Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

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

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2013 - 20193

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    Oil to Island: Repurposing Southern California's Offshore Drilling Platforms
    (2019) Delash, Michael Dollar; May, Lindsey; Du Puy, Karl; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This thesis aims to explore an untapped opportunity that exists between the industries of energy generation as we move beyond the fossil fuel era as society tries to change course for a more sustainable and positive future. Within this scope, the goal is to focus on offshore oil platform structures and reimagining them in a context of sustainable energy generation. The primary objectives are to design a satellite campus for the southern Californian universities to learn from the unique site and conditions of the platforms. This thesis will explore the potential of the offshore oil platform in a new light, not as a symbol of the fossil fuel industry as it is today but of a pinnacle of a sustainable design and production.
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    The Transformational Role of IT in Entrepreneurship: Crowdfunding and the Democratization of Access to Capital and Investment Opportunity
    (2014) Kim, Keongtae; Hann, Il-Horn; Viswanathan, Siva; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    My dissertation examines the strategic impacts of IT-enabled platforms on entrepreneurial and innovation activities. Specifically, I explore the behaviors of both investors and entrepreneurs in online crowdfunding markets that have the potential to democratize access to capital and investment opportunities. In my first essay, I examine the role of experts in a crowdfunding market. While conventional wisdom considers a crowdfunding market as a mechanism to democratize decision making and reduce reliance on experts, I find that experts still play a pivotal role in these markets. In particular, I find that the early investments by experts serve as credible signals of quality for the crowd, and have a significant impact on the crowd's investment decisions. In my second essay, I analyze whether crowdfunding democratizes access to capital for entrepreneurs. I find that difficult access to credit from traditional sources induces entrepreneurs to rely more on crowdfunding as a viable alternative, while this effect varies across project types and across areas. In each essay, I analyze micro-level data from online crowdfunding markets with a variety of econometric methods. The results have important theoretical and practical implications for questions ranging from the design of online crowdfunding markets to competition between online and offline channels for funding and regional dynamics of crowdfunding.
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    The New Century Network: A Critical Moment for Newspapers at the Dawn of the Internet
    (2013) Speer, John C.; Chinoy, Ira; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This thesis is a case study of established media during a period of rapid technological change involving new media. It examines the New Century Network (NCN), a consortium of nine companies that published more than 100 newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. Formed in 1995, NCN sought to create an online affiliate network linked to a national advertising platform. Reasons typically given for the consortium's demise include the number of participants, primitive technology and the egos of those involved. But previous accounts have largely ignored a significant paradox. Decades before the Internet, newspapers had faced emergent technologies and remained profitable. This thesis argues a defensive posture assumed by newspaper leaders limited their ability to capitalize on potentially groundbreaking ideas that arose out of NCN. These possibilities included a nascent but abandoned effort to use Internet search as a means of maintaining control of newspapers rich content.