Digital Commons Network^™

The Role Of Placental Genes On Intellectual Disability And Developmental Delay, Maedot A. Yidenk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The complex interaction between gene expressions and environmental factors plays a key role in the pathogenesis of various diseases, including neurodevelopmental disorders (Lenroot & Giedd, 2008). This study aimed to evaluate first, the magnitude of association between placental gene Methyl-CpG Binding Protein 2 (MeCP2) and intellectual disability (ID) in the offspring and second, the synergy between placental gene Forkhead box protein 1(FOXP1) and developmental delay (DD) in the offspring. We focused on assessing two specific paradigms, i) placental gene expressions of MeCP2 among children that have ID vs. children without ID; and ii) placental gene expression of …

On The Woman Question: A Defense Of Alexandra Kollontai Against Liberal Critics, Nicole Baltzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alexandra Kollontai envisioned a world in which all women and their proletarian comrades were liberated from subordination under capitalism. She served as People’s Commissar in the Bolshevik government and established the Zhenotdel, the government’s department for women. Under the Bolsheviks, women were granted equal legal status to men, divorce rights, access to birth control, and were the primary benefiters of the nationalization of domestic work (i.e., communal childcare, dining, and laundry halls). Kollontai and the Soviet Union provide us with one of the few examples of Marxist feminism in action. Liberal critics of Kollontai and her Marxist comrades and contemporaries …

Metareasoning, Opportunistic Exploration, And Explanations For Autonomous Indoor Navigation, Raj Korpan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Autonomous indoor navigation is an important task for mobile robots deployed without a map in real-world environments, such as museums or offices. While it travels, an autonomous robot navigator must contend with lack of prior knowledge, sensor noise, actuator error, and inquisitive people. This dissertation addresses these challenges with a cognitively-based hierarchical reasoning architecture that incorporates learning, exploration, reactivity, planning, heuristics, and explanations. Evaluation by simulation in large, complex, indoor environments shows that a robot controller can successfully navigate without a detailed map of every obstruction's location when it performs limited initial global exploration and plans in its learned spatial …

Delayed Modulation Of Glutamate Receptors By Anti-Epileptic Drugs After Traumatic Brain Injury In Rats, Edgar Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a significant health concern. Around 74 million people sustain a traumatic brain injury worldwide. The damage caused by TBI produces two types of injury; primary and secondary injuries. Primary injury is caused within milliseconds and is irreversible. Secondary brain injury is delayed and produced by molecular, cellular, and structural disruption after the initial injury. One of the most devastating dysfunction after TBI is glutamate neurotransmitter overactivation that could lead to neurotoxic levels of glutamate in the brain (i.e., excitotoxicity). Excitotoxicity has been linked with the development of epilepsy after TBI, also known as post-traumatic epilepsy …

Predictors Of Lexical Accessibility Of Common And Proper Nouns In Older Age: Evidence From The Tip-Of-The-Tongue State, Amy Victoria Vogel-Eyny

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One of the notable language difficulties experienced by healthy older adults is word retrieval failure, specifically the tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT). A TOT occurs when one has a strong sense of knowing the word, such that the semantic content is accessed, but the entirety of the word’s phonology is temporarily inaccessible. Such retrieval difficulty is attributable, at least in part, to characteristics of the target word. Psycholinguistic features may uniquely influence the semantic and/or phonological stages of word production. An additional factor known to influence TOT-likelihood is noun type: proper nouns elicit TOTs more often than do common nouns. The discrepancy …

The Logic Of The Land: The Agrarian Roots Of Uneven Development In Brazil, Chris Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to explain the highly uneven pattern of economic development in Brazil during the 20^th century. Stark development differences between the northern and southern regions of the country have long been a problem of concern to scholars and policymakers and have generated a number of studies over the years. However, none of these have gotten to the root of the problem, and state policy has never adequately addressed the regional disparities. This study puts forth a new theory of uneven development based on the different ways that agricultural production has come to be organized in different parts …

Essays On How Cultural Factors Affect The Sentiment And Behavior Of Financial Market Participants, Runze Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this dissertation is to explore how cultural factors influence the sentiment and behavior of financial market participants. This dissertation consists of three chapters that encompass sports events, cultural dimensions, institutional investors, financial analysts, and earnings announcements. Chapter 1 is the introduction, Chapter 2 to 4 are the main content, and Chapter 5 concludes.

In Chapter 2, I construct the Sports Mood Index (SMI) of 49 metropolitan areas in USA and Canada based on the performance of Big 4 professional sports teams and build the firm-level SMI based on institutional investors’ holdings as a proxy for investors’ mood. …

Three Essays On Spatial Econometrics: The Matrix Exponential Spatial Specification, Ye Yang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis consists of three essays on the matrix exponential spatial specification. In the first essay, we study the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation of matrix exponential spatial specification(p,q) (MESS(p,q)). We extend the model to a general higher order case and derive its GMM estimator. The large sample properties are also studied. Under homoskedasticity a best GMM estimator (BGMME) is derived and shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal. Under heteroskedasticity an optimal GMM estimator (OGMME) is derived and shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal as well. Monte Carlo experiments that discuss the large sample properties of quasi-maximum …

Learning To Feel Safe: A Translational Study Of The Influence Of Safety Learning On Anxiety-Related Overgeneralized Fear, Hyein Cho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health diagnoses, affecting about a third of the population in their lifetime. However, approximately a third of individuals with anxiety do not respond to current treatment approaches, highlighting the need to identify additional potential therapeutic mechanisms. Safety learning is one such mechanism, but methodological challenges and a dearth of research have prevented the field from advancing the understanding of the role of safety learning in the etiology and remediation of anxiety disorders. Animal research, using single-cued safety learning paradigms, has yielded promising early findings, demonstrating that safety learning directly reduces anxiety-related behaviors …

Characterizing The Brain Dynamics And Eye Movement Behavior Of Memory-Guided Saccades: A Preliminary Investigation Of Distractor Influence On Memory-Guided Saccades, Angelo V. Colmenero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research has helped to shed light on the functional organization and neural mechanisms of distractors on memory-guided saccades. In our current study we have utilized eye tracking and EEG technology to simultaneously record the changes in saccadic eye movement (SEM) behavior and event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with performance on a memory-guided saccade task with distractor conditions. Thirteen healthy control participants (n = 13; 6 female) were tasked to complete 864 memory-guided saccade trials with both visible (white) and invisible (black) distractors presented on a black background before saccade initiation. Compared with the control (black) distractor condition, distractor presentation produced a …

Essays On Economic Uncertainty And Housing Market In China, Humenghe Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that covers topics in macroeconomics.

Chapter 1. Literature Survey of China’s Housing Market and Macroeconomic Uncertainty is a survey of the literature on the history and development of China’s housing market, its unique characteristics, the driving forces behind rising housing prices, and the empirical interactions among housing market, economic uncertainty and the macroeconomy in China.

Chapter 2. The Spatial Correlation of Regional Housing Prices and Economic Uncertainty in China

Rapid real estate development and house price growth in China have garnered significant attention in academia and policy circles. Investigation into highly differentiated but interrelated …

Anticipatory Fear And Psychopathic Traits In Adolescents, Catherine Chan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Psychopathy is characterized by impulsive antisocial behavior, interpersonal and affective deficits such as lack of guilt, empathy, and remorse. An affective deficit observed in individuals with psychopathic traits is the lack of anticipatory fear. In a fearful situation, individuals generally develop fear and associate it with the situation, so they know to avoid it in the future. The ability to anticipate fear prevents individuals from committing wrongdoings due to the negative consequences that arise from it. However, individuals with psychopathic traits have been found to show reduced anticipatory fear, which in turn may contribute to more antisocial behavior. To date, …

An Analysis Of Machine Learning Techniques For Economic Recession Prediction, Sheridan Kamal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this project I used the supervised machine learning methods logistic regression, decision tree classifier, k nearest neighbor classifier, and support vector classifier, to determine the best method to predict economic recessions. To do this, I used the function train_test_split to create training and testing sets and the function TimeSeriesSplit to create walk-forward cross validation sets to use when tuning the model parameters. Each machine learning method was trained on both scaled and unscaled data and was performed using default parameters and using the tuned parameters so that there were four models of each method. It was determined that the …

Efficient Protocols For Multi-Party Computation, Tahereh Jafarikhah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) allows a group of parties to compute a join function on their inputs without revealing any information beyond the result of the computation. We demonstrate secure function evaluation protocols for branching programs, where the communication complexity is linear in the size of the inputs, and polynomial in the security parameter. Our result is based on the circular security of the Paillier's encryption scheme. Our work followed the breakthrough results by Boyle et al. [9; 11]. They presented a Homomorphic Secret Sharing scheme which allows the non-interactive computation of Branching Programs over shares of the secret inputs. …

Writing Not Writing: Transdisciplinary Poetics, Institutional Critique, Miriam L. Atkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of transdisciplinary creative practice as a means of institutional critique. The artists I have chosen as my primary focus—Robert Kocik, Eleni Stecopoulos, Zora Neale Hurston, Jimmie Durham, Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian—employ multiple mediums and fields of discourse to address the presumptions and exclusions that are structurally integral to the institutions that house them. They enact “architextural” interventions through their use of forms that move between the page and three dimensional space, incorporating architecture, sculpture, drawing, painting, film, performance, poetry and prose. My work aims at a renewed understanding of critique as such, and therefore—though …

Effects Of Working Memory Load On Ensemble Versus Individual Object Processing, Clark Moore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ensemble perception is the ability of the visual system to summarize object groups by their statistical properties. At a fundamental level, past studies show clearly that ensembles are perceived, and statistical information is sent to working memory such that a subject may report on the averages (Ariely, 2001; Brady and Alvarez, 2011). Studies show that subjects are capable of reporting ensemble statistics for large groups of objects with high accuracy, inferring that this process bypasses the capacity limitations of attention and working memory (Chong and Treisman, 2003; Baijal et al., 2013; Huang, 2015; Epstein and Emmanouil, 2017, 2021). However, few …

The Art Of Listening: A Conversational Approach To Lecture Recitals, Javor Bracic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lecture recitals as the practice of pairing live music performance with verbal explication have been around since at least the end of the eighteenth century, but research on them is surprisingly scarce despite how ubiquitous they have become. What exactly are lecture recitals? Where did they originate? How are they conducted? Is there anything we could do to improve upon them?

In this dissertation I not only consider these questions but also propose a new kind of lecture recital I call a conversation concert. After a brief historical overview of lecture-recitalists from Johann Nikolaus Forkel to Rob Kapilow, I showcase …

Compromised Values: Charlotte Posenenske, 1966–Present, Ian Wallace

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fabricated in unlimited series and sold at cost, the sculptures produced by Charlotte Posenenske between 1966 and 1967—modular wall reliefs, interactive cubic structures, and tubular geometric units whose installation requires collective decision making—were meant to confront both the artwork’s commodity status and the limitation of its consumption to a privileged elite. Nevertheless, Posenenske’s work has been effectively recuperated by the art system: first, in the 1980s, through a series of exhibitions and publications organized by her estate; and second, with her inclusion in Documenta 12 in 2007, which reintroduced her work to the market. Since the artist’s death in 1985, …

Quantum Transport In Topological Magnets, Haiming Deng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the past several years, a new field of symmetry-protected topological materials has emerged in condensed matter physics, based on the wide range of consequences that result from the realization that certain properties of physical systems can be expressed as topological invariants, which are insensitive to local perturbations. This new class of materials hosts unique surface/edge states, such as the first known topological system – quantum Hall insulator with dissipationless chiral edge states, and massless spin-helical Dirac surface states in 3D topological insulators that are unlike any other known 1D or 2D electronic systems. In this thesis, to understand the …

Genomic And Ecological Dimensions Of Malagasy Reptile And Amphibian Biodiversity, Arianna L. Kuhn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A long history of isolation coupled with complex topographic and ecological landscapes makes Madagascar ideal for exploring the historical factors that have shaped patterns of population diversity and endemism. Many species-level studies have suggested Late Quaternary climate change may have influenced population dynamics in the tropics, but Madagascar’s ecologically unique biomes or individual species properties may have driven idiosyncratic responses to these shifts. Using community-scale population genetic data I implement a hierarchical approximate Bayesian computation (hABC) approach to evaluate the degree of synchronous population expansion during glacial cycles across herpetofaunal assemblages both within and across discrete biomes and taxonomic groups. …

Circuits Underlying Serotonin Mediated Sex Differences In Fear Learning, Rebecca Ravenelle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a trauma-related disorder characterized by intense fearful memory formation. Women are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD, indicating there may be sex differences in the underlying neural circuits. Given that serotonin (5-HT) dysfunction is implicated in PTSD, and 5-HT modulates fear learning, we investigated whether there are sex differences in the modulation of fear learning by 5-HT. We administered the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) citalopram (20mg/kg or 10m/kg, i.p.) once to male and female mice prior to auditory fear conditioning and tested the effects on fear memory the next day. We found …

Environmental Cues And The Sociospatial Imaginary: An Examination Of Spatial Perception And Meaning-Making In A Gentrifying Neighborhood, Todd Levon Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What could be more ordinary or pedestrian than two people walking down an urban street and talking about what we see and what we make of it? Yet this simple, quotidian act of walking a street—seeing, perceiving and experiencing physical spaces, places and objects—and making meaning of what is encountered, is the basis of my dissertation. It is also my basis for claiming that I have learned a great deal—and much unexpectedly—about how differently different people see and interpret the urban streetscape. What are the various environmental cues that stand out to different individuals? What are the psychosocial imaginaries that …

Inevitable Associations: Art, Institution, And Cultural Intersection In Los Angeles, 1973–1988, Liz Hirsch

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Inevitable Associations: Art, Institution, and Cultural Intersection in Los Angeles, 1973-1988 considers alternative institutions and cultural intersections in bicentennial-era Los Angeles. I look at the spatial, social, and artistic convergence of Los Angeles artists rarely seen as allied, through close examination of alternative cultural infrastructure that came out of a federal jobs program called the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) and cohered around a building located at 240 South Broadway in downtown. I use the model of association—alliance through shared purpose—to demonstrate moments of convergence and interconnection. Through an analysis of the formation of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), …

Poems Of Debate And Praise: Women As Published Authors In Sixteenth-Century France, Anna Soo-Hoo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Non-fictional, published poetic exchanges between men and women in sixteenth-century France provide new perspectives into how women writers operated in a literary culture whose main producers and dominant voice were male. Contrary to the notion repeated by many critics that women of that period were supposed to stay out of the public sphere, my study finds that publishing a woman’s poems did not destroy her reputation, and there appears to have been no major backlash when a man decided to include poems by a female contemporary in his book. My study takes as its point of departure the notion that …

Europ: Expanded Cinema, Projection And The Film Co-Op In Western Europe, 1966–1979, Drew E. Bucilla

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation reconstructs “Europ”—an informal network of artists interconnected through the film cooperative movement who propagated expanded cinema throughout Western Europe in a series of artist-organized screenings, festivals and exhibitions in the late 1960s and 1970s. While Europ was never actually realized as a project, I deploy the name as a retrospective device for bringing together experimental filmmakers from Austria, Germany and the U.K. Expanded cinema was an experimental art form that stretched the definition of film by incorporating diverse media, including multiple screens and projectors, live performance, and installation. It thus resisted the confines of traditional cinemas, as it …

The Palestinian’S Venison: John Locke, Colonialism And Liberal Zionism, Benjamin Geier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Liberal Zionism is one of the most potent political forces with the American Jewish diaspora, as it allows for Jews living in the U.S. to support a strong Israel while still holding to the liberal values that the majority of American Jews believe in when it comes to domestic politics. Liberal Zionism can seem like a contradiction, but it is rooted in the work of the father of liberalism himself, John Locke. This paper examines portions of Locke’s Second Treatise and compares it to the pillars of liberal Zionist thought, showing the parallels between Locke’s justification for European colonialism in …

Sartorial Semiotics: Constructs Of Gender And Female Sexuality In Post Wwii American And European Cinema, Patricia Cabral

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cinematic costume design functions as a system of visually-perceived, material and indexical signifiers, an effective and compelling language further informed by styling and embodiment. Sartorial semiotics support and inflect role characterization, while equally underpinning or subverting tropes generated by ideological paradigms. The following methodological approaches were adopted in scrutinizing this topic: Roland Barthes’ application of semiotic theories to the domain of fashion in The Language of Fashion, and Laura Marks’ discussion of the dialectics of optical and haptic visualities in apprehending film images in The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses.

By examining the costume …

Water-Responsive, Peptide-Based Crystals, Roxana Piotrowska

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Water-responsive (WR) materials  that exert significant forces in response to changing hydration levels are receiving growing interest due to their potential applications, including use as actuators for energy harvesting devices, artificial muscles, and soft robotics. Reported examples include biological and synthetic materials with abilities to efficiently convert the chemical potential of water into mechanical actuations. However, these systems are typically complex, and consequently, their WR mechanisms are not well-understood thus preventing rational design and optimization. This thesis demonstrates the design and development of WR peptide crystals that mimic and enhance understanding of natural WR systems. The peptide crystals, with intrinsic …

Predicting Stock Price Movements Using Sentiment And Subjectivity Analyses, Andrew Kirby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a quick search online, one can find many tools which use information from news headlines to make predictions concerning the trajectory of a given stock. But what if we went further, looking instead into the text of the article, to extract this and other information? Here, the goal is to extract the sentence in which a stock ticker symbol is mentioned from a news article, then determine sentiment and subjectivity values from that sentence, and finally make a prediction on whether or not the value of that stock will go up or not in a 24-hour timespan. Bloomberg News …

(In)Hospitable Modernity: Hospitality And Its Discontents (1920–1953), Daniel A. Hengel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the tacit forms of political activity operating through the performance and space of hospitality in modern fiction. I read the habitus, praxis, and dissemblages of hospitality in modern fiction as conduits that reveal dialectics of submission and resistance to Victorian and Edwardian markers of normativity. This is ultimately an infrapolitical work. I locate fulcrums of dissent, cloaked in a guise of hospitality, in the domestic sphere and the politicization of formerly private spaces into sites with the potential to reorder legitimated forms of agency. This project attempts to uncover veiled forms of sociopolitical resistance in and through …