Matching Items (407)
Description
Since the early 1990's, researchers have been looking at intersections between education and music. After a highly popular study correlating listening to Mozart to temporary increases in spatial reasoning, many other researchers tried to find a link between different musical genres and learning outcomes. Using three musical treatments (Pop, classical, silence), this study had subjects (N=34) complete a reading-based task whereupon they were tested on their comprehension. Using a suite of sensors, data was collected to analyze the participants' emotions and affect while they read from an educational psychology textbook. The present study has two major focuses: They detail whether (1) changes in musical condition affect learning outcomes and (2) whether changes in musical condition affect emotional outcomes. The popular conception that listening to classical music makes you smarter was proven false long ago, but there may actually be some merit to using music to assist one in studying. While there were no significant changes in test scores depending on musical condition; frustration levels were significantly lower for those who listened to classical instead of pop music.
ContributorsPaley, Benjamin Henry (Author) / Atkinson, Robert (Thesis director) / Feisst, Sabine (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Music (Contributor) / T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
The NFL is one of largest and most influential industries in the world. In America there are few companies that have a stronger hold on the American culture and create such a phenomena from year to year. In this project aimed to develop a strategy that helps an NFL team be as successful as possible by defining which positions are most important to a team's success. Data from fifteen years of NFL games was collected and information on every player in the league was analyzed. First there needed to be a benchmark which describes a team as being average and then every player in the NFL must be compared to that average. Based on properties of linear regression using ordinary least squares this project aims to define such a model that shows each position's importance. Finally, once such a model had been established then the focus turned to the NFL draft in which the goal was to find a strategy of where each position needs to be drafted so that it is most likely to give the best payoff based on the results of the regression in part one.
ContributorsBalzer, Kevin Ryan (Author) / Goegan, Brian (Thesis director) / Dassanayake, Maduranga (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Technological advances in the past decade alone are calling for modifications to the usability of various devices. Physical human interaction is becoming a popular method to communicate with user interfaces. This ranges from touch-based devices such as an iPad or tablet to free space gesture systems such as the Microsoft Kinect. With the rise in popularity of these types of devices comes the increased amount of them in public areas. Public areas frequently use walk-up-and-use displays, which give many people the opportunity to interact with them. Walk-up-and-use displays are intended to be simple enough that any individual, regardless of experience using similar technology, will be able to successfully maneuver the system. While this should be easy enough for the people using it, it is a more complicated task for the designers who are in charge of creating an interface simple enough to use while also accomplishing the tasks it was built to complete. A serious issue that I'll be addressing in this thesis is how a system designer knows what gestures to program the interface to successfully respond to. Gesture elicitation is one widely used method to discover common, intuitive, gestures that can be used with public walk-up-and-use interactive displays. In this paper, I present a study to extract common intuitive gestures for various tasks, an analysis of the responses, and suggestions for future designs of interactive, public, walk-up-and use interactions.
ContributorsVan Horn, Sarah Elizabeth (Author) / Walker, Erin (Thesis director) / Danielescu, Andreea (Committee member) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This project is a collection of four arrangements from Gustav Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn for French horn and marimba, with accompanying commentary. French horn and marimba is a beautiful combination that suffers from a lack of repertoire. These arrangements, composed by Kyle Nelson, are a step toward remedying that problem, while exploring the wide range of musical styles for which this combination is suited. The four songs that have been transcribed here are Urlicht, Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen, Der Tamboursg’sell, and Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt. Together, they provide a sampling of the many poems Mahler put to music in the late 1800’s for voice and piano. The sampling ranges from the very well-known (such as those featured in Mahler’s symphonies, like Urlicht) to one of the few lighthearted arrangements (Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’s scherzo trio style) found in Mahler’s two original collections of lieder. The final product is performable as a duet with a talented horn and marimba duo, but in some circumstances it may be beneficial to divide the marimba part by stem direction and play as a trio on horn and two marimbas. The marimba part is best suited for four mallets on a 5-octave marimba.
ContributorsMartin, Stephanie Lorraine (Author) / Ericson, John (Thesis director) / Swoboda, Deanna (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Music (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
We study an idealized model of a wind-driven ocean, namely a 2-D lid-driven cavity with a linear temperature gradient along the side walls and constant hot and cold temperatures on the top and bottom boundaries respectively. In particular, we determine numerically the response on flow field and temperature stratification associated with the velocity of the lid driven by harmonic forcing using the Navier-Stokes equations with Boussinesq approximation in an attempt to gain an understanding of how variations of external forces (such as the wind over the ocean) transfer energy to a system by exciting internal modes through resonances. The time variation of the forcing, accounting for turbulence at the boundary is critical for allowing penetration of energy waves through the stratified medium in which the angles of the internal waves depend on these perturbation frequencies. Determining the results of the interaction of two 45 degree angle wave beams at the center of the cavity is of particular interest.
ContributorsTaylor, Stephanie Lynn (Author) / Welfert, Bruno (Thesis director) / Lopez, Juan (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This thesis studies the world governing body of soccer, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), by investigating its recent controversial past as a world-leading international non-profit organization. Through examining the organization's beginnings as well as its growth into a nonprofit goliath, this thesis assesses FIFA's actions compared to both the relatively relaxed legal standards in its home country of Switzerland as well as an established set of moral guidelines to analyze the organization's validity in today's complicated global environment. Topics include concerns surrounding FIFA's vast financial reserves, the organization's development programs, its treatment of minorities, and its efforts to prevent organizational transparency that may lead to legitimacy questions in the near future. In the end, assessments of FIFA's validity conclude that the organization falls somewhere between being completely credible and definitively fraudulent, as its actions seemingly are satisfactory legally according to Swiss laws and regulations on paper but questionable morally.
ContributorsJacobe, Joseph John (Author) / Thomas, George (Thesis director) / Kittilson, Miki (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
We model communication among social insects as an interacting particle system in which individuals perform one of two tasks and neighboring sites anti-mimic one another. Parameters of our model are a probability of defection 2 (0; 1) and relative cost ci > 0 to the individual performing task i. We examine this process on complete graphs, bipartite graphs, and the integers, answering questions about the relationship between communication, defection rates and the division of labor. Assuming the division of labor is ideal when exactly half of the colony is performing each task, we nd that on some bipartite graphs and the integers it can eventually be made arbitrarily close to optimal if defection rates are sufficiently small. On complete graphs the fraction of individuals performing each task is also closest to one half when there is no defection, but is bounded by a constant dependent on the relative costs of each task.
ContributorsArcuri, Alesandro Antonio (Author) / Lanchier, Nicolas (Thesis director) / Kang, Yun (Committee member) / Fewell, Jennifer (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
South Mountain is the largest municipal park in the nation. It is a bundled amenity, providing a series of linked services to the surrounding communities. A dataset of 19,209 homes in 155 neighborhoods within three miles of the park was utilized in order to complete a hedonic estimation for two nearby urban villages, Ahwatukee Foothills and South Mountain Village. Measures of access include proximity to the park, trailhead access, and adjacency to the park. Two regressions were estimated, the first including lot characteristics and subdivision fixed effects and the second using the coefficients for each subdivision as the dependent variable. These estimates describe how the location of a house in a subdivision contributes to its conditional mean price. As a result they offer a direct basis for capturing amenities measured at the neighborhood scale on home values. Park proximity, trailhead access and adjacency were found to significantly influence the price of homes at the 5% confidence level in Ahwatukee, but not in South Mountain Village. The results of this study can be applied to issues of environmental justice and park access in determining which areas and attributes of the park are associated with a high premium. Though South Mountain was preserved some time ago, development and future preservation in the City of Phoenix can be informed by such studies.
ContributorsRamakrishna, Saritha Kambhampati (Author) / Abbott, Joshua (Thesis director) / Smith, V. Kerry (Committee member) / Schoon, Michael (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Hydrogen has the potential to be a highly efficient fuel source. Its current production via steam reformation of natural gas, however, consumes a large amount of energy and gives off carbon dioxide. A newer method has since surfaced: using a microorganism's metabolism to drive hydrogen production. In this study, the conditions for maximum hydrogen production in Heliobacterium modesticaldum were identified and assessed. The cells were grown under varying conditions and their headspaces were sampled using a gas chromatogram to measure the amount of accumulated hydrogen during each condition. Two cell batches were grown under nitrogen-fixing conditions (-NH4+), while the other two cell batches were grown under non-nitrogen-fixing conditions (+NH4+). The headspaces were then exchanged with either nitrogen (N2) or argon (Ar2). It was found that the condition for which the most hydrogen was produced was when the cells were grown under nitrogen-fixing conditions and the headspace was exchanged with argon. These results suggest that most of Heliobacteria modesticaldum's hydrogen production is due to nitrogenase activity rather than hydrogenase activity. Further research is recommended to quantify the roles of nitrogenase, [NiFe] hydrogenase, and [FeFe] hydrogenase.
ContributorsMcmahon, Savanah Dior (Author) / Redding, Kevin (Thesis director) / Ghirlanda, Giovanna (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (Contributor) / School of Music (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
E-Strings Academy (www.estringsacademy.wordpress.com) is a resource website intended for the beginning violinist, violist, cellist, and bassist. The mission of the website is to extend musical learning opportunities to students outside of the physical string classroom and to engage first-year string students in musical activities at home that supplement the instruction they receive in a school setting. The current website features five different areas for students to explore: lesson videos, tunes, listening activities, games, and resources. In each area, students have the opportunity to learn and reinforce musical concepts and skill sets that they will need in order to be successful in music, both in their first year of playing and beyond. I created E-Strings Academy with the intention that I use it with my own string students in my future teaching career. It is a flexible website that I will continue to revise, adapt, and enhance to best serve the needs of my students and enrich their musical learning outside of the classroom.
ContributorsCook, Christa Marie (Author) / Schmidt, Margaret (Thesis director) / Tobias, Evan (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Music (Contributor)
Created2015-05