An Investigation of Inmate Book Requests as a Collection Development Tool

This study describes a survey of prison librarians and volunteers who have worked for prison book collectives within the past six months. The survey was conducted to explore what popular fiction and nonfiction materials inmates have requested from prison librarians and volunteers from external organizations. Although the study was unable to effectively connect inmate demographic information to the kinds of book requests made, it still collected some valuable insight on which the most popular fiction and nonfiction materials among inmates are. Suggestions made include keeping prison library collections as diverse as possible, since inmates are often unfamiliar with public libraries and don’t know what materials are available.Master of Science in Information Scienc

Fractus I for Trumpet in C and Electronic Sound: A Critical Examination of the Compositional Process

Fractus I is a composition for trumpet in C and live electronic sound. The electronics were primarily created using SuperCollider, an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis. This project investigates SuperCollider's pattern and task functionality as a means of supporting and enriching the compositional process. Fractus I develops several different code architectures in order to randomize as well as synchronize various musical elements. The piece exploits SuperCollider as both an audio synthesis tool and a performance conduit. Additionally, the nature of SuperCollider's patterns and tasks influences the form and content of the composition. The project underscores SuperCollider as a powerful, versatile and open-ended tool for musical composition and examines future directions and improvements

Some problems in polynomial interpolation and topological complexity

This thesis is comprised of two projects in applied computational mathematics. In Chapter 1, we discuss the geometry and combinatorics of geometrically characterized sets. These are finite sets of n+d choose n points in R^d which impose independent conditions on polynomials of degree n, and which have Lagrange polynomials of a special form. These sets were introduced by Chung and Yao in a 1977 paper in the SIAM Journal of Numerical Analysis in the context of polynomial interpolation. There are several conjectures on the nature and geometric structure of these sets. We investigate the geometry and combinatorics of GC sets for d at least 2, and prove they are closely related to simplicial complexes which are Cohen-Macaulay and have a Cohen-Macaulay dual. In Chapter 2, we will discuss the motion planning problem in complex hyperplane arrangement complements. The difficulty of constructing a minimally discontinuous motion planning algorithm for a topological space X is measured by an integer invariant of X called topological complexity or TC(X). Yuzvinsky developed a combinatorial criterion for hyperplane arrangement complements which guarantees that their topological complexity is as large as possible. Applying this criterion in the special case when the arrangement is graphic, we simplify the criterion to an inequality on the edge density of the graph which is closely related to the inequality in the arboricity theorem of Nash-Williams

Relationship between Friend virus and an associated lymphatic leukaemia virus.

virus into rats (Mirand and Grace, 1962; Dawson, Rose and Fieldsteel, 1966) an