This essay is a comparative anlysis of ”Paycheck”, ”The Minority Report” and ”Adjustment Team” by Philip K. Dick and their film adaptations, Paycheck,  Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau. I am primarily interested in the political message of the original stories and how it is affected in the process of transmediation into film. The political message is clearly reflected in the way the protagonists’ free will relates to the bigger system of power. This relationship can either problematize the protagonist’s struggle, forcing him to sacrifice something, or simplify the political dimension by letting him overcome every single obstacle. The extent of the political message is enhanced by its allegorical meaning, especially when related to the contemporary reality. Therefore, I will investigate how the texts and films can be read allegorically and what impact the process of adaptation has on the allegories. I will use Fredric Jameson’s approach to allegory that treats it as a method of interpretation and a tool of mediation and understanding the diversity of human experience. I argue that the allegorical element functions rather independently of the literal political message. When some allegorical interpretations are lost, new ones, connected to the sociocultural context of the adaptation are created. All three adaptations reduce the scope of the political message found in the original texts, opting for less reflective entertainment or even action cinema. Nevertheless, on the allegorical level, they offer new interpretations that echo their updated sociocultural conditions. Keywords: Philip K. Dick; Political Message; Allegory; Adaptation

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Hospitality Management / Kristin Malek / Kevin R. Roberts / This experimental study explores how different marketing tactics, such as advertising types, message appeals, and social norms, influence attitude toward the advertisement, attitude toward the convention, and pro-environmental intention. This research has three objectives: to determine how message types in green advertising affect attitudes and intentions, to examine how message appeals in green advertising affect attitudes and intentions, and to investigate the role of social norms in green advertising in the formation of those attitudes and intentions. To examine the effects of message type, message appeals, and social norms on convention attendees’ behavioral intentions toward such a convention, a 2 (message type) x 2 (message appeals) x 2 (social norms) experimental design was adopted. This was chosen given its recognized ability to clarify associative relationships by enhancing internal validity and the robustness of findings. Several hypotheses were tested with a sample of convention attendees from the United States using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Specific findings from this study include that fact that green marketing messages combining verbal claims and visual claims were significantly more effective than messages using verbal claims only. Additionally, messages with emotional appeals were significantly more effective than ones with rational appeals and messages with injunctive norm claims were significantly more effective than ones with descriptive norm claims. As the first study of its kind to empirically investigate the use of green advertising in the context of conventions, this research involved several novel applications of various theories and a conceptual model. This study utilizes research from several disciplines whose examples can inform green marketing strategies in the convention industry. At the end, the researcher discusses the possible implications of its own findings for the convention industry in addition to its segment in the broader hospitality industry in the United States.

This study explored the relationship between message modalities and memory performance in a media environment. In order to examine the role of message modalities in media multitasking activity, this research investigated the memory performance of participants after their exposure with the news stories and the commercials between same and different modalities. The research employed a 2 X 3 experiment using two independent variables: Modality of news broadcast (audio news vs. audio-visual news) and modality of commercials (audio commercials vs. visual commercials vs. audio-visual commercials). The research questionnaire was intended to reveal the influence of modality on participant performance by recalling the content of news stories, brand names of the commercials and product types of the commercials. Although the results indicate that there is no significant interaction effect of news modality and commercial modality on news recall, the majority of hypothesized interaction effect received support in this study. Finally, this research reinforces the school of human cognitive capacities are domain-specific.

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This study sought to better understand the impact of feedback on performance by examining how regulatory focus and message framing potentially interact to influence recipient's attitudes towards and recall of performance feedback recommendations. Participants were 221 undergraduates. Participant's chronic regulatory focus orientation was measured in phase 1. In phase 2, regulatory focus orientation was manipulated prior having participants complete a puzzle task. After completing the task, they were given performance feedback recommendations that were framed to highlight either promotion or prevention concerns. Their attitudes towards and recall of the recommendations they received were then measured. Though not all of the predictions of the study were supported, results indicated a significant three-way interaction between chronic promotion, the manipulation of regulatory focus, and the framing of the performance feedback recommendations that qualified the relationship between chronic promotion and attitudes. This finding supports the notion that a better understanding of how feedback impacts subsequent performance is possible by studying the interaction between regulatory focus and message framing. Implications and recommendations for future research are discussed. / Master of Science

Arguably, from the programmer's perspective, the programming model is the most important characteristic of any computer system. Perhaps this explains why, after many decades of research, architects and programmers alike continue to debate the appropriate programming model for parallel computers. Though thousands of programming models have been developed, standards such as PVM and MPI have made send-and-receive based message-passing the most popular programming model for distributed memory architectures. This thesis explores modifying the Single-Chip Message-Passing (SCMP) architecture to more efficiently support send-and-receive based message-passing. The proposed system is compared, for performance and programmability, to the active messaging programming model currently used by SCMP. SCMP offers a unique platform for send-and-receive based message-passing. The SCMP design incorporates multiple multi-threaded processors, memory, and a network onto a single chip. This integration reduces the penalties of thread switching, memory access, and inter-process communication typically seen on more traditional distributed memory parallel machines. The mechanisms proposed in this thesis to support send-and-receive based message-passing on SCMP attempt to preserve and exploit these features as much as possible. / Master of Science

An increasing number of students are learning in classrooms that employ electronic presentations designed in PowerPoint and other similar software programs. The design of the slides in such electronic presentations has an impact upon student learning, and ample recommendations are made within the literature as to specific strategies that serve as presumed best practices for the design of those slides that will best facilitate learning. While most of such recommended strategies are well supported by cognitive theory – they are considered to positively impact learning by contributing to decreased cognitive load, leveraged dual coding, and facilitated active processing, for example – many of them are not supported by empirical evidence that they do in fact enhance learning. Some of the recommended best practice strategies unsupported by empirical evidence include the use of progressive disclosure, dimming, and highlighting of text instead of full disclosure of text. Through the development and use of four separate electronic presentations, each of which was designed to employ one of these specific strategies (full disclosure, progressive disclosure, dimming, and highlighting), this study examined the impact of such strategies on student learning. The findings of this study indicate that significant differences are not evident in learning among the four different strategies. As such, this initial foray into the examination of the effectiveness of these four strategies indicates that any of the four strategies may be used with equal impact in the design of electronic presentations by instructors who want to help foster student learning. / Doctor of Philosophy / An increasing number of students are learning in classrooms that employ electronic presentations designed in PowerPoint and other similar software programs. The design of the slides in such electronic presentations has an impact upon student learning, and ample recommendations are made within the literature as to specific strategies that serve as presumed best practices for the design of those slides that will best facilitate learning. While most of such recommended strategies are well supported by cognitive theory, many of them are not supported by empirical evidence that they do in fact enhance learning. Some of the recommended best practice strategies unsupported by empirical evidence include the use of progressive disclosure, dimming, and highlighting of text instead of full disclosure of text. Through the development and use of four separate electronic presentations, each of which was designed to employ one of these specific strategies (full disclosure, progressive disclosure, dimming, and highlighting), this study examined the impact of such strategies on student learning. The findings of this study indicate that significant differences are not evident in learning among the four different strategies. As such, this initial foray into the examination of the effectiveness of these four strategies indicates that any of the four strategies may be used with equal impact in the design of electronic presentations by instructors who want to help foster student learning.