An experimental study was conducted on the strength and toughness characteristics of concrete made from recycled aggregate, cement and fly ash reinforced with reclaimed high density polyethylene plastic (HDPE) fibers. The objectives of the investigation were: (1) to evaluate the performance of a sustainable concrete containing up to 90% recycled materials; (2) to determine the variation of strength and toughness with a Fiber Factor incorporating length, width and amount of HDPE fibers; (3) to identify the best performing mix design based on tensile strength and toughness and (4) to provide some guidelines for the use of this sustainable composite in Civil Engineering construction. The results showed that the HDPE fiber reinforcements did not improve the compressive strength of the mixture. However, HDPE fibers improved the ductility and toughness which may be beneficial for structural and pavement applications. / by Roody Numa. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

<p>Holistic processing has been deemed a crucial part of human face processing. There are three tasks that are indexes of holistic processing and each is used by many researchers for the purposes of demonstrating that either their participants have intact holistic processing or that holistic processing is impaired or missing. The tasks that demonstrate holistic processing are the face inversion, composite face, and the whole-part tasks. In this dissertation, I evaluate the hypothesis that holistic processing is important for face identification. A secondary hypothesis that is evaluated is whether the three indexes of holistic processing are related and whether they are tapping the same underlying process. Chapter 2 tests the first hypothesis in a large group of young adults and shows that the composite face effect (an index of holistic processing) is not related to accuracy on two identification tasks. Chapter 3 tested both hypotheses and showed that none of the holistic indexes are related to one another and they are unrelated to face identification accuracy. In Chapter 4, a large group of older adults are tested on the composite face task and a face identification task, similar to Experiment 2 from Chapter 2. Unlike the results for young adults, older adults show a significant positive correlation between the composite face effect and identification accuracy even though older adults perform worse on the identification task.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)