Magister Artium - MA

Through the life and work of James Crossley, this thesis explores the important and often neglected significance of middle-class power and influence in the nineteenthcentury industrial city of Manchester. Born in the first year of the century, Crossley can be considered a paradigm of one section of a class divided along political and sectarian lines. He was a lawyer by profession, and a 'Church and State' Tory by inclination. After successive defeats, political ambitions gave way to antiquarian and especially literary interests, which he pursued in common with an influential network of other like-minded individuals. It is principally in this area that he made a significant contribution to the cultural maturation of the burgeoning city, and achieved the highest recognition during his lifetime. The principal topics investigated in successive chapters, through manuscript and printed sources, are: 1) Education and early literary interests. 2) The beginnings of a lifelong friendship with William Harrison Ainsworth, many of whose novels depended on source material provided by Crossley. Early literary journalism in Blackwood's Magazine and the Retrospective Review. 3) Legal training, the formation of the Manchester Law Association. 4) Political affairs, particularly in opposition to the Charter of Incorporation. 5) Dickens's visits, the expansion of Manchester's cultural infrastructure, including the Athenaeum Club 6) The growth and importance of publishing societies in the nineteenth century. Crossley's role in shaping and maintaining the Chetham Society. 7) The founding of the Manchester Free Public Library, Crossley's part in the selection and purchase of the stock, and the public recognition of this work. 8) The importance of the private collector in nineteenth-century literary research. Crossley's collection (particularly of the works of Daniel Defoe), and his influence on the work of contemporary bibliographers. 9) The Manchester man of letters, his accomplishments and status. It was concluded from this study that the life and achievements of James Crossley provide a valuable insight into the cultural development of Manchester in the nineteenth century.

Technology has become an inherent part of our daily lives. If we don’t want to abstain from the benefits technology brings, we have to acknowledge the fact that tech generates data and adjust our norms and habits to it. This thesis critiques how corporations and governmental institutions collect, store and analyze data of individuals. It discusses the economic and technological forces that stand behind the collection and usage of data in the past, today, and the near future. Beyond that, it alludes to political implications. The overarching goal is to stimulate reflection about culture and future. To achieve that, the design of an interactive educational web story within the browser is proposed. A curated personal data platform in combination with interactive web stories make data collection, data usage, and the risks of data aggregation visible. Business practices and interests are rendered transparent on the basis of users’ actual online behavior and exposure. The web stories allows to understand the meaning and value of the data traces users leave online. In five chapters, they experience the basic technologies of the Internet, business motivations, and surveillance practices in the context of their individual web browsing behavior. Each chapter invites to explore details of the topic to accommodate for individual need and interest in the matter. A critical reflection on the future of data collection is encouraged, tools and settings within the browser help users to protect their digital identities.

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Organizing personal collections of digital documents can be frustrating for two main reasons. First, the effort required to work with the folder system on personal computers and the possible misplacement and loss of documents. Second, the lack of effective organization and management tools for personal collections of digital documents. The research in this thesis investigated specific visualization and clustering features intended for organizing collections of documents and built in a prototype interface that was compared to a baseline interface from previous research. The results showed that those features helped users with: 1) the initial classification of documents into clusters during the supervised stage; 2) the modification of clusters; 3) the cluster labeling process; 4) the presentation of the final set of organized documents; 5) the efficiency of the organization process, and 6) achieving better accuracy in the clusters created for organizing the documents.

This thesis looks at legal mechanisms allowing the non-collection of tax debts in the tax systems of Canada and the United States. The goal is to shed light on the choices made in Canada’s tax collection system by juxtaposing it with the American system. The comparison reveals differences in the ways in which the two jurisdictions allow taxpayers to participate in the tax system and differences in how the two jurisdictions choose to make decisions about the forgiveness of tax debts. Although Canada has generally rejected the idea of compromise within the tax system, there is a tax policy case to be made in favour of the compromise of tax debts in certain situations.

In order to determine the most effective ways to increase ridership in their communities, bicycle planners require quality data on bicycling behavior. Traditional bicycle data collection methods, however, are limited by the large amount of time and expertise required to process and analyze the data, by their inability to provide information at the level of detail needed to understand the complexities of bicycling behavior, and by issues related to sampling bias and poor respondent trip recall. Fortunately, a relatively new method for collecting travel data has emerged that has the potential to provide higher quality and lower cost bicycle data to local planning agencies than has previously been possible with traditional data collection methods: the use of global positioning system (GPS) sensors in smartphones. Researchers at The University of Texas recently evaluated the usefulness of one such smartphone application - "CycleTracks" - to collect bicycle route data. Over 3,600 unique trips were collected from around 300 cyclists in Austin, Texas between May and October, 2011. While they found the CycleTracks app to be useful for collecting a large dataset, to this point there has been only limited analysis of the route data in terms of its usefulness in the planning field. This report will explore the ways in which GPS route data collected from smartphones can address some of the limitations of traditional data collection methods. Austin is used as a case study to show how the GPS route data can be used to plan for network connectivity, to identify barriers in the bicycle network, and to analyze cycling behavior before and after the installation of new facilities. The report finds that despite a number of limitations, smartphone-based GPS data collection has the potential to become an important part of local planning agencies' regular data collection efforts.

This thesis examines how the concept and act of collection describes a relationship with the material world that clashes with Marxist traditions. Tracing how collected objects behave semiotically, this work defends the idea that one's relation to collected objects necessitates their complete possession in order to delimit the cycling of one's singularity, between "I" and the "Other;" and, at the level of community, the collected objects (e.g., in a museum) additionally show how we attempt to make an "oeuvre" of the world. This thesis demonstrates that the death of the collector exposes an irreconcilable disjunction between the object's meaning—which disappears with the arrival of the collector's death—and the object's shell, which is left as a witness or reminder of the incommensurability of human singularity and finitude. The museum is therefore understood as an attempt to overcome the limited realities of this objective shell, generating an infinite circulation of sense, or of a life that never quite ends. / Graduate

This work focuses on the concept of sustainable propellant collection. The concept consists of gathering ambient gas while on-orbit and using it as propellant. Propellant collection could potentially enable operation in very-low Earth orbits without compromising spacecraft lifetime. This work conducts a detailed analysis of propellant collection from a physics perspective in order to test the assertions of previous researchers that propellant collection can dramatically reduce the cost of propellant on-orbit. Major design factors for propellant collection are identified from the fundamental propellant collection equations, which are derived in this work from first principles. A sensitivity analysis on the parameters in these equations determines the relative importance of each parameter to the overall performance of a propellant-collecting vehicle. The propellant collection equations enable the study of where propellant collection is technically feasible as a function of orbit and vehicle performance parameters. Two case studies conducted for a very-low Earth orbit science mission and a propellant depot-type mission serve to demonstrate the application of the propellant collection equations derived in this work. The results of this work show where propellant collection is technically feasible for a wide range of orbit and vehicle performance parameters. Propellant collection can support very-low Earth operation with presently available technology, and a number of research developments can further extend propellant-collecting concepts' ability to operate at low altitudes. However, propellant collection is not presently suitable for propellant depot applications due to limitations in power.

Due to advances in capacity, speed, and economics, NAND-based flash memory technology is increasingly integrated into all types of computing systems, ranging from enterprise servers to embedded devices. However, due to its unpredictable up-date behavior and time consuming garbage collection mechanism, NAND-based flash memory is difficult to integrate into hard-real-time embedded systems. In this thesis, I propose a performance model for flash memory garbage collection that can be used in conjunction with a number of different garbage collection strategies. I describe how to model the cost of reactive (lazy) garbage collection and compare it to that of more proactive schemes. I develop formulas to assess the schedulability of hard real- time periodic task sets under simplified memory consumption models. Results show that I prove the proactive schemes achieve the larger maximum schedulable utilization than the traditional garbage collection mechanism for hard real-time systems in flash memory.