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F. Scott Fitzgerald As A "Hot Nietzschean": The Influence Of Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy In This Side Of Paradise, The Beautiful And Damned, And The Great Gatsby, Lindsey Carman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Beginning in 1915, F. Scott Fitzgerald was exposed to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche under the guidance of mentors and from his personal reading lists. While reading Nietzsche, Fitzgerald's concern with the rise of cultural pessimism in 1920s America appeared in his fiction. Interestingly, both the philosopher and author explore the decline of Western culture in the twentieth century––a period of identity crises that affected America and Europe. This thesis investigates Fitzgerald's misreading of Nietzschean ideas that appears in his fiction to highlight the author's interest in explaining the cause of America's decline. In particular, this thesis appropriates a Nietzschean …

What Remains, Michael Leavitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Grief is a personal thing, as unique as it is ubiquitous, and each character in What Remains approaches their grief in a different way and handles it with differing degrees of success. The collection blends both realist and fabulist stories in its efforts to explore these themes, from the eponymous "What Remains," in which a man attempts to reconcile his feelings about the death of his abusive, absentee father, and what that means for his relationship with his own son; to "Convoy," a story of a Marine who confronts the culture of violence into which he's been indoctrinated, and which …

Quantitative Line Assignment In Optical Emission Spectroscopy, Jessica Chappell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Quantitative elemental analysis using Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES) starts with a high level of confidence in spectral line assignment from reference databases. Spectral interferences caused by instrumental and line broadening decrease the resolution of OES spectra creating uncertainty in the elemental profile of a sample for the first time. An approach has been developed to quantify spectral interferences for individual line assignment in OES. The algorithm calculates a statistical interference factor (SIF) that combines a physical understanding of plasma emission with a Bayesian analysis of the OES spectrum. It can be used on a single optical spectrum and still address …

Development Of Low Frequency Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Methods And Instrumentation For Biological Applications, Laura A. Buchanan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

EPR is a powerful biophysical tool that can be used to measure tumor physiology. With the addition of magnetic field gradients, the spectral properties of paramagnetic species can be mapped. To facilitate EPR imaging, methods and instrumentation at frequencies between 250 MHz and 1 GHz were developed.

At low spin concentrations, the rapid scan background signal is often many times larger than the EPR signal of interest. To help remove the background contribution, a data acquisition procedure that takes advantage of a cross-loop resonator and bipolar power supplies was developed at 250 MHz. In this procedure, two scans are collected. …

Crafting Local Food Narratives With Immigrant Voices: Participatory Ethnography Among Somali Bantu Farmers In West Denver, Raymond Alexander Pang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 2013, a non-profit, Re:Vision, established the Ubuntu Farm to work with the local Somali Bantu refugee population. It was supposed to improve access to fresh produce, offer educational opportunities, skill training and more. Early on in 2014, it became clear Re:Vision was not delivering on its promises, and by 2015 the farm had ceased to exist. Using participant observation, interviews with farm participants and staff and a review of publicly accessible financial documents, I argue that Re:Vision maintained a conflict of mission, which contributed to their farms' failings, despite their ability to grow plenty of vegetables. From there, I …

Restive Subjects: Russian Protest, 2007–2013, Carey C. Neill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation develops and evaluates a structural theory of protest onset, applied to the Russian case. Russian stability has become a pressing international political concern, as Putin has annexed the Crimea, fomented one war, in Ukraine, and become a major player in another, in Syria. In December 2011, thousands of Russians gathered in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and other cities for the largest set of protests since the fall of the USSR. Waves of protest have reappeared sporadically since. Each time, events create islands of dissent, spread widely, but unevenly, throughout the country - in a picture reminiscent of the pre-collapse …

An Exploratory Study Of Session Limited Models Of Therapy Outcomes In An Employee Assistance Program, Ivy C. Donaldson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) have grown increasingly popular over recent years. The prevalence of organizations utilizing and investing in EAP services for their employees has grown; however, companies that purchase EAPs are not well-informed as to which session-models are most effective for various diagnoses. The current study is the first to explore treatment outcomes of session-limited models (measured by Therapist Perception of Change, TPC) for diagnoses (anxiety and depression) in an EAP delivery system. Outcomes were measured by TPC ratings including: a) Regressed, b) remained at Baseline, c) Improved, and d) issue was Resolved. Analyses (Chi-Square and =t-test) were used …

Discourses Of Deception: (Re)Examining America's War On Drugs, Benjamin Steven Boyce

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

America's war on drugs is a failed experiment that has caused more damage than it will ever prevent. From its original design to its contemporary manifestations, the war on drugs is a conflict that remains firmly rooted in white supremacy. In contemporary Western societies, the rhetoric of both political leaders and mass-mediated narratives becomes the raw material of subjective reality. Since the war on drugs began nearly a century ago, the spectacle of mass media has been consistently utilized by white political elites as a vehicle of misinformation - as a well-oiled machine for spreading the false social narrative that …

Binocular Rivalry Of Emotional Expressions, Daniel Stephen Lumian

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A central debate in defining emotional space is whether emotions are organized categorically (e.g., fear, happy, disgust) or continuously (i.e., along the independent dimensions of valence and arousal). Emotional facial expressions are one tool often leveraged in trying to define emotional space. Faces are rich sources of social and emotional information. Faces, like emotions, can be organized in either categorical (e.g., happy, sad) or continuous (e.g., open-closed) ways. Therefore, understanding the relatedness of emotional facial expressions to each other may shed light on the underlying structure of emotions. Binocular rivalry (BR) is a tool which can be leveraged to measure …

Learning From Disorder And Noise In Physical Biology, Taylor Emil Firman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stochasticity, disorder, and noise play crucial roles in the functioning of many biological systems over many different length scales. On the molecular scale, most proteins are envisioned as pristinely folded structures, but intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) have no such folded state and still serve distinct purposes within the cell. At the scale of gene regulation, realistic in vivo conditions produce stochastic fluctuations in gene expression that can lead to advantageous bet-hedging strategies, but can be difficult to characterize using a deterministic framework. Even at the organismal scale, germband extension (GBE) in Drosophila melanogaster embryos systematically elongates the epithelial tissue using …

Tragic Creation: Hope For The Future—Moltmann's Creative (Mis)Reading Of Hegel's Philosophy, John Michael Bechtold

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Christian theology, in its many and varied forms, and to the detriment of both the church and the world, is often built upon a shaky epistemological foundation. In this dissertation, I describe this shaky foundation by the term 'insular universalism'. The oxymoronic nature of the term is both intentional and telling. A theology which strives for, or unwittingly arrives at, a position which is here being called 'insular universalism' achieves neither while rejecting or misunderstanding the complexity of both. When considered theologically, insular universalism could be simplistically described as the idea that "one cultural expression of the religion is exclusive …

Great Powers Have Great Currencies: Popular Nationalist Discourse And China's Campaign To Internationalize The Renminbi, Michael Stephen Bartee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Why did the Chinese government begin promoting the internationalization of its currency, the renminbi, after the 2008 global financial crisis? Only a few years earlier, Beijing balked at U.S. demands to reform its currency regime, which would require dismantling many of the country's long-preferred tools for promoting growth and maintaining domestic stability. Similar concerns about the dilution of monetary policy independence motivated previous rising economies Germany and Japan to proactively discourage the internationalization of their currencies. While China's central bank had long explored promoting greater international use of the renminbi, and such a policy would generate some benefits for China, …

Brønsted Acid Catalyzed Carbon-Carbon Bond Forming Reactions, Jiangyue Miao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this research project lies in the development of new methodology in the field of Brønsted acid catalysis enabling rapid synthesis of medicinally relevant compounds. It is foreseen that small molecule sulfonic acids evaluated in this research project will unveil new asymmetric carbon carbon bond forming reactions between substrates hitherto unexplored with Brønsted acid catalysis. It has been established that strong Brønsted acids, such as phosphoric acids, are capable of mediating highly selective transformations operating through unique mechanistic manifolds.

Specific focus for the sulfonic acid catalysts was geared towards asymmetric coupling reactions with synthetically useful precursors such as …

Higher Education Student Debt & Tuition Costs, K. Harrison Maloy Jr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

U.S. higher education tuition costs have risen at nearly double the rate of inflation over the past forty years. In 2012, student loan delinquency rose to 12% and surpassed credit card delinquency rates as the top category of consumer debt delinquency. Meanwhile, recently enacted federal policies advocate for increased higher education accessibility, affordability and attainability, but simultaneously promote educational institutions to increase spending with funds fueled by student debt. The growth of $136.8 billion in student loan delinquency has triggered decreasing participation in non-student debt markets by people with student loan debt. Fortunately, Americans continue to enroll in colleges at …

Narrativizing Theory: The Role Of Ambiguity In Religious Aesthetics, Benjamin John Peters

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project expands S. Brent Plate's "invented religious aesthetics" by bringing it into conversation with Umberto Eco's theory of ambiguity. It articulates the space that ambiguity opens within the field of religious aesthetics when viewed as a liminal or interdisciplinary theory that neither privileges the starting points of transcendental aesthetics nor the "neo-arches" of theories of materiality. It hints at new ways of studying and describing religious worlds while also illustrating the porous borderlines between narrative and theory. It argues that a religious aesthetic rooted in ambiguity emphasizes both the provisionality of knowledge and the narrativization of reality.

#Fashioningidentity And #Performingauthenticity: Communicative, Relational, And Affective Labor In The Digital Frontier Of Fashion And Lifestyle Blogging, Jessica L. Neumann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Fashion and lifestyle blogs serves as a new cultural space, where bloggers are viewed as influencers and set cultural, societal standards of an ideal womanhood. Female bloggers' various forms of labor - specifically, communicative, relational, and affective - establish a blogger's role in social and economic life and reiterate the significance of consumerism as a hallmark of femininity. Fashion and lifestyle bloggers are typically women, whose labor sustains the fashion and lifestyle blogging ecosystem. This occurs through consistent, branded communication; cultivating connections and relationships with followers and fellow bloggers; and transference of affect across digital divides, in real time, through …

Diet Breadth Evolution And Diversification Of A Generalist Insect Herbivore, Mayra Cadorin Vidal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Insect herbivores are one of the most diverse groups of multicellular organisms, and the vast majority are specialists, which feed on only a few plant species. The factors that cause some herbivores to be specialists and others to be generalists are still unclear. It is known that the selective forces from natural enemies (top-down) and the host plants (bottom-up) influence an herbivore's diet breadth. In my meta-analysis evaluating the relative important of top-down and bottom-up forces on insect herbivore fitness, I found that herbivores usually have greater performance on better quality plants and in the absence or reduction of enemy …

Leadership Practices In Similar Schools With Varying Primary Grade Reading Outcomes: A Comparative Multiple-Case Study, Jacqueline M. Cuthill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Students who are below grade level before they leave third grade are less likely to graduate. A large number of schools are failing to increase student achievement in reading, especially for students of color and those who are economically disadvantaged. Leadership can influence student achievement; however, literature lacks specifics about leadership practices that could help school leaders improve student outcomes. This multiple-case study explores the leadership practices in three similar elementary schools with varying primary grade reading outcomes and contributes details about the leadership functions of Setting Direction, Developing People and Redesigning the Organization (Leithwood, Seashore, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004). …

Girl Of Color-Power: Resisting The Neoliberal Girl Power Agent, Raisa Fernanda Alvarado

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Girl power is a complex and multi-dimensional phrase. It is a term that celebrates the positive development of girls' self-esteem, while simultaneously recognizing the shifting social positioning of girlhood in the late twentieth century. It is a call to re-write girls' passivity but simultaneously a discourse that encourages consumerism via entertainment, artifacts, and merchandise. A social movement, a catch phrase, a motto: girl power is a representative caricature of evolving conceptualizations of girlhood. This dissertation is critical of the homogeneity implicit in girl power as its hailing disproportionately centers white, middle and upper class girls. As such, this project examines …

Gestural Ekphrasis: Toward A Phenomenology Of The Moving Body In Joyce And Woolf, Lauren Nicole Benke

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This theoretical project seeks to introduce a new critical methodology for evaluating gesture - both represented in text and paratextual - in the works of Virginia Woolf - specifically The Voyage Out (1915), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and Between the Acts (1941) - and James Joyce - particularly Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Though gesture studies has developed significantly as an interdisciplinary field in recent decades and performance studies has elaborated on the moving body's significance to both text and performance, literary scholarship itself has not yet adequately incorporated possibilities for specific critical attention to gesture. Gesture is …

A Multi-State Comparison Of Nasp Domains Of Practice And School Psychologist Evaluation Rubrics, Courtney E. Hutchinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research study compares rubrics used to evaluate school psychologists to the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) 10 Domains of Practice. Using a content analysis of state evaluation rubrics, the researcher determined the extent to which various state evaluation rubrics align with the NASP domains and selected terminology from the NASP domains. Results indicate a need for a comprehensive and NASP-endorsed rubric, to be used by certified and experienced school psychologists for evaluation purposes. This research study will inform efforts at school psychology training programs, local and state education agencies, the United States Department of Education, and the NASP.

Tau Aggregation, Conformational Selection, And Inhibition, Michael R. Holden

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Tau fibrils are a pathological hallmark of over 20 neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease. There currently is no cure for these diseases and treatments are limited. Once Tau fibrils form in the brain, they propagate down neuronal networks, and this spreading is linked to disease progression. Studying the behavior and structure of Tau monomer and Tau aggregates therefore may give insight into methods by which the spread of Tau fibrils can be inhibited. The structures of the Tau fibrils from different diseases are thought to vary, partially giving rise to the different disease phenotypes. Tau natively binds to microtubules by …

Optimal Operation Of Integrated Microgrids, Abdullah Albaker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Microgrids' deployments are increasing and projected to increase even more in future due to the significant advantages that are provided by this technology for end-use customers. However, microgrids can be connected to each other to create integrated microgrids system, which can further promote the anticipated and desired benefits. An integrated operation of microgrids can potentially improve the local power system reliability and resilience, increase the individual microgrids' economic benefits, and promote further utilization of renewable energy resources. Integrating microgrids, to achieve a microgrid network or cluster, is expected be an essential application towards smarter power grids and a key operational …

No Common Ground: Competing Worldviews At Mato Tipila, Wendy Anne Felese

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project analyzes a legal conflict (Bear Lodge Multiple Use Assn v Babbitt 2 F. Supp. 2d 1448) at Mato Tipila, a significant place for the Lakota (Sioux) community and with which they have a historical and longstanding relationship. Commercial and recreational rock-climbing enthusiasts who make use of it and the tourists who arrive in droves each year to visit, call this place Devils Tower. The case centered on whether the government violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by instituting a climbing ban during the month of June to accommodate Lakota ceremonial obligations. In recent historical developments, the …

Tides Of Cooperation: The Ebb And Flow Of Regional Cooperation In Latin America, Amaleia E. Kolovos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Regional organizations have developed into important global actors as they negotiate inter-regional trade agreements, regulate economic policies, and develop international security communities. States have much to gain from such regional cooperation efforts particularly in emerging regions such as Latin America. Such gains can include increased trade and economic relations, enhanced security, attracting external investment, and increasing bargaining power at the international level. With such gains to be had, one might expect states in these regions to regularly cooperate in order to achieve their common interests. However, this is clearly not always the case. Latin America has struggled for decades with …

Study Of Optical Ofdm System For Wireless Lan Applications, Salih Mohamed S. Kenshil

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The advantages of optical fiber make it possible to extend the data rate transmission and propagation distance. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) as a multicarrier technique (MC) is used in hybrid optical-wireless system designs because it has the best spectral efficiency to radio frequency (RF) interference and lower multipath distortion. In this dissertation, a study and evaluation of optical OFDM based wireless local area network (W-LAN) systems are presented. The baseband of the OFDM signal is fully transmitted and up-converted to a radio frequency signal. Also, to reduce system costs, simple base stations (BSs) are interconnected to a central office …

The Whiteness Project Of Gentrification: The Battle Over Los Angeles' Eastside, Jaime Guzmán

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For many years, the city of Los Angeles has declared war on communities of color. In the past decade, former communities of color like Echo Park, Silver Lake, and Highland Park have all been converted into predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods. In essence, working-class people of colors' neighborhoods are being uplifted in order to welcome a much more affluent population to town. The newest target of Los Angeles' gentrification for the past couple of years has been the greater Eastside. In this project I present my critical intervention of gentrification as a whiteness project. This critical intervention argues that gentrification …

Studying Facial Expression Recognition And Imitation Ability Of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder In Interaction With A Social Robot, Farzaneh Askari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience limited abilities in recognizing non-verbal elements of social interactions such as facial expressions [1]. They also show deficiencies in imitating facial expressions in social situations. In this Master thesis, we focus on studying the ability of children with ASD in recognizing facial expressions and imitating the expressions using a rear-projected expressive humanoid robot, called Ryan. Recent studies show that social robots such as Ryan have great potential for autism therapy. We designed and developed three studies, first to evaluate the ability of children with ASD in recognizing facial expressions that are presented to …

Social Conflict On The Seas: Links Between Overfishing-Induced Marine Fish Stock Declines And Forced Labor Slavery, Jessica L. Sparks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite media attention detailing labor abuses in fisheries, social-ecological systems research has largely failed to consider whether fish stock declines could be contributing to increases in forced labor slavery. Empirical fisheries data suggests, though not a ubiquitous response to declining stocks, many vessels will fish longer, farther from shore, and deeper in waters to maintain yields. This effort intensification increases production costs, and Brashares et al. (2014), consistent with slavery theory, posited cheap and/or unpaid labor as an approach to offset increasing costs and continue harvesting fish species at a rate otherwise cost-prohibitive.

Using fuzzy cognitive mapping - a participatory, …

Psychotropic Medications And Children: Perceptions Of Mental Health Professionals, Elinor Jane Brereton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project explores mental health professionals' perspectives on the prescription of psychotropic medications to children. It emphasizes the placement of biomedicine within its larger social, economic, and political context, and the influence these structures have on the way mental illness is conceptualized and treated in children. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted in Denver, Colorado with psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and a pharmaceutical board member to capture multiple perspectives from different positionalities within the field. Participants discussed factors that they believe influence prescribing practices including: professional role changes, issues of access, limited evidence, cost, and institutional pressures to practice within a …