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Full-Text Articles in American Studies

'The Senator And The Socialite: The True Story Of America's First Black Dynasty,' By Lawrence Otis Graham, Eric S. Yellin Jan 2007

'The Senator And The Socialite: The True Story Of America's First Black Dynasty,' By Lawrence Otis Graham, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

Lawrence Otis Graham attempts to tell the important story of the Bruces and their legacy in The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty. Starting his story before the Civil War, Graham follows the “First Black Dynasty” through its ultimate fall from grace in mid-twentieth-century New York City. As with his previous bestseller, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (1999), Graham takes on the ambitious task of capturing the meaning and importance of an underappreciated group of American’s.

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Channel, Spectrum, And Waveform Awareness In Ofdm-Based Cognitive Radio Systems, Tevfik Yücek Jan 2007

Channel, Spectrum, And Waveform Awareness In Ofdm-Based Cognitive Radio Systems, Tevfik Yücek

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The radio spectrum is becoming increasingly congested everyday with emerging technologies and with the increasing number of wireless devices. Considering the limited bandwidth availability, accommodating the demand for higher capacity and data rates is a challenging task, requiring innovative technologies that can offer new ways of exploiting the available radio spectrum. Cognitive radio arises to be a tempting solution to the spectral crowding problem by introducing the notion of opportunistic spectrum usage. Because of its attractive features, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been successfully used in numerous wireless standards and technologies. We believe that OFDM will play an important …

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Highbrow: A Context Enabled Highlighting Browser, Ronald J. Zucker Jan 2007

Highbrow: A Context Enabled Highlighting Browser, Ronald J. Zucker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the World Wide Web continues to grow, more and more information is retrieved online. A person visiting a Web site has a choice of whether to skip, skim, deep read, bookmark for later revisiting, print a document, or any combination of these options. Recently, several tools have been developed to allow users to digitally annotate Web documents. These tools allow users to highlight, make text notes, and scrape information (a form of copy and paste). This dissertation introduces a new form of annotating, called context highlighting. Context highlighting is the ability to mark the text that surrounds keywords or …

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Sulk Localization And Topology Control In Large Scale Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks, Rui Zhang Jan 2007

Sulk Localization And Topology Control In Large Scale Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks, Rui Zhang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) continue to evolve as new applications emerge. In the recent past, WSNs were mostly single sink networks with a few number of homogeneous and static sensor nodes. Now, several applications require networks with multiple and moving sinks and targets as well as thousands of heterogeneous devices. However, the same constraints remain: sensor nodes continue to be very limited in resources, posing new challenges in the design of scalable and energy-efficient algorithms and communication protocols to support these new applications. This dissertation first addresses the problem of sink localization in large scale WSNs. A scalable and energy-efficient …

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Community Context And Health Disparities Among Older Adults, Helen M. Zayac Jan 2007

Community Context And Health Disparities Among Older Adults, Helen M. Zayac

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

African Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities in the U.S. continue to face conditions of residential and educational segregation, lower socioeconomic status, and higher rates of mortality than whites. Better theory-based research that uses community and individual level factors to explain how health disparities are created and perpetuated is needed. The Community Context and Health Disparities Model, which extends the work of Schulz and Northridge (2004) with elements described by Williams and Collins (2001), is described. This framework identifies the pathways by which characteristics of the physical, built, social, economic, and healthcare environments impact health and are mediated by individual traits. …

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Learning From Biometric Distances: Performance And Security Related Issues In Face Recognition Systems, Pranab Mohanty Jan 2007

Learning From Biometric Distances: Performance And Security Related Issues In Face Recognition Systems, Pranab Mohanty

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We present a theory for constructing linear, black box approximations to face recognition algorithms and empirically demonstrate that a surprisingly diverse set of face recognition approaches can be approximated well using a linear model. The construction of the linear model to a face recognition algorithm involves embedding of a training set of face images constrained by the distances between them, as computed by the face recognition algorithm being approximated. We accomplish this embedding by iterative majorization, initialized by classical multi-dimensional scaling (MDS). We empirically demonstrate the adequacy of the linear model using six face recognition algorithms, spanning both template based …

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Measurement Equivalence Of The Center For Epidemiological Depression Scale In Racially/Ethnically Diverse Older Adults, Giyeon Kim Jan 2007

Measurement Equivalence Of The Center For Epidemiological Depression Scale In Racially/Ethnically Diverse Older Adults, Giyeon Kim

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation study was designed to examine measurement equivalence of the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression (CES-D) Scale across White, African American, and Mexican American elders. Specific aims were to identify race/ethnicity-, sociodemographic-, and acculturation and instrument language-related measurement bias in the CES-D. Three studies were conducted in this dissertation to accomplish these aims. Two existing national datasets were used: the New Haven Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly (EPESE) for the White and African American samples and the Hispanic Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly (H-EPESE) for the Mexican-American sample. Differential item functioning (DIF) analyses …

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Implementation Of Unmanned Vehicle Control On Fpga Based Platform Using System Generator, Shashikala Narasimha Murthy Jan 2007

Implementation Of Unmanned Vehicle Control On Fpga Based Platform Using System Generator, Shashikala Narasimha Murthy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this research was to explore a new and improved software development tool for the implementation of control algorithms on Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). The Simulink plug in, System Generator, complements traditional Hardware Description Language (HDL) by providing a higher level graphical language for the development of FPGA designs. The design is then translated into the lower level required by the Xilinx's ISE program. By utilizing this graphical based higher level of abstraction at the design entry level, the requirement of a detailed knowledge of HDL languages is no longer required. Because of this new environment …

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Breaking The Typecast: Revising Roles For Coordinating Mixed Teams, Matthew T. Long Jan 2007

Breaking The Typecast: Revising Roles For Coordinating Mixed Teams, Matthew T. Long

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Heterogeneous multi-agent systems are currently used in a wide variety of situations, including search and rescue, military applications, and off-world exploration, however it is difficult to understand the actions of these systems or naturalistically assign these mixed teams to tasks. These agents, which may be human, robot or software, have different capabilities but will need to coordinate effectively with humans in order to operate. The first and largest contributing factor to this challenge is the processing, understanding and representing of elements of the natural world in a manner that can be utilized by artificial agents. A second contributing factor is …

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Effect Of Temperature On Copper Chemical Mechanical Planarization, Veera Raghava R Kakireddy Jan 2007

Effect Of Temperature On Copper Chemical Mechanical Planarization, Veera Raghava R Kakireddy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The effects of different process parameters on tribology and surface defects were studied till date, but there has been a very minimal study to understand the effect of slurry temperature during Copper Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP). The surface defects such as dishing, erosion and metal loss amount for more than 50% of the defects that hamper the device yield and mainly the electrical properties during the manufacturing process. In this research, the effect of slurry temperature on tribology, surface defects and electrical properties during copper CMP employing different pad materials and slurries has been explored. Experiments were conducted at different …

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Micro Coaxial Transmission Lines For Integrated Microwave Circuits, Saravana Prakash Natarajan Jan 2007

Micro Coaxial Transmission Lines For Integrated Microwave Circuits, Saravana Prakash Natarajan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The research presented in this doctoral dissertation introduces a developmental path to realize micro coaxial transmission lines for wafer-level microwave and millimeter wave circuits. The micro coax lines conceptualized in this research are three-dimensional, with a uniquely low vertical profile of 20 mu m. They are distinguishable from other transmission line topologies due to frequency limitless, cross-talk free performance in high density circuits resulting from the totally shielded construction. Design and optimization was done using equations and electromagnetic simulations. Extensive process development has been carried out to fabricate these devices on CMOS grade silicon wafers using processes amenable to the …

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Measurement And Modeling Of The Anhysteretic Magnetization Of Magnetic Cores For Temperature And Frequency Dependent Effects, Jeremy M. Walker Jan 2007

Measurement And Modeling Of The Anhysteretic Magnetization Of Magnetic Cores For Temperature And Frequency Dependent Effects, Jeremy M. Walker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Inductors and transformers are electrical devices critical to power conversion systems. The current-voltage (I-V) behavior of these devices is very nonlinear as a result of the magnetic cores used in their construction. However, in the design of these power conversion systems the present state of Spice-based models is limited to low frequency and room temperature effects. An addition to the present model found in many Spice type environments, Jiles-Atherton, is the subject of this work. Chapter 1 of this dissertation introduces the source of these nonlinearities as being a result of the relationship between the magnetic flux density, B, and …

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Analysis Of Vtol Mav Use During Rescue And Recovery Operations Following Hurricane Katrina, Kevin S. Pratt Jan 2007

Analysis Of Vtol Mav Use During Rescue And Recovery Operations Following Hurricane Katrina, Kevin S. Pratt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There can be little doubt that Hurricane Katrina will always be remembered for the damage and devastation it caused. But it also provided the first opportunity for MAVs to be used and evaluated during Search and Rescue (SAR) as well as recovery operations. Researchers from The Center for Robot-Assisted Search And Rescue (CRASAR) made two separate deployments to areas affected by Hurricane Katrina: one during initial SAR operations and a second deployment during recovery operations 90 days later. Using data and observations from both of these deployments, this work draws four key findings about semi-autonomous Miniature UAV (MAV) operations in …

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Louisa May Alcott [From Oxford Encyclopedia Of Women In World History], Melissa J. Homestead Jan 2007

Louisa May Alcott [From Oxford Encyclopedia Of Women In World History], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

American fiction writer best known as the author of the girls’ novel Little Women (1868-1869). Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to Abigail May Alcott and the progressive educator Bronson Alcott. The March family of Little Women was an idealized version of her own family, which was far less stable and more mobile. Alcott’s father’s idealistic education, and reform ventures regularly failed, necessitating the family’s frequent moves, and she and her mother increasingly provided the family’s economic support. Her childhood and adolescence were split primarily between Concord and Boston, Massachusetts, where she was deeply influenced by members of her father’s …

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Willa Cather [From The Oxford Encyclopedia Of Women In World History], Melissa J. Homestead Jan 2007

Willa Cather [From The Oxford Encyclopedia Of Women In World History], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

American novelist, Born in Virginia, Cather moved with her family to Nebraska in 1883 and is best known as a novelist of the American prairie. However, her life history and literary output belie this characterization. As a student at the University of Nebraska she published short stories and poems and worked as a journalist. This experience earned her a position at the Home Monthly magazine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When the magazine failed, she stayed in Pittsburgh, first returning to newspaper journalism and then teaching high school. For several years she lived in the family home of Isabelle McClung, a young …

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Introduction To Signet Classic's The Song Of The Lark By Willa Cather (2007), Melissa J. Homestead Jan 2007

Introduction To Signet Classic's The Song Of The Lark By Willa Cather (2007), Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In May of 1912, Willa Cather traveled to Winslow, Arizona, to visit her brother, Douglass, who worked for the railroad. The year before, she had begun a leave of absence from McClure's Magazine, where she had been an editor since 1906, so that she could focus her energies on writing fiction. Although she had been publishing short fiction regularly since 1892, her first novel-the cosmopolitan, somewhat derivative Alexander's Bridge ‒ did not appear until 1912. Feeling tired and unwell, she, like many other Americans, sought renewal in the dry air and open spaces of the desert. After six years in …

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Ultra-Wideband Electronics, Design Methods, Algorithms, And Systems For Dielectric Spectroscopy Of Isolated B16 Tumor Cells In Liquid Medium, Erick N. Maxwell Jan 2007

Ultra-Wideband Electronics, Design Methods, Algorithms, And Systems For Dielectric Spectroscopy Of Isolated B16 Tumor Cells In Liquid Medium, Erick N. Maxwell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Quantifying and characterizing isolated tumor cells (ITCs) is of interest in surgical pathology and cytology for its potential to provide data for cancer staging, classification, and treatment. Although the independent prognostic significance of circulating ITCs has not been proven, their presence is gaining clinical relevance as an indicator. However, researchers have not established an optimal method for detecting ITCs. Consequently, this Ph.D. dissertation is concerned with the development and evaluation of dielectric spectroscopy as a low-cost method for cell characterization and quantification. In support of this goal, ultra-wideband (UWB), microwave pulse generator circuits, coaxial transmission line fixtures, permittivity extraction algorithms, …

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Design And Evaluation Of New Search Paradigms And Power Management For Peer-To-Peer File Sharing, Graciela Perera Jan 2007

Design And Evaluation Of New Search Paradigms And Power Management For Peer-To-Peer File Sharing, Graciela Perera

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Current estimates are that more than nine million PCs in the U.S. are part of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing overlay networks on the Internet. These P2P hosts generate about 20% of the traffic on the Internet and consume about 7.8 TWh/yr equal to $630 million per year. File search in a P2P network is based on a wasteful paradigm of broadcasting query messages. Reducing P2P overhead traffic to reduce bandwidth waste and enabling power management to reduce electricity usage are clearly of great interest. In this dissertation, two new search paradigms with reduced overhead traffic are investigated. The new Targeted …

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Scalable Frameworks And Algorithms For Cluster Ensembles And Clustering Data Streams, Prodip Hore Jan 2007

Scalable Frameworks And Algorithms For Cluster Ensembles And Clustering Data Streams, Prodip Hore

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Clustering algorithms are an important tool for data mining and data analysis purposes. Clustering algorithms fall under the category of unsupervised learning algorithms, which can group patterns without an external teacher or labels using some kind of similarity metric. Clustering algorithms are generally iterative in nature and computationally intensive. They will have disk accesses in every iteration for data sets larger than memory, making the algorithms unacceptably slow. Data could be processed in chunks, which fit into memory, to provide a scalable framework. Multiple processors may be used to process chunks in parallel. Clustering solutions from each chunk together form …

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Error Equivalence Theory For Manufacturing Process Control, Hui Wang Jan 2007

Error Equivalence Theory For Manufacturing Process Control, Hui Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Due to uncertainty in manufacturing processes, applied probability and statistics have been widely applied for quality and productivity improvement. In spite of significant achievements made in causality modeling for control of process variations, there exists a lack of understanding on error equivalence phenomenon, which concerns the mechanism that different error sources result in identical variation patterns on part features. This so called error equivalence phenomenon could have dual effects on dimensional control: significantly increasing the complexity of root cause identification, and providing an opportunity to use one error source to counteract or compensate the others. Most of previous research has …

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"Unrighteous Compact": Louisa May Alcott's Resistance To Contracts And Promises In Moods, Nina Bannett Jan 2007

"Unrighteous Compact": Louisa May Alcott's Resistance To Contracts And Promises In Moods, Nina Bannett

Publications and Research

Alcott’s first adult novel, Moods, initially published in 1864, presents oral promises between women as extralegal alternatives to standard legal contracts between men and women. In the 1864 edition of Moods, Alcott's protagonist, Sylvia Yule, fails to understand the constraints of marriage as a type of contract, and the results are dramatic. In fact, Alcott undermines the idealized marriage plot so crucial to her later, wildly popular works like Little Women (1868-69). In the 1864 Moods, Alcott boldly questions both legal contracts and oral promises characteristic of nineteenth-century conceptions of romantic love and heterosexual friendship.

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Review: We Are All Welcome Here, Teresa Pacheco Jan 2007

Review: We Are All Welcome Here, Teresa Pacheco

Georgia Library Quarterly

Review of the novel "We Are All Welcome Here," by Elizabeth Berg.

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Winning It All: The Cinematic Construction Of The Athletic American Dream, Andrew Miller Jan 2007

Winning It All: The Cinematic Construction Of The Athletic American Dream, Andrew Miller

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

Powered by a philosophy of self-determination and an ideology of a level playing field, the Athletic American Dream has become firmly entrenched in American culture. Following narrative pattterns influenced by both newspaper sports sections and juvenile sports fiction, it coalesces around underdog-to-champion, hard-work-leads-to-victory narratives that shape the sporting imagination and help to forge the masculine ideal that is the foundation of American self-image. The Athletic American Dream is produced, packaged and sold by mass media so successfully that one could argue that it becomes the most dominant vision of the American Dream by the end of the twentieth century.

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Lawyers Not In Love, The Defenders And Sixties Tv, Steven Classen Jan 2007

Lawyers Not In Love, The Defenders And Sixties Tv, Steven Classen

Faculty Publications - Department of Communication and Cinematic Arts

This essay offers a social history and examination of The Defenders as a popular, criti- cally acclaimed television text that negotiated anxieties regarding crime, law, justice, lib- eralism, and masculinity in the 1960s and 1990s. Both The Defenders television series (1961–1965) and the Showtime motion picture series (1997–1998) by the same name rearticulated enduring tensions between law’s formalism and just desires for compassion and mercy, depicting defense attorneys as men who work both inside and outside of “law” to ensure justice and confront the lack of humanism in “the rule of law.” Such discourses are understood and appreciated in different …

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Review: When Light Breaks, Sarah Trowbridge Jan 2007

Review: When Light Breaks, Sarah Trowbridge

Georgia Library Quarterly

Review of the novel "When Light Breaks," by Patti Callahan Henry.

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Investigation Of The Rectenna Concept For Millimeter Wave Applications, Henrry La Rosa Jan 2007

Investigation Of The Rectenna Concept For Millimeter Wave Applications, Henrry La Rosa

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents the rectifying antenna potential for infrared and millimeter wave energy conversion. Infrared imaging is one of the emerging technologies that have attracted considerable attention in the next generation of military, medical, and commercial applications. Moreover, with the ever-increasing congestion of the electromagnetic spectrum at RF and microwave frequencies and the establishment of firm civilian and military requirements best met by millimeter wave systems, the interest in the technology has grown and is now firmly established. During this work a 2.5GHz slot antenna, a 2.5GHz Schottky diode detector, a CPW-to-Microstrip transition, a fully integrated Rectenna element, and a …

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Dead Roses And Blooming Deserts: The Medical History Of A New Deal Icon, Michelle F. Turk Jan 2007

Dead Roses And Blooming Deserts: The Medical History Of A New Deal Icon, Michelle F. Turk

Psi Sigma Siren

Although a memorial plaque at the Hoover Dam sets the number of workers killed during its construction at ninety-six, the real figure was nearly double. In fact, the figure would have been much higher had it not been for the precedent-setting effort by the federal government, contactors, and workers to save as many lives as possible on the project. Aside from its long unrecognized value as a jobs program, much needed stimulus to the fledging Las Vegas economy, and status as one of the “man-made wonders of the world,” Hoover Dam represented a major step forward for the American occupational …

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Cuban Femininity And National Unity In Louisa May Alcott's Moods And Elizabeth Stoddard's "Eros And Anteros", Nina Bannett Jan 2007

Cuban Femininity And National Unity In Louisa May Alcott's Moods And Elizabeth Stoddard's "Eros And Anteros", Nina Bannett

Publications and Research

This book chapter compares the depictions of Cuban women in Louisa May Alcott's first adult novel Moods (1864) and Elizabeth Stoddard's short story "Eros and Anteros" (1862). Both writers configure a love triangle between an Anglo man and two women, one Anglo and one Cuban. In both texts, the Cuban woman is rejected as an unsuitable choice for an Anglo man. Alcott’s and Stoddard’s decision to re-value the Anglo woman as the more appropriate choice can be read as a rejection of the popular nineteenth-century political doctrine of manifest destiny and, at least with Alcott, of the United States’s dependence …

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Constitution Day, 2007, Robert Berry Jan 2007

Constitution Day, 2007, Robert Berry

Librarian Publications

Robert Berry, the research librarian for the social sciences at the Ryan Matura Library, has written an essay about the Constitution and the American founding, on the occasion of Constitution Day 2007 at Sacred Heart University.

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American Fantasies Of Masculine, Physical Labor And The Dangerous Bodies Of Pacific Island Whalemen In Roger Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon And Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Jennifer Schell Jan 2007

American Fantasies Of Masculine, Physical Labor And The Dangerous Bodies Of Pacific Island Whalemen In Roger Starbuck's The Golden Harpoon And Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Jennifer Schell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Throughout the nineteenth-century, writers, such as James Fenimore Cooper and Joseph C. Hart, fairly consistently appropriated the New England whaling industry for national purposes. They claimed the economic successes of the industry as American successes, and they positioned the whalemen as exemplary American workers. However, not all American whalemen were native-born Americans; some were foreign-born laborers. The presence of Polynesian workers and their racialized laboring bodies - often described as monstrous, grotesque, and repulsive - disrupted nationalistic appropriations of the whaling industry and its workers. What was so dangerous about these men was not just that were reputed to be …

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