Operations Management (OM) is concerned with the processes involved in delivering goods and services to customers (Hopp and Spearman 2000, Shim and Siegel 1999). While recent surge in service and professional white collar work has greatly changed the arena of OM practice, OM research has not yet well address the...
This dissertation addresses the problem of the development of cities in Upper Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C.E. I investigate these cities through their settlement patterns and urban plans. I argue that these cities were not planned or organic, but exhibited degrees of planning. I treat my reconstruction of the...
Visual object tracking, i.e. consistently inferring the motion of a desired target from image sequences, is a must-have component to bridge low-level image processing techniques and high-level video content analysis. This has been an active and fruitful research topic in the computer vision community for decades due to both its...
This dissertation examines the role of market makers in making markets for options and futures on Chicago's derivatives exchanges. Recent institutional and technological changes in the ways that financial products are traded have given rise to the possibility of markets without market makers, raising the question of how these developments...
High-performance scientific computing in a modern age uses parallel techniques at a scale of hundreds of thousands of processors. These large-scale applications have I/O system workloads that are primarily driven by small, sparse I/O operations. While parallel file systems have provided application developers with scalable peak I/O bandwidth for large,...
This dissertation concerns the rhetorical discourses that define a wireless technology revolution in the United States. This inquiry engaged in rhetorical criticism of key documents, texts and exigencies embedded within successive stages of the wireless revolution spanning twenty years. Three sites of discourse were analyzed: the wireless industry's vision and...
Aluminum alloys strengthened with coherent (L1<sub>2</sub>), nanosize Al<sub>3</sub>Sc precipitates may be used as structural materials at elevated temperatures. They are creep resistant at 300°C and exhibit a threshold stress, below which creep is not measurable. Introducing ternary alloying additions, such as rare-earth elements (RE=Y, Dy, Er), that segregate within Al<sub>3</sub>Sc...
Living in a world where the machine and the Internet are ubiquitous, many people work and play online, in a world that is, ironically, often isolated and lonesome. While the Internet, as intended, connects us to information, products and services, it often draws us away from the rich connections that...
By combining cultural theory with empirical data, this dissertation asserts that late-twentieth-century mainstream theatre had the potential to support emergent ideologies in the U.S. context. The study finds fault with those who dismiss mainstream theatre based on its commercialism and shows how a production's mainstream status may position its emergent...
What is the nature of the relation between a verb and its arguments? In this dissertation, I look to evidence from language acquisition for answers.
Any theory of ditransitives must explain certain structural asymmetries noted for both double-object (DO) datives (e.g. Alfonso gave Derek the bat) and prepositional datives (Alfonso...