As many systems of military and autocratic rule came under challenge in Africa, Nigeria lost its leadership position in a democratizing era with the collapse of the Second Republic, 1979-1983. Four military heads-of-state followed. One of the most hopeful transitional experiments in Africa, conducted under General Ibrahim Babangida, 1985-1993, ended...
An address delivered at the launching of the Nigerian edition of my book on prebendalism published by Spectrum Books (Ibadan), at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs. It appeared in print in The Guardian (Lagos), June 5, 1991.
The suitability of the term “crucible” to capture the dilemmas of Nigeria is evident in this unpublished paper. After Ibrahim Babangida supplanted Muhammadu Buhari as the head-of-state in August 1985, Nigeria entered an arena of experimentation in several regards. Babangida is arguably the most dynamic, skilfull and charismatic leader in...
In this article, a Nigerian military system of governance is explicated. It was the dominant mode of governance in Nigeria until civilian rule was restored in 1999, initially under a former military ruler. Starting from the first military coup in January 1966, Nigeria experienced over 33 years of this system,...
This paper was written at the midway point in the governing of Nigeria by a paradoxical individual, Ibrahim Babangida. It should provoke further studies of his 8-year rule, 1985-1993, that seemed transformative during much of this period but ended in disarray and disappointment. The ideological orientation of the Nigerian economy;...
A long-running wager took place between the Babangida regime (1985-1993) and Nigerian civic, professional and political groups that the former would honor its commitment to usher in a Third Republic via free and fair elections. The June 12, 1993 elections were as free, fair and competently administered as could be...
When this testimony was given, there was still hope that Ibrahim Babangida would transfer the presidency to the elected Moshood Abiola before he left office on August 27, 1993. In that way, Nigeria would join the wave of post-Cold War democratizing nations. I had earlier called for a “transition in...
More than taking Nigeria back into the “dismal tunnel” of military rule, after seizing power in November 1993, Sani Abacha raced through the playbook he knew as a senior member of Babangida’s junta. Like Babangida, he pushed back the announced date for the return to civilian rule, launched an exercise...
This revised version of a paper presented at a conference at M.I.T. on State, Conflict, and Democracy in 1997 pulled together key dimensions of a Nigeria that had drifted far from constitutional and democratic governance. State and society had become increasingly criminalized; the educational system and other social sectors were...
This opinion piece, written by two long-term students of Nigerian politics, proposed a different course to the one taken following the death in mid-1998 of a military tyrant and the elected president he had imprisoned. It called for the creation of a caretaker national government of respected civilians that would...
This is the text of a public address at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs delivered soon after the inauguration of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. It identified several priorities after fifteen and a half years of military government. The country’s eroded legislative, judicial, and other state institutions needed to be rebuilt...
In many dryland environments, vegetation self-organizes into bands that can be clearly identified in remotely-sensed imagery. The status of individual bands can be tracked over time, allowing for a detailed remote analysis of how human populations affect the vital balance of dryland ecosystems. In this study, we characterize vegetation change...
It is becoming increasingly evident that the nanoscale organization and structure of macromolecules play a significant role in determining the function and properties of biological systems. To understand the relationships between biological structure and function at nanometer length scales, there is a need for methods which enable imaging of intact...
Georg Friedrich Haas composed in vain in reaction to political events in his native Austria. The piece is well known for making use of clashing tuning systems and darkness in the concert hall. These two facets of Haas’s writing have been much discussed and written about. The political dimension of...
Beethoven’s late compositional style is known for bending conventions he learned as a young man. Many discussions of his late style concentrate on adherence to and deviations from the conventions of functional harmony, fugal techniques, and sonata form. This document sheds light on an additional, previously unexamined aspect of Beethoven’s...
Kaija Saariaho’s vocal music offers singers a rewarding challenge. Her works contain extended techniques and innovative performance practices, which allow her to create interesting and moving timbral effects. Her musical language has its foundation in her cultural identity, formed when she was a girl in the forests of Finland. The...
Chaya Czernowin’s opera 'Pnima…ins innere' is about the encounter between a young Israeli boy and his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor so traumatized by his past that he cannot speak. Fittingly, the opera does not contain any words: the four singers in the work instead sing phonemes and other non-verbal sounds....
Ever since Jean-Baptiste Lully welcomed the horn to the stage as an instrument capable of producing music suitable for indoors, a tradition of horn methodology and pedagogy has been developed and expanded over the centuries. Despite the volume and variety of pedagogical materials available to the horn student and pedagogue...
Starting in the late 1950s, the advertising world rapidly became a fertile arena for experimentation in the realm of electronic music. Composers explored new forms, such as the sound logo; new technology, such as the Moog synthesizer; and new semiotic relationships between music, words, images and concepts, including attempts to...
Since the standardization of the modern brass quintet in the middle of the twentieth century, extensive research has been dedicated to the history of the genre, ensembles which have promoted and advanced brass chamber music and the growing body of original brass quintet repertoire. Such scholarship has provided practical benefits...
Since Ottorino Respighi included the recording of a nightingale in his Pini di Roma (1924), composers have used prerecorded nature sounds, or field recordings, to help establish a specific sense of place. The purpose of this project is to examine how modern composers utilize field recordings to create natural-world settings,...
This document gives a brief history of classical music (Western art music) in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a focus on recent events and developments from the beginning of the siege (1992) to the present. Further focus is placed on the effects of Sarajevo's cultural pluralism on the city's largest...
Behind the Wallpaper was written for Julia Holter and Spektral Quartet in 2014–15, expanding on a four-song cycle of the same name from 2013. It was premiered on February 23, 2015 at Amsterdam Bar & Hall in St. Paul, MN, as part of the Liquid Music Series. The piece tells...
This paper describes how Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) has evolved over time using a combination of bibliometric, social network, and text analysis. We examined the rate of knowledge production as well as changes in authors, journals, and collaborators, showing a steady growth of ALD research. The study of the collaboration...
The Northwestern University Libraries Repository and Digital Curation (RDC)
department is tasked with digitising and creating digital collections from the materials managed by the Libraries’ curators. The previous process for the intake and management of these projects created a situation of feast or famine regarding project work that was ready...
Children are impressionable customers, and the media they consume influences their behaviors and perceptions. Gender stereotypes are highly prevalent in children’s media, which can often lead children to create idealized images of what boys and girls should be. This paper explores advertising in children’s television commercials given changes in our...
The creation of Reactions allows Facebook users to provide emotional support for members within the social network as well as disclose emotions toward various content. This research study investigated how this one-click tool is appropriated depending on the content of the posts and relational intimacy with the poster and the...
While many sources have pointed to oil wealth, a British postcolonial legacy, and a developmental state as the foundation for the incredible economic rise of Nigeria in recent decades, I question the validity of those existing schools of thought and present a cultural explanation. The Nigerian people and their cultural...
The US continues to experience disproportionately high teen birth, pregnancy, and STD rates compared to other developed nations and the appropriate type of sex education for American adolescents’ has been a constant source of debate. Over the last 13 years, the US federal government has invested over $1.5 billion in...
This project would not have been possible without the support and guidance of my supervisor, Emma Elizabeth Ilett. Emma helped me establish the specific research question and structure of the study. She also assisted with statistical analysis, provided helpful advice during each step of the project, and taught me so... and Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) recipients receive pre-transplantation treatment regimens varying in conditioning intensity and antibiotic administration. Broad-spectrum, antianaerobic antibiotics have the potential to disrupt the normal gut microbiome balance and reduce immune function. We aimed to retrospectively examine the impact of pre-transplantation conditioning and antibiotics on rates of mortality,...
This study analyzed the differences between three habitats in and around EcoMinga’s Cerro Candelaria Reserve, which protects part of the Llanganates – Sangay Ecological Corridor in the eastern cloud forest of Ecuador. The EcoMinga Foundation began reforestation efforts in several abandoned pastures in the reserve in 2008, which have since... and This project would not have been possible without the support and kindness of the El Placer community. Thanks to Piedad Recalde for her constant care, humor, and enormous amounts of delicious food. Thanks to Jesús Recalde and Darwin Recalde for their companionship in the field and invaluable insights on the...
This study would not have been possible without the guidance, support, and advice from Clive Bruzas, Eliza Govender, and staff at the Blue Roof Life Space. As my initial advisor, Clive aided in my thought process of formulating a research question based on my personal interests and experience visiting Blue... and What prompts an individual who has had a positive HIV diagnosis to undergo the transition from a limiting life narrative to an empowering life narrative? With HIV positive individuals living longer lives, it is important that individuals are able to integrate the HIV/AIDS identity into their sense of self and...
Stroke is the leading cause of death and long term disability in the industrialized world. With the current population aging, the number of individuals at risk of stroke along with the associated health care costs are anticipated to rise considerably in the coming years. Consequently, there is an unmet need...
The first chapter of this dissertation develops a two-stage inference method for structural parameters in the linear instrumental variables model. In the first stage, a new statistic is used to detect whether the correlation between the structural error and the reduced form error is small. In the second stage, a...
The behavior of type-II superconductors is modeled using the time-dependent Ginzburg Landau equations (TDGLE). Pinning centers (inclusions) and geometries which maximize the critical current that can be passed through a superconductor are numerically obtained. Previous analytical results are summarized and new results are obtained for the critical current in one...
Refugees gain access to benefits and services in the United States through the bureaucratic birthdates recorded in the documents they carry when they first enter the country. Examining how and why chronometric age based on these documents was essential to resettlement was the starting point for my dissertation, which explores...
Anisotropic semiconducting thin films have attracted attention in recent years for important applications such as electrical interconnects, electronic sensors, field-emission devices and thermoelectric devices. However, the characterization of the full conductivity tensor, especially the cross-plane conductivity, remains a great challenge for anisotropic thin films. In addition, the synthesis of large-area...
Meeting the exploding demand for wireless data services will require access to new wireless spectrum. However, the traditional approach of clearing spectrum and reallocating is becoming increasingly difficult. This in turn has led to much interest in new approaches for sharing spectrum among different users, such as the those being...
Pattern recognition-based myoelectric control of upper limb prostheses has been made clinically available to individuals with more proximal upper limb amputations and can restore intuitive control of a prosthetic hand. This control method has yet to be implemented for individuals with amputations distal to the wrist (i.e. partial-hand amputations) and...
We study analytic functions on the open unit p-adic poly-disk centered at the multiplicative identity and prove that such functions only vanish at finitely many n-tuples of roots of unity unless they vanish along a translate of the formal multiplicative group. (Note that a root of unity lies on the...
Using Eynard-Orantin topological recursion, we prove here a result concerning the equivariant Gromov-Witten invariants for the projective line equipped with the standard action of the 2-torus. Our result is that the genus g, n point Gromov-Witten potential with arbitrary primary insertions may be written as a sum over certain genus...
Plasmonic nanostructures can confine light at their surface in the form of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) or localized surface plasmons (LSPs) depending on their geometry. SPPs are excited on nano- and micropatterned surfaces, where the typical feature size is on the order of the wavelength of light. LSPs, on the...
Catalyzed by the invention of magnetic tape recording, audio production has transformed from technical to artistic, and the roles of producer, engineer, composer, and performer have merged for many forms of music. However, while these roles have changed, the way we interact with audio production tools has not and still...
Data mining for materials discovery is concerned with representing materials science problems into a statistical framework, and learning models that describe observations about the processing, structure, and property of materials. The type of materials includes metals, ceramics, glass, polymers, and composites which are mixtures of multiple types. Observations come from...
Consent is at the center of feminist politics and theory; the importance of this concept is evident in the recent campus activism around sexual assault. Because consent has become so critically important, it is necessary for feminists to interrogate the concept of consent. In this dissertation, I argue that consent...
Myocardial perfusion is an important marker of cardiovascular health that is routinely evaluated clinically. Perfusion is measured most often using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging, but magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has many advantages over SPECT. Measuring perfusion quantitatively in ml/min/g would theoretically allow for improved characterization of cardiac...
The growth of incarceration in the United States, a symptom of the concomitant broader institutionalization of a ‘carceral state’, is unquestionably one of the most significant developments in the nation's history. Despite this significance, the public response to the growth and deleterious consequences of incarceration has been notably restrained. This...
Pattern recognition algorithms have been proposed as a way to control powered lower limb prostheses, specifically for transitioning between the different pre-programmed locomotion modes of the prosthesis (e.g., level ground walking, stair ascent, etc.). However, these algorithms cannot track changes in the statistical characteristics of input signals, and do not...
The purpose of the dissertation is to develop a framework for equilibration of activity-trip chain demand in an integrated system of activity scheduling and travel choices within a dynamic network equilibrium framework. Activity-based modeling systems generate detailed activity chain schedules for individuals, which have to be assigned to transportation networks....
The microwave, optical, and electro-optic properties of epitaxial barium titanate thin films grown on (100) MgO substrates and photonic crystal electro-optic modulators fabricated on these films were investigated to demonstrate the applicability of these devices for telecommunication and data networks. The electrical and electro-optical properties were characterized up to modulation...
In the past few decades, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research has shown that nouns and verbs are processed differently in cognitively healthy individuals, and can be selectively impaired in aphasic individuals. However, this noun-verb dichotomy is poorly understood. This dissertation investigated cognitive and neural distinctions between nouns and verbs by studying...
How do households confront insecurity? This dissertation is a study of how households navigate insecurity as observed through struggles with homeownership and foreclosure. I discuss insecurity as a multi-dimensional experience that puts important resources at risk of loss and reaches into many areas of family life, including health, wealth, food,...
When we speak, we communicate not only with the words we choose, but also with the patterns of sound we create. As auditory experts, musicians are especially adept at making sense of sound, and accumulating research reveals that this extends to their processing of speech and other communication signals. Much...
I present research in systems of biomedical relevance consisting of agents near or com- prising surfaces using computational approaches. The research topics include formation of bacterial biofilms, behavior of charged species near stacked, like-charged lamellae, and the the conformational behavior of lamellae with strong self-attraction.
In chapter 2, I present...
This dissertation presents some development of the single molecular ion precision spectroscopy experiment including construction of the project, spectroscopy state readout, and production of ultracold molecules. Such molecular ion spectroscopy aims at testing fundamental physics such as probing the time variation of electron-proton mass ratio.
The theories and characterization of...
The properties of crystalline materials are controlled by their composition and by their structure, however, the structure of a crystal is only partly controlled by its composition. Development of specifically directed inorganic syntheses will require an understanding of the dynamics of crystal phase forming processes, especially those processes involved in...
Lattice models of fermions, bosons, and spins have long served to elucidate the essential physics of quantum phase transitions in a variety of systems. Generalizing such models to incorporate driving and dissipation has opened new vistas to investigate nonequilibrium phenomena and dissipative phase transitions in interacting many-body systems. Circuit- QED...
We argue that a country’s level of wealth inequality can be viewed as a reflection of the quality of its housing rental market. Using the ECB’s Household Finance and Consump- tion Survey (HFCS), we document that the aggregate homeownership rate and various measures of wealth inequality are negatively correlated across...
Mixing of granular materials is an important engineering process, and a very complex problem. In this thesis, I use granular mixing in a half-full biaxial spherical tumbler (BST), a spherical container that rotates sequentially about two orthogonal axes, to motivate the study of mixing with piecewise isometries (PWIs), a rich...
Amorphous In-Ga-Zn-O (a-IGZO) and other amorphous oxide semiconductors are attracting increasing attention from the display industry for their high electron mobility, ease of large-area manufacture, and potential for future flexible electronics. However, such amorphous materials often show instability under gate voltage bias, temperature, and illumination stress, with extremely slow relaxation...
The behavior of ions in liquids confined between macromolecules determines the outcome of many nanoscale assembly processes in synthetic and biological materials such as colloidal dispersions, emulsions, hydrogels, DNA, cell membranes, and proteins. Theoretically, the macromolecule-liquid boundary is often modeled as a dielectric interface and an important quantity of interest...
Tribological behaviors of lubricated interfaces are strongly affected by the interactions between mating surfaces and the rheological properties of the lubricant between them. This research aims to improve lubrication through two approaches: 1) designing surface textures for lubrication enhancement and adhesion reduction, and 2) developing lubricants of desired rheology.
Molecular...
Broadband networks are one of the most economically significant and fastest growing sectors of the Internet. Recent studies have shown that providing broadband Internet access is instrumental for social and economic development. Several governments, as well as the UN, have gone so far as to label broadband access a basic...
Even though renal blood flow accounts for nearly a quarter of cardiac output, the renal medulla operates in an environment with a scant supply of oxygen. The reason for this apparent discrepancy is thought to be threefold. Blood flow to the outer medulla is less than 50% of that received...
Glaucoma is a neurodegenerative blinding disease associated with increased intraocular pressure, which is caused by an increased resistance to the outflow of aqueous humor. Although the cause for increased resistance remains unknown, it has been associated with a decreased density of pores in the cells of the inner wall endothelium...
This dissertation develops and applies coupled marine sulfur and strontium cycle modeling to the highly dynamic Early Cretaceous demonstrating the value of increased model constraint from linkage of biogeochemical cycles with shared forcing factors. A foundation for this work is first provided by review of relevant geochemical, sedimentological, and paleontological...
Chronic pain is a prevalent and under-treated condition that remains a mystery to the medical system and a major social and economic problem. Unfortunately, there is no single treatment superior to others for relieving chronic pain. While recent scientific discoveries have provided us with functional and anatomical brain biomarkers of...
The FDA approvals of afatinib and ibrutinib in 2013 led to a heightened interest in cysteine-reactive covalent inhibitors. However, there are few methods to discover new cysteine-reactive inhibitors for enzymes for which reversible binding scaffolds are not known. To this end, we rationally designed a chemical system to attach a...
The striatum is a subcortical nucleus that regulates a number of complex activities ranging from voluntary action selection to the subconscious formation of habit. The coordination of these operations is mediated by the principle cells of the striatum, spiny projection neurons (SPNs). SPN activity is dictated by a confluence of...
E2F-2 is a Retinoblastoma (Rb)-regulated transcription factor induced during terminal erythroid maturation. Cyclin E-mediated Rb hyper-phosphorylation induces E2F transcriptional activator functions. E2F-2-loss causes reduced peripheral red blood cell (RBC) counts, without altering relative abundances of erythroblast subpopulations. To determine how E2F-2 regulates RBC production, we comprehensively studied erythropoiesis using knockout...
Spherical Nucleic Acids (SNAs) are nanoparticle bioconjugates that have found use in a wide-range of diagnostic and therapeutic applications. These nanomaterials are composed from inorganic or organic core nanoparticle scaffolds that are functionalized with a dense surface layer of nucleic acids (typically DNA or RNA) that are oriented in a...
Metalloporphyrins fulfill incredibly diverse chemical roles in biology and photocatalysis, where they act as photosensitizers, redox sites, substrate binding sites, and facilitators of long range electron transfer. Metalloporphyrin chemistry is uniquely tuneable through conformation and functionalization of the porphyrin ring, choice of metal, and interaction with the environment as these...
Gene expression is tightly regulated at the level of transcription through cooperation between cis-regulatory elements and trans-factors that bind to the regulatory elements. Together, these factors regulate the higher order chromatin structure which establishes domains that organize the genome and coordinate gene expression. However, the molecular mechanisms controlling transcription of...
The Introduction and Appendix i-A outline briefly the history of Titan exploration since its discovery by Christiaan Huygens in 1675 through the recent International Mission of Cassini- Huygens. It discusses the roles of some of the ten most abundant elements in the Universe (H, He, C, N, O, Ne, Mg,...
Worldwide, governments are beginning to take action to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions in order to mitigate the extent of global climate change. The largest fraction of global CO2 emission comes from electrical power generation, which is rapidly being converted to wind and solar installations. The intermittent nature of renewable resources...
In this dissertation, we present three empirical studies investigating the role of linguistic experience in the processing of probabilistic information during speech production, speech perception, and across modalities. In all studies, we focus on a particular type of probabilistic information related to the probability of a word in a discourse...
Science at the nanoscale poses several recurring difficulties. How can we control the assembly of objects too small for direct manipulation to be practical? How can we extend that control to extit{in vivo} systems so we can make use of nanotechnology in medicine? And how can we recreate the extraordinary...
By 2020, there will be more than 200 billion sensor enabled objects world-wide in the Internet of Things (IoT). The biggest challenge of future IoT is to provide ultra scalable wireless access for a massive number of devices. The goal of this thesis is to build up a model for...
Patients with the Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) clinical syndrome have diverse forms of neuropathology, one of which is the cellular and molecular abnormalities of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), at post mortem autopsy. Structural anatomical differences might aid in ante mortem differential diagnosis of neuropathology. The studies in this dissertation investigated one...
Despite major advances in the past half-century, significant issues such as educational inequality persist in American education. Accountability policy has become a central, resilient approach for addressing such issues. We see this in the ongoing enactment of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the recent adoption of...
Organic photovoltaic (OPV) solar cells aim to provide efficient, flexible and lightweight photovoltaics (PV) with simple processing and low-cost. Advances in device optimization, structural and molecular design, as well as mechanistic understanding have helped increase device efficiency and performance. Within the framework of active layer optimization, systematically improving bulk heterojunction...
Planets and planetary systems change in brightness as a function of time. These "light curves" can have several features, including transits where a planet blocks some starlight, eclipses where a star obscures a planet's flux, and rotational variations where a planet reflects light differently as it spins. One can measure...
Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is a powerful technique for characterizing molecular systems. It combines the chemical selectivity of vibrational spectroscopy with plasmonic signal enhancement to achieve the ultimate limit of detection--a single molecule. By overcoming the effects of ensemble averaging, single molecule SERS (SMSERS) probes distributions in molecular interactions and...
In 2012 the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collected 19.7 fb-1of data at a center of mass energy of 8 TeV. This thesis presents two analyses focusing on the Z boson. The first is a search for the never before seen decay of a...
Consider the role of waiting rooms as informal learning environments. In this thesis, I examine a pediatric hematology and oncology clinic to evaluate the patient learning experience. Through staff interviews, waiting room observations, and a review of educational materials I argue that this process is in need of redirection. Most...
This project examines the uneven adoption of therapeutic initiatives within the organizational field of American museums to ask: How do people frame museum-going as “good” for visitors’ health? Existing research on legitimation processes would predict cultural institutions respond similarly to pressures for greater accountability from their external environments, or resist...
How mental representations are constructed and how they evolve are central problems for cognitive science. Representation decisions help determine what computations are hard or easy. Structured, relational representations are a hallmark of human cognition. Developmental studies show that children do not perform as well as adults in tasks that require...
Substance use and substance use disorder (SUD) may be variables that influence the course of HIV/AIDS risk behaviors as youth age. To our knowledge, no prospective longitudinal study has examined the association between categories of substance use disorders including alcohol use disorder alone, marijuana use disorder alone, comorbid drug use...
CD1 molecules represent a class of antigen presenting molecules that present lipid antigens to cognate T cells. These molecules have been identified in all mammals examined so far. Unlike MHC molecules, which are highly polymorphic, CD1 molecules exhibit limited polymorphism and are divided in to two groups – 1 and...
A disconnect exists between the behavior of transcriptional and genetic regulation in bacterial systems when comparing phenotypic patterns and dynamics of a population to those observed at the single cell level. In this thesis, we developed a number of tools and assays to better understand, overcome, and predict the challenges...
While infrequent, clay slope failures caused by earthquakes result in loss of life and substantial property damage. In strong seismicity areas, it is sometimes assumed that the stability of clay deposits can be evaluated through the residual undrained strength that is applicable at large deformations. A crucial factor missing in...
The airway epithelium forms an active barrier between the internal and external environments and has multiple roles critical to normal function of the lung. Its development and function are controlled by a network of transcription factors that regulate gene expression in response to varying stimuli. Dysfunction of this tissue plays...