2020 UMKC Theses - Freely Available Online
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Item On Both Sides - A Novel(2020) Arnone, Chris Michael; Hodgen, Christie, 1974-On August 11 and 12, 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia was the site of a rally for Unite the Right, an Alt-Right (neo-Nazi) group. This group sought to further white nationalist ideals and to protest the proposed removal of statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Numerous counter-protesters filled the streets of Charlottesville, defying the white nationalists. At 1:45 p.m. on August 12, 2017, James Alex Fields Jr. drove his Dodge Challenger into the crowd, injuring 19 and killing Heather Heyer. While much of the country—Democrats and Republicans alike—rallied behind Heyer and the counter protesters, President Donald Trump’s remarks did not. His initial remarks included, “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” A few days later, when given the chance to fully denounce the white supremacists, he doubled down on his own remarks by saying, “Well, I do think there’s blame, yes, I think there’s blame on both sides.” On Both Sides is a young adult novel that takes place one year after the deadly 2017 protests, examining the divided nature of the United States at this time through the lens of its youth. Erica Betancourt is a 20-year-old, Black UVA student marching on the one-year anniversary. Mandy Stephenson is a 19-year-old, white UVA student and Erica’s girlfriend. Over the course of the novel, both women come to grips with how the United States views race and how they both move through a world that tries to pull them apart. Along with Erica and Mandy, other narrative voices are woven in, like a woman who is a Daughter of the Confederacy, a rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel, and a Latina State Trooper. Together, these voices unpack how deeply racism is embedded in the fabric of America and how it affects people from all walks of life.Item AudioCNN: Audio Event Classification With Deep Learning Based Multi-Channel Fusion Networks(2020) Chilukuri, Nagababu; Lee, Yugyung, 1960-In recent years, there is growing interest in environmental sound classification with a plethora of real-world applications, especially in audio fields like speech and music. Recent research works have proven spectral images based on deep learning models for better performance than standard methods. This thesis intends to design a fusion system by combining various audio features, including Spectrogram (SG), Chromagram (CG), and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC), for useful environmental sound classification. We propose the AudioCNN model based on a fusion network consisting of multiple Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with aggregation methods for various spectral image spectrogram features and audio-specific data augmentation techniques. We have conducted our extensive experiments with benchmark datasets, including Urbansound8k, ESC-50, and ESC-10, emotion datasets. We have obtained state-of-the-art results by outperforming the previous solutions. The experiment results show that combined features with lighter network CNN models outperform baseline environmental sound classification methods. The proposed Multi-Channel fusion network with data augmentation achieved competitive results on UrbanSound8K datasets compared to existing models.Item Great Expectations: Women's Help Wanted Ads In Kansas City, 1920-1936(2021) Laurent, Jeremiah David; Burke, Diane MuttiThe question of the nature of women’s paid work has been a frequent point of historical inquiry. Using a source previously only tapped quantitatively, this paper seeks to expand our understanding of how women’s employment was advertised for and viewed during the 1920s and 30s in the United States of America. This new source is Help Wanted and Situation Wanted ads (employees seeking work) from the Kansas City Star between 1920 and 1936. Kansas City is at once a typical midwestern city and also one with unique industries due to its important position in the national transportation network. The research looks at the ads qualitatively, as reflections of sentiments and requirements for certain jobs, as well as part of an active market, subject to all the cultural elements involved in analyzing product advertising. This paper confirms several impressions from other sources, but it also reveals the extent to which women’s employment included sales jobs and raises new questions about the avenues of women’s employment during the 1920s. Most of all, these new questions demonstrate the usefulness of this new source. In the final part of the paper, I outline ways to examine the sources quantitatively. Ultimately, newspaper Help Wanted ads are an untapped source with potential for confirming and building on other research topics that have long been understated, if not ignored entirely. Hopefully, this paper will serve as a demonstration of the value of further research into this valuable historical source.Item Strategic Mourning: America's Journey After the Death of George Washington(2020) Crane, Jennifer Louise; Osborn, Matthew WarnerThis thesis examines the eulogies delivered after the death of George Washington in 1799, identifying themes in the texts and motivations of the authors. The death of the first president occurred during a series of national and international events that challenged the procedures and foundational beliefs of the new American republic. As citizens and leaders faced these challenges, they realized they had differing ideas about the role of a national government and its relationship with the citizenry. Additionally, they disagreed about how to solve problems facing the new country. The first American political parties had formed in response to these differences, with Federalists promoting a strong central government and Democratic Republicans favoring more power for the citizenry, and each party disagreeing about what it meant to be an American. When Washington died unexpectedly, Americans had to quickly manufacture practices surrounding the mourning of their presidents. Losing the man who had led them for many years—and against a backdrop of numerous national arguments—inspired eulogists to paint a heroic portrait of the popular general and president to promote calm and unity among citizens. I argue that in the process of encouraging unity and formulating Washington’s image as a perfect hero, eulogists were manufacturing not only a national identity, but also the motivation for Americans to continue the republic after the death of their first leader.Item The canonical Wnt signaling pathway affects regeneration of mechanosensory hair cells in Danio Rerio(2020) Megerson, Ellen; McGraw, Hillary FayeIn vertebrates, mechanosensory hair cells are located in the inner ear and mediate hearing. When damage to these specialized cells occur, it leads to irreversible hearing loss. Not only do aquatic vertebrates have inner ear hair cells, but mechanosensory hair cells are also found in the lateral line system. The lateral line system senses variation in water current. Neuromast mechanosensory organs comprise the lateral line and consist of hair cells, supporting cells and mantle cells. In zebrafish, hair cells of the lateral line have demonstrated a robust ability to regenerate following damage. Previous studies have suggested that hair cells are replaced via the division and differentiation of their surrounding support cells. Research using pharmacological modulators of the Wnt pathway has suggested that the Wnt pathway potentially plays a role in lateral line hair cell regeneration. In this current study, we examine the role of the Wnt signaling pathway in hair cell regeneration by employing Wnt pathway mutant zebrafish lines. Mutations in LRP5, Lef1 and a negative regulator of Wnt signaling, Kremen1, were used to study the role of Wnt signaling in regeneration of lateral line hair cells in zebrafish. These Wnt pathway mutant lines show no change in proliferation of supporting cells post injury and shifts in the number of regenerated hair cells. The results obtained in this study suggest that disrupting Wnt signaling at distinct points along the pathway leads to differential patterns of hair cell regeneration, including specification of dividing support cells. Understanding the role of the Wnt signaling pathway in zebrafish mutants will contribute to subsequent studies on hearing loss reversal in mammals with inner ear hair cell damage.