This thesis looks at the Confrontation Clause from the Sixth Amendment in light of the decision made in Maryland v. Craig. It examines the opinions of Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Antonin Scalia, and determines if their judicial philosophies were consistent with their opinion. It does so by examining the history of the Confrontation Clause from ancient history to the present, and by enumerating the judicial philosophies of O'Connor and Scalia. In conclusion, while O'Connor's majority opinion is consistent with her pragmatic philosophy, Scalia's dissent is not consistent with his originalist views.

One of the world’s largest freshwater deltas (~4000 km2), the Peace-Athabasca Delta (PAD), is located at the convergence of the Peace and Athabasca rivers and Lake Athabasca in northern Alberta, Canada. Since the early 1970s, there has been increasing concern regarding the ecological impacts on the PAD after flow regulation of the Peace River began in 1968, decreased discharge in the Peace and Athabasca rivers as a result of hydroclimatic changes in Western Canada, and increased Athabasca River water usage by oil sands development to the south. This thesis is part of an ongoing, multi-disciplinary project assessing current and past hydrological and ecological conditions in the PAD. Research conducted in this thesis aims to better understand the processes controlling water balance of lakes in the PAD using mainly stable water isotope data collected from lakes and their input sources. Isotope data are used to describe and quantify hydrological processes for individual lakes (seasonal and annual) and across the delta and are supported by other chemical and hydrometric data. An isotopic framework in d18O-d2H-space is developed for the PAD using evaporation-flux-weighted local climate data, and isotopic data collected from a reference basin, lakes throughout the PAD, and lake input sources (i.e., snowmelt, rainfall, and river water). The framework is comprised of two reference lines, the Local Meteoric Water Line, which is based on measured isotopic composition of precipitation, and the Local Evaporation Line, which is based on modelled isotopic composition of reference points. Evaporation pan data is used to assess short-term variations in key isotopic reference values, which are important for addressing short-term changes in the isotopic signature of shallow basins. This framework is used in subsequent chapters including assessment of seasonal and annual water balance of two hydrologically-contrasting shallow lakes, and to quantify the impacts of flood water and snowmelt on a set of 45 lakes in spring 2003. Five years of isotope data using time-series analysis and the isotopic framework suggested that a perched (isolated) lake and its catchment (forest and bedrock) in the northern, relict Peace sector captured sufficient rain, snow, and runoff to maintain a relatively stable water balance, and also that a low-lying lake in the southern, active Athabasca sector was regularly replenished with river water in both spring and summer. Snowmelt and rainfall were found to have diluted the perched basin by an average of 16% and 28 % respectively, while spring and summer floods were found to almost completely flush the low-lying lake. Using the spring 2003 regional dataset, flooded lakes were separated from snowmelt-dominated lakes through use of suspended sediment concentrations, isotope data, and field observations. Application of an isotope mixing model translated d18O values into a range of replenishment amount by either river water or snowmelt, which compared well with hydrological conditions at the time of sampling and previously classified drainage types of the lakes. Spatial mapping of replenishment amounts illustrated flooding of much of the Athabasca sector due to ice-jams, except for two sub-regions isolated from flooding by artificial and natural northern diversion of flow from the Athabasca River. It is also shown that most of the relict landscape of the Peace sector was replenished by snowmelt except for a few low-lying lakes close to the Peace River and its tributaries. Overall, improved understanding of lake and regional hydrology in the PAD, especially the ability to quantify the affects of various lake inputs, will improve the ability to develop effective guidelines and management practices in the PAD as lakes respond to future changes in climate and river discharge.

Methods of component mode synthesis, such as Craig and Bampton reduction, are known to generally yield more accurate results in deformable multibody dynamics. The main shortcoming of those methods is that they are intuitively based. Recently Nikravesh developed a reduction method called mode condensation which is derived from the equations of motion and yields the same results as Craig and Bampton reduction. In this dissertation, it is proven that these two methods span the same column space; therefore, they should yield identical results. We propose that mode condensation provides an analytical justification for Craig and Bampton reduction. Test results suggest that Craig and Bampton reduction and mode condensation are appropriate for a broader range of applications because their column space matches up well with the conditions under which the deformable body is restrained. Although Guyan reduction preserves exact solutions for static problems, its applications shall be limited to low frequency excitation because of raised eigen-frequencies. Modal truncation is not recommended for use in multibody dynamic settings because it lacks the ability to receive forces and displacements at the moving boundary. Another issue addressed in this dissertation is the misconception that if mean axes are adopted as the moving reference frame, only free-free modes should be used for model reduction. It was not clear how a restrained deformable body with mean axes can be condensed properly. We have shown that the conventional (nodal-fixed) mode shapes can be used with mean axes as long as the transformation matrix has full rank and contains complete rigid-body mode shapes.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Three communities of Green City, Olean, and Craig Missouri offer silent witness to the settlement patterns, economic development, and rise of popular housing in three different regions of the state. The buildings that remain provide tangible links to the past for citizens in each community. They also show how such disparate forces as evolving building technologies, mail-order catalogs, and the changing economic bases of these communities affected the design of local architecture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the most part, the contribution of these buildings to an understanding of the social history of the state and the visual and aesthetic importance of these buildings to today's landscape have not been fully investigated or appreciated.This thesis seeks to develop an understanding of the full range of influences on local Missouri architecture through a study of three communities, all of which were established as a result of the coming of the railroad during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Green City, Olean, and Craig; Missouri were selected because they are representative of hundreds of small rural communities in Missouri.The time period 1880-1930 was chosen because the largest percentage of construction took place during this time period. As a result of the economic conditions set forth by the Great Depression and the gradual decline of the railroad, few buildings were constructed after 1930. During this fifty-year period each community was transformed from wilderness into an ordered, productive agricultural landscape. The dramatic change can be seen in the buildings constructed - from the temporary, hewn-log buildings of the first settlers, to frame buildings, to more substantial brick buildings reflecting the prosperity of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coinciding with the growth and prosperity of the railroad. The thesis will investigate the hypothesis that a majority of the buildings constructed between 1880 and 1930 drew inspiration in design, form, and type from pattern books and mail-order catalogs rather than architects. / Department of Architecture

Thesis (M.A.)--Duquesne University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 211-224).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2008. / Principal faculty advisor: Ann E. Gibson, Dept. of Art History. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.F.A.) -- Montana State University -- Bozeman, 2007. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Rollin Beamish.

Ever since they were formulated in the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas' famous Five Ways to demonstrate the existence of God have been frequently debated. During this process there have been several misconceptions of what Aquinas actually meant, especially when discussing his cosmological arguments. While previous researchers have managed to tease out why Aquinas accepts some infinite regresses and rejects others, I attempt to add on to this by demonstrating the centrality of his metaphysics in his argument from motion. Aquinas cannot be properly understood or debated with a contemporary view of causality, but rather must wrestle with the concepts he actually employs in the arguments. To demonstrate this, I will compare the Thomistic argument from motion to the contemporary Kalām cosmological argument of William Lane Craig. Although some may consider it beneficial to base theistic arguments on more modern principles, this analysis shows that the metaphysical framework used by Aquinas is much less vulnerable to the rebuttals that otherwise challenge the Kalām argument, and that their differences in strength rest on their differences in metaphysics.

Recent years have seen increasing research interest in structural health monitoring (SHM). Among the many advances in SHM research, “smart” wireless sensors capable of embedded computing and wireless communication have been highly attractive. Wireless communication in SHM systems was originally proposed to significantly reduce the monetary and time cost for installing lengthy cables in an SHM system. Besides wireless sensing, the next revolution in sensor networks has been predicted to be mobile sensor networks that implant mobility into traditional wireless sensor networks. This research explores decentralized structural model updating and damage detection using mobile and wireless sensors. In the first stage of this research, mobile sensing nodes (MSNs) are developed for SHM purposes. The MSNs can maneuver upon structures built with ferromagnetic/steel materials, conduct measurement, and communicate with pears or remote servers wirelessly. The performance of the MSNs is validated through laboratory and field experiments. To further investigate the mobile sensing strategy, a decentralized structural damage detection procedure is proposed herein for the MSNs using transmissibility functions. Laboratory experiments are conducted on a steel portal frame where various structure damage scenarios are emulated. Besides experiments with MSNs, this study also investigates the nature of transmissibility functions for damage detection in an analytical manner based on a general multi-DOF spring-mass-damper system. Finally, this research also explores substructure model updating through minimization of modal dynamic residuals, which can best benefit from dense mobile or wireless sensor data concentrated in one area. Craig-Bampton transform is adopted to condense the structural model, and minimization of the modal dynamic residuals is determined as the optimization objective. An iterative linearization procedure is adopted for efficiently solving the optimization problem. The presented substructure updating method is validated through a few numerical examples. For comparison, a conventional approach minimizing modal property differences is also applied, and shows worse updating accuracy than the proposed approach. The performance of the proposed substructure model updating approach is further investigated on the effects of substructure location and size.