UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    THE COMPARISON OF TOTAL AND PHASED EVACUATION STRATEGIES FOR A HIGH-RISE OFFICE BUILDING
    (2019) Zhai, Luying; Milke, James A; Fire Protection Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This research work aims to explore the difference between total and phased evacuation strategies in high-rise office buildings and provide guidance on evacuation strategies for decision-makers in determining allowable occupant load. This work focuses on evaluating the principal factors (building height and occupant load) that may have an impact on egress time and provides a comparison of total versus phased evacuation in a hypothetical high-rise office building through a computer simulation using MassMotion. The comparison is separated into two aspects: total egress time and floor clearing time. The current thesis determined that the difference of total egress time between these two strategies increases with increased building height. The difference of total egress time between total and phased evacuation is from 165 to 878 seconds with the heights of building from 11 stories to 31 stories, respectively. The floor clearing time for the affected floors is similar in total evacuation strategy in different building heights. Also, in various building heights, the floor clearing time for affected floors has little difference in phased evacuation strategy. Moreover, this thesis depicted a graph of the floor clearing time in these two fire strategies with different occupant load factors. If a phased evacuation strategy is implemented, a decrease in the occupant load factor can be accommodated which results in the same floor clearing time as for a total evacuation strategy. The current thesis generated an equation to estimate the decrease in the occupant load factor between total and phased evacuation based on the same floor clearing time. There is a limited research work available for the comparison of total and phased evacuation. This research work provides guidance for building planners and engineers in determining total and phased evacuation strategies for high-rise office buildings. For the buildings studied, an equation is provided for engineers to quantify the impact of differences in total and phased evacuations.
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    Comparing Me to You: Comparison Between Novel and Familiar Goal-Directed Actions Facilitates Goal Extraction and Imitation
    (2011) Gerson, Sarah A.; Woodward, Amanda L; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Recognizing the goals of others' actions is critical for much of human development and social life. Origins of this knowledge exist in the first year and are a function of both acting as an intentional agent and observing movement cues in actions. In this dissertation, I explore a new mechanism I believe plays an important role in infants' understanding of novel actions---comparison. In four studies, I examine how the opportunity to compare a familiar action with a novel, tool use action (through physical alignment of the two actions) helps 7- and 10-month-old infants extract and imitate the goal of a tool use action. In Studies 1 and 2, 7-month-old infants given the chance to compare their own reach for a toy with an experimenter's reach using a claw later imitated the goals of an experimenter's tool use actions. In contrast, infants who engaged with the claw, were familiarized with the claw's causal properties, learned the associations between claw and toys, or interacted in a socially contingent manner with the experimenter using the claw did not later imitate the experimenter's goals. Study 3 replicated the finding that engagement in physical alignment facilitated goal extraction and imitation and indicated that this was true for older infants (10-month-olds). It also demonstrated that observation of the same physical alignment did not lead to goal imitation at this age. Finally, Study 4 revealed that 10-month-old infants could learn about the goals of novel actions through the observation of physical alignment when a cue to focus on the goal of the two actions was presented during the alignment process (i.e., a verbal label), indicating that infants gained a conceptual representation of the goal and used structure mapping to extract the common goal between actions. Infants who heard a non-label vocalization during the observation of physical alignment did not later imitate the experimenter's goals. The nature, breadth, and implications of these findings are discussed. Together, these findings indicate that infants can extract the goal-relation of a novel action through comparison processes; comparison could thus have a broad impact on the development of action knowledge.