Life is meant to be lived with happiness and joy, but what happens when you don't feel as if you're living, and your life feels worthless and filled with sadness? When your daily routine is disrupted? When things go left instead of right? The mental state of many individuals has progressively worsened over the past few years. There are many reasons for this. One being the overwhelming use of mobile devices and living within a digital world which has isolated us from people and communities. This thesis addresses the lack of human interaction and community support through the design of a mental health museum. The project creates a place whose program provides spaces that support wellbeing while designing a museum that explores the issues and history of mental health. The museum provides these spaces that focus on the journey towards a state of well being. While not instantaneous, the journey within the museum is both physical and psychological. The journey within the museum is experienced through a series of ramps that flow through the building, acting as a transition from one exhibit space to the other. The ramps allow the visitors to slowly move between galleries, providing time to walk and, perhaps, reflect and understand the contents of the exhibits, as well as to benefit the visitors in other ways. One of the overarching goals for the museum was to create a safe space or spaces for those who visit. As well as a journey that becomes one of mindfulness and consists of learning, reflecting, engaging, and decompressing from the stress of living in today's world. The thesis and museum addresses four ideas: Learning through exhibits and talks hosted in the lecture hall or resources within the bookstore. Reflecting while traveling to the next gallery space, or on the rooftop garden. Engaging in wellness areas through interactive displays, galleries, or use of a wellness room. Decompressing within the planted areas and green spaces intertwined with the museum's journey and the adjacent woodland with its walking trail to the nearby community garden. This thesis opens up a conversation about mental health through the design of the museum to spark the topic as a positive, encouraging and natural subject of discussion. / Master of Architecture / The mental state of many individuals has progressively worsened over the past few years. This thesis addresses the lack of human interaction and community support through the design of a mental health museum. When it comes to mental illness, from the start of symptoms and receiving treatment there is an average 11 year gap. The stigma about mental illness and mental health can be seen as a cause for this delay. Everyone is affected by mental health in one way or another. Specifically communities of low-income. The resources for mental health in these neighborhoods are low. Which is why the museum is located in Washington, D.C. across the Anacostia River in Ward 8; one of two of the poorest wards in DC. The St. Elizabeths Hospital East Campus, located in ward 8, is in the process of being redeveloped. In redevelopment is my addition of a mental health museum that contains spaces for learning, reflecting, engaging, and decompressing. This thesis opens up a conversation about mental health through the design of the museum to spark the topic as a positive, encouraging and natural subject of discussion. The project is designed to create spaces for connecting with others who have found themselves wanting to learn about the history of mental health as well as view artwork created about mental health.

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Yes / This study investigates how men’s body image develops over time. 14 men aged between 45 and 67 years completed in-depth interviews where they discussed their body image since childhood, prompted in some cases by photographs of themselves at different ages that they brought to the interviews. Transcripts were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. From the participants’ accounts it was evident that body concerns did not steadily improve or worsen, but waxed and waned over time. Results are discussed in relation to understanding changing body concerns in men’s lives, and the implications of these for future research and practice.

This thesis investigates the use of the numerical modeling tools LS-DYNA and USA in modeling general far-field underwater explosions (UNDEX) by modeling a three-dimensional box barge that is subjected to a far-field underwater explosion. Past UNDEX models using these tools have not been validated by experiment and most are limited to very specific problems because of the simplifying assumptions they make. USA is a boundary element code that requires only the structural model of the box barge. LS-DYNA is a dynamic finite element code and requires both the structural model and the surrounding fluid model, which is modeled with acoustic pressure elements. Analysis of the box barge problem results finds that the program USA is a valid tool for modeling the initial shock response of surface ships when cavitation effects are not considered. LS-DYNA models are found to be very dependent on the accuracy of the fluid mesh. The accuracy of the fluid mesh is determined by the ability of the mesh to adequately capture the peak pressure and discontinuity of the shock wave. The peak pressure captured by the model also determines the accuracy of the cavitation region captured in the fluid model. Assumptions made in the formulation of the fluid model causes potential inaccurate fluid-structure interaction and boundary condition problems cause further inaccuracies in the box barge model. These findings provide a base of knowledge for the current capabilities of UNDEX modeling in USA and LS-DYNA from which they can be improved in future work. / Master of Science

An organization’s internal processes of identity management is argued to influence its communication, which in turn influence the perceived reputation of the organization. The aim of this study is to investigate how the organizational identity is reflected upon and perceived integrated in employees’ daily work. This is done through applying the internal factors of a theoretical model, comprising of identity, culture and image, at an empirical setting. Literature on organizational identity in relation to organizational culture and organizational image is reviewed followed by conducting 12 semi structured interviews with managers from the marketing and human resource departments at Arla Foods in Sweden. The findings suggest that although employees reflect on the identity, there is a gap between reflection and action, meaning that the identity is not necessarily integrated in practice in the daily work due to different understandings of the organizational culture. In relation to the model, it is suggested that culture may not be so clearly connected to identity, whereas image and identity are very closely related. Also, the context in which the employees conduct their work is shown through the empirical setting, to be important for how employees reflect upon the identity.

These lecture notes are intended as a short introduction to diffusion processes on a domain with a reflecting boundary for graduate students, researchers in stochastic analysis and interested readers. Specific results on stochastic differential equations with reflecting boundaries such as existence and uniqueness, continuity and Markov properties, relation to partial differential equations and submartingale problems are given. An extensive list of references to current literature is included. This book has its origins in a mini-course the author gave at the University of Potsdam and at the Technical University of Berlin in Winter 2013.

abstract: Teachers must recognize the knowledge they possess as appropriate to employ in the process of achieving their goals and objectives in the context of practice. Such recognition is subject to a host of cognitive and affective processes that have thus far not been a central focus of research on teacher knowledge in mathematics education. To address this need, this dissertation study examined the role of a secondary mathematics teacher’s image of instructional constraints on his enacted subject matter knowledge. I collected data in three phases. First, I conducted a series of task-based clinical interviews that allowed me to construct a model of David’s mathematical knowledge of sine and cosine functions. Second, I conducted pre-lesson interviews, collected journal entries, and examined David’s instruction to characterize the mathematical knowledge he utilized in the context of designing and implementing lessons. Third, I conducted a series of semi-structured clinical interviews to identify the circumstances David appraised as constraints on his practice and to ascertain the role of these constraints on the quality of David’s enacted subject matter knowledge. My analysis revealed that although David possessed many productive ways of understanding that allowed him to engage students in meaningful learning experiences, I observed discrepancies between and within David’s mathematical knowledge and his enacted mathematical knowledge. These discrepancies were not occasioned by David’s active compensation for the circumstances and events he appraised as instructional constraints, but instead resulted from David possessing multiple schemes for particular ideas related to trigonometric functions, as well as from his unawareness of the mental actions and operations that comprised these often powerful but uncoordinated cognitive schemes. This lack of conscious awareness made David ill-equipped to define his instructional goals in terms of the mental activity in which he intended his students to engage, which further conditioned the circumstances and events he appraised as constraints on his practice. David’s image of instructional constraints therefore did not affect his enacted subject matter knowledge. Rather, characteristics of David’s subject matter knowledge, namely his uncoordinated cognitive schemes and his unawareness of the mental actions and operations that comprise them, affected his image of instructional constraints. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Mathematics Education 2015

In this thesis, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the solution to a Neumann boundary problem for an elliptic differential operator with singular coefficients, and reveal the relationship between the solution to the partial differential equation (PDE in abbreviation) and the solution to a kind of backward stochastic differential equations (BSDE in abbreviation).This study is motivated by the research on the Dirichlet problem for an elliptic operator (\cite{Z}). But it turns out that different methods are needed to deal with the reflecting diffusion on a bounded domain. For example, the integral with respect to the boundary local time, which is a nondecreasing process associated with the reflecting diffusion, needs to be estimated. This leads us to a detailed study of the reflecting diffusion. As a result, two-sided estimates on the heat kernels are established. We introduce a new type of backward differential equations with infinity horizon and prove the existence and uniqueness of both L2 and L1 solutions of the BSDEs. In this thesis, we use the BSDE to solve the semilinear Neumann boundary problem. However, this research on the BSDEs has its independent interest. Under certain conditions on both the "singular" coefficient of the elliptic operator and the "semilinear coefficient" in the deterministic differential equation, we find an explicit probabilistic solution to the Neumann problem, which supplies a L2 solution of a BSDE with infinite horizon. We also show that, less restrictive conditions on the coefficients are needed if the solution to the Neumann boundary problem only provides a L1 solution to the BSDE.

The limited overcrowded radio frequency spectrum compelled researchers to ex plore higher frequency ranges for wireless transmission. In recent decades, visible light communications (VLC) have gained lots of research attention thanks to the abundant bandwidth and the existing lighting infrastructure they offer. Throughout this dissertation, we study the downlink of multi-user VLC systems with the aim of operation and architecture enhancement. In this context, we accommodate the chal lenges imposed by the visible light nature such as illumination requirements and mod ulation constraints. On the operation optimization front, we investigate three VLC setups: indoor single cell, outdoor energy harvesting enabled single cell, and indoor energy harvesting enabled multi-cell VLC systems. We formulate, and provide low complexity solutions to, resource allocation problems for each setup while accounting for scenario-tailored system objectives and quality of service requirements. For the first setup, the temporal average illumination is maintained fixed while maximizing the system SE and dynamic time-division-multiple-access is employed to serve users in an interference free setup. As for the second setup, owing to the favored joint lighting and SE maximization, we solve a multi-objective optimization problem accounting for both objectives. We found that the severity of the illumination - communications tradeoff increases as the available system power budget decreases or the minimum rate requirements get tighter. In the third setup, transmitters average currents and receivers fields of view tuning strategies are developed to maximize both spectral ef ficiency and energy harvesting objectives in an interference limited scenario, where spatial illumination uniformity is required. It is found that receivers fields of view tuning is substantial to performance enhancement in dense deployments. On the architecture optimization front, we propose two intelligent reflecting surfaces-aided VLC systems and derive their power density distribution in the receiver plane. In addition, we prove their power concentration capability and quantify their relative gain with respect to one another and with respect to the reflector-free VLC systems enjoying direct line of sight. Finally, we study the channel impulse response of the proposed reflecting systems and quantify the incurred delay spread through exact ex pression, simplified bounds and asymptotic expressions when the number of reflecting elements grows unboundedly.

Woven Light Interference looks into the light and colour phenomenon interference in a textile design context. This is done by introducing dichroic filters to design structures and patterns when weaving. The experimental design research methodology was used to explore dichroic filters’ design possibility and potential, using a textile weaving technique for a spatial context. The final result is visually presented in a collection consisting of six woven textiles that have multiple expressions with internal and external effects. Together, they propose new methods of working with light and colour in the textile design, without incorporating electronics or being connected to wires, but rather change depending on the existing ambient light of a space.