The design of public open spaces frequently does not address the physical and psychological needs of their users with regard to their ages. This research gathered and restated the needs and preferences of teenagers, as an understudied group, in public open spaces, with an emphasis on neighborhood parks. Utilizing a neighborhood park in Roanoke, Virginia, the study developed findings that can influence the design of public open spaces, with the goals of providing social and physical benefits of neighborhood parks for teenagers. This research was conducted through two phases of interviews. The first phase of interviews took place with professionals who had experience in working with teenagers. The data collected in the first phase of interviews with adults were utilized for the second phase of interviews, which were with teenagers. Experimental models of the study site were created for the second phase to assist the interviewees in visualizing the various designs. In the second phase, the design options were presented to the teenaged study group in response to teenagers' characteristics and needs as determined by the outcomes of the first phase of interviews. The teenagers were asked to state their preferences among the design options. The different options for designing neighborhood parks utilized a neighborhood park in Roanoke, Virginia, as a study site. The findings of this research suggest that teenagers prefer to utilize spaces closer to the front of the park, by its edges, entrances, and exits, and the parking lot. These findings suggest that there may be no need to design specific spaces dedicated for teenagers in public spaces; however teenager's preferences should be considered in the design process of public spaces. Based on the findings of this research and the suggested relationships among the design attributes of neighborhood parks and teenagers' use of space, this research suggests that providing public spaces is linked with increased opportunities for the social development of teenagers. The primary implications of the findings of this research could help inform landscape architects and urban planners in their designs of future public open spaces that address the needs of teenagers. / Master of Landscape Architecture

The Conservation easement has become a popular tool for land protection in the past few decades. Whether this development restriction will necessarily decrease the land value is an empirical question. This study employs a hedonic pricing approach to test empirically the effects of conservation easements on land values. The econometric results indicate that conservation easements can slightly increase the land values, but the effect is statistically insignificance. Considering the limited dataset, the interpretation of the results warrant some caution. / Master of Science

This thesis is about openness in the architecture. After traveling and experiencing many different cities in Europe, I was intrigued with open spaces in cities, which offer a stage for different public interactions. I discovered that all these public spaces are formed by the surrounding architecture. This made me wonder about how architecture, as it becomes more independent today, could express and embody this openness within itself. I picked up my site at the end of the King Street in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia, which is currently unappealing to the public. I decided to create a urban plaza for the waterfront in an architectural way by generating a pavilion, which will provide various kinds of information and satisfy needs to the visitors and public. The pavilion has several different services and lies in an area with flood issues. In response to these conditions, I made all the projects suspended between columns and assigned them different heights according to the context of the site and their own functions. The different levels of the projects generate vertical open spaces in order to let the surrounding environment flow seamlessly into the pavilion. The entire project has been organized under a glass structured roof with a central staircase that ascends from King Street to the Potomac River, which has all the accesses to each level. There is a designed channel in the middle bay, placed within the girder to direct rain back into the river. / Master of Architecture

This thesis takes a fresh look at software, treating it as a document, manuscript, corpus, or text to be consumed among communities of programmers and uncovering the social roles of these texts within two specific sub-communities and comparing them. In the paper, the social roles of the texts are placed within the context of the technical and cultural constraints and environments in which programs are written. Within that context, the comments emphasize the metaphoric status of programming languages and the social role of the comments themselves. These social roles are combined with the normative intentions for each comment, creating a dynamic relationship of form and function for both normative and identity-oriented purposes. The relationship of form and function is used as a unifying concept for a more detailed investigation of the construction of comments, including a look at a literary device that relies on the plural pronoun "we" as the subject. The comments used in this analysis are derived from within the source code of the Linux kernel and from a Corporate environment in the US. / Master of Science

Yes / This study considers the effects of financial development on output in a panel cointegration framework, focusing on the implications of trade and financial openness. Our analysis indicates that after controlling for cross-sectional dependence, the typical relationship between finance and output does not hold in the long run. This relationship, however, is re-established once we account for economic openness. While trade openness emerges as more important for developing countries, financial openness is more important for advanced economies. In the long run, causality runs from financial development to output in the advanced economies, while in developing economies causality is bidirectional. There is no short-run causality between financial development and output, however.

Yes / Government legislation and calls for greater levels of oversight and transparency are leading public bodies to publish their raw datasets online. Policy makers and elected officials anticipate that the accessibility of open data through online Government portals for citizens will enable public engagement in policy making through increased levels of fact based content elicited from open data. The usability and benefits of such open data are being argued as contributing positively towards public sector reforms, which are under extreme pressures driven by extended periods of austerity. However, there is very limited scholarly studies that have attempted to empirically evaluate the performance of government open data websites and the acceptance and use of these data from a citizen perspective. Given this research void, an adjusted diffusion of innovation model based on Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory (DOI) is proposed and used in this paper to empirically determine the predictors influencing the use of public sector open data. A good understanding of these predictors affecting the acceptance and use of open data will likely assist policy makers and public administrations in determining the policy instruments that can increase the acceptance and use of open data through an active promotion campaign to engage-contribute-use.

The loudspeakers used in active noise reduction (ANR) headsets are generally identical to loudspeakers used in commercial headphones. Unfortunately, the frequency response characteristics of these loudspeakers are not particularly well suited for open-air active noise control (ANC). Open-air headsets float outside the ear with no contact between the system and the user and allow for regular conversation with others in the environment. This study has identified three limitations on the closed-loop performance of open-air headsets: the distribution of gain and phase in the loudspeaker's open-loop frequency response function, manufacturing variations in loudspeakers that can deviate from design specifications by up to 40%, and the variations in acoustic impedance coupling (ear-to-speaker) among users. This thesis explores the mechanisms that underlie these limitations with the goal of designing open-air headsets that are robust to manufacturing and user variations. Methods are introduced on ways to minimize the effects of manufacturing and user variations and are proven by experiment. With these variations minimized, the controller's design is only limited by the frequency response of the loudspeaker. A comprehensive examination of techniques to model moving-coil loudspeakers is presented followed by detailed studies on how each parameter affects the system's frequency response. A review of frequency domain control system design is then included to help the reader understand loop-shaping techniques. Finally, a compensator is designed for an open-air ANR headset using loop-shaping techniques and the robustness of the closed-loop performance is verified experimentally. / Master of Science

Software Defined Radios are computer based systems that emulate the behavior of traditional radio systems by processing digitized radio signals. A SDR replaces the traditional fixed hardware radio with a system that may be reconfigured, both during operation to provide greater flexibility and by providing software upgrades to add new capabilities without requiring new hardware. These are powerful reasons for using SDR technology; however this flexibility comes at the cost of increased hardware cost and greater power consumption compared with traditional hardware radios. This report presents measurements of memory and processor usage for a Software Communication Architecture (SCA) waveform running on an OMAP starter kit and a desktop PC. The process used to build software, originally targeted for a desktop computer, on an embedded machine with a different processor architecture is described. OSSIE, an open source SCA implementation developed at Virginia Tech, was ported to the ARM processor by adding support for building OSSIE into the OpenEmbedded build system. Once the port for the OMAP starter kit was complete, it became possible to easily re-target OSSIE for a variety of other hardware platforms. For testing purposes a simple waveform capable of transmitting several common digital modulation formats was developed. A SCA device for the Universal Software Radio Peripheral was developed to interface the waveform to the antenna. One method to reduce the cost and power consumption is to limit the amount of memory used in the radio. This reduces both cost and power consumption. This report describes the memory manager portion of the Linux kernel and how it helps reduce the memory used by the system. The exmap tool for accurately measuring memory usage is described and used to measure the memory usage of the OSSIE based test waveform. These techniques help radio developers measure and reduce the amount of memory required for the SDR, reducing system cost and power consumption. Finally, the oprofile was used to measure relative processor usage of the waveform components. Oprofile can also provide details about specific sections of waveform code that use the most processor cycles. This information helps the radio designer reduce the number of processing cycles required. This allows the hardware to use a lower speed part, or add more capability to the radio design. / Master of Science

Für den Umstieg von Closed Access auf Open Access haben sich Article Processing Charges (APCs) als vorherrschendes Geschäftsmodell mit Verlagen etabliert. Die Bearbeitung und das Monitoring von APCs stellt, so die Ausgangsthese dieser Arbeit, Universitätsbibliotheken vor große Herausforderungen, da Publikationszahlen und -kosten stetig steigen. Die Arbeit erhebt den aktuellen Stand an acht Einrichtungen mittels leitfadengestützter qualitativer Expert*inneninterviews. Zur Auswertung der Interviews kam die inhaltlich-strukturierende qualitative Inhaltsanalyse zur Anwendung. Leitende Forschungsfragen für die Untersuchung waren: Wie gestalten sich die Workflows bei der Bearbeitung und dem Monitoring von APCs an deutschen Universitätsbibliotheken? Welche Arbeitsinstrumente kommen zum Einsatz? Sind die eingesetzten Systeme interoperabel? Welche Metadaten werden wo erfasst? Was wissen die Bibliotheken über dezentrale Kosten? Die Auswertung der Studie zeigt, dass effiziente und skalierbare Arbeitsprozesse und -instrumente an deutschen Universitätsbibliotheken nur begrenzt etabliert sind, sich jedoch im Aufbau befinden. Die Workflows sind oftmals von fehlender Interoperabilität der eingesetzten Arbeitsinstrumente geprägt. Die acht Einrichtungen organisieren die einzelnen Workflowschritte sehr heterogen. Eine zentrale Rechnungsabwicklung für alle Publikationskosten einer Universität ist nicht üblich. Für die Bearbeitung und Überwachung von APCs kommen in der Regel mehrere Arbeitsinstrumente zum Einsatz, die von Bibliothek zu Bibliothek variieren. Die wenigsten Bibliotheken dokumentieren alle für das Monitoring empfohlenen Metadaten. Zudem erfasst kaum eine Einrichtung alle Metadaten in einem einzigen Informationssystem. Sehr detaillierte Kenntnisse besitzen die Bibliotheken bezüglich der Kosten, die über Publikationsfonds abgewickelt werden. Hier ist das Monitoring etabliert und funktioniert gut. Anders verhält es sich mit dezentralen Kosten, sodass ein Überblick über die Gesamtkosten des Publizierens oftmals fehlt.:1 Einleitung 2 Hintergrund – Open-Access-Transformation 2.1 Open Access 2.2 Der Goldene Weg 2.3 Geschäftsmodell Article Processing Charges 2.4 Publikationsfonds 2.5 Kosten 2.6 Initiativen 3 Ausgangslage – Bearbeitung und Monitoring von APCs 3.1 Workflows zur Bearbeitung von APCs 3.2 Arbeitsinstrumente für die Bearbeitung und das Monitoring von APCs 3.3 Interoperabilität zwischen den Arbeitsinstrumenten 3.4 Erfassung von Metadaten 3.5 Erfassung dezentraler Kosten 4 Methodisches Vorgehen 4.1 Forschungsdesign 4.2 Erhebungsmethode – leitfadengestütztes qualitatives Expert*inneninterview 4.2.1 Erhebungsinstrument – Interviewleitfaden 4.2.2 Stichprobe – Auswahl der Expert*innen 4.2.3 Durchführung der leitfadengestützen Expert*inneninterviews 4.3 Aufbereitung des Materials – Transkription 4.4 Auswertungsmethode – inhaltlich-strukturierende qualitative Inhaltsanalyse 5 Ergebnisbericht 5.1 Workflow zur Bearbeitung von APCs 5.1.1 Arbeitsschritte 5.1.2 Medienbrüche 5.1.3 Zusammenarbeit mit Dienstleistern 5.1.4 Verantwortlichkeiten 5.2 Arbeitsinstrumente für die Bearbeitung und das Monitoring von APCs 5.3 Interoperabilität der Arbeitsinstrumente 5.4 Erfassung Metadaten 5.4.1 Erfasste Metadaten und Arbeitsinstrumente 5.4.2 Erfassung dezentraler Kosten 5.4.3 Reports 5.5 Herausforderungen bei der Bearbeitung und beim Monitoring von APCs 5.6 Was funktioniert gut bei der Bearbeitung und beim Monitoring von APCs 5.7 Bewertung des Geschäftsmodells APC 6 Zusammenfassung und Diskussion der Ergebnisse 6.1 Workflow zur Bearbeitung von APCs 6.2 Arbeitsinstrumente für die Bearbeitung und das Monitoring von APCs 6.3 Interoperabilität zwischen den Arbeitsinstrumenten 6.4 Erfassung von Metadaten 6.5 Herausforderungen bei der Bearbeitung und beim Monitoring von APCs 6.6 Was funktioniert gut bei der Bearbeitung und beim Monitoring von APCs 6.7 Bewertung des Geschäftsmodells APCs 7 Fazit

published_or_final_version / Urban Planning / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning