In the first half of the twentieth century, sporadic attempts of avant-garde composers to include sounds other than pitch in musical composition paved the way for the composers in the second half to embrace the sound of all types in their creative works. The development of technology since the mid-past century has facilitated composers' inclusive use of sound. The recent achievements in electronics and computers have led to cost-effective tools for today's composers to explore new possibilities in sound design and manipulation. Gradual for tenor saxophone and fixed electronics is primarily concerned with noise. Among the infinite possibilities of noise types, metallic sounds significantly contribute to the composition. The title of the piece refers to the compositional process in which the music progressively unfolds itself from the beginning to the end. The methods and strategies used to present the content give rise to a form I call accretion, described as an organic process by which the musical materials grow. Within the process, while established materials are interacting, combining, and forming layers, new materials may be incorporated and take part in the process. Throughout the composition, the interaction between sounds with common properties guides the music toward interactive unity, while the …

The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals of Texas in Dallas, Texas offers an array of services and programs to residents in southern Dallas and other areas. However, interest in the state of access to veterinary care has been questioned for southern Dallas residents. In an area that faces certain compounding stressors, such as food deserts and transportation difficulties, a lack of access to veterinary care for pet owners is considered an additional possible stressor. Pet owners in southern Dallas, along with the SPCA of Texas, contemplate how to best provide medical care for local pets. In this body of work, I describe community access to veterinary services in southern Dallas. I provide a resident-centered explanation based on in-depth interviews with locals that discuss the current state of access to veterinary services while simultaneously analyzing the links between access to veterinary care, the area of southern Dallas itself, and ongoing issues with roaming and stray dogs.

Stravinsky seldom explained the intended theme of his works; however, he chose to do so with his Symphony in Three Movements. Stravinsky describes the first movement as a reflection on war films documenting scorched-earth tactics in China. He also states that the third movement is a reflection on the newsreels of goose-stepping soldiers, depicting the plot of the war in its entirety. In his descriptions, Stravinsky left out the second movement of the work. However, the movement already had a life of its own. The second movement expands a theme Stravinsky originally wrote for the movie The Song of Bernadette. The author, Franz Werfel, asked Stravinsky to compose music for the film when the two discussed the work and its central ideas. Although it did not appear in the film, Stravinsky recycled the music for the Symphony in Three Movements. In my opinion, the ideas of hope depicted in Werfel's novel are used by Stravinsky to evoke ideas of the importance of faith in the fallen world. My analysis aims to show the musical means used by Stravinsky to allow the central ideas from The Song of Bernadette to pervade the entirety of the Symphony in Three Movements.

Using a multiple baseline across participants with a changing criterion, this study explored and evaluated the effects of the individualized contingency management package (goal-setting, education, etc.) with sedentary typical adults while focusing on the mentoring component and the use of the technology of the exercise tracker to increase and sustain physical exercise to a level that increased health-benefiting physical activity. During initial mentoring meeting prior to the start of baseline, each participant was given a Garmin Viovsmart 3® exercise tracker, educated on the basic components of the device, and connected to the dashboard through the Garmin Connect™ app on their smartphones. Once each participant's activity stabilized, participant began intervention with weekly mentoring meetings focused on immediate feedback (social reinforcement), goal-setting and education. Through the Connect™ app, experimenter gave social reinforcement on a VR3 schedule to each participant, and participants were encouraged to participate by commenting to other participants through a private group set up for this study. The results indicate that the individualized contingency management package was effective for three of four participants whom increased their total activity minutes from pre-intervention range 0-104 min of weekly activity to post-intervention range of 269-404 min weekly. The two participants that completed two- …

The focus of the current study was to determine if SIP biases and perspective-taking serve as mediators between parental intimate partner violence (IPV), aggression, and interpersonal dominance in emerging adults' romantic relationships. We analyzed archival data comprised of self-report measures and TAT stories administered to 84 undergraduate students (women n = 62, M age = 21.73) between the ages 18 and 35. To test our hypotheses, we modified the social information processing model by incorporating perspective-taking, as measured through Interpersonal Decentering. Overall, we did not find significant association between witnessing parental IPV and Interpersonal Decentering maturity in college students. However, women's father-to-mother IPV was significantly negatively associated with Interpersonal Decentering maturity. For our mediation model, SIP aggressive responding biases were significantly associated with Interpersonal Decentering (average of story average scores) and with the presence of aggression in current romantic relationships; however, Interpersonal Decentering was not significantly predictive of aggression in current romantic relationships. Gender differences, study strengths and limitations, and future research directions are discussed.

This thesis argues that textual and historical analysis of The Carol Burnett Show reveals that the program utilized slapstick, women's comedy and feminist humor to create comedic parodies of television commercials, melodramas and women's films, and soap operas. Their television commercial parodies reflect Second Wave feminist critiques of media advertising contemporary with the program. Comparison of the work of early feminist film theorists and media critics to the program's parodies of film and soap opera reveal an interest in texts that address a female audience and that The Carol Burnett Show was making similar critiques to feminist media scholars in the years before it became a field of inquiry.

This study of lithic analysis shifts attention from typological studies to explicitly behavioral analyses, complimenting studies of both intrasite and intersite patterns of variability and change. Analysis of several assemblages from the Placitas Arroyo site complex reveals changing patterns of raw material procurement and selection, core reduction strategies, as well as tool production and discard. The most striking result thus far is the quite uniform emphasis on flake production from well-prepared cores, and the near absence of manufacture or maintenance of bifacial tools, especially projectile points. Associated with common ground stone artifacts, the flaked stone materials may well represent intensive food processing. Regardless, the technological patterns being revealed by this approach illustrate a productive new means to gain insights into changing behaviors in the Jornada Mogollon cultural tradition.

The shopping center has held an important place in the American economy for decades. However, the concept has seen multiple revolution in terms of format. The most recent shopping center concept to gain rapid popularity is the lifestyle center – an outdoor shopping mall made to resemble a pleasant main street setting, with a tenant mix emphasizing dining and entertainment. In other words, the lifestyle center concept is geared toward selling consumers things to do, versus things to buy. This thesis studies the geography of lifestyle centers in the United States in both the large-scale and small-scale view. Results show that lifestyle centers are concentrated into larger urban areas, often with a population of over 1 million. An analysis of spatial agglomeration revealed that lifestyle centers are often several miles away from the nearest traditional mall, indicating that developers do not feel the need to build near established shopping districts where traditional malls lie. Finally, results concerning trade area characteristics show the characteristics of consumers in areas where lifestyle centers have been built. Findings in this study indicate that developers are utilizing a unique approach when selecting sites for lifestyle centers compared to traditional indoor malls.

The present series of experiments were designed to investigate the utility of the use of a masking system to assess the development of stimulus control. The first experiment compares sample observing time with response accuracy in a match-to-sample task. The second experiment more closely examines this relation by subdividing the sample stimulus mask into four quadrants. The third experiment compares sample observing time during training with accuracy during a subsequent testing condition to determine if the observed differentiation between the quadrants was correlated with the development of stimulus control.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) systems are important in many areas, such as medical, communication, transportation, and consumer electronics. The underlying WPT system is comprised of a transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX). For biomedical applications, such systems can be implemented on rigid or flexible substrates and can be implanted or wearable. The efficiency of a WPT system is based on power transfer efficiency (PTE). Many WPT system optimization techniques have been explored to achieve the highest PTE possible. These are based on either a figure-of-merit (FOM) approach, quality factor (Q-factor) maximization, or by sweeping values for coil geometries. Four WPT systems for biomedical applications are implemented with inductive coupling. The thesis later presents an optimization technique for finding the maximum PTE of a range of frequencies and coil shapes through frequency, geometry and shape sweeping. Five optimized TX coil designs for different operating frequencies are fabricated for three shapes: square, hexagonal, and octagonal planar-spirals. The corresponding RX is implemented on polyimide tape with ink-jet-print (IJP) silver. At 80 MHz, the maximum measured PTE achieved is 2.781% at a 10 mm distance in the air for square planar-spiral coils.

"Natural Disasters" is a cycle of five extractable movements for septet, conductor and computer. Each movement in the cycle is inspired by the ways that humans are affected by and respond to five different classes or categories of natural disasters: meteorological, such as hurricanes, tornados, and haboobs; geological, like earthquakes and landslides; hydrological, including flooding and sea level rise; wildfires; and extra-planetary disasters such as meteors and solar flares. The disaster types are used as overarching themes and also as sources for the organization of the movements and their surface details. This paper presents an overview of the conception and organization of cycle, the themes addressed in each movement and the compositional techniques used. The history of composers using weather or disaster-related themes in prior music is reviewed, and a survey of contemporary disaster-related compositions is presented.

The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of Klawock's Tribal Citizens' relationship to harvesting what is colloquially known as customary and traditional foods and/or native foods. The state and federal governments categorize these culturally specific goods as subsistence foods. An unearthed, 5,360-year-old basket potentially links modern day Klawock Tribal Citizens with their ancestral ties to the region. Throughout this time, families in this region of Southeast Alaska have been participating in a form of indigenous fishery. Despite access to multiple grocery stores and fish canneries, tribal citizens choose to expend their family's efforts to harvest their own sockeye out of the Klawock watershed. Oral history and ethnography and methodologies were employed to record personal relationships with the harvest of these resources while also documenting a context in which these relationships exist. Klawock Cooperative Association's staff worked alongside the student researcher and participants to analyze the data and produce findings. Engaging in customary and traditional activities rewards participants with intrinsic facets of their identity. Alongside reinforcing identities, these activities teach participants about family dynamics and working as a team, as well as the responsibilities that come with. These responsibilities are formed through the assignment of roles and provide …

Recent years have observed significant change in the landscape of American religious/spiritual environment and religious/spiritual groups called new religious movements (NRMs) have developed as an alternative for many individuals to engage in religious/spiritual beliefs and practices outside the traditional religions. It was unclear if participation in NRMs provide adherents with similar mental health benefits as participation in traditional religious groups, or whether there might be important differences. The current study examined the link between participation in NRMs and relevant social and psychological outcomes including mental health symptoms, emotional well-being, attachment style, and social relationships. I recruited participants from three groups: (1) NRMs, (2) traditional religious groups, and (3) no religious/spiritual identification. I explored group differences in five key areas of mental health and well-being: (1) mental health symptoms, (2) subjective well-being, (3) attachment, (4) social belonging, and (5) meaning in life. The overall results suggested that NRM participants showed relatively few differences compared to traditional religious participants in regard to the above psychological profile. NRM participants reported more differences compared to participants who were neither religious nor spiritual. In this regard, NRM involvement was associated with some positive outcomes, including positive emotional well-being and meaning in life, and some negative …

During the 2013/16 Ebola virus disease outbreak in West Africa, numerous restrictions were placed on the movement and public gathering of local people, regardless of if the area had active Ebola cases or not. Specifically, the district of Koinadugu, Sierra Leone, preemptively enforced movement regulations before there were any cases within the district. This research demonstrates that ongoing regulations on movement and public gathering affected the livelihoods of those involved in agricultural markets in the short-term, while the outbreak was active, and in the long-term. The forthcoming thesis details the ways in which the Ebola outbreak international and national response affected locals involved in agricultural value chains in Koinadugu, Sierra Leone.

This thesis presents the realization of an intelligent cognitive radio network that uses long short term memory (LSTM) neural network for sensing and predicting the spectrum activity at each instant of time. The simulation is done using Python and GNU Radio. The implementation is done using GNU Radio and Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRP). Simulation results show that the confidence factor of opportunistic users not causing interference to licensed users of the spectrum is 98.75%. The implementation results demonstrate high reliability of the LSTM based cognitive radio network.

Many communities are promoting physical activity and active transportation as ways to combat childhood obesity and change sedentary lifestyles of school-age children. Safe Routes to School Youth Voices is a mixed methods approach to understanding the experiences and perceptions of middle school students surrounding the use of active transportation. Student experiences are explored both independently and in comparison to parental perspectives of barriers to actives transportation. Data were collected in the form of parent surveys, observations, student interviews, and student focus groups. This study aims to answer the following primary research questions: (1) What are the conditions experienced along the route? (2) What are the students' perceptions of barriers to active transportation? (3) What are the compensation practices that students take to overcome barriers? and (4) How do the students' perceptions compare with their parents? Interviews and focus groups were transcribed and coded using in-vivo, descriptive, structural and pattern methods. Primary themes which emerged include how conditions of walking to school, personal safety, compensation practices, and systematic barriers all affect the perceptions of active transportation of the student. Findings highlight the difficulties many students face when considering active transportation, and discuss the inconsistencies between student experience, parental perceptions, and intervention …

While obesity is now recognized as a major health concern in Ghana, the major drivers, causal factors, and their spatial variation remain unclear. Nutritional changes and lack of physical activity are frequently blamed but the underlying factors, particularly cultural values and practices, remain understudied. Using hot spot analysis and spatial autocorrelation, this research investigates the spatial patterns of obesity in Ghana and the explanatory factors. We also use focus group discussions to examine the primary cultural factors underlying these patterns. The results show that wealth, high education, and urban residence are the best positive predictors of obesity, while poverty, low education, and rural residence are the best (negative) predictors of obesity. Consequently, improving the socioeconomic status, for example, through higher levels of education and urbanization may increase obesity rates. Furthermore, the cultural preference for fat body as the ideal body size drives individual aspiration for weight gain which can lead to obesity. Thus, reducing obesity rates in Ghana is impossible without addressing the underlying cultural values.

A description of a documentary produced about human flesh-hook suspension. This document covers the pre-production, production, and post production of the documentary film and the research behind it.

Teaching a foreign language using task-based language teaching (TBLT) has garnered a lot of attention and has been the object of worldwide scientific studies for the last thirty years. Few of these studies, however, include an evaluation of this method by the teachers themselves, or are conducted by them directly. My thesis, centered around the notion of task-based language learning, a teaching method recommended more and more though sometimes still snubbed, relies on my professional experience as a teacher of secondary level FLE classes in the United States and on the analysis of reference studies conducted in this field. I have adopted the methodology of research-action with the goal of offering a pedagogic intervention. First I identify certain hurdles encountered by high school foreign language teachers. After this introduction, I evaluate the methods and didactic principles that stood out to lead to a teaching philosophy centered around communication, such as task-based language teaching. The second part of the thesis presents some important studies that evaluate the pros and cons of this approach. The next section examines in turn each of three tasks offered as contrast against the traditional model consisting of presentation, practice and production, known as "PPP." Finally the …

School-based health clinics are on the rise while telemedicine is increasingly used to provide communities access to health care. Incorporating the two together poses to create healthier school communities. Parker County Hospital District collaborated with Weatherford Independent School District (WISD) to implement the district's first telemedicine school-based health clinic. This project is in partnership with Parker County Hospital District to explore parent perceptions and desires of telemedicine and school-based health clinics to facilitate utilization among the WISD community.

Functional analysis is considered best practice for behavior analysts who work with people who have intellectual and developmental disabilities and engage in problem behavior. Unfortunately, a majority of practitioners do not complete functional analyses. The purpose of the present study was to train 10 practitioners to implement a practical functional assessment (PFA) decision making model and to evaluate the ecological validity of the model. Pre- and Post-training overall test scores increased, on average, by 38.18%. Testing subsections increased by 60.0% for foundations and concepts, 5.0% for graphical interpretations, and 40.0% for decision making. A job needs survey showed the greatest gains in reports of antecedent environmental supports, behavior supports in the environment, and antecedents related to the behavior repertoire. A post-training survey indicated that 8 of 8 trainees would recommend the training to others. Finally, at the conclusion of follow-up progress data collection, 3 of the 5 locations were progressing through the PFA model in their regular job duties whereas the other 2 locations experienced professional staffing issues that interfered with their workloads. These results indicate that the training was effective at increasing testing responses related to foundations and concepts as well as decision making. Additionally, when professional staffing was …

In the summer of 1906, Marion Bauer (1882-1955) boarded a ship to Paris to meet with Raoul Pugno, a French pianist and composer. Juliette Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) was also close with Pugno around the same time. Living with the Pugno family in Gargenville during the summer, Bauer was able to travel to Paris, where she met several important musicians of the time and also nineteen-year-old Boulanger. Pugno, who worked closely with Boulanger, asked her to teach counterpoint and harmony to Bauer. Boulanger agreed and reportedly asked Bauer for English lessons in payment. Both women went on to become important music pedagogues, teaching hundreds of students. Their meeting allowed Bauer and Boulanger to share their ideas on teaching and music with each other. As time passed, the relationship between the two women fade from collective memory, but Boulanger's teaching principles of harmony, hearing, la grande ligne, and music history and literature live on through her students and fellow teachers and composers. Bauer's writings demonstrate similarities to these four key principles. Using Kimberly Francis and Emily Green's understanding of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural production and an analysis of Boulanger's pedagogical principles, I believe that Boulanger's early accumulation of cultural capital and …

Many histories written by professional historians discuss the Battle of the Bulge; however, none of them incorporate the growing field of environmental history as a lens of analysis. This paper aims to address that hole in the scholarship by evaluating the impact that environmental factors exerted on the American army's ability to fight in and around Bastogne and St. Vith, Belgium during the first week of the battle. Had it not been for the environmental factors and the Americans' ability to make better use of the natural and manmade conditions than the Germans, the Allies would not have been able to achieve eventual victory. In the historiography of the battle, weather conditions are usually referenced only as the setting in which the fighting occurred. This paper goes further than simply using the environment and climate as a stage set. By looking at the way environmental conditions impacted strategic, operational, and tactical issues, a new perspective is opened up. The role that these environmental factors played is emphasized and shows that they had a greater effect on the outcome than scholars have previously credited. This paper uses first person accounts from participants, from the command level to the soldier in his …

Artist Statement from the MFA Exhibition: "Through my art I strive to raise awareness towards the protection of the ocean. Plastic pollution, over-fishing, species extinction, and nuclear waste are some of the problems I symbolize in order to create conversations around the issues and do my part in starting a wave of change. The ocean is one interconnected circulatory system for our plane,t so anywhere that humans are abusing the oceans, it affects us all. I hope to remind people of the sacredness of the sea in order to help renew our reverence and respect for it."