This dissertation is an ethnography conducted with the Los Angeles-based community arts organization called Machine Project. Operating both a storefront gallery in Echo Park and as a loose association of contemporary artists, performers, curators, and designers, Machine Project seeks to make "rarefied knowledge accessible" through…

Closing the gap between theoretical reservoir operation and the real-world implementation remains a challenge in contemporary reservoir operations. Past research has focused on optimization algorithms and establishing optimal policies for reservoir operations. In this research, we attempt to understand operators' release decisions by investigating…

MEASUREMENT CRITERIA ARE DEVELOPED FOR THE QUANTIFICATION OF THE FUNCTIONAL LOAD OF THE PHONEMES OF A LANGUAGE. THE CONCEPT OF FUNCTIONAL LOAD OR YIELD, FROM CERTAIN THEORIES OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE, STATES THAT SOME CONTRASTS BETWEEN THE DISTINCTIVE SOUNDS OF A LANGUAGE DO MORE WORK THAN OTHERS BY OCCURRING MORE FREQUENTLY AND IN MORE LINGUISTIC…

Digital collaborations are often stymied because institutions of higher education are increasingly divided between two cultures: the culture of knowledge and the culture of information. Campuses primarily remain institutions of knowledge, although practices of information acquisition can no longer be ignored, especially since the advent of…