Made available in DSpace on 2013-08-07T18:50:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 000386368-Texto+Completo-0.pdf: 443777 bytes, checksum: 6c10c15caec7c7787b2dff4682fd1841 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / This research puts in doubt the relation between homosexual identity constitution of adult men and their experience in formal, non formal and informal educative spaces and, as a starting point to develop the study, questions have been formulated which focalize perceptions and feelings from these adult men in relation to themselves and the others, having in view their ways of living in those educative spaces and, especially their discrimination experiences and resistance. It is theorically based in Critic Social Psychology contributions (Ciampa, 2001; Jacques, 1998) and in the studies of Trevisan (2000), Green (2000), Mott (2003), Nunan (2003) and Santos (1997). The method which is used is a perception analysis of phenomenologic basis (Giorgi, 1978; Bernardes, 1989) and the subjects are eight adult men who identify themselves as homosexuals. The understanding of the homosexual identity constitution process arises in the convergency of arguments which intend to penetrate the essences of the phenomenon, organized as follows: experience in formal and non formal educative spaces, experience in informal educative spaces, perceptions about homosexuality, discrimination experiences and resistance. The elaborated thoughts give support to the proposition of this work: the experiences in formal, non formal and informal educative spaces, from adult men who considerate themselves homosexuals, especially the ones which comprehend prejudice and discrimination, determine the identity constitution from these subjects as they produce singular ways for these men to become related with themselves and the world. The effort of overcoming of the discrimination condition and prejudice, which can configure movements of resistance in the individual and social plans, produce distinct meanings in the constitution of the homosexual identities of these subjects. / Esta pesquisa problematiza a relação entre a constituição das identidades homossexuais de homens adultos e suas vivências em espaços educativos formais, não formais e informais. Como ponto de partida para desenvolver o estudo, foram formuladas questões que focalizam percepções e sentimentos desses homens adultos em relação a si próprios e aos outros, tendo em vista suas vivências nesses espaços educativos e, especialmente, suas experiências de discriminação e resistência. Apoia-se teoricamente nas contribuições da Psicologia Social Crítica (Ciampa, 2001; Jacques, 1998) e nos estudos de Trevisan (2000), Green (2000), Mott (2003), Nunan (2003) e Santos (1997). O método utilizado é uma análise compreensiva de base fenomenológica (Giorgi, 1978; Bernardes, 1989) e os sujeitos são oito homens adultos que se identificam como homossexuais. A compreensão do processo de constituição das identidades homossexuais emerge na trama dos temas que pretendem penetrar as essências do fenômeno, assim organizados: vivências em espaços educativos formais e não formais; vivências em espaços educativos informais; percepções sobre homossexualidade; experiências de discriminação e resistência. As reflexões elaboradas sustentam a tese deste trabalho: as vivências em espaços educativos formais, não formais e informais, de homens adultos que se consideram homossexuais, especialmente as que envolvem preconceito e discriminação, marcam a constituição das identidades desses sujeitos à medida que produzem maneiras singulares deles relacionarem-se consigo mesmo e com o mundo. O esforço de superação da condição de discriminação e preconceito, o qual pode configurar movimentos de resistência nos planos individual e social, imprime significados distintos na constituição das identidades homossexuais desses sujeitos.

abstract: As urban populations grow, water managers are becoming increasingly concerned about water scarcity. Water managers once relied on developing new sources of water supply to manage scarcity but economically feasible sources of unclaimed water are now rare, leading to an increased interest in demand side management. Water managers in Las Vegas, Nevada have developed innovative demand side management strategies due to the cities rapid urbanization and limited water supply. Three questions are addressed. First, in the developed areas of the Las Vegas Valley Water District service areas, how did vegetation area change? To quantify changes in vegetation area, the Matched Filter Vegetation Index (MFVI) is developed from Mixture Tuned Match Filtering estimates of vegetation area calibrated against vegetation area estimates from high-resolution aerial photography. In the established city core, there was a small but significant decline in vegetation area. Second, how much of the observed decline in per capita consumption can be explained by Las Vegas land cover and physical infrastructure change that resulted from extensive new construction and new use of water conserving technology, and how much can be attributed to water conservation policy choices? A regression analysis is performed, followed by an analysis of three counter-factual scenarios to decompose reductions in household water into its constituent parts. The largest citywide drivers of change in water consumption were increased water efficiency associated with new construction and rapid population growth. In the established urban core, the most significant driver was declining vegetation area. Third, water savings generated by a conservation program that provides incentives for homeowners to convert grass into desert landscaping are estimated. In the city core, 82 gallons of water are saved in June for each square meter of landscape converted in the first year after conversion, but the savings attenuate to 33 gallons per meter converted as the landscape ages. Voluntary landscape conversion programs can generate substantial water savings. The most significant result is that the most effective way to ensure long term, sustainable reductions in water consumption in a growing city without changing water prices is to support the construction of water efficient infrastructure. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Sustainability 2014

Syftet med den här studien är att undersöka vilka faktorer som styr olika generationers attityd till elbilen i staden Las Vegas i USA och hur dessa attityder kan forma ett potentiellt köpbeteende. Generationerna som undersöktes var Gen X, Y och Z. Mätningen av attityd i studien inspirerades från Tricomponent Attitude Model, som mäter konsumenternas kognitiva, affektiva och konativa attityd. Studien använde sig av en enkätundersökning med påståenden för att fånga attityder hos konsumenter i staden, vilket gjorde att uppsatsen antog sig en kvalitativ forskningsmetod. Enkäten fick in 64 svar som sedan analyserades utifrån attitydkomponenterna i relation till faktorer, som gav undersökningen numerära verktyg att använda vid mätning av potentiellt köpbeteende. Resultatet visade att Gen X hade ett negativt potentiellt köpbeteende, medan Gen Y och Z hade ett positivt potentiellt köpbeteende. Analysen utgick från att hitta ledtrådar i generationernas grundattityder till de presenterade faktorerna och som därmed kunde förklara köpbeteendet.

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Downtown districts of cities are usually the first areas to be developed and can inform one of how and why growth occurred in a particular instance. Las Vegas, an oasis within the Mojave desert, originated due to its strategic location in the Southwest US that provided spring water for westward travelers. The area currently known as downtown Las Vegas, one of the first areas to be developed, is depressed due to economic downturn. An arts district is emerging in this district. However, its growth is hampered by a lack of foot traffic and local activity. University of Nevada - Las Vegas (UNLV) is in need of a new building for the arts department to accommodate its expanding program. The purpose of my thesis is to propose a satellite campus in Downtown Las Vegas that can house an arts building along with workshops and art galleries. The goal is to stimulate the development of the downtown arts district by developing strong interaction between the students and local arts activity. / Master of Architecture

The use of delayed drainage in land subsidence modeling greatly complicates model calibration, particularly when the thickness of the fine-grained interbeds varies throughout the modeled region. This thesis documents two separate projects (chapters) related to the use of delayed drainage in groundwater flow and subsidence modeling with parameter estimation. The overall goal of these projects was to better understand how delayed drainage affects accurate parameter estimation and how it is currently affecting the subsidence processes occurring in Las Vegas Valley. Chapter 1 describes an investigation on the value of subsidence data for groundwater model calibration considering delayed drainage. The calibration results of 13 hydraulic parameters of a synthetic conceptual model evaluated for 24 test cases indicate that (1) the inverse of the square of the observation values is a reasonable method to weight the observations, (2) spatially abundant subsidence data typically produce superior parameter estimates even with observation error under constant and cyclical pumping, (3) when subsidence data are limited and combined with drawdown data, outstanding results are obtained for constant pumping conditions. However, for cyclical pumping with observation errors, the best parameter estimates are achieved when multiple years of seasonal subsidence data are provided. The results provide useful suggestions for real-world calibration problems. Chapter 2 outlines the development of an updated flow and subsidence model for Las Vegas Valley covering the entire period of development of the basin. The new model includes a subsidence package that takes into account delayed drainage of fine-grained interbeds. Previous models used subsidence packages that assumed instantaneous equilibration of heads across all hydrogeologic units. The new model resulted in an agreement with measured water-level and improved the simulation of land subsidence. The analysis shows that the typical residual subsidence in Las Vegas Valley can be accurately simulated by incorporating delayed drainage in a long-term model. The study also indicates the need for more sophisticated modeling practices that use delayed drainage with parameter estimation processes to accurately calibrate flow and subsidence models. / Master of Science

Internet of Things (IoT) is the idea that every device around us is connected and these devices continually collect and communicate data for analysis at a large scale in order to enable better end user experience, resource utilization and device performance. Therefore, data is central to the concept of IoT and the amount being collected is growing at an unprecedented rate. Current networking systems and hardware are not fully equipped to handle influx of data at this scale which is a serious problem because it can lead to erroneous interpretation of the data resulting in low resource utilization and bad end user experience defeating the purpose of IoT. This thesis aims at improving data transportation for IoT. In IoT systems, devices are connected to one or more cloud services over the internet via an access link. The cloud processes the data sent by the devices and sends back appropriate instructions. Hence, the performance of the two ends of the network ie the access networks and datacenter network, directly impacts the performance of IoT. The first portion of the our research targets improvement of the access networks by improving access link (router) design. Among the important design aspects of routers is the size of their output buffer queue. %Selecting an appropriate size of this buffer is crucial because it impacts two key metrics of an IoT system: 1) access link utilization and 2) latency. We have developed a probabilistic model to calculate the size of the output buffer that ensures high link utilization and low latency for packets. We have eliminated limiting assumptions of prior art that do not hold true for IoT. Our results show that for TCP only traffic, buffer size calculated by the state of the art schemes results in at least 60% higher queuing delay compared to our scheme while achieving almost similar access link utilization, loss-rate, and goodput. For UDP only traffic, our scheme achieves at least 91% link utilization with very low queuing delays and aggregate goodput that is approx. 90% of link capacity. Finally, for mixed traffic scenarios our scheme achieves higher link utilization than TCP only and UDP only scenarios as well as low delays, low loss-rates and aggregate goodput that is approx 94% of link capacity. The second portion of the thesis focuses on datacenter networks. Applications that control IoT devices reside here. Performance of these applications is affected by the choice of TCP used for data communication between Virtual Machines (VM). However, cloud users have little to no knowledge about the network between the VMs and hence, lack a systematic method to select a TCP variant. We have focused on characterizing TCP Cubic, Reno, Vegas and DCTCP from the perspective of cloud tenants while treating the network as a black box. We have conducted experiments on the transport layer and the application layer. The observations from our transport layer experiments show TCP Vegas outperforms the other variants in terms of throughput, RTT, and stability. Application layer experiments show that Vegas has the worst response time while all other variants perform similarly. The results also show that different inter-request delay distributions have no effect on the throughput, RTT, or response time. / Master of Science / Internet of Things (IoT) is the idea that every electronic device around us, like watches, thermostats and even refrigerators, is connected to one another and these devices continually collect and communicate data. This data is analyzed at a large scale in order to enable better user experience and improve the utilization and performance of the devices. Therefore, data is central to the concept of IoT and because of the unprecedented increase in the number of connected devices, the amount being collected is growing at an unprecedented rate. Current computer networks over which the data is transported, are not fully equipped to handle influx of data at this scale. This is a serious problem because it can lead to erroneous analysis of the data, resulting in low device utilization and bad user experience, hence, defeating the purpose of IoT. This thesis aims at improving data transportation for IoT by improving different components involved in computer networks. In IoT systems, devices are connected to cloud computing services over the internet through a router. The router acts a gateway to send data to and receive data from the cloud services. The cloud services act as the brain of IoT i.e. they process the data sent by the devices and send back appropriate instructions for the devices to perform. Hence, the performance of the two ends of the network i.e. routers in the access networks and cloud services in datacenter network, directly impacts the performance of IoT. The first portion of our research targets the design of routers. Among the important design aspects of routers is their size of their output buffer queue which holds the data packets to be sent out. We have developed a novel probabilistic model to calculate the size of the output buffer that ensures that the link utilization stays high and the latency of the IoT devices stays low, ensuring good performance. Results show that that our scheme outperforms state-of-the-art schemes for TCP only traffic and shows very favorable results for UDP only and mixed traffic scenarios. The second portion of the thesis focuses on improving application service performance in datacenter networks. Applications that control IoT devices reside in the cloud and their performance is directly affected by the protocol chosen to send data between different machines. However, cloud users have almost no knowledge about the configuration of the network between the machines allotted to them in the cloud. Hence, they lack a systematic method to select a protocol variant that is suitable for their application. We have focused on characterizing different protocols: TCP Cubic, Reno, Vegas and DCTCP from the perspective of cloud tenants while treating the network as a black-box (unknown). We have provided in depth analysis and insights into the throughput and latency behaviors which should help the cloud tenants make a more informed choice of TCP congestion control.

The purpose of this thesis is to raise awareness about the contribution historic signs make to the experience of a place. Illuminated signage has played a key role in the development of the American landscape. The relationship between illuminated signage and sense of place is complex. Because of the ephemeral nature of signs and the public perception of them as advertising tools, the preservation community frequently overlooks signs. By examining three case studies, this thesis presents three different approaches to the preservation of illuminated signage. The first case study is the 2002 New Mexico Route 66 Neon Sign Restoration Project. This case uses Route 66 to examine the preservation of original material in original location. The second case study is the 2002 Amendment to the New York City Zoning Regulations, which mandates signage saturation in Times Square. This case examines the preservation of the experience of Times Square by protecting the historical use of innovative signage. The third case study is the 1996 installation of restored illuminated signs by the Neon Museum in Las Vegas at the Fremont Street Experience. This case examines the collections approach to preserving original Las Vegas illuminated signs in an outdoor museum setting as public works of art. While these three case studies evaluate iconic locations, the lessons are broadly applicable. The preservation approaches outlined here illustrate that every situation is unique and requires a full analysis of the context of the sign. Preservationists should evaluate signage within their local communities by examining the artistry and materiality of the signs. However, it is equally important to evaluate the overall community context of the signs. In order to preserve the experience of historic illuminated signage, it is imperative that preservationists and the general public understand that there are numerous approaches to safeguarding these works and that the time to take action is now. / text

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:48:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 CamilaNOT_DISSERT.pdf: 4321465 bytes, checksum: d103bd2da647997e8dfd0a8784c2060d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-02-01 / Nonogram is a logical puzzle whose associated decision problem is NP-complete. It has applications in pattern recognition problems and data compression, among others. The puzzle consists in determining an assignment of colors to pixels distributed in a N  M matrix that satisfies line and column constraints. A Nonogram is encoded by a vector whose elements specify the number of pixels in each row and column of a figure without specifying their coordinates. This work presents exact and heuristic approaches to solve Nonograms. The depth first search was one of the chosen exact approaches because it is a typical example of brute search algorithm that is easy to implement. Another implemented exact approach was based on the Las Vegas algorithm, so that we intend to investigate whether the randomness introduce by the Las Vegas-based algorithm would be an advantage over the depth first search. The Nonogram is also transformed into a Constraint Satisfaction Problem. Three heuristics approaches are proposed: a Tabu Search and two memetic algorithms. A new function to calculate the objective function is proposed. The approaches are applied on 234 instances, the size of the instances ranging from 5 x 5 to 100 x 100 size, and including logical and random Nonograms / O Nonograma ? um jogo l?gico cujo problema de decis?o associado ? NP-completo. Ele possui aplica??o em problemas de identifica??o de padr?es e de compacta??o de dados, dentre outros. O jogo consiste em determinar uma aloca??o de cores em pixels distribu?dos em uma matriz N  M atendendo restri??es em linhas e colunas. Um Nonograma ? codificado atrav?s de vetores cujos elementos especificam o n?mero de pixels existentes em cada coluna e linha de uma figura, sem especificar suas coordenadas. Este trabalho apresenta abordagens exatas e heur?sticas para solucionar o Nonograma. A Busca em Profundidade foi uma das abordagens exatas escolhida, por ser um exemplo t?pico de algoritmo de for?a bruta de f?cil implementa??o. Outra abordagem exata implementada foi baseada no algoritmo Las Vegas, atrav?s do qual se pretende investigar se a aleatoriedade introduzida pelo algoritmo Las Vegas traria algum benef?cio em rela??o ? Busca em Profundidade. O Nonograma tamb?m ? transformado em um Problema de Satisfa??o de Restri??es. Tr?s abordagens heur?sticas s?o propostas: uma Busca Tabu e dois algoritmos Mem?tico. Uma nova abordagem para o c?lculo da fun??o objetivo ? proposta neste trabalho. As abordagens s?o testadas em 234 casos de teste de tamanho entre 5 x 5 e 100 x 100, incluindo Nonogramas l?gicos e aleat?rios

Employee disengagement creates an unhealthy working environment. Disengagement rates among Las Vegas hospitality industry organizations led to dissatisfaction among employees and resulted in low productivity and profitability. This qualitative descriptive study involved exploring employee engagement strategies that hospitality industry supervisors and managers used to implement programs, thereby solving the employee engagement problems of their organizations. The conceptual framework for the study was leader-member exchange theory. Twenty participants with 5 or more years of Las Vegas hospitality experience who had already successfully implemented engagement programs answered open-ended questions in semistructured interviews. Company documents constituted an additional data source. Analyzing the data involved triangulation using multiple data sources in identifying themes such as interaction effects of employee engagement programs on employees, mutual respect between leaders and subordinates, and organizational benefits. Better engagement could lead to positive social change through increased job satisfaction and improved customer service, thereby engendering increased social interactions among members of the local community. The former could reduce stress and contribute to the quality of life of community members including the families of the workers.- The latter could lead to greater profits for the employers, thus potentially increasing the tax base in the community.