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"To Sew Or To Sow?” European Gender Images And Development In Rural Ecuador, Barbara Grunenfelder-Elliker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the impact of a gender specific Swiss development project on Andean artisans women who struggle to intensify their craft production in the face of an increasing subsistence crisis characteristic among rural small producers around the globe. The selection of a project which has proven sustainable over a number of years allowed the author to conduct fieldwork in three different settings (1992-1995): among two hundred artisan women from eleven rural communities in Ecuador's Azuay province, who embroider table linen and apparel for export; among Ecuadorian and expatriate Swiss development specialists in Quito and Cuenca; and, to a limited …

A Developmental Study Of The Nmda Receptor, Katherine M. Flynn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The N-methyl-D-aspartate type of glutamate receptor (NMDAR) is involved in the regulation of many neural functions, including neuroendocrine modulation of the vertebrate brain-pituitary-gonad axis. We have used a freshwater teleost, the platyfish (Xiphophorus maculatus), to document age- and gender-specific variations in NMDAR properties. We first localized immunoreactive (ir-) NMDAR in male and female platyfish brain at four stages of the lifespan. Distribution was limited to cells of the nucleus olfactoretinalis (NOR), a gonadotropin releasing hormone-containing nucleus. The number of ir-NMDAR cells was increased in pubescent and mature females when compared to immature and senescent animals. In …

An Interpretive Analysis Of Bela Bartok's Performance Of His Own Music, Shu-Yuan Yang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bartok's recordings made between 1912 and 1945 are considered valuable sources to Bartok interpreters. These recordings provide us with a wealth of information about the composer's intentions and helpful interpretive ideas. This study shows that Bartok performs with great freedom that expresses what goes beyond the scores.

The pieces selected in this study include Bagatelle Op. 6 No. 2, Evening in Transylvania from Ten Easy Piano Pieces, the first movement of Suite Op. 14, and Allegro Barbaro. By analyzing Bartok's recordings on these four pieces, this thesis explores that Bartok's interpretive decisions are related to stylistic and structural characteristics. …

The Administrative Efficiency Of Hospitals And The Effect Of Electronic Data Interchange: A Critical Evaluation Of The Stochastic Frontier And The Data Envelopment Analysis Models To Efficiency Measurement, Dimitrios N. Tsaprounis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The investigation and measurement of administrative efficiency is an issue of great concern for health care policy decision makers and has important implications for the efficiency of the overall health care sector itself as well as for the cost containment efforts and the restructuring of the health care system.

The administrative cost efficiency of the United States health care system has received much attention during the last years, and has been under continuous criticism since it became widely known that the country's administrative costs are higher than those of any other country in the world.

As criticism on administrative inefficiency …

Sonata For Trumpet And Piano, Paul Howard Kirby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work is a three-movement sonata conceived in the traditional classical forms of sonata-allegro, song, and rondo, but using a greatly broadened definition of tonality. While the movements are rooted in B, E, and B, respectively, the resources employed to establish, maintain, and develop these tonal centers include many other techniques in addition to traditional functional harmony.

Tina Modotti's Vision: Photographic Modernism In Mexico, 1923-1930, Sarah Margaret Lowe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a close consideration of photographs by Tina Modotti (1896-1942), whose work marks the beginning of a modernist aesthetic in post-Revolutionary Mexico. Modotti's photographs are distinguished by a formal clarity coupled with incisive social content. Her work was informed by dominant modes of modernist photographic practice manifest in America and Europe in the 1920s.

This study sets out previously unknown biographical information on Modotti in Chapters I through IV. Modotti was among the many expatriate artists and intellectuals who settled in Mexico during the 1920s, when the country was undergoing a cultural Renaissance. This rebirth was stimulated by …

Use Of Verb Inflections In The Oral Expression Of Agrammatic Spanish-Speaking Aphasics, Jose Gregorio Centeno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Studies on agrammatic verb errors have basically addressed the production of verb forms as whole lexical units without looking at their inflectional affixes. There has been limited research assessing the possible role of the variables encapsulated in verbal inflections in verb access and retrieval. The purpose of this investigation was to, first, address the possible factors causing a hierarchy of sparing in Spanish verb inflections, and, second, extend the explanatory factors proposed by earlier cross-linguistic investigations on verb inflectional performance by agrammatic speakers. This investigation studied the production of verb inflections by agrammatic Spanish speakers in a sentence repetition task. …

I Couldn't Kill It Any Other Way: Infanticide In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Deirdre Mary Day-Macleod

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at maternal infanticide in texts by William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Harriet Beecher Stowe in order to trace a relation between the rise of a discourse of the moral mother in the Eighteenth century and literary depictions of infanticide in the Nineteenth century. In Wordsworth's "The Thorn" (1798) infanticide provides a means to express anxiety over modernization, industrialization and authorship in a revision of the traditionally oral and rural ballad. The Heart of Midlothian (1818) by Sir Walter Scott tells the story of the effects of an infanticide that has never occurred suggesting maternal infanticide …

The Politics Of Economic Integration In Latin America: A Case Study Of The Andean Group, 1969–1995, Julio J. Chan-Sanchez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines and confirms the hypothesis, through the study of the evolution of the Andean Group (a subregional economic integration unit in South America), that economic integration is a quasi-cyclical process involving phases of progress, stagnation, and decline. It is not a smooth linear progression. This quasi-cyclical evolution is fundamentally determined by the governments of the member countries. As such, the individual governments are the most important actors in setting the evolution of the economic integration process.

The integration process will progress when all the governments of the member countries find the Andean Group useful for attaining some of …

An Empirical Analysis Of Alcohol Addiction, Ismail Sirtalan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is an empirical application of the rational addiction theory to the consumption of alcohol and heavy drinking. The model, developed by Becker and Murphy, emphasizes the interdependency of past current and future consumption of an addictive good. This is different than myopic addiction models where the current consumption is dependent on past consumption but not on future consumption. The data employed is the Monitoring the Future Survey, a panel representative of young adults between seventeen and twenty-seven years old, over a period of fourteen years from 1976 to 1989. Since alcohol abuse is most prevalent in this age …

Tonal And Nontonal Elements In The Recent Chamber Music Of Ned Rorem, Paul Howard Kirby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The recent (1981-91) chamber music for mixed instrumental ensembles of Ned Rorem demonstrates the use of tonal (or nearly tonal) material in combination with nontonal material (sometimes based freely on a twelve-note row) in such a manner that every composition has clearly identifiable sections (or whole movements) principally generated by each, even though the tonal sections often contain some nontonal elements, while the nontonal sections often borrow elements from tonality. Additionally, some sections (or movements) are balanced throughout between the use of tonal and nontonal elements.

Gender, Politics, And Modernist Music: Analyses Of Five Compositions By Ruth Crawford (1901–1953) And Marion Bauer (1887–1955), Ellie Michiko Hisama

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Using analytical models developed from recent work in the theory of musical contour, this dissertation presents reading of five compositions by the twentieth-century American composers Ruth Crawford and Marion Bauer. It relates biographical information about these composers to their musical works, emphasizing the contexts of gender and politics. My analyses of the third and fourth movements from Crawford's String Quartet (1931) and Bauer's Toccata from her Four Pieces for Piano, op. 21 (1930) explore how gender-specific experiences of these composers might relate to the structure of their music; my analyses of Crawford's 1932 song "Chinaman, Laundryman" from her Two Ricercari …

(En)Gendering Romanticism: A Study Of Charlotte Bronte's Novels, Ariella Bechhofer Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through her writing, Charlotte Bronte takes issue both with the masculinist assumption of Romanticism and the limitations of the conventional woman's novel. Bronte was drawn to Romanticism for its elevation of subjectivity, the poet's creative imagination, and emotional intensity, as well as its representation of the questing spirit in pursuit of self-definition and transcendence. She also appreciated the Romantics' recognition of the limits of expression and the fields of interpretation opened up by the lack of fixity which is emphasized by Romantic irony. Yet, writing as a Romantic also presented an obstacle to Bronte as a woman writer, for the …

An Examination Of The Socio-Economic Determinants Of Punishment Using Abductive Polynomial Networks, Farrukh Behzad Hakeem

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this research is to examine aspects of the relationship between socio-economic conditions and imprisonment in a particular historical setting. Previous research suggests that this relationship is problematic and situationally variable. The approach taken in this dissertation reflects a belief that earlier studies can be faulted for their failure to take account of the fiscal climate of the state as an influence on the size of prison populations.

This analysis will employ the Marxist model, as developed by Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939) and widely applied (though with mixed results) in research conducted over the last half-century. This model …

Gatekeepers To The Franchise: Election Administration And Voter Participation In New York, Ronald Joseph Hayduk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Political scientists continue to debate the causes, consequences and remedies for America's exceptionally low voter turnout. While scholarly investigation has focused on several factors which produce low voter turnout, the machinery that administers elections in the U.S. has been ignored. Nor have the political influences and environments that determine these agencies' procedures and their place in the electoral system been adequately analyzed. There is, nevertheless, good reason to believe boards of elections play a greater role in shaping participation than is generally appreciated. Evidence indicates that in conducting elections and in implementing electoral rules–such as voter registration procedures–boards of elections …

Social Consequences Of Delayed Childbearing And Infertility, Joan Liebmann-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a qualitative longitudinal study of delayed childbearing and infertility. The initial sample consisted of 35 women. Although they knew they might never have biological children, most did not regret postponing parenthood.

Because infertility is a socially defined illness, the doctor-patient relationship was fraught with conflict. It tended to follow a set pattern: from dependency to disappointment to discord to dissociation. The optimal doctor-patient relationship was mutual participation.

Infertility adversely affected marriages. The "medicalization of masturbation" and intercourse caused many marital problems. Couples also argued over how often and with whom to discuss infertility, when to stop treatment and …

Thermal Development And Rejuvenation Of The Marginal Plateaus Along The Transtensional Volcanic Margins Of The Norwegian-Greenland Sea, Nilgun Okay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The predominance of large-scale paleo-shear zones in the Norwegian-Greenland Sea is thought to be the major cause of asymmetric seafloor spreading in this region. Plate reconstructions suggest that nascent mid-ocean ridges propagated into these obliquely oriented shear zones causing transtension to occur. The asymmetric evolution of the northern Norwegian-Greenland Sea is evident from both the morphology of the seafloor as well as its geophysical characteristics. The eastern passive margins of the northern Norwegian-Greenland Sea are punctuated by volcanic plateaus which have significantly higher heat flow than the western passive margins. It is hypothesized that marginal volcanic plateaus formed originally in …

Measurement Of Fungal Biomass In Wooden Art Objects Using Atp Photometry And Energy Charge, Fernando Nieto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this study ATP photometry and energy charge (EC) measurements were used to detect and quantify fungal biomass in wood. Three species of wood decaying fungi were used: Phanerochaete chrysosporium (white rot), Poria placenta (brown rot), and Chaetomnium globosum (soft rot). The fungi were grown in malt extract broth (MEB) for one month at 25 °C, and sampled at selected intervals to measure the ATP content and the EC of the mycelium. The mycelia were ground and extracted with cold 5% trichloroacetic acid (TCA) for 20 hours. The conversion factors calculated were based upon the EC of the mycelium. When …

Automatic And Controlled Information Processing In Alzheimer's Disease, Linda S. Carozza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research investigation explored the cognitive processing operations of 18 healthy elderly (HE) subjects and 12 Alzheimer's Disease (AD) subjects in the mild clinical stage of the disease in their performance on a semantic priming task involving semantic lexical activations of both automatic and controlled processing natures.

Relatively little conclusive evidence has been documented regarding the relative roles of attention and memory processing in the lexical-semantic impairment of Alzheimer's Disease. A lexical decision processing task was implemented to investigate the effects of normal aging and neuropathological damage of Alzheimer's Disease on subjects' semantic priming abilities. The research design was based …

Child Sexual Abuse, Moral Panic, And The Mass Media: A Case Study In The Social Construction Of Deviance, Steven M. Gorelick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a case study of newswork in a moral panic. Specifically, Stanley Cohen's concept of "moral panic" is used to examine the practices of a group of reporters who covered a widely publicized case of alleged child sexual abuse in a day-care center. Moral panics occur when a perceived threat to the social order emerges with such force, and with such little overt warning, that routine discourse about right and wrong gives way to a flood of indignation about an extraordinary breach of normal moral boundaries. Suspending normal rules governing social control, officials rush to crack down on the …

From Idyll To Exile: The Transformed Self In The Early Works Of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Elizabeth Powers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines works of Goethe's pre-Weimar period and his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which reconstructs that early period as the emergence of poet and oeuvre in terms of the abandonment of the idyll. It disputes the traditional view of Goethe as the poet of experience ("Erlebnis"). It seeks instead to demonstrate that Goethe wrote in the manner of his poetic forebears–by the imitation of literary models–and that "experience" was created in his work by emptying these models of their communal content. Once liberated from traditional literary forms, the new subjective lyric voice was literally homeless and its encounters with …

Mary Mccarthy, Mary Gordon, And The Irish-American Literary Tradition, Stacey Lee Donohue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a distinct literary canon in the United States, composed of Irish-Catholic-American writers, which requires different modes of criticism or evaluation than other U.S. literatures, particularly the dominant, largely Protestant or Protestant-influenced, American literary canon. In addition, as a recently recognized literary tradition, many women writers have either been ignored or unnoticed because their works do not immediately fit into the evolving criteria of evaluation for the Irish-American literary tradition. My purpose in this study is not to survey the Irish-American literary canon, but to examine two women writers who have not always been admitted to an innately misogynistic …

The Spectacle Of Suffering: Repetition And Closure In The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel, Rebecca E. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the publication of The Castle of Otranto in 1764 initiated the genre of the gothic novel, critics have claimed that gothic endings are bland, inadequate, or otherwise unsatisfying. Analyzing works written in the period 1764 to 1820 by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, Mary-Anne Radcliffe, Mary and Percy Shelley and Charles Robert Maturin, this dissertation demonstrates that the focus on endings has blinded critics to the reader's source of pleasure in the gothic. I have drawn upon a representative sampling of novels to present a model of the interaction of reader and gothic text focused on …

The Tradition Of Autobiography In Music, Antoni Pizà

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A survey of autobiographical writings by composers from the fourteenth century to the present focusing on the question of how composers create a self. Although, the Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (1528-96) can be considered the earliest autobiography by a composer, the genre also stems from lexicographical practices in eighteenth-century Germany (scholars such as Walther and Mattheson requested autobiographies from composers with the intention to include them in biographical dictionaries of music). In the nineteenth century, Wagner's autobiographies show the composer's concern with providing a solid image of himself through writing. Stravinsky's Autobiography demonstrates the composer's preoccupation for giving an exegesis …

Some Consequences Of Semantic Externalism, Consuelo Preti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Semantic externalism is the view that meaning and mental content are determined by relations to the world of objects and properties outside the physical boundaries of the subject of mental states. What you mean by your words–what you're thinking when you're thinking about something–is essentially constituted by the world at large. It has become customary to formulate externalism in terms of so-called twin earth cases–cases where (some kinds of) content do not supervene on inner states, but this formulation can be shown to be too limited to be of any great use in characterizing a theory of mind. A more …

Modal Properties And Spontaneous Emission Factor In Unstable-Resonator Semiconductor Lasers, Gang Yao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An experimental study has been carried out on the spectral, modal, and dynamical properties of a monolithic unstable-resonator semiconductor laser. Due to the large loss and the non-power-orthogonal nature of the transverse and longitudinal modes in the unstable resonator, the spontaneous emission factor, defined as the ratio of the power of the spontaneous emission entering the lasing mode to the total power of the spontaneous emission, is much larger than that of a regular Fabry-Perot cavity of the same dimension. The large spontaneous emission factor has profound effects on the lasing properties. For a 100-{dollar}\mu{dollar}m-wide and 500-{dollar}\mu{dollar}m-long stripe-geometry unstable resonator …

Long Chain Molecules In The Molten State: Surface Adsorption, Near Surface Structure, And Mutual-Diffusion, Xiaofeng Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The surface segregation in a binary mixture of polymer due to surface energy difference or end-grafting is studied. The surface energy difference induced segregation is compared with the mean-field theory. The end-labeling of chains strengthens the ability of the chain to bind to the surface, and the stretching of the end grafted chains is proved to be a controlling fact limiting the brush density. The structure of a chain near a surface needs to be known in order to make more quantitative analysis. Such knowledge is currently not available although a reflecting surface model is proposed.

We also studied the …

Perceptions Of Patients Meeting The Criteria For A Diagnosis Of "Multiple Chemical Sensitivities": Exploration Of Social Situation And Need, Beth Miriam Lewis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While no one explanation as to the possible nature of "multiple chemical sensitivities" has gained unanimous acceptance within the medical/science community, similar controversy does not exist with regard to the recognition of social problems generated for people suffering from this condition. In an effort to identify areas of psychosocial need requiring social work intervention, a descriptive study was carried out with a group of patients seen in an outpatient occupational health clinic. Medical charts of a deliberate sample of 423 clinic patients, seen during the period 1980-1990, were reviewed, yielding a total of 83 patients meeting criteria specific to MCS. …

Saving The Environment: Science And Social Action, Patricia D'Andrade

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes environmental arguments for their stance toward science. It is a sociology of knowledge investigation of arguments made primarily by environmental scientists in the United States in the 1960s and 70s.

The environmental crisis puts science in question but at the same time looks to science for information and solutions. Thus, science is a center of contention around which arguments develop and oppositions are established. Science is beginning to take the place of political thought in providing legitimating concepts for arguments intended to effect social change. Major environmental books and articles by American authors of the 1960s and …

Psychoanalysis And Constructionalism: Clinical And Metapsychological Implications, Richard H. Loewus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Attempts to reconceptualize the epistemological basis of psychoanalytic metapsychology and clinical praxis from constructionalist perspectives are reviewed and critiqued. The constructionalist epistemology of the American philosopher, Nelson Goodman, is absent in these discussions. Goodman offers a relativism with restraints, a constructionalist epistemology that asserts no one given reality to which our constructions must answer, but does not accept that therefore all constructions are equally valid. Instead, constructions, or what Goodman calls world versions must answer to standards of "Rightness". Goodman's reconception of philosophy subsumes the concept of truth as a special class of rightness, and replaces the concept of knowledge …