The Wanderer is an orchestra piece 18'42" in duration. The purpose of this project is to provide the composer an opportunity to express through music his experience with God, rebellion, and returning as the wanderering son did in the Bible's parable.

The biomechanics of slips are commonly studied in laboratory settings in an effort to improve the understanding of slip mechanisms for the advancement of slip and fall prevention strategies and risk assessment methods.  Prior studies have shown changes in gait after slipping, and these changes can reduce the external validity of experimental results.  As such, most researchers only slip participants one time.  The ability to slip participants more than once, after allowing gait to return to a natural baseline, would improve the experimental efficiency of these studies.  Therefore, the goal of this study was to determine the time duration of slip-induced changes in gait. The required coefficient of friction (RCOF), a parameter highly predictive of risk of slipping, was measured on thirty-one young male adults during level gait on three separate days before slipping, immediately (<10 minutes) after slipping, and either one, two, four, or six weeks later.  On average, the RCOF decreased 12% from its baseline value (0.20) after slipping, indicating the adoption of a protective gait with a decreased risk of slipping.  The RCOF data trended toward baseline values 4-6 weeks after the slip experience, but remained statistically different from baseline.  This indicates that the slip-induced gait alterations have long-lasting effects, enduring up to six weeks after the slip experience. / Master of Science

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The problem addressed in this study was: What home modifications are made to residential environments to meet the functional capabilities of the aging in place audience? The study was conducted in two phases. In Phase I 102 Floyd County, Virginia, adults 65 years of age or older were interviewed in order to identify their task capabilities and identify the modifications being made to meet their environmental needs and task capabilities. Phase II consisted of a case study of six females taken from the Phase I sample group. This section of the study focused on the modifications identified in Phase I, the techniques used, and the reasons they were made. The findings indicate that 26% of the adults in the study were experiencing difficulty with at least one Activity of Daily Living, 33% were experiencing difficulty with at least one Instrumental Activity of Daily Living. However, like many older adults, these individuals had a relatively high function level and wanted to stay in their home as long as possible. Modifications are being made in order to equalize the participants' function level and the characteristics of the living environment. Housing education programs should be targeted toward the elderly and their family members and provide more information relating to aging in place. Professionals in housing and related fields should have the knowledge necessary to advise clients on making decisions to help insure their ability to live independently as they age. / Master of Science

M. Tech. Entertainment Technology / Adapting popular motion pictures to theatre stage productions has been very popular in recent years. Some of the best examples are the motion picture productions The Lord of the Rings, Billy Elliot and The Colour Purple that were adapted to stage musical productions. This was the case with the original Danish film Festen or The Celebration that was adapted and staged as a theatre play with English text in London in 2004. Pertaining to Festen, the film was originally produced according to the Dogma 95 Principles - a set of principles that were specifically aimed at the film industry and totally differed from any known and applied film practices of the time. The main problem that scenic designers of later stage productions had to deal with when the film was adapted to a stage production was that these principles had a very specific influence on the stage designs for this specific production. For the staging of the play Festen by the Drama Department of Tshwane University in Pretoria the director and the designer not only decided to oppose the Dogma 95 Principles totally, they also decided to design a set in a Film Noir style. They further decided to stage the play with a Caucasian cast using the English text and a black cast using a Zulu text. This resulted in having a major influence on the final outcome of the production. The research question that has to be answered in this research project is "whether it is possible to adapt the design of a very specific type of film production that was originally governed by a set of specific principles for a stage production of the same play".

The thesis focuses on the significance of the cinematic medium for Elizabeth Bowen's novels, from the level of prose and formal representations to broader aspects of narrative and character. The chapters on To the North (1932) and The House in Paris (1935) examine complementary issues of motion and stillness and the consequent impact on subjective experiences of time, space, knowledge, and identity. The final chapter expands the issue of genre revision in The Heat of the Day (1949) to the greater problem of precedent and the reconstruction of identity through storytelling; the novel not only uses formal cinematic techniques by evoking the tone of film noir, but also reconfigures narrative and character tropes of the genre. Thus the advent of cinema not only opened up formal possibilities in the language of fiction but also expanded the types of worlds and effects an author could depict.

Tzvetan Todorov définit le fantastique comme étant le propre de la nouvelle et non pas de la poésie et c’est un genre qui se situerait entre l’étrange et le merveilleux. Pourtant la poésie baudelairienne semble déroger à cette règle, tant au niveau formel que thématique. Les Petits Poèmes en prose constituent un genre hybride entre le recueil de nouvelles et le recueil de poèmes. Dans Les Fleurs du mal, l’ordre des pièces obéit à la logique d’un récit. Quant aux traductions des œuvres d’Edgar Poe, Baudelaire y injecte de la poésie. Sur le plan thématique, les motifs fantastiques sont présents dans l’œuvre de Baudelaire de manière quasi-systématique. Certains d’entre eux prennent des formes singulières et insolites chez l’écrivain. Et par le fait qu’il exalte la bipolarité formelle et thématique, le romantisme baudelairien n’est pas sans nous rappeler la démarche hoffmannienne de l’écriture. Tout en gardant à l’esprit la théorie de Todorov, nous essayons, pas à pas, de démontrer l’existence d’un fantastique baudelairien dont semble même s’inspirer certaines œuvres cinématographiques. / Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as being a genre at the interface between the strange and the wonderful, a genre characteristic of the novel but not of poetry. Baudelaire's poetry, however, seems to depart from this rule, both formally and thematically. The Little Poems in Prose is a hybrid between the collection of short stories and that of poetry. In The Flowers of Evil, the order of the plays obeys the logic of a narrative. As for the translations of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire indulged into poetry. Thematically, the fantastic patterns are present in Baudelaire's work almost systematically. Some of them are unique and unusual forms to the writer. Given that he exalts the formal and thematic bipolarity, Baudelaire’s romance is not reminiscent of Hoffman's approach to writing. Bearing in mind the theory of Todorov, we attempt, step by step to demonstrate the existence of a Baudelairean fantasy which seems to have inspired even some films.