Dollywood: Presenting Regional Culture Through Themed Environments

Dolly Parton's "Tennessee Mountain Home" and her hardscrabble rural upbringing are essential to our idea of her as a celebrity. We think we know Dolly Parton because of what we think we know about those mountains, we also think we know those mountains because of what we think we know about Dolly Parton. Dollywood is an essential southern place, a simultaneously artificial and authentic piece of Americana carved out of the Smokey Mountains by the sheer force of Dolly Parton's personality. After the nearby National Park, it is the largest draw for tourists in the region. The park allows visitors to experience themes from Parton's life, and to experience her idealized vision of the Smoky Mountains. To create, and curate, these environments the park leans heavily on tropes of mountain life, incorporating a carefully crafted blend of stereotype, nostalgia, and anachronism to sell a uniquely personal conception of the mountains.Master of Art

Evaluation of Free Form Deformation and Demons Registration with Discontinuities

Medical image registration plays an important part in most today’s clinical procedures. Registration goal is to find transformation which warps one image into the space of another. Registration of moving organs in human body has a significant part in therapy planning. This task is harder in cases when one organ (tissue) slides along another, i.e. in a case of discontinuities in the motion field. Discontinuities introduce unwanted transformations which often lead to poor or unsatisfied registration results. In this paper we evaluate one form of discontinuities for two well-known and used registration algorithms namely Free Form Deformation and Demons

Closing Gaps in Tennessee\u27s Waste Tire Program and Giving Local Governments More Flexibility to Prevent Illegal Tire Dumping

https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/govpubs-tn-advisory-commission-intergovernmental-relations-miscellaneous-reports/1012/thumbnail.jp

PRIVATE ACTS, PUBLIC PROBLEMS: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AS A POLICY CASE STUDY

This project discusses the relevant literature on decision-making, looks at the ways domestic violence is discussed and how the terminology has changed/progressed over time, and defines it for the purposes of this project. It then examines four states - an individualistic, resource-rich state; a moralistic, resource-average state; and two traditionalistic, resource-poor states. States were chosen based on their full compliance with the National Incident-Based Reporting System, their categorization as individualistic, moralistic, and traditionalistic as defined by Daniel J. Elazar (1972), and their categorization as resource-rich, resource-average, and resource-poor based on 2010 Census data. By using each state as a case study, this research aids in understanding the domestic violence policies in each state, the history of those policies, the factors at work in policy decisions (i.e. information, resources, and the political culture), and the role of domestic violence experts/advocates in the larger policy realm

Generalized div-curl based regularization for physically constrained deformable image registration

Variational image registration methods commonly employ a similarity metric and a regularization term that renders the minimization problem well-posed. However, many frequently used regularizations such as smoothness or curvature do not necessarily reflect the underlying physics that apply to anatomical deformations. This, in turn, can make the accurate estimation of complex deformations particularly challenging. Here, we present a new highly flexible regularization inspired from the physics of fluid dynamics which allows applying independent penalties on the divergence and curl of the deformations and/or their nth order derivative. The complexity of the proposed generalized div-curl regularization renders the problem particularly challenging using conventional optimization techniques. To this end, we develop a transformation model and an optimization scheme that uses the divergence and curl components of the deformation as control parameters for the registration. We demonstrate that the original unconstrained minimization problem reduces to a constrained problem for which we propose the use of the augmented Lagrangian method. Doing this, the equations of motion greatly simplify and become managable. Our experiments indicate that the proposed framework can be applied on a variety of different registration problems and produce highly accurate deformations with the desired physical properties