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Articles 31 - 60 of 279
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A Veteran Welfare State: Veterans' Benefits, Coalition Politics, And Social Policy Change, 1943-1973, Melinda R. Tarsi
A Veteran Welfare State: Veterans' Benefits, Coalition Politics, And Social Policy Change, 1943-1973, Melinda R. Tarsi
Doctoral Dissertations
America’s commitment to the reintegration of veterans via social policy is not a recent political development; since the end of World War II, federal and state government programs have been designed (and redesigned) to successfully transition former military personnel back into civilian life. Beginning with the 1944 Serviceman’s Readjustment Act (commonly known as the G.I. Bill), the federal government has taken the primary role in this reintegration initiative, investing billions of dollars into veterans’ benefit programs for education assistance, unemployment compensation, and job placement services. Even as the legislation has been renewed after military conflicts, veterans’ education benefits have remained …
Movements And Conservation Of The Migratory White-Eared Kob (Kobus Kob Leucotis) In South Sudan, Malik D. Marjan
Movements And Conservation Of The Migratory White-Eared Kob (Kobus Kob Leucotis) In South Sudan, Malik D. Marjan
Doctoral Dissertations
The annual movements of white-eared kob (Kobus kob leucotis), tiang (Damaliscus korrigum tiang), in eastern South Sudan was investigated to provided appropriate information for developing effective conservation actions for the migratory kob. Although kob is the focus of the study tiang has been included as the two migrations are ecologically linked and overlap at least in the wet season. During the 20 years of the civil war which ravaged South Sudan, the kob and tiang populations were thought to be severely hunted for food by both the combatants and local people to the extent that their …
Lightweight, High-Temperature Radiator For In-Space Nuclear-Electric Power And Propulsion, Briana N. Tomboulian
Lightweight, High-Temperature Radiator For In-Space Nuclear-Electric Power And Propulsion, Briana N. Tomboulian
Doctoral Dissertations
The desire to explore deep space destinations with high-power and high-speed spacecraft inspired this work. Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEP), shown to provide orders of magnitude higher specific impulse and propulsion efficiency over traditional chemical rockets, has been identified as an enabling technology for this goal. One of large obstacle to launching an NEP vehicle is total mass. Increasing the specific power (kW/kg) of the heat radiator component is necessary to meet NASA’s mass targets. This work evaluated a novel lightweight, high-temperature carbon fiber radiator designed to meet the mass requirements of future NEP missions. The research is grouped into three …
Measurement Of The Parity Violating Asymmetry In Elastic Electron Scattering Off 208pb, Jonathan W. Wexler
Measurement Of The Parity Violating Asymmetry In Elastic Electron Scattering Off 208pb, Jonathan W. Wexler
Doctoral Dissertations
The Lead Radius Experiment (PREX) was carried out in order to provide a model independent measurement of the RMS radius √ < r2 >of the neutron distribution in the 208Pb nucleus. The parity-violating scattering asymmetry for longitudinally polarized 1.06 GeV electrons from an unpolarized 208Pb target was measured at Q2 = 0.00880 GeV2. This measurement was performed by the PREX collaboration in Hall A at Jefferson Laboratory in Newport News, VA, between March and June, 2010. The electron detectors used in this measurement were designed and fabricated by University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Smith College. The resulting …
All-American Vacationland: African American, Puerto Rican, And Italian Resorts In The Catskill Mountains, 1920-1980, Laura A. Miller
All-American Vacationland: African American, Puerto Rican, And Italian Resorts In The Catskill Mountains, 1920-1980, Laura A. Miller
Doctoral Dissertations
In the twentieth century, New York State’s Catskill Mountain resort area was an “All-American” vacationland. Each summer, many different racial and ethnic minorities sought a brief respite from their lives and labor in New York City at boarding houses, resorts, and bungalows scattered throughout the mountains. Collectively, these groups contributed to the development of a highly segregated resort area that reflected, on an exaggerated scale, the racial, ethnic, and class divisions within New York City and the nation as a whole in the twentieth century. This dissertation examines the Catskills resort landscape through a comparative analysis of African American, Puerto …
Teachers Talk: A Case Study Of The Experience Of Working Across Cultures With Immigrant Children And Their Families, Anne Lundberg
Teachers Talk: A Case Study Of The Experience Of Working Across Cultures With Immigrant Children And Their Families, Anne Lundberg
Doctoral Dissertations
One of the persistent challenges confronting our society is how to reduce inequities in educational and life chances of students from different socioeconomic, ethnic, language, and racial backgrounds. One of the most important factors in a child’s success in school is the degree to which their families are actively involved in their education. These two facts framed this research work. The current large-scale immigration occurring in the U.S.A. is an important social development because children of immigrants currently make up 20% of all youth in the U.S.A.; first and second generation immigrant children are the most rapidly growing segment of …
A Defense Of Russellian Descriptivism, Brandt H. Van Der Gaast
A Defense Of Russellian Descriptivism, Brandt H. Van Der Gaast
Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation, I defend a Russellian form of descriptivism. The main supporting argument invokes a relation between meaning and thought. I argue that the meanings of sentences are the thoughts people use them to express. This is part of a Gricean outlook on meaning according to which psychological intentionality is prior to, and determinative of, linguistic intentionality. The right approach to thought, I argue in Chapter 1, is a type of functionalism on which thoughts have narrow contents. On this view, the attitude ascriptions of a regimented psychology capture what people really believe and desire. These attitude ascriptions have …
Receiver Design And Security For Low Power Wireless Communications Systems, Kyle A. Morrison
Receiver Design And Security For Low Power Wireless Communications Systems, Kyle A. Morrison
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation focuses on two important areas in wireless communications: receiver design and security. In the first part of this dissertation we consider low data rate receiver design for ultra-wideband (UWB), a wideband radio technology that promises to help solve the frequency allocation problem that often inhibits narrowband systems. Reference-based receivers are promising candidates in the UWB regime, because the conventional rake receiver designs suffers from complexity limitations and inaccuracies in channel estimation. Many reference-based systems have arisen as viable solutions for receivers. We unify these systems as well as other systems into the general framework for performance analysis to …
Stress And Depression During Pregnancy Among Hispanic Women: Risk For Adverse Birth Outcomes And The Role Of Physical Activity, Kathleen Szegda
Stress And Depression During Pregnancy Among Hispanic Women: Risk For Adverse Birth Outcomes And The Role Of Physical Activity, Kathleen Szegda
Doctoral Dissertations
Preterm birth and low birth weight are among the leading causes of infant mortality and morbidity in the United States. Puerto Rican women are at increased risk for these adverse birth outcomes and elevated levels of depression and psychosocial stress during pregnancy when compared to non-Hispanic Whites. Therefore, it is important to understand whether these psychological factors increase risk for these adverse birth outcomes and mechanisms to prevent/reduce depression in this high-risk population. The first study of this dissertation examined associations between perceived stress during pregnancy and preterm birth, low birth weight, and birth of a small-for-gestational age infant (SGA) …
Care Time In The U.S.: Measures, Determinants, And Implications, Joo Yeoun Suh
Care Time In The U.S.: Measures, Determinants, And Implications, Joo Yeoun Suh
Doctoral Dissertations
These essays focus on improving both the measurement and valuation of time devoted to family care, as well as exploring factors, such as gender, age, and earnings, that affect time allocation. The first essay examines whether time devoted to primary child care activities can be truly understood to represent the total amount of time devoted to child care (as is implied by the focus on primary care activities that dominates the time-use literature), exploring problems of conventional definitions of child care and utilizations of time-use surveys. The second essay explores the measurement issues of relative temporal burden on “sandwich” family …
Productive Stagnation And Unproductive Accumulation In The United States, 1947-2011., Tomas N. Rotta
Productive Stagnation And Unproductive Accumulation In The United States, 1947-2011., Tomas N. Rotta
Doctoral Dissertations
My doctoral research addresses the question of how productive and unproductive forms of capital accumulation interact in the United States. My contribution is to first develop a new understanding of the labor theory of value in order to better explain how financial and rentier forms of revenues relate to the wealth created in productive activities. Second, I offer an innovative analysis of historical trends regarding unproductive accumulation in the postwar United States economy. For that purpose, I propose a new methodology to estimate Marxist categories from conventional input-output matrices, national income accounts, and employment data. A core feature of my …
The Discovery And Study Of Fluvirucin B1 Polyketide Synthase, Tsung-Yi Lin
The Discovery And Study Of Fluvirucin B1 Polyketide Synthase, Tsung-Yi Lin
Doctoral Dissertations
Rapidly decreasing numbers of viable therapeutic leads in the pharmaceutical pipeline demand new, sustainable methods for improved drug discovery and development. Despite vast improvements in de novo drug design and target recognition, Nature remains the richest source of small molecule therapeutics. Among many natural products, polyketides are not only the most promising ones for developing new antibiotic leads, but also exhibit unusually high therapeutic value ranging from clinical use as anticancer, antiviral, and immunosuppressant drugs. Modular polyketide synthases (PKSs) are dedicated nano-machinery that can be manipulated to produce a structurally diverse library for drug discovery programs. The ability to manipulate …
Using Formal Methods To Verify Transactional Abstract Concurrency Control, Trek S. Palmer
Using Formal Methods To Verify Transactional Abstract Concurrency Control, Trek S. Palmer
Doctoral Dissertations
Concurrent application design and implementation is more important than ever in today's multi-core processor world. Transactional Memory (TM) Concurrent application design and implementation is more important than ever in today's multi-core processor world. Transactional Memory (TM). Each has its own particular advantages and disadvantages. However, these techniques each need some extra information to `glue' the non-transactional operation into a transactional context. At the most general level, non-transactional code must be decorated in such a way that the TM run-time can determine how those non-transactional operations commute with one another, and how to `undo' the non-transactional operations in case the run-time …
Understanding Structure-Property Relationships At The Nano-Bio Interface For Delivery Applications, Krishnendu Saha
Understanding Structure-Property Relationships At The Nano-Bio Interface For Delivery Applications, Krishnendu Saha
Doctoral Dissertations
The surface chemistry of the nanomaterials creates an effective interface between two entirely different worlds: nanotechnology and biology. Understanding the interaction between nanomaterial surface chemistry and biological entities can be useful for a wide variety of biomedical applications as well as can provide crucial information for nanotoxicology. In my research, I have used gold nanoparticles as a model platform to synthesize a family of nanoparticles with atomic level control of their surface properties and probe their interaction with biological systems. First part of my research focused on the understanding the uptake mechanisms, toxicity, and hemolytic properties of cationic nanoparticles, an …
Privacy-Preserving Sanitization In Data Sharing, Wentian Lu
Privacy-Preserving Sanitization In Data Sharing, Wentian Lu
Doctoral Dissertations
In the era of big data, the prospect of analyzing, monitoring and investigating all sources of data starts to stand out in every aspect of our life. The benefit of such practices becomes concrete only when analysts or investigators have the information shared from data owners. However, privacy is one of the main barriers that disrupt the sharing behavior, due to the fear of disclosing sensitive information. This dissertation describes data sanitization methods that disguise the sensitive information before sharing a dataset and our criteria are always protecting privacy while preserving utility as much as possible. In particular, we provide …
On The Formation And Evolution Of Early-Type Galaxies, Christina Williams
On The Formation And Evolution Of Early-Type Galaxies, Christina Williams
Doctoral Dissertations
Galaxies in the local Universe are characterized by blue, star-forming disk galaxies, and red, massive early-type galaxies (ETGs) whose star-formation has been quenched early in the Universe's history. The ETGs are relics of the evolutionary processes that transform galaxies over cosmic time, but currently we still lack a comprehensive understanding of their evolution. An important link in the evolution of ETGs is that the first quenched galaxies (z~2) are both the most massive, and most compact, suggesting a physical connection between high stellar density and efficient, rapid cessation of star-formation. In this dissertation, I seek insight into the formation and …
Computational Communication Intelligence: Exploring Linguistic Manifestation And Social Dynamics In Online Communication, Xiaoxi Xu
Doctoral Dissertations
We now live in an age of online communication. As social media becomes an integral part of our life, online communication becomes an essential life skill. In this dissertation, we aim to understand how people effectively communicate online. We research components of success in online communication and present scientific methods to study the skill of effective communication. This research advances the state of art in machine learning and communication studies. For communication studies, we pioneer the study of a communication phenomenon we call Communication Intelligence in online interactions. We create a theory about communication intelligence that measures participants’ ten high-order …
Retrieval Models Based On Linguistic Features Of Verbose Queries, Jae Hyun Park
Retrieval Models Based On Linguistic Features Of Verbose Queries, Jae Hyun Park
Doctoral Dissertations
Natural language expressions are more familiar to users than choosing keywords for queries. Given that, people can use natural language expressions to represent their sophisticated information needs. Instead of listing keywords, verbose queries are expressed in a grammatically well-formed phrase or sentence in which terms are used together to represent the more specific meanings of a concept, and the relationships of these concepts are expressed by function words. The goal of this thesis is to investigate methods of using the semantic and syntactic features of natural language queries to maximize the effectiveness of search. For this purpose, we propose the …
Guanidinium-Rich Romp Polymers Drive Phase, Charge, And Curvature-Specific Interactions With Phospholipid Membranes, Michael T W Lis
Guanidinium-Rich Romp Polymers Drive Phase, Charge, And Curvature-Specific Interactions With Phospholipid Membranes, Michael T W Lis
Doctoral Dissertations
Protein transduction domains (PTDs) and their and their synthetic mimics are short sequences capable of unusually high uptake in cells. Several varieties of these molecules, including the arginine-rich Tat peptide from HIV, have been extensively used as vectors for protein, DNA, and siRNA delivery into cells. Despite the wide-ranging utility of PTDs and their mimics, their uptake mechanism is still under considerable debate. How the molecules are able to cross phospholipid membranes, and what structural components are necessary for optimal activity are poorly understood. This thesis explores how PTDMs interact with phospholipid membrane phase, anionic lipid content and negative Gaussian …
Computational Modeling Of Learning Biases In Stress Typology, Robert D. Staubs
Computational Modeling Of Learning Biases In Stress Typology, Robert D. Staubs
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation demonstrates a strong connection between the frequency of stress patterns and their relative learnability under a wide class of learning algorithms. These frequency results follow from hypotheses about the learner's available representations and the distribution of input data. Such hypotheses are combined with a model of learning to derive distinctions between classes of stress patterns, addressing frequency biases not modeled by traditional generative theory. I present a series of results for error-driven learners of constraint-based grammars. These results are shown both for single learners and learners in an iterated learning model. First, I show that with general n …
Primary And Secondary Reactions Of Cellulose Melt Pyrolysis, Alex D. Paulsen
Primary And Secondary Reactions Of Cellulose Melt Pyrolysis, Alex D. Paulsen
Doctoral Dissertations
Fast pyrolysis of biomass is a next-generation biofuels production process that is capable of converting solid lignocellulosic materials (in their raw form) to a transportable liquid (bio-oil) which can be catalytically hydrogenated to fuels and chemicals. Pyrolysis reactors depolymerize solid biomass by heating the feedstock (in the absence of oxygen) up to high temperatures (400 – 600 °C) to produce a short-lived intermediate liquid phase (only a few seconds), which ultimately breaks down to form small (1-6 carbon) oxygenates. These vapor-products can then be condensed at room temperature to produce liquid bio-oil. While biomass fast pyrolysis has enormous potential to …
Three Essays On Hedge Funds, Liping Qiu
Three Essays On Hedge Funds, Liping Qiu
Doctoral Dissertations
In Essay 1, we find that, on average, hedge funds decrease leverage prior to the beginning of the financial crisis, with leverage remaining below the pre-crisis levels. We also find that younger funds with lower current leverage and stricter fund governance are more likely to increase leverage following favorable performance; funds exposed to higher risk, higher management fee and higher current leverage tend to delever. Managers increase leverage in order to enhance future performance following superior returns only to be disappointed. We find mixed evidence on the performance difference between levered and unlevered funds, but levered funds do survive longer. …
Essays On The Minimum Wage, Ben Zipperer
Essays On The Minimum Wage, Ben Zipperer
Doctoral Dissertations
This three-essay dissertation empirically examines the effects of minimum wages on teen and restaurant earnings and employment, and also on the receipt of public benefit programs. In the first chapter, co-authored with Arindrajit Dube, we extend the synthetic control approach to 32 state-level case studies of minimum wage increases. We do not find a statistically significant effect on teen employment, with the mean elasticity close to zero. There is also no indication of heterogeneous treatment effects. Finally, we discuss some important practical challenges, including the ability to find close matches and the choice of predictors used for constructing a synthetic …
The Role Of Napping On Memory Consolidation In Preschool Children, Laura Kurdziel
The Role Of Napping On Memory Consolidation In Preschool Children, Laura Kurdziel
Doctoral Dissertations
Nocturnal sleep has been shown to benefit memory in adults and children. During the preschool age range (~3-5 years), the distribution of sleep across the 24-hour period changes dramatically. Children transition from biphasic sleep patterns (a nap in addition to overnight sleep) to a monophasic sleep pattern (only overnight sleep). In addition, early childhood is a time of neuronal plasticity and pronounced acquisition of new information. This dissertation sought to examine the relationship between daytime napping and memory consolidation in preschool-aged children during this transitional time. Children were taught either a declarative or an emotional task in the morning, and …
Three Essays In Macroeconomic History, Joshua W. Mason
Three Essays In Macroeconomic History, Joshua W. Mason
Doctoral Dissertations
Following Minsky, an economy can be understood as a set of units linked to each other by flows of money payments and by the commitments to future payments reflected on balance sheets. This dissertation offers three accounts of the historical evolution of the US economy, conceived of a network of balance sheets, over the course of 20th and early 21st century. The first essay looks at changes in the pattern of payment flows between nonfinancial corporations and financial markets associated with the ``shareholder revolution" of the 1980s. It argues that the shift in payouts to shareholders from a quasi-fixed stream …
Designing Efficient And Accurate Behavior-Aware Mobile Systems, Abhinav Parate
Designing Efficient And Accurate Behavior-Aware Mobile Systems, Abhinav Parate
Doctoral Dissertations
The proliferation of sensors on smartphones, tablets and wearables has led to a plethora of behavior classification algorithms designed to sense various aspects of individual user's behavior such as daily habits, activity, physiology, mobility, sleep, emotional and social contexts. This ability to sense and understand behaviors of mobile users will drive the next generation of mobile applications providing services based on the users' behavioral patterns. In this thesis, we investigate ways in which we can enhance and utilize the understanding of user behaviors in such applications. In particular, we focus on identifying the key challenges in the following three aspects …
Comprehending Each Other: Weak Reciprocity And Processing, Helen Majewski
Comprehending Each Other: Weak Reciprocity And Processing, Helen Majewski
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation looks at the question of how comprehenders get from an underspecified semantic representation to a particular construal. Its focus is on reciprocal sentences. Reciprocal sentences, like other plural sentences, are open to a range of interpretations. Work on the semantics of plural predication commonly assumes that this range of interpretations is due to cumulativity (Krifka 1992): if predicates are inherently cumulative (Kratzer 2001), the logical representations of plural sentences underspecify the interpretation (rather than being ambiguous between various interpretations). The dissertation argues that the processor makes use of a number of general preferences and principles in getting from …
Impact Of Surface Active Minor Components On Physicochemical Properties Of Association Colloids And Lipid Oxidation In Bulk Oil, Ketinun Kittipongpittaya
Impact Of Surface Active Minor Components On Physicochemical Properties Of Association Colloids And Lipid Oxidation In Bulk Oil, Ketinun Kittipongpittaya
Doctoral Dissertations
Lipid oxidation is a great concern for food manufacturers and consumers as it negatively impacts not only food quality and nutritive values of food lipids, but also consumer health. Lipid oxidation in bulk oil is impacted by chemical factors, such as, prooxidants and antioxidants, and is also related to the existence of physical structures. Bulk oils contain a variety of surface active minor components which are able to form physical structures known as association colloids. These physical structures create oil-water interfaces which seem to be an important site where lipid oxidation occurs in bulk oil. Thus, this research focused on …
Mass Spectrometry Based Experimental Strategies To Characterize Native And Non-Native Disulfide Bonds In Cysteine-Rich Protein Therapeutics, Adriana Z. Kita
Mass Spectrometry Based Experimental Strategies To Characterize Native And Non-Native Disulfide Bonds In Cysteine-Rich Protein Therapeutics, Adriana Z. Kita
Doctoral Dissertations
The impact post-translational modifications (PTMs) can have on the structure, function, and immunogenicity of protein therapeutics makes it especially important for these protein-based treatments to be well characterized. Mass spectrometry has become instrumental in the examination of enzymatic and non-enzymatic PTMs. Disulfide bonds fall into both of these categories in which native disulfide bonds are formed in the ER by disulfide mediated enzymes and non-native disulfide bonds are often formed by non-enzymatic reducing/oxidizing reactions. Disulfide bonds are particularly important for protein folding and reinforcing higher order structure, and are typically characterized by LC-MS of non-reduced peptides. However, characterizing the disulfide …
Southie Versus Roxbury: Crime, Welfare, And The Racialized Gubernatorial Politics Of Massachusetts In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Daniel T. Kirsch
Southie Versus Roxbury: Crime, Welfare, And The Racialized Gubernatorial Politics Of Massachusetts In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Daniel T. Kirsch
Doctoral Dissertations
Racial and ethnic divisions at the national level and their effects on politics take on an abstract character when not discussing specific communities. To obtain a reliable, consistent, and potentially reliable measure of a relationship, demographic information and voting behaviors at the small community, submetropolitan level must be examined in high-turnout, same-office elections over a protracted period, ideally in a polity with a penchant for racial tolerance. The political language of Boston has been mired in racialization since at least the Civil Rights era, particularly since the Boston anti-segregation busing crisis of the 1970s. While previous research has focused on …