In the United States substance abuse takes a toll that is costly in both economic and human terms. In 2005 we paid 467.7 billion dollars to address the consequences of substance abuse, and each year we have lost an estimated 537,000 of our fellows...
Estimating and analysis of deformation, either rigid or non-rigid, is an active area of research in various medical imaging and computer vision applications. Its importance stems from the inherent inter- and intra-variability in biological and...
This thesis looks at the optimization of fluid flow and mass transfer using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in a micro fluidic coulter counter. CFD will be used to solve equations of fluid flow and mass transfer to see how molecules within the...
Within the discipline of rhetoric and composition, the notion of coherence possesses the status of sine qua non, yet this notion has been treated unevenly or been taken for granted, much as the process of composing itself was taken for granted for...
Image processing; Computer vision; Pattern recognition systems
Image segmentation is one of the most important problems in image processing, object recognition, computer vision, medical imaging, etc. In general, the objective of the segmentation is to partition the image into the meaningful areas using the...
The vast knowledge of nucleic acids is evolving and it is now known that DNA can adopt highly complex, heterogeneous structures. Among the most intriguing are the G-quadruplex structures, which are thought to play a pivotal role in cancer...
Rhetoric--Study and teaching (Higher); Academic writing--Study and teaching--Social aspects
Scholars in rhetoric and composition have heralded a new way of thinking about writing, referring to the change as a paradigm shift (Hairston, Young) or naming the new direction a "social turn" in rhetoric and composition (Bizzell,...
Discrimination in criminal justice administration--United States; Drug control--Social aspects--United States; War on Terrorism, 2001- --Social aspects; Crime and race--United States; United States--Race relations
This thesis is an examination of the relationship between race and ethnicity and the American justice system. It is a comparative case study of the racial dimensions of the War on Drugs in the domestic criminal justice system and the ethnic...
Narrative causal understanding is related to a variety of school-related skills such as reading comprehension, and memory. Previous research shows a developmental trend in the ability to use and understand causal connections that begins at age 4...
Gay rights; Gays--Employment; Bullying in the workplace
Employee retention continues to be a major drain on the resources of organizations, especially in terms of personnel, productivity, and financial resources. One of the primary motivators of employee turnovers established by research is the issue of...
Corpus callosum; Diagnostic imaging; Autism--Diagnosis
Early detection of human disease in today’s society can have an enormous impact
on the severity of the disease that is manifested. Disease such as Autism and Dyslexia,
which have no current cure or proven mechanism as to how they develop, can...
Learning and scholarship--Outlines, syllabi, etc.; English language--Rhetoric-- Outlines, syllabi, etc.; Education, Higher--Curricula; Instructional systems--Design
This dissertation is an investigation of composition's disciplinary conceptions of the course syllabus, from its often-relegated position as textual object to a more interactive and complex subject of our discipline. The course syllabus is an...
The objective of this thesis is to develop computer programs for the dynamic analysis of structures. For a shear building two computer programs were developed: (1) Dynamic Analysis of a Shear Building within the Elastic Range and (2) the Dynamic...
Hurricane Katrina, 2005--Psychological aspects; Writing--Psychological aspects; Psychic trauma in literature; Crisis in literature
The discourses of "trauma" and "post-trauma" have become pervasive in representations of life as it is lived in contemporary globalized culture. As new media technologies make the world more accessible, we become accustomed to...
Type 2 diabetes presents a public health crisis and a global pandemic. Successful management of diabetes requires engagement in a daily regimen of self-care behaviors to achieve optimal glycemic control and to reduce the severity of...
Teaching--Methodology; Universities and colleges--Faculty--Attitudes
Conceptions of teaching and learning held by faculty in higher education broadly reflect two dominant approaches, those that are teacher-focused and content oriented, and those that are student-focused and learner oriented (Entwistle, Skinner,...
Simplified modeling generates a great deal of interest in the area of crashworthiness analysis. Modeling methods used to create simplified computer models for crashworthiness have been well developed. In advanced simplified models, researchers...
Narration (Rhetoric)--Social aspects; Narration (Rhetoric)--Study and teaching
My dissertation examines instructor responses to a popular personal writing assignment, the literacy narrative. Previous studies have shown this assignment to be popular with instructors because of the reflection it is thought to generate; however,...
Utopias; Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969; Irigaray, Luce; Agamben, Giorgio, 1942-
What is the idea that "utopia" names? How can discourse represent that idea? Setting aside temporarily deeper problems with the idea of representation, and focusing on how a complex philosophical discourse might approach the problem of...
From a computerized image analysis prospective, early diagnosis of lung cancer involves detection of doubtful nodules and classification into different pathologies. The detection stage involves a detection approach, usually by template matching,...
