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"Chasing A Ghost": Addressing The Opalescence/Aggregation Relationship Of An Igg 1 Antibody, John C. Champagne

Doctoral Dissertations

This study was conducted to address the aggregation/opalescence relationship of an IgG 1 therapeutic antibody under a variety of conditions. The opalescence characteristics of three antibodies, Mab 1, 2 and 3, were examined as a function of salt dependence, protein concentration and temperature, using a variety of biophysical techniques. The high molecular weight species were initially identified using batch static and dynamic light scattering and separated by asymmetric flow field flow fractionation. When the salt dependence was examined, any structural changes were characterized using differential scanning calorimetry, circular dichroism and fluorescence, while the association state and temperature dependence was measured …

Sustainable Management Of Industrial Capital: Lca And Spatial Analysis In Decision Making For Beneficial Use Of Industrial By -Products, Alberta C. Carpenter

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this research was to broaden understanding of multiple impacts in assessing materials for construction. Life cycle assessment was used to this effect to understand the impacts from the use of industrial by-products for different applications on different spatial scales. The first two studies looked at applications in highway construction for a single project scenario and for a regional management scenario. The third study considered life cycle impacts for the management of construction and demolition (C&D) wood debris to include combustion for energy recovery. The fourth chapter reviews the literature for life cycle energy impact for building materials. …

Bridging Cultures: American Indian Students At The Northfield Mount Hermon School, Kathryn A. Askins

Doctoral Dissertations

University of New Hampshire, May, 2009 In 1879, two very different types of boarding schools opened their doors: the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, headed by Army Captain Richard Henry Pratt, and the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies, founded by evangelist D. L. Moody. While Captain Pratt was dedicated to the assimilation and acculturation of Native children into the dominant culture, D. L. Moody was determined to offer affordable education to financially disadvantaged young women. In the fall of 1880 the Seminary welcomed sixteen Choctaw, Cherokee, and Creek students, and, in 1881, the newly opened Mount Hermon Boys' School accepted four …

A System Model For The Effect Of Polarization Mode Dispersion On Digital Modulated Optical Signals In Single Mode Fibers, Abhijit Shriram Chitambar

Doctoral Dissertations

A comprehensive systems model that retains the discrete nature of the output delay distribution in order to accurately characterize the pulse broadening due to Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) is developed in this thesis. PMD in optical channels has been a critical factor limiting high-speed data transmission over long distances in optical networks. PMD is a source of Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) and its impact increases with the transmission data rate. Since economical adaptive compensation schemes are currently unavailable, it is essential to characterize this impairment to completely understand its impact and develop effective countermeasures. An incremental approach has been developed …

The Effects Of Documentation On Young Children's Memory, Bethany Karen Benson Fleck

Doctoral Dissertations

A central part of the Reggio Emila approach to early childhood education is the teaching method of "documentation." In documentation, educators extensively observe, record, and display young children's work through its progression. Educational and developmental literatures offer speculative claims and a theoretical basis supporting the facilitative effects of documentation on young children's memory. The current study is the first to empirically investigate the effects that documentation has on episodic and semantic memory. Sixty-six four and a half to 6-year-old children experienced a novel learning event. Two days later the children were reminded of the event and its content information using …

Keeping Visual-Auditory Associations In Mind: The Impact Of Detail And Meaningfulness On Crossmodal Working Memory Load, Anne T. Gilman

Doctoral Dissertations

Complex objects have been found to take up more visual working memory---as measured by lowered change-detection accuracy with such stimuli---than simple colored shapes (Treisman, 2006; Xu, 2002). While verbal working memory studies have similarly shown reduced apparent capacity for longer words (Baddeley, 2007), other research has demonstrated that features contributing to object categorization and recognizability can help visual working memory capacity (Olsson & Poom, 2005; Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2004). Until very recently, no measures of crossmodal working memory capacity had been proposed, even though crossmodal associations are part of the fabric of learning, from classical conditioning to calculus. The working …

The Mental Demands Of Marine Ecosystem -Based Management: A Constructive Developmental Lens, Verna Gerard Delauer

Doctoral Dissertations

Ecosystem-based Management (EBM) is a relatively new and promising approach to the management of marine systems. EBM is holistic by seeking to include ail stakeholders affected by marine policy. Stakeholders may include individuals from ail levels of government, academia, environmental organizations, and marine-dependent businesses and industry. This dissertation lays out the substantive differences of marine EBM stakeholder engagement processes versus other, single sector processes. EBM processes are more complex than existing stakeholder engagement mechanisms, to sufficiently require a more sophisticated conceptual understanding of the process and the people involved. There are implicit cognitive, interpersonal, and intra-personal demands of EBM that …

Determination Of Geotechnical Properties Of Seafloor Sediment Using A Free Fall Penetrometer, Gopala Krishna Mulukutla

Doctoral Dissertations

A study was conducted to determine the penetration behavior of a cylindrical probe free falling to the seafloor and to utilize the data obtained to evaluate the engineering properties of surficial sediment. Two experimental probes, each equipped with accelerometers, pressure sensors and optical backscatter sensors were deployed in different sediment regimes. The data collected was used to derive the sediment type and determine physical properties such as undrained shear strength, coefficient of consolidation and shear modulus for soft fine-grained sediment.

Acceleration signals from drops of a free fall penetrometer contain information about the nature of the seafloor. A simple sediment …

The Maritime Revival: Antimodernity, Class, And Culture, 1870--1940, Glenn Michael Grasso

Doctoral Dissertations

Between 1870 and 1940, Americans redefined their perceptions, ideas, and cultural meanings of seafaring under sail. The Maritime Revival---a cultural phenomenon that took the workaday nineteenth-century maritime world and converted it into an archetypical exercise in essential Americanism---selectively picked stories, symbols, and specific lifestyles and elevated them to heroic status. Part of larger nineteenth-century revivalism, the Maritime Revival created an image of seafaring that was a small subset of the entire experience-as-lived. By the 1930s, Americans recognized a heroic, but lost, golden age of sailing ships that did not correspond to the maritime world that had once been a ubiquitous …

Excavating The Landscapes Of American Literature: Archaeology, Antiquarianism, And The Landscape In American Women's Writing, 1820--1890, Christina Healey

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the ways that women writers made use of the discourses of antiquarianism and archaeology between the years 1820 and 1890. Focusing especially upon the writings of Sarah Josepha Hale, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, the project examines depictions of artifacts, ruins, relics, and other antiquities in literary landscapes. Each of these women presents a unique way of knowing the world that is manifested in the ways their texts join different ways of understanding the landscape, its occupants, the artifacts it contains, its strata and geological history, and its aesthetic value. …

A Wild Web: The Tangled History Of Attitudes Toward Wildlife In A Dynamic New England Culture, 1945--1985, Mary H. Hopkins

Doctoral Dissertations

Attitudes toward wildlife are considerably more complex than one might suspect. This dissertation started with a hypothesis that population growth would correlate with increasing negative attitudes toward wildlife, but historical evidence only partially supports this hypothesis. Information about the frequency and types of wildlife references appearing in newspapers between 1945 and 1985 was gathered from a systematic sampling of six New Hampshire newspapers that represented towns with differing growth trends. While analysis of quantitative data minimized any correlation between growth and negative attitudes, qualitative data from newspaper articles, archival sources, government reports, books and articles, and other sources provided evidence …

Synoptic Controls On Ozone Over The Northeastern Us And Continental Export, Jennifer D. Hegarty

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focused on the impact of circulation, a key climate variable, on air quality from regional to global scale. The relationships between circulation and tropospheric ozone (O3) levels were investigated for the surface over the northeastern U.S. as well as for the spring-, winter- and summertime North American export and trans-Atlantic Transport. The latter studies utilized the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) retrievals of O3 and carbon monoxide (CO) to explore the three-dimensional structure of continental outflow and to identify anthropogenic influence on the free troposphere over the remote oceanic region. The key findings are summarized as follows. First, the …

Absent Meaning: Fascination, Narrative, And Trauma In The Holocaust Imaginary, Christopher Scott Massey

Doctoral Dissertations

Examining post-1970 representations of the Holocaust and Nazism along with critical responses to these representations, the dissertation demonstrates how a use of the term "fascination" has shaped contemporary understandings of how the Holocaust should and should not be represented and remembered. My argument is that despite its pervasive and influential usage in the discourse of Holocaust representation, no critical attention has been given to what the term means. In as much as the term's usage draws the historical and ethical boundaries across which representations of the Holocaust cannot pass, this dearth of critical attention given to the term means that …

Temporal Variation, Regional Sources, And Removal Processes Of Volatile Organic Compounds In New England, Rachel S. Russo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation describes three research projects with the common objective of characterizing the influence of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) on air quality in New England using measurements made over multiple years (2002-2008) and from different sampling locations. The specific objectives include identifying sources (direct emission or secondary production), quantifying mixing ratios, and characterizing the chemical (i.e., oxidation, photolysis) and physical (i.e., transport, mixing) processes which regulate the distributions of VOCs in the troposphere over southeastern New Hampshire.

Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the seasonal and interannual variability of nonmethane hydrocarbons (NMHCs), selected halocarbons, and alkyl nitrates using measurements from canister …

Treatment Of Contaminated Sediments Using Reactive Cap Technology: Characterization And Modeling Of Geotechnical, Hydraulic And Contaminant Transport Behavior Of Cap-Sediment Systems, Rafael Antonio Prieto Piedrahita

Doctoral Dissertations

Reactive cap technology is a promising in-situ remediation solution for contaminated sediment, mainly because it has the potential to reduce costs and environmental impacts when compared to solutions that rely solely on dredging and disposal. Reactive capping mats have been recently used in demonstration projects as a passive remediation technology for contaminated sediment. The mats used in this research were comprised of two geosynthetic fabrics bound to a fibrous core filled with a reactive material. The type of geotextiles and reactive material are selected based on the characteristics of the contaminated material and the contaminants on site. The mat is …

A Modified Synthesis, C-Functionalization, Resolution And Racemization Kinetics Of Cross -Bridged Tetraazamacrocycles, Antoinette Yolanda Odendaal

Doctoral Dissertations

Modifications to the literature-reported procedure for the synthesis of cross-bridged cyclam and homocyclen tetraamines are presented. The synthesis involves the use of a cis-tricyclic bisaminal intermediate for the preparation of tetracyclic bisaminals and the microwave-assisted reductive ring opening of N,N'-dibenzyl bisaminal salts. The cis-tricyclic bisaminal was also used in the preparation of a C-functionalized cross-bridged cyclam. The resolution of racemic cross-bridged cyclam by selective crystallization of its diastereomeric salt of L-(+)-tartaric acid is described. Additionally, the kinetics of racemization of enantiopure cross-bridged cyclam is presented.

Instability Among Middle Class Families And The Impact Of Health Insurance, Sarah A. Savage

Doctoral Dissertations

What it takes to be middle class in the United States has changed dramatically from the post World War II period to the 1970s and the present. At the same time the requirements for attaining the income and assets associated with a middle class position changed, many financial protections available to the middle class weakened. The new economic landscape following a period of economic restructuring has made it harder to earn a position in the middle class while the changed political landscape has possibly made it harder to maintain one's position. This research examines the extent to which middle class …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Functional Polymers With Controlled Architecture And Their Application As Anticorrosion Primers, Anne S. Quincy

Doctoral Dissertations

There are over 2900 ballast tanks in the U.S. Navy inventory and their annual maintenance cost amounted to 415 million dollars in 2006, half of which was directly correlated to corrosion. Ballast tanks which form the basic skeleton of a vessel, are subjected to very corrosive conditions. Epoxy based protective coatings are used by the Navy for minimizing corrosion and they currently offer five to seven years of protection. The work described in this thesis is in line with a major program instigated by the U.S. Navy to improve the reliability of tank coatings.

This thesis investigates the synthesis and …

Modeling Congenital Disorders Of Glycosylation In Caenorhabditis Elegans: Genetic Influences And Structural Consequences Of N-Linked Glycosylation, Weston Booth Struwe

Doctoral Dissertations

The attachment of oligosaccharides to the amide nitrogen of asparagine side chains in proteins is a fundamental process occurring in all metazoans. This process, known as N-glycosylation, is complex and is achieved by the precise interactions of various cellular components. The initial stage of N-glycosylation occurs in the endolasmic reticulum and is preserved among eukaryotes. Glycans are further developed in the Golgi and the structural complexity depends greatly on the animal species, tissue and developmental stage. Oligosaccharides are unique biomolecules because unlike DNA or proteins, no primary sequence exists nor is its' synthesis template driven. A major goal of glycobiologist …

Solar Wind Stream Interfaces: The Importance Of Time, Longitude, And Latitude Separation Between Points Of Observation, Kristin Diane Commer Simunac

Doctoral Dissertations

Using data from the Plasma and Suprathermal Ion Composition (PLASTIC) instruments onboard the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), I have studied the evolution of solar wind stream interfaces in the ecliptic plane near 1 AU over time scales of hours to a few days. STEREO consists of two nearly identical satellites in orbits similar to the Earth's orbit about the Sun. One observatory leads the Earth (STEREO/A), and the other lags behind (STEREO/B). The PLASTIC instruments, build by a team lead by A.B. Galvin of the University of New Hampshire, measure solar wind and suprathermal ion composition. In this work, …

Photosynthetic And Oxidative Stress In The Green Alga Dunaliella Tertiolecta: The Effects Of Uv-B And Uv-A Radiation, Priya Sampath Wiley

Doctoral Dissertations

The penetration of ultraviolet-B (UV-B; 290-320 nm) into the biosphere has increased in response to decreased stratospheric ozone. As a consequence, significant attempts have been made to elucidate the effects of UV-B radiation on primary producers such as phytoplankton and plants. Considerably less effort has been devoted to describing the role played by ultraviolet-A (UV-A; 320-400 nm) radiation, which is not attenuated by stratospheric ozone. The present work details the independent and combined effects of UV-B and UV-A radiation on photosynthetic and oxidative stress responses using the unicellular green alga Dunaliella tertiolecta as a model organism. A UV-B spectral profile …

Genetic Variation Within The Daphnia Pulex Genome, Abraham Eaton Tucker

Doctoral Dissertations

Genetic variation within the diploid Daphnia pulex genome was examined using a high quality de novo assembly and shotgun reads from two distinct D. pulex clones. Patterns of variation and divergence at single nucleotides were examined in physical and functional regions of the genome using comparative assembly output and available annotations. Additionally, mitochondrial genomes of the same D. pulex clones were assembled and compared for patterns of divergence, and substitutional biases. Intron presence/absence polymorphisms were identified computationally and verified experimentally. Finally, gene duplicate demographics were examined for patterns of divergence and estimates of gene birth rates.

Arresting Beauty, Framing Evidence: An Inquiry Into Photography And The Teaching Of Writing, Kuhio Walters

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the uses and conceptualizations of photography in college Composition. Composition has long been conflicted over the relation between form and content---and since the 1970s, between aesthetics and politics. Today, this disciplinary tension manifests in how the visual is brought into pedagogy: either it is approached aesthetically, as something to beautify a text, or politically, as a source of cultural critique. The field's uses of photography have been positioned within this aesthetics/politics binary, but to understand the medium as only one or the other is to miss its full practical and theoretical potential.

Theoretically, photography is powerful and …

Prodigal Sons: Indigenous Missionaries In The British Atlantic World, 1640--1780, Edward E. Andrews

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the hundreds of black and Native American preachers who worked as Christian missionaries in the early modern British Atlantic world. While scholars have generally accepted the convention that most missionaries were white Europeans who knew little about the native peoples they were trying to convert, there were practical and theological explanations for why native preachers not only became ubiquitous, but often outnumbered their white counterparts in Protestant missions. The language barrier, the opportunity to tap into extensive kinship networks, and early modern interpretations of black and Indian bodies all catalyzed the formation of an indigenous evangelical corps …

Invariant Frechet Algebras On Bounded Symmetric Domains, Oleg Eroshkin

Doctoral Dissertations

Let D be a bounded domain in the complex vector space Cn . We say that D is symmetric iff, given any two points p, q ∈ D, there is a biholomorphism &phis;, which interchanges p and q. These domains were classified abstractly by Elie Cartan in his general study of symmetric spaces, and were canonically realized in Cn by Harish-Chandra. They include polydisks and Siegel domains.

Let D be a bounded symmetric domain in Cn , and G be the largest connected group of biholomorphic automorphisms of D. The algebra C( D) of all continuous (not necessarily bounded) complex-valued …

Engaged Scholarship At Land-Grant Institutions: Factors Affecting Faculty Participation, Lisa Townson

Doctoral Dissertations

At a time when universities and their faculty are called to work in partnership with partners to address important societal issues, engaged scholarship has become an important movement in higher education. This research examines the perceptions of tenured and tenure-eligible faculty members at land-grant institutions and describes how disciplinary differences influence faculty members' expression of and likelihood to practice engaged scholarship; work with community partners; and how they perceive engaged scholarship is recognized and rewarded by their institutions. A stratified random sample of tenure-track faculty members from all 1862 land-grant institutions was surveyed via the Internet and data were analyzed …

Wavelet Regression With Long Memory Infinite Moving Average Errors, Juan Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

For more than a decade there has been great interest in wavelets and wavelet-based methods. Among the most successful applications of wavelets is nonparametric statistical estimation, following the pioneering work of Donoho and Johnstone (1994, 1995) and Donoho et al. (1995). In this thesis, we consider the wavelet-based estimators of the mean regression function with long memory infinite moving average errors, and investigate the rates of convergence of estimators based on thresholding of empirical wavelet coefficients. We show that these estimators achieve nearly optimal minimax convergence rates within a logarithmic term over a large class of non-smooth functions that involve …

Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone In Agnathans, Scott Ira Kavanaugh

Doctoral Dissertations

Hagfish and lampreys are the only two representatives of Agnathans among extant vertebrates. The regulatory hypothalamic neurohormone, gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), regulates reproduction in all vertebrates through the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis. Most vertebrates have at least two forms of GnRH in the brain. In hagfish the primary amino acid structure of GnRH has not been identified as yet, however, indirect methods have shown an immunoreactive GnRH or a GnRH-like peptide in the brain of hagfish. In addition concentrations of brain immunoreactive-GnRH have been correlated with reproductive stages in the Atlantic hagfish ( Myxine glutinosa). Therefore the objective of the first study was …

Executive Control In The Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Lori A. Newman

Doctoral Dissertations

Converging evidence supports the hypothesis that the prefrontal cortex is critical for executive control. One prefrontal subregion, the anterior cingulate cortex has previously been shown to be active in situations involving high conflict, presentation of salient, distracting stimuli, and error processing, i.e. situations that occur when learning new response contingencies, when previously learned response strategies fail, or when a shift in attention or responding is required. These situations all involve goal-oriented monitoring of performance in order to effectively adjust cognitive processes. Several neuropsychological disorders, for instance schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder, are correlated with morphological changes …

Kadison -Singer Algebras With Applications To Von Neumann Algebras, Mohan Ravichandran

Doctoral Dissertations

I develop the theory of Kadison-Singer algebras, introduced recently by Ge and Yuan. I prove basic structure theorems, construct several new examples and explore connections to other areas of operator algebras. In chapter 1, I survey those aspects of the theory of non-selfadjoint algebras that are relevant to this work. In chapter 2, I define Kadison-Singer algebras and give different proofs of results of Ge-Yuan, which will be further extended in the last chapter. In chapter 3, I analyse in detail a class of elementary Kadison-Singer algebras that contain Hinfinity and describe their lattices of projections. In chapter 4, I …