Digital Commons Network^™

Functional Characterization Of The Plant 15-Cis-Zeta-Carotene Isomerase Z-Iso, Jesus Alonso Beltran Zambrano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Vitamin A deficiency is a widespread health issue in the tropics. To solve this issue, efforts are underway to increase provitamin A carotenoids such as β-carotene in staple crops which can be achieved by breeding, metabolic engineering or a combination of both approaches. However, rational strategies to improve carotenoid content in crops require sufficient knowledge of pathway regulation. Therefore, to better understand how plants synthesize provitamin A and to guide metabolic engineering strategies in crops such as maize, the functional characterization of the new ζ-carotene isomerase (Z-ISO) is of significant importance.

Z-ISO was recently discovered in maize and Arabidopsis (Chen …

Street Code Adherence, Callous-Unemotional Traits And The Capacity Of Violent Offending Versus Non-Offending Urban Youth To Mentalize About Disrespect Murder, Zoe A. Berko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

National statistics are not available on the proportion of violent juvenile offenses driven by the experience of being disrespected. However, the New York Police Department estimates that about 40% of the city's shootings involve members of violent crews of 12 to 20 year olds with most of this gun violence driven by incidents of disrespect. Mentalization, defined as the ability to envision mental states (i.e., feelings, beliefs and intentions) in oneself and others, is viewed as underlying affect regulation, impulse control, self-monitoring, and the experience of self-agency, all of which are implicated in interpersonal violence (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, …

Techniques For Automatic Normalization Of Orthographically Variant Yiddish Texts, Yakov Peretz Blum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Yiddish is characterized by a multitude of orthographic systems. A number of approaches to automatic normalization of variant orthography have been explored for the processing of historic texts of languages whose orthography has since been standardized. However, these approaches have not yet been applied to Yiddish.

Using a manually normalized set of 16 Yiddish documents as a training and test corpus, four techniques for automatic normalization were compared: a hand-crafted set of transformation rules, an off-the-shelf spell checker, edit distance minimization with manually set weights, and edit distance minimization with weights learned through a training set.

Performance was evaluated by …

Economies Of Touring In American Theatre Culture, 1835-1861, Nicole Berkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Employing methods from print and material culture studies, this dissertation explores the economic, social, and cultural dynamics of theatrical touring during a period, 1835-1861, when the ultimate symbols of anxiety over rising industrialization, migration, and urbanization--con artists and prostitutes or "confidence men and painted women"- were associated with both theatre and transportation. I argue that touring was central to the spread of theatre culture and is therefore critical to understanding U.S. popular culture. This project examines how geographic movements, as well as the circulation of extra-theatrical materials like newspapers and photographs, were instrumental not only for performers who attempted to …

The Philosophical Side Of Contemporary Art Forms, Kristina Bodetti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this project is to show that contemporary art forms, specifically popular music, film and comics/graphic novels, are capable of, and do in many cases work as philosophical pieces. I believe that an analysis of these mediums will reveal instances in which the works of art explicate established philosophical theories, expand upon them, and in some cases invent new theories.

Each new medium of art gets examined by philosophy in its turn and its merits as a unique art form are debated. From these arguments it is possible to extrapolate the ways in which these works can become …

Impact Of Ethnic Conflict On Development: A Case Study Of Guyana, Visnoonand Bisram

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study presents an alternative framework, from the dominant political and economic theories, for explaining the feeble and relatively slow pace of development of an ethnically divided, resource rich country.

The study, using primary and secondary sources, empirical evidence, and interpretive analysis, examines the emergence and role of racial conflict and its stifling impact on national development in Guyana, which represents an extreme case of a society plagued by racial division. Organizations including labor unions and political parties, as well as occupations and aspects of the economy, among other social constructs, are all racially divided. Utilizing an inter-disciplinary (sociology, political …

Institutionalizing Colonial Identity: A Case Study On The Indian Partition, Jamie Bodine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1947, the British colony of India was declared independent and emerged as two separate states, Pakistan and India. To examine this event, I ask what material cause(s) made possible the institutional separation between these two new states. To approach this question, I will review the process of political identity formation from the upheaval of 1857 to the 1947 partition. In so doing, I argue that the system of categorizing those who were under British colonial rule manufactured a particular set of political identities on the Indian subcontinent.

The Myth Of The Unteachable: Youth, Race And The Capacity Of Alternative Pedagogy, Cathy R. Borck

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My research consisted of three years of qualitative inquiry, including 62 interviews with members of the Department of Education, school administrators, teachers and students, as well as a yearlong ethnography at a transfer school that I chose because of its history of success with the city's hardest- to-reach youth. To my knowledge, mine is the first formal study of New York City transfer schools. "Transfer schools" are New York City's public alternative schools, which serve "over-age, under- credited" high school students (i.e. students who are "behind" in school). These students experience many challenges and interruptions to their education, including homelessness, …

Population Genomic Inference Of Ecology, Conservation, Evolution, And Demographic History Of Atlantic Seahorses And Pipefishes (Syngnathidae), Joel Thomas Boehm

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the Atlantic Ocean powerful directional ocean currents can play a significant role in the formation and persistence of marine species. Syngnathidae fishes have a sparse fossil record, high morphological plasticity, and many of these species are difficult to observe in the wild, therefore they frequently lack life history information and the status of regional lineages and species designations are often obscure. In this dissertation I explore the ecology, evolution, and conservation of primarily Atlantic seahorses (Hippocampus) and pipefish (Syngnathus) in four core chapters, using differing genetic datasets ranging from mitochondrial DNA to genome-wide RAD sequences. Most Synganthids have the …

L'Harmonie Révée: An Analysis Of Henri Pousseur's 'Votre Faust' And 'Les Litanies D'Icare', Andre Rene Bregegere

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters, largely self-contained, each dedicated to a different piece by Belgian composer Henri Pousseur (1929-2009). The first chapter presents a detailed survey of Pousseur's opera, Votre Faust, attempting to address all major aspects of this vast, ambitious work: origins and reception, compositional design, relationship with the Western operatic and literary tradition, formal experimentations, and harmonic innovations. The second chapter presents a detailed analysis of a work representative of Pousseur's more recent output, Les Litanies d'Icare (1993) for piano solo, focused on Pousseur's trademark techniques of parametric, serial design (technique des groupes), and …

The Sadistic Reader: Gender And The Pleasures Of Violence In The Novel, Pamela Burger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project seeks to explain the prevalence of narratives that feature sexual violence against women in the tradition of the Anglophone novel. To this end, it posits the existence of a sadistic reading practice that coincides with readers' sympathetic identification. A sadistic reader takes pleasure in the bodily violation of the woman at the center of a novel; such a reader enters the text expecting violence, and experiences a sense of narrative gratification when the inevitable violation plays out. These expectations emerge from repeated interactions with a literary tradition in which victimized heroines are routine. To explore such sadism, I …

Let The Record Show: Mapping Queer Art And Activism In New York City, 1986-1995, Tara Jean-Kelly Burk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although scholars increasingly scrutinize late twentieth-century American art produced in relation to social movements organized around feminism, anti-racist politics, health activism, and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) identity, scholars usually fail to address the importance of printed ephemera as a medium of artistic expression. Ephemeral materials, such as posters, are cheap to make and print. They are typically distributed illicitly via un-commissioned wheat-paste campaigns in urban public space. Collectives tend to make their designs copyright-free to encourage wide distribution. Particularly in the era before digital social media, these materials were central to the ways in which communities coalesced in …

On The Fringe Of Italian Fascism: An Examination Of The Relationship Between Vinicio Paladini And The Soviet Avant-Garde, Christina Brungardt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Vinicio Paladini's career as an artist, architect, and cultural critic illuminates the paradoxes of the Italian avant-garde between the World Wars. He emerged as an early proponent of communist-Futurism in 1922 and attempted to integrate futurist techniques with the Marxist theories of Antonio Gramsci. In addition, Paladini provided a direct point of contact between the Russian and Italian avant-garde, traveling to Moscow and reporting to the Italian public on Soviet artists' developments in film, photomontage, and architecture. Yet he struggled to merge his leftist ideology with his artistic practice as Fascism spread throughout Italy. Although he has been largely neglected …

Quadratic Discriminant Analysis Revisited, Wenbo Cao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, we revisit quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), a standard classification method. Specifically, we investigate the parameter estimation and dimension reduction problems for QDA.

Traditionally, the parameters of QDA are estimated generatively; that is the parameters are estimated by maximizing the joint likelihood of observations and their labels. In practice, classical QDA, though computationally efficient, often underperforms discriminative classifiers, such as SVM, Boosting methods, and logistic regression. Motivated by recent research on hybrid generative/discriminative learning, we propose to estimate the parameters of QDA by minimizing a convex combination of negative joint log-likelihood and negative conditional log-likelihood of observations and …

The Emergence Of L1 Innovations In Spanish-English Bilinguals: Evidence From Cross-Linguistic Structural Priming, Agustina Carando

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the hypothesis that structural priming is an internal mechanism motivating processes of convergence in bilinguals. The focus of the investigation is linguistic innovations in Spanish produced by Spanish-English bilinguals. Innovations involve both changes in the frequency of alternative constructions and existing patterns produced in new contexts modeled on English equivalents. From structural priming techniques that model convergence, the data assess the extent of English influence on Spanish, in a contact setting (New York, United States) and a non-contact setting (Córdoba, Argentina).

In the field of language contact, convergence may manifest itself as an increase in the use …

Chinese Hereditary Mathematician Families Of The Astronomical Bureau, 1620-1850, Ping-Ying Chang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a research that relied on the online Archive of the Grand Secretariat at the Institute of History of Philology of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan and many digitized archival materials to reconstruct the hereditary mathematician families of the Astronomical Bureau in Qing China. The research found several patterns and strategies that these hereditary mathematician families exhibited during their long careers at the Astronomical Bureau. It found that family networks remained the most important channel that the Astronomical Bureau used to recruit new members until the last days of the Qing dynasty. Moreover, professional mathematicians at the Astronomical …

Use Of The Modified Emotional Stroop Task To Detect Suicide Risk In College Students, Yeunjoo Chung

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is a challenge to detect those who are at potential risk for suicide because the base rate of suicidal behaviors in non-clinical samples is low. The aim of the present study was to investigate the concurrent and predictive validity of the emotional Stroop task (EST) as a behavioral marker for suicidal behaviors in a college population. Eight hundred and twenty students were asked to perform the EST and to respond to suicide-related self-report measures and were followed up with18 months later. The results indicated that participants with past suicide attempts had longer response latencies to the word "suicide" as …

Integrating Phylogenomics, Biogeography And Systematics To Explore The Taxonomy And The Rise Of The Ratsnakes, Xin Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Understanding the evolutionary processes that create the spectacular diversity of organisms, both in species numbers and form, is a primary goal for biologists. Global ratsnakes are a species-rich assemblage with high morphological and ecological diversity and a distribution that encompasses both the Old World (OW) and the New World (NW). To explore the mechanism leading to the divergence of the ratsnakes, I tested the hypotheses regarding the area of origin and global dispersal, and examined the patterns of diversification and trait evolution. Given adaptive radiation via ecological opportunity, a diversity-dependent diversification pattern and an early burst trait evolutionary pattern are …

Tonic And Phasic Inhibitory Mechanisms Mediating Sensorimotor Decision-Making In The Goldfish Auditory Startle Circuit, Paul C.P. Curtin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work describes related studies of cellular and synaptic signaling mechanisms involved in the balance of excitation and inhibition in the goldfish auditory startle circuit. The general purpose of these experiments was to identify novel mechanisms that contribute to action selection at different stages of the motor control hierarchy. The methods applied to achieve this goal tested the effects of selective antagonists for target receptor systems on sound-evoked excitation and inhibition of startle.

Chapter 2 describes a study of a poorly-understood serotonergic mechanism, the 5-HT_5A receptor, that was not previously functionally characterized in native tissues or associated with neural …

Policy Advocacy And The Performance Of Muslim American Identity, Emily Cury

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In much of the political science literature, lobbying is conceptualized as a strategic attempt to influence policy. Policy actors are seen as independent agents competing to achieve policy outcomes that closely resemble their preferences. This understanding of policymaking has acquired a taken-for-granted nature and is therefore seldom questioned. The discourse of policy advocacy as a bargaining process has becomes, in part, a constraining discourse, leading academic inquiry to focus on questions of tactics and policy outcomes and ignore questions of how the policy process itself shapes and influences actors' identities and behavior.

Understood in purely strategic terms, Muslim American foreign …

Child Abductors Who Have Killed Their Victims: A Theoretical Approach To Spatial Analysis, Tonya M. Desa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite the intense and prolonged public attention received when a child is abducted and killed, there are major gaps in the academic literature. One of the gaps pertains to the distances traveled by the offender between key crime locations. The overall aim of this study was to provide information concerning typical travel distances of offenders. This project utilized an archival data set compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. The database constructed for this project consisted of 72 victims who were abducted and murdered by 68 offenders. The date range for these …

Neoliberal Dystopias: Postmodern Aesthetics And A Modern Ethic In Four Pairs Of Plays By Argentine And Irish Playwrights (1990-2003), Noelia Diaz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is an exploration of eight plays, four from Argentina, four from Ireland, comprehending the period between 1990 and 2003. Both countries share a strong tradition of national theatre that, from its beginnings, was closely intertwined with the development of the nation state. Theatre functions in Argentina and Ireland as a medium through which representations of what it means to be Irish or Argentine have been explored, questioned, and contested. It is the aim of this project to examine how the apparently non-political and ahistorical theater of the playwrights I will examine is indeed a response to a contextualized …

More Than Objects: Understanding Female Slaves In Barbados In The Early Modern Period, Phoebe Martine Downes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will focus on representations of African women in the British colony of Barbados in the early modern era, using travelers' accounts, planters' records and the writings of abolition-minded reformers. The topic is significant because most scholars have focused on British colonial life during the nineteenth century, examining the planter class or the region's colonial commodities.

The period from 1600 to 1700 was an era of beginnings in the British colonial world, with England establishing its first Caribbean colonies and experimenting with different economic strategies to gain wealth. This period was also significant due to the emergence of slavery …

Voices From On High: Rhetorical Education In A Jewish Women's Writing Center, Andrea Rosso Efthymiou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic dissertation looks at how the mission statement at one institution of higher education--Yeshiva University (YU)--establishes rhetorical education for its undergraduate students. The research site for this study of rhetorical education and institutional mission is the college writing center at YU's women's campus, Stern College for Women. This study defines rhetorical education as the way an institution authorizes written, spoken, and behavioral communication, with the goal of developing its students as civic beings, through its institutional mission. My findings demonstrate how undergraduate writing tutors disidentify with institutional rhetorical education to subvert, resist, and revise institutional rhetorical education, offering alternatives …

Essays On Spatial Econometrics: Estimation Methods And Applications, Osman Dogan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of four essays on the estimation methods and applications of spatial econometrics models. In the first essay, we consider a spatial econometric model containing spatial lags in the dependent variable and the disturbance terms with an unknown form of heteroskedasticity in the innovations. We first prove that the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is generally inconsistent when heteroskedasticity is not taken into account in the estimation. We show that the necessary condition for consistency of the MLE depends on the specification of the spatial weight matrices. Then, we extend the robust generalized method of moment (GMM) estimation approach …

De Novo Design And Engineering Of Functional Metal And Porphyrin-Binding Protein Domains, Bernard Howard Everson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this work, I describe an approach to the rational, iterative design and characterization of two functional cofactor-binding protein domains. First, a hybrid computational/experimental method was developed with the aim of algorithmically generating a suite of porphyrin-binding protein sequences with minimal mutual sequence information. This method was explored by generating libraries of sequences, which were then expressed and evaluated for function. One successful sequence is shown to bind a variety of porphyrin-like cofactors, and exhibits light- activated electron transfer in mixed hemin:chlorin e6 and hemin:Zn(II)-protoporphyrin IX complexes. These results imply that many sophisticated functions such as cofactor binding and electron …

An Examination Of The Effect Of Vision-Related Factors And Availability Of Health Care Resources On Depression, Functional Status, And Falls Among New York City Senior Center Attendees, Lauren Evans

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is substantial variability across different geographic regions and demographic groups in health outcomes and health resource availability. This dissertation examines the relationship between self-reported ocular disease and depression, functional status, and falls in a diverse sample of senior center attendees in New York City. Further, these analyses explored whether the availability of health care resources at the area level affects the observed relationship between ocular disease and these other adverse outcomes.

This dissertation project addresses two main gaps in the current research, specifically, the need to better understand elders' experiences with these conditions in different geographic regions and demographic …

The Theoretical And Psychological Foundations Of Care In Environmental Ethics, Rachel Fedock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I investigate the phenomenon of care, provide some of the theoretical and psychological framework for the ethics of care, and apply this framework to environmental issues. The neglected dimensions of care I explore are: the emotions of care, care as a virtue, and the caring person, respectively, while constructing possible conceptions of in what each dimension consists. I argue for the necessity of sympathy and concern within the ethics of care, while arguing against the necessity of empathy. Next, I explore the virtue of care as an ideal, where emotions, desires, reasoning, motive, duty and action all play an important …

Towards The Total Synthesis Of (+/-)-Gephyrotoxin 287c, Maciej E. Domaradzki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Studies directed toward the total synthesis of (+/-)-Gephyrotoxin 287C are described herein. Even though the target alkaloid has been synthesized four times to date, it still presents an interesting synthetic challenge. Our ultimate goal is to develop an efficient enantioselective synthetic route utilizing oxazolone chemistry in order to demonstrate its utility as a dienophilic component in intramolecular Diels-Alder reactions. This is part of a greater ongoing study aimed at a range of suitable alkaloid targets.

Chapter 1 provides introduction to frog toxins as secondary metabolites and subsequently shifts to the target alkaloid. (+/-)-Gephyrotoxin 287C was originally described by Daly and …

Neural Mechanisms Underlying The Perception Of Three-Dimensional Shape From Texture: Adaptation And Aftereffects, Carole Filangieri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Input into the visual system is two-dimensional (2D) and yet we effortlessly perceive the world around us as three-dimensional (3D). How we are able to accurately extract 3D shape information from the 2D representations that fall on the retina remains largely unknown. Although much research has been conducted that investigates higher levels of form processing (i.e. face recognition), less is known about the mechanisms that underlie the perception of simple 3D shape. Previous studies in our lab have shown that our ability to perceive 3D shape from texture cues relies on the visibility of orientation flows -- patterns that run …