A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile platforms or nodes that come together to form a network capable of communicating with each other, without the help of a central controller. To avail the maximum potential of a MANET, it is of great importance to devise a routing scheme, which will optimize upon the performance of a MANET, given the high rate of random mobility of the nodes. In a MANET individual nodes perform the routing functions like route discovery, route maintenance and delivery of packets from one node to the other. Existing routing protocols flood the network with broadcasts of route discovery messages, while attempting to establish a route. This characteristic is instrumental in deteriorating the performance of a MANET, as resource overhead triggered by broadcasts is directly proportional to the size of the network. Bounded-dynamic source routing (B-DSR), is proposed to curb this multitude of superfluous broadcasts, thus enabling to reserve valuable resources like bandwidth and battery power. B-DSR establishes a bounded region in the network, only within which, transmissions of route discovery messages are processed and validated for establishing a route. All route discovery messages reaching outside of this bounded region are dropped, thus …

The primary goal of this thesis is to provide a comparative analysis of the institutional and organizational mechanisms designed to monitor and control political corruption at the national level. The paper will provide comparisons of these arraignments and control systems across three nations. The thesis will identify differences across countries in terms of organizational and institutional political corruption control mechanisms, and use the CPI index to suggest and identify those control mechanisms that appear to be present in nations with low CPI measurements. Finally, the thesis will conclude with the discussion concerning the future prospects for controlling political corruption in Turkey based on the comparative analysis described above.

Critics and audiences alike have neglected the idea of Wilde as a precursor to Beckett. But I contend that a closer look at each writer's aesthetic and philosophic tendencies-for instance, their interest in the fluid nature of self, their understanding of identity as a performance, and their belief in language as both a way in and a way out of stagnancy -will connect them in surprising and highly significant ways. This thesis will focus on the ways in which Wilde prefigures Beckett as a dramatist. Indeed, many of the themes that Beckett, free from the constraints of a censor and from the societal restrictions of Victorian England, unabashedly details in his drama are to be found residing obscurely in Wilde. Understanding Beckett's major dramatic themes and motifs therefore yields new strategies for reading Wilde.

The thesis examines the relationship between Martha Stewart's rendition of domesticity and a broader cultural trend of the late 1990s U.S. domestic retreatism. It argues that the mode of construction and representation of the "domestic dream" in Stewart's programs cannot be examined outside of such concepts as class and ethnicity, whose understanding depends on the cultural, social, and political context of a given era, a context, in which they become transparent as aspects of the Western (white, patriarchal) status quo. Performing a deconstructive reading of these categories as employed by Stewart in the process of creation of her media persona, the thesis examines what the negative as well as positive reactions to "Martha Stewart" convey about the condition of American society of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

More so than any other science in the past several decades, Biology has seen an explosion of new information and monumental discoveries that have had a profound impact on much more than the science itself. Much of this has occurred at the molecular level. Many of these modern concepts, ideas, and technologies, as well as their historical context, can be easily understood and appreciated at the high school level. Moreover, it is argued here that the integration of this is critical for making biology relevant as a modern science. A contemporary high school biology curriculum should adequately reflect this newly acquired knowledge and how it has already has already begun to revolutionize medicine, agriculture, and the study of biology itself. This curriculum provides teachers with a detailed framework for integrating molecular biology into a high school biology curriculum. It is not intended to represent the curriculum for an entire academic year, but should be considered a significant component. In addition to examining key concepts and discoveries, it examines modern molecular techniques, their applications, and their relevance to science and beyond. It also provides several recommended labs and helpful protocols.

By examining southwestern masculinity from three separate lenses of cultural experience, Mexican American, Native American and female, this thesis aims to acknowledge the blending of masculinities that is taking place in both the fictitious and factual southwest. Long gone are the days when the cowboys chased down the savage Indians or the Mexican bandits. Southwestern literature now focuses on how these different cultures and traditions can re-construct their masculinities in a way that will be beneficial to all. The southwest is a land of borders and liminal spaces between the United States and Mexico, between brown and white, legal and illegal. All of these borders converge here to create the last American frontier. These converging borders also encompass converging traditions, cultures, and genders. By blending the cowboy, the macho, and the warrior, perhaps these Southwestern writers can construct a liminal masculinity more representative of the southwest itself.

This thesis is an examination of "paranoid conspiracy" films, a film noir subgenre that emerged in mainstream American cinema in the early 1970s and turns on vast, shadowy conspiracies located within U.S. "power structures" (government agencies, the military, the media) and directed against the American public. Specifically, it focuses on the emergence of these films in the 1970s, their almost complete disappearance during the Reagan presidency, and subsequent reemergence in the early 1990s. Placing representative texts in the context of U.S. political and social reality of the last three decades, it analyzes the relationship between the conspiracy theory genre, the "crisis of confidence" in the American society, and the process of formation of American national identity.

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.

The Pink Papers is a collection of three short stories and a novel in progress consisting of four chapters. Each piece is a work of original fiction. The preface addresses the female writer and the female voice in fiction. "Broken Clock" and "Pink Paper" are the stories of two girls coping with endometriosis. "Normal Capacity" looks at the loss of a dream through the eyes of a first-year law student. The novel in progress, titled Blanchard, OK, is set in a rural farming town in Oklahoma. The novel tells the stories of 24-year-old Robin, her Aunt Paula, and Paula's boyfriend, Sam.

The registers of the singing voice, as commonly understood by singers, refer to the different vocal qualities induced by adjustments at the level of the larynx and of the vocal tract. This explains why register unification can be approached either one or a combination of the following procedures: (1) resonance alignment through vowel modification, (2) register alignment through intensity exercises. The wide-spread acceptance of vowel modification has made singers reluctant in exploring other avenues of register development. If registers are laryngeally derived, there should be another way of register unification, which directly addresses the coordination of the laryngeal muscles. In support of this argument, this thesis investigates the teaching practices of a group of twentieth-century American voice teachers, who rely on intensity manipulation as the primary means for enhancing the register adjustments. Intensity exercises such as the messa di voce has long been practiced in historical pedagogy, but it is not until now that voice science confirmed its significance in register coordination.

The resources (memory, power and bandwidth) are limited in wireless and mobile networks. Previous research has shown that the quality of service (QoS) of the mobile client can be improved through efficient resources management. This thesis contains two areas of research that are strongly interrelated. In the first area of research, we extended the MoSync Algorithm, a network application layer media synchronization algorithm, to allow play-out of multimedia packets by the base station upon the mobile client in a First-In-First-Out (FIFO), Highest-Priority-First (PQ), Weighted Fair-Queuing (WFQ) and Round-Robin (RR) order. In the second area of research, we make modifications to the DSR and TORA routing algorithms to make them energy aware routing protocols. Our research shows that the QoS of the mobile client can be drastically improved through effective resource allocation.

Wireless ad hoc networks are expected to play an important role in civilian and military settings where wireless access to wired backbone is either ineffective or impossible. Wireless sensor networks are effective in remote data acquisition. Congestion control and power consumption in wireless ad hoc networks have received a lot of attention in recent research. Several algorithms have been proposed to reduce congestion and power consumption in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. In this thesis, we focus upon two schemes, which deal with congestion control and power consumption issues. This thesis consists of two parts. In the first part, we describe a randomization scheme for congestion control in dynamic source routing protocol, which we refer to as RDSR. We also study a randomization scheme for GDSR protocol, a GPS optimized variant of DSR. We discuss RDSR and RGDSR implementations and present extensive simulation experiments to study their performance. Our results indicate that both RGDSR and RDSR protocols outperform their non-randomized counterparts by decreasing the number of route query packets. Furthermore, a probabilistic congestion control scheme based on local tuning of routing protocol parameters is shown to be feasible. In the second part we present a simulation based performance study …

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 …

Treatment of dichloromaleic anhydride and 1,8-diaminonaphthalene in either benzene or toluene under refluxing conditions gives low yields of the new heterocyclic compound 8,9-dichloropyrrolo[1,2-a]perimidin-10-one. This product has been isolated and characterized in solution by NMR, IR, and UV/vis spectroscopies, and the solid-state structure of 8,9-dichloropyrrolo[1,2-a]perimidin-10-one has been established by X-ray crystallography. The nature of the HOMO and LUMO levels of 8,9-dichloropyrrolo[1,2-a]perimidin-10-one has been studied by extended Hückel molecular orbital calculations.

Through my work, I explored the application of texture and materials as a means to identify specific functions. I show how texture and material selections that specifically engage the sense of touch can aid in effective environments for the elderly. By means of this study, I demonstrated how the sensory perception of the elderly is utilized in designing productive environments for the senior population in regards to the sense of touch. The interior design of senior living environments can greatly enhance the retirement experience for the elderly population. With the information I have gained through my research and work will reflect in my future design projects. I also wish to share this enlightenment with others in my field of study.