Thomas Dixon (1864-1946) has won a singular place in history as a racial ideologue and an exemplar of Southern racism. The historical evidence, however, suggests Southern culture was only one of a variety of intellectual influences, and, though highly visible in most famous works, not Dixon’s primary concern. Rather, his discussions of the South are framed within larger intellectual debates over the region as a whole, and how it related to the rest of the nation. Throughout his life, Dixon helped shape and articulate those values in the formation of a new American identity at the turn-of-the-century. By incorporating the methods of intellectual biography, whiteness studies, literary analysis, and cultural studies into the scholarly approaches of history, this work enlarges the historical understanding of Dixon through the examination of his very long life and varied career and the exploration of his equally diverse and numerous writings, both personal and public. This project’s end goal is to enrich historical understanding of how national identity is interpreted, constructed, and shaped over time, and the many different components influencing its formation. This research found that defining what is and is not American built on and responded to the major issues of a specific historical context. Dixon’s, and the nation’s larger attempts at defining the terms of Americanism became increasingly complicated during key national turning points, such as the Spanish-American War, the economic depressions of the 1890s, and political realignments at the turn-of-the-century. Analyzing Dixon’s works revealed the influence of the various forces that reshaped American identity, including race theories, scientific advancements, immigration, sectional reconciliation, imperialism, and religion. This work concludes that national identity construction is fluid, and that researchers must consider the importance of historical context in analyses of ideology and cultural trends.

People with cerebral palsy (CP) may develop muscle contractures, which are defined as a loss of joint range due to an increase in passive muscle stiffness [1]. Computer models suggest that intramuscular fat can increase muscle stiffness [2]. There is evidence that children with spastic CP have elevated intramuscular fat fractions, but quantitative estimations of the intramuscular fat fraction are variable [1]. Therefore, a reliable method for in vivo quantification of intramuscular fat is required. The aim of this thesis was to compare two- and three-point Dixon fat-water separation methods, as well as the IDEAL algorithm for intramuscular fat quantification of the gastrocnemius medialis, for both children with CP and typically developed peers. As a reference standard, the water- and fat-only maps resulting from the Philips mDIXONXD turbo-spin-echo sequence were used (Ingenia CX, Philips Healthcare, The Netherlands). It was found that neither of the methods can compare to the reference standard, which is probably due to poor performance of the phase unwrapping algorithm applied on this data. Further studies need to be done in order to better quantify the phase error in multi-echo Dixon MRI.

The following thesis examines the development of the Louisiana Superdome from a concept that created division amongst the people of Louisiana, including those in the New Orleans metropolitan area, to a facility that would serve as, "a symbol of our recovery". This thesis begins with the fanfare and euphoria from the reopening of the Superdome in September 2006 following millions of dollars worth of damage from Hurricane Katrina and from those using it as a "shelter of last resort". It then introduces some of the major players in the Superdome's development from a divisive concept into a symbol of the community. This thesis examines the factors in the evolution of the meaning of the Superdome for those in the surrounding communities. The factors include political ideology, economic conditions, race relations, and entertainment.

Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864 -1946) and Thomas E. Watson (1856-1922), two controversial and radical figures, are often credited with the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan. Dixon, writer of novels and plays such as The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905), and Watson, politician, prolific writer, and publisher of Watson’s Magazine and The Jeffersonian, reached the masses and saturated popular culture with their racial agenda. As each of these men had especially long careers, this thesis focuses on particular times and specific issues. With Dixon, the writing of The Clansman (1905) and production of The Birth of a Nation (1915) are key points in his career and exemplary of his feelings about race, gender and power. For Watson, the Leo Frank controversy (1913-1915) demonstrates the same. Moreover, each man’s career was associated by others with the second coming of the Klan in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Thus, this era is significant for analysis of both men’s work. Through their writings, plays, and political stances, Dixon and Watson ensured widespread reception of a racial message aimed at maintaining the Southern social order at the turn of the twentieth century. While desired social order placed white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men at the top of the social pyramid, a viewing of their work through a gendered lens adds complexity to these motivations. This thesis applies a gendered analysis in a comparative study of these two racist publicists in order to identify and analyze what for them, is the fundamental foundation of that social order. In doing so, not only is an obsession with racial control demonstrated, but also a deep-seated desire to protect and control white womanhood—the most important component of the white, Anglo, Protestant majority. In this analysis, gender emerges as a means to augment race and power while maintaining and bolstering the traditional social order.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an important medical imaging technique for visualizing soft tissue structures in the body. It has the advantages of being noninvasive and, unlike x-ray, does not rely on ionizing radiation for imaging. In traditional hydrogen-based MRI, the strongest measured signals are generated from the hydrogen nuclei contained in water and fat molecules.Reliable and uniform water fat separation can be used to improve medical diagnosis. In many applications the water component is the primary signal of interest, while the fat component represents a signal which can obscure the underlying pathology or other features of interest. In other applications the fat signal is the signal of interest. There currently exist many techniques for water fat separation. Dixon reconstruction techniques take multiple images acquired at select echo times with specific phase properties. Linear combinations of these images produce separate water and fat images. In MR imaging, images with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), that can be generated in a short time, are desired. Balanced steady-state free precession (bSSFP) MRI is a technique capable of producing images with high SNR in a short imaging time but suffers from signal voids or banding artifacts due to magnetic field inhomogeneity and susceptibly variations. These signal voids degrade image quality. Several methods have been developed to remove these banding effects. The simplest methods combine images across multiple bSSFP image acquisitions. This thesis describes a technique in water fat separation I developed which combines the advantages of bSSFP with Dixon reconstruction in order to produce robust water fat decomposition with high SNR in a short imaging time, while simultaneously reducing banding artifacts which traditionally degrade image quality. This algorithm utilizes four phased-cycled bSSFP acquisitions at specific echo times. Phase sensitive post-processing and a field map are used to prepare the data and reduce the effects of field inhomogeneities. Dixon reconstruction is then used to generate separate water and fat images.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of West Florida, 2007. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 194 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Cette thèse s’attache à étudier la notion d’événement dans la nouvelle contemporaine, à travers un corpus de recueils américains, français et italiens, parus entre 1980 et 2007. Habituellement défini comme une rupture, engageant un bouleversement ontologique pour le sujet qui l’éprouve, l’événement connaît une autre représentation dans les récits brefs ici étudiés, engageant une réflexion épistémologique sur la littérature contemporaine, entre conscience d’un monde marqué par le manque et volonté de continuer malgré tout à raconter, selon d’autres modalités. Cette réflexion est mise en évidence par le récit bref. Nos nouvelles montrent à chaque fois ce qui semble être un appauvrissement. Ainsi, l’événement connaît un évidement : sa portée est atténuée, il n’entraîne pas de changements dans la conscience du personnage. De même, nos textes font voir un désengagement des instances auctoriale et narratoriale, empêchant l’établissement d’une signification univoque et d’une morale explicite. Enfin, ces histoires narrent fréquemment un dysfonctionnement, tant matériel que du récit en lui-même. Mais à chaque fois, ces carences sont en fait le lieu d’un renouvellement. L’évidement est la possibilité de proposer un autre récit où le sensationnel est mis à distance ; le désengagement permet au lecteur d’adopter vis-à-vis du texte une attitude qui ne soit pas celle de la maîtrise absolue ; le dysfonctionnement n’inaugure pas une nouvelle ère du soupçon, mais une volonté de souligner le potentiel narratif. De cette façon, la nouvelle contemporaine comme l’événement narré affichent une tension, entre perte et renouvellement. / This thesis sets out to study the notion of event in the contemporary short story, through a corpus of american, french and italian collections, published between 1980 and 2007. Usually defined as a breakdown, which leads an ontological upheaval for the subject who distressed it, the event has another representation in the short stories studied in this corpus. It puts an epistemological reflection about the contemporary literature, between awareness of a world marked by a gap and will of continuing to tell in any case, but with other modes. This reflection is particularly evident in the short story. Our collections show every time what seems to be an impoverishment. Indeed, the event distresses a « digging » : its impact is softened, it doesn’t lead changes in the character’s conscience. Similarly, our texts show a withdrawal of the author and the narrator, which prevents an unequivocal signification and an explicit moral. Finally, these stories frequently tell about a material malfunctionning, that also concerns the story itself. But everytime, these lacks are in fact the possibility of a renewal. The « digging » gives the opportunity to offer another story where the sensational is put at a distance ; the withdrawal allows to the reader to have with the text a posture which isn’t an absolute control ; the malfunctionning isn’t the beginning of a new suspicion’s age, but a will to emphasize narrative potential. By this way, the contemporary short story and the related event show a tension between loss and renewal.

Interface balance laws are derived to describe transport across a phase interface. This is used to derive generalized conditions for phase nucleation and growth, valid even for solids with inhomogeneous surface stress.<div><br></div><div>An explicit interface tracking approach called Enriched Isogeometric Analysis (EIGA) is used to simulate phase evolution. Algebraic level sets are used as a measure of distance and for point projection, both necessary operations in EIGA. Algebraic level sets are observed to often fail for surfaces. Rectification measures are developed to make algebraic level sets more robust and applicable for general surfaces. The proposed methods are demonstrated on electromigration problems. The simulations are validated by modeling electromigration experiments conducted on Cu-TiN line structures.</div><div><br></div><div>To model topological changes, common in phase evolution problems, Boolean operations are performed on the algebraic level sets using R-functions. This is demonstrated on electromigration simulations on solids with multiple voids, and on a bubble coalescence problem. </div>

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Submitted by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2017-05-03T11:12:17Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Thiago Oliveira Santos - 2017.pdf: 1704337 bytes, checksum: 5239119ebfae88548d735ca15b9a10a0 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2017-05-03T11:58:38Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Thiago Oliveira Santos - 2017.pdf: 1704337 bytes, checksum: 5239119ebfae88548d735ca15b9a10a0 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-03T11:58:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Thiago Oliveira Santos - 2017.pdf: 1704337 bytes, checksum: 5239119ebfae88548d735ca15b9a10a0 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-03-24 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This doctoral dissertation is a comparative study of three main contemporary authors: Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth, through the reading of three main novels written by them, respectively, Mason & Dixon; Blood Meridian and American Pastoral in this order here analyzed. The main objective of the research and its writing is an attempt to prove a historiographical connection as well as of themes and of style among these three novels, in their effort to reinterpret the American History in a strongly ironic way. This has been characterized by Harold Bloom (also in a ironical way, it seems) as “the style of our age”, among other reasons because the three writers as well as their three novels are focused on grasping different periods of the United States History and on deconstructing the main basis of American myths, even if through different and individualized narrative styles. The most important of these myths is the one that, since the Colonial Period, and based in the belief that being White, Protestant and of Anglo-Saxon origin would make the new man to be born in the New Continent a New Adam, and his nation, America, a new and exemplar Paradise on Earth. Mason & Dixon, Blood Meridian and American Pastoral show, each one in his own way, how this myth resulted in failure. In order to achieve this we have chosen three main myths as the basis for this research: The Myth of the American Eden (from the European imaginary Colonial Paradise); The Myth of the American Adam (from the concept of the new man, inhabitant of that Paradise; The Myth of the Manifest Destiny (the Messianic idea of a possible Universal Paradise). In order to achieve this, in the first chapter, dealing with Mason & Dixon, we will analyze the context of the Eighteenth Century and the beginning of the American Nation. In the second chapter, dealing with Blood Meridian, we will analyze the context of the Nineteenth Century, when the territorial expansion during the Great March to the West took place. In third and last chapter, dealing with American Pastoral, the context of the Twentieth Century, specifically the period from the end of World War II to the 1990s, that is, from the American Golden Age of prosperity to the economic and social crisis during and after the Vietnam War. Finally, we will try to analyze the logic of the irony shared by the three authors who, in their three novels, historically summarize the failure of the formation of the ideal nation based on its three main myths and its continual recurrence to different types of violence / Esta tese é uma leitura comparativa de três autores contemporâneos de destaque na ficção norte-americana: Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy e Philip Roth, a partir de três romances escritos por eles: Mason & Dixon; Blood Meridian e American Pastoral, respectivamente, nesta ordem aqui analisados. O objetivo principal da pesquisa e escrita da tese é uma tentativa de comprovar uma relação historiográfica mas também de temas e de estilo entre as três obras citadas, ao se empenharem em reinterpretar a História ame-ricana de modo fortemente irônico, que Harold Bloom (também ironicamente, parece) denominou como um exemplo do que seria the style of our age – o estilo de nossa época –, entre outras razões, por serem tanto os três escritores como seus três romances empe-nhados em abordar diferentes períodos da História dos Estados Unidos e a desconstruir as principais bases dos mitos americanos, mesmo se através de estilos narrativos indivi-duais díspares, principalmente aquele através do qual, desde a colonização e com base na crença de que ser branco, protestante e de origem anglo-saxônica tornaria o novo homem a nascer no novo continente, um novo Adão, e sua pátria, a América, um novo e exemplar Paraíso. Mason & Dixon, Blood Meridian e American Pastoral mostram, cada um a seu modo, como esse mito resultou em fracasso. Para tanto, baseamos nossa pesquisa em três mitos principais: 1. Mito do Éden americano (originado do imaginário europeu sobre o Paraíso colonial); 2. Mito do Adão americano (o conceito do homem novo, habitante do Paraíso); 3. Mito do Manifest Destiny (a ideia messiânica para um Paraíso universal). Para conseguir isso, no primeiro capítulo, abordaremos, em Mason & Dixon, o contexto do século XVIII e formação da nação americana; no segundo capítulo, em Blood Meridian, o contexto do século XIX, durante o qual a expansão do território americano durante a Campanha para o Oeste aconteceu; no terceiro e último capítulo, em American Pastoral, o contexto do século XX, especificamente do fim da Segunda Guerra Mundial até a década de 90, isto é, da era de ouro do desenvolvimento dos EUA até as crises políticas e econômicas durante e depois da Guerra do Vietnã. Por fim, pretendemos analisar a lógica da ironia comum aos três autores que, em seus três livros, historicamente resumem o fracasso da formação da nação ideal fundamentada em seus três mitos principais e por sua contínua recorrência a diferentes tipos de violência.