This study will cover the history from 1946 to 1952 of a state hospital located in Helmuth, New York, known as Gowanda State Homeopathic Hospital (GSH). It describes the community, physical campus and the surrounding area where it is located. The experience of treating military personnel suffering from combat-related mental illness during the 1940s led many psychiatrists to emphasize the social dimensions of mental disorder and to hypothesize that mentally ill civilians and veterans may best be treated outside of traditional mental institutions in their hometowns. This theory was implemented with the discovery of psychotropic drugs in the mid 1950s. By the early 1950s about 100,000 patients were housed in these asylums in New York State alone. Since the 1600s, Seneca Indians occupied this region in western New York State. Farmers, tanners, fur trappers, and blacksmiths came to found the village of Collins in 1821. In 1894 the state of New York took back the title to 500 acres to construct a state hospital as a refuge for the "insane." About 100 buildings were erected. The GSH was completed because doctors thought that mental illness was the result of environmental factors and that disease, which was preventable, could become more serious without intervention. These beliefs gave rise to the Mental Hygiene Movement. The concept of mental hospitals also meant an escape from the larger society to farm animals, grow victory vegetable gardens, make wicker furniture and various folk arts and to return to a previous period that was totally agrarian. From 1946 to 1952 the census showed that a 4,000-bed capacity was filled at Gowanda. The doctors were Americans and immigrants with and without licenses to work in state hospitals. Several were from Germany and were themselves casualties of the war. The neighboring farmers, villagers, and Seneca were hired to work with patients as staff or orderlies. Therapy consisted of talk therapy, hydrotherapy, occupational therapy and other timely and available treatments for the mentally ill. All patients able of body and mind worked various jobs to support the whole community.

Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, transcended his mythical personae through the band's songs, his poems, and works about him. Morrison's cult continues today, through pilgrimages to his grave (a major tourist attraction in Paris), Oliver Stone's film The Doors (1991), videos on YouTube.com, rediscoveries of already released recordings, and new discoveries of unreleased recordings, lost films, and unpublished manuscripts of Morrison's poetry. Fans, filmmakers, photographers, the music industry, writers, and members of The Doors have cultivated him into their icon, hierophant, and God. But does myth construction about Morrison possess any goals, continuity, or direction? The music was essential to Morrison's creative development and image, so why do so few published works about Morrison examine the songs themselves? Writings in Rolling Stone and by those affiliated with the magazine dominate literature about Jim Morrison and The Doors. Many of these writings are essential to scholarship about The Doors; however, some merely aim to perpetuate myths about Jim Morrison. Other writings deserve attention since they offer fascinating perspectives about Morrison and possess discernable directions; therefore, the scope of this study focuses on The Los Angeles Free Press, Down Beat, and The Miami Herald. It explores Morrison's use of voice, words, and music, and discusses original and new contexts. As metacritique, this study examines how writers singled out and focused on Morrison and shows how limits of interpretation (from the perspectives of authenticity, representation, perception, and reception) are related to Morrison's aesthetics and involvement in 1960s counterculture. These writings illustrate how the Doors and Morrison himself created not only worlds out of their compositions, performances, and recordings; more specifically, they created interplay with the counterculture and musical material culture. The treatment of songs and poems here leads to exciting avenues for analyzing The Doors' songs.

The primary purpose of this research was to dissect the state of Louisianas comprehensive curriculum and make suggestions for enhancement to a document that is intended to set basic standards for education in all public schools throughout the state. While the Louisiana State Department of Education acknowledged a real need for such a document, the one it originally produced fell short of many educators expectations. In taking into consideration the diversity of the states students and their heritages, the researcher makes suggestions for enriching the English language arts (ELA) curriculum for secondary students by incorporating a wider variety of multicultural, multiethnic, and womens literature and writing along with folkloristic teachings. The researcher began her process by consulting several educational authors and texts, namely selected articles by Ogbu and Understanding by Design by McTighe and Wiggins, before embarking on personal interviews during which she conversed with a curriculum writer as well as experienced and respected educators in the Baton Rouge community. Dividing the findings into three categories, the researcher analyzed Louisiana State Universitys Laboratory Schools curriculum to serve as a model for advancement of the states public schools curriculum and then delved into the states curriculum to explore what material is being covered in the document. This research is followed by a chapter analyzing the construction of the current comprehensive curriculum and the disconnect that exists between the states intended implementation and what is really happening in many schools. Finally, the researcher presents suggestions for diversifying the material and literature being taught by including cultural teachings from a variety of sources designed to envelope students from all ethnicities in the hopes of producing well-rounded and educated world citizens. Suggestions include utilizing the Louisiana Folklife Program and its website to implement a folklore unit within the ELA curriculum allowing students to use a kinesthetic approach to exploring their own and other cultures and working through various resources to discover literature of often times curriculum-neglected cultures, such as Cuban, Cajun and Acadian, Zimbabwean, and Nigerian, as well as womens writings.

This thesis focuses on the role of the Basque language (Euskera or Euskara) in the national identity of the Basque people. I looked at the history of Basque education, from the beginnings of the ikastola movement of the early 20th century to the current bilingual education system. I examined the use of Euskara in education from the primary school level to the university level in the Basque Autonomous Community. This research involved looking at the BAC governments detailed studies on students in the various linguistic models of education in the BAC. Other areas I discuss in this paper are the use of Euskera in media, government, commerce, and social settings. The majority of my research focused on the role of language in the attitudes of Basque musicians; I conducted this research via the social networking site MySpace.com. I collected data from Basque rock bands MySpace profiles and asked members of those bands to respond to questionnaires concerning their language and education. Based on the research done by the BAC government regarding Basque education and my own research on Basque musicians, I concluded that for Basque nationalism to continue, Basque-language education must continue.

Experimental studies have been performed on two-pass rectangular internal coolant channels with aspect ratio AR 4:1 with high rotation numbers. Three passages are investigated: smooth, 90 deg ribbed and 45 deg ribbed. A maximum Reynolds number of 150,000 and a maximum rotation number of 0.6 are achieved in the study. These maximum parameter values are considerably higher than those previously reported for the 4:1 AR geometry, and provide data for parameter ranges that may be representative of certain modern turbine blades. Heat transfer behaviors with rotation in the three passages are presented. Rotation effects, density effects and buoyancy effects are discussed. Friction factors and thermal performance factors are also provided. In addition, innovative finning strategies are proposed and tested in a straight stationary rectangular channel using transient liquid crystal method aiming to enhance the heat transfer rate of heat exchangers. The test results show an overall heat transfer rate of 3 and above for Reynolds numbers up to 65,000.

This dissertation focuses on the study of maintenance management for repairable systems based on optimal stopping theory. From reliability engineerings point of view, all systems are subject to deterioration with age and usage. System deterioration can take various forms, including wear, fatigue, fracture, cracking, breaking, corrosion, erosion and instability, any of which may ultimately cause the system to fail to perform its required function. Consequently, controlling system deterioration through maintenance and thus controlling the risk of system failure becomes beneficial or even necessary. Decision makers constantly face two fundamental problems with respect to system maintenance. One is whether or when preventive maintenance should be performed in order to avoid costly failures. The other problem is how to make the choice among different maintenance actions in response to a system failure. The whole purpose of maintenance management is to keep the system in good working condition at a reasonably low cost, thus the tradeoff between cost and condition plays a central role in the study of maintenance management, which demands rigorous optimization. The agenda of this research is to develop a unified methodology for modeling and optimization of maintenance systems. A general modeling framework with six classifying criteria is to be developed to formulate and analyze a wide range of maintenance systems which include many existing models in the literature. A unified optimization procedure is developed based on optimal stopping, semi-martingale, and lambda-maximization techniques to solve these models contained in the framework. A comprehensive model is proposed and solved in this general framework using the developed procedure which incorporates many other models as special cases. Policy comparison and policy optimality are studied to offer further insights. Along the theoretical development, numerical examples are provided to illustrate the applicability of the methodology. The main contribution of this research is that the unified modeling framework and systematic optimization procedure structurize the pool of models and policies, weed out non-optimal policies, and establish a theoretical foundation for further development.

Through a research approach of emergence applied to a corpus of academic letures, I developed a theory to explicate the referents of a class of frequently used pronouns (I, you, and we), which I term the Participatory Pronouns. My theory of the Positioning of Participatory Pronouns resolves the main practical concern of the research participants, which is to place their utterances in contexts for authoritative, intellectually sound, and socially relevant interpretation. At the theoretical level, my theory is a specification of Relevance Theory and resolves disparate previous analyses of pronouns. Overall, my work provides a new paradigm for how referents are retrieved, the language function of these referents, the discourse strategies of the speakers, and what these reveal about academic lectures. Through analysis of seven thousand pronouns from twenty-three university-level, introductory science lectures, my findings emerged from the data as the best explanation for the usage of the participatory pronouns I, we, and you. These pronouns occur frequently in the academic lecture and help to create social and spatial contexts for interpretation. Member-checking interviews and additional tests of validity and reliability verified the limits and generalizability of my findings. The academic lecture is a principal locus of engagement between students and professors. The main concern of the professors in their lecture is how to position their speech in contexts for interpretation so that their message is intellectually sound, socially relevant, and authoritative. My concept of participant positioning analyzes the way speakers and listeners place speech in a social and physical context for interpretation. The Positioning of Participatory Pronouns theory explains the associated language functions of juggling, categorical referents, economy, and interchangeability while also accounting for the discourse strategies of extending, exampling, and staturing. Here I explicate the conditions for the occurrence of economy, categorical referents, and interchangeability, which have been noted but not resolved in previous research. My research goes beyond all extant explanations of pronominal reference offering the concept of referent juggling, accounting for switching between several referents designated by the same pronominal form, as well as discourse strategies that are essential to academia.

Cotton is the most important textile fiber for apparel use and is preferred to synthetic fibers for reasons such as comfort and feel. Cotton may also be used to produce the regenerated cellulose fibers, such as lyocell and viscose, which have numerous textile applications. A major drawback of cotton, and other cellulosic fibers, is its inherent ability to burn. Many finishes have been developed to impart flame resistance to cotton. These finishes have limited use in textiles for apparel due to problems with the finish not being durable during laundering and increasing the susceptibility of the fabric to wear. Most of these finishes have been developed for products that are not laundered, such as drapery and furnishing fabrics. The development of cellulose/clay nanocomposites for use as flame retardant materials based on cotton is reported in this paper. These materials are designed to take advantage of the thermal stability and flame resistance imparted by silicate filler materials and should require no fire retardant finish. The use of cellulose/clay nanocomposites can allow for the use of natural fibers in applications which are currently limited to synthetic fibers. The use of cellulosic fibers as a feedstock for the composite materials makes use of renewable resources and reduces the use of harsh chemicals normally found in flame retardant materials and finishes. Novel nanocomposite materials have been produced from cellulose with layered silicate clays used as the nanofiller material. Three exfoliation and intercalation methods using different solvents and clay pretreatment techniques were attempted in production of these organic-inorganic hybrids. The method that resulted in superior cellulose/clay nanocomposites utilized a pretreatment of the clay and 4-methylmorpholine-N-oxide as the cellulose solvent. The nanocomposites show significant improvements in thermal properties when compared with cellulose control sources and cellulose processed under the conditions for nanocomposite preparation. The degradation temperature of the nanocomposites increased by 45 °C and the char yields for some compositions doubled those of the controls. The crystalline melt of the materials decreased by 15 °C.

Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) is one of the most widely used decision methodologies in the sciences, business, and engineering worlds. MCDM methods aim at improving the quality of decisions by making the process more explicit, rational, and efficient. One controversial problem is that some well-known MCDM methods, like the additive AHP methods and the ELECTRE II and III methods, may cause some types of rank reversal problems. Rank reversal means that the ranking between two alternatives might be reversed after some variation occurs to the decision problem, like adding a new alternative, dropping an old alternative or replacing a non-optimal alternative by a worse one etc. Usually such a rank reversal is undesirable for decision-making problems. If a method does allow it to happen, the validity of the method could be questioned. However, some recent studies indicate that rank reversals could also happen because of peoples rational preference reversal which may be caused by their emotional feelings, like regret and rejoicing. Since regret and rejoicing may play a pivotal role in evaluating alternatives in MCDM problems, sometimes the decision maker (DM) may want to anticipate these emotional feelings and consider them in the decision-making process. Most of the regret models in the literature use continuous functions to measure this emotional factor. This dissertation proposes to use an approach based on a linguistic scale and pairwise comparisons to measure a DMs anticipated regret and rejoicing feelings. The approach is shown to exhibit some key advantages over existing approaches. Next a multiplicative MCDM model is adopted to aggregate the alternatives associated regret and rejoicing values with their performance values to get their final priorities and then rank them. A simulated numerical example is used to illustrate the process of the proposed method. Some sensitivity analyses which aim at examining how changes of regret and rejoicing values might affect the ranking results of the decision problems are also developed. Then a fuzzy version of the new method is introduced and illustrated by a numerical example. Finally, some concluding remarks are made. Ranking intransitivity and some other issues about the proposed method are analyzed too.

This study seeks to uncover the characteristics of foreign language instructors discourse styles implemented in the classroom when teaching students the target language. Foreign language classrooms are unique to academia because the teachers of the language, depending on whether they are native or non-native speakers of the target language, learned it in different environments and for distinct purposes. Many of the previous studies examining the effect a teachers ability in the target language will have on his/her instruction have focused on native and non-native speakers teaching styles and/or methodologies. Rather than the effect on the teachers style, the central question in this dissertation is how an instructors native or non-native ability will affect his/her pedagogical discourse when presenting the target language to students. Through the analysis of data collected from university classrooms with native and non-native instructors, three salient variances in the instructors teaching discourse are revealed: the effect the L1 of the students has in presenting the L2, the pronouns used to address students and refer to speakers of the target language and the students native language, and the positioning and quantity of code-switching implemented in the classes. Due to the non-native instructors sharing the same L1 as their students, they have an advantage of identifying the learning process of their students. Furthermore, non-native instructors build solidarity with their students by consistently using the first person plural pronoun when comparing the forms and cultures of their and the students L1 to the forms and cultures of the target language. Code-switching in the classroom room is unique and different from that which is heard in speech communities. Contributing to previous literature on classroom code-switching, the present study reveals two significant motivations behind the instructors code-switching: a pedagogical tool and topic expansion. From the results revealed in this study, the non-native speakers are more pedagogically prepared to recognize their students progress in the acquisition of the target language and to answer questions their students have about the target language. These results further aid in the preparation of language teachers in order to improve the overall outcome of future language students.