The problem of this study was to determine if there were differences in perceived attitudes of self-concept between young people who returned to alternative education after dropping out of public education and educationally disadvantaged at-risk youth in Coordinated Vocational Academic Education (CVAE) classes as measured by the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale. The hypotheses formulated for the study predicted no significant difference in mean attitude self-concept scores of returned dropouts to alternative schools and CVAE students enrolled in junior high school preemployment laboratories and high school students enrolled in Cooperative Education classes as measured by the Piers-Harris scale; and no significant change in mean attitude self-concept scores of former dropouts enrolled in alternative education centers and CVAE students as measured by the Piers-Harris scale over a two-month period utilizing an extended Solomon Four-Group Design, with and without the treatment. The scale was administered to 351 students from junior high and high school CVAE classes in Ector County (Odessa), Fort Stockton, and Midland Independent School Districts and alternative schools in Denton, Fort Stockton, Midland and Odessa, Texas. The self-concept scores were treated for significance by an analysis of variance. Findings were that all groups tested scored within the age range, junior high school CVAE students scored lowest, but not significantly lower (p > .05); and junior high school CVAE students, alternative school students, and high school CVAE students all had a slight increase in self-confidence scores over the two-month period. All null hypotheses were retained. It was concluded that, overall, junior high school CVAE students, former dropouts who returned to an alternative school, and high school CVAE students possessed positive self-concepts that were above the national mean for the scale; and that CVAE classes enhance the self-concept of academically disadvantaged students in Cooperative Education classes.

No description available.

Shelby tube sediment samples collected from the foundations of ten (10) bridges located in the state of Georgia were tested in the laboratory to find their erosional behavior and the correlation of erosion parameters with sediment properties in order to improve the prediction of scour around bridge foundations. These sites were spatially distributed in order to fall into different major river basins and in different physiographic regions. A description of the Valley and Ridge, Blue Ridge, Piedmont, and Coastal Plain physiographic regions of Georgia is included, and the erosion parameters found from flume measurements are associated with their respective regions. Flume measurements were performed using a rectangular, tilting, recirculating flume located in the hydraulics lab in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. Velocities up to 1.7 m/s and bed shear stresses up to 21 Pa can be achieved in the flume. Regression analysis was performed on erosion rates as a function of applied shear stress to determine the parameters of the erosion function. The resulting parameters, the critical shear stress and the erosion rate constant, were correlated with soil properties and physiographic regions. Experimental methodology was chosen to approach this problem because the involvement of interparticle forces for fine-grained materials makes it difficult to deal with the erosion phenomenon through other means. Nevertheless, analytical description of the erosion phenomenon was included in order to provide a better understanding of it. Linear, exponential and power regression mathematical models for erosion rate were compared, and the two best-fit regression models of erosion rate as a function of shear stress are proposed to formulate a methodology intended to characterize the behavior of a soil exposed to erosive flow conditions. One of them is a linear model to calculate critical shear stresses and low erosion rates. The second model, which is exponential, has the advantage of describing the erosion rate response for a wider range of shear stress values. It is shown that one of the most relevant predictors for the critical shear stress and erosion rate constant in the regression models is the fine material content present in the sample, which is an indirect indicator of the contribution of interparticle forces to the erosion process. Applying the described methodology, a more case-specific calculation of the erosion at bridge foundations can be performed taking into account the actual material in situ.

Drilled shaft retaining walls are common earth retaining structures, well suited to urban environments where noise, space, and damage to adjacent structures are major considerations. The design of drilled shaft retaining walls in non-expansive soils is well established. In expansive soils, however, there is no consensus on the correct way to account for the influence of soil expansion on wall behavior. Based on the range of design assumptions currently in practice, existing walls could be substantially over- or under-designed. The goal of this research is to advance the understanding of the effects of expansive clay on drilled shaft retaining walls. The main objectives of this study are to identify the processes responsible for wall loading and deformation in expansive clay, to evaluate how these processes change with time, and to provide guidance for design practice to account for these processes and ensure adequate wall performance. The primary source of information for this research is performance data from a four-year monitoring program at the Lymon C. Reese research wall, a full-scale instrumented drilled shaft retaining wall constructed through expansive clay in Manor, Texas. The test wall was instrumented with inclinometers and fiber optic strain gauges, and performance data was recorded during construction, excavation, during natural moisture fluctuations, and during controlled inundation tests that provided the retained soil with unlimited access to water. In addition to the test wall study, a field assessment of existing TxDOT drilled shaft retaining walls was conducted. The main process influencing short-term wall deformation was found to be global response to stress relief during excavation, which causes the wall and soil to move together without the development of large earth pressures or bending stresses. Long-term wall deformations were governed by the development of drained conditions in both the retained soil and the foundation soil after approximately eight months of controlled inundation testing. To ensure adequate wall performance, the deformations and structural loads associated with short- and long-term conditions should be combined and checked against allowable values. / text

The last half of the twentieth century has seen a rapid increase in the process of secularization in both Britain and America, and this trend is nowhere more clearly evident than in the widespread relaxation of sexual mores. Within the Catholic Church a tension has arisen between liberal Catholics who argue for the right of Catholics to act according to the dictates of individual conscience, and traditionalists who champion the absolute moral authority of the Church. Liberal Catholics emphasize the Thomist view in which the flesh and its desires are seen as part of God's creation and, therefore, intrinsically good, while conservative Catholics lean toward an Augustinian/Jansenist view which equates sexual desire with the fallen nature of humankind. There has also been a great deal of unrest among Catholic women regarding continuing misogynistic tendencies within the male-dominated Church. This study focuses upon portrayals of women and sexuality in selected novels by four representative contemporary Catholic novelists, David Lodge, Mary Gordon, Piers Paul Read, and Anne Redmon. In their fiction, these writers pursue moral questions related to sexuality which preoccupy contemporary Catholics, reflecting in their work the empirical struggle of Catholics to reconcile Church law with their individual needs and desires. In their ratio to each other, these novelists represent in microcosm the spectrum of opinion among lay Catholics regarding sexual morality. Liberals David Lodge and Mary Gordon affirm in their fiction the goodness of the body and its desires, while Piers Paul Read argues for the orthodox view that the flesh must be rigidly controlled in the interests of spiritual health. Anne Redmon explores issues of women and sexuality without entering the debate between liberal and conservative Catholics. As this study makes clear, the contemporary Catholic novel provides an experientially based context for moral reflection on sexual behaviour parallel to and often in tension with the traditional teaching of the Church. The recent Catholic novel has also provided an important site for the exploration of women's sexual needs, desires, and moral thinking against the background of an all-male hierarchical Church, which has largely been silent in this area.

Esta Tese aborda, de modo original e pioneiro, importantes aspectos da Engenharia de Fundações do Sul de Minas: a) sistematização de conhecimentos sobre a Geologia regional; b) identificação e caracterização da prática de fundações; c) definição (com a formação de um banco de dados) dos perfis mais representativos do subsolo de suas principais cidades; d) estudo dos parâmetros físicos, químicos e geomecânicos de um solo típico; e) implantação de campo experimental de fundações da Universidade Federal de Lavras, com a realização de provas de carga. Grande ênfase foi dada aos itens (a), (c) e (e). Priorizou-se o estudo das fundações de baixa capacidade de carga, no estudo do comportamento carga-recalque de ensaios de placa, de provas de carga a compressão em estacas-broca isoladas e de tubulões curtos instrumentados. Destacam-se as análises sobre os efeitos de forma, profundidade, melhoramento do terreno de fundação e de inundação nas fundações rasas e da variação L/d na resistência lateral unitária das estacas, sendo valorizadas as fórmulas empíricas com base no SPT. São apresentadas fórmulas de previsão de carga, em função do SPT, para sapatas, estacas de pequeno diâmetro e tubulões curtos e um estudo de custos, onde se mostra que a opção indiscriminada por tubulões é inadequada para certas faixas de carga de trabalho. Adicionalmente, são feitas recomendações para intensificar o uso de sondagens tendo em vista a grande variabilidade das propriedades dos solos regionais e para aumentar os fatores de segurança nestas fórmulas onde houver possibilidade de ocorrência de colapso no solo. / This work presents, at time, important aspects of Foundation Engineering at Southern Region of Minas Gerais State: a) systematization of the knowledge about regional geology; b) identification and characterization of practice in foundations; c) definition (though establishment of a data base) of most representative sub-soil profiles at main cities at the region; d) study of physical, chemical and geomechanical parameters of a typical soil; e) implementation of a experimental field for foundation studies at Federal University of Lavras, by execution of load tests. A large emphasis was given to items a, c and e. The study of foundations of low load capacity was prioritized when testing plates, isolated piles under compression and short drilled piers with sensors. Analysis such as form effects, depth, soil improvement and flooding on shallow foundations and variation of L/d on the lateral unity resistance by emphasizing the empiral equations based on SPT were all pointed out. Mathematical equations are presented for load estimation as function of SPT for small diameter piles and short drilled piers as well as a cost study where it can bem shown that the undistinguished alternative for piers is inadequate for some load values. In addition, due to soil spatial variability and safety factor increment on soils subject for colapse, recommendations on intensive use of SPT test are given.

The last half of the twentieth century has seen a rapid increase in the process of secularization in both Britain and America, and this trend is nowhere more clearly evident than in the widespread relaxation of sexual mores. Within the Catholic Church a tension has arisen between liberal Catholics who argue for the right of Catholics to act according to the dictates of individual conscience, and traditionalists who champion the absolute moral authority of the Church. Liberal Catholics emphasize the Thomist view in which the flesh and its desires are seen as part of God's creation and, therefore, intrinsically good, while conservative Catholics lean toward an Augustinian/Jansenist view which equates sexual desire with the fallen nature of humankind. There has also been a great deal of unrest among Catholic women regarding continuing misogynistic tendencies within the male-dominated Church. This study focuses upon portrayals of women and sexuality in selected novels by four representative contemporary Catholic novelists, David Lodge, Mary Gordon, Piers Paul Read, and Anne Redmon. In their fiction, these writers pursue moral questions related to sexuality which preoccupy contemporary Catholics, reflecting in their work the empirical struggle of Catholics to reconcile Church law with their individual needs and desires. In their ratio to each other, these novelists represent in microcosm the spectrum of opinion among lay Catholics regarding sexual morality. Liberals David Lodge and Mary Gordon affirm in their fiction the goodness of the body and its desires, while Piers Paul Read argues for the orthodox view that the flesh must be rigidly controlled in the interests of spiritual health. Anne Redmon explores issues of women and sexuality without entering the debate between liberal and conservative Catholics. As this study makes clear, the contemporary Catholic novel provides an experientially based context for moral reflection on sexual behaviour parallel to and often in tension with the traditional teaching of the Church. The recent Catholic novel has also provided an important site for the exploration of women's sexual needs, desires, and moral thinking against the background of an all-male hierarchical Church, which has largely been silent in this area. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

More than any other period in the history of Western Europe, the Middle Ages were informed by translation. Practices of translation pervaded and underlay every aspect of medieval culture and politics. Yet, our understanding of how medieval writers thought about translation remains profoundly lacking. Most contemporary histories of translation theory choose to neglect the Middle Ages entirely, or to turn them into a footnote to Jerome’s distinction between “sense-for-sense” and “word-for-word” translation. Consuming the Word offers a new approach to medieval translation theory by considering texts, genres, and forms that have been largely neglected by scholars. While most research in this field has concentrated on texts that are regarded as explicitly “theoretical,” such as prefaces, commentaries, and treatises, Consuming the Word extends this investigation to the figurative language of “literary” works: poetical texts written primarily for moral and intellectual edification, aesthetic pleasure, and entertainment. By analyzing an archive of four 14th-century devotional poems composed in Spanish, Italian, and Middle English, this dissertation demonstrates that the writers of the Middle Ages articulated arguments on language, interpretation, and translation whose complexity and originality greatly surpassed the arid and derivative thinking about translation that is generally attributed to this period. Consuming the Word further demonstrates that, by the late 14th century, Christian devotional writers tended to deploy a particular figure to construct arguments on translation, interpretation, and vernacularity: the figure of gluttony. In the first chapter of this dissertation I examine the theories of language and translation conceived by Dante Alighieri in the first decades of the 14th century. I argue that the figures of consumption and gluttony that appear in the last section of Purgatorio are meant to convey a theoretical justification for his use of the vernacular, bringing to fruition several contradictory arguments that are only outlined in his two previous works on the subject: Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia. In the second chapter I concentrate on Cleanness, an anonymous and generally overlooked Middle English poem in which the poet ostensibly eulogizes the virtue of purity. By examining its figurative depictions of cooking and feasting, I contend that, rather than as a casual assortment of disparate scriptural episodes, Cleanness should be interpreted as a coherent argument in favor of vernacular translation. On the contrary, in the third chapter I show how a contemporary Middle English poem, the more famous Piers Plowman, relies on the personification of gluttony to disclose an almost antithetical argument. In Piers Plowman, vernacular translation is described as a losing bargain, morally and intellectually detrimental. In my fourth and final chapter, I turn to the celebrated Libro de Buen Amor, to analyze how its figures of eating and overeating convey an argument on the endlessness of all interpretation and on the importance of choice in the act of translating.

This dissertation pursues two distinct but parallel projects in relation to the work of Bernard of Clairvaux and Middle English imaginative literature. First, I argue for a Bernardine anagogical lens as a way to better understand the deepest theological commitments and most distinctive formal innovations of certain key Middle English literary texts, especially Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. Second, I outline a more genealogical project, tracing the figure of Bernard as it is explicitly invoked in widely circulated Middle English works including Piers, The Parson’s Tale, and the Prick of Conscience. These two threads connect to suggest that the work of Bernard of Clairvaux can offer a new way to understand the relationship between theological and literary texts in the late Middle Ages. Because Bernard’s influence in the vernacular is as much as matter of style as of content, it requires a more capacious way of theorizing the theological implications and even motivations of literary form. The “figure of Bernard” acts as a cipher for later works to explore their deepest intellectual preoccupations, and makes it possible to trace the way they imagine the anagogical interval between the presence and absence of Christ, the over- and under-estimation of the presence of eternity in time. The Bernardine themes of “presumption” and “despair” serve as a useful shorthand for signaling this theorization, and help me to extend its application beyond texts in which Bernard is explicitly invoked—including to writers, like Chaucer and Thomas Malory, whose work is often assumed to be firmly secular.

It is the intention of this thesis to present not only a visual exploration of a design problem, but also an explanation of a particular design process. It is fashionable these days for a designer to make statements about his design philosophy as a way of legitimizing his architectural intentions. My aim is to avoid this kind of justification by instead presenting the project as a process description. This description will make my beliefs and intentions both evident and understandable to those unfamiliar with my work as well as provide a personal record of the project’s development. To date my architecture education has been shaped in different countries, through different educational systems, and with different teachers and students. This thesis stands as a record of my accumulated experiences and as a description of a personal approach to working with architectural problems. I believe the most important part of an architecture education is the development of one‘s own design process. This exposition represents a beginning. / Master of Architecture