In 1939, composer Julia Smith's first opera Cynthia Parker dramatized the story of a Texas legend. Smith manipulated music, text, and visual images to make the opera accessible for the audience in accordance with compositional and institutional practices in American opera of the 1930s. Transparent musical themes and common Native Americans stereotypes are used to define characters. Folk music is presented as diegetic, creating a sense of authenticity that places the audience into the opera's Western setting. The opera is codified for the audience using popular idioms, resulting in initial but not lasting success.

The plurality of worlds has had a long history in England, which has not gone unnoticed by scholars. Historians have tended to view this English pluralist tradition as similar to those found on the continent, and in doing so have failed to fully understand the religious significance that the plurality of worlds had on English thought and society. This religious significance is discovered through a thorough investigation of plurality as presented by English natural philosophers and theologians, and in so doing reveals much about England in the seventeenth century. As natural philosophers incorporated plurality within the larger framework of natural theology, it became a weapon of science and reason to be used against the unreasonable atheists of late seventeenth-century England.

In this thesis, I address the dichotomy between liberal arts education and terminal vocational training in the American community college. The need is for reform in the community college in relation to philosophical instruction in order to empower citizens, support justice and create more sustainable communities. My call for reform involves a multicultural integration of philosophy into terminal/vocational programs as well as evolving the traditional liberal arts course to exist in a multicultural setting. Special attention is focused on liberating the oppressed, social and economic justice and philosophy of education.

Motor vehicle theft is the costliest property crime in the United States equaling billions of dollars in losses each year. Despite law enforcement success in decreasing the rate of motor vehicle theft in recent years, the actual number of thefts has increased. It is vital for law enforcement agencies to know who is committing motor vehicle theft and where vehicles are being stolen. This study answers these questions by examining offender demographic characteristics and the location types most targeted for motor vehicle theft in Texas from 2001 to 2005. The state of Texas was chosen because Texas has continually been ranked second in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Report for the number of reported incidents of motor vehicle theft in the United States.

This pilot study addresses the distribution of nonstandard syntactic and lexical features in Indian English (IE) across a homogeneous group of highly educated IE speakers. It is found that nonstandard syntactic features of article use, number agreement and assignment of verb argument structure do not display uniform intragroup distribution. Instead, a relationship is found between nonstandard syntactic features and the sociolinguistic variables of lower levels of exposure to and use of English found within the group. While nonstandard syntactic features show unequal distribution, nonstandard lexical features of semantic reassignment, and mass nouns treated as count nouns display a more uniform intragroup distribution.

Current syndromic surveillance systems utilize centralized databases that are neither scalable in storage space nor in computing power. Such systems are limited in the amount of syndromic data that may be collected and analyzed for the early detection of infectious disease outbreaks. However, with the increased prevalence of international travel, public health monitoring must extend beyond the borders of municipalities or states which will require the ability to store vasts amount of data and significant computing power for analyzing the data. Intelligent mobile agents may be used to create a distributed surveillance system that will utilize the hard drives and computer processing unit (CPU) power of the hosts on the agent network where the syndromic information is located. This thesis proposes the design of a mobile agent-based syndromic surveillance system and an agent decision model for outbreak detection. Simulation results indicate that mobile agents are capable of detecting an outbreak that occurs at all hosts the agent is monitoring. Further study of agent decision models is required to account for localized epidemics and variable agent movement rates.

No other government agency receives as much attention as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The high-profile agency frequently captures attention of the media in both positive and negative contexts. This thesis takes a case study approach using organizational learning and sensemaking theories to investigate crisis communication within NASA's 2003 Columbia tragedy. Eight participants, who in some capacity had worked for NASA during the Columbia tragedy in a communication centered position, were interviewed. Using a grounded theory framework, nine themes emerged pertaining to organizational learning, leadership, structure, and organizational culture. The results of the study aid in understanding how high risk organization's (HROs) can learn from previous failures and details how organizational culture can hinder organizational change.

The study compared delay discounting in adult humans using two different methods of adjustments. Both methods used hypothetical choices of monetary outcomes. One involved adjustments using a fixed sequence of ascending or descending amounts, the other used a bisection algorithm in which the changes in amounts varied as a function of the subjects' choices. Two magnitudes of delayed outcomes were used: $1,000 and $10,000. A within subject design was used to compare indifference curves and discounting measures across the two adjusting procedures. Twenty four subjects were divided in two groups and exposed to the procedures in opposite order, to account for sequence effects. Results from within subject comparisons showed no systematic differences between procedures.

It is the purpose of this paper to explore how Morris' novel relates to life in Twin Oaks, primarily as depicted in two books: Living the Dream (1983) by Ingrid Komar, a long-term visitor to the commune and Kinkade's Is It Utopia Yet? (1996). This comparison will demonstrate that the experiences of contemporary intentional communities such as Twin Oaks provide a meaningful context for reading News from Nowhere because of the similarities in goals and philosophy. It will further demonstrate that though Twin Oaks was originally inspired by a utopian novel much more in the tradition of Bellamy's work than Morris', the community's subsequent evolution has brought it much closer in philosophy to News from Nowhere than Looking Backward.

Calculations were performed on transition-metal complexes to (1) extrapolate the structure and bonding of the ground and phosphorescent states (2) determine the luminescence energies and (3) assist in difficult assignment of luminescent transitions. In the [Pt(SCN)4]2- complex, calculations determined that the major excited-state distortion is derived from a b2g bending mode rather than from the a1g symmetric stretching mode previously reported in the literature. Tuning of excimer formation was explained in the [Au(SCN)2]22- by interactions with the counterion. Weak bonding interactions and luminescent transitions were explained by calculation of Hg dimers, excimers and exciplexes formed with noble gases.

This study examined the consistency between verbal responses to hypothetical conflict scenarios and the actual conflict resolutions techniques children apply in everyday play. Twenty-one children were interviewed and observed in order to determine their conflict resolution strategies. During the interview process, each child was asked to finish 6 hypothetical conflict scenarios. During the observation portion, each child was observed in 2 conflict scenarios. Significant (p < .05) differences were found with regards to verbal responses for 3 scenarios, verbal and behavioral responses of females (females exhibited more socially acceptable conflict resolution strategies in their verbal responses, yet less socially acceptable conflict resolution strategies in their behavioral responses), and socially acceptable responses to conflict in verbal strategies. Results were discussed in light of previous research comparing gender differences and peer relationships to conflict resolution strategies.

Aggression in dogs is a significant public health concern with 7.2 mortality cases per 100 million inhabitants and approximately 4.7 million dog bites annually. Canine aggression is typically viewed as a genetic trait and treated as pathology through the use of medical or respondent behavioral procedures. In this study the effects of the differential negative reinforcement of safe, alternative behaviors to aggression using distancing as the reinforcer were evaluated. The results demonstrated that even when the aggression was in evidence throughout most of the dog's lifetime, it responded quickly to changes in reinforcement contingencies.

Terrorism has become a focus of much political thought over the past few years, and with good reason, yet most quantitative studies of terrorism investigate the likelihood of a terrorist incident while ignoring the precursors to terrorist group formation. I examine cases of new terrorist group formations between the years 1968 and 1999 as a function of domestic demographic, geographic, governmental and societal factors. This is done by Poisson regression analysis, which determines the significance of the independent variables on a count of new international terrorist group formations per country year. The results indicate that higher levels of material government capability, high levels of political freedom, the availability of low-cost refuge, and a cultural tradition of terrorism all have a positive impact on the number of new terrorist group formations, while a higher degree of governmental durability has a negative impact.

The prominent division in early America between the established eastern populations and communities in the West is evident when viewed through the lens of eighteenth-century Philadelphia newspapers, which themselves employed an East-West paradigm to interpret four events: the Paxton Boys Incident, Regulator Rebellion, Shays's Rebellion, and Constitutional Convention. Through the choices of what words to use to describe these clashes, through oversights, omissions, and misrepresentations, and sometimes through more direct tactics, Philadelphia newspapermen revealed a persistent cultural bias against and rivalry with western communities. This study illustrates how pervasive this contrast between East and West was in the minds of easterners; how central a feature of early American culture they considered it to be.

The majority of the world's languages are poorly represented in informational media like radio, television, newspapers, and the Internet. Translation into and out of these languages may offer a way for speakers of these languages to interact with the wider world, but current statistical machine translation models are only effective with a large corpus of parallel texts - texts in two languages that are translations of one another - which most languages lack. This thesis describes the Babylon project which attempts to alleviate this shortage by supplementing existing parallel texts with texts gathered automatically from the Web -- specifically targeting pages that contain text in a pair of languages. Results indicate that parallel texts gathered from the Web can be effectively used as a source of training data for machine translation and can significantly improve the translation quality for text in a similar domain. However, the small quantity of high-quality low-density language parallel texts on the Web remains a significant obstacle.

An alternating treatment design was used to systematically evaluate the communication response forms, picture exchange communication system (PECS) or sign language, selection for a child with pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified, profound hearing loss, and cochlear implants. The child had a limited pool of high preference items and very few functional skills. Key factors for this child included a structured environment that created a verbal community and contingent access to high preference items. No preference in communication response form was observed. The child successfully used four response forms to communicate: gestures, PECS, sign language, and vocalization. The results are discussed in terms of decision making factors in the selection of response forms.

Music that is categorized as part of the Indianist movement in American music (ca. 1890-1925) typically evokes Native American culture, ritual, story, or song through compositional gestures. It may also incorporate Native American tunes. Amy Beach (1867-1944) is considered to have composed five Indianist works, but her Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet, op. 80 has not been included as one of them. This thesis rethinks categorization of the piece, seeking the "Indian" in it through examination of its gestures, instrumentation, and relationship to contemporary Indianist compositions.

Commonly, when it is desirable to replace an essential gene with an allelic series of mutated genes, or genes with altered expression patterns, the complementing constructs are introduced into heterozygous plants, followed by the selection of homozygous null segregants. To overcome this laborious and time-consuming step, the newly developed two-component system utilizes a site-specific recombinase to excise a wild-type copy of the gene of interest from transformed tissues. In the first component (the first vector), a wild-type version of the gene is placed between target sequences recognized by FLP recombinase from the yeast 2 μm plasmid. This construct is transformed into a plant heterozygous for a null mutation at the endogenous locus, and progeny plants carrying the excisable complementing gene and segregating homozygous knockout at the endogenous locus are selected. The second component (the second vector) carries the experimental gene along with the FLP gene. When this construct is introduced, FLP recombinase excises the complementing gene, leaving the experimental gene as the only functional copy. The FLP gene is driven by an egg apparatus specific enhancer (EASE) to ensure excision of the complementing cDNA in the egg cell and zygote following floral-dip transformation. The utility of this system is being …

Plasma polymerization techniques were used to synthesize and deposit hydrogel on silicon (Si) substrate. Hydrogel is a network of polymer chains that are water-insoluble and has a high degree of flexibility. The various fields of applications of hydrogel include drug release, biosensors and tissue engineering etc. Hydrogel synthesized from different monomers possess a common property of moisture absorption. In this work two monomers were used namely 1-amino-2-propanol (1A2P) and 2(ethylamino)ethanol (2EAE) to produce polymer films deposited on Si ATR crystal. Their moisture uptake property was tested using FTIR-ATR technique. This was evident by the decrease in -OH band in increasing N2 purging time of the films. Secondly, two monomer compounds namely vinyl acetic acid and glycidyl methacrylate which have both amine and carboxylic groups are used as solid surface for the immobilization of bovine serum albumin (BSA). Pulsed plasma polymerization was used to polymerize these monomers with different duty cycles. Initial works in this field were all about protein surface adsorption. But more recently, the emphasis is on covalent bonding of protein on to the surface. This immobilization of protein on solid surface has a lot of applications in the field of biochemical studies. The polymerization of vinyl acetic acid …

Substance abuse is an expensive problem facing the American public and the criminal justice field. Using secondary data analysis this study examined 1,921 participants across five substance abuse programs within California and New York jail systems. Specifically this study explored the impact of location, demographic characteristics, offense committed, and previous drug treatment on successful completion of the treatment program. Descriptive analyses were used to examine the demographic characteristics of the sample and the types of drugs used by participants in the thirty days prior to jail admission. Results from bivariate analyses indicated that location, demographic characteristics, and previous drug treatment were all significantly related to successful completion. Implications for current correctional treatment programs and future research on this topic are discussed

Raptor rehabilitation has become commonplace globally, yet studies on the survival and adaptation of great horned owls (Bubo virginianus) after release has been neglected to an appreciable extent. The primary objective of this study is to provide quantitative data on the success of rehabilitated and released great horned owls in the North Texas region. Owls (N=12) were rehabilitated and released onto the Ray Roberts Greenbelt Corridor in Denton County, Texas, and monitored using radio telemetry to evaluate home range (November 2002 - February 2005). With approximately 75% of the birds released for this study surviving until transmitter battery failure, it is believed that the rehabilitation process was successful for these birds.

How does respect for human rights affect the disbursement of food aid by US foreign policymakers? Scholars analyzing foreign aid generally look at only total economic aid, military aid or a combination of both. However, for a more nuanced understanding of human rights as a determinant of foreign aid, the discrete foreign aid programs must be examined. By disentangling component-programs from total aid, this analysis demonstrates how human rights influence policymakers by allowing them to distribute food aid to human rights abusing countries. Consequently, policymakers can promote strategic objectives with food aid, while legally restricted from distributing other aid. The primary theoretical argument, which links increasing human rights abuse with increasing food aid, is supported by results from a Heckman model. This procedure models the two-stage decision-making process where foreign policymakers first, select countries for aid and then, distribute aid to those selected.

This study explored benefits of providing employee training and development beyond the specific content covered in such interventions. The relationship between training and development opportunities, and associated factors (job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intent) were significant among participants. Implications for training and development investment returns are considered. Previous research has identified training and development as an antecedent to perceived organizational support. Results failed to confirm perceived organizational support as mediating the relationship between training and organizational commitment. Age was found to be significantly correlated with job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intent, while education level was not found to have an impact. Limitations of this study, practical implications and recommendations for further study are discussed.

Biracial individuals undergo a developmental process that is different than monoracial individuals. Not only do they have to develop a strong and cohesive self-esteem, but also develop a strong and cohesive racial identity to have a healthy self-concept. The media is a social structure that has infiltrated into many aspects of American lives, including their racial identity. The media perpetuates current beliefs concerning race and racial identity. This research investigates how biracial identity has been portrayed in the media. Historically, biracial individuals have been portrayed as the tragic "mulatto" because of their confused racial background. In addition, mulatto women have been stereotyped as exotic and sexual objects. A content analysis was used to investigate how the media presents biracial identity. Only movies with black/white biracial individuals were watched. The categories under study included perceived race, character's race, skin color, likeability, sex appeal, ability to contribute, ability to be violent, mental health, overall positive portrayal social, and negative portrayal score. This study may suggest that the media is making attempts to rectify old stereotypes. Overall, this study does demonstrate that the media portrays biracial and black characters differently in film. One overarching theme from these results implies that the perception of …