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Martin Site Collection and Collections Importance: Relevancy Through Cultural Heritage, Digital Technology, And Repatriation
No full textM.A.The goal of this paper is to explore a collection, the Martin Site Collection, and determine how to find relevancy and meaning in a collection that has not been utilized in several years. By looking at this collection as well as others, we get a sense of what is being done to manage a collection that has not been utilized or accessed and the importance it can bring. Collections of this type are full of important information, if utilized and made accessible it will help the wider academic community. It will also offer a valuable way to learn about our shared histories, in ways that have been overlooked in the past. Questions of accessibility are currently becoming more and more apparent as research is expanding and our world becomes increasingly technological based. With the usage of technology, accessibility of collections has become increasingly easier, but it has still not been something that has been utilized by the wider community. 'Flashy' and 'cool' collections have been showcased, while collections that do not have as much of a marketable value have been overlooked. Collections like the Martin Site may not be 'flashy' but hold incredible research knowledge. If these collections were utilized in a more accessible way, they could be used to their full extent. I address the topic of collections and the Martin Site collection through topics of cultural heritage, digitization, and repatriation to determine the proper context and utilization of the collection.**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact [email protected]. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.*
Designing Multicomponent Materials using Statistical Learning
No full textPh.D.The design and deployment of multicomponent chemistries for novel materials remains a major challenge across all domains. The chief issue that arises is the massive search space that increases in complexity as the allowable number of combinatorial combinations increases. Furthermore, the appropriate domain representation for the resultant high dimensional data spaces that stem from such analyses remains a challenge. Thus, a robust strategy is required to introduce the appropriate representation and necessary computational tools and models that can survey the large number of combinations possible in an efficient manner and allow for understanding the crucial link between how modifications in chemistry affect properties for a given class of materials. In this dissertation we present an informatics approach to identify chemical discovery pathways for multicomponent materials using statistical analyses and high dimensional representations of multicomponent materials. We present a computational framework that enable us to navigate the issues of uncertainty within the existing high dimensionality that exists for such problems as well as develop new approaches for the efficient representation of the materials domain that encode the information required for the representation of such multicomponent chemistries rapidly and efficiently. Our work thus provides new techniques and results that allow for the universal exploration of the materials domain that is beyond the use cases presented here.**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact [email protected]. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.*
Microexpressions in Social Interactions: Implications to Recognition of Deception, Emotion, and Trait Impressions
No full textM.A.Nonverbal cues are one of the most important sources of information in social interaction. One important source of nonverbal clues are facial expressions. Although research has examined overt facial expressions of emotion, very little research has examined the effect spontaneously generated microexpressions of emotion, which are facial expressions of emotion that last less than 500ms. The present study sought to examine the role spontaneous microexpressions have on a human's ability to detect deception, recognize emotions, perceive others on various traits, and how verbal information helps guide these perceptions. A mixed model design was employed where 84 participants were randomly assigned to an audio on or audio off condition. Participants viewed 16 videoclips of people spontaneously responding to a bitter or sweet drink, where they either lied or told the truth about their feelings. Participants viewed these responses and answered several questions about the reactions they witnessed. Results found participants were above chance recognizing both deception and emotion, and most accurate detecting lies that had microexpressions. Women were more accurate at recognizing the particular emotions expressed in the microexpression compared with men. Stimuli displaying microexpressions were perceived as less trustworthy, confident, honest, and more anxious than those displaying neutral expressions. The present study hopes to add further light and significance of spontaneous microexpressions in the recognition of deception, emotion, and trait perceptions.**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact [email protected]. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.*
The Measure of Humanity: Literary Quantification and the Routes of Accumulation in British Atlantic Writing, 1650 – 1800
No full textPh.D."The Measure of Humanity" wagers that we can only grasp how numbers became integral to social and political thought in long eighteenth-century Britain when we shift our attention from the metropole to the colonial theater. Historians of science and epistemology have long observed the importance of commercial practices like double-entry bookkeeping to the development of numerical abstraction as a tool of political philosophy. To better understand the relays between quantitative theory and practice, my dissertation concentrates on the spaces in which numerical reasoning and representation most acutely directed the maintenance of territory and the governance of persons—the colonial plantation, as well as the broader networks of exchange and extraction of which it formed a crucial cornerstone. I invert Srinivas Aravamudan's injunction to read literature as colonial archive, and instead, read the archive of West Indian settlement and plantation—travel histories, agricultural tracts, plantation manuals, and political pamphlets—alongside canonically "Literary" materials like James Grainger's 1764 georgic poem The Sugar-Cane and Sarah Scott's novel The History of Sir George Ellison (1766). This strategy reveals a body of imaginative writing that mobilizes enumeration, measurement, and speculative calculation—in brief, the repertoire of early quantitative reasoning—to represent and maintain the extractive site of the plantation, as well as the colonial societies it upheld. I argue that as travelers, planters, merchants, and abolitionists recruited numerical techniques to register the material realities of the plantation at a textual level, they lent literary form to a worldview predicated on aggregating land, labor, and capital into systems whose historical contours could be tracked over time and modified through political intervention. In this way, my project illuminates the significance of literary and cultural production in the eighteenth-century Anglophone Caribbean to the emergence of biopolitics in the metropole.**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact [email protected]. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.*
Solid Electrolytes Based on Interpenetrating Polymer Networks for Solid-State Lithium-Ion Batteries
No full textM.S.Lithium-ion batteries enrich our modern-day lives and are poised to make a big impact on the future of our planet's sustainability. Current Li-ion batteries offer good ionic conductivity but have safety issues due to the flammability of their electrolytes. Two of the ways to improve the capabilities of Li-ion batteries is to improve safety or use Li-metal anode, which may require solid electrolytes. In this work, solid polymer electrolytes (SPEs) are prepared by crosslinking poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate with poly(ethylene glycol) methyl ether acrylate to form an interpenetrating network with poly(propylene carbonate) using LiClO4 as salt. The prepared SPEs were characterized using FTIR spectroscopy to determine ion interactions between polymers and LiClO4. The glass-transition temperatures, mechanical stabilities, and electrochemical properties of the SPEs were determined in terms of PPC and LiClO4 content. SPEs showed two glass-transition temperatures corresponding to an XLPEO+LiClO4 phase and PPC+LiClO4 phase and no crystallization/melting. The Young's modulus of the SPEs at 5 wt% LiClO4 increased from 3 MPa at 5 wt% PPC to 37 MPa at 20 wt% PPC. The toughness and tensile strength of the SPEs also showed significant improvement upon the addition of PPC. The ionic conductivity of the SPEs decreased with increasing PPC or LiClO4 content and the ion transport mechanisms were examined through the Arrhenius, Vogel-Tammann-Fulcher (VTF), and Maxwell equations. The SPEs do not follow the Arrhenius model which confirms that ion transport is not via the hopping mechanism. Additionally, the SPEs support the Maxwell model confirming that there is ion conduction in the two phases observed from the thermal analysis.**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact [email protected]. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.*
Forms of Disability: Sensation, Narrative, and Care in the Modernist Novel
No full textPh.D.This dissertation, "Forms of Disability: Sensation, Narrative, and Care in the Modernist Novel," reads modernist fiction alongside the efforts of psychiatry beginning in the late-nineteenth-century and continuing into the first-half of the twentieth-century to standardize understandings of psychosis, tracing a genealogy from degeneration to schizophrenia to autism. I show how – where psychiatry pathologized individuals with these conditions as deficient and disordered, as cognitively impaired, psychotically withdrawn, or psychosocially incompetent – modernist experimentations with embodied forms of human experience in the novel form made it possible to affirm distinctive and vivid modes of processing sensation. I read modernist novels – by Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Samuel Beckett – as depathologizing sensory disability, as offering new ways of understanding disability as a matter of thinking and relating differently. I argue that these novels were able to imagine sensorially divergent forms of personhood through their formal techniques and innovations – from the impression's mediation of sense and thought to the sensory language of illness, from narrative sequences of sensory association to spherical shapes of sensation. I do not simply draw on insights from the field of disability studies but also show what this field can gain from the recent interest in the politics of form within literary studies: against criticism that reads disability as breaking literary forms apart, I show how sensation is given form in these novels through relationships of care. This interdisciplinary projects seeks to reveal how the forms it describes are aesthetic and social, imagined and material, and thereby situated within broader historical and cultural contexts.**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact [email protected]. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.*
Pyrethroid and Chlorpyrifos Exposure and IQ of Children from the Salud Ambiental Montevideo (SAM) Study in Uruguay
No full textM.S.Introduction: Because of their rapid development in early life (infancy to school age), children are vulnerable to environmental exposures. With the increased use and access to pesticides globally, including for residential use, young children are likely to come into contact with these compounds in their daily lives. Research on pesticide exposure in urban populations is increasing, but mostly for biomonitoring programs rather than to examine health effects. There are few studies on how exposure to multiple pesticides affects cognition in school-age children. Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess the extent to which exposure to pyrethroids and chlorpyrifos, two commonly used pesticides for agricultural and residential applications, is related to general cognitive abilities among ~7-year-old children from Montevideo, Uruguay. Methods: Of 357 children enrolled into the study, 214 had complete data on all relevant variables. Children's cognition was assessed using tests from the Woodcock-Muñoz cognitive battery. Morning spot urine samples were collected for pesticide analyses and fasting blood was collected for blood lead analysis. One metabolite of chlorpyrifos (TCPy, 3,5,6-trichloro-2-pyridinol) and four metabolites of pyrethroids (3-PBA, 3-phenoxybenzoic acid; cis- and trans-DCCA, cis/trans-3-(2,2-dichlorovinyl)-2,2-dimethylcyclopropane carboxylic acid; and λCA, λ- cyhalothrin) pesticides were measured in urine. Urinary creatinine concentrations were also measured. Sociodemographic information was collected via questionnaire or observation in the home. The association between a general intellectual ability (GIA) score and each pesticide metabolite in urine, expressed as quartiles, was tested in separate linear regression models, accounting for child sex and age, maternal education, parental smoking, blood lead levels, HOME scores, and season of assessment. For comparison, three types of models were conducted: 1) using metabolite concentrations (wet weight) as independent variables and 2) using metabolite concentrations adjusted for creatinine as independent variables. Additionally, urinary pesticide metabolites (adjusted creatinine and modeled as continuous variables) were used in stratified models to assess the effect modification by sex, BMI z-score, and blood lead level cut at the median. Results: The median urinary metabolite values of TCPy, 3-PBA, cis-, and trans-DCCA being 10.72, 3.22, 0.55, and 1.86 ng/ml, respectively. After accounting for covariates, children in the highest quartiles of TCPy and trans-DCCA had higher GIA scores, (5.92 [1.43, 10.21]) and (5.43 [0.69, 10.17]), respectively, in models using metabolites (wet weight) as independent variables. When the metabolites were adjusted for creatinine, the associations became negative and no longer statistically significant. In stratified analyses, confidence intervals overlapped, suggesting little difference in associations between boys and girls, in children with lower vs. higher BLLs, and children with lower vs. higher BMI. Conclusion: In this cross-sectional study, urban school children with marked exposure to chlorpyrifos and pyrethroids pesticides, at levels higher than those reported by NHANES Biomonitoring Data in children of the same age group. Nevertheless, there was little evidence for an association between urinary pesticide metabolites and general cognitive abilities.**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact [email protected]. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.*
"O Fortuna" and the Mythic Medieval: A Study in Multi-Media Receptions
No full textPh.D.This study posits register theory as a framework for discussing pre-existing music in multimedia. Even with all of their semiotic underpinnings, the present theories related to the analysis of musical multimedia are geared toward discourse surrounding one analytical object. While all of the various extant approaches are all useful in that regard, they do not adequately provide a means of discussing the layered meanings that arise when already existing music is paired with a number of different media across several decades. Instead of trying to expand any one of these approaches, I build upon Michael Long's award-winning work that introduces register theory to the discourse of musical multimedia. Register theory is able to operate on multiple levels—one can look at a single musical gesture, as Long does, or at a piece of music as a whole. This facet makes it incredibly useful on a meta-conceptual plane, allowing us to go beyond the accepted confines of intertextual and semiotic analysis. Ultimately, though, it is the ability of register theory to operate on both micro and macro levels, that allows one to traverse multiple spaces and put analyses of different works into dialogue with each other. In the process, a discursive space is opened in which intertextual, semiotic, philosophic, and any number of other approaches and a potentially great variety of inter- and intra- disciplinary concerns can also be brought into dialogue. As a case study I focus mostly on one song, "O Fortuna," and offer some close readings of a variety of multimedia contexts in which it is used. Chapter one explores the troubled world of Carl Orff in an effort to paint a picture of the immediate context in which the song was created. I probe how Orff's compositional philosophy fits into broader musicological constructs surrounding neoclassicism and modernist anxiety, viewing Carmina Burana as an act that participates in the mythologization of the Middle Ages for nostalgic purposes. In the process I suggest that perhaps this action is what opens the cantata up to be used for a number of different ideological purposes, as the Mythic Medieval often operates as an idyllic locale for the reification of contemporary agendas. Chapter two offers a detailed close reading of John Boorman's film Excalibur. Here I use an against the grain reading to argue that Boorman uses "O Fortuna" along with a number of quotations from Wagner and many other filmic elements to create a Barthesian second order myth—a mythification of myth itself that inherently comments on the myths it uses. Chapter three explores connections between the Mythic Medieval and contemporary cultural constructs of the epic. I offer an analysis of multiple television advertisements to argue that "O Fortuna" and "Sunrise" from Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra are used in these ads to evoke the register of epic. In so doing, they tap into cultural constructions related to the same sort of nostalgic Medievalism Orff seems to have been engaged in. In this context, though, they play on these connections to modernist anxieties to offer their ostensible cures—a moment of idyllic respite or a technological marvel that will usher in a bright new future—with a bold irony that is designed to undercut their message by playing to the expectations of a knowing modern subject. I then offer some concluding thoughts about what kinds of questions, particularly related to pre-existing music in multimedia contexts, register theory might be used to answer.**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact [email protected]. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.*
Class Struggle Within the Middle-Class: Academic Competition for Selective College Admissions Among Korean 'Early Study Abroad' Students in the Globalized Arena
No full textPh.D.Drawing on retrospective and current accounts of transition from secondary to postsecondary education in the United States among Korean 'early study abroad (ESA)' students from different middle-class backgrounds, this dissertation examines a particular form of academic race towards the goal of selective college admissions and sheds light on the nature of the academic competition as "class warfare" within the middle-class in the era of globalization. The case of Korean ESA students is particularly meaningful as a concrete example illuminating the new contexts of the neoliberal globalization in contemporary society, considering the relatively higher levels of education fever, underemployment rate of university graduates, and participation in ESA experiences in Korean society as compared to other countries. For data collection, I interviewed 44 student participants from three research universities in three different cities in the United States, and also traveled several cities in Korea to interview 15 parent participants. More specifically, in this dissertation, I categorize main participants into two groups—the less privileged middle-class group (e.g., the Browning University group) and the more privileged middle-class group (e.g., the Chester and Gould Universities group), and analyze similarities and differences between the two groups in light of the differences in their college selectivity and socioeconomic conditions. Findings reveal that the gap between family backgrounds within the middle-class result in different "classed" practices in their educational trajectories, in spite of ostensible similarities. First of all, a careful examination of Korean ESA students from different middle-class backgrounds uncovers a gap of ESA readiness between the less and the more privileged middle-class students, thereby highlighting their different starting points in the academic race towards the goal of selective college admissions. In addition, while the use of private education services among respondents in the Browning University group were predominantly restricted by the price of the service, respondents in the Chester and Gould Universities group were more likely to purchase higher-quality services irrespective of their price tags. In the long term, the high-quality services enabled students to professionally prepare themselves for admission to selective colleges, even though students and parents did not have fully developed college knowledge at that point. Furthermore, respondents in the Chester and Gould Universities group were able to pursue higher levels of academic engagement and aggressive investment with a clear target of elite private institutions, whereas their counterparts in the Browning University group were required to adjust their levels of academic engagement and financial investment and focus on a relatively less privileged, but still selective, target such as flagship universities. Importantly, the globalized arena of "class warfare" in the field of education results in an increased level of intensity and sophistication of class struggle in contemporary society. To be specific, the growth of ESA students contributes to the acceleration and intensification of the positional competition in the social hierarchy in two ways: on the one hand, as a new form of educational inequality between the socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged families, it serves to solidify the unequal structure of educational opportunity; on the other hand, by intensifying the academic race among middle-class students regardless of their nationality and citizenship status, it also drives middle-class students to strive for valuable academic credentials, and finally, gives rise to a globalized arena of unprecedented class struggle within the middle-class.**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact [email protected]. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.*
Regulation of Molecular Motors by Glycogen Synthase Kinase 3β (GSK3β) and Presenilin (PS) During Axonal Transport
No full textPh.D.Within axons, molecular motors transport essential components required for neuronal function, maintenance, and viability. Defects in axonal transport have been implicated in many neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's disease (AD). Although multiple levels of regulation must exist for proper transport of cargoes along axons, little is known about these mechanisms. Previous work in our lab showed that Presenilin (PS), a gene implicated in AD, and Glycogen synthase kinase 3β (GSK3β), regulates axonal transport, however, the mechanism by which these proteins function was unknown. In my work, we tested the overall hypothesis that PS and GSK3β regulate motor function during axonal transport. In chapter 2, we hypothesized that PS regulates GSK3β-mediated functions on motor proteins in vivo. We found that functional PS with an intact loop region is essential for the rescue of GSK3β-mediated transport defects, while disruption of PS loop or expression of a non-functional PS variant failed to rescue axonal blockages in vivo. We proposed a scaffolding mechanism for PS in which the loop region sequesters GSK3β away from motors for the proper regulation of motor function. Further, since active-GSK3β associated with and phosphorylated KHC (kinesin heavy chain) in vitro, in chapter 3, we hypothesized that GSK3β phosphorylation site on KHC is essential for kinesin-1 function in vivo. We identified a functional GSK3β phosphorylation site, S314, in the Drosophila KHC motor domain. Our in vitro results led us to propose that GSK3β phosphorylation at S314 acts as a stop for kinesin-1, while the loss of phosphorylation at this site causes uncoordinated motility, perhaps by decreasing kinesin's ATPase activity. Further, endogenous loss of GSK3β-phosphorylation at S314 decreased kinesin-1 attachment to MTs and membranes, mitochondrial motility in vivo, and/or kinesin motor ATPase activity. Together, our observations suggest a model in which GSK3β regulates kinesin-1 motor activity in vivo via differential phosphorylation. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the complex regulatory mechanisms that exist for controlling motor protein activity during axonal transport in vivo.**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact [email protected]. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.*