Thesis (doctoral)--Göteborgs universitet, 1993. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement and English abstract inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-289) and indexes.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 1998. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 353-373).

Thesis (doctoral)--Göteborgs universitet, 1993. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement and English abstract inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-289) and indexes.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boise State University, 2009. / Title from t.p. of PDF file (viewed June 30, 2010). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-94).

The art on the Berlin Wall has been looked at often for its social and political meaning. Instead, I intend to look at the artwork and text which appeared on the Berlin Wall as art. In this paper I will discuss the formal aspects of the art on the Berlin Wall as well as its import as an example of public art and as a forum created through visual representation.

This thesis deals with the perception of the Cold War in selected German feature films. Sonnenallee (Leander Haussmann, 1999), Die Unberührbare (Oscar Roehler, 2000), Good Bye Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003), Herr Lehmann (Leander Haussmann, 2003) and Das Leben der Anderen (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006) have been selected for a comparative analysis that focusses on narratives of the Cold-War era after reunification, and for an examination of how the social impact of German unification has been addressed in these films. In terms of methodology, the thesis uses Pierre Sorlin's social history of cinema and Pierre Nora's concept of lieu de mémoire to describe the social imagination and nostalgic representation of memories. There is a research gap in previous studies concerning how the Cold War has become a topic in recent German feature film production, and this study aims to complement those earlier works.

Approximately 30% of the UK s housing stock is comprised of older, solid wall buildings. Solid walls have no cavity and were built without insulation; therefore these buildings have high heat loss, can be uncomfortable for occupants throughout the winter and require an above-average amount of energy to heat. Solid wall buildings can be made more energy efficient by retrofitting internal wall insulation (IWI). However, there is little empirical evidence on how much energy can be saved by insulating solid wall buildings and there are concerns that internal wall insulation could lead to overheating in the summer. This thesis reports measured results obtained from a unique facility comprised of a matched pair of unoccupied, solid wall, semi-detached houses. In the winter of 2015 one house of the pair was fitted with internal wall insulation then both houses had their thermal performance measured to see how differently they behaved. Measuring the thermal performance was the process of measuring the wall U-values, the whole house heat transfer coefficient and the whole house airtightness of the original and insulated houses. Both houses were then monitored in the winter of 2015, monitoring was the process of measuring the houses energy demand while using synthetic occupancy to create normal occupancy conditions. In the summer of 2015 indoor temperatures were monitored in the houses to assess overheating. The monitoring was done firstly to see how differently an insulated and an uninsulated house perform under normal operating conditions: with the blinds open through the day and the windows closed. Secondly, a mitigation strategy was applied to reduce high indoor operative temperatures in the houses, which involved closing the blinds in the day to reduce solar gains and opening the windows at night to purge warm air from the houses. The original solid walls were measured to have U-values of 1.72 W/m2K, while with internal wall insulation the walls had U-values of 0.21 W/m2K, a reduction of 88%. The house without IWI had a heat transfer coefficient of 238 W/K; this was reduced by 39% to 144 W/K by installing IWI. The monitored data from winter was extrapolated into yearly energy demand; the internally insulated house used 52% less gas than before retrofit. The measured U-values, whole house heat loss and energy demand were all compared to those produced from RdSAP models. The house was found to be more energy efficient than expected in its original state and to continue to use less energy than modelled once insulated. This has important implications for potential carbon savings and calculating pay-back times for retrofit measures. In summer, operative temperatures in the living room and main bedroom were observed to be higher, by 2.2 oC and 1.5 oC respectively, in the internally insulated house in comparison to the uninsulated house. Both of these rooms overheated according to CIBSE TM52 criteria; however the tests were conducted during an exceptionally warm period of weather. With the simple mitigation strategy applied the indoor operative temperature in the internally insulated house was reduced to a similar level as observed in the uninsulated house. This demonstrates that any increased overheating risk due to the installation of internal wall insulation can be mitigated through the use of simple, low cost mitigation measures. This research contributes field-measured evidence gathered under realistic controlled conditions to show that internal wall insulation can significantly reduce the energy demand of a solid wall house; this in turn can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and could help alleviate fuel poverty. Further to this it has been demonstrated that in this archetype and location IWI would cause overheating only in unusually hot weather and that indoor temperatures can be reduced to those found in an uninsulated house through the use of a simple and low cost mitigation strategy. It is concluded that IWI can provide a comfortable indoor environment, and that overheating should not be considered a barrier to the uptake of IWI in the UK.

In The Walls We Build, the wall acts as a metaphor for the walls we build within ourselves and outside of our selfs. Walls creating separation and alienation, leading to an increasingly polarized society. In this thesis I will be investigating the wall from a material as well as a non-material standpoint. By building a wall out of glass I hope to be able to activate thoughts about what a wall is and what it does to us, and how the inner and outer walls are influencing each other.

Mechanically Stabilized Earth (MSE) wall is a civil structure that has been used for various purposes e.g., supporting bridges, residential or commercial buildings, roadways, railroads etc. In general, MSE wall uses either metal strip, bar or geosynthetics materials as reinforcement. Roger et al. (2010) mentioned that an approximately 57% of the MSE wall constructed in U.S. utilize steel strips as the resources of reinforcement. The usage of metal steel strips is followed by usage of steel bar mats (24%) and geosynthetics grids (18%). Even though MSE walls are designed for a service life of 75 to 100 years, early complication has often been reported. Corrosion of the reinforced steel has been the major cause that afflicts the long-term performance of these walls. The deicing salts used on pavements to melt down snow is one of the major cause of corrosion of these reinforced steels. The aggressiveness of deicers in terms of corrosion of these reinforced steel is studied through the potentiodynamic polarization technique at various concentrations. This study aims to determine the corrosion behavior on galvanized steel and bare steel in presence of individual deicing salt or deicers e.g., sodium chloride, calcium chloride, magnesium chloride and potassium acetate at various (i.e., 0.25, 0.50 and 1.0 M) concentration. Subsequently, the surface morphology was analyzed by using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and the mineralogical composition was observed through X-Ray Diffraction (XRD). In addition, the corrosivity of two backfill aggregates, natural aggregate and recycled concrete aggregate, was compared. The result shows that the corrosion effect of deicers on reinforced steel depends on its chemical composition and concentration. The SEM imaging showed the presence of micro cracks on the surface of galvanized steel, resulting in pitting corrosion rather than general surficial corrosion. Comparing the corrosion rate of these deicers, the aggressiveness of these deicers on galvanized steel can be arranged in the following order: sodium chloride > calcium chloride > magnesium chloride > potassium acetate. Although sodium chloride was most aggressive for both the steel, the aggressiveness of these deicers on bare steel was different from that of galvanized steel and can be arranged in following order: sodium chloride > magnesium chloride > calcium chloride > potassium acetate. The pH and electrical resistivity of the natural and recycled aggregates were compared with standard provided by American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and found to be non-corrosive. The corrosion rate of both the aggregates on galvanized and bare steel were inappreciable. While analyzing the corrosiveness of these two aggregates, recycled concrete aggregate was observed to be more aggressive than the natural aggregate.

In the context of urban buildings, architectural floor plans describe a building's structure and spatial distribution. These digital documents are usually shared in file formats that discard the semantic information related to walls and rooms. This work proposes a new method to recover the structural information by extracting walls and detecting rooms in 2D floor plan images, aimed at multi-unit floor plans which present challenges of higher complexity than previous works. Our proposed approach is able to handle overlapped floor plan elements, notation variations and defects in the input image, and its speed makes it suitable for real applications on both desktop and mobile devices. We evaluate our methods in terms of precision and recall against our own annotated dataset of multi-unit floor plans. / Graduate