2011 UMKC Theses - Access Restricted to UMKC
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The items in this collection are the scholarly output of the students of the School of Graduate Studies.The items in this collection are theses that are available only to members of the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus. Click on one of the browse buttons above for a complete listing of the works.
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Item Public perceptions of sailors' wives in eighteenth-century England(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2012-01-20) Riebe, Melissa Ann; Payne, Lynda Ellen StephensonEighteenth-century England was a time of heightened activity for the Royal Navy. Men both joined or were pressed into the navy by growing numbers to defeat the island nation from its enemies, leaving behind their loved ones for long periods of time. This research focuses on the wives left behind and how they were portrayed in English print culture throughout the century. Many studies have been done on the Royal Navy and the lives of 'Jack Tar,' but little research has been dedicated to how the wives of ordinary sailors subsisted in their absences. When studies of the poor and poor women in particular, are often based on generalizations, this research shows that they were quite present during this period. By analyzing newspapers articles, charity records, sea songs, ballads, artwork, illustrations, and pottery, it is evident that sailors' wives were a prominent issue in eighteenth-century naval discussions. I argue that this small group of poor women was not left out of history, and by using these sources it is possible to find a more nuanced picture of sailors' wives that has been overlooked in past scholarship. These women found themselves at the center of debates surrounding sailors' pay and treatment, a significant topic of popular entertainment, and a valuable component of patriotism and national identity. It is possible to conclude from this study that sailors' wives were often used in a variety of ways, to bolster debates surrounding naval practices, to enhance philanthropists' reputations, and as exaggerated forms of entertainment in songs and illustrations. But the goal of this study is to discourage the action of making generalizations about these women and the poor in general, by showing that it is possible to find their presence in history by digging a little harder.Item Policing Troost: a replication and expansion of Herbert's territoriality and normative orders thesis(University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2011-12-27) Short, Craig Collin; Novak, Kenneth J.Police officers in the United States constantly fluctuate in their roles between being formal agents of state control and simple public servants. This dynamic societal role allows significant fluidity in officer behavior, belief system, and activities. Herbert (1997) argued that this dynamic can be explored and interpreted within the understanding that officers affect social control though the maintenance and control of geographic space. Territoriality and the six normative orders function to organize, interpret, and typify officer attitude, actions, and orientations. Using non-participant observation, the author observed the Kansas City Police Department exploring the validity and applicability of territoriality in the social context of urban Kansas City, Missouri. Spending over 120 hours in the field, the author found Herbert's (1997) thesis to be both applicable to the Kansas City Police and informative for social, racial, and political realities in the urban core. Within the social landscape of Kansas City, the effect of territoriality on officers and citizens was inexplicable. Officers' behavior and cognitive processing was shaped by their spatial and social distance from citizens. Going forward, police managers, researchers, and citizens must consider environmental context and its relationship to police officer behavior.Item The use of superabsorbent polymer in standard and pervious concrete(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011) Farney, Christopher John, 1980-; Kevern, John T.The use of internal curing and specifically the use of super absorbent polymers has recently become an important topic in concrete research. Internal curing has been shown to reduce autogenous shrinkage in concrete mixtures, especially in high-strength mixtures where the water to cement ratio is low. Super absorbent polymer has not been studied in regards to its effect on pervious concrete. This research was conducted to examine the effectiveness of a commercially available super absorbent polymer in both standard and pervious concrete. The testing was initially conducted on mortar mixtures, followed by standard and high-strength concrete mixtures, and finally pervious concrete mixtures. Several tests were conducted including compressive strength, autogenous and total shrinkage, restrained shrinkage, moisture loss, abrasion, as well as others. The results followed similar trends as much of the previous research conducted on standard and high-strength mixtures containing super absorbent polymer. The pervious concrete containing super absorbent polymer showed an improvement in compressive strength, abrasion resistance, moisture loss, and total shrinkage compared to a control pervious mixture. If long term testing shows an improvement in the durability of pervious concrete containing super absorbent polymer, the applications for pervious concrete could be significantly increased.Item Topic network: a semantic model for effective learning(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011-06-08) Garg, Taru, 1987-; Lee, Yugyung, 1960-There has been tremendous interest in sharing and retrieving information through the Web. A search engine can be used to retrieve relevant web documents. However, the sheer volume of results returned often requires substantial effort to determine which documents are relevant, what information they contain, and how they relate to each other. Learning about a particular topic could be facilitated if it were possible to automatically find and summarize the important topics in a given domain. This can be achieved by defining a learning model that is based on the automated analysis of the importance of topics and relationships between them. In this thesis, an intelligent and dynamic model called Topic Network is proposed. Given a topic of interest, Topic Network generates a network of relevant terms and associations between them based on available Web resources. The steps involved are (1) Retrieving data from the Web and Ontologies, (2) Selecting relevant terms and their relationships using association and importance factors, and (3) Visualizing the network and associated web documents for each topic in the network. A visual prototype system useful for clinical trial research has been developed for three important domains such as Clinical Trials, Informed Consent, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. We have evaluated the model in terms of accuracy and performance as well as performed a comparison with a traditional learning model. The results illustrate the enhanced efficiency and quality of learning through the Web when using the Topic Network model.Item Life without my head(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011-05-24) Abernathy, Piper Lynn; Bar-Nadav, HadaraThis book of poems understands the human body as artifice, a device to broadcast and receive pain, even as it promises great pleasure. Here, this device is mostly female: a hyper-sexualized screensaver for a voyeuristic gaze, both flesh and holograph, sensual and synthetic, animated and automated, a dysmorphic image made to seem real. Inspired by a culture absorbed with alteration, alternate versions, and revisions, many of these poems are informed by less than literary sources, but sources that are fraught by their own revisionism and sense of disreality: tabloid magazines, internet pornography, film and television, even the warning labels on our household products. Here, women's bodies are reinvented via plastic surgery and remade by chemical, technological, and violent sexual transformation. Their bodies are powered-up even when appearing dead. Questions of power permeate many of these poems: who is in charge of the body on the table? On the screen? Is violence acted on a machine less animal? The variety of forms these poems take (off-kilter tercets, rambling lines of ghazals, stark monosticks, etc.) are physical bodies in and of themselves, aiming to mirror their content in both shape and suggestion. Many poems explore how the language of the body and the language of technology intersect in humorous and disturbing ways, since the gods of technology have co-opted the body to insinuate their way into every nook and make their own artifice appear natural. Despite the often playful nature of the language (rhyme, wordplay) these poems emit a painful broadcast. Real bodies do experience sex as rape, and they do undergo bloody, perfection-seeking surgeries; real bodies do dance ugly with drugs and death, and we are compelled to watch. There is a Jerry Springer sensibility at work in many of these poems: audience aware and aiming for the jugular. The body is always a talk show. iv