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Description
"The Reality of Imagination" is short animated film about a young girl name Isabel who, with her sketchbook and box of crayons, demonstrates the power of imagination through her drawings. From her own bedroom, her simple sketches transform into more complicated, realistic drawings, bringing her artistic creation to life. From a bouncing red ball, to flying on a plane, to a thunderstorm, her world extends beyond her sketchbook. The overall message is to demonstrate the importance of art and the power of imagination, especially seen from the perspective of a young child where much of that development is evident. In addition, further exploration of the film industry and learning about the production process was conducted to continue exercising my interest for film editing and graphic designing. This involved devising the script, selecting the appropriate actors, planning the production set, purchasing the tools and equipment, putting together a production crew, and applying the concepts learned about editing to create a short film that was approximately 3 minutes long. The editing software application used for this production was Final Cut Pro X distributed by Apple while the camera used was a Canon EOS Rebel T6. At least three different editing techniques were applied in the film and included stop-motion, keying, and split-screening. Furthermore, other concepts such as transforming and resizing video clips were applied along with learning to use the audio and visual effect resources available from Final Cut Pro X to enhance the quality of the film. An in-depth analysis of the entire process is also given in detailed.
ContributorsReyes, Diana (Author) / Ganssle, Gene (Thesis director) / Giner, Oscar (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
The Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) is a genetically distinct subspecies of the gray wolf (Canis lupus) that was driven to the brink of extinction as a result of human persecution. The wolf is listed as Endangered under the Endangered Species Act, and a recovery program is underway in Arizona and New Mexico to restore its population. However, the wolf is struggling to recover due to high mortality, which is a result of continued human hostility toward it. This thesis examines historical and current human attitudes toward the wolf and the implications that they have had on the extermination and recovery of the subspecies. An overview is given of wolf biology, the history of wolf extermination and recovery, and recent events relating to the recovery of the wolf. Negative impacts on ranching, hunting, and human safety are the main reasons for opposition toward wolves and wolf recovery; these concerns are analyzed, and solutions to them are proposed, with the goal of addressing them while fostering non-lethal coexistence with the wolf. In addition, opposition to wolves and wolf recovery is tied in with larger socio-political issues and is influenced by the representation of the wolf in culture; these issues in the context of wolves are also analyzed.
ContributorsLenk, Heather Nicole (Author) / Smith, Andrew (Thesis director) / Minteer, Ben (Committee member) / Brown, David E. (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
As mobile devices have risen to prominence over the last decade, their importance has been increasingly recognized. Workloads for mobile devices are often very different from those on desktop and server computers, and solutions that worked in the past are not always the best fit for the resource- and energy-constrained computing that characterizes mobile devices. While this is most commonly seen in CPU and graphics workloads, this device class difference extends to I/O as well. However, while a few tools exist to help analyze mobile storage solutions, there exists a gap in the available software that prevents quality analysis of certain research initiatives, such as I/O deduplication on mobile devices. This honors thesis will demonstrate a new tool that is capable of capturing I/O on the filesystem layer of mobile devices running the Android operating system, in support of new mobile storage research. Uniquely, it is able to capture both metadata of writes as well as the actual written data, transparently to the apps running on the devices. Based on a modification of the strace program, fstrace and its companion tool fstrace-replay can record and replay filesystem I/O of actual Android apps. Using this new tracing tool, several traces from popular Android apps such as Facebook and Twitter were collected and analyzed.
ContributorsMor, Omri (Author) / Zhao, Ming (Thesis director) / Zhao, Ziming (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
In developed countries, municipalities deliver drinking water to constituents through water distribution systems. These transport water from a treatment plant to homes, restaurants, and any other site of end use. Proper water distribution system infrastructure functionality is a critical concern to city planners and managers because component failures within these systems restrict or prevent the ability to deliver water. The reduced capacity to deliver water forces the health and well being of all citizens into jeopardy. The breakdown of a component can even spark the failure of several more components, causing a sequence of cascading failures with catastrophic consequences. To make matters worse, some forms of component failures are unpredictable and it is impossible to foresee every possible failure that could occur. In order to prevent cataclysmic losses that are experienced during system failures, the development of resilient water distribution infrastructure is vital. A resilient water distribution system possesses an adaptive capacity to mitigate the loss of service resulting from component failures. Traditionally, infrastructure resilience research has been retrospective in nature, analyzing the infrastructure system after it suffered a failure event. However, this research project takes water distribution resilience research in a new direction. The research identifies the Sensing Anticipating, Adaptation, and Learning processes that are inherent in the current operations of each component in the water distribution system (pumps, pipes, valves, tanks, nodes). Additional SAAL processes have been recommended for the components that lack adaptive management in current practice. This workis unique in that it applies resilience theory to water distribution systems in an anticipatory manner. This anticipatory application of resilience will provide operators with actionable process for them to implement during failure situations. In this setting, resilience is applied to existing systems for noticeable improvements in operation during failure situations.
ContributorsRodriguez, Jordan Robert (Author) / Seager, Thomas (Thesis director) / Eisenberg, Daniel (Committee member) / Bondank, Emily (Committee member) / Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Programs (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Bioscience High School, a small magnet high school located in Downtown Phoenix and a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math) focused school, has been pushing to establish a computer science curriculum for all of their students from freshman to senior year. The school's Mision (Mission and Vision) is to: "..provide a rigorous, collaborative, and relevant academic program emphasizing an innovative, problem-based curriculum that develops literacy in the sciences, mathematics, and the arts, thus cultivating critical thinkers, creative problem-solvers, and compassionate citizens, who are able to thrive in our increasingly complex and technological communities." Computational thinking is an important part in developing a future problem solver Bioscience High School is looking to produce. Bioscience High School is unique in the fact that every student has a computer available for him or her to use. Therefore, it makes complete sense for the school to add computer science to their curriculum because one of the school's goals is to be able to utilize their resources to their full potential. However, the school's attempt at computer science integration falls short due to the lack of expertise amongst the math and science teachers. The lack of training and support has postponed the development of the program and they are desperately in need of someone with expertise in the field to help reboot the program. As a result, I've decided to create a course that is focused on teaching students the concepts of computational thinking and its application through Scratch and Arduino programming.
ContributorsLiu, Deming (Author) / Meuth, Ryan (Thesis director) / Nakamura, Mutsumi (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The Colorado River is the lifeblood for seven Basin States including Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Nevada. This water source aided westward expansion and allowed the arid Southwest to grow. Today, the river is over-allocated resulting in reduced flows. This could lead to water challenges in Arizona and the other Basin states. This river is the single largest entity from which Arizona receives water. Despite this, Arizona is still better situated for water cutbacks than other states like California. Arizona has more than nine million acre-feet of banked underground water and access to other water sources including the Salt and Verde rivers. Government officials are making decisions now that will affect water usage in Arizona for decades and generations to come. Digital media, such as iPad magazines are a good way to reach this technologically savvy generation and engage them concerning important issues. Designing for digital platforms presents unique opportunities. This platform requires solid content and visually appealing design to attract a Millennial audience born between the years 1981 and 1996, according to Pew Research Center. Digital magazines currently present a small segment of the media market, however this segment is growing exponentially. A study by Pew Research Center reports that this slice of the population is interested in consuming the news and emerging technologies such as digital magazines. These are good ways to reach and interest a digitally engaged readership. Reaching this age group is important because the Millennial generation will need to determine the future of the Colorado River and water use in Arizona. To ensure the future of water in the West, this generation needs to "learn about the reality of our water supply, what our real water challenges are and then get engaged and have a voice in what we do about our water planning for the future" (Porter, 2015). DISCLAIMER: The digital magazine was created in InDesign with interactive PDFs, which are best viewed on tablets. Screenshots of the magazine are included to demonstrate the magazine.
ContributorsPrice, Mallory Jeanne (Author) / Matera, Fran (Thesis director) / Hill, Retha (Committee member) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This project's goal was to design a Central Processing Unit (CPU) incorporating a fairly large instruction set and a multistage pipeline design with the potential to be used in a multi-core system. The CPU was coded and synthesized with Verilog. This was accomplished by building on the CPU design from fundamentals learned in CSE320 and increasing the instruction set to resemble a proper Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) CPU system. A multistage pipeline was incorporated to the CPU to increase instruction throughput, or instructions per second. A major area of focus was on creating a multi-core design. The design used is master-slave in nature. The master core instructs the sub-cores where they should begin execution, the idea being that the operating system or kernel will be executing on the master core and the "user space" programs will be run on the sub-cores. The rationale behind this is that the system would specialize in running several small functions on all of its many supported cores. The system supports around 45 instructions, which include several types of jumps and branches (for changing the program counter based on conditions), arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, or, and, etc.), and system calls (for controlling the core execution). The system has a very low Clocks per Instruction ratio (CPI), but to achieve this the second stage contains several modules and would most likely be a bottleneck for performance if implemented. The CPU is not perfect and contains a few errors and oversights, but the system as a whole functions as intended.
ContributorsKolden, Brian Andrew (Author) / Burger, Kevin (Thesis director) / Meuth, Ryan (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The purpose of this honors project is to analyze the difference between different powder separation techniques, and their suitability for my capstone project – ‘Effect of Powder Reuse on DMLS (Direct Metal Laser Sintering) Product Integrity’. Due to the nature of my capstone project, my group needs to characterize foreign contaminants in IN 718 (Ni-based superalloy) powder with a mean diameter around 40um. In order to clearly analyze the contaminants and recycle useful IN 718 powders, powder separation is favorable since the filtered samples will be much easier to characterize rather than inspect all the powders at once under microscope. By conducting literature review, I found that powder separation is commonly used in Geology, and Chemistry department. To screen which combination of techniques could be the best for my project, I have consulted several research specialists, obtained adequate knowledge about powder separation. Accordingly, I will summarize the pros and cons of each method with regard the specific project that I am working on, and further explore the impacts of each method under economical, societal, and environmental considerations. Several powder separation techniques will be discussed in details in the following sections, including water elutriation, settling column, magnetic separation and centrifugation. In addition to these methods, sieving, water tabling and panning will be briefly introduced. After detailed comparison, I found that water elutriation is the most efficient way to purity IN718 powder for reuse purpose, and recovery rate is as high as 70%, which could result in a significant reduction in the manufacturing cost for Honeywell since currently Honeywell only use virgin powders to build parts, and 90% of the leftover powders are discarded.
ContributorsLuo, Zheyu (Author) / Adams, James (Thesis director) / Tasooji, Amaneh (Committee member) / Materials Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Observations of four times ionized iron and nickel (Fe V & Ni V) in the G191-B2B white dwarf spectrum have been used to test for variations in the fine structure constant, α, in the presence of strong gravitational fields. The laboratory wavelengths for these ions were thought to be the cause of inconsistent conclusions regarding the
variation of α as observed through the white dwarf spectrum. This thesis presents 129 revised Fe V wavelengths (1200 Å to 1600 Å) and 161 revised Ni V wavelengths (1200 Å to 1400 Å) with uncertainties of approximately 3 mÅ. A systematic calibration error
is identified in the previous Ni V wavelengths and is corrected in this work. The evaluation of the fine structure variation is significantly improved with the results
found in this thesis.
variation of α as observed through the white dwarf spectrum. This thesis presents 129 revised Fe V wavelengths (1200 Å to 1600 Å) and 161 revised Ni V wavelengths (1200 Å to 1400 Å) with uncertainties of approximately 3 mÅ. A systematic calibration error
is identified in the previous Ni V wavelengths and is corrected in this work. The evaluation of the fine structure variation is significantly improved with the results
found in this thesis.
ContributorsWard, Jacob Wolfgang (Author) / Treacy, Michael (Thesis director) / Alarcon, Ricardo (Committee member) / Nave, Gillian (Committee member) / Department of Physics (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Preventive maintenance is a practice that has become popular in recent years, largely due to the increased dependency on electronics and other mechanical systems in modern technologies. The main idea of preventive maintenance is to take care of maintenance-type issues before they fully appear or cause disruption of processes and daily operations. One of the most important parts is being able to predict and foreshadow failures in the system, in order to make sure that those are fixed before they turn into large issues. One specific area where preventive maintenance is a very big part of daily activity is the automotive industry. Automobile owners are encouraged to take their cars in for maintenance on a routine schedule (based on mileage or time), or when their car signals that there is an issue (low oil levels for example). Although this level of maintenance is enough when people are in charge of cars, the rise of autonomous vehicles, specifically self-driving cars, changes that. Now instead of a human being able to look at a car and diagnose any issues, the car needs to be able to do this itself. The objective of this project was to create such a system. The Electronics Preventive Maintenance System is an internal system that is designed to meet all these criteria and more. The EPMS system is comprised of a central computer which monitors all major electronic components in an autonomous vehicle through the use of standard off-the-shelf sensors. The central computer compiles the sensor data, and is able to sort and analyze the readings. The filtered data is run through several mathematical models, each of which diagnoses issues in different parts of the vehicle. The data for each component in the vehicle is compared to pre-set operating conditions. These operating conditions are set in order to encompass all normal ranges of output. If the sensor data is outside the margins, the warning and deviation are recorded and a severity level is calculated. In addition to the individual focus, there's also a vehicle-wide model, which predicts how necessary maintenance is for the vehicle. All of these results are analyzed by a simple heuristic algorithm and a decision is made for the vehicle's health status, which is sent out to the Fleet Management System. This system allows for accurate, effortless monitoring of all parts of an autonomous vehicle as well as predictive modeling that allows the system to determine maintenance needs. With this system, human inspectors are no longer necessary for a fleet of autonomous vehicles. Instead, the Fleet Management System is able to oversee inspections, and the system operator is able to set parameters to decide when to send cars for maintenance. All the models used for the sensor and component analysis are tailored specifically to the vehicle. The models and operating margins are created using empirical data collected during normal testing operations. The system is modular and can be used in a variety of different vehicle platforms, including underwater autonomous vehicles and aerial vehicles.
ContributorsMian, Sami T. (Author) / Collofello, James (Thesis director) / Chen, Yinong (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05