Matching Items (48)
Filtering by
- Genre: Masters Thesis
- Creators: Cooke, Nancy J.
- Resource Type: Text
- Status: Published
Description
Ranging in subject from a Tuareg festival outside Timbuktu to the 1975 "Battle of the Sexes" race at Belmont track to a Mississippi classroom in the Delta flood plains, the poems in The Body Snatcher's Complaint explore the blurring of self hood, a feeling of foreignness within one's own physical experience of the world, in the most intimate and global contexts.
ContributorsMurray, Catherine (Author) / Hogue, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Cruz del Sur is an exploration of what it means to be an outsider: as a resident, as a foreigner, from the perspective of the human eye, or from the perspective of a camera lens. An unlikely blending of voices, these poems embark the reader on a journey across a continent, and also into an interior: a mystical quest.
ContributorsMontgomery, Scott (Author) / Dubie, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
As technology enhances our communication capabilities, the number of distributed teams has risen in both public and private sectors. There is no doubt that these technological advancements have addressed a need for communication and collaboration of distributed teams. However, is all technology useful for effective collaboration? Are some methods (modalities) of communication more conducive than others to effective performance and collaboration of distributed teams? Although previous literature identifies some differences in modalities, there is little research on geographically distributed mobile teams (DMTs) performing a collaborative task. To investigate communication and performance in this context, I developed the GeoCog system. This system is a mobile communications and collaboration platform enabling small, distributed teams of three to participate in a variant of the military-inspired game, "Capture the Flag". Within the task, teams were given one hour to complete as many "captures" as possible while utilizing resources to the advantage of the team. In this experiment, I manipulated the modality of communication across three conditions with text-based messaging only, vocal communication only, and a combination of the two conditions. It was hypothesized that bi-modal communication would yield superior performance compared to either single modality conditions. Results indicated that performance was not affected by modality. Further results, including communication analysis, are discussed within this paper.
ContributorsChampion, Michael (Author) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Thesis advisor) / Shope, Steven (Committee member) / Wu, Bing (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Black Laurel is a book-length manuscript which has at its center poems that reveal and explore issues related to Michele Poulos's identity as a Greek-American writer, discovering the connections that link the past and present of both Greece and America. These poems often work as a quest to recover identity. They explore the idea that it is her own privileged perspective as an educated Greek-American woman that both allows and in some ways prevents her seeing herself in the Greeks who today are struggling economically, emotionally, and psychologically. Many of the poems work to achieve a complex understanding of both an individual as well as a broader cultural history. These poems sometimes take on the personas of striking figures from other times and other landscapes, while others draw on materials which are somewhat more autobiographical. In one poem titled "Before My Mother Set Herself on Fire," the speaker is an imagined daughter in a modern-day Greek family. The poem, inspired by a news story about an elderly man who shot himself in the head in front of Syntagma Square in Athens to protest the austerity measures imposed on the Greek population, explores the various ways in which a national crisis may affect an individual family. Alternatively, Poulos delves into her personal family history in "When the Wind Falls," a poem about the Nazi invasions of northern Greece. At the same time, this focus on past and present Greece is only one strand in a wide-ranging manuscript woven of materials which also include a variety of subjects related to science, history, eroticism, mysticism, and much more.
ContributorsPoulos, Michele (Author) / Dubie, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
New Pastoral journeys through the altered states of the American West. Readers witness dream-fields at harvest time, watch humans become agro-industrial test subjects, and overhear an exchange of letters set in an alternate (?), [more] dystopian present. Fractured, fragmented, leaping, and stitched, the poems use disjuncture, within and/or between poems, to see with clarity and complexity a landscape that is increasingly all ecotone. In addition to environmental violence, this work explores disclosure and secrecy, intimacy and estrangement, voyeurism, political policing, and, inevitably, the mysteries of making art. Pastoral landscapes have often been compared to patchwork. Now, heavy with guilt, we walk a wounded quilt, searching, with little hope, for bandages.
ContributorsSlinker, Nathan (Author) / Dubie Jr, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Ball, Sara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Research on priming has shown that exposure to the concept of fast food can have an effect on human behavior by inducing haste and impatience (Zhong & E. DeVoe, 2010). This research suggests that thinking about fast food makes individuals impatient and strengthens their desire to complete tasks such as reading and decision making as quickly and efficiently as possible. Two experiments were conducted in which the effects of fast food priming were examined using a driving simulator. The experiments examined whether fast food primes can induce impatient driving. In experiment 1, 30 adult drivers drove a course in a driving simulator after being exposed to images by rating aesthetics of four different logos. Experiment 1 did not yield faster driving speeds nor an impatient and faster break at the yellow light in the fast food logo prime condition. In experiment 2, 30 adult drivers drove the same course from experiment 1. Participants did not rate logos on their aesthetics prior to the drive, instead billboards were included in the simulation that had either fast food or diner logos. Experiment 2 did not yielded faster driving speeds, however there was a significant effect of faster breaking and a higher number of participants running the yellow light.
ContributorsTaggart, Mistey. L (Author) / Branaghan, Russell (Thesis advisor) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Committee member) / Song, Hyunjin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
When discussing human factors and performance, researchers recognize stress as a factor, but overlook mood as contributing factor. To explore the relationship between mood, stress and cognitive performance, a field study was conducted involving fire fighters engaged in a fire response simulation. Firefighter participants completed a stress questionnaire, an emotional state questionnaire, and a cognitive task. Stress and cognitive task performance scores were examined before and after the firefighting simulation for individual cognitive performance depreciation caused by stress or mood. They study revealed that existing stress was a reliable predictor of the pre-simulation cognitive task score, that, as mood becomes more positive, perceived stress scores decrease, and that negative mood and pre-simulation stress are also positively and significantly correlated.
ContributorsGomez-Herbert, Maria Elena (Author) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Thesis advisor) / Becker, Vaughn (Committee member) / Branaghan, Russell (Committee member) / Hyunjin, Song (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Although current urban search and rescue (USAR) robots are little more than remotely controlled cameras, the end goal is for them to work alongside humans as trusted teammates. Natural language communications and performance data are collected as a team of humans works to carry out a simulated search and rescue task in an uncertain virtual environment. Conditions are tested emulating a remotely controlled robot versus an intelligent one. Differences in performance, situation awareness, trust, workload, and communications are measured. The Intelligent robot condition resulted in higher levels of performance and operator situation awareness (SA).
ContributorsBartlett, Cade Earl (Author) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Thesis advisor) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Committee member) / Wu, Bing (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Although there are many forms of organization on the Web, one of the most prominent ways to organize web content and websites are tags. Tags are keywords or terms that are assigned to a specific piece of content in order to help users understand the common relationships between pieces of content. Tags can either be assigned by an algorithm, the author, or the community. These tags can also be organized into tag clouds, which are visual representations of the structure and organization contained implicitly within these tags. Importantly, little is known on how we use these different tagging structures to understand the content and structure of a given site. This project examines 2 different characteristics of tagging structures: font size and spatial orientation. In order to examine how these different characteristics might interact with individual differences in attentional control, a measure of working memory capacity (WMC) was included. The results showed that spatial relationships affect how well users understand the structure of a website. WMC was not shown to have any significant effect; neither was varying the font size. These results should better inform how tags and tag clouds are used on the Web, and also provide an estimation of what properties to include when designing and implementing a tag cloud on a website.
ContributorsBanas, Steven (Author) / Sanchez, Christopher A (Thesis advisor) / Branaghan, Russell (Committee member) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The objective of this project was to evaluate human factors based cognitive aids on endoscope reprocessing. The project stems from recent failures in reprocessing (cleaning) endoscopes, contributing to the spread of harmful bacterial and viral agents between patients. Three themes were found to represent a majority of problems: 1) lack of visibility (parts and tools were difficult to identify), 2) high memory demands, and 3) insufficient user feedback. In an effort to improve completion rate and eliminate error, cognitive aids were designed utilizing human factors principles that would replace existing manufacturer visual aids. Then, a usability test was conducted, which compared the endoscope reprocessing performance of novices using the standard manufacturer-provided visual aids and the new cognitive aids. Participants successfully completed 87.1% of the reprocessing procedure in the experimental condition with the use of the cognitive aids, compared to 46.3% in the control condition using only existing support materials. Twenty-five of sixty subtasks showed significant improvement in completion rates. When given a cognitive aid designed with human factors principles, participants were able to more successfully complete the reprocessing task. This resulted in an endoscope that was more likely to be safe for patient use.
ContributorsJolly, Jonathan D (Author) / Branaghan, Russell J (Thesis advisor) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Committee member) / Sanchez, Christopher (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011