Digital Commons Network^™

Fieldwork/Fieldwalking: Art, Sauntering And Science In The "Walking Country", Perdita Phillips

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

fieldwork/fieldwalking is a contemporary art project exploring practices of walking and science in the field. 11 explores the themes of walking and-fieldwork in art, and as art. Whilst the. sociology of science in the laboratory has been well theorised, less has been said about the field in the natural sciences. And, equally, the most recent and provocative walking art is found in urban areas, in a fabric dominated by the patterns of human settlement. How could new walking art be made in non-urban places? The project set out to investigate how these two, fieldwork and walking, could be combined in …

The Analysis Of Potential Space Tourism Market, Sandra Sankovic

Theses

In December of 2004, RIT Professor C.J. Wallington and students in the space tourism development course (winter 2004/ 2005) conducted a space tourism market survey. The target markets for these surveys were comprised of acquaintances (including family) of RIT students who took the space tourism course. Professor Wallington was interested in finding out if the student's families, friends, and acquaintances would want to take a space trip. The survey was comprised of twenty-one questions that focused on gathering demographic information, knowledge of and interest in zero-gravity, suborbital flights, and low earth orbit habitats. The results of this survey were never …

Creative Problem Solving Through Methods Of Collaborative Improvisation, Alex J. Girard

Theses

The field of graphic design is an inherently creative and collaborative endeavor. The design process itself can involve a range of people and variables that are brought together for the purpose of creation through a forum of influence, exchange and teamwork. This thesis will study problem solving processes in a variety of settings, the role of parameters and constraints, and their effects on the evolution of creativity, particularly focusing on solutions that are responses to the predefined context in which they are created. One of the major goals of this thesis is to infuse the graphic design approach to problem …

Iran In U. S. Media : A Framing Analysis Of Newsweek, Time, And The New York Times, Farideh Dada

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

The Synthesis And Characterization Of A Novel Single Source Beta-Barium Borate Precursor Barium (18-Crown-6) Dimesitylborinate, Travis M. Scott

Theses

Nonlinear optical materials are a rapidly growing market and are expected to exceed $1.6 billion by 2009. Significant time, energy, and investment have been applied to increasing the efficiency of producing NLO materials. Of these materials beta-barium borate has stood out as an important NLO product. The goal of this research was the development of a novel beta-barium precursor suitable for applications in thin film technology. Special attention was paid towards development of a precursor suitable for metal organic chemical vapor deposition. To that end special attention was paid towards the synthesis of a mononuclear barium compound. The novel BBO …

Capillary Flow Analysis And Computation Of De-Wetting And Wetting Resistances In Angular Geometries, Daniel Bolleddula

Dissertations and Theses

Capillary flows in containers or conduits with interior corners are commonplace in nature and industry. The majority of investigations addressing such flows solve the problem numerically in terms of a flow resistance coefficient (friction factor) for cases where spontaneous liquid spreading along the corner occurs for contact angles below the Concus-Finn critical wetting condition for the particular conduit geometry of interest. This research effort provides missing numerical data for the flow resistance function F_i for partially wetting systems above the Concus-Finn condition. In such cases the fluid spontaneously de-wets the interior corner and often retracts into corner-bound drops. A …

0761: Marvin L. Stone Papers, 1924-2000, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

Personal papers of Marvin L. Stone. Marshall Alumnus, past editor of U.S. News and World Report, Deputy Director of the U.S. Information Agency during the Reagan Administration. He was founding president and chairman of the non-profit International Media Fund (IMF) in Washington, D.C, an organization that promoted free press in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. After the IMF, he spent a year in Europe on a Knight Foundation journalism fellowship, and then retired in 1996[?].

To view materials from this collection that are digitized and available online, search the Marvin L. Stone Collection, 1924-2000 here.

Seating For Communicating, Myung Taek Jung

Theses

Not listed.

Aesthetics Into The Twenty-First Century, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

The new concerns facing aestheticians in the twenty-first century require serious attention if the discipline is to maintain continued viability as an intellectual discipline. Just as art changes as cultures develop, so must aesthetics. In support of this view is a personal account of evolving engagement with aesthetics and the factors that led to embracing change and a plurality of practices as essential to the health of aesthetic today. A brief examination of the state of aesthetics as it has evolved in the American Society for Aesthetics since its inception in the 1940s will follow. These two lines of development, …

Keith Haring. Artre Per Tutti, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Transmission And Reception Of Blended Family Narratives In The Church Context, Christopher W. Perry

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Manta Project: Conception, Implementation, And Reflections On A Cable Array Robot And Its Interfaces, Brian Ballsun-Stanton

Theses

We have created and flown a cable array robot based flying sculpture. This sculp ture, in its various versions, flew in both Rochester, New York and London, England. This thesis both explores the construction of the flying sculpture and presents a pub lished paper wherein an Human-Robotic Interaction design space is proposed to facilitate discussion of robotic interfaces.

Tum Tum Yum Yum, Nongyao Moon Krapugthong

Theses

Not included

Identification And Ranking Of Relevant Image Content, Mustafa I. A. Jaber

Theses

The work in this thesis proposes an image understanding algorithm for automatically identifying and ranking different image regions into several levels of importance. Given a color image, specialized maps for classifying image content namely: weighted similarity, weighted homogeneity, image contrast and memory color maps are generated and combined to provide a perceptual importance map. Further analysis of this map yields a region ranking map which sorts the image content into different levels of significance.

The algorithm was tested on a large database that contains a variety of color images. Those images were acquired from the Berkeley segmentation dataset as well …

Artfully Concealed, Athesia V. Benjamin

Theses

The following document is a summary of the development of my work during two years in the MFA painting program at Rochester Institute of Technology. The process intrinsic to thesis development eventually brought me to my final concept of obscuring my identity as a way to develop a body of figurative paintings. Along with the eleven pieces created during this two-year period, I have thoroughly studied this specific topic within the context of contemporary and historical art and identified artists with like concepts and images.

Beetle Blasphemy, Ferris Webby

Theses

A descriptive narration of a project to create a 3D animated short comedy film, "Beetle Blasphemy," featuring a beetle who believes himself to be the Messiah. Includes original proposal, timeline, budget, original script, original storyboards, and film stills.

Identification Of Trans-Splicing Sites In Leishmania Major Using Probabilistic Methods, Lukas Habegger

Theses

Leishmania major, a member of the Kinetoplastida family, is a primitive protozoan that causes a human disease, called leishmaniases, affecting numerous people worldwide. The identification of new drug targets to combat leishmaniases necessitates a thorough understanding of how genomic instructions are transformed into functional proteins. It requires not only the prediction and categorization of all the genes, but also a profound understanding of their regulation. Much of gene regulation may occur through a process known as frarcs-splicing. Trans-splicing, which is mechanistically similar to cissplicing, is the process of cleaving a large polycistronic transcript into smaller monocistronic components.

The goal of …

Pharma On The Hot Seat, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

The pharmaceutical industry has been receiving greater scrutiny lately due in large part to the many public and private legal enforcement actions taken against pharmaceutical manufacturers. These enforcement actions, along with legal developments such as the OIG Compliance Guidance for Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s statutory guidelines for public corporations, the HIPAA privacy regulations, and the Medicare Modernization Act, have the potential to encourage the pharmaceutical industry to self-regulate beyond the bounds currently required by the law. After a brief overview of enforcement actions and compliance programs directed toward the pharmaceutical industry, this Article reviews a similar situation the hospital …

Foreword: The Politics Of Health Law: Any Tipping Points In View?, Frances H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

Malcolm Gladwell explored the way certain ideas and behaviors can proliferate "just like viruses do" once they achieve a critical mass in The Tipping Point,' his best-seller about the sorts of widespread and rapidly adopted social phenomena he labels epidemics. Gladwell's subtitle, "How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference," indicates that he thinks it need not take much to get one of these social epidemics rolling. He does believe, however, that three factors are essential: getting "people with a particular and rare set of social gifts" involved,² packaging the ideas so they are "irresistible" under the circumstances, ^{3 …}

Performance Evaluation Of Extended Sparse Linearization In Gf(2) And Gf(28), Tigin Kaptanoglu

Theses

XSL (eXtended Sparse Linearization) is a recent algebraic attack aimed at the Advanced Encryption Standard. In order to shed some light into the behavior of the algorithm, which is largely unknown, we have studied XSL on equation systems with variables interpreted either as bits or bytes. The algorithm solves byte-systems much faster than it does bit-systems, which promts us to suggest that if a more compact representation of equation systems can be found, such as one where the variables are 8-byte blocks, or even a more generalized form of 8n-byte blocks, it may be possible to increase the speed of …

Effective Approaches To Minimize The Problem Of Pharmaceuticals And Other Personal Care Products In The Environment, Papun Pramanick

Theses

Studies have shown that pharmaceuticals and other personal care products (PPCPs) are present in the environment, especially in water, due to different human activities. Some of these compounds are toxic to our eco-system. Although there is no evidence of adverse human health effect from the presence of PPCPs in the environment to date , some adverse effects on aquatic life cycle already have been found. Therefore, protecting our environment as well as human health from adverse effect(s) of PPCPs is a growing concern. The objective of this thesis work was to collect information about the principal approaches available to pharmaceutical …

Using Eye Tracking To Understand Banner Blindness And Improve Website Design, Chad Lapa

Theses

Banners, as a form of advertising on the web, are important for businesses. Conversely customers want to navigate the site without being distracted by irrelevant or annoying ads. Design and placement of banners is not well understood and "banner blindness", which occurs when users overlook the banner entirely, is what causes the ineffectiveness of the banner. This study employs eye tracking to investigate how banner background color and the banner’s relevance to users’ tasks influence banner blindness. Eye movements were collected for users performing several tasks and viewing banners in a task-free context. Different banners were counterbalanced with task order. …

Rook Polynomials For Chessboards Of Two And Three Dimensions, Benjamin Zindle

Theses

Not provided.

Five Myths About Sprawl, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

In Sprawl: A Compact History, Robert Bruegmann, an art historian, has painted a superficially convincing case for the status quo, asserting that sprawl is "a natural result of affluence that occurs in all urbanized societies." Bruegmann's book has generated glowing media publicity. This article suggests that Bruegmann overestimates the universality of sprawl, by overlooking the differences between pedestrian-friendly cities with some sprawling development and cities in which automobile-dependent sprawl is the only choice available to most consumers. In addition, Bruegmann understates the harmful social effects of sprawl, especially the effect of automobile-dependent development upon non-drivers. Bruegmann also consistently underestimates the …

You Can Have It All: Less Sprawl And Property Rights Too, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Some commentators believe that smart growth and property rights are at loggerheads - and to be sure, these theories do lead to differing positions on a few issues (most notably urban growth boundaries and similar anti-sprawl regulations). But as to a wide variety of issues, smart growth advocates and property rights theorists can find common ground. Both groups can support eliminating zoning regulations that mandate automobile-dependent, sprawling development, such as single-use zoning, minimum parking requirements and minimum lot size requirements.

How Ehs Managers Can Influence Environmental Excellence Within Their Organization, Joseph Whitaker

Theses

The objective of this work is to evaluate the various management styles and systems applicable to the Environmental, Health, and Safety ('EHS') profession; furthermore, it will present ways in which managers will discover how to understand and evaluate projects from a 'business' point of view, allowing them to compete within their organization for capital and human resources. ... This paper will also discuss various evaluations used to ensure proper buy-in from management -- a process that will facilitate the allocation of human and financial resources to environment, health, and safety projects. The evaluation will focus on two primary elements. The …

Situational Awareness In The Marine Towing Industry, Boris Towns

Theses

Loss of situational awareness has been cited as the most common cause of accidents in the maritime industry. However, current research has not proven beneficial in determining the factors that underpin situational awareness. This study examined situational awareness among licensed captains and pilots of the inland towing industry. Twenty towboat captains, who operate on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW) from New Orleans, LA to Houston, TX and who represented 16 towing vessel companies, were interviewed and participated in an integrated survey that explored fatigue, communication, dangerous drugs and alcohol, social stress, and mental workload. These factors were believed to have …

Point Seeking: A Family Of Dynamic Path Finding Algorithms, Andrew Fanton

Theses

In the field of Artificial Intelligence, calculating the best route from one point to another, known as “path finding,” has become a common problem. If an agent cannot effectively navigate through an environment – be it real or virtual – it will often not be able to perform even the most routine tasks. For example, a Martian rover can't collect samples if it can't get to them; meanwhile, a computer game is not much of a challenge if your opponents can't find their way around. The problem of path finding has three basic aspects: map representation, path generation, and locomotion. …

Visualization Analysis Of Astrophysics N-Bodied Problem Using Image Morphological Processing Techniques, Thomas J. Borrelli

Theses

This project’s primary goal is to detect points of interest within the output data resulting from running a simulation of the Astrophysics N-Bodied problem (GRAPEcluster). Morphological Image Processing techniques will be applied to the visualized data in order to detect areas of interest within the original data. Several Morphological Image Processing techniques will be used and the results compared in the analysis. The final output of the VRAD (Visualization of Raw Astrophysics Data) System will be two-fold: first, the VRAD system will output a text file that contains the x, y and z coordinates of each region of interest in …

The Performance Of Group Diffie-Hellman Paradigms: A Software Framework And Analysis, Kieran S. Hagzan

Theses

A mobile computing environment typically involves groups of small, low-power devices interconnected through a mobile and dynamic network. Attempts to secure communication over these “ad-hoc” networks must be scalable to conserve the minimal resources of mobile devices as network sizes grow. In this project, the scalability of differing Group Diffie-Hellman security key generation implementations is examined. In theory, the implementation utilizing a data structure with the lowest theoretical run-time complexity for building the Diffie-Hellman group should prove the most scalable experimentally. A common modular framework was implemented to support generic Group Diffie-Hellman key agreement implementations abstracted from the underlying data …