Design history and the human experience

This thesis, Design History and the Human Experience, is a course which offers a new approach to teaching design history by presenting the material through a historical/popular culture lens. The research and content organizing methodology will show how design is part of a larger context reflecting and creating the culture we live in. When design history includes an emphasis on the historical and cultural contexts, the designer\u27s work takes on deeper meaning and relevance. The underlying philosophy of the thesis, Design History and The Human Experience, argues that design does not occur in a vacuum but emerges from many social, cultural and historical influences. This thesis demonstrates the relationship between design and these influences, and offers a methodology for presenting and teaching the material. The course also takes into account the importance of critical mediation and considers at the circumstances surrounding the critical evaluation of the designers\u27 work, for it is through this evaluation process that certain work is given prominence in design history while other designers go unmentioned

The Railroad in American Poetry

In many ways travel by train is a speeded-up version of what we are all doing – a here and now experience of what it\u27s like to be human. Trains tend to make us reflective and introspective. For over 150 years poets have used railroad imagery in an attempt to enter into the universal experience of trains. This thesis will examine the remarkably strong hold the railroad image has had on the consciousness of poets, ranging from the Transcendentalists to contemporary American poets. For many of the nineteenth-century poets, the image of the railroad expresses the promise and the danger of technology in modern industrial society, while the contemporary poets do not generally write poems “about” the railroad, but use train imagery to journey through the psychic landscape of the country and one\u27s own mind and being. Today\u27s train poems reveal why they must take a journey through the landscape of the self in order to be fully awake in the world. There are hundreds of railroad poems out there that reveal poets\u27 psychic journeys. Almost every major and minor American poet since Emerson has either written a train poem or has used railroad imagery in their poems. Trains continue to fascinate our poets\u27 imaginations despite the railroad\u27s demise, because they still represent profound metaphors in American consciousness- symbols of speed and power personifying industrial society itself; yet at the same time trains remain a symbol of time\u27s passage upon our\u27 scarred, native soil. In examining railroad verse, we will look at how the consciousness of the poet explores what trains are, because like any good poem, railroad poems also probe into the language depths of the unconscious mind, which is the repository of primal, sensory images, and reach forth toward a harmony or wholeness with the rational, ordering, conscious mind. The first four chapters of the thesis invite us to travel along the nineteenth-century railroad of Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman. On their trains we find that the image of the railroad is incorporated harmoniously into the landscape. Succeeding chapters examine the poetry of the twentieth-century. I separated the chapters into the following themes to represent the diversity of the railroad in American poetry: Come Serve the Muse,Again;” Arrivals and Departures at the Station; Sketches of American People and American Landscapes; Troop Trains and Holocaust Trains;” and Journeying Through the Landscape of Consciousness. In these chapters the image of the train will take us on an inward journey of personal and spiritual freedom

Image-Based Scene Analysis for Computer-Assisted Laparoscopic Surgery

This thesis is concerned on image-based scene analysis for computer-assisted laparoscopic surgery. The focus lies on how to extract different types of information from laparoscopic video data. Methods for semantic analysis can be used to determine what instruments and organs are currently visible and where they are located. Quantitative analysis provides numerical information on the size and distances of structures. Workflow analysis uses information from previously seen images to estimate the progression of surgery. To demonstrate that the proposed methods function in real-world scenarios, multiple evaluations on actual laparoscopic image data recorded from surgeries were performed. The proposed methods for semantic and quantitative analysis were successfully evaluated in live phantom and animal studies and also used during a live gastric bypass on a human patient

Real-Time Polarimetry of Hyperpolarized 13C Nuclear Spins Using an Atomic Magnetometer

We introduce a method for nondestructive quantification of nuclear spin polarization, of relevance to hyperpolarized spin tracers widely used in magnetic resonance from spectroscopy to in vivo imaging. In a bias field of around 30 nT we use a high-sensitivity miniaturized 87Rb-vapor magnetometer to measure the field generated by the sample, as it is driven by a windowed dynamical decoupling pulse sequence that both maximizes the nuclear spin lifetime and modulates the polarization for easy detection. We demonstrate the procedure applied to a 0.08 M hyperpolarized [1-13C]-pyruvate solution produced by dissolution dynamic nuclear polarization, measuring polarization repeatedly during natural decay at Earth's field. Application to real-time and continuous quality monitoring of hyperpolarized substances is discussed

Change of shell structure and magnetic moments of odd-N deformed nuclei towards neutron drip line

Examples of the change of neutron shell-structure in both weakly-bound and resonant neutron one-particle levels in nuclei towards the neutron drip line are exhibited. It is shown that the shell-structure change due to the weak binding may lead to the deformation of those nuclei with the neutron numbers $N \approx$ 8, 20, 28 and 40, which are known to be magic numbers in stable nuclei. Nuclei in the "island of inversion" are most easily and in a simple manner understood in terms of deformation. As an example of spectroscopic properties other than single-particle energies, magnetic moments of some weakly-bound possibly deformed odd-N nuclei with neutron numbers close to those traditional magic numbers are given, which are calculated using the wave function of the last odd particle in deformed Woods-Saxon potentials.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure