Although many feminist fairy-tale scholars have theorized how the tales shape the lives of their readers, few have explicitly examined what readers themselves have to say about how fairy tales impacted their choices and expectation. This article turns to fanfiction written by fans of ABC's Once Upon a Time television series to discover how these fans challenge or reify fairy-tale expectations, particularly in terms of gender. After outlining the brief history of fairy-tale reception studies concerned with gender, the article then turns to a close reading of three OUAT fanfiction retellings of Beauty and the Beast that show the couple in contemporary settings dealing with ordinary and magic-less problems, such as a loveless marriage, sexual violence, and the stillbirth of a child. The close reading of these stories reveal that even as they challenge the passive princess ideal seen in many early Disney retellings, they also challenge the ideal of the handsome prince who can ensure a happily ever after. Instead of saving the heroine from impending trauma, the hero must support her as she copes after trauma has already struck. In each of these stories, the couples must empathetically relate to each other's pain, support rather than force the recovery process, and redefine happily ever after as dynamic, peaceful moments rather than an absolute, static ending. The analysis of fanfiction writer and reader interactions reveals that these stories are also used as models for the readers' and writers' own experiences in supporting friends who have gone through trauma, emphasizing that fairy tales are still relevant to their readers' lives.

As the importance of water use in the power generation sector increases across the nation, the ability to obtain and analyze real power plant data is pivotal in understanding the water energy nexus. The Navajo Generating Station in Arizona and the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Alabama are examples of where water shortages have threatened the operation of power generators. The availability of freshwater in the United States is beginning to dictate how and where new power plants are constructed. The purpose of this study is to provide and analyze cooling system parameters using 2008 data provided by the Energy Information Administration. Additionally, the cost of water saved among different categories of power plants is calculated. In general, the conditions which cause cooling systems to withdraw less water are not necessarily the more expensive conditions, and vice versa. While not all the variability in the cost of cooling systems is being accounted for, the results from this study prove that nameplate capacity, capacity factor, age of power plant, and region affect the costs of installed cooling systems. This study also indicates that it would be most cost effective for once-through cooling systems to be replaced with recirculating- pond instead of recirculating- tower systems. The implications of this study are that as power plant owner's struggle in balancing cost with water dependence, several parameters must first be considered in the decision-making process. / Master of Science

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A death in research exacerbates the lack of knowledge and information in respect of the needs and life view of the aged. Two studies were conducted in this population group with specific reference to the 'once-off interview'. Information was gathered using interview schedules focusing on therapeutic skills of social workers working within the system which cares for the aged. Results of a pilot study and an expanded study were compared in order to establish the inter-relationship between the. needs of the elderly, their elemental experiences in line with Bloom's theory (1984), and the role of the social worker. Findings revealed that the majority of "discontinuances" after the first interview were because the needs of the elderly clients had in fact been met. The need for day care services, transport and the expansion of the 'home help' facility was highlighted to enable the elderly to retain their independence in the community / Social Science / M.A. (Social Science: Mental Health)

A death in research exacerbates the lack of knowledge and information in respect of the needs and life view of the aged. Two studies were conducted in this population group with specific reference to the 'once-off interview'. Information was gathered using interview schedules focusing on therapeutic skills of social workers working within the system which cares for the aged. Results of a pilot study and an expanded study were compared in order to establish the inter-relationship between the. needs of the elderly, their elemental experiences in line with Bloom's theory (1984), and the role of the social worker. Findings revealed that the majority of "discontinuances" after the first interview were because the needs of the elderly clients had in fact been met. The need for day care services, transport and the expansion of the 'home help' facility was highlighted to enable the elderly to retain their independence in the community / Social Science / M.A. (Social Science: Mental Health)

A three-dimensional inversion was implemented for magnetotellurics, which is a passive electromagnetic method in geophysics. It exploits natural electromagnetic fields of the Earth, which function as sources. Their interaction with the conductive parts of the subsurface are registered when components of the electric and the magnetic field are measured and evaluated. The all-at-once approach is an inversion scheme that is relatively new to geophysics. In this approach, the objective function – the basis of each inversion – is called the Lagrangian. It consists of three parts: (i) the data residual norm, (ii) the regularisation part, and (iii) the forward problem. The latter is the significant difference to conventional inversion approaches that are built up of a forward calculation part and an inversion part. In the case of all-at-once, the forward problem is incorporated in the objective function and is therefore already taken into account in each inversion iteration. Thus, an explicit forward calculation is obsolete. As an objective function, the Lagrangian shall reach a minimum and therefore its first and second derivatives are evaluated. Hence, the gradient of the Lagrangian and its Hessian are constituent parts of the KKT system – the Newton-type system that is set up in the all-at-once inversion. Conventional inversion approaches avoid the Hessian because it is a large, dense, not positive definite matrix that is challenging to handle. However, it provides additional information to the inversion, which raises hope for a high quality inversion result. As a first step, the inversion was programmed for the more straightforward one-dimensional magnetotelluric case. This was particularly suitable to become familiar with sQMR – a Krylov subspace method which is essential for the three-dimensional case to be able to work with the Hessian and the resulting KKT system. After the implementation and validation of the one-dimensional forward operator, the Lagrangian and its derivatives were set up to complete the inversion, which successfully solved the KKT system. Accordingly, the three-dimensional forward operator also needed to be implemented and validated, which was done using published data from the 3D-2 COMMEMI model. To realise the inversion, the Lagrangian was assembled and its first and second derivatives were validated with a test that exploits the Taylor expansion. Then, the inversion was initially programmed for the Gauss-Newton approximation where second order information is neglected. Since the system matrix of the Gauss-Newton approximation is positive definite, the solution of this system of equations could be carried out by the conventional solver pcg. Based on that, the complete KKT system (Newton\\\'s method) was set up and preconditioned sQMR solved this system of equations.

The optimal estimation theory of the Wiener-Kalman filter is extended to cover the situation in which the number of memory elements in the estimator is restricted. A method, based on the simultaneous diagonalisation of two symmetric positive definite matrices, is given which allows the weighted least square estimation error to be minimised. A control system design method is developed utilising this estimator, and this allows the dynamic controller in the feedback path to have a low order. A 12-order once-through boiler model is constructed and the performance of controllers of various orders generated by the design method is investigated. Little cost penalty is found even for the one-order controller when compared with the optimal Kalman filter system. Whereas in the Kalman filter all information from past observations is stored, the given method results in an estimate of the state variables which is a weighted sum of the selected information held in the storage elements. For the once-through boiler these weighting coefficients are found to be smooth functions of position, their form illustrating the implicit model reduction properties of the design method. Minimal-order estimators of the Luenberger type also generate low order controllers and the relation between the two design methods is examined. It is concluded that the design method developed in this thesis gives better plant estimates than the Luenberger system and, more fundamentally, allows a lower order control system to be constructed. Finally some possible extensions of the theory are indicated. An immediate application is to multivariable control systems, while the existence of a plant state estimate even in control systems of very low order allows a certain adaptive structure to be considered for systems with time-varying parameters.

This thesis is focused on two topics: (i) synthesis and characterization of bilayer graphene and pyrolytic carbon by atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition, and (ii) application of graphene in the fabrication of a buckyball memory device. Monolayer and bilayer graphene are semi-metal with zero bandgap. One can induce a bandgap in bilayer graphene by applying a gate voltage in the stacking direction. Thus, bandgap and Fermi level in bilayer graphene can be controlled simultaneously with a double-gate device, making it a useful material for future semiconducting applications. Controlled synthesis of bilayer graphene would be the first step to fabricate bilayer graphene based devices. In this context, we report a uniform and low-defect synthesis of bilayer graphene on evaporated nickel films. Ultra-fast cooling is employed to control the number of layers and sample uniformity. The process is self-limiting, which leads to bilayer graphene synthesis over a wide range of growth-time and precursor flow-rate. Pryolytic carbon is another important carbon nanomaterial, due to its diverse applications in electronic and biomedicalengineering. We employ chemical vapor deposition with ultra-fast cooling technique to synthesize pyrolytic carbon. Furthermore, we elucidate a method to calculate the in-plane crystal size by using Raman spectroscopy. Finally, the use of bilayer graphene in a write-once read-many memory device has been demonstrated. The device showed irreversible switching from low-resistance to high-resistance state, with hysteresis in the transport characteristics. The control sample showed random switching and hysteresis due to electromigration of metal atoms into the active material of the device. We attribute the reliability and performance of the reported device to the ultra-smooth graphene contacts, which additionally inhibits electromigration from the underlying metallic film. Moreover, the memory device showed excellent endurance and retention characteristics.

Flash memories have become the main type of non-volatile memories. They are widely used in mobile, embedded and mass-storage devices. Flash memories store data in floating-gate cells, where the amount of charge stored in cells – called cell levels – is used to represent data. To reduce the level of any cell, a whole cell block (about 106 cells) must be erased together and then reprogrammed. This operation, called block erasure, is very costly and brings significant challenges to cell programming and rewriting of data. To address these challenges, rank modulation and rewriting codes have been proposed for reliably storing and modifying data. However, for these new schemes, many problems still remain open. In this work, we study error-correcting rank-modulation codes and rewriting codes for flash memories. For the rank modulation scheme, we study a family of one- error-correcting codes, and present efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. For rewriting, we study a family of linear write-once memory (WOM) codes, and present an effective algorithm for rewriting using the codes. We analyze the performance of our solutions for both schemes.