2010 UMKC Theses - Freely Available Online
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Item Meretites' Faience Ushebtis: An Analysis and Determination of their Production in a Late Period or Ptolemaic Workshop(2010) Valentine, Michele Renee Kliebert; Cohon, Robert; Art and Art HistoryThe hundreds of faience shabtis in an individual Late Period burial demanded a significant production effort within a workshop. Petrie's discovery of thousands of molds for small faience objects in Amarna (1891-92) and Memphis (1908-13) led scholars such as Alfred Lucas (1962) and Hans Schneider (1977) to conclude that the majority of faience shabtis were mold-made and then manually detailed as needed. Beyond this, little information remains regarding the exact production methods. Using stylistic analyses and numerous measurements made during my two-year study of the 305 shabtis from the burial assemblage for a wealthy woman named Meretites (380 to 250 BC.; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art), I determined more precisely how they were manufactured. Within a single atelier, four separate teams of craftsmen each produced a distinct stylistic group of shabtis from start to finish. Besides employing different molds, each team completed the desired detailing of the baskets, hands, and tools, and the incised hieroglyphs in their own unique manner. Variations in glazing indicate that faience recipes and, possibly, firing differed slightly among the work groups. The work teams themselves varied in size and structure. The discrete group of craftsmen staffing each team ranged from at least two to more than four workers. While the production tasks appear evenly divided amongst two craftsmen in one team, the remaining groups contained a primary craftsman supported by one or more workers. Thus, the manufacturing process proves unique to each work team.Item InfoKiosk: An Information Kiosk With Text-Free User Interface(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011-01-20) Sunkari, Prashant; Medhi, DeepankarEven though computer usage may seem very intuitive to almost everyone, they have minimum usability requirements that the user's ability to read is in the language being used. In developing countries such as India, where the adult literacy rate is 66%, this basic requirement for computer usage is its major hindrance. Some other hindrances to accessing modern technology are socio-economic inequality and cultural diversity. InfoKiosk is an end-user application as a step towards providing a text-free user interface (UI) using an existing architectural framework. InfoKiosk UI is designed using features such as action images to represent types of information, mouse-over audio for navigation help, and universal help videos throughout every screen of the application. User inputs and outputs to InfoKiosk are kept intuitive and easy to understand. Two kinds of possible user inputs are - audio and mouse click. In response, the user will receive streaming audio and/or video from YouTube or the InforKiosk server. The design and development of InfoKiosk involve working with technologies such as Java Sound API and, Lumenvox text-to-speech translator.Item Family traditions(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011-01-20) Scott, Eric Otis; Hodgen, Christie, 1974-Family Traditions tells the story of young adults who have grown up as Wiccans. Because Wicca remains a new and small religion, the vast majority of its followers converted from Christianity or other faiths, and the number of people who have been raised as Wiccans is vanishingly small. These children learn to hide their religion from their schools and families and confront the negative associations society makes toward neopaganism while handling the disillusion and doubt that comes with any religion. But these difficulties also result in intense bonds between the children of Wiccans, and those relationships form the basis for many of these stories. The works include linked stories of a fictional coven and the author's own experiences of both the absurd and the profound.Item An Energy Efficient Addressing Scheme For a Static Wireless Sensor Network(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011-01-20) Chandrakant, Sawal Nilesh; Beard, CoryIn this thesis, we propose architecture for a static wireless sensor network where sensors are arranged into a zones with the nodes at each zone interconnected with nodes in sub zones. We also provide an energy efficient routing algorithm in the network. In our proposed architecture, every sensor obtains a unique node identifier addressed in a binary addressing fashion. We show that our algorithm can handle addition or deletion of nodes, admits simple and distributed routing, and is easily extensible. We also present simulation results showing the energy required per packet transmission and overhead analysis in our approach is less as compared to other work. This thesis starts with an introduction to Wireless Sensor Networks and the Directional Source Aware Protocol (DSAP). Then a hierarchical structure and Spatial IP address assignment architecture is studied. We then propose our zone architecture which implements energy efficient addressing scheme.Item Classification of Human Postural and Gestural Movements Using Center of Pressure Parameters Derived From Force Platforms(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2010) Saripalle, Sashi K. (Sashi Kanth); Derakhshani, RezaThe human body, while standing, can be imagined as a complex feedback system that produces continuous sway patterns. Subtle body movements that can be caused by sensory cues such as visual or auditory, affective, cognitive, pathological or many other factors besides intended movements can be easily captured in the sway patterns derived from ground reaction forces and the body's center of pressure (COP). The purpose of this research is to classify human body movements, even the subtle movements, using a carefully selected feature set. For the first time, we propose a method to classify postural and gestural movements using data from force platforms collected from participants performing 11 choreographed movements. Twenty-three different displacement and frequency based features were initially extracted from COP time series, and ranking and wrapper methods were used for classification-guided feature extraction. Linear classifiers such as Fisher's Linear Discriminant analysis classifier and nonlinear classifiers such as nearest neighbor classifiers, support vector machines (SVM), and neural networks were explored and successfully applied to the aforementioned movement classification. The average classification rates on test sets ranged from approximately 79% to 92%. All the methods proposed in this experiment performed well by themselves over at least one movement type, but none could outperform the others for all movement types and therefore a set of movement-specific features and classifiers is proposed.