Both chapters of this dissertation relate to the aggregate value of corporations in an economy. In particular, they relate to the ratio of the aggregate total market value of corporations over the replacement cost of their recorded capital. The first chapter introduces a model that can explain why this ratio...
Metal and bimetallic nanoparticles are of interest and are widely used in various applications because of their unique optical, electronic, and catalytic properties, which differ from those of their bulk counterparts. Better understanding of the thermodynamic and kinetic properties of nanoparticles and their underlying growth mechanisms can serve as a...
People today increasingly first meet others in mediated spaces, undergoing impression formation processes where they view information, gain impressions, and make decisions about others. Previous research examines profile information (e.g. name, photo, about me) that people provide about themselves within this process, finding that people try to craft profiles for...
The African trypanosome Trypanosoma brucei is a single-celled eukaryotic protozoan parasite with a single cilium/flagellum. It cycles between its mammalian host (bloodstream cell), in which it scavenges cholesterol, and its tsetse fly host (procyclic cell), in which it both scavenges cholesterol and synthesizes ergosterol. For the first part of the...
"Migration Forms” centers on the place where migration and Morocco meet to tell two stories. One argues for the centrality of migration to the projects of local, contemporary art making and postcolonial nation building, while the other examines the codification, circulation, and contestation through visual form of this North African...
In this dissertation, I discuss the role of neutrino masses and fermion flavor in modern particle physics and present several efforts aimed at exploiting these properties in searches for new physics. In particular, I discuss (1) the effects of neutrino decays on neutrino propagation; (2) the sensitivity of the Deep...
Significant deviations in the glass transition temperature (Tg) of nanoconfined polymer films from the bulk have been studied for over twenty years with the focus on high molecular weight (MW), linear polymers. This thesis explores low MW polymers, which represent an important class of materials widely used as coatings, detergents,...
In March 1977 an exceptionally strong earthquake struck Romania ruled by the communist president and dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his regime. The policies and actions implemented and undertaken in the days, weeks, and year that followed were forms of aftershocks. The Ceauşescu regime modeled the 1977 earthquake recovery on previous...
Languages provide expressions that allow its users to indicate their source of information for a given claim, which can have an effect of attenuating how committed they appear to be to the truth of their claims (e.g., ame-ga futteiru-sooda ‘It is raining, I hear’). This linguistic notion has been termed...
Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 to confront the crisis of anti-black police violence in the Bay Area, the Black Panthers advocated armed struggle against the violences and aggressions of racist American imperialism domestically and internationally. Against interpretations that would deem their image-making to be secondary to their professed political...
The U.S. Department of Education’s Ready To Learn (RTL) initiative funds (a) mass media and related community outreach intended to promote school readiness among all children—especially at-risk populations—, and (b) formative and summative research by third party evaluators (Michael Cohen Group, 2012). Today, the majority of American preschoolers have consumed...
Knot invariants can be defined using Legendrian isotopy invariants of the knot conormal. There are two types of invariants raised in this way: one is the knot contact differential graded algebra together with augmentations associated to this dga, and the other one is the category of simple sheaves microsupported along...
This dissertation comprises three essays on industrial organization. In Chapter 1 I study the productivity effects of corporate diversification, where productivity is understood as a measure of sales per input at the productive unit level, and diversified firms are defined as firms that operate in different industries. I develop and...
With the advances in electronics and communication devices over the last several decades, radio-frequency antennas have miniaturized from externally mounted “rabbit ears” on our grandma’s televisions to devices small enough to be concealed within the body of the cellphone itself, corresponding to the carrier frequencies used from on the order...
This dissertation contains three results related to modular forms and Galois representations of low weight. In chapter 1, we prove that the Galois pseudo-representation valued in a Hecke algebra which acts faithfully on a space of weight one Katz modular forms of level prime to p is unramified at p....
This dissertation, “Altered Belonging: The Transnational Modern Dance of Itō Michio,” argues that Itō forged an artistic and social identity out of the very categories of racial and national difference typically used to exclude Japanese from Euro-American society. The strategies he employed provide a paradigm for how performing bodies marked...
Traditionally, simulation analysis has focused on designing a computationally efficient algorithm assuming a correct simulation model is given. As computation becomes cheaper, we are now able to perform more sophisticated simulation analyses involving extensive computation and consider all sources of errors in the simulation model and their effects to the...
The floor plate (FP) is a ventral midline organizing structure of the developing neural tube that provides positional information using morphogen concentration gradients towards the production of diverse neuron types. In caudal regions the FP is non-neurogenic unlike the mesodiencephalic region of the FP that is highly neurogenic, and is...
In this thesis, we advocate for the use of slice spheres, a common generalization of representation spheres and induced spheres, in parameterized homotopy theory. First, we give an algebraic characterization of the layers of the Hill-Hopkins-Ravenel slice filtration.
Next, we explore the homology of parameterized symmetric powers from this point...
This dissertation explores the relationship between dance cultures and media cultures in the United States between the 1940s and the 1960s, when both were experiencing a period of multiplicity and flux in their forms. Bringing together theories and methodologies from dance studies, media studies, and cultural history, it considers how...
This dissertation analyzes theater performances that use narratives of U.S. military veterans in the post 9/11 era in order to cross the military-civilian divide. Engaging theories of performance, embodiment, and affect, this project investigates the depiction of military bodies onstage, the public perception of military identities, and the lived experience...
Our capacity to share ideas through content is the paramount feature of the human brain. All of our species’ advanced communication and coordination fundamentally relies on our ability to “think alike,” yet the parallels between our brains are grossly understudied, especially regarding engagement with dynamic audiovisual stimuli. Therefore, we present...
Spatial-temporal data mining, with data driven model and machine learning techniques, significantly benefit the traditional transportation research. This dissertation focus on three problems related to uncertain location data, lane-level traffic speed clustering and anomalous traffic speed prediction.
We take a first step towards combining the uncertain location data i.e., fusing...
Thermal overheating is a serious concern in modern supercomputing systems. Elevated temperature levels reduce the reliability and the lifetime of the underlying hardware and increase their power consumption. Previous studies on mitigating thermal hotspots at the hardware and run-time system levels have typically used approaches that trade off performance for...
Free radical polymerization has a wide range of applications and continues to attract research interest as the demand for tailored specialty polymers grows. Sequence distribution, tacticity and composition of copolymers play a key role in understanding the reaction kinetics and the properties of the polymers 1. One of the chief...
Recent scholarship in critical urban theory, urban political ecology, and related fields has emphasized the "hybridity" of urban-environmental systems. This argument is contrasted with the socially constructed "binary" relationship between "city" and "nature" that dominated historical understandings of urban-environmental connections. Despite wide agreement on these issues, the trajectories that precipitated...
This project elaborates an aesthetic politics that treats the possible as the site of a transformative exhaustion. It examines the aberrant temporal movements that are produced by exhaustive procedures, arguing that by disrupting the habitual structure of time, what I refer to as stereoscopic time, they render the present susceptible...
Accurate thermodynamic databases are the foundation of predictive microstructure and property models. An initial assessment of the commercially available Thermo-Calc TCAL2 database and the proprietary aluminum database of QuesTek demonstrated a large degree of deviation with respect to equilibrium precipitate phase prediction in the compositional region of interest when compared...
Circling the Cosmograms marks the first full-length study of second-generation feminist and/or queer art and performance in the Haitian Dyaspora (Haitian Kreyòl spelling) following the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Through archival research, visual and performance art analysis, and in-depth interviews, I document the ways feminist and/or queer Haitian-American...
Halide perovskites, AMX3 (A = monocation, B = Ge, Sn, or Pb, and X = halogen), present a versatile class of solution-processable semiconductors made from earth abundant materials with outstanding electrical and optical properties. Their solar cell efficiencies have dramatically increased from ~9% to ~22% in less than five years...
Ecological restoration is vital to the conservation of biodiversity and provision of ecosystem services in a changing world. Biodiversity is often a goal of restoration, and species to be planted for restoration are often selected based on diversity objectives. But species are not independent; they are related to one another...
Seismic waves from large-magnitude earthquakes sometime trigger small secondary earthquakes or tectonic tremor. These secondary signals are important to observe and study because their occurrence reflects on the state of stress of the subsurface, which is important for hazard assessment. Here we first report on how individual inspection by a...
Bacterial gene expression requires numerous steps that are energetically costly and tightly regulated. Following transcription of messenger-RNA, the translation of mRNA into protein is further regulated by a variety of sequence features both within and upstream of coding sequences. Collectively, these features contribute to the control of translation initiation, elongation,...
How do independent artists use social media and e-commerce websites to support their creative businesses? This dissertation examines independent artists’ participation in the peer economy for selling handmade goods, a hybrid economy that combines sharing content on social media and selling goods on e-commerce platforms. While a multidisciplinary array of...
This dissertation asks how deepening global inequalities reshape the ways families negotiate “economic moralities,” normative expectations of material obligation and entitlement. It focuses on the families of middle class migrants: French-educated Senegalese urbanites whose diplomas no longer protect them from discrimination in Paris but who, among Africans, are still construed...
In today's marketplace, consumers purchase a basket of goods of different categories from many different types of retail stores. While most marketing literature focuses on studying a single retail chain or a single category, my dissertation considers consumers' collective basket purchases across different retail formats. By doing so, my dissertation...
Over the past two decades, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has been successfully applied to various fields of biomedical researching and clinical studies, including cardiology, urology, dermatology, dentistry, oncology, and most successfully, ophthalmology. This dissertation seeks to extend the current OCT practice, which is still largely morphology-based, into a new dimension,...
Web users suffer from security and privacy threats. According to Symantec, 430 million new unique pieces of malware have been discovered in 2015, and over half a billion personal records were stolen or lost in the same year. Defense mechanisms can be classified as reactive approach and proactive approach. Reactive...
Optical quantum communication (QC) has the potential to address the demands of high-speed and maximally-secure communication. In optical QC, information is encoded onto the state of photons. By using entangled photonic states, QC protocols can support fundamentally secure communication for applications which cannot use classical information. To increase the information...
This dissertation develops a theory of rebel-state engagement during armed conflict that links these varied interactions to processes of institutional change in the state in which they unfold. Conventional wisdom portrays conflict zones as lacking institutions or pitting armed groups and states as competitors. Yet, this dissertation finds that rebels...
This dissertation focuses on exploring novel light steering and spectral engineering functionalities by flat optics, which includes photonic architectures of flat plasmonic metasurfaces, nanoparticle arrays, and thin film coatings. We have designed, fabricated and characterized different plasmonic metasurfaces (trapezoid-shaped antennas, nanorings/nanowires, etc.), nanoparticle arrays (single-layered or multilayered nanocubes and nanodisks),...
This dissertation examines the situated and interactional nature of cultural experiences. Drawing on the literature on materiality, place, and space, the study analyzes how the physical and spatial characteristics of art galleries and art museums in Accra, Ghana, and Johannesburg, South Africa, lead people to engage with culture, and derive...
Simulation analytics treats stochastic simulation as data analytics for systems that do not yet exist, and extends traditional performance estimation and system optimization to uncovering underlying patterns and the key drivers and dynamics of system behavior by retaining the sample paths generated throughout simulation runs. My dissertation addresses two research...
This dissertation casts an aesthetic light on a selection of polyphonic novels from the Francophone contemporary canon. From the forms of feminism around the prophet of islam in Far from Madina by Assia Djebar, to the multiple voices of Créolité in Solibo Magnificent by Patrick Chamoiseau, to the forms of...
Topoisomerases are ubiquitous enzymes involved in maintaining the supercoiled state of DNA in the cell. Structural, biophysical, and biochemical studies have provided an overall view of the mechanisms of DNA transformation by these enzymes, but many aspects, particularly their dynamic characteristics, remain poorly understood. Type IA topoisomerases change the topology...
SIRT3 is a mitochondrial-localized, NAD+-dependent deacetylase, tumor suppressor protein that functions to direct mitochondrial energy sensing and antioxidant proteins, increasing the efficiency of energy utilization, providing a redox balanced environment, and preventing aging-related diseases. One SIRT3 deacetylation target is NADP+-dependent isocitrate dehydrogenase 2 (IDH2), a key Krebs Cycle enzyme that...
A failure to effectively regulate emotions elicited by a stressful life event contributes to symptoms of psychopathology. This regulatory failure may result from a deficit in executive control. For some individuals, executive control is impaired following stress exposure. Thus, for some individuals, when executive control is needed to regulate emotions...
Ross (2015) proposed a recovery theorem which uses prices of contingent claims to recover market’s expectations about underlying asset returns. His work relies on two assumptions. He assumes all uncertainty of the economy follows a finite state irreducible Markov chain and that the pricing kernel is transition independent. We first...
“The Vicarious Middle Ages” investigates the religious and cultural history of proxy penance where medieval Christians believed that it was possible to suffer on behalf of another person. In proxy penance, one person completed a penitential work for another, who received the spiritual benefit. From the third until the sixteenth...
Phase separation in segmented polymers provides distinct challenges in regard to their chemical reaction kinetics and characterization. Well studied, it has been shown that structure, phase separation and non-covalent interactions are key factors in the design of elastomeric polyurethanes. Specifically, this dissertation is focused on two areas: the synthesis of...