Digital Commons Network^™

Toward A Psychological Understanding Of The Effects Of Changes In Group Status On Intergroup Relations, Katya Alex Migacheva

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Societies undergoing drastic transformation are often inundated with intergroup strife, particularly, when the transformation is accompanied by drastic shifts in groups' status (e.g., Bettlehem & Janowitz, 1964). The present dissertation project aimed to begin understanding the effects of such changes in group status on intergroup outcomes, and to identify psychological processes that may underlie these effects. To achieve these goals, two studies examined perceived dimensions of status change ( magnitude, direction, and speed ) in relation to outgroup-specific outcomes (unity and threat ) and general diversity-related outcomes (attitudes toward equity, openness to diversity, and ethnocentrism ). Study 1 …

Structural Studies Of Membrane-Assembled Popd And Popb, The Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Type 3 Secretion Translocators, Fabian B Romano Chernac

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Transport of proteins across membranes is essential during many stages of pathogen infection and colonization of human cells. Many Gram-negative pathogens use a Type 3 Secretion (T3S) system to inject proteins into the target cell during infection. Substantial genetic and biochemical evidence suggest that proteins are translocated across the host plasma membrane through a proteinaceous pore or translocon formed by two bacterial secreted proteins: the T3S translocators. Despite its key role in pathogenesis, virtually nothing is known about the assembly mechanism, structure, and composition of this critical transmembrane complex.

To this end, a cell-free system for the structural and functional …

A Comprehensive Fifty-One Jurisdiction Review Of Statutes Mandating And Encouraging The Teaching Of History In K-12 Schools., A. Edward Cutting

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

No abstract provided.

On Co-Optimization Of Constrained Satisfiability Problems For Hardware Software Applications, Kunal Ganeshpure

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Manufacturing technology has permitted an exponential growth in transistor count and density. However, making efficient use of the available transistors in the design has become exceedingly difficult. Standard design flow involves synthesis, verification, placement and routing followed by final tape out of the design. Due to the presence of various undesirable effects like capacitive crosstalk, supply noise, high temperatures, etc., verification/validation of the design has become a challenging problem. Therefore, having a good design convergence may not be possible within the target time, due to a need for a large number of design iterations.

Capacitive crosstalk is one of the …

Wrinkling Of Floating Thin Polymer Films, Jiangshui Huang

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This thesis presents an extensive study of wrinkling of thin polystyrene films, tens of nanometers in thickness, floating on the surface of water or water modified with surfactant.

First, we study the wrinkling of floating thin polystyrene films under a capillary force exerted by a drop of water placed on its surface. The wrinkling pattern is characterized by the number and length of wrinkles. A metrology for measuring the elasticity and thickness of ultrathin films is constructed by combining the scaling relations that are developed for the length of the wrinkles with those for the number of wrinkles. This metrology …

Word Recognition In The Parafovea: An Eye Movement Investigation Of Chinese Reading, Jinmian Yang

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Chinese is a logographic writing system that drastically differs from alphabetic scripts in many important aspects. Thus, the nature of parafoveal processing in reading Chinese may be different from that in reading alphabetic languages. Here, four eye-tracking experiments using the boundary display change paradigm (Rayner, 1975) were conducted to explore the role of high level information, like semantic and plausibility information, in the parafovea for Chinese readers.

Experiments 1 and 2 used two-character words that can have the order of their component characters reversed, and still be lexical units as target words. Readers received a parafoveal preview of a target …

Teaching For Social Justice With Standards-Based Secondary English Language Arts Curriculum, Alison George Dover

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Teaching for social justice is the attempt by classroom teachers to use their position in the classroom to promote social and educational reform within and despite current educational conditions and mandates. However, while a growing number of K-12 teachers have published anecdotal reports of their attempts to teach for social justice in secondary classrooms (e.g., Bender-Slack, 2007; Christensen, 2000; Singer, 2005), there is great variability among these accounts, and scant evaluation of their impact on specific academic, behavioral/motivational, and attitudinal outcomes (see Grant & Agosto, 2008; Kelly & Brandes, 2008; Poplin & Rivera, 2005).

This qualitative study addresses this research …

A Comprehensive Study Of The Extensional Rheology Of Complex Fluids, Manojkumar Chellamuthu

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Non-Newtonian fluids play an important role in our daily life. The visco-elastic nature of these fluids comprises a class of materials found in variety of items ranging from food, to plastic products, to the cosmetic products. The design and tunability of non-Newtonian fluids is only possible through an understanding of their complex dynamics and rheology. In this thesis, a filament stretching rheometer is used to investigate the extensional rheology of three important classes of complex visco-elastic fluids namely surfactants, suspensions and polymers.

Surfactants with their unique molecular amphiphilic chemistry allow them to form long wormlike micellar structures, which behave like …

Galaxy Evolution At High-Redshift: Millimeter-Wavelength Surveys With The Aztec Camera, Kimberly S Scott

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Galaxies detected by their thermal dust emission at submillimeter (submm) and millimeter (mm) wavelengths comprise a population of massive, intensely star-forming systems in the early Universe. These "submm/mm-galaxies", or SMGs, likely represent an important phase in the assembly and/or evolution of massive galaxies and are thought to be the progenitors of massive elliptical galaxies. While their projected number density as a function of source brightness provides key constraints on models of galaxy evolution, SMG surveys carried out over the past twelve years with the first generation of submm/mm-wavelength cameras have not imaged a large enough area to sufficient depths to …

Physical Activity And Maternal/Fetal Outcomes In A Pregnant Latina Population, Audra L Gollenberg

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Physical activity guidelines encouraging activity among healthy pregnant women have been issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, yet Latina women remain more sedentary than non-Latina white women. Latina women are also at higher risk for gestational diabetes mellitus and, among Latina women, Puerto Rican women have the highest rates of low birth weight and preterm-related infant death. This dissertation utilized data from the Latina GDM study, a prospective cohort study of 1,231 Latina women recruited early in pregnancy and followed through delivery. Participants were interviewed in early and mid pregnancy for assessment of sociodemographics, acculturation, medical, and …

"Hedging Future Uncertainty: A Framework For Obsolescence Prediction, Proactive Mitigation And Management", Craig L Josias

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Component obsolescence in the "high-tech" electronics industry has become a problem that cannot be ignored. Although recent attention has been given to component obsolescence, in general this issue is still dealt with reactively. This often results in sustainment of a long-life system such as ships, airplanes, power plant, and space based programs to be extremely costly. In addition, delayed schedules, extended downtimes, and technology lags are common occurrences in approaches that deal with obsolescence as it occurs. In wake of the rapid pace of technology innovation, turbulent markets and growing globalization, developing proactive approaches for dealing with obsolescence is a …

Electronic Spectroscopy And Dissociation Dynamics Of Gasphase Transition Metal Containing Cations And Dications, Kanchana Manori Perera

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Studies of gas-phase ionic clusters have become an integral component in understanding microsolvation and catalysis by transition metal cations. Further interest in this field is due to the possibility of bridging the gap between the condensed and gas phases by developing our understanding of clusters and the possibility that small clusters can have unique chemical and catalytic properties. Most gas phase studies have focused on singly charged ions. Electrospray allows for the production of multiply charged ions solvated by a few solvent molecules. Understanding smaller reactive species such as metal centered clusters with well-defined, gas phase conditions also allows for …

Factors Influencing The Stability Of Carotenoids In Oil-In-Water Emulsions, Caitlin Suzanne Boon

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Lycopene has recently received interest as an antioxidant in human tissues. These same antioxidant properties present challenges in preventing oxidative degradation within food products. In this research, degradation of lycopene in model emulsion systems was examined to better understand the chemical stability of this potential functional food ingredient.

Lycopene in corn oil or hexadecane was used to make oil-in-water emulsions using small molecule surfactants. Emulsion color loss was used to estimate lycopene loss and was monitored using an integrating sphere. Lipid hydroperoxide and hexanal formation was used to monitor the development of lipid oxidation.

Oxidation and color loss were found …

Globalization And Identity Formation: A Postcolonial Analysis Of The International Entrepreneur, Banu Ozkazanc-Pan

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

In the United States, the past twenty years has witnessed a growing academic interest in understanding 'globalization,' i.e., a series of interconnected social, cultural, and political processes occurring under integrated economies. Management scholars have tried to understand globalization in terms of its potential consequences for companies conducting business in various countries and regions. However, globalization involves more than this, for as new relationships between people and places occur, new ideas about who they/ us are in those relationships also emerge. How can international management scholars thus understand these complex relationships occurring under globalization? How can they theorize and study such …

Agent Interactions In Decentralized Environments, Martin William Allen

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

The decentralized Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP) is a powerful formal model for studying multiagent problems where cooperative, coordinated action is optimal, but each agent acts based on local data alone. Unfortunately, it is known that Dec-POMDPs are fundamentally intractable: they are NEXP-complete in the worst case, and have been empirically observed to be beyond feasible optimal solution.

To get around these obstacles, researchers have focused on special classes of the general Dec-POMDP problem, restricting the degree to which agent actions can interact with one another. In some cases, it has been proven that these sorts of structured forms of interaction …

Antioxidant Distribution And Effectiveness In A Model Muscle System, Ann T Ballesteros

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Gallic acid esters (GAE) of varying alkyl chain length were used to determine how antioxidant physical location and partitioning influence hemoglobin-catalyzed lipid oxidation. Specific GAE used were propyl gallate (PG), octyl gallate (OG), and lauryl gallate (LG). GAE partitioning experiments were performed with either isolated cod muscle membranes or washed cod muscle, which primarily contain polar membrane lipids and myofibrillar proteins. Canola oil was used in some experiments to determine how neutral lipids impact partitioning behavior. GAE distribution was determined spectrophotometrically in the recovered membranes, aqueous phase, and oil layer after employing differential centrifugation. Oxidation was monitored by measuring thiobarbituric …

Phonological Trends In The Lexicon: The Role Of Constraints, Michael Becker

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This dissertation shows that the generalizations that speakers project from the lexical exceptions of their language are biased to be natural and output-oriented, and it offers a model of the grammar that derives these biases by encoding lexical exceptions in terms of lexically-specific rankings of universal constraints in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004). In this model, lexical trends, i.e. the trends created by the phonological patterning of lexical exceptions, are incorporated into a grammar that applies deterministically to known items, and the same grammar applies stochastically to novel items. The model is based on the Recursive Constraint Demotion algorithm …

It’S ‘A Good Thing’: The Commodification Of Femininity, Affluence, And Whiteness In The Martha Stewart Phenomenon, Melissa A Click

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This study examines the ideologies of gender, race, and class present in Martha Stewart's unprecedented popularity, beginning with the publication of Stewart's first magazine in 1990 and ending in September 2004, after Stewart's conviction for her involvement in the ImClone scandal. My approach is built on the intersection of American mass communication research, British cultural studies, and feminist theory, and utilizes Hall's Encoding/Decoding model to examine how social, cultural and political discourses circulate in and through a mediated text and how those meanings are interpreted by those who receive them. Drawing from textual and ideological analysis of over thirteen years …

Landscape Ecology Of Large Fires In Southwestern Forests, Usa, Sandra L Haire

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

The recent increase in large fires in southwestern forests has prompted concern regarding their ecological consequences. Recognizing the importance of spatial patterns in influencing successional processes, I asked: (1) How do large fires change plant communities?; (2) What are the implications of these changes for ponderosa pine forests?; and (3) What is the relationship of fire severity to gradients of climate, fuels, and topography? To address the first two questions, I studied succession in the woody plant community at two sites that burned in high-severity fire: La Mesa fire in northern New Mexico (1977) and Saddle Mountain in northern Arizona …

High Stakes: A Poly-Communal Archaeology Of The Pocumtuck Fort, Deerfield, Massachusetts, Siobhan M Hart

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

The process of defining heritage is fraught with the inequalities of social and political power concomitant with colonialism. As a result, disenfranchised and marginalized groups worldwide have been given little say in heritage matters until recently. Though often perceived as "experts" on the past, archaeologists are just one of many stakeholders with interests in how the past is used in the present. As such, archaeologists today face the challenge of decolonizing heritage work through engagement with diverse stakeholder communities. In this dissertation, I explore the ways that archaeologists have been working at this over the last two decades through a …

Parents, Patriarchy, And Decision-Making Power: A Study Of Gender Relations As Reflected By Co-Residence Patterns Of Older Parents In The Immigrant Household, Lang Lin

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This dissertation focuses on the living arrangements of multi-generational households among ten biggest immigrant groups in the United States. Specifically, it examines whether the husband's or the wife's older parents were more likely to be present. Co-residence patterns were taken as a proxy that reflected relative decision-making power in the family. A number of factors hypothesized to be associated with the outcome were examined to explore the effect of immigration on gender role ideology and gender relations in the post-1965 immigrant family. More than 102,000 multi-generational households from the 2000 U.S. Census were included in the analyses.

Results suggested that …

Do Actions Speak Louder Than Knowledge? Action Manipulation, Parent-Child Discourse And Children’S Mental State Understanding In Pretense, Dawn K Melzer

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

In the current study children 3-5 years of age (N = 75) participated in a mental state task to investigate the effect of action saliency on young children's appreciation of mental states during pretend play activities. They also engaged in a parent-child interaction period, including storybook reading and pretend play activities, in order to examine the relation between mental state term utterances and performance on the mental state task. Two actors appeared side-by-side on a television screen, either in motion or as static images; one actor had knowledge of the animal he was pretending to be; the other actor did …

Post-Marxism After Althusser: A Critique Of The Alternatives, Ceren Ozselcuk

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This dissertation provides a particular Marxian class analytical political economy critique of post-Marxism. The dissertation demonstrates the ways in which different positions within post-Marxism continue to essentialize the conceptualizations of class and capitalist economy. What distinguishes this dissertation from other dominant critiques of post-Marxism is the anti-essentialist epistemological and ontological position it adopts. By adopting an anti-essentialist epistemological position the dissertation is able to demonstrate the discontinuities and continuities between post-Marxism and the Marxian tradition. The dissertation does this by reading the heterogeneous and disparate post-Marxian approaches as so many different ways to "resolve" the central tension of the Althusserian …

How Does Beauty Matter? An Exploration Of Employee Perceptions Of Office Aesthetics, Elizabeth A Siler

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Buildings make it possible for people to work together in organizations. In organization studies research, the physical aspects of organizations have been neglected in favor of intangible aspects (Gagliardi, 1996; Strati, 1999). Much of the research in management and organizational studies about physical workplaces concentrates on the instrumental aspects of offices, such as the relationship between open-plan offices and employee attitudes and behaviors (e.g. Hatch, 1987; Oldham, 1988), but it does not address the aesthetic aspects of offices.

The physical workplace is part of the field of organizational aesthetics, which encompasses a range of topics and theoretical approaches, from aesthetics …

Do Metabolic And Psychosocial Responses To Exercise Explain Ethnic/Racial Disparities In Insulin Resistance?, Rebecca E Hasson

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Introduction . Non-Hispanic blacks (blacks) are more insulin resistant compared to non-Hispanic whites (whites), increasing their risk for Type 2 diabetes. The role played by ethnic/racial disparities in the response to physical activity in mediating those higher rates of insulin resistance in blacks is unknown. Because the beneficial effects of exercise are transient and require subsequent doses of exercise to maintain the effect; the metabolic and psychosocial responses to single exercise bouts have strong implications for both opposing insulin resistance and raising the probability that an individual will continue to exercise. Purpose . To compare the metabolic and psychosocial responses …

Approaches To Estimation Of Haplotype Frequencies And Haplotype-Trait Associations, Xiaohong Li

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Characterizing the genetic contributors to complex disease traits will inevitably require consideration of haplotypic phase, the specific alignment of alleles on a single homologous chromosome. In population based studies, however, phase is generally unobservable as standard genotyping techniques provide investigators only with data on unphased genotypes. Several statistical methods have been described for estimating haplotype frequencies and their association with a trait in the context of phase ambiguity. These methods are limited, however, to diploid populations in which individuals have exactly two homologous chromosomes each and are thus not suitable for more general infectious disease settings. Specifically, in the context …

Supercritical Fluid Deposition Of Thin Metal Films: Kinetics, Mechanics And Applications, Christos Fotios Karanikas

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

In order to meet the demands of the continuous scaling of electronic devices, new technologies have been developed over the years. As we approach the newest levels of miniaturization, current technologies, such as physical vapor deposition and chemical vapor deposition, are reaching a limitation in their ability to successfully fabricate nano sized electronic devices.

Supercritical fluid deposition (SFD) is a demonstrated technology that provides excellent step coverage for the deposition of metals and metal oxides within narrow, high aspect ratio features. This technique shows the potential to satisfy the demands of integrated circuit miniaturization while maintaining a cost effective process …

Understanding Adsorption In Mesoporous Materials Through Lattice-Based Density Functional Theory And Monte Carlo Simulation, Bradd E Libby

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Confining walls induce qualitative changes in adsorbed fluids. Among the most intriguing phenomena is hysteresis, where a pore fills with fluid at a greater pressure than it empties. The causes and mechanisms by which this occurs are intensely investigated yet still poorly understood. Ordered mesoporous silicas, recently discovered materials with well-defined pore size distributions, provide an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the fundamental physics of the interaction of fluids with complex solids.

In part of this computational investigation we examine idealized pores. In agreement with other recent studies, we find that in 'inkbottle'-shaped pores, where a large cavity is …

Molecular Designs Toward Improving Organic Photovoltaics, Arpornrat Nantalaksakul

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) that have been studied to date have poor power conversion efficiencies. This dissertation focuses on various molecular designs that could lead to both a fundamental understanding of photoinduced charge separation at a molecular level and also provide a solution to improve bulk properties of organic materials to overcome the poor efficiencies of OPV devices.

The effect of molecular architectures on the efficiency of electron transfer, a primary step in OPVs functioning, is evaluated in this work. We have shown that even though dendrimer provides an interesting architecture for efficient electron transfer due to the presence of multiple …

American Jacobins: Revolutionary Radicalism In The Civil War Era, Jordan Lewis Reed

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This dissertation is an attempt to portray the revolutionary character of the American Civil War through a comparative methodology utilizing the French Revolution as both point of influence and as a parallel example. Within this novel context, subtle trends in the ideological development of the Republican Party's Radical wing undertake new meaning and an alternative revolutionary heritage takes shape around an idealization of the universalism of the French and Haitian Revolutions of the 1790s. The work argues that through a diffusion of ideas and knowledge of events from the streets of Paris into the fields of Haiti and onto the …