Bobbin Friction Stir Welding (BFSW) is a new application of Friction Stir Welding (FSW) that can be used to join materials together with little to no axial forces. This eliminates the need of a backplate or anvil needed to apply counter pressure against the tool. The applications of BFSW are growing every day. This new technology is helping the automotive industry and many other industries join materials more effectively and efficiently. This technology can be used to join materials with high strength to weight ratios to make cars lighter to increase fuel efficiency. This will also greatly reduce the cost of current joining technologies.The purpose of this research is to prove the feasibility of augmenting a BFSW tool with cutters to join enclosed castings while simultaneously removing ribs and variations in thickness by (1) penetrating a BFSW tool into the material away from an edge; (2) removing any inconsistencies in the material thickness while maintaining a weld; and (3) removing a BFSW tool from the casting away from an edge leaving a clean exit hole without destroying either the casting or the tool.

With the rising trend of personal devices like laptops and smartphones being used in businesses and significant enterprises, the concern for preserving security arises. In addition to preserving security measures in outside devices, the network speed and performance capable by these devices need to be balanced with the security aspect to avoid slowing down virtual private network (VPN) activity. Performance tests have been done in the past to evaluate available software, hardware, and network security protocol options that will best benefit an entity according to its specific needs. With a variety of comparable frameworks available currently, it is a matter of pick and choose. This study is dedicated to developing a unique process-testing framework for personal devices by comparing the default security encryptions of different VPN architectures to the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) set of complying encryptions. VPN architectures include a vendor-supplied VPN, Palo Alto Networks, open-sourced OpenVPN application, and a Windows PPTP server to test security protocols and measure network speed through different operating platforms. The results achieved in this research reveal the differences between the default security configurations and the encryption settings enforced by FIPS, shown through the collected averaged bandwidth between multiple network tests under those settings. The results have been given additional analysis and confidence through t-tests and standard deviation. The configurations, including difficulty in establishing, between different VPNs also contribute to discovering OpenVPN under FIPS settings to be favorable over a Palo Alto firewall using FIPS-CC mode due to higher bandwidth rate despite following the same encryption standards.

Per job isolation of temporary file storage in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments provide benefits in security, efficiency, and administration. HPC system administrators can use the mount_isolation Slurm task plugin to improve security by isolating temporary files where no isolation previously existed. The mount_isolation plugin also increases efficiency by removing obsolete temporary files immediately after each job terminates. This frees valuable disk space in the HPC environment to be used by other jobs. These two improvements reduce the amount of work system administrators must expend to ensure temporary files are removed in a timely manner.Previous temporary file removal solutions were removal on reboot, manual removal, or removal through a Slurm epilog script. The epilog script was the most effective of these, allowing files to be removed in a timely manner. However, HPC users can have multiple supercomputing jobs running concurrently. Temporary files generated by these concurrent or overlapping jobs are only deleted by the epilog script when all jobs run by that user on the compute node have completed. Even though the user may have only one running job, the temporary directory may still contain temporary files from many previously executed jobs, taking up valuable temporary storage on the compute node. The mount_isolation plugin isolates these temporary files on a per job basis allowing prompt removal of obsolete files regardless of job overlap.

Effective strategies are needed to help parents become more involved in the education of their teenage children. Parent Reciprocal Teaching (PRT) is proposed as an effective strategy to increase parent involvement and help students increase academic performance. 120 students in a 10th-grade high school physics course participated in either the PRT homework assignments or traditional reciprocal teaching (TRT) assignments. The PRT homework assignments required students to teach their parents/guardians at home, while the TRT assignments required students to teach a peer during class time. Data was collected though test scores and surveys sent home to parents and students. Findings indicate that (1) PRT very comparable, and in some instances, better than TRT in its academic benefit, (2) resulted in parents feeling more involved in their child's education, (3) parents were more aware of what their child was learning and more mindful of how well their child understood the course content. It is suggested that more educators incorporate the practice of PRT so that students can benefit from the effect of increased parent involvement as found in other studies on parent involvement: stronger academic achievement, improved school attendance and behavior, more positive perceptions of school and self, and higher educational aspirations.

According to previous studies, a higher degree of processing fluency leads to higher liking; however, other studies indicate that a higher degree of processing fluency leads to lower recognition. This experiment examines the influence of processing fluency on both liking and recognition to determine if the same results occur when participants are asked to rate liking and remember images. Subjects rated a series of images by level of liking, then were given a recognition test. The stimuli were a combination of fluent and disfluent product images with varied fluency in each of four categories: Amount of Information, Figure-Ground Contrast, Clarity, and Symmetry. Results indicated that participants liked fluent images more than disfluent images. However, results also revealed a trend that recognition may have been higher for fluent images, and that the effects of fluency on recognition depended on which type was manipulated. Thus, the effects of varying processing fluency are different when participants are asked to both rate liking and remember items. This experiment aims to provide successful marketing tactics, suggesting that marketers make their products fluent in order to produce greater liking and memory.

An estimated 300,000 people contract Lyme disease in the USA every year, 10-20% of whom will experience long-term symptoms even after antibiotic treatment. These patients are said to have Chronic Lyme Disease (CLD). However, diagnostic guidelines, treatment protocols, and the etiological existence of CLD have been the subject of much controversy in the biomedical field, leading to negative mental and physical health outcomes for of patients with CLD. Patient support networks focused on illness experience, known as biosocialities, have formed in response to this controversy. CLD biosocialities create opportunities for patients to participate in biomedical activism and the scientific research process. A historical precedent for biosocial impact on biomedical knowledge and improved health outcomes has been established from patient activists with HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, and PTSD. The impact of CLD patients’ biosocial activism on a scientific and sociological level is evaluated through an examination of the publications of CLD support networks and biomedical research publications. CLD biosocial activism has resulted in more patient-centered research endeavours, etiological proof of CLD, improved diagnostic technologies, and new treatment protocols. These biomedical results have implications for improved CLD patient health outcomes and credibility for CLD as a legitimate disease on a biological and sociological level.

At California State University San Bernardino, students can ordinarily register online and join waiting lists when a course is full. However, the system does not support waiting lists when a course has associated laboratory sections. This project addresses this problem.

This research sought to understand the potential association between officer perceptions of organizational justiceand officer perceptions of body-worn cameras (BWCs). A questionnaire was administered to a convenience sample of 362 officersfrom the 750 sworn personnel from the Richmond Police Department in Richmond, VA, yielding a response rate of 91% and representing 44% of the Richmond Police Department’s sworn employees. This study extends prior work by partially replicating a previous BWC survey conducted by leading body-worn camera scholars, utilizing a large sample from an urban mid-Atlantic police department. This study also extends prior work on officer perceptions of organizational justice by examining officer perceptions of personal behavior modifications motivated by BWCs. Findings indicate that officers had positive general perceptions of BWCs but did not perceive that their own behavior would change due to wearing a BWC. Officers reported high perceptions of self-legitimacy and mixed perceptions of organizational justice; for example, although three quarters of respondents (74.6%) felt that command staff generally treats employees with respect, less than a third felt command staff explained the reasons for their decisions (29.1%) and that employees had a voice in agency decisions (29.7%), indicating areas for improvement in agency communication. Exploratory factor analysis yielded three separate organizational justice factors: procedural justice, distributive justice, and interactional justice. Regression analyses indicated that only procedural justice had a significant association with officers’ general perceptions of BWCs after controlling for officer demographics and perceptions of self-legitimacy (β = .20, p < .001), and there were no significant correlations between officer perceptions of organizational justice constructs and their perceptions of personal behavior modification motivated by BWCs. Policy recommendations include quarterly command staff attendance at precinct roll calls to improve internal department communication and an evaluation of the promotion process to improve officer perceptions of organizational justice. Practitioner/researcher partnerships are recommended to realize the full potential of BWC video data in improving department training and policies.

This research explores the relationship between testosterone and conceptions of masculinity and maleness in North America. The purpose of this study was to discover how men's experiences and enactments of their own masculinity and maleness add dimensions to cultural tropes of masculinity. Aging men (ages 39-75) and transgender men (male-identified, though not born biological men), illuminate the extent to which masculinity and maleness are a cultural achievement, enacted in concert with both cultural mores and individual desires. The research is based on over 27 months of fieldwork, in and around Boston, Massachusetts, using the methods of participant observation, semi-structured interviewing, and discourse analysis. I interviewed of 21 aging men and 24 transgender men. Men responded to semi-structured questions on their identity, experiences of living within their bodies, and understandings of testosterone as an object, commodity, and metaphor. Part commodity, part multi-faceted symbol, testosterone at once establishes, maintains, and enforces a coherently embodied gender. This comparative research suggests that we cannot fully understand the complexity of experiential gender identity without first unpacking the multiple elements of identity (e.g., cultural ideals, individual performances, and biological bodies) which come together in a single human being. This dissertation exposes cultural ideals of masculinity, and shows how men work with, and against, these ideals in constructing their own identities. This research shows that men have enduring and particularistic relationships with their own bodies which both reflect and challenge dominant stereotypes of the male body. I articulate strategies for aging men and transgender men to simultaneously identify and disidentify with cultural masculinity, demonstrating the shifting relevance of cultural masculinity in men's actual gendered lives. This work coins the term "maskulinity," the act of men utilizing cultural notions of masculinity to pass as men at will. I argue that in their acceptance and rejection of cultural masculinity, men in turn modify U.S. understandings of masculinity. This dissertation illuminates striking similarities between aging men and transgender men, showing how these men live in and through their bodies.

An educational researcher sought to collaborate with a classroom instructor to introduce problem-based learning as a new teaching intervention. First, a classroom instructor was approached to consider how a problem-based learning instructional approach might fit with their existing curriculum plan. The researcher and the classroom teacher used a discussion framework to decide together how to best design a professional learning course meant to prepare the teacher to use the new techniques in their classroom. The teacher took the professional learning course and subsequently designed his own problem-based learning course. That course was then delivered to undergraduate students in a college senior thermo-fluids lab course. Quantitative and qualitative data describe how students recognized the connection between the lab course and their perceptions of a future career as engineers. Preliminary findings suggest the researcher and teacher professional learning codesign process contributed positively to the classroom teachers developing and delivering their own PBL course that was perceived by students to contribute positively to their content knowledge, motivation and perception of their future career as engineers.