Lashing Reason To The Mast: Understanding Judicial Constraints On Emotion In Personal Injury Litigation, Jody L. Madeira

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Arguing from the premise that personal injury plaintiffs and injury evidence do not taint proceedings by encouraging jurors to adjudicate based on emotion rather than evidence, this article reviews and challenges judicial attempts to constrain jurors' emotive responses to an injured plaintiff in three areas of personal injury litigation: voir dire, admissibility of evidence, and restrictions on damages arguments and assessment. The judicial abhorrence of sympathy as a ground for substantive decision making during some phases of the trial clashes with judicial tolerance of the emotion during others, giving rise to a pattern of sympathy in, sympathy out where the …

Towards A Cosmopolitan Vision Of International Law: Identifying And Defining Cil Post Sosa V. Alvarez-Machain, Christiana Ochoa

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, future Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) litigants seemingly will be asked to demonstrate that the norms giving rise to their actions are violations of clearly established Customary International Law (CIL). Given the mutable character of CIL, especially in the area of human rights, this will surely fuel the already voluminous literature on the content of the CIL of human rights.

While debate will certainly arise over the norms that have been become CIL, significant attention must be also be devoted to the problems inherent in the CIL of …

Recognizing Odysseus' Scar: Reconceptualizing Pain And Its Empathic Role In Civil Adjudication, Jody L. Madeira

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article proffers a consideration of how the expression of pain impacts the interpersonal dimensions of personal injury proceedings, contesting through philosophical logic and textual analyses of case law and legal practitioners' texts the conclusion of scholars such as Elaine Scarry and Robert Cover that pain unmakes both the word and the world. Seeing pain as something that can and must be communicated, albeit in a different form than pain embodied, makes pain a much more profound force, comports with our understanding of pain as a physical yet interpersonally meaningful sensation, and has many evidentiary ramifications. Taking as its premise …

A Comparative Study Of Household Demand For Meats By U.S. Hispanics, Carlos Ignacio Garcia

LSU Master's Theses

The general objective of this research project was to study the consumption behavior of U.S. Hispanics for meat products. A comprehensive review of literature on the studies of U.S. Hispanic consumers was performed by means of a systematic survey; different sources of information useful in studying Hispanic consumers were documented. The simultaneous increase in population and income of Hispanics in the United States is attractive to food companies, and makes more relevant the study of their consumer behavior patterns for discovering future market opportunities. Censored incomplete demand systems of the LinQuad form were used for recognizing the consumption patterns by …

The Effect Of Music Tempo On Movement Responses Of Preschool Children, Melanie Woods Alexander

LSU Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of tempo on movement responses of children ages one to three. For two weeks, 17 children between the ages of 22 and 36 months were videotaped twice per week to observe and measure their movement responses to fast and slow musical stimuli. During these sessions, the children were videotaped in their classrooms, engaged in either free play or in a quiet group activity. The videotaped sessions were then analyzed using a Motor Observation Form. Once all of the tapes had been viewed and scored, overall percentages of movement and no …

Heroic Individualism: The Hero As Author In Democratic Culture, Alan I. Baily

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My study focuses on the literature of democratic morality, with specific reference to the question of "heroic individualism." I attempt to elucidate the notion of heroic individualism by examining three modern democratic moralists whose work occupies the space between politics and literature: Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Nietzsche. In brief, I conclude that the central aspiration of heroic individualism is to bridge the gap between writing and action, the Text and the Voice. The dialogue among Rousseau, Carlyle, and Nietzsche reveals that the problem of writing as action is central to heroic-individualist morality. Each of these authors demonstrates …

An Investigation Of Focus: Local, Regional, And National Newspaper Coverage In The Aftermath Of Hurricane Katrina, Roxanne Kearns Dill

LSU Master's Theses

This study examined the content in coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by local, regional, and national newspapers. Specifically, six newspapers were examined for a variety of items, including topics covered, frame, types of sources cited, types of authorities quoted, geographic focus, and assignment of blame for the devastation and evacuee distress that followed this historic storm. The analysis covered a two-week period, from August 29, 2005, the day Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, to September 11, 2005. The research methods included a content analysis of the 263 articles that appeared on Page 1 of The New York …

"A Kind Providence" And "The Right To Self Preservation": How Andrew Jackson, Emersonian Whiggery, And Frontier Calvinism Shaped The Course Of American Political Culture, Ryan Ruckel

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Andrew Jackson has inspired numerous biographies and works of historical scholarship, but his religious views have attracted very little attention. Jackson may have been a giant on the political landscape, but he was also a human being, an ordinary American who experienced the same difficulties and challenges as other Americans of the early nineteenth century. Another common experience for many Americans of Jackson’s day included church life, revivals, and efforts to conceptualize every day events within the context of religious experience. Finding out where Jackson stood on religion and what role religion played in his thinking helps situate him as …

Petrological And Geochemical Investigations Of Deep Sea Turbidite Sands In The Pandora And Moresby Troughs: Source To Sink Papua New Guinea Focus Area, Luke Jeremiah Patterson

LSU Master's Theses

The Moresby and Pandora Troughs of the northern Coral Sea are components of the deep-sea depositional system that is the ultimate sink for the Source to Sink Papua New Guinea (PNG) Focus Area. Cores collected from the R/V Melville during March-April 2004 reveal marine volcaniclastic and terrigenous turbidites deposited in these troughs during the Quaternary. Constraining the spatial, temporal, and provenance characteristics for these terrigenous sands through mineralogical, chemical, and textural analysis is the primary focus of this study. All cores contain thinly-bedded sandy turbidite packages interlayered with hemipelagic marls and typical centimeter-to-meter-thick turbidite sequences. The Moresby Trough core JPC22 …

A Woman's Place : An Authentically Feminist Zone, Elizabeth Anne Blazek

Undergraduate Theses and Senior Projects

No abstract provided.

Something Borrowed, Something Blue : Carrying Old Traditions Into A New Life, Katherine M. Argenziano

Undergraduate Theses and Senior Projects

No abstract provided.

The Rate Of Decline Of Social Skills Across Dementing And Non-Dementing Individuals With Intellectual Disabilities: A Longitudinal Study, Julia D. Lott

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study sought to establish rate of decline of adaptive skills in a population of individuals with intellectual disability (ID) and dementia compared to similar persons without dementia, as well as examining the variability of positive and negative social behaviors across diagnostic classes. Among the general population, differential rates of functional decline have been established for normal aging and dementia. This knowledge assists in making differential diagnoses of dementia, establishing prognosis, and long-term planning. For this study, participants in each group were individually matched for age, gender, Down’s syndrome status, and level of ID. Participants in the matched control group …

Examining Middle School Students Learning Language Arts Skills In Context, Erica L. Dinkins

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the embedded language approach is effective in teaching the traditional language arts curriculum, and whether it holds any advantages over the more traditional approach. Twelve teachers in ten different schools taught language skills using the embedded language approach, while twelve matched teachers explicitly taught the same skills using traditional workbook practice activities for six weeks. Treatment efficacy was assessed using gain scores between pretest and posttest using a battery of informal and standardized measures. In addition, weekly comprehension probes were administered to examine whether language arts skills taught during the week …

Hurricane Katrina: A Content Analysis Of Media Framing, Attribute Agenda Setting, And Tone Of Government Response, Brigette Lynn Brunken

LSU Master's Theses

This study content analyzed print media coverage of government response from four newspapers in the five weeks immediately after Hurricane Katrina, looking for common frames, attribute agenda setting, and tone. In addition, it assessed week-to-week differences throughout coverage. Findings indicate that the order of Semetko and Valkenburg's (2000) common frames changed, emphasizing human interest first. Conflict, attribution of responsibility, economic consequences, and morality frames followed. Media's use of attribute agenda setting was evident throughout coverage, primarily emphasizing the issues, relief and rescue, economic, negative timeliness, and rebuilding and repairing. Media's tone of government response was moderately neutral with federal tone …