The first two decades of the new millennium have witnessed an abundance of change in the areas of textual production, digital communication, and our collective engagement with the Internet. This study explores these changes, which have yielded both positive and negative cultural and developmental outcomes, as products of digital dissonance. Dissonance is characterized by the disruptive consequences inherent in technology's incursion into the print publication cultures of the twentieth century, the explosion in social-media interaction that is changing the complexion of human contact, and our expanding reliance on the World Wide Web for negotiating commerce, culture, and communication. This study explores digital dissonance through the prism of an emerging literary subgenre called technohorror. Artists working in the area of technohorror are creating works that leverage the qualities of plausibility, mundanity, and surprise to tell important stories about how technology is altering the human experience in the twenty-first century. This study explores such subjects as paradigmatic changes in textual production methods, dynamic authorial hybridity, digital materiality in folklore studies, posthumanism, transhumanism, cognitive diminution, and physical degeneration as explored in works of technohorror. The work's rhetorical architecture includes elements of both theoretical and qualitative research. This project expands on City University of New York philosophy professor Noel Carroll's definition of art-horror in developing a formal explanation of technohorror and then exploring that literary subgenre through the analysis of a series of contemporary texts and industry-related trends. The study also contains original interviews with active scholars, artists, editors, and librarians in the horror field to gain a variety of perspectives on these complicated subjects.

This dissertation is a textual experiment in noise poetics. It is an experiment in that it results from indeterminate means, alternative grammar, and experimental thinking. The outcome was not predetermined. Noise poetics is the use of noise to explain, elucidate, and evoke (akin to other poetic forms) within the textual milieu in a manner that seeks to be less determinate and more improvisational than conventional writing. This text argues that noise poetics is a necessary form for addressing political inequality, coexistence with the (nonhuman) other, the ecological crisis, and sustainability because it approaches these issues as system of interconnected fragments and excesses and thus has the potential to reach or envision solutions in novel ways. The experiment draws quotations and fragments from a diverse collection of noise theory texts, arranged and assembled via indeterminate cut-up methods based on the work of several prominent artists and theorists (John Cage and William Burroughs among them). The experimental text (contained in full in Appendix B) was then edited and added to in order to craft the textual project into an argument for noise poetics that followed the juxtaposed lines of thought towards possible conclusions and practical applications. This project coincided with and was supplemented by bruit jouissance, a multimedia audiovisual noise project (contained and explicated in Appendix A). The two projects together are two applications of thoryvology (an articulation of noise theory created and presented within the text) and as complementary methods of viewing and understanding each other.

The goal of this study was to compare the morphological and hemodynamic characteristics of normal and remodeled vascular networks in the mouse gracilis muscle. To this end, previously developed models to assess flows and vascular branching were used to assess the normal and remodeled microcirculatory networks. The analysis revealed that the average individual vessel flow rates for vessels of similar caliber and total volumetric flow rates in the networks do not change for vessels of the same caliber after remodeling. Connectivity changes and average diameters primarily change in the larger arterioles after remodeling. A few correlations could be made between architectural and flow properties, however, further modifications in the analysis methods can make future correlations more effective. In order to improve the analysis a parameter sensitivity analysis tool (PSAT) was developed. The PSAT is helpful in teasing apart the individual effects of morphological parameters such as vessel connectivity, vessel diameters, and vessel lengths. In future, another important component that allows the investigator to exclusively alter vessel quantities for all the orders can be added to improve the PSAT.

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a common cause of sudden cardiac death. Much of the disease is not completely understood, which makes treatment and prevention difficult. Many researchers are using technology, such as advanced imaging techniques and finite element analysis, to better understand the disease. While there is much progress being made to look at the analysis of actual excised diseased arteries, there is still not a standardized model to predict the future of any one lesion. The purpose of this study is to explore the possibility of creating a standardized model to predict the mechanical stability of the fibrous cap due to lipid content in atherosclerotic lesions.

Recent growth in the commercial availability of consumer grade 3D user interface devices like the Microsoft Kinect and the Oculus Rift, coupled with the broad availability of high performance 3D graphics hardware, has put high quality 3D user interfaces firmly within the reach of consumer markets for the first time ever. However, these devices require custom integration with every application which wishes to use them, seriously limiting application support, and there is no established mechanism for multiple applications to use the same 3D interface hardware simultaneously. This thesis proposes that these problems can be solved in the same way that the same problems were solved for 2D interfaces: by abstracting the input hardware behind input primitives provided by the windowing system and compositing the output of applications within the windowing system before displaying it. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach this thesis also presents a novel Wayland compositor which allows clients to create 3D interface contexts within a 3D interface space in the same way that traditional windowing systems allow applications to create 2D interface contexts (windows) within a 2D interface space (the desktop), as well as allowing unmodified 2D Wayland clients to window into the same 3D interface space and receive standard 2D input events. This implementation demonstrates the ability of consumer 3D interface hardware to support a 3D windowing system, the ability of this 3D windowing system to support applications with compelling 3D interfaces, the ability of this style of windowing system to be built on top of existing hardware accelerated graphics and windowing infrastructure, and the ability of such a windowing system to support unmodified 2D interface applications windowing into the same 3D windowing space as the 3D interface applications. This means that application developers could create compelling 3D interfaces with no knowledge of the hardware that supports them, that new hardware could be introduced without needing to integrate it with individual applications, and that users could mix whatever 2D and 3D applications they wish in an immersive 3D interface space regardless of the details of the underlying hardware.

The Blue Thermal Vacuum Chamber (TVAC) located in the Space Environments Laboratory at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), may be used for thermal vacuum testing of test articles that fit with in the semi cylindrical test section that has a radius of approximately 18 cm and a length of 61 cm. The potential test articles include CubeSat systems and subsystem. The Blue TVAC can also be used for educational and research purposes. The goal of this thesis project is to develop a thermal model of the Blue TVAC to predict and analyze the thermal response of the chamber. Thermal vacuum testing is conducted to verify the repeatability of a test and validate the thermal model. Thermal vacuum tests were conducted according to the ISO Standard 19683 to measure the temperature at various points in the chamber. This data was used to determine the thermal response of the chamber and the distribution of heat within the chamber. After conducting a total of fifteen thermal vacuum tests, eleven without a test article and four with a test article, a repeatable testing procedure was written to ensure that results from such tests are consistent. A thermal model was developed using Thermal Desktop to predict the temperature distribution within the chamber during the cooling phase, cold soak phase, heating phase, and hot soak phase of a thermal vacuum test. The simulations of the empty thermal vacuum test predict the platen temperature in the Blue TVAC with a thermal uncertainty margin of less than 10℃. The simulations of the thermal vacuum test with a 3U CubeSat mass model predict the platen temperature in the Blue TVAC with a thermal uncertainty margin of less than 30℃. These simulations can predict the mass model temperature with a thermal uncertainty margin of less than 15℃. The thermal model can v be used to analyze how future changes to the Blue TVAC may affect the thermal distribution in the chamber. Finally, recommendations are made to further improve the performance and repeatability of the Blue TVAC as well as the thermal model with specific instruction for implementing changes and verifying potential improvements.

With the increased use of wind turbines as sources of energy, maintenance of these devices becomes more and more important. Utility scale wind turbines can be time consuming and expensive to repair so an intelligent method of monitoring these devices is important. Commercial solutions for condition monitoring exist but are expensive and can be difficult to implement. In this project a novel condition monitoring system is developed. The priority of this system, dubbed the LifeLine, is to provide reliable condition monitoring through an easy-to-install and low-cost system. This system utilizes a microcontroller to collect acceleration data to detect imbalances on turbines blades. Two graphical user interfaces are created. One improves control with a small wind turbine while the other interfaces with the LifeLine. A custom PCB is designed for the LifeLine and additional rotor speed, current, and voltage sensors are incorporated into the LifeLine system. Future improvements to this system are also discussed.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.