This project highlights the importance of the Indian film industry as a legitimate field of scholarly and academic research. Through interdisciplinary eyes, the Indian film industry and its byproducts are examined through a multitude of different approaches including gender, film, and cross-cultural studies. The films mentioned in this research are the highest grossing, have the most famous actors and actresses, and are from the 1990s to present. Films were watched with a critical eye to see what exactly was shown and examined. Other scholars’ and critics’ work was read, films discussed, and critical assumptions were made based on all of the information gathered and perspectives observed. The reason research was conducted on this subject and in this fashion is because there was none of its kind that dealt specifically with Indian cinema in a critical light. Any research referenced is older and discusses older films. If society were really able to understand culture today in a world of generalized hybridity, scholars must study objects such as Bollywood. With the industry’s mobility, it creates new kinds of audiences who do not speak the same language, share the same local knowledge about cinema, but instead find themselves as active participants in reading, enjoying, and interpreting film. By doing this, new viewers are exposed to Bollywood as well as new meanings and ways of looking are created. Hopefully with the advent of this thesis, it will inspire others to view Bollywood film as a legitimate field of scholarly and academic research. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Program of Liberal Studies / Removed from view at the request of the author

A set of wireless nodes or routers coming together to form a network in which every node acts as a router can be defined as a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). Mobility causes a number of issues in ad hoc networks. To overcome this, routing protocols using various mobility metrics have been suggested. One such protocol is proposed in this thesis, whereby the most commonly used ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol is modified so that it uses the mobility metric “route lifetime” as a routing metric In addition, the route cache timeout or the route expiry timeout is set to the value of the route lifetime. To achieve this, the value of the route lifetime is calculated and then implemented appropriately in AODV. Simulations in the Global Mobile Information System Simulator (GloMoSim), a network protocol simulation software that simulates wireless and wired network systems, demonstrate an increase in packet delivery ratio and a decrease in mean end-to-end latency, in comparison to the AODV protocol. This is achieved with a slight increase in control overhead. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Low back disorders remains the top musculoskeletal disorder across several industries, where lifting is commonly associated as a major risk factor in the workplace. Researchers have developed numerous assessment methods to identify high-risk jobs, where the ACGIH Lifting Threshold Limit Values (TLV) assessment method one of the most recent methods, providing guidelines to protect virtually any individual with a certain duration, frequency, and horizontal and vertical distance, protecting the individual from work-related shoulder and/or low back disorders associated with lifting. Several research voids were found for the ACGIH Lifting TLV method regarding gender, anthropometry, acquire versus placing an object, horizontal distance, and when the origin and final destination differs. A controlled experiment utilizing the probability of the Low Back Disorder (LBD) Risk using the Industrial Lumbar Motion Monitor (iLMM) was conducted to assess these voids. The experimental task consisted of lifting a box with handles from randomly selected locations of two vertical and four horizontal distances, to a fixed destination adjusted to each individual‟s waist height. Eighteen anthropometry-gender mixed subjects acquired and placed the box four times from each zone, with a complete interval of fifteen seconds each time. Results showed that essentially there is no significant difference among either gender or anthropometry raging within low- to medium- LBD Risk probabilities. In conclusion, the ACGIH lifting TLVs table for frequent lifting tasks appears to be appropriate to be applied regardless gender or anthropometry in the workplace environment with similar lifting conditions as described in the method. Also may be used to assess both origin and destination of the lifting task. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering.

Older adults are the fastest growing age group of the population in the US, yet they are the least physically active group compared to the others. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Heart Association, all recommend that older adults should spend at least 30 minutes, five days per week doing moderate-intensity physical activity or 20 minutes of vigorous-intensity activity on at least three days per week to maintain good functional fitness. With respect to the amount (steps) of daily physical activity, there are few recommendations. A general consensus suggests that to remain healthy and maintain functional fitness, older adults should attain between 6,000 and 8,500 steps per day. One hundred and seven women aged 60 – 80 years old (73.23 ± 7.73 yrs) were asked to wear an accelerometer during all waking hours for two weeks. Daily physical activity was monitored for 2 weeks, variables analyzed were steps and intensity of physical movement ranging from low to high intensity. Evaluating the descriptive statistics of this study and comparing them to the suggested adult of physical activity levels (Sedentary = 2000-4999, Low Active = 5000-7499, Somewhat Active= 7500-9,999, Active = 10,000 - 12,999, and Highly Active = 13,000 or more), no age group was Active. Even when evaluating the mean of participant’s one high day, the two most active age-groups (60s and 70s) were only considered Somewhat Active at approximately 8,200 daily steps. This 8,200 daily step rate does meet the older adult recommendations suggested by more recent research. With respect to the recommendation about the intensity level of physical, no group met this goal. The highest 5-day average was achieved by the 70-year old group at just over 16 minutes, followed by the 60-year olds at just over 14 minutes. The 80 year old group engaged in the least amount of moderate intensity activity with their highest average at just over 13 minutes once per week. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Program of Gerontology.

In the present situation of armed and political conflict in Nepal, protection of children is at stake. There is a pressing need in such an environment to address all aspects of children‟s rights in order to be able to reach out to children in crisis. One group of children in crisis are those living on the street. I have often seen street children picking rags, sniffing glue, begging & selling newspapers and the like. These children, living on the streets day and night, have been directly affected by poverty and social exclusion. Even though there are a few child welfare organizations in Nepal trying to address the problems of street children, a large group of these children remain a part of the urban landscape. It seems like the common public response to street children is either sympathy or hostility. They are perceived as victims or criminals. It was within this context that my interest in exploring the lives of street children in Nepal emerged. My goal was to uncover some of the perceptions about the lives of street children from the organizations working with them. Through semi-structured interviews with child welfare workers and observations of some of these children themselves, this study explored a) how agencies indentify street children b) what are the main reasons children become street children c) the risks street children face and d) how individuals and organizations can help guide a positive transition to the life of street children. The following questions will work as a tool to disclose other important answers. For instance, the answers to reasons children come to the street is helpful in developing preventive measures. Similarly, answers to the risk factors that street children face will be effective in designing protective measures for those children who are already on the street. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Program of Liberal Studies.

This thesis seeks to analyze Holy Spirit possession in Pentecostal communities through case studies in Jamaica, Ghana and Papua New Guinea. This study will contribute to the comparative concerns of the growing subfield of the anthropology of Christianity as well as address the lack of in-depth studies of Pentecostal rituals in the anthropological study of Pentecostalism. It is argued that the traditional anthropological study of spirit possession, while showing the similarity of possession phenomena among institutional and traditional religions, is somewhat limited by privileging either explanatory or interpretive approaches and by its traditional focus on non-Christian, small-scale spirit cults. In order to organize Holy Spirit possession for cross-cultural comparison, this thesis will review and suggest the usefulness of Emma Cohen’s typology of executive and pathogenic forms of possession. Finally, building on a theoretical orientation of skilled learning as well as Catherine Bell’s notion of ritualization, it will be argued that through the practice of Holy Spirit possession the Pentecostal’s life-world is continuously being reworked and defined. In the study of Pentecostalism and Pentecostals, anthropologists need to take this practice seriously, not only in specific instances of possession, but also what this might mean for Pentecostal conceptions of personhood that informs belief and behavior. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Anthropology.

This research basically deals with Orthogonal Machining of Unidirectional Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) Composites as secondary operations like machining is a very important process in composites manufacturing. Even though composites are manufactured to near net shape, machining operations becomes obvious to attain dimensional accuracy and surface finish for further assembly operations. The machining of FRP’s is different and more complicated to that of metals because of their anisotropic and inhomogeneous nature, along with the chip formation mode for its brittle behavior. Fibers are very abrasive in nature and cause extreme tool wear making it difficult for cutting and when combined with matrix which is comparatively weak produce fluctuating force on the tool to augment for the tool wear. It will be very helpful to study their behavior for optimizing the machining condition and to minimize the above mentioned drawbacks. This work will be basically dealing on the experimental study and numerical prediction of machining quality during orthogonal machining on various fiber orientation and cutting conditions. Orthogonal machining was performed using 3-axis miniMILL for experimental work and commercially available simulation software ABAQUS 6.9-2 for numerical study. The numerical findings are presented to supplement experimental work for predicting delamination which is very important for its service life along with some interesting observation which is discussed in this report. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

IEEE 802.11e is a fairly recent amendment to the IEEE 802.11 WLAN standard that supports quality of service (QoS) (or service differentiation) based on medium-access control (MAC) and contention-based channel access. While prior research has been done regarding the performance of this enhancement, the focus here is on two novel aspects: performance of this standard in a large testbed, and energy consumption of an individual node that relies on this service differentiation. Results demonstrate that to get the best benefits of service prioritization, there should be an even distribution of nodes in each service class to prevent intra-class contention. Furthermore, results also demonstrate the high correlation between energy consumption of a node with its traffic priority class. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Manufacturers are increasingly looking at ways to reduce operating costs through energy savings. While research has been done to identify energy usage throughout a facility--such as lighting, computers, heating and cooling--very little research has been done on reducing the energy consumption of manufacturing equipment. Sample literature review shows the bulk of research on equipment is for tip energy, the energy when a tool makes contact with a work piece. This excludes the energy of all the machine’s background processes: motors, pumps, fans, etc. Several models have been created to predict the energy usage of a machine including both the tip energy and the energy of the background processes; however, these models are experimental laboratory studies. The purpose of this thesis is to collect and analyze real-time data of manufacturing equipment in a production setting. Real-time data is important to understand energy consumption at the machine level and the product level. This thesis reports on a method to collect and analyze real-time manufacturing equipment energy data for a simple part. It also reports on the use of that data to validate the uplci method to estimate the energy consumed for a part using three uplci’s: turret punch uplci, brake forming uplci and drilling uplci. A data logger recorder was connected to each machine to record the energy usage as it produced parts. This data was then broken down into energy modes and analyzed. The results for each machine showed how the machine utilized energy as it produced parts. The real-time data did not validate the uplci calculations; however, the method to collect the real-time data was proven and shown to be easily repeatable by manufacturers. This research provides a solid method for manufacturers to use to identify areas to reduce their energy costs through improved production scheduling and CNC programming. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a wireless technology that has replaced barcodes. This technology is used in today’s world to track assets and people. An RFID system consists of three components: the tag, the reader, and the middleware. The RFID tag stores data, the reader is used to identify the data stored in the tag or write data to the tag, and the RFID middleware is the application that connects the data that the reader obtains from the tag with the company inventory or database. Unlike barcode readers, an RFID reader is capable of reading multiple tags located in its range. When this occurs, the probability of tag collision at the reader’s end is high. To avoid tag collision, anti-collision protocols are used. Slotted Aloha is one of the main anti-collision protocols used with RFID. This thesis proposed a mathematical model and a simulator to analyze the performance of the Slotted Aloha protocol without interference. Tag detection is directly related to tag signal strength detected by the reader. Radio Frequency signals behave differently when different objects are present in the environment. For example water absorbs radio signals. When water is present in the environment, tag detection will not be successful, since radio signals will be absorbed by the water. Therefore, water is considered an interference factor in tag detection. This thesis also proposed a mathematical model and a simulator to analyze the performance of the Slotted Aloha protocol with interference. A comparison of both sets of results shows that the proposed mathematical model and the simulator are accurate. Results of the analysis show that the time required to identify tags with interference is longer than the time required to identify tags without interference. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.