My dissertation offers the first complete compilation of all known examples of the door motif in Roman Italy, from its initial appearance in the second century BCE, to its disappearance in the early fourth century CE. My research expands the corpus from 91 examples to 242 examples. The door motif can be defined as the fundamental rather than incidental rendering of a door found in various media in Roman art. In this project, I examine seven types of works with this motif: domestic decorations, urns, altars, cippi, loculus slabs, stelae, and sarcophagi. Particular attention is paid to the distribution of this extant material, their chronology, context, formal characteristics, and any unusual features related to the door motif’s appearance. In addition, this dissertation includes catalogue entries with the most up-to-date information on the location, date, findspot, descriptions, and images of every example of the door motif found on the Italian peninsula. Despite considerable earlier literature on the door motif, the subject has not been systematically investigated. In current and previous scholarship, the door motif is often mentioned but almost always in passing, and primarily in relation to its appearance in funerary contexts or occasionally in domestic wall paintings. The two most extensive publications on the door motif, now forty-five years old, are incomplete and focus largely on the door’s symbolic meaning. My dissertation compiles and updates this existing scholarship to present the only comprehensive catalogue of door motif examples in Roman Italy. In addition, by gathering this previously disparate material, I use the catalogued group of objects to open new discussions that focus specifically on the depiction of the door. These discussions include the door’s formal characteristics, context, and frequency of its appearance. In re-examining the door motif and its representation more closely, this dissertation also provides a foundation for future scholars to ask new questions about the image’s meaning. Altogether, the materials presented in this dissertation provide a new foundation for the examination of the popular door motif and a springboard for future scholarship.

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Recent exponential increases in attendance at wine tasting rooms resulted in growing research in this subject area as producers seek to learn more about wine tasting room customers and identify ways to capitalize on additional revenue-generating opportunities. Direct wine sales are big business with $3.4 billion in sales in the United States in 2010. Research has shown that small and medium-sized wineries have become financially dependent on direct sales linked to wine tasting rooms with an average of 70 percent of winery sales coming from the tasting room. With limited sources outlining best practices within wine marketing, there is a clear need to identify and classify the literature on this topic. This research applies a marketing theoretical approach using the 4Ps (product, place, price, and promotion) of the marketing mix in conjunction with a comprehensive citation-based global literature review, with the goal of assessing those factors, if any, which may impact wine tasting room profitability. Our findings highlight key differences in individual wine tasting room marketing mix strategies which emphasize the need to understand consumer tastes and preferences for the wine tasting experience. Research shows that investing in the product and promotion of the wine tasting room has a positive impact on profitability. Key profit drivers include investing in branding, tasting room staff, and aggressively pursuing word-of-mouth recommendations to enhance wine tasting room profitability. / Master of Science

Opening a door is still a hard problem in robotics. Many robotic manipulators use open-loop position control to open doors, which reduces reusability and reliability in the face of slight differences or sensor errors. Many others use force feedback or impedance control but skip past the problem of grabbing the handle, which could lead to failures due to sensor errors. This research assumes that perception is faulty, and uses joint-level force feedback to probe the location of the door and its handle before attempting to open it. The resulting control strategy is at least 33% faster than the open-loop control system it replaces, and had an 83% success rate during testing in place of the previous method's 60% success rate. / Master of Science

This paper examines the determinants of tax lobbying report compliance and issues lobbied. Disclosure rules under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 and Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 require lobbyists to disclose the issues on which they lobby the U.S. federal government. Despite these disclosure rules, I find substantial variation in the level of compliance with the Act related to tax issues. Using a hand-collected dataset of corporate tax lobbying reports, I find that only 68.4% of these reports are fully compliant with the Act, on average. Notably, the percentage of compliant tax lobbying reports has declined significantly over time, from almost 90% compliance in 2008 to less than 50% compliance by 2017, with some rebound to about 60% by 2019. I find greater compliance when lobbying reports are filed by in-house lobbyists, by revolving door lobbyists, for lobbying activity related to the Department of the Treasury, later in the year, and with a higher tax lobbying dollar amount, and lower compliance for larger firms. Additionally, I identify that the major tax issues lobbied relate to international taxes, investment incentives, and non-income taxes. I find that lobbying reports that mention either international taxes or investment incentives are more likely to have a higher tax lobbying dollar value, suggesting they are more valuable to corporations than non-income taxes. Overall, this paper provides detailed evidence on firms’ compliance with federal disclosure laws related to tax lobbying, the nature of tax issues being lobbied, and the role of lobbyists in advocating for those issues.

Lightweight sandwich composite structures exhibit high strength and bending stiffness and have been used in various load-bearing aerospace structures. A primary weakness of these structures is the low interfacial strength that can result in the disbonding between the facesheet and the core. Through-thickness reinforcement techniques, such as stitching, can be utilized to improve the interfacial strength of sandwich composites. This study focuses on fabrication and structural testing of stitched sandwich composite main landing gear (MLG) strut doors. The MLG strut doors are constructed from carbon fiber non-crimp fabric facesheets and closed-cell foam core that are stitched using a modified lock stitching technique. To assess the effects of stitching, two doors were fabricated, one with and one without through-the-foam stitching. A vacuum-assisted resin transfer molding process was used to infuse the doors. The strut doors were subjected to quasi-static loading, and the mechanical responses of the stitched and unstitched strut doors are presented.

Yes / Trips over obstacles are one of the main causes of falling in older adults, with vision playing an important role in successful obstacle negotiation. We determined whether a horizontal-vertical illusion, superimposed onto low-height obstacles to create a perceived increase in obstacle height, increased foot clearances during obstacle negotiation thus reducing the likelihood of tripping. Eleven adults (mean ± 1 SD: age 27.3 ± 5.1 years) negotiated obstacles of varying heights (3, 5, 7 cm) with four different appearance conditions; two were obstacles with a horizontal-vertical illusion (vertical stripes of different thickness) superimposed on the front, one was a plain obstacle and the fourth a plain obstacle with a horizontal black line painted on the top edge. Foot clearance parameters were compared across conditions. Both illusions led to a significant increase in foot clearance when crossing the obstacle, compared to the plain condition, irrespective of obstacle height. Superimposing a horizontal-vertical illusion onto low-height obstacles can increase foot clearance, and its use on the floor section of a double-glazing door frame for example may reduce the incidence of tripping in the home.

Följande rapport bygger på examensarbetet inom CAD-teknikerprogrammet påHögskolan i Halmstad. Arbetet innefattar framtagning av ett höjdjusterbartarmstöd till bilförare, en produkt som inte finns på marknaden idag.Utförandet av arbetet har bl.a. inneburit kriterieuppställning med krav ochönskemål, framtagning av produktförslag i form utav skisser och 3D-modeller, valav material genom undersökningar, även protoyptillverkning och produktanalyser.En del vikt har lagts på att genomföra marknadsundersökningar för att se om detfinns ett intresse för produkten. / The following report is based on the final thesis within the CAD-technicianprogram at Halmstad University. The work includes the development of a heightadjustable armrest for the driver, a product that’s not available on the market yet.The execution of the work has involved a criterion lineup with demands andrequirements, development of product proposals in the shape of sketches and 3Dmodels, choice of materials through studies, prototypes were produced for producttesting. Some attention has been given to carry out market research to see if thereis an interest in the product.