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No description available.

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Sports medicine professionals are continuously attempting to keep the incidence of injuries down. One way to accomplish this is to employ preventive methods that identify athletes who are at a greater risk of becoming injured prior to the start of the athletic season. The Functional Movement Screen™ (FMS) is a screening method that attempts to identify those individuals at risk of sustaining injuries by determining deficits in athletes' mobility and stability. This is an area of great conflict because athletic injuries result from many factors, not only in mobility and stability weaknesses. Therefore, it must first be determined whether deficient scores on the FMS are the result of the proposed weakness, or rather other potential risk factors. Functional Movement Screen™ scores were collected from 136 collegiate Division 1-A football players from three athletic programs. The scores were separated into one of three groups based upon the position played by each subject: (1) skill group, (2) combo group, and (3) line-of-scrimmage group. Data were also collected on each subject's height, weight, and relative body weight (BMI). The results of the ANOVA and Tukey HSD showed that there was a significant difference p < 0.05 between the line-of-scrimmage group and the skill group, as well as between the line-of-scrimmage group and the combo group. No significant difference was demonstrated between the combo group and the skill group. The results of the Pearson Correlation demonstrated a significant negative relationship p < 0.05 between the height of an athlete and the score received on the FMS. Significant negative relationships p < 0.01 were shown between the weight of an athlete and the score received on the FMS, as well as the relative body weight (BMI) and the athletes' score on the FMS. The results suggest that the score an athlete receives on the FMS may not reflect mobility and stability deficiencies because other factors affect the outcome of the scores. Therefore, at the present time, the FMS may not be a reliable tool by itself for identifying athletes who are at a greater risk of sustaining non-contact types of injuries. / Ph. D.

Two primary ideas drove the design of this church, sited at a Christian camping and retreat center in southwest Pennsylvania. The control of light entering the building is realized through a double layer of screens which form the exterior walls of the building and the walls of the sanctuary inside. These screens are the result of rigorous experimentation to maximize daylight and reduce glare in the space. The second main idea centers around the treatment of the overhead plane. Unified as a screen, curvilinear sheets of fabric are lit by openings in the roof to create sinuous bands of light that define the overhead plane and draw the eye upward. The primary design of these curves continue to define smaller elements in the church. As a secondary concern, the site links the church to the camp proper. A curving approach dips into the earth to obscure views of the church just until the visitor approaches the final court that leads to the building entrance. It is only when the person enters the sanctuary do they realize how the exterior and interior screens control the sunlight to illuminate a worship space that is flexible enough to both meet the needs of the camp and allow for future evolution of the liturgy. / Master of Architecture

Anxiety Disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States. While nearly 18% of Americans will experience an anxiety disorder within any given year, only one-third of those will receive treatment. Current mental health treatment facilities must navigate opposing needs for both awareness and access as well as privacy and respite. This thesis explores the ability of architecture to influence emotion and mediate between opposites through the design of a community anxiety treatment center in the heart of Old Town Alexandria, VA. The building combines community services, outpatient treatment, and in-patient treatment under one roof. Rather than a treatment facility that is removed from the city, the center is placed within an urban community, creating increased awareness and access to treatment as well as an expanded care journey through community connectivity. The building itself mediates between urban and therapeutic space, sequentially removing patients from urban stimuli as they move through increasing levels of treatment. As patients recover and begin to return to the city itself, the building gradually reintroduces them to the urban environment. Post-treatment, the location in Alexandria, VA allows patients to continue recovery through community support groups and activities. / Master of Architecture

This thesis assessed the readability of CRT displays viewed under ambient lighting conditions and then evaluated the findings with respect to the ISO 9241-7 standard. More specifically, two phases of work were conducted in this thesis. In Phase 1, seven monitors were evaluated photometrically according to the ISO 9241-7 standard to determine whether they were Class I, II, or III in positive and negative polarity. Additionally, six filters were attached to each of the monitors and their ISO Class also was assessed. All monitor/filter combinations yielded either Class I or II in positive polarity and Class II, III or failed in negative polarity. In Phase 2, fourteen participants were asked to read Tinker passages from seven display/filter combinations (tested in Phase 1) under five lighting conditions and two screen polarities. The purpose of the Phase 2 was to determine if people perform differently for Class I, II, or III monitor/filter combinations. The dependent measures were the time to read the Tinker passage (reading time) and the ability to identify the out of context word in each passage (accuracy). An Analysis of Variance was used to determine the significant effects of reading time and accuracy. The ANOVA results indicate that specular glare interferes significantly more with reading time than does diffuse glare. Diffuse (200 lux) and Specular reading times also were correlated against two ISO metrics: screen image luminance ratio (Diffuse, 200 lux) and specular reflection luminance ratio. Reading times did not correlate with the screen image luminance ratio, but they did correlate with one of the ISO specular reflection luminance ratios. The results of this thesis indicate that the ISO standard should not equally weight the screen image and the specular reflection luminance ratios. Additionally, the results indicate that it is not necessary to have separate ISO Classes for positive and negative polarity. Furthermore, people did not read differently for Class I, II, or III monitor/filter combinations. Finally, the data of this investigation provide an initial human factors database for use in assessing the validity of ISO 9241-7. / Master of Science

A Tablet PC is a portable computing device which combines a regular notebook computer with a digitizing screen that interacts with a complementary electronic pen stylus. The pen allows the user to input data by writing on or by tapping the screen. Like a regular notebook computer, the user can also perform tasks using the mouse and keyboard. A Tablet PC gives the users all the features of a regular notebook computer along with the support to recognize, process, and store electronic/digital ink, enabling a user to make and save hand-written notes or data. In institutions of teaching and learning, instructors often use computer-based materials like web pages, PowerPoint® slides, etc., to explain subject matter. The ability to annotate on presentation information using the electronic stylus of a Tablet PC has attracted the attention of the academic community to use the Tablet PC as a potential tool for increasing the effectiveness of presentations in teaching and learning. Tablet PC-based applications such as OneNote®, WindowsJournal® and Classroom Presenter have been developed to enhance note-taking in classrooms based on the fact that a pen stylus is a more natural form of input device for making notes on the computer as compared to the regular keyboard and mouse. Although tools like OneNote®, WindowsJournal® enhanced the note-taking process on the Tablet PC, they lacked the ability to allow the user to directly annotate on the lecture content. Classroom Presenter provides the ability to integrate classroom notes and the presentation material by allowing the instructors and students to annotate over the lecture material. However, all the above tools lacked the ability to allow a user to take notes over the output window of an arbitrary application like Excel, an active simulator or a movies players output. The Tablet PC based tool, WriteOn, developed at Virginia Tech, addresses this drawback. WriteOn, when deployed on the Tablet PC in a classroom environment, allows the instructor to utilize electronic ink to annotate on top of any application window visible on the Tablet PC display screen, including those that play active content like a movie or simulation. WriteOn facilitates a user to annotate over a dynamic application window by activating its virtual transparency surface called the eVellum (electronic vellum). The user can view a movie or an active simulation running in the eVellum background because of its transparent color. The user can deactivate the eVellum to make it invisible by "piercing" it if he/she wishes to access the desktop or an application window under the vellum window. WriteOn provides the instructor with the ability to broadcast a composite of the dynamic lecture content and ink annotations to the students in real-time. The term dynamic lecture contents is meant to indicate that the content being annotated need not be static words on a background, but may also be window contents that are changing in time. Using WriteOn, the students can make their own notes by writing on the eVellum enabled on top of the lecture stream window without losing visibility of the lecture. The instructor/student can save the ink annotations along with base lecture material as a movie file. The ability of WriteOn to improve classroom presentation and student note-taking as shown by initial tests, were pedagogically very useful. However, in order to deploy WriteOn on large scale in classrooms as an active and effective teaching tool of choice, several aspects of the application had to be improved. One aspect of the application that needed improvement was the user interface. The primitive Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the WriteOn tool was not easily usable by instructors and students from non-computer science backgrounds. The second aspect needing improvement was the operational performance of the application in terms of its CPU resource utilization. The WriteOn tool has shown to have operational performance issues during the screen capture process. This research therefore aims to address improvements in the GUI to make it more user friendly and increase the operational performance to the point where the user does not notice degradation of a base lecture application. Incorporation of these improvements has led us to rename the application as WriteOn1.0. WriteOn1.0 implements a picture-based GUI that comprises of two forms: a main form that appears shortly after WriteOn1.0 starts and a toolbar. The WriteOn1.0 toolbar appears in the center of the top edge of the display as soon as the user initiates a task like a screen recording session, by clicking on the appropriate menu button on the main form. The toolbar provides the user, accessibility to perform all the desired activities like annotating, screen recording, presentation broadcast, and piercing of the eVellum by a single-click of the appropriate menu icon. Tool tips that appear when the user points the mouse over a picture icon on the toolbar, explain the task that shall be performed when he/she clicks on the underlying menu icon. WriteOn1.0 introduces a window-like resizable and movable eVellum called the scalable eVellum that it activates in the area of interest specified by the user. Unlike the first implementation of the eVellum which had a fixed location and spanned the entirety of the user's desktop window, the instructor/student define the dimensions of the scalable eVellum and can choose to re-dimension, relocate and pierce through it at any point of time during a session. WriteOn1.0 also introduces the transparent mode of operation wherein the instructor/student, without having to deactivate the scalable eVellum can access any underlying window by a right-click of the mouse on the eVellum surface while the ink annotations are intact on the foreground. WriteOn1.0 addresses the operational performance issues observed during a screen capture session in WriteOn by capturing the activities only in the area of interest of the user for recording and broadcasting. By combining this scheme with a with a lossless screen capture codec called the MSU screen capture codec that has a high-compression ratio and that is optimized for speed for data compression, WriteOn1.0 greatly improves the operational CPU performance of the tool. WriteOn1.0 employs various technologies to implement its features. The improvements to operational performance are implemented by using the MSU screen codec from Moscow State University's Graphics and Media Lab. Microsoft®'s Video for Windows Framework (VfW) and WindowsMedia Player API's are used to realize the module that records the screen activities to an AVI file while DirectShow of DirectX and ConferenceXP API's are used for streaming presentations over a network. WriteOn1.0, with its features like its scalable eVellum, good operational performance and picture-based GUI is aimed at potentially making it a teaching tool of choice across classrooms and changing the method of classroom instruction of courses involving dynamic content. / Master of Science