Cranial suture closure has long been recognized as a character of human development related to aging. For this reason, it has been utilized for forensic and archaeological studies to determine the age at death of unidentified and skeletonized individuals. Despite remaining a popular age indicator today, studies dating back to the 19th Century have published contradictory results on the nature of this relationship. Many authors have concluded that cranial suture closure exhibits, at most, a sketchy relationship with age and should not be used as an age indicator, whereas others have supported its inclusion despite a wide range of variability. Traditional methods for assessing cranial suture closure all defined degrees of obliteration and assigned discrete scores. However, with the development of technology, new techniques may be capable of better assessing the association of cranial suture closure in age. The current study is an attempt to address cranial suture closure with a new quantitative method that utilizes laser technology. 196 black male crania from the Hamann-Todd Collection were observed. The suture landmarks established by Meindl and Lovejoy were recorded standard scores and were also scanned with the laser device, which quantifies the amount of reflected light off of a surface. The results showed that the laser device accurately and consistently quantifies light reflected through a suture joint, especially when calibrated to the surrounding bone. A general trend for the laser measurements to decrease with age was observed. It was concluded that a relationship between suture closure and age does exist, but other factors affecting suture closure should not be overlooked. Further application of the laser method, through the refinement of data collection techniques and the device used, may increase what is known on the structure and development of the skull, and may be able to more precisely elucidate the tenuous relationship between suture closure and age. / Thesis [M.A]: Wichita State University, College of College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Anthropology / "December 2007."

This thesis traces the development of the philosophical and religious movement of New Thought and outlines the histories of the two New Thought churches in Wichita, Kansas: Unity Church and New Thought Community Church. Though based on the teachings of Christ, New Thought incorporates other sources including Hinduism, Swedenborgianism, Transcendentalism and Mesmerism. New Thought is sometimes referred to as New Gnosticism, but where the Gnostics were dualists, New Thought is monistic and can more properly be called a Christian/Hindu syncretism. The spiritual and mesmeric healer, Phineas Quimby, provided in the 1850s and 1860s a focus around which the New Thought movement coalesced. Later writers and teachers developed New Thought into a theology. They include Warren Felt Evans, Julius and Annetta Dresser, Horatio Dresser, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore (cofounders of Unity School of Christianity), Emilie Cady, Malinda Cramer (founder of Divine Science), Ernest Holmes (founder of Religious Science), Emmet Fox, and Masaharu Taniguchi (founder of Seicho-No-Ie). Proponents of New Thought call it “practical Christianity” for its emphasis on healing and improvement of life. Modern psychology, self-help methodologies, and New Age understandings of spirituality all owe a pioneering debt to New Thought. Personal interviews, material from Unity Village archives, and publically available online and book sources provided the data for this thesis. Besides chronicalling people and events, it focuses on how the organizations of churches founded by New Thought leaders tended to mirror their earlier church affiliations. The resulting churches represent functional syncretisms of traditional church structures with a superimposed New Thought theology. / Thesis (M.A)-- Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of History / "December 2007."

Metal cutting subjects the material being cut to strains greater than 100% at high strain rates between 103/s and 106/s and may be a good test for mechanical properties in this strain rate regime. This thesis presents an experimental study of the velocity field in the primary shear zone (PSZ) while cutting OFHC copper under six different cutting conditions. A new type of ultra high speed camera is used to acquire sequences of high resolution stereoscopic microphotographs of the PSZ at frame rates from 50 kHz to 1 MHz. The velocity field is obtained by 3D stereoscopic correlation of the images. The gradient of the velocity field yields the strain rate field. These fields are averaged over multiple experiments for each of the six test conditions to obtain the average fields for each test condition. It is found that the strain rate field scales up with increase in cutting speed and decrease in depth of cut. Under conditions that result in low strain rates, the PSZ resembles a triangular shear zone, narrower at the cutting edge and wider at the free surface. Under conditions that produce higher strain rates, the PSZ is parallel sided. In both cases, the strain rate is found to decrease monotonically from the cutting edge to the free surface. It is found that the decrease in strain rate causes a corresponding decrease in strain in the chip, from higher strain values in the chip near the tool to lower stains in the chip near the free surface. This occurs in spite of the fact that tools used are very sharp, with cutting edge radius < 1μm and a high rake angle of 30°, in an effort to minimize the indentation component. Slip line fields derived from the velocity fields show that the higher strains closer to the cutting edge are caused by a decrease in the shear angle of the lower boundary of the PSZ. Hencky’s equations indicate an increase in hydrostatic pressure near the cutting edge and this suggests that the increased strain and hydrostatic pressure may be attributable to the friction at the chip-tool interface. While the strain rate distribution usually shows a broad zone of distributed shear deformation, the strain rate distributions in some tests (more often under conditions that result in low strain rates) show fine structural features characteristic of persistent shear bands. / Thesis (M.S)-- Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering / "December 2007."

Treatment of hamsters on the day of birth with the synthetic estrogen and prototypical endocrine disruptor, diethylstilbestrol (DES), induces severe anomalies throughout the female reproductive tract. The disruption phenomenon seen in the ovaries must be the result of either: 1) A direct mechanism that involves primary lesions in the neonatal ovary; and/or 2) An indirect mechanism that involves primary lesions in the hypothalamus and/or pituitary that then secondarily result in altered gonadotropin-regulated function of the mature hamster ovary. To test those alternative hypotheses, we used the convenient hamster cheek pouch system to perform homo-transplantation and cross-transplantation of ovaries among postnatal/prepubertal (day 21) control (CON) and neonatally DES-treated donor and host animals. Thereafter, host animals were monitored for estrous cycle activity and finally sacrificed at two months of age when blood was collected to determine endocrine status and both ectopic ovarian masses and in situ uteri were collected and fixed for histological and immunohistochemical analysis. Evidence consistent with the indirect mechanism emerged early in the study from the monitoring of estrous cycle activity in hosts with viable ovarian transplants. Regardless of transplant treatment, all CON hosts exhibited regular, 4-day estrous cycles while all neonatally DES-treated hosts were non-cyclic. RIA analysis of sex steroids and gonadotropins in the serum of all treatment groups indicated maintenance of pituitary-ovarian axis function in terms of hormonal synthesis and secretion. Histological analysis revealed that the viable, ectopic ovarian masses, either as homotransplants or as cross-transplants, did not replicate either the normal morphology seen in intact, CON animals or the characteristic disrupted morphology seen in intact, DES-exposed animals. However, consistent with the equivalent serum estradiol levels measured in all four transplant groups, ovarian masses from all treatment groups were steroidogenically active as evidenced by immunohistochemical detection of aromatase. Despite the equivalent serum estradiol levels in all four transplant groups, severe endometrial dysplasia including evidence of inflammation was confined to the two neonatally DES-exposed host groups. We interpret the full spectrum of data reported here as being consistent with the alternative hypothesis that neonatal DES treatment disrupts morphogenesis and function of the adult hamster ovary via an indirect mechanism. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Biological Sciences / "July 2007."

BACKGROUND: Left Ventricular Assist Device’s (LVAD) have become a viable treatment alternative to heart transplantation. While under LVAD support, some have shown significant recovery of native heart function allowing for the removal of the device. METHODOLOGY: The patient in this study was diagnosed with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy and demonstrated worsening heart failure over a five year period with a maximum left ventricular end diastolic diameter of 8.99 cm and an ejection fraction between 20-25%. Upon implantation of a LVAD, the patient’s central hemodynamic function returned to near normal and the device was removed. Four months post explanation a cycle ergometry graded exercise peak VO2 test was performed. Exercise began at 0 Watts and increased 25 Watts per 3 minute stage. 12 lead EKG was used to determine heart function. RESULTS: The patient showed improvement in peak aerobic capacity when compared to pre LVAD cardiopulmonary stress tests. VO2 increased from pre LVAD measures of 11.8ml•kg-1•min-1 to 17.0 ml•kg-1•min-1. Time to maximal exertion increased from 5 minutes 27seconds to 15 minutes. CONCLUSION: The results from this case study indicate that significant improvements in native heart function is possible with a period of mechanical unloading through LVAD support. / Thesis (M.Ed)-- Wichita State University, College of Education, Dept. of Kinesiology and Sport Studies / "August 2007."

Recent advances in wireless data and real time communication have stimulated the need to allow mobile users to send multicast data by using secure and seamless connectivity to the global Internet and with one another without any compromise. IP multicast provides solutions to a broad range of services. For example e-learning courses, MPEG video, Videoconferencing, and White-boards etc. In all of these applications, IP multicasting conserves a huge amount of bandwidth by simultaneously sending the information to multiple recipients. The Mobile IP is the standard which supports mobility and provides two schemes for mobile users to receive multicast packets, either by using a tunnel from the home agent (home subscription) or by joining multicast groups in the foreign network (remote subscription). Both schemes are a compromise in terms of security and routing in order to support multicast in Mobile IP. The problem with the first scheme is that it uses non-optimal routing and latency increases as the mobile user starts moving away from the home network, the second scheme requires a multicast router in the foreign network and may suffer from frequent modifications in the multicast distribution tree each time the mobile user moves to a different foreign network. Also, the solutions provided for multicasting in mobile networks are not secure, and bogus users can easily intercept multicast packets by becoming a part of the multicast distribution tree. This thesis describes and discusses the research related to improving secure multicasting mechanism in Mobile IP with special reference to real time applications. It introduces Trusted Multicast Agents (TMA) to facilitate secure multicasting in Mobile IP. A trusted multicast agent is a secure and trusted multicast router that serves disjointed multiple foreign networks by sitting in the middle of the sender and receiver. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering / "July 2007."

To overcome several clinical challenges involving mechanical heart valves, accurate numerical simulation of blood flow through these devices has been of interest. Since heart disease is the leading cause of death around the world, the hemodynamic study of the heart is of extraordinary interest in the field of bio fluid dynamics. Recent numerical/experimental investigations have shown that mechanical heart valves inherit the “production of sufficiently large shear and turbulent stresses to cause clinical problems such as hemolysis.” Due to several parameters including the non-Newtonian behavior of blood, pulsatile waveform, strong blood and tissue interactions, clinical difficulties, etc., experimental examination of blood flow in the heart and its valves is a very difficult task. Therefore, comprehensive numerical analysis of this complex fluid-structure system is essential. However, precise experimental investigations are still imperative for developing appropriate and accurate turbulence models and for validating numerical techniques.In the current computational effort, the first set of objectives was numerical investigations of vortex shedding behind a two-dimensional tilting-disk mechanical heart valve in a straight channel, which is a simplified representation of the mitral position, using first- and several higher-order finite volume schemes as well as examination of the non-Newtonian viscosity effects on shedding frequency and amplitude. For the low Reynolds number (low inflow), both first- and higher-order schemes resulted in identical shedding frequencies; however, higher-order schemes improved the shedding amplitude. For pulsatile inflow, the first-order scheme was found to be in better qualitative and quantitative agreement with previous investigations. Careful scrutiny of the findings revealed that higher-order schemes implemented in the code produced too much dispersion error for applications in the present study. In addition, non-Newtonian viscosity did not affect the overall flow structure, although it caused significant shear-thinning for both types of inflow. Furthermore, numerical simulations of laminar Newtonian and non-Newtonian blood flow across 2D and 3D models of a Björk-Shiley tilting-disk mechanical heart valve in the aortic position with sinuses of valsalva (valve replacements are more common in the aortic position) under steady and physiological pulsatile inflows were performed to investigate the three dimensional effects as well as the influences of pulsatile waveform and non-Newtonian nature of blood on the overall flow structure. The results of grid and time-step independency tests as well as validation with previous investigations were satisfactory. Obvious differences of various flow parameters between 2D and 3D analyses clarified noticeable breakup of symmetry by the third dimension. Similar to the 2D case in a straight channel, it was observed that the non-Newtonian viscosity did not affect significantly the maximal velocity components and maximal vorticity magnitude, although it caused substantial shear-thinning and altered the overall flow structure, particularly during the regurgitation phase. It was found that three-dimensional effects were much smaller for the non-Newtonian viscosity model than the Newtonian model at all time levels. Indeed, the non-Newtonian behavior resulted in a “less complex vortical flow” and consequently “less probability of blood cell damage” compared to the Newtonian fluid. Since the longer the blood cells are trapped in the vortices, the more chance of hemodynamic damage, it is essential to consider the non-Newtonian behavior of blood in the analysis. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Aerospace Engineering / "July 2007."

In the current storage era, Fibre Channel (FC) protocol is used for high performance and reliability, providing different levels of service with 1Gbps to 4Gbps physical interfaces. FC transports Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) data, between storage devices. FC spans from 500 meters to 10 Kilometers [27, 28] using multimode, single mode fibers respectively, limiting the storage to a site or between two sites. In order to overcome this distance limitation and implementation costs, Fibre Channel over Internet Protocol (FCIP) and Internet Fiber Channel Protocol (iFCP) were introduced [30, 31]. FCIP tunnels the fibre channel frames over Internet between two fiber switches, with in the same network. iFCP is an IP Based gateway to gateway protocol, which interconnects different FC-SANs. Again, all these protocols are involved with fiber channels which increase the cost. iSCSI is a new IETF standardized protocol[26], which transports SCSI data over Internet. Advancements in Ethernet technologies from 1Gbps to 10 Gbps make iSCSI deployment to yield better results in terms of performance and can be very cost effective compared to FCIP and iFCP. Some of the widely used storage applications in the industry are archiving and mirroring, these applications are used for backup/recovery process in IT industry. Archiving is a process in which data is written to portable media such as optical disks or magnetic tapes. Mirroring is a process of data replicated on the remote disk. Mirroring can be done in two ways, synchronous and asynchronous. In synchronous mirroring, when ever there is an update with data, it is written to both local and remote disk at the same time. In asynchronous mirroring, data is updated periodically irrespective of the actual update. If iSCSI is used for remote mirroring, end users need to ensure the performance of iSCSI should meet the requirements of the application. Most of the studies proved deficient in considering some or the other aspects. In this research work, the author presents the modeling and analysis of iSCSI between two SAN Islands considering iSCSI level errors, which will enable the IT industry to use this model for their analyze before they actually deploy. Throughout the analysis, the author employs asynchronous mirroring between the SAN Islands. iSCSI level errors need to be considered when the SCSI data is on the Internet, which will seriously effect the performance of the application in real time. The prototype was analyzed using TCP/IP and UDP traffic with both dedicated links and Internet links. When iSCSI is used to interconnect different SAN islands, one should ensure its performance to meet the application requirements. The bandwidth management for time critical applications like synchronous and asynchronous mirroring is essential while analyzing performance on IP networks, for this the key operations of iSCSI like iSCSI read, iSCSI write were modeled. Also, the throughput under realistic traffic conditions varying different parameters like network types, round trip time, bandwidth and distance was modeled. Security is another important attribute which should be taken in to account while IP networks are involved. It is essential to consider security of data while block level data is being transferred between two storage islands using iSCSI. The errors processed by this protocol on the IP network were considered and suitable iSCSI error recovery procedures were analyzed. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering / "July 2007."

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an object identification technology that is being adopted rapidly by industry and government organizations, such as the United States Department of Defense, consumer products manufacturer Proctor & Gamble, and retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Target. It is expected that RFID will be used to tag consumer items such as food and clothing in the future. While this technology brings many benefits to retailers as well as consumers, it has also caused a lot of concerns about potential threats to consumers' privacy. Although several proposals have been offered in the way of mitigating security and privacy threats created by RFID, none have taken a holistic view of RFID security and management in the consumer home environment. This thesis presents a secure architecture for the use and management of RFID in a home environment. The architecture is platform independent, scalable, extensible, and easy to use for non-technical consumers. The architecture provides increased privacy with a novel mechanism for RFID authentication. A proof-of-concept system based on this architecture is simulated in software to prove that the proposed architecture mitigates many threats related to RFID use by consumers in a home environment while also providing capabilities for the convenient management of RFID tagged objects at home. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering / "July 2007."

The purpose of this study was to quantify muscle activation and body sway on a series of unstable surfaces. Surface electrodes were used to obtain muscle activation data from the tibialis anterior, gastrocnemius, gluteus medius, and gluteus maximus while body sway data (mean amplitude of A-P Sway, mean amplitude of M-L Sway, and Sway Index) was obtained using a force platform. Theraband stability trainers were used to provide a series of unstable surfaces. A total of fifteen participants (five females, ten males) volunteered in this study. It was determined that muscle activation increased as surfaces increased in instability. For example, peak tibialis anterior muscle activation when standing on the platform (one leg) was 34.5 %MVC while that for standing on the black surface was 64.9 %MVC. It was also determined that as body sway increased, muscle activation of the lower body increased as well. Several standing conditions (i.e. standing on one leg versus two legs, leaning in a particular direction) were also studied and it was determined that certain conditions significantly affect muscle activation as well as postural sway. This study provides objective muscle activity and postural sway data previously void in the literature which can be applied to a rehabilitation, health, or ergonomic setting. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering / "July 2007."