The well-being of the American steel industry is vital to the overall health of the United States (U.S.) economy. This belief is, in part, the impetus for the enactment of protective tariffs and quotas. This paper examines the impact of the announcement of the 2001 tariffs. Numerous forces have buffeted the U.S. steel industry over the last decade. Domestic steel firms operate in a highly global, fiercely competitive, and capital-intensive industry. This environment has proven inhospitable to the U.S. steel industry, widely criticized for inefficiency and overcapacity. A regression analysis finds that the announcement of the 2001 tariffs had no statistically significant impact on U.S. domestic raw steel production. Supporting theories are reexamined, and the implications of this finding for trade policy are explored.

This software is aimed at providing user-friendly, easy-to-use environment for the user to scrub (de-identify/modify) the DICOM header information. Some tools either anonymize or default the values without the user interaction. The user doesn't have the flexibility to edit the header information. One cannot scrub set of images simultaneously (batch scrubbing). This motivated to develop a tool/utility that can scrub a set of images in a single step more efficiently. This document also addresses security issues of the patient confidentiality to achieve protection of patient identifying information and some technical requirements

Agent-based architecture explains the rationale and basis for developing agents that can interact with users through natural language query/answer patterns developed systematically using AIML (artificial intelligence mark-up language) scripts. This thesis research document also explains the architecture for VISTA (virtual interactive story-telling agents), which is used for interactive querying in educational and recreational purposes. Agents are very effective as conversational interfaces when used along side with graphical user interface (GUI) in applications and Web pages. This architecture platform can support multiple agents with or with out sharing of knowledgebase. They are very useful as chat robots for recreational purposes, customer service and educational purposes. This platform is powered by Java servlet implementation of Program D and contained in Apache Tomcat server. The AIML scripting language defined here in is a generic form of XML language and forms the knowledgebase of the bot. Animation is provided with Microsoft® Agent technology and text-to-speech support engine.

Recent developments in the Internet have inspired a wide range of business and consumer applications. The deployment of multimedia-based services has driven the demand for increased and guaranteed bandwidth requirements over the network. The diverse requirements of the wide range of users demand differentiated classes of service and quality assurance. The new technology of Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) has emerged as a high performance and reliable option to address these challenges apart from the additional features that were not addressed before. This problem in lieu of thesis describes how the new paradigm of MPLS is advantageous over the conventional architecture. The motivation for this paradigm is discussed in the first part, followed by a detailed description of this new architecture. The information flow, the underlying protocols and the MPLS extensions to some of the traditional protocols are then discussed followed by the description of the simulation. The simulation results are used to show the advantages of the proposed technology.

Due to the rapid growth of wireless networking, the fallible security issues of the 802.11 standard have come under close scrutiny. Nowadays most of the organizations are eager to setup wireless local area networks to reduce the hassles of limited mobility provided by conventional wired network. There are serious security issues that need to be sorted out before everyone is willing to transmit valuable corporate information on a wireless network. This report documents the inherent flaws in wired equivalent privacy protocol used by the 802.11 standard and the ensuing security breaches that can occur to a wireless network due to these flaws. The solutions suggested in this report might not actually make the 802.11 standard secure, but will surely help in the lead up to a secure wireless network standard.

On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a very interesting platform to provide analytical power to the data present in the database. This paper discusses the system designed which handles integration of data from two remote legacy reservation systems to merge as one Integrated database server and also the design of an OLAP database and building an OLAP cube for the data warehousing. OLAP cube is useful for analysis of data and also for making various business decisions. The Data Transformation Services (DTS) in the Microsoft® SQL Server 2000 is used to integrate as a package the collection of data and also for refreshing data in the databases. On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) cube is designed using Microsoft® Analysis Server.

Complexity can emerge from extremely simple rules. A paradigmatic example of this is the model of ballistic deposition (BD), a simple model of sedimentary rock growth. In two separate Problem-in-Lieu-of Thesis studies, BD was investigated numerically in (1+1)-D on a lattice. Both studies are combined in this document. For problem I, the global interface roughening (IR) process was studied in terms of effective scaling exponents for a generalized BD model. The model used incorporates a tunable parameter B to change the cooperation between aggregating particles. Scaling was found to depart increasingly from the predictions of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang theory both with decreasing system sizes and with increasing cooperation. For problem II, the local single column evolution during BD rock growth was studied via statistical analysis of time series. Connections were found between single column time series properties and the global IR process.

This research shows that the Japanese rice policy has affected the volume of exported and imported rice; moreover, multilateral and bilateral agreements have also affected Japanese rice policy. Japan's institution of subsidies and trade barriers has made its rice products too expensive for foreign trade and its domestic consumers. Since the WTO agreement has forced Japan to open its market gradually over six years, Japan may be unable to compete internationally because of its limited land, high labor costs, and the field utility fees.

Many organic materials have been studied to be used as semiconductors, few of them being pentacene and polythiophene. Organic semiconductors have been investigated to make organic thin film transistors. Pentacene has been used in the active region of the transistors. Transistors fabricated with pentacene do not have very high mobility. But in some applications, high mobility is not needed. In such application other properties of organic transistors are used, such as, ease of production and flexibility. Organic thin film transistors (OTFT) can find use as low density storage devices, such as smart cards or I.D. tags, and displays. OTFT are compatible with polymeric substrates and hence can find use as flexible computer screens. This project aims at making 'smart clothes', the cheap way, with pentacene based OTFT. This problem in lieu of thesis describes a way to deposit pentacene films and characterize it. Pentacene films were deposited on substrates and characterized using x-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). The substrate used was ~1500Å platinum on silicon wafer or bare silicon wafer. was used. A deposition system for vacuum deposition of pentacene was assembled. The XRD data for deposited pentacene films shows the presence of two phases, single …

The unusually large hyperfine structure splittings in the 23P state of the 3He isotope is measured using electro-optic techniques with high precision laser spectroscopy. Originally designed to probe the fine structure of the 4He atom, this experimental setup along with special modifications I implemented to resolve certain 3He related issues has made possible new high precision hyperfine structure measurements. Discussed are the details of the experimental setup and the modifications, including in depth information necessary to consider while performing these measurements. The results of these hyperfine structure measurements give an order of magnitude improvement in precision over the best previously reported values.

This project in lieu of thesis identifies successful methods of fundraising utilized by a sampling of three secondary theater arts programs from North Texas. Programs were evaluated on their ability to fund their programs and provide a quality arts education for their students. Guidelines for fundraising were developed that allow secondary theater programs to flourish without placing an additional burden on already overextended tax system. Findings were framed in a Marxist socio-economic context, seeking to find some relation between supply-side economics and the failure of certain communities to offer quality arts programs. Marxist philosophy, emphasizing the values of community and shared wealth, served to frame findings in the context of arts programs serving and enhancing their own communities.

Chapter 1 discusses how the concept of the stitch as art object evolved. The question in the statement of problems concerned the use of design principles on the stitch and the perception of the stitch by the viewer. Chapter 2 discusses the various processes involved in creating the works to answer the proposed questions, and discusses the use of literalism in the concept of the works. Chapter 3 discusses what was learned from the experience.

Security is one of the main concerns of users who need to connect to a remote computer for various purposes, such as checking e-mails or viewing files. However in today's computer networks, privacy, transmission to intended client is not guaranteed. If data is transmitted over the Internet or a local network as plain text it may be captured and viewed by anyone with little technical knowledge. This may include sensitive data such as passwords. Big businesses use firewalls, virtual private networks and encrypt their transmissions to counter this at high costs. Secure shell protocol (SSH) provides an answer to this. SSH is a software protocol for secure communication over an insecure network. SSH not only offers authentication of hosts but also encrypts the sessions between the client and the server and is transparent to the end user. This Problem in Lieu of Thesis makes a study of SSH and creates a sample secure client and server which follows SSH and examines its performance.

Machine Learning is the ability of a machine to perform better at a given task, using its previous experience. Various algorithms like decision trees, Bayesian learning, artificial neural networks and instance-based learning algorithms are used widely in machine learning systems. Current applications of machine learning include credit card fraud detection, customer service based on history of purchased products, games and many more. The application of machine learning techniques to natural language processing (NLP) has increased tremendously in recent years. Examples are handwriting recognition and speech recognition. The problem we tackle in this Problem in Lieu of Thesis is applying machine-learning techniques to improve the performance of a conversational agent. The OpenMind repository of common sense, in the form of question-answer pairs is treated as the training data for the machine learning system. WordNet is interfaced with to capture important semantic and syntactic information about the words in the sentences. Further, k-closest neighbors algorithm, an instance based learning algorithm is used to simulate a case based learning system. The resulting system is expected to be able to answer new queries with knowledge gained from the training data it was fed with.

Secure communication is the primary challenge in today's information network. In this project an efficient secret key agreement protocol is described and analyzed along with the other existing protocols. We focus primarily on Leighton and Micali's secret-key agreement without the use of public-key encryption techniques. The Leighton-Micali protocol is extremely efficient when implemented in software and has significant advantages over existing systems like Kerberos. In this method the secret keys are agreed upon using a trusted third party known as the trusted agent. The trusted agent generates the keys and writes them to a public directory before it goes offline. The communicating entities can retrieve the keys either from the online trusted agent or from the public directory service and agree upon a symmetric-key without any public-key procedures. The principal advantage of this method is that the user verifies the authenticity of the trusted agent before using the keys generated by it. The Leighton-Micali scheme is not vulnerable to the present day attacks like fabrication, modification or denial of service etc. The Leighton-Micali protocol can be employed in real-time systems like smart cards. In addition to the security properties and the simplicity of the protocol, our experiments show that in …

This problem in lieu of thesis outlines a body of work that uses technology and pop elements to discover ways to understand what it means to be human. In doing so it expands the interpretation of technology, ontology, and pop, and allowed the artist to find an essential balance between the three. It details the understanding of these borrowed aesthetics and their connection to the creative process.

Due to the growing need of the Internet and networking technologies, simple, powerful, easily maintained distributed applications needed to be developed. These kinds of applications can benefit greatly from distributed computing concepts. Despite its powerful mechanisms, Jini has yet to be accepted in mainstream Java development. Until that happens, we need to find better Remote Method Invocation (RMI) solutions. Feasibility of implementation of Multicasting in RMI is worked in this paper. Multicasting capability can be used in RMI using Jini-like technique. Support of Multicast over Unicast reference layer is also studied. A piece of code explaining how it can be done, is added.

As the use of virtual environments (VEs) is becoming more widespread, user needs are becoming a more significant part in those environments. In order to adapt to the needs of the user, a system should be able to infer user interests and goals. I developed an architecture for user modeling to understand users' interests in a VE by monitoring their actions. In this paper, I discussed the architecture and the virtual environment that was created to test it. This architecture employs sensors to keep track of all the users' actions, data structures that can store a record of significant events that have occurred in the environment, and a rule base. The rule base continually monitors the data collected from the sensors, world state, and event history in order to update the user goal inferences. These inferences can then be used to modify the flow of events within a VE.

The first objective for this problem in lieu of thesis project was to gather, identify to the lowest practical taxonomic level and organize all available aquatic insects collected from high altitude Colorado aquatic systems during the summers of 1994, 1996, 1998, and 2002 for the University of North Texas Environmental Science Field Course (BIOL 5650). The curated collection will be housed in the Elm Fork Natural History Museum, located at the University of North Texas. The second objective was to provide a summary and discussion of the occurrence and distribution of the aquatic insects collected from Mt. Blanca in 1994, 1996, and 1998 and to create a taxa list of aquatic insects collected from Cochetopa Creek during the summer of 2002.

I want to find a balance within the juxtaposition of representational imagery, patterned fabric, stain and found objects, which effectively communicates the ideas of my work, yet still provides a visually interesting object/painting. How do my materials relate to the content and/or meaning of the work? How will focusing on a single subject affect the development and visual content of my painting? How will I choose representational images to use in relation to the aims of my subject? I was struck by the connections between the baby doll and the real baby. The baby doll became a representation of an idealized body. My interest in baby doll source materials evolved through several different stages, beginning with drawings of baby dolls, then actual doll parts, and finally to imagery of babies with genetic defects. Formally, the work was able to progress as the idea or content progressed.

The focus of my graduate work was to find my own voice through my continued efforts in woodcarving. I proposed to produce six to eight wood carved sculptures for my thesis that would be dealing with a juxtaposition of struggle expressively portrayed by the figure between two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds. I used these works to express my emotions about myself, and my interactions with others in a form of nonverbal communication with the viewer. The result of this process did lead me to find my own voice and with this voice I expressed three-dimensionally, not only my own struggles, but also those that many other women have experienced as well.

The focus of my work is the incorporation of three-dimensional sculptural forms into the design of my garments while still maintaining the functional purpose of the garment. Origami paper folding is the inspiration for the sculptural forms. The major endeavor was to explore and solve the relationship between the organic human forms and the geometric forms created by the origami paper folds. This presented a challenge of exact precision. During this process, I experimented with different fabrics, which can accommodate the sharp creases and retain the shape. A variety of folding patterns were also explored. Although the design should be innovative and creative, the final garment must be wearable and comfortable.

This problem in lieu of thesis report presents a study on gate electrode materials on high K dielectrics, including poly-SiGe and Ru. The stability of poly-SiGe in direct contact with Hf silicon-oxynitride (HfSiON) is studied by rapid thermal annealing (RTA), Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (RBS), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM). By performing a series of RTA treatments we found that as RTA thermal budgets reach 1050 C for 30s, the poly-SiGe layer begins to intermix with the HfSiON film, as observed by TEM. The maximum annealing condition for the Hf0.14Si0.23O0.46N0.17 film to remain stable in contact with poly-SiGe is 1050 C for 20s in high purity N2(99.9%) ambient. We also found that after 1000 C annealing for 60s in a nitrogen ambient, the poly-SiGe crystal phase structure was changed from a columnar structure to a large grain structure. For a metal gate, Ru was studied to determine N2annealing effects on sheet resistance of Ru sample electrodes and electrical characterization of Ru/HfSiOx/Si stack. Results show that a pure Ru metal gate is not a good choice for high k materials since it is hard to etch off, and different annealing conditions can cause large changes in …

Through this body of work and this paper the possibilities of using Fashion Design to express the concepts of the circle has been explored. This was done with three questions in mind: How can I use the shape of the circle as inspiration for fashion design? How can I express related words and phrases in my design? and How can I use the colors black and white to emphasize the concept of my design. To answer these questions I have created two groups of garments: one was inspired by circular objects, such as cherries and drops, and the other starting from words and phrases such as "study circle" and "circle the wagons." In the first group the emphasis was on the aesthetics of the garment while the second group was more focused on meaning. All garments are black and white.