Excursions is a single movement piece for full orchestra based on a seven-note germinal motive. Its excursive qualities are produced by continuous variations. The form, therefore, is not derived from any particular sectional or formal organization, but is the result of continual motivic development. Transpositional combination of pitch class sets creates transformations of the germinal motive. / School of Music

PARABLES by ERIN DIXON Under the Direction of Joe Peragine ABSTRACT This is a thesis about my most recent paintings. This work represents a quest for a real understanding of what painting means to me, as well as an exploration of fictional narrative and allegory which is derived from my life experience. Yet despite all the associations I have with these paintings, even with the most auto-biographical ones, they are meant to be open-ended. It is not necessary to know anything about me upon viewing them. Parables fictitiously illustrate a moral principle, and this work celebrates what I have learned in life and school.

Adipose tissue volume and distribution is related to metabolic diseases such as diabetes and atherosclerosis. This relationship is in focus for much research, much due to a worldwide increase in obesity. It is in many cases of interest to calculate the amount of adipose tissue in different compartments within the body. Commonly used methods are however prone to introduce errors due to partial volume effects. Previous studies have successfully segmented three adipose tissue compartments from abdominal two-point Dixon fat-water MRI volumes using Morphon registration and atlas segmentation. This thesis extends upon the previous work by enabling segmentation of whole-body MRI volumes and by improving the registration with the use of both fat and water data. Possible methods for bone marrow segmentation are also tested and evaluated. The methods presented seem to be sufficient for creating whole-body volumes from a set of smaller volumes. The adipose tissue segmentation was adequate for subjects with relatively small volumes of adipose tissue, whereas segmentation of subjects with large amounts of adipose tissue require further improvement. Of the evaluated methods for bone marrow segmentation one seemed to perform adequately on all the tested datasets. Due to the few datasets available for testing it was not possible to draw any general conclusions as to how well the presented methods perform.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Joseph Peragine, committee chair; Teresa Bramlette-Reeves, Cheryl Goldsleger, committee members. Title from file title page. Electronic text (25 p. : col. ill.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Aug. 14, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 16).

Preklinické magneticko-rezonanční (MR) zobrazování na malých zvířatech je velmi aktuální a vyžaduje, vzhledem k rozměrům těchto zvířat, vyšší citlivost. Vyšší citlivosti lze dosáhnout použitím MR systému s vysokým základním magnetickým polem (např. 4,7 T a výše). Vyšší citlivost přináší výhody v podobě možnosti vyššího rozlišení, lepší poměr signál-šum, větší chemický posuv, prodloužení longitudinální relaxace (T1), atd. Na druhou stranu vyšší magnetické pole znamená větší deformace základního magnetického pole na rozhraních tkání s rozdílnou susceptibilitou a zkrácení transverzální relaxace (T2). Tuková tkáň je významně zastoupena v lidském těle a primárně sloužící pro uchovávání energie ve formě tuků. Tukovou tkáň lze rozdělit na hnědou a bílou tukovou tkáň. Hnědá tuková tkáň se vyskytuje hlavně u novorozenců, ale může být ve velmi malém množství také u dospělých jedinců. Bílá tuková tkáň je určena pro ukládání tuků, které slouží jako zdroj energie. Kromě toho bílá tuková tkáň produkuje adipokiny, hormony a mnoho dalších látek důležitých pro náš metabolizmus. Tuk lze obecně považovat jako biomarker při určitých nemocech (obezita, steatóza jater, a další). Z tohoto důvodu je kvantifikace tuku velmi důležitá pro správnou diagnózu. V MR zobrazování je speciální skupina metod pro separaci vody a tuku. Tyto metody se nazývají Dixonovy metody a jejich princip je založen na chemickém posuvu. V této práci je popsána nová T2-váhovaná sekvence pro Dixonovu akvizici (Kapitola 5.3). Navržená sekvence je z hlediska akviziční doby velmi efektivní a řadí se mezi tříbodové Dixonovy (3PD) techniky. Nově navržená sekvence fast triple spin echo Dixon (FTSED) vychází z původní sekvence rychlého spinového echa (FSE). Modifikací původní sekvence FSE vedla ke vzniku nové sekvence FTSED, která umožňuje získat tři obrazy během jediné akvizice, bez toho aniž bychom prodloužili celkovou dobu měření. Sekvence byla úspěšně implementována na 9,4 T MRI systém na Ústavu přístrojové techniky v Brně. Získaná data byla pak zpracována iterativně pomocí algoritmu IDEAL (iterative decomposition of water and fat with echo asymmetry and least-squares estimation). Výsledkem jsou separátní obrazy vody a tuků, z kterých lze vypočítat mapy frakce tuku (FF-mapy). Sekvence byla ověřena na fantomech a poté byla odzkoušena potkanovi. Úspěšná implementace této metody na 9,4 T MRI systému znamená, že může být použita také na MR zobrazovacích systémech s nižšími magnetickými poli.

Master of Arts / Department of English / Timothy A. Dayton / This thesis project seeks to reconcile the literary criticism of Marxist critic and advocate of literary realism Georg Lukács with the writing of postmodern author Thomas Pynchon in order to validate the continued relevance of Lukácsian aesthetics. Chapter 1 argues that Lukács’ The Historical Novel is not only a valid lens with which to analyze Pynchon’s own historical novel, Mason & Dixon, but that such analysis will yield valuable insight. Chapter 2 illustrates the aesthetic transition from the historical drama to the historical novel by using Lukács’ ideas to explicate The Courier’s Tragedy, a historical drama found within the pages of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Chapter 3 applies Lukács’ ideas on the “world-historical” figure and the “mediocre” hero of the classic historical novel to Mason & Dixon. Chapter 4 asserts that Mason & Dixon enables contemporary readers to experience the novel as what Lukács calls a “prehistory” to the present. This chapter also illustrates how the prehistory of Mason & Dixon anticipates Pynchon’s nonfiction essay “A Journey into the Mind of Watts.” Finally, this chapter demonstrates how Pynchon avoids the pitfall of modernization in Mason & Dixon, which Lukács defines as the dressing up of contemporary crises and psychology in a historical setting. Chapter 5 ties together the work of the previous four chapters and offers conclusions on both what Pynchon teaches us about Lukács, as well as what Lukács helps us to learn about Pynchon.

The Dixon technique is a well-established method in magnetic resonance imaging for obtaining separate images of water and fat. Here we present a generalized solution to the two-point Dixon problem with a geometric interpretation, allowing for flexible echo times and a multi-peak fat model. By simulation and experiment, we have analyzed the dependence on the echo times of the error in the water, fat, and relative background phasor values due to both signal noise and T2* decay. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that broken symmetry due to the multi-peak nature of fat enables direct water and fat determination without phase correction, and we have quantified the reliability of this technique as a function of the echo times. The results may provide valuable guidance for selecting scan parameters to balance the objectives of optimizing fat-water identification, minimizing error in the pixel values, and minimizing total scan time.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: R. Bruce Bickley, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 26, 2003). Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis approaches Thomas Pynchon's novel, Mason & Dixon, in terms of its narrative structure and sentimental content. Pynchon is generally regarded as a challenging and innovative writer, so narrative is an unsurprising subject for a study of his most recent work; sentimentalism, on the other hand, is a far cry from traditional approaches to his writing. Despite this, however, as I outline in my introduction, sentimentalism has long hovered around the edges of Pynchon's work. In Mason & Dixon it takes a privileged role as the dominating mood of the novel's final section, "Last Transit." This sentimentalism, far from being the retrogressive move that the term might imply, is bound up in a radically reconceived approach to the narrating voice of novelistic discourse, whence comes the unifying feature of my study. In Mason & Dixon, I identify this unity in the novel's referencing of film, long-established as one of Pynchon's major cultural influences. In my first chapter, I outline my approach to sentimentalism and narrative-in the modern and, specifically, modernist novel, as well as in contemporary film. In chapter two I outline my conception of Mason & Dixon's narrator as emulating film's visual representations; in chapter three, I explore this narrator as a "radically underdetermined" identity, who represents, not a linguistically embodied subjectivity, but rather representation as its own agent, as representation itself. In my fourth and final chapter, I examine how this narrator manages the sentimental content of the novel, concentrating on the character of Mason.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1994. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-146).