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.
Browse
14 results
Search Results
Item EXAMINATION OF PHOTOCHEMISTRY AND METEOROLOGY OF ATMOSPHERIC POLLUTANTS FROM THE NORTH CHINA PLAIN(2020) Benish, Sarah Elizabeth; Dickerson, Russell R; Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Increasingly severe air pollution over metropolitan regions in China has raised attention in light of its local and regional impacts on health and climate. Computer models can simulate complex interactions between photochemistry and meteorology to inform policy decisions in reducing ground-level pollution. However, models rely on an accurate portrayal of emissions that often possess large uncertainties over regions with evolving pollution characteristics. This work is comprised of a quantitative analysis of air pollutants in the North China Plain that strives to improve such uncertainties by identification of important sources and meteorological conditions for pollution through the combination of observations and models. Measurements used in this dissertation focus on in situ observations from the Spring 2016 Air chemistry Research in Asia (ARIAs) campaign, which sampled atmospheric composition across the heavily populated and industrialized Hebei Province in the North China Plain. High amounts of ozone (O3) precursors were found throughout and even above the planetary boundary layer, continuing to generate O3 at high rates to be potentially transported downwind. Evidence for the importance of anthropogenic VOCs on O3 production is presented. Concentrations of NOx and VOCs even in the rural areas of this highly industrialized province promote widespread O3 production and in order to improve air quality over Hebei, both NOx and VOCs should be regulated. The ARIAs airborne measurements also provide a critical opportunity to characterize chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) over a suspected CFC-11 source region in China, finding mixing ratios were well above 2016 global background levels. Based on correlations of CFCs with compounds used in their manufacture, I identify likely source regions of new CFCs production and release, in violation of the Montreal Protocol. Finally, I examine the influence of meteorology on surface and aloft measurements during ARIAs. A multiday persistent high pressure episode is presented as a case study to examine the influence of regional transport on air quality measured during ARIAs. This dissertation provides valuable information for understanding one of the most polluted regions in China. Coordinated field and modeling efforts can together provide scientific guidance to inform pollution control measures to meet air quality targets in China.Item Employment Writing in Group Outplacement Training Programs(2017) Brearey, Oliver James; Wible, Scott A; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation provides an empirical account of rhetorical and writing practices in outplacement, which comprises a collection of for-profit and governmental organizations that offer consulting and counseling services to aid displaced professional workers—who are usually highly experienced in their fields—in finding new employment. Outplacement organizations offer training and support in job application letter, résumé, and networking script writing; capabilities assessment; job-finding strategies; networking and interview preparation; and ongoing opportunities for out-of-work people to provide each other with mutual support. Neither job-placement agencies nor recruiters, outplacement training programs are sites of teaching and learning that prepare experienced professionals to find new employment independently. In outplacement, out-of-work people learn to apply their professional capabilities to the task of finding new employment. Through participant observation in group outplacement training programs, interviews with outplacement practitioners and participants, and analyses of published outplacement training manuals and other textual artifacts produced by outplacement organizations, I discern three distinct ways in which outplacement consultants, the providers of the service, help outplacement candidates, the service’s recipients, to engage in rhetorical and writing-based job-finding practices. First, as they compose in practical job-finding genres by writing résumés, job application letters, and networking scripts, outplacement candidates learn to both identify their professional capabilities and connect them to new workplace opportunities. Second, as they compose in reflective genres, including those of life writing, outplacement candidates learn to negotiate tensions between their personal goals and the contemporary realities of professional employment. Third, as they learn job-search strategies that include tasks such as composing audio-visual job-finding texts and participating in both traditional and distance-mediated, multimodal employment interviews, outplacement candidates become familiar with technological innovations in personnel recruitment and learn how to adapt, throughout their careers, to the continually changing contexts of professional hiring practices. My dissertation makes a unique contribution to rhetoric and writing studies by focusing on the rhetorical and writing work that out-of-work people do at key moments of transition in their professional lives as they move from workforce displacement, through unemployment and outplacement, and toward reemployment.Item Electracy in Praxis: Pedagogical Relays for an Undergraduate Writing Curriculum(2016) Geary, Thomas Michael; Logan, Shirley W.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The paradigm shift from traditional print literacy to the postmodern fragmentation, nonlinearity, and multimodality of writing for the Internet is realized in Gregory L. Ulmer’s electracy theory. Ulmer’s open invitation to continually invent the theory has resulted in the proliferation of relays, or weak models, by electracy advocates for understanding and applying the theory. Most relays, however, remain theoretical rather than practical for the writing classroom, and electracy instruction remains rare, potentially hindering the theory’s development. In this dissertation, I address the gap in electracy praxis by adapting, developing, and remixing relays for a functional electracy curriculum with first-year writing students in the Virginia Community College System as the target audience. I review existing electracy relays, pedagogical applications, and assessment practices – Ulmer’s and those of electracy advocates – before introducing my own relays, which take the form of modules. My proposed relay modules are designed for adaptability with the goals of introducing digital natives to the logic of new media and guiding instructors to possible implementations of electracy. Each module contains a justification, core competencies and learning outcomes, optional readings, an assignment with supplemental exercises, and assessment criteria. My Playlist, Transduction, and (Sim)ulation relays follow sound backward curricular design principles and emphasize core hallmarks of electracy as juxtaposed alongside literacy. This dissertation encourages the instruction of new media in Ulmer’s postmodern apparatus in which student invention via the articulation of fragments from various semiotic modes stems from and results in new methodologies for and understandings of digital communication.Item Going to the Source: A Case Study of Four Faculty and Their Approaches to Writing Instruction(2015) Callow, Megan; O'Flahavan, John; Malen, Betty; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines four college professors’ approaches to writing instruction in the disciplines of history and engineering. An investigation of writing instruction in two disparate disciplinary contexts contributes to our understanding of how instructors approach writing instruction in the disciplines, and which factors encourage and inhibit writing instruction. This study proposes and assesses the validity of a guiding conceptual framework, which posits that the primary factors influencing faculty’s approaches to writing instruction are academic biography, disciplinary identity, and educational ideology. The study employs a qualitative case study methodology, and data sources include in-depth interviews, field observations, and analysis of documents such as syllabi and writing prompts. This dissertation is founded on a premise that the instructor is an under-studied but essential player in the Writing in the Disciplines movement. The study reveals more about the nature of discipline-based writing instruction, and proposes a conceptual framework for future research on instructional approaches to disciplinary writing.Item Lear(2015) Oberhauser, Michael James; Wilson, Mark E.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This opera, Lear, draws its libretto directly from William Shakespeare's King Lear. Some supporting characters and subplots have been removed, and some characters have been fused to reduce the time and forces needed to produce this piece. Parent/child relationships, eyesight, and deception/disguises are important themes in this adapted libretto. The last point, deception and disguises, receives special attention in the opera. Each time a character dons a disguise a "transformation" motive is heard. Simultaneously, at least one of the woodwind players will switch to a traditional doubling instrument to add a timbral change to the visual change on the stage. Two characters in the opera never sing, but only speak: Lear and Gloucester. This separates them from the rest of the cast to highlight their paternal nature. The music for spoken sections includes liberal use of fermatas, vamps, and other forms of repetition to underscore the speech. Most characters have musical motives and/or signature styles to aid in their characterization. Goneril and Edmund are intelligent, eloquent, and manipulative. heir music can be triadic and diatonic when they need it to be, and their lines are often winding and chromatic. Regan and Oswald, on the other hand, are more characters of action than thought. Their music is more blunt and to the point. The harmony of the opera moves among diatonic, quartal, whole-tone, octatonic, hexatonic, and more complicated harmonies, depending on the character singing or speaking and what his motives are at that moment. At several points in the opera, a rhythmic pattern will continue over a bar that obscures the meter. Sometimes multiple patterns will be present at once. The harmony is at its most complicated when these patterns overlap, or when two characters' personal motives are presented simultaneously. The opera's duration is approximately two hours. The cast calls for two sopranos, two mezzo-sopranos, two baritones, a bass-baritone, and two male actors. The opera is scored for Flute (doubling Piccolo and Alto Flute), Oboe (doubling English Horn), Bb Clarinet (doubling Bass Clarinet), Bassoon, Horn in F, Percussion (one player), Piano, String Quartet, and Double Bass.Item THE ROLE OF PROACTIVITY IN OVERCOMING THREAT: A MODEL OF TEAM LEARNING(2014) Firth, Brady; Tangirala, Subrahmaniam; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Team learning is critical for teams to be successful in dynamic environments. However, teams often experience threats that can lead to rigid approaches to their work. Threats can cause teams to rely on well-known responses to their tasks and prevent them from exploring new ideas and opportunities. Consequently, threats can be associated with diminished learning in teams. I focus on this issue by examining the following question: What enables teams to reduce the negative effects of threat on team learning? I argue that when confronting threat, teams composed of members with higher proactive personality are likely to more positively frame the threat and engage in behaviors that enable them to explore alternative approaches to their work. Therefore, I propose that proactivity can help teams buffer against the negative effects of threat on team learning processes, which include behaviors such as seeking feedback, engaging in experimentation, and discussing errors. I test my hypotheses in an experimental study in which 94 5-person teams work on a command and control simulation. I manipulate a) team composition with respect to proactivity and b) threat, which was conceptualized as a potential loss to personal reputation and public discrediting for poor performance. Results indicate that irrespective of their proactivity levels, teams demonstrated high levels of team learning processes in the absence of threat. By contrast, in the presence of threat, only teams in the high proactivity condition maintained high levels of learning processes whereas teams in the low proactivity condition displayed significantly diminished learning processes and (subsequent) performance.Item Quantitative modeling of mantle heterogeneity and structure(2010) Arevalo, Jr., Ricardo David; McDonough, William F; Geology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mantle-derived rocks, particularly mid-ocean ridge basalts (MORB) and intraplate ocean island basalts (OIB), provide insights into the compositional heterogeneity and first-order structural make-up of the modern mantle; laser ablation (LA-) ICP-MS analysis provides the ideal analytical tool for the in situ chemical characterization of these materials. The silicate Earth, as defined by the MORB and OIB source regions plus the continental crust, is determined to have a representative W/U and K/U ratio of 0.65 ± 0.45 (2σ) and 13,800 ± 2600 (2σ), respectively, equating to 13 ± 10 ng/g W and 280 ± 120 μg/g K in the silicate Earth. Although both the isotopic composition of W and the constancy of the terrestrial W/U ratio may serve as tracers of putative core-mantle interactions, both of these proxies are sensitive to the chemical composition of the mantle source and have yet to resolve a core signal in Hawaiian picrites. The abundance of K in the silicate Earth indicates a current convective Urey ratio of ~0.34 and mantle cooling rate of 70-130 K*Gyr−1, after taking into account potential heat flux across the core-mantle boundary. The Earth's balance of radiogenic heat and budget of 40Ar necessitate a lower mantle reservoir enriched in radioactive elements. The bulk Earth Pb/U ratio, determined here to be ~85, suggests ~1200 ng/g Pb in the bulk Earth and ≥3300 ng/g Pb in the core. A compositional model of MORB, which is derived from a suite of sample measurements augmented by a critically compiled data set, shows that Atlantic, Pacific and Indian MORB can be distinguished based on both trace element abundances and ratios. The geochemical signatures associated with global MORB are not entirely complementary to the continental crust, and require an under-sampled reservoir enriched in Ti, Nb and Ta. A compositional model of OIB, which is based on the inferred chemical composition of OIB parental melts from Hawaiian shield volcanoes as well as the Austral-Cook islands, indicates that the OIB source region may only be ≥1.0x as enriched in incompatible elements as the unfractionated silicate Earth, and constitute up to ≤50% of the modern mantle mass.Item Distant Light: Songs on Texts by Richard Boada(2010) Collier, Robert E.; Wilson, Mark E; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Distant Light: Songs on Texts by Richard Boada is a collection of songs for baritone voice, piano, alto saxophone, and percussion (vibraphone and marimba). The texts do not present a continuous narrative, but they share common themes. Most are set in the rural South and deal with the conflict between nature and industrial development. This piece functions as a cohesive whole, but each song could be performed separately and would be effective out of the context of the entire work. Distant Light is made up of eight songs and is approximately 23 minutes in duration.Item Requiem for Chorus and Harp: Conductor as Composer, Composer as Conductor(2008) Culverhouse, William; Maclary, Edward; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Western music history is filled with composers who also conduct their own works, and conductors who also devote time to composing. This project will attempt to examine the experience of the composer-conductor by addressing the following questions: First, what is it like to compose a piece of music for a group one conducts regularly? How does one's experience as a conductor influence compositional decision-making? Second, what is it like to conduct one's own music? How does one's experience as a composer influence rehearsal planning and performance conducting? The inquiry will focus on the preparation for and performance on May 16 of three pieces: Advent Antiphons and The Transfiguration, both written for the St. Matthew's Schola Cantorum in 2000, and the Requiem for chorus and harp, begun in January 2007 and completed in April 2008, all with the composer conducting. The completed project will include copies of scores, a DVD of rehearsal excerpts, CDs and DVDs of the performance, and a text document examining the questions mentioned above. The text document will address biographical information on the composer-conductor, focusing on experiences relevant to the inquiry; composition and history of the St. Matthew's Schola Cantorum and of his relationship with them; information about the compositions themselves and the compositional process; and a discussion of the rehearsal process and performance of the pieces.Item The Status of Instruction in Composition in Elementary General Music Classrooms of MENC Members in the State of Maryland(2008-05-05) Phelps, Kerry Bowman; Silvey, Philip; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this study was to examine the status of composition activities in elementary level general music classrooms in the state of Maryland. Participants (N=60) completed an online questionnaire with questions in the areas of teacher demographics, beliefs about composition, and frequency of composition activities in the classroom. Responses indicated that composition was present, at a low frequency, at all student grade levels. Relationships were found between student grade level and structure of composition activity and student grade level and group structure of composition activity. Implications of the frequency of composition activities as well as relationships found for music education are discussed. Suggestions are made for increasing the frequency of composition activities by building upon the most common practices identified by this study.