Work of art in Wood, Fabric, Acrylic, Monofilament, Resin by artist Lara Asam as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "Thresholds"

Work of art in Wood, Fabric, Acrylic, Monofilament, Resin by artist Lara Asam as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "Thresholds"

Work of art in Wood, Fabric, Acrylic, Monofilament, Resin by artist Lara Asam as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "Thresholds"

Work of art in Wood, Fabric, Acrylic, Monofilament, Resin by artist Lara Asam as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "Thresholds"

Work of art in Wood, Fabric, Acrylic, Monofilament, Resin by artist Lara Asam as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "Thresholds"

Work of art in Wood, Fabric, Acrylic, Monofilament, Resin by artist Lara Asam as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "Thresholds"

Work of art in Wood, Fabric, Acrylic, Monofilament, Resin by artist Lara Asam as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "Thresholds"

Work of art in Wood, Fabric, Acrylic, Monofilament, Resin by artist Lara Asam as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "Thresholds"

Work of art in Wood, Fabric, Acrylic, Monofilament, Resin by artist Lara Asam as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "Thresholds"

Work of art in Wood, Fabric, Acrylic, Monofilament, Resin by artist Lara Asam as part of a 2021 MFA Exhibition, entitled "Thresholds"

Works of art on Porcelain by artist Brianna Shimer (Research for Thesis) as part of a 2022 MFA exhibition, entitled "To(Gather)/Together" in the the Cora Stafford Gallery South, 1201 W Mulberry St, Denton, TX 76201, from March 9 to 12, 2022.

Works of art on Porcelain by artist Brianna Shimer (Pieces within Exhibition) as part of a 2022 MFA exhibition, entitled "To(Gather)/Together" in the the Cora Stafford Gallery South, 1201 W Mulberry St, Denton, TX 76201, from March 9 to 12, 2022.

Work of art in spider wood, aquarium plants, 3d prints by artist Russell Anderson as part of his 2021 exhibition, entitled "Modified Aesthetics on an Inner Space".

Work of art in spider wood, aquarium plants, 3d prints by artist Russell Anderson as part of his 2021 exhibition, entitled "Modified Aesthetics on an Inner Space".

Each of my oil or pastel paintings is an observation of seemingly mundane familiar places that I encounter day-to-day. I think of my art as a kind of visual journalism, where I examine common human emotions evoked by a careful consideration of the substance of light interacting with spaces or objects. The naturalistically rendered compositions are cropped and depicted in small fragments, allowing the viewer a brief glimpse into a quiet portrayal of the world. Essentially, my art allows me to share my sensibilities and to connect with others through portraits of ordinary, yet intimate, moments in time.

Through painting, I use materiality to describe the material world. By rooting my practice in visual culture and art history, I seek to extend the meaning of images beyond their initial form. The coalescing of opposing and complimentary formal elements accentuate the visual and contextual friction. This allows the work to exist in an ambiguous state. Seen together, my works appear disparate, but they suggest alternative meanings through association with one another. The works can exist on their own, but engage in dialogue when juxtaposed against each other. Although about specific occurrences, the works afford the viewer their own interpretations.

Work of art in vinyl, aquarium light, brackets by artist Russell Anderson as part of his 2021 exhibition, entitled "Modified Aesthetics on an Inner Space".

Work of art in vinyl, aquarium light, brackets by artist Russell Anderson as part of his 2021 exhibition, entitled "Modified Aesthetics on an Inner Space".

Memory Beast was a series of experiments in multispecies collaborative storytelling. A new tool was created, a memory beast, a holotype representing our ideas of specific species, based on memories and drawings collected in participatory research. The fabricated memory beasts, placed next to their biological counterparts, made visible the conflation of living species with personal memory and cultural imagery. Using this new tool, implanted with sonic recordings of cows, the beginnings of an interspecies pidgin language was developed. Memory Beast imagined and enacted new pathways to finite flourishing on a wounded earth, planting story seeds for alternative realities.

Artist Statement from the MFA Exhibition: "In my recent work, I have expanded upon the deconstruction, reconstruction, and reflection that has informed my artistic process for many years. My working method involves using remnants from previous works; they reappear in their original form or are reworked, aged destroyed, or recreated from different materials. My Process allows me to illustrate the passage of time as older work takes on new forms in a renewed context. New connections begin to surface as my paintings and accompanying objects are layered into a work about the passage of time as well as other passages; a migratory mentality know to all who live away from home."

Pleroma is a digital drama: a work composed of digital animation combined with electroacoustic music, presenting an original dramatic narrative. Pleroma's dramatic elements evoke both the classical form of tragedy and the concept of perceptual paradox. A structural overview of the drama and its characters and a plot synopsis are given to provide context for the critical discussion. Analytical descriptions of Beethoven's Coriolan Overture Op.62 and Mahler's Symphony No. 9 are provided to give background on tragic form and Platonic allegory in music. An investigation into the elements discussed in the analysis of the instrumental works reveals several layers of possible interpretation in Pleroma. Dramatic elements allow for tragic narratives to be constructed, but they are complemented by character associations formed by pitch relationships, stylistic juxtapositions, and instrumentation. A copy of the dramatic text is included to supplement the multimedia production: http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc33228/

When I was first introduced to photography, I was mainly drawn to landscape imagery. I enjoyed being a solitary spectator. Over time, inclusions of figurative elements became more and more apparent in my work. I purposefully began to incorporate a figure into my landscapes, ascribing to it a certain nostalgia and a sense of isolation I was experiencing on many levels at that time. Before long, I felt disconnected from these images because of their ambiguity and generalization. I found myself craving more content and personal commitment in my photography. At the end 2003, I started experimenting with a 4" x 5" format camera, which forced me, to some extent, to change my way of photographing and seeing. That is how the beginning of this new body of work was born. I was accustomed to shooting with a 35 mm camera, which allowed me to be spontaneous, quick and immediate. I permanently switched to a large format. I could see myself benefiting from this change. I lost some of the spontaneity that a 35 mm format offers but I gained the beauty of working with larger negatives and the endless possibilities of view camera movements. Thanks to this technical transformation, …

This problem in lieu of thesis is a discussion of two topics: Brownian movement and quantum computers. Brownian movement is a physical phenomenon in which the particle velocity is constantly undergoing random fluctuations. Chapters 2, 3 and 4, describe Brownian motion from three different perspectives. The next four chapters are devoted to the subject of quantum computers, which are the signal of a new era of technology and science combined together. In the first chapter I present to a reader the two topics of my problem in lieu of thesis. In the second chapter I explain the idea of Brownian motion, its interpretation as a stochastic process and I find its distribution function. The next chapter illustrates the probabilistic picture of Brownian motion, where the statistical averages over trajectories are related to the probability distribution function. Chapter 4 shows how to derive the Langevin equation, introduced in chapter 1, using a Hamiltonian picture of a bath with infinite number of harmonic oscillators. The chapter 5 explains how the idea of quantum computers was developed and how step-by-step all the puzzles for the field of quantum computers were created. The next chapter, chapter 6, discus the basic quantum unit of information …

Peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) was the first automated method for protein identification in proteomics, and it remains in common usage today because of its simplicity and the low equipment costs for generating fingerprints. However, one of the problems with PMF is its limited specificity and sensitivity in protein identification. Here I present a method that shows potential to significantly enhance the accuracy of peptide mass fingerprinting, using a machine learning approach based on a hidden Markov model (HMM). This method is applied to improve differentiation of real protein matches from those that occur by chance. The system was trained using 300 examples of combined real and false-positive protein identification results, and 10-fold cross-validation applied to assess model discrimination. The model can achieve 93% accuracy in distinguishing correct and real protein identification results versus false-positive matches. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve area for the best model was 0.833.