An individual’s occupation is often a salient component to ones life. Numerous traditional career developmental theories have been employed in the hopes of understanding the motivations and attitudes individuals have toward particular types of careers. Research indicates that entrepreneurs are primarily motivated by monetary gain, desires to be their own boss, and career independence. The present study utilized qualitative interviews as a means to gain a greater understanding of action sports retail business owners experiences and how their identity as a surfer/skater/snowboarder influenced their career decisions and their motivations to own an action retail business. The data were analyzed using Consensual Qualitative Research methodology (Hill, 2012). Results indicate that the business owners primarily identify as surfers/skaters/snowboarders, opposed to businessmen, and that they were primarily motivated to open their own action sport retail businesses due to their passion for the action sports and interest in remaining apart of the action sport lifestyle. These findings partly contrast previous research regarding the motivations of entrepreneurs’ primary motivation being monetary gain.

This thesis examines the route I took to produce a live activist performance in which twenty-six self-identifying women collaborated to destroy wax assault rifles with domestic products. These guns act as a metaphor for the violence that happens to many women on a daily basis. One in four women will encounter domestic violence, and one in six women will be raped in their lifetimes in the United States. Not only are many of our bodies attacked mentally, physically and sexually, but also the government stakes claim on our bodies. With 138 representatives voting against the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and many of those same representatives also voting against stricter gun regulations it is apparent that these politicians do not see it problematic that women's bodies are targets. When the women come together, their connections are empowering, fierce, sometimes gentle, and always meaningful. As women, we may be targeted, but when we are together, and our voices are loud -- and in unison, we are strong.

Osteoarthritis is a progressive degenerative joint disease which causes pain, inflammation, and eventual loss of joint function. This debilitating disease affects approximately 3% of U.S. adults over 30 years old, with direct medical costs of over $100 billion each year. Post-traumatic osteoarthritis is a sub-set of osteoarthritis initiated by injuries such as a fracture of the joint surface. When a surgeon reconstructs a fractured joint, there are often residual incongruities on the surface, which can lead to elevated contact stresses. Increased cartilage contact stress has been shown to be a major risk factor for developing post-traumatic osteoarthritis. Computational modeling offers a method of detecting elevated contact stresses and thereby assessing the associated risk of a patient developing post-traumatic osteoarthritis. Discrete element analysis (DEA) is a computational method capable of fast and reliable contact stress predictions that has been used successfully to predict knee and ankle osteoarthritis. The purpose of this study was to validate the accuracy of DEA models of both intact and fractured hips by directly comparing experimentally measured intra-articular contact stresses in human cadaveric hips to corresponding DEA predictions. Overall correlation was greater than 90% for both intact and fractured hips. The validated DEA algorithm was then applied to a series of 3 patients with a hip fracture and another series of 19 patients with surgical hip re-alignment. As anticipated, changes in contact stress correlated well with pain and function (p < 0.05). This validated DEA model appears to be a clinically useful tool for identifying patients who are at higher risk for developing osteoarthritis as a result of elevated joint contact stresses.

A learning disability (LD) is any disability resulting from a primary impairment in comprehending or expressing language. Many studies have looked at atypical language processes in children - particularly those with Specific Language Impairment and Dyslexia - but few have considered to how language demands, and therefore the impact of LD, change as children or adolescents transition into the postsecondary setting where auditory language abilities are often a necessary component for success. In this study we posited that students with LD would have a more difficult time learning information from a typical lecture format, and that contributors such as extant vocabulary, short-term verbal memory, and attention would all predict outcomes for post-lecture test performance. Participants were 34 individuals with LD and 34 individuals who were typically developing (ND). Each participant watched a 30-minute lecture. Before the lecture, a baseline-test of general topic knowledge was given. Afterwards a post-test was given regarding specific information from the lecture. Additionally, multiple standardized tests and ratings were given to each participant to look at individual differences that contributed to outcomes on the post-test. We found that LD students learned less information from the lecture than did the ND students, as measured in both recall and recognition formats. Post-test performance for all students was predicted based on vocabulary and attention. Verbal memory was an additional predictor for LD participants.

This dissertation provides a comparative study of letters and digital media as infrastructures of modern Chinese romance. It examines young Chinese lovers’ experiences with digital media in comparison with their forebears’ experiences with love letters in order to understand how the increased ease of communication shapes Chinese romantic relating. Based on historical documents and in-depth interviews, this dissertation argues that the Internet and mobile technology augment Chinese lovers’ capacities to contact each other over distance, to express emotions that are restrained by conventions, and to create private alcoves in public places. These augmented capacities alter various boundaries in and around romantic relationship and intensify Chinese lovers’ negotiation between individuality and relationship, between disclosure and concealment, and between the public and private realms of life. Specifically, young Chinese lovers are better able to maintain a continual sense of togetherness but have more difficulty protecting personal boundaries and being alone. They find it easier to articulate feelings that are untoward in face-to-face speech, but they also find it harder to prove the sincerity of love in text and to avoid confrontation in impulsive message exchange. They have more access to a private space, albeit virtual, and more chances to publicize their romantic lives, but by doing so they also contribute to diminished sociality in offline public spaces and have to rely on the kindness of strangers for privacy more than ever before. For young Chinese lovers, digital media promise the freedoms that are regulated and controlled by social institutions in their offline worlds, but seeking these freedoms via digital media poses chges to their relationships with themselves, with each other, and with the larger social and public worlds they live in. These chges for romantic relating, as this dissertation argues, manifest the problems of the physical and the material while digital media facilitate spiritual contact over distance. The boundaries of personal accessibility are rooted in the limitation of human attention and ultimately in human mortality; the problem of sincerity in verbalized love lies in the difficulty of invoking deeds as the culturally preferred signifier of love; private nooks in public spaces are problematic both because bodily presence in physical locales entails expectations of sociality and because information storage in virtual venues requires a material apparatus that is beyond the control of individuals. As digital media reduce physical distance as the obstacle to lovers’ spiritual contact, they also intensify the tension between the spiritual and the physical aspects of communication and relationships. Overall, this dissertation provides a tripartite approach to the study of mediation and sociality based on three dimensions of communication: contact, content, and context. It emphasizes the importance of examining the ways in which communication media enable individuals to connect with each other, to express themselves, and to privatize or publicize their relationships. This approach provides a holistic understanding of how media shape modern sociality and how that mediation contributes to the shift of social boundaries and changes in social etiquette. In addition, this study enriches the current understanding of emerging media, particularly personal communication technologies (PCTs), as a social-technological combination, and proposes the study of the combination in plural and contradictory forms. Methodologically, it suggests the significance of studying both the symbolic and material aspects of mediated communication and of examining various modes, modalities, and genres of mediated communication as the locale where the material channels of media and the symbolic meanings of interaction intersect.

The oboe and English horn works of Ross Edwards are fascinating and challenging to oboists of all abilities. However, Edwards' works have received little recognition beyond Australia. These pieces can be used to expose students to non-European influences in music, especially that of Aboriginal Australians. These works deserve to be considered part of the standard repertoire of an oboist due to their musical and technical demands and their position in the repertoire of the 20th and 21st centuries. Modern Australian music history can be traced back to the time the English first colonized the continent. After that time, the country began its journey toward musical independence from England eventually leading to a uniquely Australian sound. Born in 1943, Ross Edwards is a contemporary Australian composer that has identified his music as Australian. He acknowledges several outside sources in his music, from Australian Aboriginal to the distilled sounds of nature from the Australian Outback. Edwards has created his own musical style, utilizing distilled musical fragments later named icons, and system he uses to compose his works. It is through an understanding of where Australia's musical heritage begins, and how it develops, that we may gain a greater knowledge of contemporary Australian composers like Ross Edwards. This study demonstrates the importance of Ross Edwards' music in the development of an Australian sound through historical context and the analysis of his oboe and English horn works.

By breaking design down from a whole composed of individual parts, I work to create user experiences derived from spaces and the objects within them. These spaces and objects are brought together in their relationship with the human presence. By translating an experience into a physical environment, I, as a designer, am afforded the opportunity to introduce my own perception into the minds of others who enter the space. In working with the idea of creating an experience as visual form, I wanted to create a space that evoked an experience we don't get in our everyday lives, a feeling of ascending into flight. Human designed environments have the ability to transport us from our current surroundings and into a unique environment that can affect us not just visually, but emotionally and physically through multiple senses of perception.

Atmospheric mineral dust has a large impact on the earth’s radiation balance and climate. The radiative effects of mineral dust depend on factors including, particle size, shape, and composition which can all be extremely complex. Mineral dust particles are typically irregular in shape and can include sharp edges, voids, and fine scale surface roughness. Particle shape can also depend on the type of mineral and can vary as a function of particle size. In addition, atmospheric mineral dust is a complex mixture of different minerals as well as other, possibly organic, components that have been mixed in while these particles are suspended in the atmosphere. Aerosol optical properties are investigated in this work, including studies of the effect of particle size, shape, and composition on the infrared (IR) extinction and visible scattering properties in order to achieve more accurate modeling methods. Studies of particle shape effects on dust optical properties for single component mineral samples of silicate clay and diatomaceous earth are carried out here first. Experimental measurements are modeled using T-matrix theory in a uniform spheroid approximation. Previous efforts to simulate the measured optical properties of silicate clay, using models that assumed particle shape was independent of particle size, have achieved only limited success. However, a model which accounts for a correlation between particle size and shape for the silicate clays offers a large improvement over earlier modeling approaches. Diatomaceous earth is also studied as an example of a single component mineral dust aerosol with extreme particle shapes. A particle shape distribution, determined by fitting the experimental IR extinction data, used as a basis for modeling the visible light scattering properties. While the visible simulations show only modestly good agreement with the scattering data, the fits are generally better than those obtained using more commonly invoked particle shape distributions. The next goal of this work is to investigate if modeling methods developed in the studies of single mineral components can be generalized to predict the optical properties of more authentic aerosol samples which are complex mixtures of different minerals. Samples of Saharan sand, Iowa loess, and Arizona road dust are used here as test cases. T-matrix based simulations of the authentic samples, using measured particle size distributions, empirical mineralogies, and a priori particle shape models for each mineral component are directly compared with the measured IR extinction spectra and visible scattering profiles. This modeling approach offers a significant improvement over more commonly applied models that ignore variations in particle shape with size or mineralogy and include only a moderate range of shape parameters. Mineral dust samples processed with organic acids and humic material are also studied in order to explore how the optical properties of dust can change after being aged in the atmosphere. Processed samples include quartz mixed with humic material, and calcite reacted with acetic and oxalic acid. Clear differences in the light scattering properties are observed for all three processed mineral dust samples when compared to the unprocessed mineral dust or organic salt products. These interactions result in both internal and external mixtures depending on the sample. In addition, the presence of these organic materials can alter the mineral dust particle shape. Overall, however, these results demonstrate the need to account for the effects of atmospheric aging of mineral dust on aerosol optical properties. Particle shape can also affect the aerodynamic properties of mineral dust aerosol. In order to account for these effects, the dynamic shape factor is used to give a measure of particle asphericity. Dynamic shape factors of quartz are measured by mass and mobility selecting particles and measuring their vacuum aerodynamic diameter. From this, dynamic shape factors in both the transition and vacuum regime can be derived. The measured dynamic shape factors of quartz agree quite well with the spheroidal shape distributions derived through studies of the optical properties.

Since Woodrow Wilson's (1885) analysis of Congress, researchers assumed that members of Congress look to one another for information, cues, and advice on unfamiliar policy areas. The amount of time and effort that each legislator and their staffers would have to put in to make all of these voting decisions would be insurmountable. Fellow legislators are a resource to turn to for guidance or assistance. Legislators are able to influence their colleagues above and beyond each of their individual preferences. The members of Congress that are most influential will not necessarily be the same for every bill. The significant legislators may be one's co-partisans and the party leadership or they may be a group of legislators with whom they share a common interest. Spatial analysis allows researchers to look more explicitly at the relationships between legislators and their colleagues. I use spatial probit and a spatial duration model to study these issues by examining the factors that influence voting decisions and the timing of position announcements. I look at a variety of different policy areas, including foreign policy, education, and agriculture, over an extensive time period (1933-2014) to test which relationships are most influential on their decisions. I study the interdependence between three different relationships, same party, state delegation, and ideological similarity, and hypothesize that these ties will lead legislators to behave more similarly. The use of the spatial analysis provides an opportunity to test these relationships and see if even after controlling for other influences there is dependence between legislators. In my research, I find that legislators are interdependent regardless of their individual characteristics. When I analyze voting behavior, legislators' behave similarly from one another across all three relationships above and beyond what we would expect given their personal preferences. These positive findings do not hold when I study the timing of position announcements where legislators behave dissimilarly from one another when interdependence exists. The study, overall, suggests that legislative ties are especially important in explaining voting behavior and that it is critical to account for these relationships.

In 2008 flooding occurred over a majority of Iowa, damaging homes, displacing residents, and taking lives. In the wake of this event, the Iowa Flood Center (IFC) was charged with the investigation of distributed flood mitigation strategies to reduce the frequency and magnitude of peak flows in Iowa. This dissertation is part of the several studies developed by the IFC and focused on the application of a coupled physics based modeling platform, to quantify the coupled benefits of distributed flood mitigation strategies on the reduction of peak flows in an agricultural watershed. Additional investigation into tile drainage and terraces, illustrated the hydrologic impact of each commonly applied agricultural practice. The effect of each practice was represented in numerical simulations through a parameter adjustment. Systems were analyzed at the field scale, to estimate representative parameters, and applied at the watershed scale. The impact of distributed flood mitigation wetlands reduced peak flows by 4 % to 17 % at the outlet of a 45 km2 watershed. Variability in reduction was a product of antecedent soil moisture, 24-hour design storm total depth, and initial structural storage capacity. The highest peak flow reductions occurred in scenarios with dry soil, empty project storage, and low rainfall depths. Peak flow reductions were estimated to dissipate beyond a total drainage area of 200 km2, approximately 2 km downstream of the small watershed outlet. A numerical tracer analysis identified the contribution of tile drainage to stream flow (QT/Q) which varied between 6 % and 71 % through an annual cycle. QT/Q responded directly to meteorological forcing. Precipitation driven events produced a strong positive logarithmic correlation between QT/Q and drainage area. The addition of precipitation into the system saturated near surface soils, increased lateral soil water movement, and reduced the contribution of instream tile flow. A negative logarithmic trend in QT/Q to drainage area persisted in non-event durations. Simulated gradient terraces reduced and delayed peak flows in subcatchments of less than 3 km2 of drainage area. The hydrographs were shifted responding to rainfall later than non-terraced scenarios, while retaining the total volumetric outflow over longer time periods. The effects of dense terrace systems quickly dissipated, and found to be inconsequential at a drainage area of 45 km2. Beyond the analysis of individual agricultural features, this work assembled a framework to analyze the feature at the field scale for implementation at the watershed scale. It showed large scale simulations reproduce field scale results well. The product of this work was, a systematic hydrologic characterization of distributed flood mitigation structures, pattern tile drainage, and terrace systems facilitating the simulation of each practices in a physically-based coupled surface-subsurface model.