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Thesis (M.F.A.)--West Virginia University, 2009. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 57 p. : col. ill. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 37).

When people give to a good cause they usually give and forget about it, however that is not always the case. For one family from Texas giving was much more. They chose to sacrifice all that they knew to help those in need. They left behind all they knew and moved to Xai-Xai Mozambique Africa. In one short year they have set up a church, two care points that feed over 500 kids each day, a community center and a pre-school. Teaching the people of Xai-Xai to be resourceful, help each other, and helping them rebuild after years of civil war and a flood that nearly wiped out the entire city. Becoming a part of community and sharing the love of God with those who may have never even heard the name of Jesus. Putting into practice, exactly what is says in the Bible, to be the hands and feet of Jesus and not just setting up camp within the church building. This is a story of the Stauber family. / text

ITC/USA 2014 Conference Proceedings / The Fiftieth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 20-23, 2014 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, CA / In this paper, we present our research on photo- and video-based 3D ranging and modeling. We have constructed such a 3D ranging and modeling system, PhotoModel3D, that was made available for free, non-commercial use over the Web. The system has received over a hundred thousands Web visits and thousands of use in the past two years alone. Currently, we demo 900 3D models thus constructed using photos and videos contributed from anonymous users all over the world. Here, we describe the algorithms used in the 3D pipeline and present the results of a comparison study and an accuracy analysis of its performance.

Spinal cord injuries (SCI) are characterized by the inability of mature neurons to regenerate or repair by themselves. In an attempt to overcome the SCI, a novel photo-sensitive cyclic Arg-Gly-Asp-Ser (RGDS) peptide was synthesized using solid phase peptide synthesis (SPSS) to control 3T3 fibroblast cell attachment on hyaluronic acid (HA) hydrogel. The circular RGDS peptide was designed using RGDS sequence labeled with Anp group (3-Na-fmoc-amino-3-(2-nitrophenyl) propionic acid) at the N terminus. The peptide was photo-labile cyclic caged to shelter its bioactivity and UV light was used to make the peptide uncaged. Accuracy of the cyclic caged RGDS peptide was confirmed by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and mass spectrum (MS). The molecular weight of cyclic caged RGDS peptide was confirmed as 881 by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) and electrospray ionization (ESI) mass spectrum. Stability of the cyclic caged RGDS peptide under various pH conditions was verified by circular dichroism spectroscopy. The bioactivity of cyclic caged and uncaged RGDS peptide was tested by photo-controllable directing cell growth based on cell attachment study, cell counting study, and cell morphology study. Three dimensional model structures of cyclic caged and uncaged RGDS peptides were computed by Hyperchem program. The first order reaction theory of Anp uncaging reaction was confirmed by kinetic study. Bioactivity caging and uncaging property of the peptide was also fully confirmed by cell attachment study. This cyclic caged RGDS peptide would be a promising tool in cell patterning for repairing of SCI.

Anatase titanium dioxide was synthesized using a hydrothermal treatment of bis(ammonium lactato) titanium dihydroxide (ALT) under a variety conditions. Heating the precursor produces highly crystalline particles that do not undergo a crystal phase transition upon calcination; however, it does remove a layer of surface adsorbed lactate. Three titanium-polyelectrolyte composites (PAA, PAH, and PEI) were formed through electrostatic polymer chain collapse. In order to gain a measure of the relative photo-activity of these various samples the interaction and de-colouration of methylene blue (MB) was investigated. The composite particles were not active whereas the non-composite titanium dioxide and solution phase PAA were individually active. MB was found to form dimers with anionic PAA through electrostatic interaction; however, there was no difference in the de-colouration rate of these dimers versus the monomers. Finally, it was found that pre-irradiating the polyelectrolyte prior to combining with MB decreases the de-colouration rate.

Anatase titanium dioxide was synthesized using a hydrothermal treatment of bis(ammonium lactato) titanium dihydroxide (ALT) under a variety conditions. Heating the precursor produces highly crystalline particles that do not undergo a crystal phase transition upon calcination; however, it does remove a layer of surface adsorbed lactate. Three titanium-polyelectrolyte composites (PAA, PAH, and PEI) were formed through electrostatic polymer chain collapse. In order to gain a measure of the relative photo-activity of these various samples the interaction and de-colouration of methylene blue (MB) was investigated. The composite particles were not active whereas the non-composite titanium dioxide and solution phase PAA were individually active. MB was found to form dimers with anionic PAA through electrostatic interaction; however, there was no difference in the de-colouration rate of these dimers versus the monomers. Finally, it was found that pre-irradiating the polyelectrolyte prior to combining with MB decreases the de-colouration rate.

Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) have been used to treat drinking water and wastewater but their application to greywater is limited to photocatalysis. Therefore, three homogeneous AOPs were investigated in this project: Fenton, photo-Fenton, and UVC/H2O2 processes. Alum and ferrous sulphate coagulation were also compared and their supernatants were treated by UVC/H2O2. The process comparisons were based on the removal of chemical oxygen demand (COD), treatment type (physical separation versus chemical oxidation), sludge formation, complexity in operation, required pH, visual aesthetic of effluent and energy requirement. Treating greywaters collected from the researcher's home or laboratory, alum coagulation achieved 73% COD removal and was more effective than ferrous sulphate coagulation (49%) and the Fenton process (45%). The photo-Fenton process removed 83% COD, compared with 87% by overnight settlement and subsequent UVC/H2O2 treatment. Using ferrous sulphate and alum, sequential coagulation and UVC/H2O2 treatment removed 91% and 98% COD, respectively. Overnight settlement generated little sludge and the subsequent UVC/H2O2 treatment removed most organic contaminants by oxidation. All other processes produced a large quantity of chemical sludge from coagulation which requires appropriate disposal. Also, the residual iron in some treated water was not aesthetically desirable. The Fenton and photo-Fenton processes were complex and involved the optimisation of multiple parameters. Their requirement for different procedures according to the greywater type presents a major challenge to process design and operation. Due to the non-selectivity of the hydroxyl radicals (●OH), the UVC/H2O2 process was capable of treating all greywaters collected by the researcher, and its operation was moderate in complexity. The COD removal was modelled as a pseudo first-order reaction in terms of H2O2 dosage: The rate constant (k´) increased linearly up to 10 mM H2O2, above which the excess H2O2 scavenged the ●OH and reduced the rate. The overall kinetics of COD removal followed a second-order equation of r = 0.0637 [COD][H2O2]. In contrast to the literature, operation of UVC/H2O2 in acidic conditions was not required and the enhanced COD removal at the initial pH of 10 was attributed to the dissociation of H2O2 to O2H-. Maintaining the pH at 10 or higher resulted in poorer COD removal due to the increased decomposition rate of H2O2 to O2 and H2O. The performance of the UVC/H2O2 treatment was unaffected for initial pH 3 - 10 with the initial total carbonate concentration (cT) of 3 mM. For initial cT ≥ 10 mM, operating between pH 3 and 5 was essential. After 3 hours of the UVC/H2O2 treatment, the effluent met the requirement of Class B reclaimed water specified by the Environment Protection Authority of Victoria, and less than 1 org/100 mL of Escherichia coli survived. A subsequent treatment such as filtration may be required to meet more requirements for biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5), turbidity and total suspended solids. Since the biodegradability (as BOD5:COD) of the greywater was increased from 0.22 to 0.41 with 2 hours of UVC/H2O2 treatment, its integration with a subsequent biological treatment may be viable to reduce the costs and energy consumption associated with the UVC/H2O2 process.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / Digital photography has not only changed the nature of photography and the photographic process, but also the manner in which we share photographs and tell stories about them. Some traditional methods, such as the family photo album or passing around piles of recently developed snapshots, are lost to us without requiring the digital photos to be printed. The current, purely digital, methods of sharing do not provide the same experience as printed photographs, and they do not provide effective face-to-face social interaction around photographs, as experienced during storytelling. Research has found that people are often dissatisfied with sharing photographs in digital form. The recent emergence of the tabletop interface as a viable multi-user direct-touch interactive large horizontal display has provided the hardware that has the potential to improve our collocated activities such as digital photograph sharing. However, while some software to communicate with various tabletop hardware technologies exists, software aspects of tabletop user interfaces are still at an early stage and require careful consideration in order to provide an effective, multi-user immersive interface that arbitrates the social interaction between users, without the necessary computer-human interaction interfering with the social dialogue. This thesis presents PhoTable, a social interface allowing people to effectively share, and tell stories about, recently taken, unsorted digital photographs around an interactive tabletop. In addition, the computer-arbitrated digital interaction allows PhoTable to capture the stories told, and associate them as audio metadata to the appropriate photographs. By leveraging the tabletop interface and providing a highly usable and natural interaction we can enable users to become immersed in their social interaction, telling stories about their photographs, and allow the computer interaction to occur as a side-effect of the social interaction. Correlating the computer interaction with the corresponding audio allows PhoTable to annotate an automatically created digital photo album with audible stories, which may then be archived. These stories remain useful for future sharing -- both collocated sharing and remote (e.g. via the Internet) -- and also provide a personal memento both of the event depicted in the photograph (e.g. as a reminder) and of the enjoyable photo sharing experience at the tabletop. To provide the necessary software to realise an interface such as PhoTable, this thesis explored the development of Cruiser: an efficient, extensible and reusable software framework for developing tabletop applications. Cruiser contributes a set of programming libraries and the necessary application framework to facilitate the rapid and highly flexible development of new tabletop applications. It uses a plugin architecture that encourages code reuse, stability and easy experimentation, and leverages the dedicated computer graphics hardware and multi-core processors of modern consumer-level systems to provide a responsive and immersive interactive tabletop user interface that is agnostic to the tabletop hardware and operating platform, using efficient, native cross-platform code. Cruiser's flexibility has allowed a variety of novel interactive tabletop applications to be explored by other researchers using the framework, in addition to PhoTable. To evaluate Cruiser and PhoTable, this thesis follows recommended practices for systems evaluation. The design rationale is framed within the above scenario and vision which we explore further, and the resulting design is critically analysed based on user studies, heuristic evaluation and a reflection on how it evolved over time. The effectiveness of Cruiser was evaluated in terms of its ability to realise PhoTable, use of it by others to explore many new tabletop applications, and an analysis of performance and resource usage. Usability, learnability and effectiveness of PhoTable was assessed on three levels: careful usability evaluations of elements of the interface; informal observations of usability when Cruiser was available to the public in several exhibitions and demonstrations; and a final evaluation of PhoTable in use for storytelling, where this had the side effect of creating a digital photo album, consisting of the photographs users interacted with on the table and associated audio annotations which PhoTable automatically extracted from the interaction. We conclude that our approach to design has resulted in an effective framework for creating new tabletop interfaces. The parallel goal of exploring the potential for tabletop interaction as a new way to share digital photographs was realised in PhoTable. It is able to support the envisaged goal of an effective interface for telling stories about one's photos. As a serendipitous side-effect, PhoTable was effective in the automatic capture of the stories about individual photographs for future reminiscence and sharing. This work provides foundations for future work in creating new ways to interact at a tabletop and to the ways to capture personal stories around digital photographs for sharing and long-term preservation.

Thèse (M.Sc.)--Université Laval, 2009. / Bibliogr.: f. 82-90. Publié aussi en version électronique dans la Collection Mémoires et thèses électroniques.