A growing body of research analyzes how corporate social responsibility programs are used to absorb and neutralize the social criticisms coming from social and environmental movements and to superficially respond to the ensuing new regulations. If companies have powerful tools to resist changes and blunt the meaning of the law,...
Maneuvering your limbs requires both accurate commands for how to move, and accurate feedback of their true movements. Conventional prosthetic arms currently lack this sense of proprioceptive feedback, which can make daily tasks difficult without close visual monitoring. Although studies have successfully provided artificial proprioceptive feedback to improve control, this...
Deep learning is a new area of machine learning research that allows deep neural networks composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction. Deep learning has helped in achieving the objective of pushing machine learning closer to one of its original goals of...
Neurons are sensitive to the mechanical properties of their environment and show better growth, survival and differentiation when they are cultured in soft environments with mechanical properties similar to those of the brain compared to other tissues. Within the central nervous system (CNS), there is also a range of mechanical...
Desmosomes, complex structures found at intercellular junctions, are important for the development, structural integrity, and immune barrier of the skin. Extracellular components of the desmosome connect neighboring cells and intracellular interactions amongst cadherin, armadillo, and plakin proteins anchor the desmosome to intermediate filaments. Beyond their canonical role as “spot welds”...
With the growing size of networks and datasets and the lack of centralized access to information, distributed control and optimization become inevitable. In the first part of this thesis, we develop an asynchronous Newton-based distributed optimization algorithm and analyze its convergence properties. Our algorithm benefits from the fast convergence properties...
Organic solar cells (OSC) are a next generation solar energy technology that offers the advantages of scalable fabrication, light weight, flexibility, and earth-abundant starting materials. Despite tremendous advances in OSC power conversion efficiency (PCE) over the last decade, active layer material selection and optimization is still largely empirical. In order...
The authors of the article “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation” created this workshop as a space for participants to discuss issues of environmental sustainability in digital preservation, identify and enact change toward sustainable practices in their organizational contexts, and identify and plan further research. The workshop was run for the...
There is growing evidence that growth with invasive species influences the traits of co-occurring native plants over multiple generations. Some studies indicate that these experienced populations perform better in the presence of the invasive species that led to the trait changes. These experienced populations could serve as source material for...
Soil texture has important ramifications on the shape and size of roots as well as impacting how much water is taken up and the distribution of nutrients in the soil. These factors lead to differences in growth characteristics and plant performance. However, what traits and how the plant responds to...
Understanding how root traits vary within a species and how traits respond to heterogeneous environments, can provide important insight into functional plant attributes that influence plant survival in competitive environments. Selecting plant material with root traits that will support its survival in heterogenous environments may help improve the outcomes of...
Restoration practitioners have many seed material choices when restoring plant communities, and for some species, cultivars may be the most affordable and accessible material available. However, the process of plant selection and commercial seed production can limit trait variability critical to survival and persistence in heterogeneous environments. Several studies have...
This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website,... and The Bilingual Muse analyzes the work of seven Russian poets who translated their own poems into English, French, German, or Italian. Investigating the parallel versions of self-translated poetic texts by Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Andrey Gritsman, Katia Kapovich, Marina Tsvetaeva, Wassily Kandinsky, and Elizaveta Kul’man, Adrian Wanner considers how verbal...
This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website,... and This book investigates what change is, according to Aristotle, and how it affects his conception of being. Mark Sentesy argues that change leads Aristotle to develop first-order metaphysical concepts such as matter, potency, actuality, sources of being, and the teleology of emerging things. He shows that Aristotle’s distinctive ontological claim—that...
Every object emits radiation depending of their temperature. Objects between 300K to 100K emit radiation in the infrared range (1-12µm). These radiations cannot be seen by the human eyes. Infrared detectors find applications in many aspects of life, from night vision and target tracking for homeland security and defense, to...
Episodic memory provides a means by which we are able to reflect on the past, make decisions about the future, and form a learned identity. Even subtle changes to our memory can have a detrimental impact on our daily lives. Memory declines as we age, and clinically salient impairment is...
Two-dimensional (2D) materials and heterostructures have attracted significant attention for a variety of nanoelectronic and optoelectronic applications. At the atomically thin limit, the material characteristics and functionalities are dominated by surface chemistry and interface coupling. Therefore, methods for comprehensively characterizing and precisely controlling surfaces and interfaces are required to realize...
The dissertation consists of three self-contained papers. In Chapter 1, we study the inventory management problem in a dual sourcing system, where there are two supply sources or modes with different sourcing costs and lead times. We provide closed-form solutions to a robust optimization model for inventory management in a...
This dissertation explores the reciprocal relationship between international politics and digital computation since the 1960s by examining the first attempts to use computer simulation to credibly forecast our planet’s economic and environmental future on a global scale. In particular, this project offers the first sustained historical analysis of the origins...
A core problem in many computer vision applications is visual recognition (including object classification, detection and localization). Recent advances in artificial neural networks (aka ”deep learning”) have significantly pushed forward the state-of-the-art visual recognition performances. However, due to the lack of semantic structure modeling, most current deep learning approaches do...
The fact that informational asymmetries impose a significant barrier in path of smooth functioning of markets has been well known in Economics since the 1970s. Communication and information exchange allow to mitigate these barriers to a certain extent. The existing Economic literature allows to get a good grasp of static...
Nature and Civilization is a focused interpretation of Kant’s politics insofar as it bears on the distinction between nature and civilization. It seeks to answer the question, How is Kant’s distinction between nature and civilization informing his global political thought? Kant thinks that in moving from the state of nature...
This dissertation examines the legal, economic, and social transformations experienced by American widowed women from the Salem Witchcraft Trials to the Civil War to expand how scholars of literature, the law, and American history define women’s citizenship prior to suffrage. Emphasizing literature’s importance to nineteenth-century nation-building during the era of...
Since their introduction nearly a century ago, protein vaccines and therapeutics have revolutionized our ability to prevent and treat human disease. However, existing production processes for biopharmaceuticals are technically complex and rely on living cells, which necessitates highly centralized manufacturing in large-scale production facilities, specialized equipment, and cold-chain distribution. With...
Use of bio-renewable polysaccharides to produce materials with a high technological impact has gained a lot of attention recently. Efforts have been made, for example to produce triboelectric generators from cotton, as well as, nanostructures of chitosan gels for drug delivery. Another well-known example is the use of β-Cyclodextrin (β...
T cells and cancer cells have many common features, including their need to proliferate and their metabolic requirements. In particular, glucose metabolism is highly upregulated in both cancer cells and T cells to support proliferation and other cellular functions. The first step of glycolysis is catalyzed by Hexokinase, which exists...
Deformation in materials with a hierarchical microstructure is expected to be complex because of the interaction between the units that form such a microstructure. The complexity of deformation would be even higher when additional inelastic deformation modes are active in such materials, apart from traditional elastic and plastic deformation modes....
This dissertation presents a comprehensive study of thin-film LiMn2O4 (LMO) cathodes applied in lithium ion batteries (LIBs). The primary aim was to establish fundamental understanding of the relationship between interfacial LMO chemistry/electrochemistry and its detrimental drawback, i.e. fast capacity fade over long term cycling, and then develop effective mitigation methods....
The goal of this thesis is to design practical algorithms for nonlinear optimization in the case where the objective function is deterministic or stochastic. Problems of this nature arise in many applications including machine learning and image processing. The thesis is divided into four main chapters. Chapters \ref{chap:Inexact}, \ref{chap:Adasample} and...
For much of the twentieth-century, English-language music scholars were reticent to speculate about the origins of music. In recent years, however, the study of music’s evolutionary origins has been revitalized. Resonating Subjects brings a critical-historical perspective to this renewed convergence of music studies and evolutionary science. Through close examinations of...
Lubrication is the most means for sliding interface failure prevention because it helps separate two interacting surfaces, reduce asperity contacts and thus extend the working life of the parts. Improving the tribological performance of lubricated interfaces is a challenging work, as several influence factors are involved, such as coating, plasticity,...
Extensive study of nanomaterial chemical and optical properties has enabled their integration into a variety of applications. However, less thoroughly investigated are the heat generation and dissipation processes of nanomaterials following optical excitation. These phenomena are of immense importance as thermal energy can distort a material’s structure, which has profound...
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common non-cutaneous cancer among U.S. men. Lack of effective treatments for advanced disease make it a significant public health concern. However, PCa’s long natural history makes it an excellent target for prevention approaches that reduce overtreatment of indolent disease, treatment related morbidity, and mortality....
This dissertation considers a periodically-forced 1-D Langevin equation that possesses two stable periodic solutions in the absence of noise. We aim at answering the question: is there a most likely noise-induced transition path between these periodic solutions that allows one to identify a preferred phase of the forcing when the...
Global energy demand is increasingly rapidly in today’s modern world with increasing living standards all around the world. As global energy demand rises, energy efficiency has never been more crucial and that the improvement of tribological systems is critical to the progress of the global future. A large part of...
Modeling human language is at the very frontier of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Statistical language models are probabilistic models that assign probabilities to sequences of words. For example, topic models are frequently used text-mining tools to organize a vast set of unstructured documents by exploring their theme structure. More...
This thesis describes a novel demonstration of quantum teleportation, a protocol within the broader field of quantum information science, carried out by an electron transfer reaction within a molecular system. As described in Chapter 1, quantum information science has potential impacts in computation, communication, and cryptography. This field relies on...
Design problems are highly ill-structured, having “ambiguous specifications of goals, no determined solution path, and the need to integrate multiple knowledge domains” (Jonassen, 2000, p. 80). Design problems are generated by stakeholders to meet needs that exist outside of the classroom (Simon, 1973; Jonassen, 2000)—this is in contrast to most...
Semiconductor nanowires, such as group IV and III-V nanowires, shows distinct electrical, optical and mechanical properties from their bulk counterparts due to their nanoscale size and 1-D morphology. For example, the quantum confinement effect modulates the band gap of a semiconductor nanowire when its diameter approaches or below the exciton...
Theoretical investigation of photochemical processes in molecules is a nontrivial task. Ab initio calculations that completely describe such processes are often intractable to perform given today’s hardware. Thus, to gain insight into common areas of interest, such as in transition metal photochemistry and organic photovoltaics, less accurate but more feasible...
Etching flourished as a printmaking medium in Paris during the Second Empire and early Third Republic, the precise timeframe of the city’s drastic transformation due to the state-authorized phase of urban renewal implemented under the reign of Napoléon III by his prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. This study...
We address the problem of efficient maintenance of the answer to a new type of query: Continuous Maximizing Range-Sum (Co-MaxRS) for moving objects trajectories. The traditional static/spatial MaxRS problem finds a location for placing the centroid of a given (axes-parallel) rectangle $R$ so that the sum of the weights of...
In three empirical chapters, this dissertation examines the field of sustainability over time, specifically uncovering the processes by which contentious interactions between movements and organizations can shift to the development of shared meaning and the creation of new organizational positions. The dissertation utilizes the analyses strategies of text analysis, field...
This dissertation uses the lens of sociomateriality to examine two cases of innovative, technology-mediated civic learning programs, a U.S. Government class in a suburban high school that engages students in a simulation of the legislative process, and an English Language Arts unit in an urban public school in which students...
Celebrity, reputation, and identity were complex issues for nineteenth-century British actresses. This dissertation examines how actresses responded to, integrated, and defied gender norms and social structures as they performed “authentic” identities for consuming publics. I investigate how actresses participated in charity events and bazaars, autobiographical writing, and advertising campaigns in...
Regulations often impose quality restrictions on firms, which in turn can influence prices and welfare in a theoretically ambiguous manner. To study such quality restrictions, my coauthor and I examine the Wright Amendment by analyzing its full repeal in 2014 as a natural experiment, and the analysis is documented in...
Cognitive impairment is a significant public health concern as the United States (US) population continues to age at unprecedented rates. It is well established that older adults are more likely to have higher rates of morbidity and mortality, in addition to greater healthcare utilization and costs. A parallel concern is...
Polymer nanocomposites have attracted great interest in recent years because of their potential as tailored materials with enhanced properties. Recent experiments have shown that polymer nanocomposites are able to achieve significant improvement in dielectrical, thermal, mechanical and other physical properties compared with their parent polymer systems. More importantly, these outstanding...
Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels are non-selective cation channels expressed in the brain and heart where they exert control over many diverse physiological properties. In the hippocampus, HCN channels are enriched in a dendritic gradient within CA1 pyramidal cells where they reduce dendritic integration and dampen neuronal excitability. HCN channels...