This thesis explores the evolution, growth and sudden decline of the East Washington community, located in East Point, Georgia. This African-American community was strategically created in 1912, when the city council passed its first residential segregation ordinance. This research uses oral histories and other documents to analyze the survival techniques that enabled East Washington to endure the turmoil of Jim Crow racial segregation from its 1912 inception to its 1962 transformation due to urban renewal. First, it identifies the people who chose to migrate to this area, where they came from and what enticed them to settle in East Point. Second, it discusses the network of institutions that they built and depended upon, including businesses, schools and churches, in order to maintain their largely autonomous community. Finally, it illuminates East Washington’s demise through urban renewal.

<p>The purpose of this dissertation is to chart the development of an ambivalent female identity in the Gothic genre, as exemplified by Ann Radcliffe&rsquo / s late eighteenth century fictions. The thesis examines the social and literary context of the emergence of the Gothic in English literature and argues that it is intimately tied up with changes in social, political and gender relations in the period.</p>

Duomenų perdavimas elektros tinklais. Magistro baigiamasis darbas elektronikos inžinerijos laipsniui. Vilniaus Gedimino technikos universitetas. Vilnius, 2012, 67 p., 38 iliustr., 15 lent., 27 bibl., 3 priedai. Darbo tikslas – sukurti ir ištirti duomenų perdavimo elektros tinklais sistemos modelį. Darbe išnagrinėti šiuolaikiniai duomenų perdavimo elektros tinklais standartai, ištirti šiuolaikiniai duomenų perdavimo elektros tinklais metodai, atskleisti pagrindiniai šiuolaikinių duomenų perdavimo elektros tinklais metodų trūkumai. Siekiant sumažinti šiuolaikinių sistemų trūkumus sudarytas duomenų perdavimo elektros tinklais sistemos modelis su dirbtiniu neuronų tinklu. Gautieji darbo rezultatai atitiko užduotyje iškeltus reikalavimus. / The goal of this work was to create and analize a power line comunication model. This work analizes up to date power line comunication standards, methods and the main disadvantages of these methods are discussed. To compensate these disadvantages a power line communication system model with an artificial neural network was proposed. The results of this work suits the task. The systems with the artificial neural network model gave positive results.

This dissertation argues that a diversity of epistemology within the field of rhetoric and composition can encourage Imagining as a strategy to negotiate the conundrums and binaries of the post-everything era, especially in negotiating the social presence of online learning. I trace Imagination from Enlightenment Pedagogy, which privileged the individual, unteacheable genius, to the conflation of invention and Imagination and the disappearance of both in current-traditional, modern, and postmodern pedagogy. Underlying this disappearance seems to be a distrust of Imagination, as exemplified by Kenneth Burke. I suggest that strategy of Imagining, rather than the faculty of Imagination, is needed—a move that is congruent with the active agency suggested by Marilyn Cooper. I also suggest that the theoretical basis for Imagining as a bridge can be found in the “Thirdness” of Charles Sanders Pierce. Following Coleridge, I suggest that four means of knowing serve as foundations for Imagining: the group, the text, knowledgeable others, and the spirit. These four means can give the field of rhetoric and composition a diversity of epistemologies, and these terms provide the means to more fully describe our complex, partial, and recursive ways of knowing in the twenty-first century. These ways of knowing are especially necessary in online learning where teachers and students may only “see” each other through their words. I argue that these means of knowing enhance Imagining and that a unsyllabus is a way to implement Imagining.

his dissertation examines the rhetoric of the homestead movement in antebellum America as a particular instance of domesticity. Homestead rhetoric alters the modes of identity and subjectivity usually found in domesticity, and alters the home-nation metaphor at the moment when the nation faced an increasing sectional divide that would lead to a Civil War. As deployed by Congressmen, homestead rhetoric used domesticity to define the relationship between manhood and citizenship. Harriet Jacobs uses this rhetoric in her autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to shape an identity more in line with male homesteaders than with the subjects of women’s domesticity. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Haunted Homestead offers the home-nation metaphor as a solution to national crisis, but ultimately the crisis is too large to solve through domesticity. This dissertation uses Jurgen Habermas’s concepts of lifeworld and system to assess the types of subjects created through the different modes of domesticity. Lifeworld describes modes of communication that foster the agency of individuals, and system describes the instrumentalization of individuals into roles where they are only a means to an end. The lifeworld created through homestead rhetoric is ultimately systematized by the importance of transforming land into property; Harriet Jacobs recognizes that she must escape the systematization of slavery and enter into a new economic system to have her rights fully acknowledged; Southworth’s failure to find a literary solution to national problems suggests the limits of a literary lifeworld, or the extent to which the domestic itself has been systematized. This dissertation concludes by considering how Laura Ingalls Wilder’s experience homesteading in South Dakota can bring an ecocritical perspective to lifeworld and system. Ingalls Wilder rejects the system of commodified nature to find contentment in a lifeworld affirmed through an agrarian relationship to the land.

In recent years, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been applied to estimate in many areas of hydrology and hydraulic engineering. In this thesis, multilayered feedforward backpropagation algorithm was used to establish for the prediction of unit discharge q (m3/s/m) in a rectangular free overfall. Researchers&rsquo / experimental data were used to train and validate the network with high reliability. First, an appropriate ANN model has been established by considering determination of hidden layer and node numbers related to training function and training epoch number. Then by applying sensitivity analysis, parameters involved in and their effectiveness relatively has been determined in the phenomenon. In the scope of the thesis, there are two case studies. In the first case study, ANN models reliability has been investigated according to the training data clustered and the results are given by comparing to regression analysis. In the second case, ANN models&rsquo / ability in establishing relations with different data clusters is investigated and effectiveness of ANN is scrutinized.

Abstract This study examines the connection between power and identity in three Gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Following the identity theories of Erik Erikson, I argue that identity has biological, psychological, and social aspects that are subject to change over time. As individual agency—the ability to function as a person—depends on a relatively certain and stable sense of personal identity, Gothic villains—both individuals and institutions—gain and maintain their power by disempowering their victims. In order to do so, they work to compromise these victims’ sense of personal identity, causing them to suffer identity crises that greatly reduce their ability to function. Employing various means—including threats of rape, destruction of reputation, imprisonment, forced exile, denial of freedom of thought, torture, and others—Gothic villains attempt to weaken their victims by placing them in situations that cause the fears that Erikson argues all people share to become paralyzing and debilitating states of anxiety, states in which the victims suffer from a temporary, or, in extreme cases, permanent loss of agency. These Gothic victims’ paranoia, identity crises, and subsequent loss of agency underscore the importance of individuals’ identity and constitute the horror that is at the heart of Gothic fiction.

Drug development is a long and expensive process. It is often not until potential drug candidates are administered to humans that accurate quantification of their pharmacokinetic characteristics is achieved. The goal of developing quantitative structure-pharmacokinetic relationships (QSPkRs) is to relate the molecular structure of a chemical entity with its pharmacokinetic characteristics. In this thesis artificial neural networks (ANNs) were used to construct in silico predictive QSPkRs for various pharmacokinetic parameters using different drug data sets. Drug pharmacokinetic data for all studies were taken from the literature. Information for model construction was extracted from drug molecular structure. Numerous theoretical descriptors were generated from drug structure ranging from simple constitutional and functional group counts to complex 3D quantum chemical numbers. Subsets of descriptors were selected which best modeled the target pharmacokinetic parameter(s). Using manual selective pruning, QSPkRs for physiological clearances, volumes of distribution, and fraction bound to plasma proteins were developed for a series of beta-adrenoceptor antagonists. All optimum ANN models had training and cross-validation correlations close to unity, while testing was performed with an independent set of compounds. In most cases the ANN models developed performed better than other published ANN models for the same drug data set. The ability of ANNs to develop QSPkRs with multiple target outputs was investigated for a series of cephalosporins. Multilayer perceptron ANN models were constructed for prediction of half life, volume of distribution, clearances (whole body and renal), fraction excreted in the urine, and fraction bound to plasma proteins. The optimum model was well able to differentiate compounds in a qualitative manner while quantitative predictions were mostly in agreement with observed literature values. The ability to make simultaneous predictions of important pharmacokinetic properties of a compound made this a valuable model. A radial-basis function ANN was employed to construct a quantitative structure-bioavailability relationship for a large, structurally diverse series of compounds. The optimum model contained descriptors encoding constitutional through to conformation dependent solubility characteristics. Prediction of bioavailability for the independent testing set were generally close to observed values. Furthermore, the optimum model provided a good qualitative tool for differentiating between drugs with either low or high experimental bioavailability. QSPkR models constructed with ANNs were compared with multilinear regression models. ANN models were shown to be more effective at selecting a suitable subset of descriptors to model a given pharmacokinetic parameter. They also gave more accurate predictions than multilinear regression equations. This thesis presents work which supports the use of ANNs in pharmacokinetic modeling. Successful QSPkRs were constructed using different combinations of theoretically-derived descriptors and model optimisation techniques. The results demonstrate that ANNs provide a valuable modeling tool that may be useful in drug discovery and development.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2006. / Supervisor: Lorraine York. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 277-287).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2006. / Supervisor: Lorraine York. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 277-287).