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Innovation Highlight - Collaborating to create the City of Dallas Human Trafficking Awareness Dashboard
No full textAm I on Earth?: Immanence, Transcendence, and Religion in Kink Experience
No full textKink is not a religion, however it is in relationship with religion. Kink has something to say about and to religion. In this dissertation, I combine interviews from community partners and fieldnotes from participate observation from the kink communities in Saint Louis, Missouri and the Dallas/Fort-Worth Metroplex to analyze the relationships between kink practices, kinksters, and the Kink Community with religion.
While kinksters and the Kink Community mostly consider kink and religion adversaries, or in the least, incompatible practices and belief systems, religion offers kinksters a framework to understand, articulate, and organize their kink identities and roles as individuals and as a Community in meaningful ways. In the field of religious studies, kink provides a schema to consider ‘religion’ outside of religion and it also offers new approaches to evaluate ‘religion’ inside of religion.
I use John Sarrouf’s model of “essential tensions” to demonstrate the requisite role of immanence and transcendence in kinksters’ understandings and experiences, as well as in the functioning of the Kink Community. In kink, immanence and transcendence are separate principles and epitomize different experiences that are never quite separate. They must exist together and they must be antagonistic toward one another. Through this tension, immanence and transcendence stabilize each other as well as everything around them. This dissertation will reveal how and why immanence and transcendence are functioning in this way, why it’s related to religion, and what it says about religion
Best Practices: Spatial Valence Theory to Encourage Exploration
Get PDFThis research explores the combination of valence levels for various elements within a game environment and how these levels, when combined with the visibility of the elements, contribute to the concept of spatial valence. The study applies this theory to a level artifact, examining how spatial valence can guide player navigation within the level. This thesis provides future level designers with a more holistic view of guiding the player within the level by refining the valence theory
Decay, Destruction and the Moebius Aesthetic
Get PDFFor my thesis, my masteries are destruction, dynamic material, and style matching to Moebius. This project took around one year to complete. The scene takes place in an abandoned, lost clinic, where molds and fungus have escaped, parasitizing and killing the doctor. The clinic is overrun with these growths, which serve as the central focus of the scene. The fungi spread across walls, floors, and furniture. One level of the scene has a peaceful yet hopeless early morning atmosphere at its core, while the other closely matches the style of Moebius’s (Jean Giraud) artwork.
The destruction is explored through the main elements: the corpse, organs, and architecture. Extensive sculpture, modeling, and texturing techniques were used to study the breakdown of different models, ensuring that the destruction elements integrate seamlessly into the scene, enhancing its storytelling.
In terms of style matching to Moebius, I focused on learning the workflow for stylized game art. By adjusting textures and shaders, I balanced realistic and stylized aspects without changing the geometry, achieving a unique aesthetic that fits the Moebius style.
Dynamic material plays a key role in bringing the scene to life. The movement of various elements enhances storytelling, making the environment feel more vivid and interactive. Through a multiply method, different dynamic elements were created, adding depth and complexity to the scene.
This project has contributed to my growth by refining my ability to blend realism with stylization and enhance environmental storytelling. It also underscores the importance of creating immersive, dynamic worlds in the gaming industry, offering valuable insights for future creative and technical projects
Statistical Learning Of Multimodal Medical Imaging Data With Block-Wise Missing Structure
No full textThis dissertation addresses the pervasive challenge of block-wise missingness in multimodal medical imaging data. To address this, we propose two novel frameworks: BaMM and IMMR. Through rigorous theoretical development, extensive simulations, and real-world applications on the ADNI dataset, these frameworks demonstrate competitive performance in prediction accuracy and uncertainty quantification. These contributions significantly advance the field of multi-modal medical data analysis by providing effective solutions for handling missing data and improving the reliability of diagnostic predictions
PlaySense-ID: Haptic-Enhanced Multimodal Biometric Authentication for Gaming Controller Users
No full textIn this work, we propose a multimodal biometric authentication system leveraging sig nals from inertial sensors and audio-based haptic responses collected through standard gaming controllers. To enhance the biometric representation, we introduce a haptic-enhanced chirp signal and design a feature fusion strategy that integrates inertial and MFCC-based audio features. Our approach employs a novel LSTM-based architecture with multi-head self-attention, dual cross-modal attention, dynamic feature fusion, and residual correction, significantly improving model performance over traditional method without haptic input. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a substantial improvement in authentication accuracy, achieving an accuracy of 98.5% and reducing Equal Error Rate (EER) to 0.4%. Robustness and generalization tests, conducted under varying environmental conditions and background noise scenarios, further validate the model’s resilience to real-world disturbances. Moreover, the proposed method provides practical advantages for deployment, offering a seamless, low-cost, and non-intrusive authentication experience suitable for immersive gaming environments
Strategic Claim Payment Delays? Evidence from Property and Casualty Insurance
No full textIt is well-known that insurers raise premiums after adverse events. We show that they also slow the pace of claim payments, potentially imposing high state-contingent costs on loss-making clients. In addition, payment adjustments also occur after adverse shocks in unrelated business lines. These shifts increase unpaid losses—a substantial liability on insurers’ balance sheets— augmenting liquidity analogously to interest-free credit. Slowdowns are more prevalent among insurers with lower capital or liquidity, who serve clients less likely to file regulatory complaints. This evidence aligns with insurers’ strategic financial considerations, though whether they constitute formal delays in the legal sense remains an open question
Location of Firearm Suicides in the United States, 2003-2021
Get PDFSuicide is a leading cause of death in the US, with firearms accounting for more than half of those deaths. Current research about firearm suicide prevention largely focuses on promoting secure storage to reduce or delay access to lethal means at home. While such prevention measures are essential, their exclusive focus on the home environment may fail to address firearm suicides outside the home, which may vary by subpopulation and circumstance. However, there is little information on these factors. We sought to quantify and describe firearm suicides that occur outside the home to inform more comprehensive and effective prevention strategies for these deaths
Military Vehicles Concept with Dynamic Materials and Destruction
Get PDFThis thesis artifact focuses on making concept art for 3 military vehicles and models fully rendered. It is accompanied by dynamic materials and static destruction of one of them.
The vehicle concept focuses on making 2D concept art of 3 military vehicles sharing common chassis and modeling them.
The dynamic materials include making 3 different materials that can be triggered by an event. These materials include burning metal, snow-covered surface, and muddy tank surface.
The destruction focuses on making static destruction demonstrating partly destructed vehicles to the degree that even their interior structure are exposed. An example is tank wreck with half of the body torn off and exposing the interior part
Who Regulates Abortion Now?
Get PDFContrary to both conventional wisdom and recent Supreme Court pronouncements, abortion is not simply a matter of state oversight. For a quarter century now, the federal government has been intimately involved in “regulating” abortion through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval and continued oversight over mifepristone and other abortion medications. This Article considers the extent to which federal abortion law both coexists and conflicts with state law, as it does with most areas of medicine. We evaluate which body of law is better able at achieving the goals of modern medicine that is evidence-based, ethical, consistent, and individualized