This essay is a comparative anlysis of ”Paycheck”, ”The Minority Report” and ”Adjustment Team” by Philip K. Dick and their film adaptations, Paycheck,  Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau. I am primarily interested in the political message of the original stories and how it is affected in the process of transmediation into film. The political message is clearly reflected in the way the protagonists’ free will relates to the bigger system of power. This relationship can either problematize the protagonist’s struggle, forcing him to sacrifice something, or simplify the political dimension by letting him overcome every single obstacle. The extent of the political message is enhanced by its allegorical meaning, especially when related to the contemporary reality. Therefore, I will investigate how the texts and films can be read allegorically and what impact the process of adaptation has on the allegories. I will use Fredric Jameson’s approach to allegory that treats it as a method of interpretation and a tool of mediation and understanding the diversity of human experience. I argue that the allegorical element functions rather independently of the literal political message. When some allegorical interpretations are lost, new ones, connected to the sociocultural context of the adaptation are created. All three adaptations reduce the scope of the political message found in the original texts, opting for less reflective entertainment or even action cinema. Nevertheless, on the allegorical level, they offer new interpretations that echo their updated sociocultural conditions. Keywords: Philip K. Dick; Political Message; Allegory; Adaptation

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Hospitality Management / Kristin Malek / Kevin R. Roberts / This experimental study explores how different marketing tactics, such as advertising types, message appeals, and social norms, influence attitude toward the advertisement, attitude toward the convention, and pro-environmental intention. This research has three objectives: to determine how message types in green advertising affect attitudes and intentions, to examine how message appeals in green advertising affect attitudes and intentions, and to investigate the role of social norms in green advertising in the formation of those attitudes and intentions. To examine the effects of message type, message appeals, and social norms on convention attendees’ behavioral intentions toward such a convention, a 2 (message type) x 2 (message appeals) x 2 (social norms) experimental design was adopted. This was chosen given its recognized ability to clarify associative relationships by enhancing internal validity and the robustness of findings. Several hypotheses were tested with a sample of convention attendees from the United States using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Specific findings from this study include that fact that green marketing messages combining verbal claims and visual claims were significantly more effective than messages using verbal claims only. Additionally, messages with emotional appeals were significantly more effective than ones with rational appeals and messages with injunctive norm claims were significantly more effective than ones with descriptive norm claims. As the first study of its kind to empirically investigate the use of green advertising in the context of conventions, this research involved several novel applications of various theories and a conceptual model. This study utilizes research from several disciplines whose examples can inform green marketing strategies in the convention industry. At the end, the researcher discusses the possible implications of its own findings for the convention industry in addition to its segment in the broader hospitality industry in the United States.

This study explored the relationship between message modalities and memory performance in a media environment. In order to examine the role of message modalities in media multitasking activity, this research investigated the memory performance of participants after their exposure with the news stories and the commercials between same and different modalities. The research employed a 2 X 3 experiment using two independent variables: Modality of news broadcast (audio news vs. audio-visual news) and modality of commercials (audio commercials vs. visual commercials vs. audio-visual commercials). The research questionnaire was intended to reveal the influence of modality on participant performance by recalling the content of news stories, brand names of the commercials and product types of the commercials. Although the results indicate that there is no significant interaction effect of news modality and commercial modality on news recall, the majority of hypothesized interaction effect received support in this study. Finally, this research reinforces the school of human cognitive capacities are domain-specific.

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An increasing number of students are learning in classrooms that employ electronic presentations designed in PowerPoint and other similar software programs. The design of the slides in such electronic presentations has an impact upon student learning, and ample recommendations are made within the literature as to specific strategies that serve as presumed best practices for the design of those slides that will best facilitate learning. While most of such recommended strategies are well supported by cognitive theory – they are considered to positively impact learning by contributing to decreased cognitive load, leveraged dual coding, and facilitated active processing, for example – many of them are not supported by empirical evidence that they do in fact enhance learning. Some of the recommended best practice strategies unsupported by empirical evidence include the use of progressive disclosure, dimming, and highlighting of text instead of full disclosure of text. Through the development and use of four separate electronic presentations, each of which was designed to employ one of these specific strategies (full disclosure, progressive disclosure, dimming, and highlighting), this study examined the impact of such strategies on student learning. The findings of this study indicate that significant differences are not evident in learning among the four different strategies. As such, this initial foray into the examination of the effectiveness of these four strategies indicates that any of the four strategies may be used with equal impact in the design of electronic presentations by instructors who want to help foster student learning. / Doctor of Philosophy / An increasing number of students are learning in classrooms that employ electronic presentations designed in PowerPoint and other similar software programs. The design of the slides in such electronic presentations has an impact upon student learning, and ample recommendations are made within the literature as to specific strategies that serve as presumed best practices for the design of those slides that will best facilitate learning. While most of such recommended strategies are well supported by cognitive theory, many of them are not supported by empirical evidence that they do in fact enhance learning. Some of the recommended best practice strategies unsupported by empirical evidence include the use of progressive disclosure, dimming, and highlighting of text instead of full disclosure of text. Through the development and use of four separate electronic presentations, each of which was designed to employ one of these specific strategies (full disclosure, progressive disclosure, dimming, and highlighting), this study examined the impact of such strategies on student learning. The findings of this study indicate that significant differences are not evident in learning among the four different strategies. As such, this initial foray into the examination of the effectiveness of these four strategies indicates that any of the four strategies may be used with equal impact in the design of electronic presentations by instructors who want to help foster student learning.

Novice Instructional Designers (IDs) often struggle to perform at the same level as experts. Specialized knowledge and experience are needed to discover the challenges and device appropriate solutions. Scaffold, guides, and heuristics can help novice when needing to perform tasks that require specialized knowledge. One common instructional design task requiring specialized knowledge is the development of instructional materials. Instructional message design (IMD) is a problem solving process to improve the quality of instructional materials through the application of research based principles. As this process is often not covered in novice IDs training, they will encounter more issues while attempting to address the challenges that come with creating instructional materials. Using a developmental study, a decision support tool was created to assist novice IDs with applying IMD, specifically the redundancy principle due to its ability to improve the communication within the materials. This study describes the operationalization of the principle, the design and development of the tool, expert review and revisions made based on their feedback, and the implications from the development of such a tool. / Doctor of Philosophy / Novices usually struggle to do tasks like experts. This is truer as the number of tasks and amount of specialized knowledge needed to do those tasks increases. Novices can perform these tasks if guides or tools are available. When creating courses, there are many tasks to accomplish like creating course materials. There are many rules to support the making of good, effective course materials. This study focused on designing and developing a tool to assist the novice when making course materials. The tool would help novices apply a rule to improve course materials so that students would have a better experience when using them.

As transistor feature sizes continue to shrink, it will become feasible, and for a number of reasons more efficient, to include multiple processors on a single chip. The SCMP system being developed at Virginia Tech includes up to 64 processors on a chip, connected in a 2-D mesh. On-chip memory is included with each processor, and the architecture includes support for communication and the execution of parallel threads. As with any new computer architecture, benchmark kernels and applications are needed to guide the design and development, as well as to quantify the system performance. This thesis presents several benchmarks that have been developed for or ported to SCMP. Discussion of the benchmark algorithms and their implementations is included, as well as an analysis of the system performance. The thesis also includes discussion of the programming environment available for developing parallel applications for SCMP. / Master of Science