This creative thesis is a retelling of events as a collection of poems. Struggling with mental illness most of my life, I base most of my writing in this odd juxtaposition—the struggle for life alternating with my delight in its splendor. I find myself writing about the most challenging times in my life along with the most magnificent. The critical introduction explores and elaborates on the context and influences of my writing. Every line of poetry on every page has been a journey of reconciliation with my past and present—a journey deciphering who I am among all the leftovers of what I have been. An undeniably essential expedition.

This Terrible Silence is a collection of nineteen stand-alone stories. The work largely focuses on characters on the fringe of society—alcoholics, gamblers, thieves, liars, cheaters, and loners, who feel trapped or destined to repeat their troubles. In the struggle to break free, either by self-fulfillment or outside interference, these stories showcase the characters’ hearts and wills in the face of often daunting or insurmountable desperation. The stories in this collection are influenced by the work of Raymond Carver, and the Dirty Realism of Larry Brown, Breece DJ Pancake, Jayne Anne Phillips, and others. With minimal exposition, the characters are laid bare with cutting dialogue and active, scenic description. In the title piece, the narrator intends to tell a man vs. nature story of his encounter with a cougar, but quickly dissolves into a battle with his own slipping mental health in the face of a failing relationship. In the first-person point of view, the act of telling the story holds its own exigency for the narrator’s need to understand his or her motives and desires, as is most evident in Carver’s work, such as “Cathedrals.” In theme and style, I’ve sought to put together a collection that might allow readers to find truth and empathy from common, low, sometimes immoral, but largely human characters.

A Radiological Dispersal Device (RDD) is any device that releases radioactive material into the environment (e.g. Dirty Bomb). Depending on the size of the explosion, location, and the weather conditions the affected area could be several city blocks. In such an event there could be hundreds, even thousands of contaminated victims seeking medical treatment. One concern in the healthcare industry is the uncertainty of the level of radiation exposure to the healthcare providers from these contaminated patients. The intention of this study is to estimate the levels of skin contamination for victims arriving at the hospital needing conventional medical treatment. Given a skin contamination of the victim the effective dose rate to the healthcare providers can be estimated in certain scenarios. The effective dose rate will determine how long the healthcare provider would be able to care for the victims.

A [U-232]UBe13 neutron source was designed and modeled and the fluence and flux distributions were calculated. The [U-232]U decay chain emits six high energy alpha particles in quick succession and is ideal for use in a beryllium (a,n) neutron source. [U-232]U is an undesirable byproduct in the production of [U-233]U in the thorium fuel cycle; its concentrations can vary from 5-3000 ppm in bred [U-233]U. A 1.1018-cm diameter by 1.1018-cm tall cylinder of [U-233]UBe13 with 300ppm U-232 at 0.74 GBq (20 mCi) was modeled and found to have a peak yield of 3.5*105 n/s after 10.17 years. At this peak yield, the [U-232]UBe13 source has better neutron production efficiency per initial alpha emission activity than other beryllide neutron sources.

An RDD attack against the U.S. is something America needs to prepare against. If such an event occurs the ability to quickly identify the source of the radiological material used in an RDD would aid investigators in identifying the perpetrators. Spent fuel is one of the most dangerous possible radiological sources for an RDD. In this work, a forensics methodology was developed and implemented to attribute spent fuel to a source reactor. The specific attributes determined are the spent fuel burnup, age from discharge, reactor type, and initial fuel enrichment. It is shown that by analyzing the post-event material, these attributes can be determined with enough accuracy to be useful for investigators. The burnup can be found within a 5% accuracy, enrichment with a 2% accuracy, and age with a 10% accuracy. Reactor type can be determined if specific nuclides are measured. The methodology developed was implemented into a code call NEMASYS. NEMASYS is easy to use and it takes a minimum amount of time to learn its basic functions. It will process data within a few minutes and provide detailed information about the results and conclusions.

In this dissertation, we studied two seemingly uncorrelated, but conceptually related problems in terms of source-channel coding: 1) wireless image transmission and 2) Costa ("dirty-paper") code design. In the first part of the dissertation, we consider progressive image transmission over a wireless system employing space-time coded OFDM. The space-time coded OFDM system based on a newly built broadband MIMO fading model is theoretically evaluated by assuming perfect channel state information (CSI) at the receiver for coherent detection. Then an adaptive modulation scheme is proposed to pick the constellation size that offers the best reconstructed image quality for each average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A more practical scenario is also considered without the assumption of perfect CSI. We employ low-complexity decision-feedback decoding for differentially space- time coded OFDM systems to exploit transmitter diversity. For JSCC, we adopt a product channel code structure that is proven to provide powerful error protection and bursty error correction. To further improve the system performance, we also apply the powerful iterative (turbo) coding techniques and propose the iterative decoding of differentially space-time coded multiple descriptions of images. The second part of the dissertation deals with practical dirty-paper code designs. We first invoke an information-theoretical interpretation of algebraic binning and motivate the code design guidelines in terms of source-channel coding. Then two dirty-paper code designs are proposed. The first is a nested turbo construction based on soft-output trellis-coded quantization (SOTCQ) for source coding and turbo trellis- coded modulation (TTCM) for channel coding. A novel procedure is devised to balance the dimensionalities of the equivalent lattice codes corresponding to SOTCQ and TTCM. The second dirty-paper code design employs TCQ and IRA codes for near-capacity performance. This is done by synergistically combining TCQ with IRA codes so that they work together as well as they do individually. Our TCQ/IRA design approaches the dirty-paper capacity limit at the low rate regime (e.g., < 1:0 bit/sample), while our nested SOTCQ/TTCM scheme provides the best performs so far at medium-to-high rates (e.g., >= 1:0 bit/sample). Thus the two proposed practical code designs are complementary to each other.

Thesis (M.S. in Applied Physics)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): Xavier Maruyama. Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-77, 79-81). Also available online.

I explore the changing use of political violence by the new Latin American military regimes, specifically post-1976 Argentina with comparative analysis towards Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, as well as by those who protested military authoritarianism during the Dirty War and Operation Condor. These military dictatorships adopted aggressive anti-communist ideologies and displayed them through internal, covert violence. In this study, I adopt definitions of the 'spectacle of violence' and the 'spectacle of absence' that seek to explore the politics of diplomacy behind violent acts that have informed the processes of staging, or hiding, both the methods and outcome of inflicted violence. Geopolitics of the post-human rights legislation era and the Argentine military’s perception of a failed judicial system fostered the institutionalization of a new violent performance, the spectacle of absence, in opposition to the guerrillas' application of the public spectacle of violence. My analysis of violent spectacles within Argentina and their reception at home and abroad displays the various meanings transmitted and received through the medium of political violence as performance.

I tidigare forskning som gjorts inom ämnet dirty work osynliggörs mentala förberedelser för individer som ska äntra ett sådant yrke. Därtill osynliggörs också i forskning kring polisstudenter och våld i relation till polisyrket hur polisstudenter själva reflekterar och känner inför att kanske bruka och utsättas för våld i sitt framtida yrke. Syftet med denna uppsats har därför varit att belysa hur polisstudenter, som står inför en karriär inom ett dirty work, reflekterar över att de kan komma att bruka och själva utsättas för våld i framtiden, samt hur de upplever att de förbereds inför detta. Studien är gjord genom kvalitativ metod och semistrukturerade intervjuer har genomförts. Sex polisstudenter har intervjuats, samtliga vid två tillfällen. Resultatet visar att polisstudenterna socialiseras till att kunna bruka våld, dels genom lärare, men också genom sina kurskamrater. Att våld kan komma att bli en stor del av deras yrkesvardag är de mycket medvetna om, även om våld, menar polisstudenterna, inte är att prioritera framför kommunikation. Genom att anta en roll kan polisstudenterna härleda ett möjligt våldsamt ingripande till organisationen. Detta skapar en risk för distans till ett handlande. I samband med våldsamma situationer finns känslor som inte är önskvärda att visa upp då de kan leda till en presentation av yrkesrollen som inte är till en polis fördel. Polisstudenterna visar till största del en trygghet inför sina arbetsuppgifter som många gånger innefattar våldsamma ingripanden. Utbildningen verkar där med, på ett bra sätt, förbereda sina studenter inför polisyrkets eventuella våldsanvändning.

Thesis (M. S.)--Nuclear and Radiological Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Hertel, Nolan; Committee Member: Ansari, Armin; Committee Member: Wang, C. K. Chris.