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Toward A General Theory Of Polymeter: Polymetric Potential And Realization In Elliott Carter's Solo And Chamber Instrumental Works After 1980, Ève Poudrier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a conceptual framework and tools for the analysis of polymeter in contemporary musical practices applied to the short instrumental works of Elliott Carter, where multiple temporalities have been identified as an essential aesthetic component. Three works are discussed in more detail: Changes for guitar (1983), Esprit rude/Esprit doux I for flute and clarinet (1985), and 90+ for piano (1994). The composer's use of metrical modulations and structural polyrhythms is re-evaluated in the context of a theory of polymeter. Structural polyrhythms are represented by means of proximity charts, and Carter's compositional strategies are explored, including rhetorical use of …

Turning Space Into Place In The Sprawling “New City”: Shrinking Space, Visions Of Place, Homeowners In Conflict, Lael Leslie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Was there a "real place" to be found in the sprawling "new city" landscape? This interview study considers the categories of sprawl as a placeless, apolitical space, and of the suburban white middle class, to explore how "place" is variously understood by homeowners confronting rapid spatial reconfiguration. The interviewees are residents of a municipality located in one of New Jersey's "growth corridors." Emphasis is on homeowners' experiences, and on what they view as problems related to rapid growth.

Given the long settlement history of this northeastern seaboard region, this study finds that relations among homeowners had changed over time in …

Complexity Issues In Justification Logic, Roman Kuznets

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Justification Logic is an emerging field that studies provability, knowledge, and belief via explicit proofs or justifications that are part of the language. There exist many justification logics closely related to modal epistemic logics of knowledge and belief. Instead of modality □ in pure justification logics, or in addition to modality □ in hybrid logics, which has an existential epistemic reading 'there exists a proof of F,' all justification logics use constructs t:F, where a justification term t represents a blueprint of a Hilbert-style proof of F. The first justification logic, LP, introduced by Sergei Artemov, was shown to be …

Employee Ownership And Participation Effects On Firm Outcomes, Brent Kramer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hundreds of firms in the U.S. are majority-owned by their employees through Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). This study measures whether employee ownership makes a difference in firm outcomes, looking also at effects of worker participation in management-type decisions. Theorists have suggested that the rarity of employee ownership is prima facie evidence that such firms could not be as efficient as traditional firms. But institutional and financing constraints may be a more realistic explanation for their rarity, and it is important for policy purposes to investigate efficiency objectively.

The author compares sales per employee for a panel of over 300 …

Essays On Dynamics Of Financial Markets, Esin Cakan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this study, the effects of different macroeconomic news on stock markets and different stock market co-movements are investigated. Impacts of good and bad macroeconomic news announcement surprises on the mean and conditional volatility of U.S. daily equity and Treasury bond market returns during economic recessions and expansions are examined. By jointly modeling returns and volatilities using a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models, it is found that surprise in unemployment news has no impact on stock returns during business cycles. On the other hand, the results indicate a significantly positive relation between the short term (long term) bond prices …

Predicting Within-Source Agreement In Multisource Feedback Ratings: An Examination Of Characteristics Of The Rater Group And The Focal Manager, Christine Schrader Fernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Multisource feedback (MSF) involves gathering information about a manager's effectiveness from his or her boss, peers, and subordinates. Researchers typically average MSF ratings within rating sources (e.g., peers or subordinates), which assumes that agreement within rating sources is relatively high. However, there is little prior MSF research that has addressed the issue of within-source agreement, and the extant studies have often used inappropriate statistical techniques such as reliability indices. Moreover, this research often focuses on assessing the mean level of agreement or reliability within rating sources but has ignored the variability surrounding these indices. The purpose of the present study …

Involvement Of Inflammation In Tau Pathology And Mechanisms That Drive Neurodegeneration In Alzheimer's Disease, Lisette T. Arnaud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two of the hallmarks of neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), are (1) the appearance of proteinaceous deposits in inclusion bodies containing aggregates of ubiquitinated proteins and (2) activated microglia and astrocytes surrounding the diseased neurons. In Alzheimer's disease, the intracellular inclusion bodies are known as neurofibrilary tangles (NFT). The mechanisms leading to inclusion body formation and their role in the progression of neurodegeneration are still largely unknown.

Many of the proteins that accumulate in inclusion bodies depend on the ubiquitin/proteasome pathway (UPP) for their degradation. This pathway is responsible for the bulk (∼80%) of intracellular protein degradation. Because …

Synergistic Surfactant Interactions And The Consequences On Phase Behavior, Interfacial Tension Reduction And Hydrophobic Surface Wetting, Makonnen Mateós Payne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ability for some of the nonionic trisiloxane surfactants to completely and rapidly wet a hydrophobic surface has been well documented for several years. However, to date, the behavior of the trisiloxane surfactants at the solid-liquid interface is not yet completely understood, leading to an incomplete understanding of the mechanism for complete wetting. In this work we report our findings with regard to the synergistic interactions between polyethylene oxide surfactants of the general structure CiE j and compare the behavior to a known super wetting surfactant. Pendant drop tensiometry experiments and sessile drop contact angle measurements on hydrophobic surfaces were …

Rigidity And Stability For Isometry Groups In Hyperbolic 4-Space, Youngju Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is known that a geometrically finite Kleinian group is quasiconformally stable. We prove that this quasiconformal stability cannot be generalized in 4-dimensional hyperbolic space. This is due to the presence of screw parabolic isometries in dimension 4. These isometries are topologically conjugate to strictly parabolic isometries. However, we show that screw parabolic isometries are not quasiconformally conjugate to strictly parabolic isometries. In addition, we show that two screw parabolic isometries are generically not quasiconformally conjugate to each other. We also give some geometric properties of a hyperbolic 4-manifold related to screw parabolic isometries.

A Fuchsian thrice-punctured sphere group has …

Meritocracy: A Socio-Educational Policy Conundrum Transversing Selected Works Of James Bryant Conant, Benjamin Enoma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, adjacent strands of the meritocratic discourse intercept by accident of history. It occurs either in the Jeffersonian tradition of culling from all sectors of the populace a natural aristocracy of talents as proposed by James Conant through the development of Scholastic Aptitude Tests, or by expanding the structure of opportunity to all individuals and leveling uneven terrains through social policies like desegregation of schools and affirmative action. In other words, it is a case of policies based on the 'laissez-faire' doctrine versus those based on governmental intervention. "This interception to some degree has fused the strands …

Development Of Lexical Tone Production In Disyllabic Words By 2- To 6-Year-Old Mandarin-Speaking Children, Puisan Wong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated children's development in the production of Mandarin lexical tones in familiar disyllabic words and tested the hypothesis that disyllabic tone contours with more complex fundamental frequency contours are more difficult for children to produce. Participants were forty-four 2- to 6-year-old monolingual Mandarin-speaking children and 12 mothers. Their disyllabic tone productions were elicited by picture naming and low-pass filtered to eliminate lexical information while retaining the fundamental frequency contours. Three Mandarin-speaking judges listened to the filtered stimuli, and categorized the children's and adult's disyllabic tones. Acoustic analysis was performed on selected accurate child and adult productions and on …

The Phenomenon Of Amoralism: An Investigation Of The Cognitive And Emotive Roots, Andrei G. Zavaliy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An amoralist is defined as a person who rejects the claims of moral reasons to special authority, and systematically acts without regard to the generally accepted moral standards. A psychopath can be seen as a paradigm case of an extreme amoralist, although the less severe cases of selective amoralists are considered. The research into the typical behavioral pattern, motivational structure, and the value system of psychopaths can shed light on at least three aspects related to the analysis of the moral agency. First, it can help elucidating the emotive and cognitive conditions necessary for moral performance. Secondly, it can provide …

L1 Acquisition Of Japanese Particles: A Corpus-Based Study, Mari Fujimoto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a comprehensive examination of L1 Japanese particle acquisition using two sets of corpora of naturalistic speech, JCHAT, longitudinal speech data of three Japanese children and the mothers (Miyata 2004a, b, and c, and MacWhinney 2000), and CHJ, adult-to-adult telephone conversation. The analysis reveals that despite differences in their language environment, all three children complete particle acquisition around MLU (m) 3.00 regardless of differences in the threshold of particle use. Further, none of the three children mimicked their mother's frequency of particle use, even as they all conform to a particular sequence of particle acquisition. The first set …

Markers Of Dyslexia In Adult Spanish-Speakers Who Report Severe Difficulty Learning English, Elizabeth Ijalba

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The relationship between native-language reading ability and second-language (L2) learning was explored in a cohort of 60 adult Spanish-speakers learning English as a second language. The research questions centered on whether underlying nativelanguage deficits associated with dyslexia would be present in a subset of English Language Learners who reported severe difficulty learning English. Our participants were divided into two education groups (below and above12th grade). These two groups were classified into three groups based on self- and teacher- ratings of ease or difficulty in English learning ability: for the high-education group, Poor English Language Learners (PELL, N=7); Good English Language …

The Impact Of A Home-Based Intervention Program On Maternal Reflective Functioning In First-Time Mothers, Maia Rebecca Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study investigates the impact of "Minding the Baby," a home-based intervention program, on maternal reflective functioning (RF). It was hypothesized that the reflective capacity of mothers who received the MTB intervention would increase over the course of the study, and that this increase would be reflected in the quality of their responses to clinical interviews administered before and after birth. The guiding premise of the intervention was that helping mothers develop a reflective stance would enable them to become more regulating, sensitive, and autonomy-promoting caregivers and thus positively affect a range of developmental outcomes in their infants.

The …