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Multi-Ethnic Stakeholders And Their Perspective Of Culture-Based Intervention Programs In Belize: Case Study Of Program For The Garifuna People, Juan Nunez
Doctoral Dissertations
The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how the development of Garifuna cultural identity by the Garifuna Language and Arts and Crafts in Schools Program at St. Peter Claver School in Punta Gorda, Belize. Culture-based education is described as contextualized relating “what students learn to their culture, communities, lives, and land.” This is a case study designed to understand the purpose of the program, identify its participants, review its curriculum, observe instructional strategies, and interview its stakeholders over a three-month period. Data was collected through documentation, direct observation, interviews, and audio recording. A descriptive framework was used …
Hiplife Music In Ghana: Postcolonial Performances Of Modernity, Nii Kotei Nikoi
Hiplife Music In Ghana: Postcolonial Performances Of Modernity, Nii Kotei Nikoi
Doctoral Dissertations
This research project examines the operation of development discourse in popular culture, how it is reproduced, contested and how alternatives are imagined. It is a post-development study of the production and consumption of Ghanaian hiplife music videos and culture. It explores how hiplife makers challenge development discourse and advance alternative ideas of social transformation. Considering the enduring (and damaging) legacies of colonialism, hiplife as a site of relative freedom of expression is fertile for the potential production of a decolonial vocabulary to heal colonial wounds— undoing colonial sensibilities imposed on the colonized. The project reveals that mainstream male hiplife stars …
Predictive Simulation Of Human Movement And Applications To Assistive Device Design And Control, Vinh Nguyen
Predictive Simulation Of Human Movement And Applications To Assistive Device Design And Control, Vinh Nguyen
Doctoral Dissertations
Predictive simulation based on dynamic optimization using musculoskeletal models is a powerful approach for studying biomechanics of human gait. Predictive simulation can be used for a variety of applications from designing assistive devices to testing theories of motor controls. However, one of the challenges in formulating the predictive dynamic optimization problem is that the cost function, which represents the underlying goal of the walking task (e.g., minimal energy consumption) is generally unknown and is assumed a priori. While different studies used different cost functions, the qualities of the gaits with those cost functions were often not provided. Therefore, this dissertation …
Elliptic Curves And Power Residues, Vy Thi Khanh Nguyen
Elliptic Curves And Power Residues, Vy Thi Khanh Nguyen
Doctoral Dissertations
Let E1 x E2 over Q be a fixed product of two elliptic curves over Q with complex multiplication. I compute the probability that the pth Fourier coefficient of E1 x E2, denoted as ap(E1) + ap(E2), is a square modulo p. The results are 1/4, 7/16, and 1/2 for different imaginary quadratic fields, given a technical independence of the twists. The similar prime densities for cubes and 4th power are 19/54, and 1/4, respectively. I also compute the probabilities without the technical …
Gaming For Life: Gaming Practices, Self-Care, And Thriving Under Neoliberalism, Brian Myers
Gaming For Life: Gaming Practices, Self-Care, And Thriving Under Neoliberalism, Brian Myers
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation frames gaming practices in relationship to thriving, an area of inquiry that has received little attention within the fields of video game studies and cultural studies. It argues that video games can be used by audiences as a tool for thriving, provided we define thriving outside of the framework of success and failure established by a neoliberal political rationality. Using survey data from 70 video game audience members, textual analysis, and ethnographic and auto-ethnographic methodologies, this dissertation first describes how video game audience members define thriving by distinguishing it from a related term, self-care. It then moves to …
A Parallel Direct Method For Finite Element Electromagnetic Computations Based On Domain Decomposition, Javad Moshfegh
A Parallel Direct Method For Finite Element Electromagnetic Computations Based On Domain Decomposition, Javad Moshfegh
Doctoral Dissertations
High performance parallel computing and direct (factorization-based) solution methods have been the two main trends in electromagnetic computations in recent years. When time-harmonic (frequency-domain) Maxwell's equation are directly discretized with the Finite Element Method (FEM) or other Partial Differential Equation (PDE) methods, the resulting linear system of equations is sparse and indefinite, thus harder to efficiently factorize serially or in parallel than alternative methods e.g. integral equation solutions, that result in dense linear systems. State-of-the-art sparse matrix direct solvers such as MUMPS and PARDISO don't scale favorably, have low parallel efficiency and high memory footprint. This work introduces a new …
Consensual Qualitative Research: Replicability Of Results And Social Reliability Of Process, Nicholas Morrison
Consensual Qualitative Research: Replicability Of Results And Social Reliability Of Process, Nicholas Morrison
Doctoral Dissertations
To solidify further their scientific footing, qualitative approaches would ideally demonstrate that they yield replicable information about a phenomenon under study. Although consensual qualitative research (CQR; Hill, 2012) proposes a rigorous, multistep method to enhance interjudge reliability and instill confidence in the results, it remains unclear if multiple uniformly trained teams analyzing the same stimulus set would arrive at similar analytic output (i.e., replicability—a high form of trustworthiness). Moreover, it is unclear if replicability (or lack thereof) might be influenced by the process through which CQR judges arrive at their output (i.e., social reliability). Addressing these gaps, this …
Petrogenesis Of Basaltic Lavas In Iceland And The Springerville Volcanic Field, U.S.A.: The Influence Of Tectonic Setting, Depth Of Melting And Volatiles, Marissa Mnich
Doctoral Dissertations
Icelandic basalts were long thought to be low in water (e.g. Gunnarsson et al., 1998), but more recent studies suggest that hotspots, like the Iceland mantle plume, may be a source of hydrous basaltic melts (Nichols et al., 2002). To explore a possible link between location, volatile concentration and resulting petrogenetic implications, samples were collected from eleven volcanic centers throughout Iceland. Water concentrations were measured in melt inclusions and phenocrysts using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. Results for a subset of samples indicate variable water in melt inclusions ranging from approximately 50 ppm to over 3000 ppm. Samples from southwestern …
Tools For Tutoring Theoretical Computer Science Topics, Mark Mccartin-Lim
Tools For Tutoring Theoretical Computer Science Topics, Mark Mccartin-Lim
Doctoral Dissertations
This thesis introduces COMPLEXITY TUTOR, a tutoring system to assist in learning abstract proof-based topics, which has been specifically targeted towards the population of computer science students studying theoretical computer science. Existing literature has shown tremendous educational benefits produced by active learning techniques, student-centered pedagogy, gamification and intelligent tutoring systems. However, previously, there had been almost no research on adapting these ideas to the domain of theoretical computer science. As a population, computer science students receive immediate feedback from compilers and debuggers, but receive no similar level of guidance for theoretical coursework. One hypothesis of this thesis is that immediate …
Fluorescence Spectroscopy And Microscopy Studies Of Chromophore Coupling In Isolated Small Molecule Nanostructures, Sarah R. Marques
Fluorescence Spectroscopy And Microscopy Studies Of Chromophore Coupling In Isolated Small Molecule Nanostructures, Sarah R. Marques
Doctoral Dissertations
My thesis focused on understanding the structural changes producing different spectral signatures seen in aggregates of 7,8,15,16- tetrazaterrylene (TAT). Recent work from our group showed crystallographically selective directional charge-separation within isolated extended TAT crystals without the need of an interface. Aggregates of different size not only exhibited different exciton recombination kinetics, but different spectral signatures. The motivation for understanding the change in the structural properties producing the unique spectral signatures is elucidating the mechanism of this directional charge-separation, intrinsic or extrinsic. In this case, an intrinsic mechanism means it is caused by molecular design and packing, and extrinsic mechanism means …
Characterization Of Β-2-Microglobulin Pre-Amyloid Oligomers And Their Role In Amyloid Inhibition, Tyler M. Marcinko
Characterization Of Β-2-Microglobulin Pre-Amyloid Oligomers And Their Role In Amyloid Inhibition, Tyler M. Marcinko
Doctoral Dissertations
In dialysis patients, β-2 microglobulin (β2m) can aggregate and eventually form amyloid fibrils in a condition known as dialysis-related amyloidosis, which deleteriously affects joint, bone, and organ function, and eventually causes organ failure. To understand the early stages of the amyloid assembly process, we have employed a series of biophysical tools including chromatography, spectroscopy, and most especially, native electrospray ionization (ESI) together with ion mobility mass spectrometry (IM-MS) to study soluble pre-amyloid oligomeric species. We have also collaborated and integrated computational modeling to help better understand and rationalize the structural basis behind oligomerization. Recently, several small molecules have been identified …
Dimensions Of Us Global Financial Power: Essays On Financial Sanctions, Global Imbalances, And Sovereign Default, Mariam Majd
Dimensions Of Us Global Financial Power: Essays On Financial Sanctions, Global Imbalances, And Sovereign Default, Mariam Majd
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation examines how U.S. capabilities in the global financial arena enable it to affect outcomes to its advantage. The first essay presents theoretical support for the hypothesis that holdings of U.S. sovereign debt collateralize public and private dollar borrowing in developing and emerging market economies. The second essay empirically tests the theory presented in Chapter 1 and provides evidence that, indeed, a statistically significant relationship exists between a country’s official holdings of US Treasury securities and its level of outstanding dollar credit. Our results demonstrate that even after controlling for a persistence effect (i.e., inertia) in US Treasury security …
The Catalytic Urease Subunit Urec Is Critical For Bifidobacterium Longum Urea Utilization, Yang Lyu
The Catalytic Urease Subunit Urec Is Critical For Bifidobacterium Longum Urea Utilization, Yang Lyu
Doctoral Dissertations
In the first study, we investigated the utilization of a human milk nitrogen source, urea, by Bifidobacterium. Urea accounts for ~15% in human milk, which is an abundant non-protein nitrogen (NPN). Some bifidobacteria are found to harbor urease gene clusters that potentially enable their hydrolysis of the human milk urea. However, the underlying mechanisms are still unclear. To incisively link the urease gene cluster with bifidobacterial urea utilization, chemical mutagenesis (i.e. ethyl methanesulfonate) was performed on the urease-positive Bifidobacterium longum subsp. suis UMA399. Mutants were selected on differential media and genetic lesions were identified using whole genome sequencing. …
Galaxies And Gas In Dark Matter Halos And The Cosmic Web, Seunghwan Lim
Galaxies And Gas In Dark Matter Halos And The Cosmic Web, Seunghwan Lim
Doctoral Dissertations
In the current understanding of galaxy formation, galaxies are believed to form and evolve in dark matter halos. The dark matter halos are collapsed objects that form and grow via gravitational instability of small initial density fluctuation in the cosmic field. They are not only the hosts of galaxies but are tracers of the cosmic web of the Universe. They are thus crucial components for understanding how galaxies form and evolve within the cosmic web. This dissertation is a systematic investigation of the galaxies and gas in the dark matter halos and the cosmic web, using observation data of large …
An Examined Life Of A Language Teacher Of Chinese: An Autoethnographic Investigation Into Agency, Ying Zhang
An Examined Life Of A Language Teacher Of Chinese: An Autoethnographic Investigation Into Agency, Ying Zhang
Doctoral Dissertations
There is a paucity of research about and done by L2 Chinese educators regarding the theoretical construct of agency. It is also noted that the qualitative inquiry is marginalized in L2 Chinese research field, let alone the narrative study of the agency of experienced by L2 Chinese-teachers. In this dissertation research, I aim at filling in the gap by conducting a longitudinal autoethnography which captures over a decade (1997-2017) of my personal and professional development with an agency perspective. The highly personalized autoethnographic accounts open up my personal and professional life as an experienced, college-level, transnational, early 40’s female native …
Neural Models For Information Retrieval Without Labeled Data, Hamed Zamani
Neural Models For Information Retrieval Without Labeled Data, Hamed Zamani
Doctoral Dissertations
Recent developments of machine learning models, and in particular deep neural networks, have yielded significant improvements on several computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition tasks. Progress with information retrieval (IR) tasks has been slower, however, due to the lack of large-scale training data as well as neural network models specifically designed for effective information retrieval. In this dissertation, we address these two issues by introducing task-specific neural network architectures for a set of IR tasks and proposing novel unsupervised or \emph{weakly supervised} solutions for training the models. The proposed learning solutions do not require labeled training data. Instead, …
Joint Asymptotics For Smoothing Spline Semiparametric Nonlinear Models, Jiahui Yu
Joint Asymptotics For Smoothing Spline Semiparametric Nonlinear Models, Jiahui Yu
Doctoral Dissertations
We study the joint asymptotics of general smoothing spline semiparametric models in the settings of density estimation and regression. We provide a systematic framework which incorporates many existing models as special cases, and further allows for nonlinear relationships between the finite-dimensional Euclidean parameter and the infinite-dimensional functional parameter. For both density estimation and regression, we establish the local existence and uniqueness of the penalized likelihood estimators for our proposed models. In the density estimation setting, we prove joint consistency and obtain the rates of convergence of the joint estimator in an appropriate norm. The convergence rate of the parametric component …
Class, Gender, And Mediated Labor Activism In Globalizing China, Siyuan Yin
Class, Gender, And Mediated Labor Activism In Globalizing China, Siyuan Yin
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation analyzes the relationships between mediated labor activism and the formation of counter-hegemonic forces in contemporary China. As China becomes a seemingly ideal model to justify the normalization of global capitalism, this study seeks to demonstrate how resistance from disenfranchised groups can challenge hegemonic power. Rural-to-urban migrant workers, who have been among the most disadvantaged groups since China’s economic reform of the 1980s, suffer from institutionalized discrimination, economic exploitation, and social exclusion. Approaching the analysis from an intersectional feminist lens, I explore the politics and possibilities of working-class resistance in searching for a just and equal China. Based on …
Response Retrieval In Information-Seeking Conversations, Liu Yang
Response Retrieval In Information-Seeking Conversations, Liu Yang
Doctoral Dissertations
The increasing popularity of mobile Internet has led to several crucial changes in the way that people use search engines compared with traditional Web search on desktops. On one hand, there is limited output bandwidth with the small screen sizes of most mobile devices. Mobile Internet users prefer direct answers on the search engine result page (SERP). On the other hand, voice-based / text-based conversational interfaces are becoming increasing popular as shown in the wide adoption of intelligent assistant services and devices such as Amazon Echo, Microsoft Cortana and Google Assistant around the world. These important changes have triggered several …
Extreme Dynamics Of Nanomaterials Under High-Rate Mechanical Stimuli, Wanting Xie
Extreme Dynamics Of Nanomaterials Under High-Rate Mechanical Stimuli, Wanting Xie
Doctoral Dissertations
Nanomaterials demonstrate novel mechanical properties attributed to the extremely large interfacial area. At quasi-static rates, the interfacial interactions are crucial in mechanical behaviors, however, materials under extreme mechanical stimuli are rarely studied at nanoscale. With an advanced laser-induced projectile impact test, we perform supersonic impact of micro-projectiles on polymer films, multilayer graphene, carbon- based nanocomposites membranes as well as individual micro-fibers, to study the interface interactions in the high-rate regime, and develop a simplified model to characterize the ballistic performance of materials.
Cytochrome P450 Monooxygenase-Mediated Lipid Metabolism In Obesity And Colon Tumorigenesis, Weicang Wang
Cytochrome P450 Monooxygenase-Mediated Lipid Metabolism In Obesity And Colon Tumorigenesis, Weicang Wang
Doctoral Dissertations
Colon cancer is a major public health issue: it is expected to have 140,250 new cases and 50,630 deaths during 2018, making colon cancer the third most common type of cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Obesity is associated with enhanced colonic inflammation, which is a major risk factor of colorectal cancer. Currently, more than 35% of adults and nearly 17% of children are obese. Considering the obesity and colon cancer epidemic in the United States, there is an urgent need to identify novel therapeutic targets for obesity and colon cancer. Here, using …
Supramolecular Nanoassemblies For The Separation And Mass Spectrometric Analysis Of Peptides And Modified Proteins, Meizhe Wang
Supramolecular Nanoassemblies For The Separation And Mass Spectrometric Analysis Of Peptides And Modified Proteins, Meizhe Wang
Doctoral Dissertations
Protein post-translational modifications (PTMs) play key roles in cellular physiology and disease, and identifying their locations on proteins can be beneficial for understanding more deeply protein chemistry. The methods applied for PTM analysis are most often based on mass spectrometry (MS). In the past few years, considerable progress has been made in developing MS-based proteomics technologies for global PTM analysis. Novel mass spectrometric peptide sequencing and analysis technologies allow for modification site mapping at molecular level. However, detecting PTMs on proteins and peptides by MS is challenging because of their low abundance and heterogeneity. Therefore, separation prior to MS analysis …
Three Essays On Remote Work And Regional Development, Ryan Wallace
Three Essays On Remote Work And Regional Development, Ryan Wallace
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation is comprised of three papers that collectively explore the relationship between remote work, or people that work from anywhere, and regional economic development. The first paper measures remote occupational employment in the United States with Census microdata and a shift-share model to decompose the share of occupational growth attributed to remote work. Findings indicate remote work has grown significantly since 2000, with the most pronounced growth in high skill jobs. The second paper uses a mixed-methods design to understand the role of remote work in migration decisions. It concludes that remote work arrangements enable access to employment opportunities …
Phrasal And Clausal Exceptive-Additive Constructions Crosslinguistically, Ekaterina Vostrikova
Phrasal And Clausal Exceptive-Additive Constructions Crosslinguistically, Ekaterina Vostrikova
Doctoral Dissertations
This work focuses on the syntax and semantics of exceptive and exceptive-additive constructions across different languages. Exceptive-additive constructions are constructions that can be interpreted as ‘except for’ and ‘in addition to’ depending on the context they are used in. The meaning an exceptive-additive construction gets depends on the other functional elements in a sentence. Those constructions get the exceptive meaning when they are put together with universal quantifiers and they get the additive meaning with existentials, wh-words and focus associates. In each context only one of the meanings is available. This work is the first systematic study of the …
Extracting And Representing Entities, Types, And Relations, Patrick Verga
Extracting And Representing Entities, Types, And Relations, Patrick Verga
Doctoral Dissertations
Making complex decisions in areas like science, government policy, finance, and clinical treatments all require integrating and reasoning over disparate data sources. While some decisions can be made from a single source of information, others require considering multiple pieces of evidence and how they relate to one another. Knowledge graphs (KGs) provide a natural approach for addressing this type of problem: they can serve as long-term stores of abstracted knowledge organized around concepts and their relationships, and can be populated from heterogeneous sources including databases and text. KGs can facilitate higher level reasoning, influence the interpretation of new data, and …
Residual Stress Models For Large Eddy Simulation Of Stratified Turbulent Flows, Felipe Augusto Ventura De Bragança Alves
Residual Stress Models For Large Eddy Simulation Of Stratified Turbulent Flows, Felipe Augusto Ventura De Bragança Alves
Doctoral Dissertations
The residual stresses and scalar fluxes are required to close the momentum and scalar transport equations in simulations of turbulence that are not fully resolved in space. In stratified turbulence, the stress and fluxes are statistically anisotropic unless the smallest resolved length scale is smaller than the Ozmidov scale and the buoyancy Reynolds number is sufficiently high for there to exist a range of scales that is statistically isotropic. In this work, a tensorial basis set is derived analytically that potentially contains sufficient information about the anisotropic interaction between resolved and residual scales. The residual stress tensor is evaluated by …
Service Competition And Data-Centric Protocols For Internet Access, Thiago Teixeira
Service Competition And Data-Centric Protocols For Internet Access, Thiago Teixeira
Doctoral Dissertations
The Internet evolved in many aspects, from the application to the physical layers. However, the evolution of the Internet access technologies, most visible in dense urban scenarios, is not easily noticeable in sparsely populated and rural areas. In the United States, for example, the FCC identified that 50% of the census blocks have access to up to two broadband providers; however, these providers do not necessarily compete. Additionally, due to the methodology of the study, there is evidence that the number of actual customers without broadband access is higher since the FCC considers the entire block to have broadband if …
Efficient Self-Supervised Deep Sensorimotor Learning In Robotics, Takeshi Takahashi
Efficient Self-Supervised Deep Sensorimotor Learning In Robotics, Takeshi Takahashi
Doctoral Dissertations
Deep learning has been successful in a variety of applications, such as object recognition, video games, and machine translation. Deep neural networks can automatically learn important features given large training datasets. However, the success of deep learning in robotic systems in the real world is still limited mainly because obtaining large datasets and labeling are costly. As a result, much of the successful work in deep learning has been limited to domains where large datasets are readily available or easily collected. To address this issue, I propose a framework for acquiring re-usable skills efficiently combining intrinsic motivation and the control …
Understanding China’S Discourse On South-South Cooperation And China-Africa Higher Education Exchange: A Field Research Study At Zhejiang Normal University’S China-Africa International Business School, Yi Sun
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation research attempts to distinguish China’s model from that of the traditional North-South relationship, with a focus on how China’s philosophy articulates its foreign policy and the nation’s higher education engagement with African countries. It examines the China-Africa higher education partnership in response to China’s discourse on South-South Cooperation (SSC), Africa’s human resource flows, and the benefits and constraints of current China-Africa cooperation. In order to achieve these goals, the dissertation uses one of the China-Africa partnership universities in China, Zhejiang Normal University (ZJNU) as a site for its field research. The fieldwork looks at both a student level …
Machine Learning Models For Efficient And Robust Natural Language Processing, Emma Strubell
Machine Learning Models For Efficient And Robust Natural Language Processing, Emma Strubell
Doctoral Dissertations
Natural language processing (NLP) has come of age. For example, semantic role labeling (SRL), which automatically annotates sentences with a labeled graph representing who did what to whom, has in the past ten years seen nearly 40% reduction in error, bringing it to useful accuracy. As a result, a myriad of practitioners now want to deploy NLP systems on billions of documents across many domains. However, state-of-the-art NLP systems are typically not optimized for cross-domain robustness nor computational efficiency. In this dissertation I develop machine learning methods to facilitate fast and robust inference across many common NLP tasks. First, …