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The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fiction and their roots in the American cultural experience. Science fiction in America has long served to reflect the countryu27s hopes, desires, ambitions, and fears. The ideas and conventions associated with science fiction are pervasive throughout American film and television, comics and visual arts, games and gaming, and fandom, as well as across the culture writ large. Through essays that address not only the history of science fiction in America but also the influence and significance of American science fiction throughout media and fan culture, this companion serves as a key resource for scholars, teachers, students, and fans of science fiction

http://opus.ipfw.edu/sasi2015/1001/thumbnail.jp

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is a prevalent tool in tracking moving objects. In supply chain management systems, most major retailers use RFID systems to track the movement of products from suppliers to warehouses, store backrooms, and eventually points of sale. The amount of information generated by such systems can be enormous since each individual item (a pallet, a box, or a SKU) will leave a trail of data as it moves to different locations. Data warehousing provides architectures and tools for business executives to systematically organize, understand, and use their data to make strategic decisions. Warehousing and analyzing massive RFID data sets is an important problem with great potential benefits for inventory managing, object tracking, and product procurement processing. Many industries that have been collecting digital data are having difficulties scaling up their systems because of the large size of the data. Since the data sets are so large and complex, it becomes difficult and expensive to process using traditional database management tools and data processing applications. Cloud computing services and big data platforms, such as Hadoop, can scale to handle much larger data sets. In this thesis, I propose two RFID data warehouse designs, normalized schema and denormalized schema, that can handle massive amounts of RFID data and support a variety of OLAP queries as well as location and path related queries. This thesis implements the proposed schemas using a relational database system (PostgreSQL) and a big data platform (Hadoop/Hive), and then conducts performance tests with the cloud computing service. I closely studied how the schema designs, database systems, data storage formats, and the number of Hadoop nodes affected the performance for each type of queries I implemented. A lot of businesses are interested in switching from relational databases to big data platforms, thinking this will enhance the query performance. This thesis shows that a big data platform does not always have a better performance than a relational database when there are less than a few billion records. Also, when the size of the data is not big enough, increasing the number of Hadoop nodes is not always effective because the percentage of wait-time takes longer than the percentage of query-time. Once the characteristics of data and the database query optimizer are understood, there are extensive opportunities to increase the query performance in both systems

Long before digital imaging was so common, photography relied on light-induced chemical reactions to produce images. For over a century, the photochemical reactions of silver salts dominated this market, but the reactions of other photosensitive salts containing iron or chromium have also been used to generate photographs as far back as the 1840s. These “alternative” processes have been rediscovered by modern photographers who are interested in making one-of-a-kind prints from digitally-captured images. The science of many alternative photographic processes has long been overlooked. The ferric-gum photographic development technique is such a process. It relies on the hardening of the binder in watercolor paint (gum Arabic) when it contacts paper containing a salt called iron(III) chloride. Prior to applying the paint, the paper is saturated with iron(III) chloride, then exposed to ultraviolet light through a transparency of a digitally-recorded image. This produces a faint image due to the bleaching of the iron(III) ions in the paper. Watercolor paint is now applied to the paper and a hardened film is formed where the gum Arabic contacts the unbleached iron(III) chloride. Washing the paper in water removes the unhardened paint, producing an image with much greater contrast. The process that hardens the gum Arabic has been named “crys-gelling” by practitioners, but the nature of the chemical interaction between the iron(III) ions and the molecules in the gum Arabic has not yet been unraveled. To better understand the interaction between iron(III) ions and gum Arabic, we have prepared paper samples saturated with various iron(III) salts, coated them with a suspension of gum Arabic and measured their absorbance of infrared light. This type of analysis, called infrared spectroscopy, provides us with information of the chemical bonding within the gum Arabic and any changes in that bonding produced by the presence of iron(III) ions. We have made measurements of multiple points on each sample and applied a statistical technique called principal component analysis to highlight differences in the measurements between samples. Finally, we correlate these differences to identify changes in the chemical bonding. We have, to date, studied a group of organic salts (iron(III) ammonium oxalate, iron(III) oxalate and iron(III) ammonium citrate) and a group of inorganic salts (iron(III) chloride, iron(III) bromide, iron(III) sulfate and iron(III) nitrate) and will present the results from our analysis of these samples.http://opus.ipfw.edu/stu_symp2015/1002/thumbnail.jp

In this quasi-experimental mixed methods study, we examined the effectiveness of a faculty-to-faculty mentoring program to increase student success rates in online courses at an American university. Over one semester, 24 faculty mentees worked with 6 faculty mentors on improving course organization and implementing student engagement techniques. Using methodological triangulation, we found positive results for two of our effectiveness measures (i.e., mentor and mentee feedback and mentors’ ratings of mentees’ courses). However, in terms of our third measure (i.e., student learning data), although institutional data showed that there was a 4.1% aggregate increase in online student success after the intervention, the intervention group made no significantly greater gains than two control groups. Our findings highlight some benefits and shortcomings of these types of university initiatives and also emphasize the importance of using triangulation to integrate participant feedback with formal measures of student success

Focusing on the consumption and production of sports-based satire, this article stands to support teachers in sharpening students’ understandings of common satirical features, engaging students in the critical reading of online texts, and positioning students to make their own statements about social issues that have infiltrated the athletic arena

The authors contend that making effective and sustainable process improvements requires collaborative design among team members. Collective System Design (CSD) is a creative process that involves a group of people who design a product, service and/or process to meet customer, business, and societal needs. The focus is to include the thoughts and actions of the people who are in the system as part of the design process. This paper describes the tone, thinking, structure and work methods developed by the Emergency Room (ER) team at Franciscan St. Francis Health using Collective System Design and evaluates the phases of the St. Francis Emergency Room design from Staff Engagement in 2007 to the Now ER design in 2012 and to continuous improvement in 2013

This paper describes the eight laboratory experiments developed for the Electrical Power and Machines (ECET 231) course in the Department of Computer, Electrical, and Information Technology at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW), Indiana. The labs were first used during the Spring Semester of 2011 and have been improved every year since then. A brief description of each of the eight laboratory experiments, their respective objectives and the results obtained by some of the students are discussed in this paper. Student assessments for this course/lab are also presented. The feedback has been very positive and encouraging

This session focused on the relationship between gender roles, human rights laws, religious teachings and sustainable development. Moderated by Karen Hamilton (Secretary General, Canadian Council of Churches, Canada), speakers were Nazila Ghanea (Associate Professor International Human Rights Law, University of Oxford, OSCE Advisory Panel of Experts on Freedom of Religion or Belief, United Kingdom), Sherrie Steiner (Assistant Professor of Sociology, Indiana Purdue University Fort Wayne, USA), Anita Soboleva (Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Department of Theory and History of Law, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia), and Lena Larsen (Executive Director, Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo, Norway) Sherrie Steiner identified ways in which women of faith and faith communities are both making positive contributions to sustainable development, but the affirmation of a sustainability that affirms human flourishing requires adjustments to how gender roles are frequently lived out. The social construction of gender roles contributes to both the problem and the solution of the current crisis. Although women are more impacted by environmental degradation than men, when empowered, women tend to bring more stable and broad based changes to the community because of their caregiving roles in social relations and their responsibilities in everyday life. For this reason, investing in women has a multiplier effect for environmental sustainability. Historically, when women have exercised leadership roles in religious movement organizations, they have partly embraced and partly subverted dominant ideals about gender relations. Women often used their homes as basic organizing units within the movement, especially as a survival strategy during periods of repression and opposition from both organized religion and the state. Women negotiate their roles in a complex interplay between family, faith and the public domain. Although religious freedom may introduce an element of flourishing into the struggle for human survival, rigid gender role construction undermines the affirmation of life. Perhaps it is through women’s ongoing subversive embrace of their place in the world that sustainable development becomes possible.

All three choral ensembles at IPFW combined to sing choral music selected around the theme of ‘night,” with Dr. North accompanying at the piano

Class D amplifiers has two pole switching operation of transistors either in voltage mode configuration that uses series resonator or current mode configuration which uses parallel resonator circuit. In the operation of the Class D amplifier, transistors act as switches and they turn on and off alternately. The series resonator circuit comprised of L and C resonates at the operational frequency and tunes amplifier output circuit to provide sinusoidal output current waveform. Class D amplifiers are widely used in RF applications including semiconductor wafer processing, medical resonance imaging (MRI) and radar applications due to their several benefits including capability of delivering significant level RF power per die in comparison to other existing RF amplifier topologies. In plasma applications, pulsed RF power is used to improve the quality of the process results in semiconductor fabrication by enhancing notch effect and selectivity in the etch‐process. Plasma processes during pulsing may require high pulsing frequencies with small duty cycles. Hence, RF amplifiers that give the ability to provide high pulsing frequencies with adjustable duty cycles become very important. In this paper, the design, simulation and implementation of Class D RF amplifier that can operate between medium frequency (MF) to high frequency (HF) ranges for pulsed plasma applications are given. The characteristics of Class D amplifiers under various load conditions for RF continuous wave (CW) and pulsed waves have been studied extensively. The analytical, simulation, and experimental results are compared and agreement has been observed

Music from merry old England played on instruments of the period

This presentation examines how precarities against which artist-teacher-activist Dr. Margaret Burroughs successfully deployed art and activism still threaten to destroy the legacy of racial pride and history she worked so tirelessly to create. By understanding Burroughs’ anti-racist efforts, we can better grasp the available means to counter these ongoing injustices

Recently there has been increased interest in perception of self-motion (vection) in virtual environments. Bubka et. al. (2008) found less vection with an expanding optic flow pattern (visual stimuli approaching viewer) than with a contracting optic flow pattern (visual stimuli receding from the viewer). In another study, researchers found that people with video game experience are better at discriminating contracting optic flow than individuals with less video game experience, but no significant difference between the two groups at discriminating expanding optic flow (Hutchinson u26 Stocks, 2013). We examined effects of video game experience on vection, as well as motion sickness, with expanding and contracting optic flow patterns. Assuming that contracting flow patterns are more common in video games than in real life, we predicted experienced video gamers would feel more vection with a contracting flow than with an expanding flow. In our study, introductory psychology students rated time spent playing video games in the past 6 months. In a 3D head-mounted display, participants viewed one of four displays of moving white dots against a dark background for 8 minutes. Dots were displayed in an expanding or contracting flow pattern. The task was to press the spacebar when participants noticed a change in color of a crosshair in the center of the screen and to press a foot pedal when they experienced vection. Participants rated feelings of motion sickness before and after viewing the display. The results showed that more experienced video game players felt significantly more vection (perception of self-motion) in the contracting flow condition than did less experienced players. Highly experienced gamers felt significantly less motion sickness in the expanding flow condition than did less experienced gamers. We conclude that there may be two different mechanisms governing the effects of video game experience on vection and motion sickness. Because backward self-motion is more commonly experienced in video games than in the real world, there may be increased perception of selfmotion for a contracting flow pattern (visual stimuli receding from the viewer) for video gamers. However, everyone has experience with expanding optic flow as a cue for forward self-motion, regardless of video game experience, and therefore there would be no effect of video game experience for the expanding flow pattern. To explain our motion sickness findings, we observe that even in the virtual world, there is more exposure to expanding flow than contracting flow. If motion sickness is caused by sensory conflict between lack of vestibular feedback and visual cues for movement, then experienced video gamers may have less motion sickness for expanding flow because of more experience with this type of sensory conflict.http://opus.ipfw.edu/stu_symp2015/1032/thumbnail.jp

Amphibians are of great conservation concern due to alarming population declines worldwide. These vulnerable species are threatened by habitat loss and degradation, especially in the midwestern United States. Efforts to restore wetland habitat can mitigate some aspects of habitat loss, but effective sampling techniques and suitable analytical approaches are needed to accurately measure the quality and functionality of the restored habitat. Occupancy modeling was applied to amphibians inhabiting a 716 acre restored wetland system in northeast Indiana in 2013 and 2014. Two types of survey methods, call surveys and tadpole surveys, were used to measure and compare amphibian presence and absence in forested, established wetlands and open, restored wetlands. Occupancy models based on habitat type revealed most species used both types of wetlands, with the exception of Ambystoma LTJ hybrid salamanders which bred exclusively in the forested, established wetlands. Factors affecting occupancy and habitat use varied among species, suggesting habitat preference is species-specific. Across both years, tadpole occupancy rates were the highest in the Northern Leopard Frog, Lithobates pipiens, a species of special concern in Indiana. Occupancy probability of calling American Bullfrogs, Lithobates catesbeiana, declined significantly in 2014, while rates of the Northern Cricket Frog, Acris crepitans, also a species of special concern, remained equal in both years. Across almost all species, occupancy rates were significantly higher for calling males than for tadpoles. Management decisions are often based on wetland characteristics where frogs call, but should also take into account habitat where reproduction is successful. These results on occupancy and metapopulation dynamics will be used to gauge population health and restoration success while providing management suggestions for the preserve and surrounding areas.http://opus.ipfw.edu/stu_symp2015/1074/thumbnail.jp

In order to do more extensive testing in superconductive materials one must be able to produce superconductive material. For a room temperature superconductor, Yttrium Barium Cupric Oxide, YBa2Cu3O7 is great as an entry level superconductor. However in order to produce YBa2Cu3O7, one must heat it to high temperatures for significant amounts of time. Depending on the stage of firing, the components will be held at a temperature greater than 900°C for between 18 hours to 24 hours. Should the temperature fall below, or creep above, a certain threshold the entire material being heated is wasted. In an effort to sleep in my own bed, and see the sunlight from outside Kettler Hall, an automated system, with proper safety lockouts, must be designed. In order to ensure proper temperature without hands on adjustment, a PSoC, Programmable System on a Chip, is used to detect, collect, and actively control a heating element. To ensure accuracy double correlated sampling is advisable. The signal from a thermocouples produces a significant amount of noise at low temperature, and this noise becomes greater the hotter the thermocouple becomes. Double Correlated Sampling can be used to determine the current signal from the thermocouple as well as the base signal, and subtract the noise off the signal, providing a nice clear signal, for the PSoC to determine an accurate temperature and adjust accordingly.http://opus.ipfw.edu/stu_symp2015/1056/thumbnail.jp