Writing groups are used regularly in the academic arena, but they are also used in the non-academic community. This paper is an exploration of the use of nonacademic writing groups in Salem, Oregon. In Chapter 2 I discuss the theory behind writing groups--what it is about writing and responding that is beneficial and useful. Chapter 3 explores the roots of writing groups in Salem including some self-improvement groups, which were the precursors of writing groups. Chapter 4 then includes detailed descriptions of the groups which are currently meeting in Salem, including their formats, purposes, and some examples of their processes. Based on this information, the paper discusses the educational and social benefits of writing groups and the role of these groups in the community of Salem, Oregon. / Graduation date: 1993

This thesis aims to explore selected works of Beatriz Colomina, a revisionist architectural historian who has made influential studies on visuality, domesticity, media and gender, and their reflections in the architectural world. Colomina is a distinguished architectural historian since she places a new lens on a period when architecture ceased to be only for the elite and media has gradually penetrated into everyone&rsquo / s life in order to understand how architecture became accessible to the public through media and how this has affected the perception of modern architecture. This new lens entailed not only the inseparability of media and architecture but also how war and domesticity featured in this relationship. Against this background, this study attempts to investigate the innovative approach of Beatriz Colomina by comparing and contrasting her two prominent books: Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994) and Domesticity at War (2007). The former introduces us to the relationship between architecture and media, whereas the latter exemplifies this relationship by focusing on the cold war period as a time where media became an integral part of the domestic environment. This study aims to extract Colomina&rsquo / s contribution to architectural history by first disentangling and analysing and then merging these two books under common themes. In doing so, it seeks to answer the following questions: What is the role of archives in Colomina&rsquo / s methodology in writing these two books? What is the relationship between the document and the historian that emerges from this methodology? What common themes can be extracted from these two books as an analytical framework in order to better understand and study Colomina&rsquo / s approach? What differentiates her as a historian from other historians of modern architecture, specifically from Siegfried Giedion and Kenneth Frampton? What messages does Colomina give her reader through the form as well as the content of her books? What is her contribution to architectural historiography?

This study represents an attempt to address and discuss some of the most significant questions in the research on virtual software development work today. The research is held as a collective case study, including three cases with distinctive characteristics in both the software projects investigated and the types of collaborations. The study aims to reveal the success factors in virtual work, especially on the issues of communication, coordination and collaboration, by presenting the unfavorable experiences and major issues encountered in each case, as well as the favorable ones and lessons learned at the end of the development processes. The collective research focuses on both the global and non-global contexts. As a result, it points out the distinctive and opposite findings of the cases, and proposes discussions of those findings according to the properties of the development settings.

This study analyzes the users&rsquo / expectations from automobile interface in terms of their subjective assessments and middle class automotive design. The factors that affect the users&rsquo / impressions in both physical and psychological manner are presented. The importance of subjective users&rsquo / expectations and the issue of usability, which is handled from the traditional definition through the pleasure in use context, are discussed. The correlations between the physical appearance and psychological and behavioral responses are examined since the aesthetic properties affect the consumer satisfaction in both physically and psychologically. Automobile interface is identified under the considerations of user expectations. Factors that affect the drivers&rsquo / perception of interior and the decision making process are mentioned regarding with physical and psychological expectations of users. The case study is performed to clarify design criteria of the dashboards that belong to middle class segment under the consideration of Turkish drivers&rsquo / subjective evaluations. The study provides the chance of understanding the consumers&rsquo / attitudes toward the instrument panel elements through their design properties. This study examines and proposes Turkish users&rsquo / preferences and tastes in terms of physical and psychological expectations in the field of automobile interior design. It also provides techniques and results about users&rsquo / subjective evaluations that could be taken into account while designing an automobile belongs to a specific car segment with visual and functional properties of dashboard.

The Global System for Mobile (GSM) Communication is the most widely used cellular technology. The privacy has been protected using some version of stream ciphers until the 3rd Generation of GSM. KASUMI, a block cipher, has been chosen as a standard algorithm in order to be used in 3rd Generation. In this thesis, s-boxes of KASUMI, MISTY1 (former version of KASUMI) and RIJNDAEL (the Advanced Encryption Standard) are evaluated according to their linear approximation tables, XOR table distributions and satisfaction of the strict avalanche criterion (SAC). Then, the nonlinear part, FI function, of KASUMI and MISTY1 are investigated for SAC. A new FI function is defined by replacing both s-boxes of KASUMI by RIJNDAEL&rsquo / s s-box. Calling this new version KASUMI-R, it is found to have an FI function significantly better than others. Finally, the randomness characteristics of the overall KASUMI-R for different rounds are compared to those of MISTY1 and KASUMI, in terms of avalanche weight distribution (AWD) and some statistical tests. The overall performance of the three ciphers is found to be same, although there is a significant difference in their FI functions.

The purpose of the study is to examine the differences in resilience scores of university entrance examination (UEE) applicants in terms of entrance time, graduation area, and school type variables, and to investigate the role of learned resourcefulness, perceived social support, and gender in predicting resilience scores of UEE applicants in the 2007-2008 academic year. The sample of the study consisted of 865 (505 females and 360 males) volunteered UEE applicants enrolled in twelve different private courses located in Ankara and three different private courses located in Bursa. Achievement-Related Negative Life Events Subscale of Life Events Inventory for University Students (Gen&ccedil / &ouml / z &amp / Din&ccedil / , 2006 / Oral, 1999) was employed as a screening measure. Furthermore, a demographic data form developed by the researcher, Rosenbaum&rsquo / s Self-Control Schedule (Rosenbaum, 1980a / Siva, 1991), The Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (Eker &amp / Arkar, 1995 / Zimet, Dahlem, Zimet, &amp / Farley, 1988), and Harter&rsquo / s Self-Perception Profile for Adolescents (Harter, 1988 / Sahin &amp / Berkem-G&uuml / ven&ccedil / , 1996) were used to collect data. One-way analysis of variance and multiple regression analysis were conducted to analyze the data. The results of one-way analysis of variance indicated that the groups of entrance time to university entrance examination (entering the exam for the first time, second time, or third time), graduation area (equally weighted, quantitative, or social sciences), and school type (General High School, Anatolian High School, Private High School, or Vocational High School) were not significantly different with respect to their resilience scores. On the other hand, the results of multiple regression analysis revealed that all the predictor variables (learned resourcefulness, perceived social support, and gender) were significant predictors which explained 19 % of the total variance in resilience scores. The study found that participants who reported high levels of learned resourcefulness, and perceived social support had higher resilience scores. In addition, being male was found to be associated with higher resilience scores.

Video databases and content based retrieval in these databases have become popular with the improvements in technology. Metadata extraction techniques are used for providing data to video content. One popular metadata extraction technique for mul- timedia is information extraction from text. For some domains, it is possible to &amp / #64257 / nd accompanying text with the video, such as soccer domain, movie domain and news domain. In this thesis, we present an approach of metadata extraction from match reports for soccer domain. The UEFA Cup and UEFA Champions League Match Reports are downloaded from the web site of UEFA by a web-crawler. These match reports are preprocessed by using regular expressions and then important events are extracted by using hand-written rules. In addition to hand-written rules, two di&amp / #64256 / erent machine learning techniques are applied on match corpus to learn event patterns and automatically extract match events. Extracted events are saved in an MPEG-7 &amp / #64257 / le. A user interface is implemented to query the events in the MPEG-7 match corpus and view the corresponding video segments.

There are many components which define and complete the urban spaces. One of these components is urban equipment which responds to the needs of the dweller by serving different purposes and creates a link between urban life and public life style. Urban equipment not only enables the interaction between urban spaces and the users of these places, but also has an efficient role in defining the cities&rsquo / quality and &ldquo / identity&rdquo / . Ankara, as the capital city of the Turkish Republic, has had an important mission throughout its history. But although it is the first planned city of the Turkish Republic, Ankara has become a victim of modernization and rapid and unplanned urbanization. As a result of this situation Ankara started to lose its own values. The main purpose of this thesis is, to identify the roles of urban equipment as a visual image, based on the perception of environmental spaces and creating urban identity. The methodology in this thesis is firstly determining the urban equipment on Atat&uuml / rk Boulevard which lies between Ulus and Kugulu Park which is the center line of Ankara and then questioning their effects on the urban identity. For this reason a questionnaire is applied to the local users and then according to this questionnaire&rsquo / s results, urban equipment&rsquo / s values as an urban identity element are analyzed. As a result of this study, urban equipments on Atat&uuml / rk Boulevard and their positive and negative values are determined. Therefore, how they are perceived by the local users and their contribution to the spatial and urban identity is determined.

Cities in Turkey are great risk pools. Underqualified building stocks are the major components of such risk pools. For the mitigation of risks, &#039 / engineering approach offers retrofitting of individual buildings as an ultimate method. However, this proposition has economic and legal difficulties. Instead, it is essential to develop new policies to focus on areas of high earthquake risk as comprehensive urban regeneration activities. This new policy requires new tools to monitor urban regeneration processes. It is obligatory to make comprehensive plans for high risk areas and to take low income groups into consideration in mitigation action plans. Comprehensive regeneration in existing districts could provide means and standards of safety not necessarily maintained by the retrofitting of individual buildings. Potentials of regeneration processes are readily observed and practiced in Turkey as means of regulating urban regeneration processes, even if for purposes other than safety. Analysis of a set of regeneration projects selected from world experience indicates that current regeneration practice in Turkey is far from a comprehensive approach. Municipalities are fully empowered to designate regeneration areas and carry out redevelopment activities often providing increased dentsities on compensate for the costs. This has been reinstated in the new draft law. Rather than a separate law, general regulation of regeneration could be accommodated in the Development Law 3194. A special Law concerning regeneration could instead focus only on risk reduction issues in cities throughout Turkey. The identification of priorities for such regeneration processes could be made by the Ministry of Public Works and Settlement as the central authority, clarifying the scale and timing of each project. The implementation tools of urban regeneration and issues like authorization, responsibility, funding, and auditing could be determined in this special law. A new approach for urban regeneration is needed to describe organizational, participatory, financial framework.

In globalizing world, increase in demand for high speed rail travel requires comfortable ride over bridges while maintaining an economical design. These bridges either have composite steel I-girders, prestressed precast I or box girder superstructures. The span lengths can reach up to 40 meters. If frequency of wheel load pass at a point on bridge matches with one the critical frequencies of the structure, excessive vibration can developed both at the train and the bridge even if the structure is structurally safe. Excessive vibration can discomfort the passengers. Focus of this study is given to identify certain thresholds for the rigidity of span to minimize the passenger discomfort at short-span composite steel I-girder high speed railroad bridges. In this context, various span lengths with different girder configurations have been analyzed under various train design speeds and ballast stiffness. Eigenvalue analyses are performed to determine critical frequencies of bridges. Moving force models are used to determine structural vibrations as recommended by high speed railroad bridge design specifications. It is well-known that stiffer structures can have significantly less vibration amplitudes than lighter ones providing a comfortable ride for high speed train passes.