The purpose of this project is to develop a website that helps left handed students, their parents, and teachers to help left-handers, whether they are left-or-right-brain dominant, succeed. This website will be a tool to get to know their children and students better. The project consists of a paper and a website to educate about left-handed people.

Hokkaido University (北海道大学) / 博士 / 医学

This thesis provides a rhetorical analysis of prophetic texts, non-fiction premillennialist dispensational studies, the fictional series, Left Behind and interviews with series’ readers. This thesis argues that prophetic rhetoric constitutes an epistemological position whereby Rapture believers create knowledge, cast knowledge as good or evil and finally act as gatekeepers to determine what can and should be known. Rapture subculture is composed of both a hard core and a set of narrative believers, those who have acquired the nomenclature, but perhaps not the dogmatic belief in a Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon, and Millennium schema. The process of turning narrative believers into hard core believers relies on the use of a range of topoi, appeals to authority, evil and time. Rapture rhetoric, aimed at bolstering the beliefs of the hard core and cultivating the beliefs of those still undecided, relies on the process of transfer to gain acceptance for one claim based on acceptance of another and then relies on narrative plasticity to enlarge the basis for those accepted claims. These arguments are exchanged for stories in the fictional Left Behind series, whereby the characters, institutions and knowledge of the end-times becomes encapsulated in an easy-to-read and simple-to-relate tale that codes knowledge as either good knowledge revealed from God or evil knowledge acquired through human understanding. These narratives and arguments both get used among prophetic believers to explain their lives and their world, internally and externally to the prophetic subculture, in order to convince more narrative believers of the truth of their claims. Prophetic communities develop knowledge products, cultural entailments and cultural manifestations of prophetic belief to serve as symbols of the end-times narrative. Rapture subculture, based on prophetic beliefs, is not monolithic; however, this thesis is able to draw some broad generalizations about the prophetic community and the rhetoric they use to explain their claims within their ranks and to the outside world.

This thesis investigates the functional categories in the vP domain, including aspect, modality, and focus. For this research initiative, five constructions were examined: the Mandarin temporal adverbial, the Mandarin excessive ta, the Mandarin de/bu, the Turkish question particle –mI, and the Armenian auxiliary constructions. These constructions involve functional categories that are expected to appear at the C/IP periphery; however, they surface inside the vP domain. The existence of these low grammatical elements raises non-trivial questions such as how functional categories should be mapped out in the structure, and whether a unified structure can be proposed to account for the cross-linguistic phenomena examined in this thesis. The investigation of these constructions showed that there are cross-domain interactions between low and high functional categories. While Mandarin temporal adverbial constructions showed interactions between viewpoint aspect and lexical aspect via the distributions of the temporal adverbials and various co-occurrence restrictions, the other four constructions demonstrated interactions between the low and the high categories via intervention effects. I argue that low functional categories must be licensed by their counterparts in the C/IP domain, and that the licensing relation and the structural conditions imposed on this relation can be captured if an Agree relation is established between the functional categories in these two domains. The analysis also reveals that low functional categories are the result of feature lowering from v* to some functional projection below it, and the formal features of the low functional categories must assign their values to their counterparts in the C/IP domain via Agree to provide a meaningful input to LF. I propose a parallel analysis between CP and vP to account for the existence of the low grammatical elements in two respects: (1) C and *v, as phase heads, have an edge feature (EPP) and Agree features that need to be valued and/or checked at a functional projection lower than the each phase head; (2) the formal features of C can appear at *v if they are licensed by an associate feature present in the C/T domain for the purpose of Full Interpretation (Chomsky 1995, 2000).

The contribution of left ventricular (LV) torsion and recoil in augmenting stroke volume during exercise is poorly understood. This study examined the effects of aging on LV torsion and recoil at rest and during sub-maximal exercise in 11 young (YU) and 9 older, untrained males (OU), and 12 age-matched older, endurance-trained males (OT) in upright and supine body positions. LV torsion increased from rest to exercise in YU in upright and supine body positions (9.9±2.3 to 13.2±5.2 degrees, p=.03, and 8.8±3.8 to 12.8±6.6 degrees, p=.02, respectively), but not in OU. LV torsion increased with exercise in the supine body position only in OT (p=.046). There were no differences in EDV or change in ESV with supine exercise across groups suggesting that once the Frank-Starling mechanism is fully recruited, the young heart, and that of older, endurance-trained subjects may augment SV by increasing LV torsion and contractility rather than contractility alone.

The contribution of left ventricular (LV) torsion and recoil in augmenting stroke volume during exercise is poorly understood. This study examined the effects of aging on LV torsion and recoil at rest and during sub-maximal exercise in 11 young (YU) and 9 older, untrained males (OU), and 12 age-matched older, endurance-trained males (OT) in upright and supine body positions. LV torsion increased from rest to exercise in YU in upright and supine body positions (9.9±2.3 to 13.2±5.2 degrees, p=.03, and 8.8±3.8 to 12.8±6.6 degrees, p=.02, respectively), but not in OU. LV torsion increased with exercise in the supine body position only in OT (p=.046). There were no differences in EDV or change in ESV with supine exercise across groups suggesting that once the Frank-Starling mechanism is fully recruited, the young heart, and that of older, endurance-trained subjects may augment SV by increasing LV torsion and contractility rather than contractility alone.

Electrical machines are subject to different types of failures. Early detection of the incipient faults and fast maintenance may prevent costly consequences. Fault diagnosis of wind turbine is especially important because they are situated at extremely high towers and therefore inaccessible. For offshore plants, bad weather can prevent any repair actions for several weeks. In some of the new wind turbines synchronous generators are used and directly connected to the grid without the need of power converters. Despite intensive research efforts directed at rotor fault diagnosis in induction machines, the research work pertinent to damper winding failure of synchronous machines is very limited. This dissertation is concerned with the in-depth study of damper winding failure and its traceable symptoms in different machine signals and parameters. First, a model of a synchronous machine with damper winding based on the winding function approach is presented. Next, simulation and experimental results are presented and discussed. A specially designed inside-out synchronous machine with a damper winding is employed for the experimental setup. Finally, a novel analytical method is developed to predict the behavior of the left sideband amplitude for different numbers and locations of the broken bars. This analysis is based on the magnetic field theory and the unbalanced multiphase circuits. It is found that due to the asymmetrical structure of damper winding, the left sideband component in the stator current spectrum of the synchronous machine during steady state asynchronous operation is not similar to that of the induction machine with broken bars. As a result, the motor current signature analysis (MCSA) for detection rotor failures in the induction machine is usable to detect broken damper bars in synchronous machines. However, a novel intelligent-systems based approach is developed that can identify the severity of the damper winding failure. This approach potentially can be used in a non-invasive condition monitoring system to monitor the deterioration of a synchronous motor damper winding as the number of broken bars increase over time. Some other informative features such as speed spectrum, transient time, torque-speed curve and rotor slip are also found for damper winding diagnosis.

This thesis provides a rhetorical analysis of prophetic texts, non-fiction premillennialist dispensational studies, the fictional series, Left Behind and interviews with series’ readers. This thesis argues that prophetic rhetoric constitutes an epistemological position whereby Rapture believers create knowledge, cast knowledge as good or evil and finally act as gatekeepers to determine what can and should be known. Rapture subculture is composed of both a hard core and a set of narrative believers, those who have acquired the nomenclature, but perhaps not the dogmatic belief in a Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon, and Millennium schema. The process of turning narrative believers into hard core believers relies on the use of a range of topoi, appeals to authority, evil and time. Rapture rhetoric, aimed at bolstering the beliefs of the hard core and cultivating the beliefs of those still undecided, relies on the process of transfer to gain acceptance for one claim based on acceptance of another and then relies on narrative plasticity to enlarge the basis for those accepted claims. These arguments are exchanged for stories in the fictional Left Behind series, whereby the characters, institutions and knowledge of the end-times becomes encapsulated in an easy-to-read and simple-to-relate tale that codes knowledge as either good knowledge revealed from God or evil knowledge acquired through human understanding. These narratives and arguments both get used among prophetic believers to explain their lives and their world, internally and externally to the prophetic subculture, in order to convince more narrative believers of the truth of their claims. Prophetic communities develop knowledge products, cultural entailments and cultural manifestations of prophetic belief to serve as symbols of the end-times narrative. Rapture subculture, based on prophetic beliefs, is not monolithic; however, this thesis is able to draw some broad generalizations about the prophetic community and the rhetoric they use to explain their claims within their ranks and to the outside world.

Traffic platoons created by traffic signals may have impacts on the operations of downstream intersections because they change the arrival pattern and gap distribution of upstream traffic. There’s been a lot of research dealing with platoon effects on operations at signalized intersections, while very limited research has been done for that of unsignalized intersections. This research aims to develop a methodology for analyzing the platoon impacts on major-street left-turn (MSLT) delay at two-way stop-controlled (TWSC) intersections. The main idea is using a microscopic simulation tool to simulate different platoon scenarios in opposing through traffic, then applying regression models to capture the impacts of platoons on the delay of MSLT. Two platoon variables were adopted as a simplification of the complex platoon scenarios, making it practical to analyze the platoon effects on MSLT delay. The first two steps were to build simulation models for real-world unsignalized intersections and simulate scenarios with a combination of various factors related to platoons in VISSIM simulation. Calibrations of these simulation models based on field data were performed before simulation started. The next step was to define, derive and calibrate two platoon variables for describing the duration and intensity of platoon arrivals in the opposing through traffic, which effectively simplified the large combination of various factors. At last, the two platoon variables and their relationship with MSLT delay change factor were modeled with regression tools. A relationship between the two variables and the delay change factor was established, which indicated a positive effect by upstream platoons on MSLT delay and made it possible to quantify the impacts. The findings in this research could also be used for future research on left turn treatment regarding platoon or signal impacts.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Toledo, 2009. / Typescript. "Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology." Bibliography: leaves 58-66.