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Small Firms, Global Economies: The Economic Sociology Of The Northwest Atlantic Sea Urchin Industry, Sean Raymond Lauer

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the organizational dynamics of firms operating in the East Coast sea urchin industry. First, I examine the confluence of economic and political conditions under which the industry evolved. As a part of the export driven growth of the past decade in the US the East Coast sea urchin industry benefited from political conditions, which encouraged development of global markets for US products. Along with this, the Japanese have displayed a seemingly insatiable demand for sea urchin roe through the 1990s. In 1971 the governance of the international monetary system changed from a fixed to floating exchange rate. …

Hardware-Software Codesign In A High-Level Synthesis Environment, Tamas L. Visegrady

Doctoral Dissertations

Interfacing hardware-oriented high-level synthesis to software development is a computationally hard problem for which no general solution exists. Under special conditions, the hardware-software codesign (system-level synthesis) problem may be analyzed with traditional tools and efficient heuristics. This dissertation introduces a new alternative to the currently used heuristic methods. The new approach combines the results of top-down hardware development with existing basic hardware units (bottom-up libraries) and compiler generation tools. The optimization goal is to maximize operating frequency or minimize cost with reasonable tradeoffs in other properties.

The dissertation research provides a unified approach to hardware-software codesign. The improvements over previously …

Using Character Varieties: Presentations, Invariants, Divisibility And Determinants, Jeffrey Allan Hall

Doctoral Dissertations

If G is a finitely generated group, then the set of all characters from G into a linear algebraic group is a useful (but not complete) invariant of G . In this thesis, we present some new methods for computing with the variety of SL2C -characters of a finitely presented group. We review the theory of Fricke characters, and introduce a notion of presentation simplicity which uses these results. With this definition, we give a set of GAP routines which facilitate the simplification of group presentations. We provide an explicit canonical basis for an invariant ring associated with a symmetrically …

Evolution Of Pycnogonid Life History Traits, Eric Carl Lovely

Doctoral Dissertations

The Pycnogonida is a class of arthropods with interesting life histories. Pycnogonids prey on hydroids and some invade hydranths while larvae. Males brood the eggs and larvae hatch as protonymphons. Questions relating to the evolution of life history characteristics were addressed. Evolutionary relationships were poorly understood. It was necessary to determine the relationships within the Pycnogonida and compared to other arthropods.

Twenty-four morphological characters were coded for twenty-three pycnogonid genera and one fossil ancestor, Palaeoisopus problematicus. A branch and bound analysis resulted in fifteen most parsimonious trees. The Nymphonidae were found to be basal. The Ammotheidae were paraphyletic and led …

Alternative Teacher Compensation Systems: Practices And Perceptions As Reported By New Hampshire Principals, Bradford Wilson Craven

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine New Hampshire principal's perceptions regarding alternative compensation plans for teachers. Alternative compensation plans, unlike traditional teacher pay plans, are not based exclusively on years of experience and formal educational attainment. Forms of alternative compensation plans include individually-based merit pay, career ladders, skill-and-knowledge-based pay, and group performance awards.

This research was intended to provide a better understanding of how principals view the various alternatives to traditional salary schedules. An assumption of this study was that principals in the state play the primary role in formal teacher evaluations, and any new compensation plans that …

Finding A Voice: Poetry And Performance With First Graders, Lisa Lenz Bianchi

Doctoral Dissertations

This is a qualitative research study of a ten week immersion unit in the reading, writing, and performance of poetry conducted in a first grade classroom in Closter, New Jersey during the winter of 1995. The three girls selected as case studies show the ways in which remarkably different children expand their repertoires of ways with words as speakers, readers, and writers. Danielle, a performative speaker, learns to make her tacit knowledge about performance part of her explicit frames of reference. This shift enables her to serve as a coach for peers who are less adept at crafting performative texts. …

The Effect Of Physical And Biological Site Characteristics On The Survival And Expansion Of Transplanted Eelgrass (Zostera Marina L), Ryan Clark Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

Eelgrass (Zostera marina L.) was transplanted at seven sites along the New Hampshire side of the Piscataqua River in 1993 and 1994. The eelgrass transplanting was one component of the New Hampshire Port Authority Mitigation Project, designed to mitigate for impacts to natural resources associated with the expansion of the port facility. Over 2.5 hectares of eelgrass were transplanted using a newly developed transplanting technique, the horizontal rhizome method, and ultimately created eelgrass habitat at several sites. However, transplants did not survive at any of the intertidal areas planted and were greatly reduced at several subtidal sites. The intertidal transplants …

Effects Of Intralaminar Thalamic Nuclei, Prefrontal Cortical, And Hippocampal Lesions On A Seven-Choice Serial Reaction Time Task, Joshua Alan Burk

Doctoral Dissertations

Slow response speed has been associated with several neuropsychological disorders including Korsakoff's disease. The ability to respond to brief stimuli can be tested to assess whether slow response speed is due to slow stimulus processing. A seven choice serial reaction time task was developed to test the ability to respond to brief stimuli. Distractibility and stimulus discriminability were manipulated to challenge performance and cues were presented to enhance performance. In Experiment 1, six unlesioned rats were tested on this task. As expected, significant deficits were found when (1) stimulus duration was decreased, (2) bright distractor light was briefly presented, (3) …

Ordinary Women: Government And Custom In The Lives Of New Hampshire Women, 1690-1770, Marcia Schmidt Blaine

Doctoral Dissertations

The prominence of patriarchy and common law has caused many historians to concentrate on the limitations placed on eighteenth-century Anglo-American women. The results often present women as objects, rather than subjects, of study. Using four major primary sources: Governor, Council and Assembly records, petitions, licensing materials, and treasury records, this study examines the relationship between ordinary women and the provincial government of New Hampshire in order to explain the customary options available to women in proceedings with the government. Even with a spouse still living, Anglo-American women acted as family agents and representatives when captured by the Native Americans and …

Isolation And Characterization Of A Caenorhabditis Elegans Src Loss-Of-Function Allele Using Reverse Genetics, Jennifer Dignan Hogan

Doctoral Dissertations

The vertebrate proto-oncogene Src is a protein-tyrosine kinase that has been implicated as a component of receptor-mediated signal transduction pathways important for cell growth and differentiation. Consistent with this notion, overexpression or activation of Src by mutation induces neoplastic transformation in cell culture, leads to tumorigenesis in laboratory animals, and has been observed in a number of human tumors. Despite years of intensive investigation, neither its role in oncogenesis nor its normal, biological role is understood.

To diminish the issue of redundancy that has complicated analysis of Src function in vertebrates and Drosophila, I have chosen to study Src function …

Analysis Of Impact And Value Of Neasc High School Accreditation Procedures On School Accountability And School Improvement From 1987-1997, George Allan Cushing

Doctoral Dissertations

From a 1983 federal study which concluded, as its title suggests, that America had become A Nation at Risk because of a failing public school system, the modern standards movement was born. This educational reform movement beginning in the 1980's and continuing through the 1990's brought about the development and establishment of many accountability and improvement initiatives aimed at public schools. Also during this time, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), through its Commission on Public Secondary Schools along with five other regional accrediting agencies across the country, was continuously engaged in the practice of evaluating and …

An In Situ Measurement Of Charged Mesopheric Dust During A Sporadic Atom Layer Event, Lynette Jean Gelinas

Doctoral Dissertations

In this thesis we discuss the results of the Sudden Atom Layers (SAL) sounding rocket, launched from Puerto Rico the evening of February 19, 1998, as part of the Coqui II sounding rocket campaign. A charged dust detector was constructed and flown on the Sudden Atom Layers (SAL) sounding rocket. The existence of charged dust population has implications for many upper atmospheric processes, including the formation of sporadic atom layers (Na s), thin layers of neutral atomic metal which form in the Earth's mesosphere. In particular we focus on the interesting results from the charged dust experiment and the electric …

The Role Of Cytokines In The Pathogenesis Of Experimental Legionella Pneumophila Infections, Corinna Mary Krinos

Doctoral Dissertations

Legionnaires' disease is an acute lobar pneumonia caused, primarily by the facultative intracellular pathogen Legionella pneumophila. This organism when inhaled by humans descends into the lower respiratory tract and parasitizes alveolar macrophages. L. pneumophila adhered to U-937 cells, A549 cells and peritoneal macrophages from A/J mice in an opsonin-independent fashion. Following attachment, the organism penetrated the cell membrane, replicated within these cells eventually inducing lysis. To better define the adhesion of L. pneumophila to host cells, an E. coli clone (LP 116), expressing the 25 kDa major outer membrane protein (MOMP) of L. pneumophila was used in binding studies. This …

The Long-Term Effects Of Disturbance On Nitrogen Cycling And Loss In The White Mountains, New Hampshire, Christine Lynn Goodale

Doctoral Dissertations

Theories of nitrogen retention suggest that N cycling and loss should increase with ecosystem successional age and with chronic N deposition over time (N saturation). These factors both affect northeastern U.S. forests, most of which receive elevated rates of N deposition and have experienced past disturbances by wind, logging, fire, or agriculture. This work examined the long-term (80--110 year) effects of land-use history on nitrogen cycling and loss in the White Mountains, New Hampshire. Historical land-use maps were used to identify a network of watersheds and plots containing burned, logged, or old-growth forests. Nitrate-N fluxes from old-growth watersheds exceeded those …

The Ideal Free Distribution Of Group Choice: A Social Psychology Of Human Behavior, John Robert Kraft

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation presents an experimental analysis of social behavior. The behavior is called Group Choice (Baum & Kraft, 1998) and the analysis is a social foraging model called the Ideal Free Distribution (IFD; Fretwell & Lucas, 1970). The IFD is a social foraging model that describes the distribution of a group of foragers in a patchy environment. Group Choice describes group members engaging in two behaviors. The IFD suggests that group members engage in two behaviors in the same relative relation to the consequences obtained from those behaviors. The IFD of Group Choice is analogous to the Matching Law analysis …

Dynamic Analysis Of Unevenly Sampled Data With Applications To Statistical Process Control, Laura Ann Mcsweeney

Doctoral Dissertations

Dynamic analysis involves describing how a process changes over time. Applications of this type of analysis can be implemented in industrial settings in order to control manufacturing processes and recognize when they have changed significantly. The primary focus of this work is to construct methods to detect the onset of periodic behavior in a process which is being monitored using a scheme where data is sampled unevenly.

Techniques that can be used to identify statistically significant periodic structure using the periodogram will be reviewed and developed. The statistical properties of the periodogram for unevenly sampled data will be calculated. These …

The Ship In The Forest: New England Maritime Industries And Coastal Environment, 1630-1850, William Burgess Leavenworth

Doctoral Dissertations

This work examines the relationship between New England's maritime industries and the coastal ecotone, from Massachusetts Bay to Penobscot Bay and occasionally beyond, between 1630 and 1850. It begins with the early English use of the littoral ecosystem, and describes the effects of expanding maritime development and related industries---shipbuilding, fishing, farming and forestry---on that ecosystem until the late ante-bellum era. It also investigates the role of the coastal ecosystem in the development of New England's colonial and early Federal political structure and economies, and describes in some detail the role of strategic coastal resources in the wars of the 17th …

Behavioral And Physiological Responses Of The Lobster, Homarus Americanus, To Temperature: A New Synthesis, Steven Harold Jury

Doctoral Dissertations

Temperature has a pervasive influence on lobster behavior, physiology and ecology and affects their subsequent distribution in thermally variable habitats such as estuaries and coastal areas. A multidisciplinary approach, including field and laboratory studies, was used to show: (1) that lobsters sense temperature with warm and cool thresholds as small as 0.1--0.2°C; (2) the relationship between temperature and activity is not linear, but instead switches between a high activity level in warmer months (10--20°C) and a lower level in colder months (<10°C) with transition periods in the spring and fall; (3) Parallel studies in the lab and field show that daily levels of activity are not greatly influenced by small temperature variations (i.e. tidally induced changes of 14°C), but activity levels are significantly higher in the field (249 +/- 55.1 m/d) than in the laboratory (88 +/- 12.0 m/d); (4) lobsters prefer a narrow range of temperatures over others available in a thermal gradient and avoid temperatures >23.5 +/- 0.4°C, suggesting that they behaviorally thermoregulate. While this preferred temperature shifts seasonally, the final preferred temperature …

Preparation And Characterization Of Derivatized Microparticles Immobilized In Hydrogel Membranes For Optical Chemical Sensing Based On Polymer Swelling, Eric William Miele

Doctoral Dissertations

Hydrogel membranes containing aminated microparticles have been investigated for reflectance based optical sensing. The membranes were evaluated by UV/Vis spectrophotometry, for potential use in a remote distributive fiber optic chemical sensor. This work describes efforts for improving the signal and decreasing the overall response time of the membranes. The microparticles were prepared by dispersion and seeded emulsion polymerization techniques. The microparticles were derivatized to introduce pH sensitivity. The hydrogel membranes containing swellable microparticles are turbid. Scattering occurs at the microparticle-hydrogel interface and is based on refractive index changes accompanying polymer swelling. The particles swell in response to hydrogen ion concentration, …

Controls On Spatial And Temporal Variability In Nitrous Oxide Fluxes Across A Tropical Rainforest Ecosystem In The Luquillo Experimental Forest, Puerto Rico, Claire Patricia Mcswiney

Doctoral Dissertations

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a trace gas that contributes to the greenhouse effect and participates in the reactions that destroy stratospheric ozone. Soil microbial processes are significant producers of this trace gas, particularly in tropical areas, which are considered major sources in the global N2O budget. Nitrous oxide fluxes to the atmosphere are variable in space and time. In this study, spatial and temporal variability in surface N2O fluxes were assessed as well as the major environmental controls on N2O production for a tropical rainforest watershed in northeastern Puerto Rico. A static chamber technique was used to assess surface fluxes …

Motherwork, Artwork: The Mother/Artist In Fiction By Parton, Phelps, Chopin, Woolf, Drabble, And Walker, Nancy Hoyt Lecourt

Doctoral Dissertations

This study asks the question, What happens to a practicing (fictional) mother who also tries to be a practicing artist? How do literary texts represent such people? How do they represent the relationship between material and artistic work? The primary works studied are Sarah Parton's Ruth Hall, (1855), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Story of Avis (1877), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), and Margaret Drabble's The Millstone (1965). The conclusion focuses on Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use."

Mother-artists finds themselves on the "wrong" side of the nature/culture binary, where ideologies about "true womanhood" and …

Mentoring In Adolescence: A Sociocultural And Cognitive Developmental Study Of Undergraduate Women And Sixth-Grade Girls In A Mentoring Program, Katharina Maria Fachin Lucas

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was two-fold. First, a quasi-experimental study was conducted to explore the cognitive developmental effects of taking on the role of "mentor" as an undergraduate or the role of "mentee" as a sixth grader in one university-based mentoring program. Second, an ethnographic study was conducted to study the experiences of ten sixth graders and ten undergraduates as they took on the role of "mentor" or "mentee" in a planned mentoring relationship. A sociocultural analysis explored processes occurring on the personal, interpersonal, and community level that shaped the mentoring experiences of the participants.

The participants in this …

Three-Dimensional Imaging Of Turbulent Flows: Optical Tomography With Proper Orthogonal Decomposition, Barbara Jeanne Pelliccia

Doctoral Dissertations

Fluid flows with turbulent characteristics are evident in many important engineering and scientific applications. For years researchers have investigated fluid flow turbulence but have not attained a complete physical understanding and quantitative description of the turbulent fluid motion. One approach has been to identify and classify the organized, or coherent, structures imbedded in the turbulence. Research in this area has been restricted by the lack of complete three-dimensional descriptions of the flow. In many studies, the velocity field is measured in either one or two dimensions using mechanical probes which can disrupt the downstream evolution of the flow and offer …

Functional Characterization Of The Ccr4-Not Transcriptional Regulatory Complex, Vasudeo Badarinarayana

Doctoral Dissertations

The CCR4-NOT transcriptional regulatory complex affects expression of a number of genes both positively and negatively. This study demonstrates that the CCR4-NOT complex functionally and physically interacts with TBP and TAFs. Firstly, mutations in CCR4, NOT4, and NOT5 suppressed the his4-912 delta insertion by a mechanism similar to that observed for the defective TBP allele spt15-122. This mechanism appeared to involve stabilization of TBP binding to a specific non-consensus TATA sequence, CATAAA, in the his4-912 delta element. Secondly, using modified HIS3 promoter derivatives containing specific mutations within the TATA sequence, it was found that the NOT proteins were general repressors …

Confronting The War Machine: Draft Resistance During The Vietnam War, Michael Stewart Foley

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation recovers the history of the draft resistance movement in Boston during the Vietnam War. It is a blend of social, political, and cultural history that seeks not merely to assert the importance of draft resistance to our understanding of the antiwar movement and the Vietnam War era, but also to capture the experience of draft resisters and their supporters.

It is an actor-oriented history. The sources used include the personal private manuscript collections of participants, court records, underground newspapers, a 1997 survey administered to 310 former resisters and draft resistance activists (185 responded), and interviews with more than …

When Does Gender Matter? Explaining The Transition To Adulthood As A Gendered Process, Kimberly Autumn Mahaffy

Doctoral Dissertations

Most gender theory and research focuses on two points in the life course: childhood and middle adulthood. Less attention is given to the period in between. The purpose of this dissertation is to determine whether and how the transition to adulthood is gendered. To what extent do school, family, and labor market contexts have a different effect on adolescent girls and boys as they become adults?

Using data from the High School and Beyond 1980 Sophomore Cohort Study (1980--1992), 1 examine how social context differentially affects the plans for the future and adult status outcomes of young women and men. …

Class In Seventeenth-Century British Drama By Women, Erika Mae Olbricht

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that seventeenth-century drama by women should be analyzed as a public discursive practice rather than as privatized "closet drama." This study focuses on class in order to delineate the texts' participation in public modes of representation and offers post-marxist readings as an alternative to the gynocritical/biographical model that dominates criticism on literature by women of the early modern period.

Chapter one of this dissertation problematizes separate spheres ideology, lest texts by women become separated from the economic sites that inform them. I consider the ideological importance of generic conventions, arguing that conventions of tragedy and comedy are …

Problem-Based Learning In Athletic Training Education, Kerri-Ann Catlaw

Doctoral Dissertations

The purposes of the study were first to identify the frequency and the degree to which athletic training educators employed Problem Based Learning (PBL), its variants, and traditional methods in their teaching; and second to solicit educators' judgments of the quality of educational outcomes in their coursework. A survey instrument was distributed to a random sample of 101 CAAHEP accredited curriculum athletic training educators. Eighty-three subjects returned the instrument, yielding a response rate of 82%. The survey contained 20 closed-response items and 3 open-response items, and was divided into three sections highlighting demographic information, teaching methods, and educational outcomes. The …

New Methods For Modeling Accelerated Life Test Data, Michelle Hopkins Capozzoli

Doctoral Dissertations

An accelerated life test (ALT) is often used to obtain timely information for highly reliable items. The increased use of ALTs has resulted in nontraditional reliability data which can not be analyzed with standard statistical methodologies. I propose new methods for analyzing ALT data for studies with (1) two independent populations, (2) paired samples and (3) limited failure populations (LFP). Here, the Weibull distribution, which can accommodate a variety of failure rates, is assumed for the models I develop. For case (1), a parametric hypothesis test, a Bayesian analysis and a test using partial likelihood are proposed and discussed. For …

At The Heart Of It: Middle School Writers Use Talk And Multimedia Journals To Forge A Literate Classroom Community, Julie A. Pantano

Doctoral Dissertations

In this research study, I investigated how middle school writers use talk and multi-media journals to forge a literate classroom community. Talk and multi-media journals helped middle school writers to construct and maintain a safe, caring, supportive, and respectful learning environment where transformative literacy and learning experiences could take place.

Classroom talk played a vital role in improving students' relationships in this literate classroom community and engaging them in meaningful ways with their multi-media journals. During the research study, explicit instruction in the social aspects of talk emerged as important as explicit instruction in language arts content.

The multi-media approach …