Browsing by Subject "Texas A&M"
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Item The collapse of the Texas A&M bonfire and the media aftermath(2011-05) Measley, Travis; Sylvie, George; Morrison, MarkThis report is an in-depth analysis of the media coverage of the 1999 collapse of the Texas A&M Bonfire. The report also provides insight, through extensive interviews with journalists involved in the coverage, of how reporters handle the personal emotions associated with tragedy reporting. Through the interviews, I paint a picture of what it was like to arrive on the scene in College Station on Nov. 19, 1999 and detail some of the different strategies and philosophies journalists used to cover the event. The final part of the report is dedicated to exploring the relationship between media and communities in tragedy. The Bonfire collapse and the Columbine school shootings in Littleton, Colo., serve as case studies to analyze the effect of media on a community and vice versa. To conclude, the report attempts to paint a picture of the reality of the Bonfire coverage – its difficulties, its successes and, in some areas, where the media failed.Item Design-Build and CM at Risk- comparative analysis for owner decision making based on case studies and project surveys(2012-07-16) Park, Soon RockCurrently, many researchers and stakeholders believe that effective delivery systems for construction projects are key to improving project quality and value in the construction industry. Therefore, it is important that owners use the best project delivery system because there are significant consequence due to differences in contracting processes and roles and responsibilities among contracting parties. For the reason, this research aims to compare the efficiency of DB with that of CMAR, as two methods used to select or deny expectations, specifically through quantitative and qualitative analysis. In order to do that, the researcher identified performance data and benefits, drawbacks, and success factors of DB and CMAR through survey and case projects and also analyzed performance data collected from two case projects. Consequently, owners will be able to understand characteristics, differences, and success factors of two different PDSs based on the comparative study. Furthermore, this research could be used to develop a decision support system for owners to select an appropriate PDS.Item Introducing the Texas A&M University Libraries Digital Asset Management Ecosystem(2017-05) Creel, James; Bolton, Michael; Potvin, Sarah; Huff, Jeremy; Savell, Jason; Welling, William; Laddusaw, Ryan; Day, Kevin; Hahn, Douglas; Cooper, Micah; Stricklin, RobertAfter several years of planning and technical development across Texas A&M University departments, the University Libraries are excited to announce the deployment of the first round of production-level services and applications comprising our Digital Asset Management Ecosystem. In this presentation, we will give a grand tour of the existing services and discuss our next steps. Our approach has emphasized a service-oriented architecture with separation of concerns between components and standard protocols for information transfer. This has enabled us to integrate legacy components into the same workflows as new ones. In particular, our legacy DSpace instance, OAKTrust, participates on a par with a new Fedora repository, and both repositories can receive content from our ingestion tools and use that content to drive user-facing discovery and exhibition layers. Conduits for curation and ingestion of content include legacy workflows with DSpace SAF (Simple Archive Format), SWORD (Simple Webservice Offering Repository Deposit) from Vireo, and various command-line scripts. New, more user-friendly workflows use RESTful APIs through the MAGPIE (Metadata Assignment GUI Providing Ingest and Export) application that has been presented previously at TCDL. The MAGPIE application can bring in metadata from our Voyager catalog, CSV spreadsheets, DSpace SAF exports, and automated suggestions from controlled vocabularies. The content (PDF or image) and metadata are then displayed in the system for a human to edit and amend. Publication over REST APIs is currently available for DSpace, Fedora, and Archivematica. MAGPIE can also operate in a “headless” mode if no human curation is required. In “headless” mode ingested content is published immediately to the destination. Content available in our DSpace and Fedora IRs is of course exposed via the out-of-the-box interfaces these systems provide. For DSpace, these interfaces include the XMLUI, Solr, and an RDF webapp. For Fedora, these include Solr, Fuseki, and a robust messaging service. In addition, Fedora now offers a facility called API-X for proxying and modifying HTTP requests to Fedora in interesting customizable ways. One important development in this framework is the PCDM extension from Amherst College, which provides RDF metadata for PCDM-structured objects in your Fedora repository. We use this extension to drive a new IIIF manifest generator that generates Collection or Presentation manifests compatible with a variety of services, including Spotlight, Mirador and the Bodleian Libraries IIIF Manifest editor. In the future, we plan to enhance our IIIF manifest generator to utilize RDF responses from the DSpace RDF webapp in the same way it does from the Amherst PCDM Fedora extension. We will also continue to deploy new user-interfaces for discovery and exhibition. In this regard, we are pleased to have the flexibility to use custom in-house solutions or existing open-source projects, so long as they adhere to standards such as well-defined REST APIs, PCDM-RDF, and IIIF.Item Sensitivity of Swept-Wing, Boundary-Layer Transition to Spanwise-Periodic Discrete Roughness Elements(2014-12-12) West, David EdwardMicron-sized, spanwise-periodic, discrete roughness elements (DREs) were applied to and tested on a 30? swept-wing model in order to study their effects on boundary-layer transition in flight where stationary crossflow waves are the dominant instability. Significant improvements have been made to previous flight experiments in order to more reliably determine and control the model angle of attack (AoA) and unit Reynolds number (Re'). These improvements will aid in determining the influence that DREs have on swept-wing, laminar-turbulent transition. Two interchangeable leading-edge surface-roughness configurations were tested: polished and painted. The baseline transition location for the painted leading edge (increased surface roughness) was unexpectedly farther aft than the polished. Transport unit Reynolds numbers were achieved using a Cessna O-2A Skymaster. Infrared thermography, coupled with a post-processing code, was used to globally extract a quantitative boundary-layer transition location. Each DRE configuration was compared to curve-fitted baseline data in order to determine increases or decreases in percent laminar flow while accounting for the influence of small differences in Re' and AoA. Linear Stability Theory (LST) guided the DRE configuration test matrix. In total, 63 flights were completed, where only 30 of those flights resulted in useable data. While the results of this research have not reliably confirmed the use of DREs as a viable laminar flow control technique in the flight environment, it has become clear that significant computational studies, specifically direct numerical simulation (DNS) of these particular DRE configurations and flight conditions, are a necessity in order to better understand the influence that DREs have on laminar-turbulent transition.Item Sensitivity of Swept-Wing, Boundary-Layer Transition to Spanwise-Periodic Discrete Roughness Elements(2014-12-12) West, David EdwardMicron-sized, spanwise-periodic, discrete roughness elements (DREs) were applied to and tested on a 30? swept-wing model in order to study their effects on boundary-layer transition in flight where stationary crossflow waves are the dominant instability. Significant improvements have been made to previous flight experiments in order to more reliably determine and control the model angle of attack (AoA) and unit Reynolds number (Re'). These improvements will aid in determining the influence that DREs have on swept-wing, laminar-turbulent transition. Two interchangeable leading-edge surface-roughness configurations were tested: polished and painted. The baseline transition location for the painted leading edge (increased surface roughness) was unexpectedly farther aft than the polished. Transport unit Reynolds numbers were achieved using a Cessna O-2A Skymaster. Infrared thermography, coupled with a post-processing code, was used to globally extract a quantitative boundary-layer transition location. Each DRE configuration was compared to curve-fitted baseline data in order to determine increases or decreases in percent laminar flow while accounting for the influence of small differences in Re' and AoA. Linear Stability Theory (LST) guided the DRE configuration test matrix. In total, 63 flights were completed, where only 30 of those flights resulted in useable data. While the results of this research have not reliably confirmed the use of DREs as a viable laminar flow control technique in the flight environment, it has become clear that significant computational studies, specifically direct numerical simulation (DNS) of these particular DRE configurations and flight conditions, are a necessity in order to better understand the influence that DREs have on laminar-turbulent transition.