Contemporary transnational literature presents a unique interpretive problem, due to new methods of language and culture negotiation in the information age. The resulting condition, transnational compositionality, is evidenced by specific linguistic artifacts; to illustrate this I use three American novels as a case study: Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon, Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. By extension, many conventional literary elements are changed in the transnational since modernity: satire is no longer a lampooning of cultures but a questioning of the methods by which humans blend cultures together; similarly, complex symbolic constructions may no longer be taken at face value, for they now communicate more about cultural identity processes than static ideologies. If scholars are to achieve adequate interpretations of these elements, we must consider the global framework that has so intimately shaped them in the twenty-first century.

This study examined incidental receptive and productive vocabulary gains within conversation-class interactions. Eleven Mexican learners of English attended four videotaped conversation lessons where 40 target words were incorporated in different types of exposure. Stimulated recall interviews with students highlighted the effect of cognates, learners' access to passive vocabulary, and use of their vocabulary knowledge in learning related words. Posttests revealed a correlation between frequency and receptive/productive gains. Mean scores showed that words mentioned with synonyms were learned most often, followed by task-essential words and last those mentioned without explanation. A two-way ANCOVA revealed main effects for cognates, and a statistical interaction between cognate status and types of exposure. A statistical correlation was found between receptive and productive gains. Aptitude scores correlated with productive gains but not with receptive gains. The results provide implications for ESL teachers who consider incidental learning of vocabulary within their conversation lessons.

This study compares independent use of two known algorithms (Kalmar filter with background subtraction and Particle Filter) that are commonly deployed in object tracking applications. Object tracking in general is very challenging; it presents numerous problems that need to be addressed by the application in order to facilitate its successful deployment. Such problems range from abrupt object motion, during tracking, to a change in appearance of the scene and the object, as well as object to scene occlusions, and camera motion among others. It is important to take into consideration some issues, such as, accounting for noise associated with the image in question, ability to predict to an acceptable statistical accuracy, the position of the object at a particular time given its current position. This study tackles some of the issues raised above prior to addressing how the use of either of the aforementioned algorithm, minimize or in some cases eliminate the negative effects

Forest encroachment is understood to be the main reason for prairie grassland decline across the United States. In Texas and Oklahoma, juniper has been highlighted as particularly opportunistic. This study assesses the usefulness of three remote sensing techniques to aid in locating the areas of juniper encroachment for the LBJ Grasslands in Decatur, Texas. An object based classification was performed in eCognition and final accuracy assessments placed the overall accuracy at 94%, a significant improvement over traditional pixel based methods. Image biomass was estimated using normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) for 1 meter resolution IKONOS winter images. A high correlation between the sum of NDVI for tree objects and field tree biomass was determined where R = 0.72, suggesting NDVI sum of a tree area is plausible. However, issues with NDVI saturation and regression produced unrealistically high biomass estimates for large NDVI. Canopy height model (CHM) derived from 3-5m LiDAR data did not perform as well. LiDAR typically used for digital elevation model (DEM) production was acquired for the CHM and produced correlations of R = 0.26. This suggests an inability for this particular dataset to identify juniper trees. When points that registered a tree height where correlated with field …

According to Walter Stephens, witch-theorists in the fifteenth century developed the witchcraft belief of demon copulation in order to prove the existence of demons and therefore the existence of God. In England, during the mid-seventeenth century, Cartesian and materialist philosophies spread. These new philosophies stated there was nothing in the world but corporeal substances, and these substances had to conform to natural law. This, the philosophers argued, meant witchcraft was impossible. Certain other philosophers believed a denial of any incorporeal substance would lead to atheism, and so used witchcraft as proof of incorporeal spirits to refute what they felt was a growing atheism in the world. By examining this debate we can better understand the decline of witchcraft. This debate between corporeal and incorporeal was part of the larger debate over the existence of witchcraft. It occurred at a time in England when the persecution of witches was declining. Using witchcraft as proof of incorporeal substances was one of the last uses of witchcraft before it disappeared as a valid belief. Therefore, a better understanding of this debate adds to a better understanding of witchcraft during its decline.

Previous research indicates that survivors of sexual assault often blame themselves for the assault. Research has also shown that people blame the perpetrator in some situations and the survivor in other situations involving sexual assault. The purpose of this study was to discover if survivors of sexual assault who blame themselves tend to blame other survivors (survivor blame) in situations different from their own. Another purpose was to assess whether or not sexual assault survivors who do not blame themselves for their attack tend to blame other survivors. The participants' attributional style was also assessed in order to understand the relations between self-blame and survivor blame in situations involving sexual assault. Findings indicated that certain types of attributional style are related to self-blame in sexual assault survivors and blame toward sexual assault survivors depicted in vignettes. This indicates that attributional style may have important implications in the clinical setting to aid sexual assault survivors who experience self-blame, as well in educating society about sexual assault and the ultimate responsibility of perpetrators.

Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths behind lung cancer in the United States. Colonoscopy is the preferred screening method for detection of diseases like Colorectal Cancer. In the year 2006, American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE) and American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) issued guidelines for quality colonoscopy. The guidelines suggest that on average the withdrawal phase during a screening colonoscopy should last a minimum of 6 minutes. My aim is to classify the colonoscopy video into insertion and withdrawal phase. The problem is that currently existing shot detection techniques cannot be applied because colonoscopy is a single camera shot from start to end. An algorithm to detect phase boundary has already been developed by the MIGLAB team. Existing method has acceptable levels of accuracy but the main issue is dependency on MPEG (Moving Pictures Expert Group) 1/2. I implemented exhaustive search for motion estimation to reduce the execution time and improve the accuracy. I took advantages of the C/C++ programming languages with multithreading which helped us get even better performances in terms of execution time. I propose a method for improving the current method of colonoscopy video analysis and also an extension for the same to …

Despite the central importance of conditional discriminations to the derivation of equivalence relations, there is little research relating the dynamics of conditional discrimination learning to the derivation of equivalence relations. Prior research has shown that conditional discriminations with simple sample and comparison stimuli are acquired faster than conditional discriminations with complex sample and comparison stimuli. This study attempted to replicate these earlier results and extend them by attempting to relate conditional discrimination learning to equivalence relations. Each of four adult humans learned four, four-choice conditional discriminations (simple-simple, simple-complex, complex-simple, and complex-complex) and were tested to see if equivalence relations had developed. The results confirm earlier findings showing acquisition to be facilitated with simple stimuli and retarded with complex stimuli. There was no difference in outcomes on equivalence tests, however. The results are in implicit agreement with Sidman's theory of stimulus equivalence.

Wetting of a substance has been widely investigated since it has many applications to many different fields. Wetting principles can be applied to better select cleans for front end of line (FEOL) and back end of line (BEOL) cleaning processes. These principles can also be used to help determine processes that best repel water from a semiconductor device. It is known that the value of the dielectric constant in an insulator increases when water is absorbed. These contact angle experiments will determine which processes can eliminate water absorption. Wetting is measured by the contact angle between a solid and a liquid. It is known that roughness plays a crucial role on the wetting of a substance. Different surface groups also affect the wetting of a surface. In this work, it was investigated how wetting was affected by different solid surfaces with different chemistries and different roughness. Four different materials were used: silicon; thermally grown silicon dioxide on silicon; chemically vapor deposited (CVD) silicon dioxide on silicon made from tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS); and organosilicate glass (OSG) on silicon. The contact angle of each of the samples was measured using a goniometer. The roughness of the samples was measured by atomic force …

Most newspapers today are struggling to survive in an increasingly fragmented and digital media environment. How have their owners or corporate parents shaped or adapted their business practices to in order to thrive? This question guides the overall approach to this study. The focus is on one newspaper, the Dallas Morning News. In particular, how has the News used corporate messages to respond to the changing media landscape? This study employs forms of rhetorical and discourse analysis to determine the effectiveness of the News' corporate messages during a 10-year period in order to answer this question. This study finds that the News used inconsistent and ineffective corporate communications throughout this tumultuous period.

Play is a significant part of childhood. Typically developing children exhibit a wide range of interests within their play behavior, but children with autism do not. The purpose of this study was to design and implement an assessment tool that will capture the constellation of behaviors indicating play interests in young children. The Early Play Interests Assessment (EPIA) includes categories of play behavior and their components behaviors. Additionally, measures of child affect were built into the EPIA. All behaviors were observed under various environmental conditions. The results show that the EPIA was useful in observing toddlers' play behavior within behavioral categories and components and in assessing the interactions among these measures of play interests. The results are discussed in relation to the importance of creating observational systems to quantify play interests in typical and atypical children and for establishing a link between the information gathered in assessment and the planning and implementation of autism interventions.

Out of Date chronicles the filmmaker's personal journey as she tries to untangle her mixed feelings on singlehood and romance, and turns to the older generation for advice, tales of love and stories of success or failure. The documentary links and contrasts different generations' experiences in love and dating. Also, the film deals with loneliness, commitment, gender differences, and social and cultural practices of love and dating.

Smart structures are relevant and significant because of their relevance to phenomena such as hazard mitigation, structural health monitoring and energy saving. Electrical resistance could potentially serve as an indicator of structural well-being or damage in the structure. To this end, the development of a microprocessor-based automated resistance measurement system with customized GUI is desired. In this research, a nodal electrical resistance acquisition circuit (NERAC) system was designed. The system hardware interfaces to a laptop, which houses a customized GUI developed using DAQFactory software. Resistance/impedance was measured using DC/AC methods with four-point probes technique, on three substrates. Baseline reading before damage was noted and compared with the resistance measured after damage. The device was calibrated and validated on three different substrates. Resistance measurements were taken from PVDF samples, composite panels and smart concrete. Results conformed to previous work done on these substrates, validating the effective working of the NERAC device.

With the development of free and easy-to-use software programs, blogging has helped turn Web consumers into Web content providers. Blogging provides distinctive insight into comprehending e-consumer behavior explicitly with respect to social networking and information searching behaviors while facilitating a state of flow. The objectives of this study are to identify determinant dimensions of blogging motivations and flow, and to investigate the hypothesized relationships of the motivational blogging behavior. Analyzing data (n = 432) from a southwestern university, results reveal the critical dimensions of motivations, behaviors, and flow in blogging. Upon extending Hoffman and Novak's (1996) flow model, 14 out of 26 hypotheses were confirmed regarding the significant impacts of blogging motivations and flow on blogging behaviors. The findings revealed that the desire for information, enjoyment, and loyalty are the primary drivers for experiential blogging behavior. Specifically, information-seeking is the decisive motivation to urge experiential and e-shopping behavior concurrently. This study shows that indulgence and telepresence in flow might play pivotal mediating roles to promote the goal-oriented e-shopping behavior resulting enjoyment and loyalty-seeking motivations.

The economic disaster known as the Great Depression struck Grayson County, Texas, in 1929, and full economic recovery did not come until the close of World War II. However, the people of Grayson benefited greatly between 1933 and 1946 from the myriad spending programs of the New Deal, the building of the Denison Dam that created Lake Texoma, and the establishment of Perrin Army Air Field. Utilizing statistical data from the United States Census and the Texas Almanac, this thesis analyzes the role of government spending‐federal, state, and local‐in the economic recovery in Grayson County.

Texas textile mills comprise an untold part of the modern South. The bulk of Texas mills were built between 1890 and 1925, a compressed period of expansion in contrast to the longer developmental pattern of mills in the rest of the United States. This compression meant that Texas mill owners benefited from knowledge gained from mill expansion elsewhere, and owners ran their mills along the same lines as the dominant southeastern model. Owners veered from the established pattern when conditions warranted. This case study focuses on three mills in Texas that operated both independently and as a corporation for a total of sixty years. One mill in McKinney dominated the economy of a small town and serves as the primary focus of this paper. A second mill in Waco served a diversified economy in the center of the state; and the third mill, built in Dallas was concentrated in a major city in a highly competitive job market. All three of these mills will illuminate the single greatest difference between Texas mills and mills elsewhere, the composition of the labor force. Women did not dominate the mill labor force in Texas nor did children, except in limited cases, make-up a …

Second language (L2) researchers and teachers have increasingly come to believe that using a computer-based corpus can be extremely helpful in the language classroom. The purpose of this study is to examine whether corpora can be used outside of the classroom in order for students to improve their essays independently. No previous study has tried to examine students' essays in relation to corpus use so that this study is exploratory. Seven international students wrote five essays on specific topics and then corrected their errors through corpus research. Two experiments were conducted with different students and followed three steps: receiving information about how to use the BYU COCA, writing and correcting, and interviews with students. I examined quantitatively the number and types of errors that students were able to correct in two experiments and reported qualitatively on students' interview responses.

Many calamities in history like hurricanes, tornado and flooding are proof to the large scale impact they cause to the life and economy. Computer simulation and GIS helps in modeling a real world scenario, which assists in evacuation planning, damage assessment, assistance and reconstruction. For achieving computer simulation and modeling there is a need for accurate classification of ground objects. One of the most significant aspects of this research is that it achieves improved classification for regions within which light detection and ranging (LiDAR) has low spatial resolution. This thesis describes a method for accurate classification of bare ground, water body, roads, vegetation, and structures using LiDAR data and aerial Infrared imagery. The most basic step for any terrain modeling application is filtering which is classification of ground and non-ground points. We present an integrated systematic method that makes classification of terrain and non-terrain points effective. Our filtering method uses the geometric feature of the triangle meshes created from LiDAR samples and calculate the confidence for every point. Geometric homogenous blocks and confidence are derived from TIN model and gridded LiDAR samples. The results from two representations are used in a classifier to determine if the block belongs ground or …

Optimal animal welfare has been a long-term goal for captive animal institutions. To measure welfare a definition and identification of elements that make up welfare need to be established. Further, a method to measure welfare's elements that can be implemented into staff's daily routine is necessary to establish baseline levels and track changes in welfare. The goal of the proposed captive animal activity tracking system is to allow for the measurement of each element of welfare quickly, while providing information regarding the animal's current state of welfare and how changes to the animal's environment affect welfare. The data show that this system is effective in revealing behavioral patterns and changes in behavior that occurred in response to environmental changes.

Social stimuli that function as reinforcers for most children generally do not function as reinforcers for children diagnosed with autism. These important social stimuli include smiles, head nods, thumb-ups, and okay signs. It should be an important goal of therapy for children with autism to condition these neutral social stimuli to function as reinforcers for children diagnosed with autism. There is empirical evidence to support both a pairing procedure (classical conditioning) and a discriminative stimulus procedure to condition neutral stimuli to function as reinforcers. However, there is no clear evidence as to the superiority of effectiveness for either procedure. Despite this most textbooks and curriculum guides for children with autism state only the pairing procedure to condition neutral stimuli to function as reinforcers. Recent studies suggest that the discriminative stimulus procedure may in fact be more effective in conditioning neutral stimuli to function as reinforcers for children diagnosed with autism. The present research is a further comparison of these two procedures. Results from one participant support recent findings that suggest the discriminative stimulus procedure is more effective in conditioning neutral stimuli to function as reinforcers. But the results from the other participant show no effects from either procedure, suggesting future …

Existing literature on foreign aid does not indicate what type of political regime is best to achieve human development outcomes or use aid funds more efficiently. I contend that political leaders of different regime types have personal incentives that motivate them to utilize foreign aid to reflect their interests in providing more or less basic social services for their citizens. Using a data set of 126 aid-recipient countries between the years of 1990 and 2007, I employ fixed effects estimation to test the model. The overall results of this research indicate that foreign aid and democratic institutionalization have a positive effect on total enrollment in primary education, while political regime types show little difference from one another in providing public health and education for their citizens.

The purpose of this study is to examine gender bias in sports media from the perspective of the sports columnist. The research analyzed 1,082 sports columns written by ten columnists (five male, five female) at newspapers across the United States. The columns were scrutinized to determine if the column subject was male or female. Results found that 84.4% of the sports columns were written about male athletes or men's sports compared to only 9% devoted to female athletes and women's sports. The research also found that female sports columnists write about female sports 12.7% of the time, while male sports columns only dedicate 6% of their columns to female athletes or women's sports. Newspapers with a larger circulation were more likely to have sports columns about female sports than were newspapers with smaller readerships. Six of the columnists were then interviewed to get their opinions on gender issues in sports journalism.

The experimenter asked if documented equivalence class membership would influence the development of shared discriminative stimulus function established through simple successive discrimination training. In Experiment 1, equivalence classes were established with two sets of 9 stimuli. Common stimulus functions were then trained within or across the equivalence classes. Greater acquisition rates of the simple discriminations with stimuli drawn from within the equivalence classes were observed. In Experiment 2, a third stimulus set was added with which no equivalence relations were explicitly trained. The findings of Experiment 1 were replicated, but the Set 3 results were inconsistent across subjects. The outcomes of the two experiments demonstrate that equivalence classes have an effect on other behavioral relations which requires further investigation.

Performance and power consumption are most important issues while designing embedded systems. Several studies have shown that cache memory consumes about 50% of the total power in these systems. Thus, the architecture of the cache governs both performance and power usage of embedded systems. A new N-way reconfigurable data cache is proposed especially for embedded systems. This thesis explores the issues and design considerations involved in designing a reconfigurable cache. The proposed reconfigurable data cache architecture can be configured as direct-mapped, two-way, or four-way set associative using a mode selector. The module has been designed and simulated in Xilinx ISE 9.1i and ModelSim SE 6.3e using the Verilog hardware description language.