3D integration of integrated circuits is becoming a prominent solution in the design of high performance chips. Multiple dies can be stacked in a single 3D structure and utilizes Through Silicon Vias (TSV) for die to die communications. While this feature significantly decrease the latency of data transfer, multi-tier stacking...
Algorithms which are efficient and robust are essential to meet the increasing computational demands in the world today. In this thesis, we consider the analysis and design of both distributed algorithms for dynamic average consensus and centralized algorithms for convex optimization.
Dynamic average consensus consists of a group of agents,...
In Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), spinal motoneurons degenerate in the order of large motoneurons that innervate fast and fatigable muscle fibers to small motoneurons that innervate slow muscle fibers (Pun et al. 2006). This order of degeneration is peculiar in that it is in direct opposition to the normal order...
The goal of this thesis is to design practical algorithms for nonlinear optimization in the case when the objective function is stochastic or nonsmooth. The thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 describes an active-set method for the minimization of an objective function that is structurally nonsmooth, viz., it...
This dissertation investigates the evolution of national identification and assimilative trends among Germans who remained behind in the Czech lands from the end of the postwar expulsions in 1946 through the Czech Republic’s entry to the European Union in 2004. My primary lens of analysis is associational life, or formal...
Traditionally, research on perception and sensory systems has considered the senses as independent and modular functions that only converge after sufficient processing in unisensory areas. Recently, however, that view has been called into question with a number of demonstrations of multisensory interactions that may occur as early as primary cortex....
While literature indicates that fewer than half of older adults aged 65 years or older receive high quality end-of-life care, less is known about the quality of end-of-life care experienced by the segment of that population with multiple chronic conditions (MCC). Drawing upon the Teno Model of high quality end-of-life...
Ultrafast spectroscopy offers an unprecedented view on the dynamic nature of chemical reactions. From charge transfer in semiconductors to folding and isomerization of proteins, these all important processes can now be monitored and in some instances even controlled on real, physical timescales. One of the biggest challenges of ultrafast science...
The hormone prolactin (PRL) contributes to breast cancer pathogenesis through various signaling pathways, one of the most notable being the JAK2/signal transducer and activator of transcription 5 (STAT5) pathway. PRL-induced activation of the transcription factor STAT5 results in the upregulation of numerous genes implicated in breast cancer pathogenesis. However, the...
Metabolite biosensors are powerful tools for basic biological research, medical diagnostics, and biotechnological applications. However, a generalizable strategy for developing new metabolite biosensors when an existing sensor cannot be found in nature, is a persistent challenge. Furthermore, while transcription factor biosensors have the broadest range of applications, the pool of...
In today's rapidly changing world, there is constant demand for the development of new, high performance materials. Fire resistant steels can provide greater safety in the event of a building fire, creep resistant stainless steels can allow for higher power plant efficiency, and cobalt based superalloys have potential for use...
This dissertation studies the small dispersion asymptotics in highly stratified models. My goal is to show that accurate inferences are possible even if s, the number of strata, is large while m, the number of observations within each stratum, is small, provided that the model ”fit well” in the term...
This dissertation presents a program of research on cultural cognition of the natural world, involving long-term research with indigenous Ngöbe partner communities (Panama) and selected comparisons to Western samples (US). In two series of experiments focused on agency concepts, we show that cultural frameworks recruit distinct principles for inferring agency...
During the eighteenth century, European trade with Asia was characterized by the importation of sophisticated manufactured goods in exchange for silver. The features of Euro-Asian trade testify to the vitality of the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese economies in the period before the Great Divergence. Many European observers, however, mistook them...
Heterogeneous catalysts play a prominent role in our society, used in applications that range from the production of plastics to the catalytic cracking of crude oil. Industrial catalysts are typically made of mixed metal oxides or nanosized metal particles deposited on high surface area supports. Industrially relevant catalytic materials are...
In eukaryotic organisms, genomic DNA is organized and condensed into repeating arrays of nucleosomes. The histone protein octamer of each nucleosome wraps 147 base pairs of DNA, effectively restricting access by transcription factors and other regulatory proteins to that region. An additional histone, histone H1, binds the DNA outside the...
Depression in children and adolescents is a prevalent, recurrent, and frequently chronic disorder, representing a considerable public health burden (Birmaher, Ryan, Williamson, Brent, & Kaufman, 2005; Costello et al., 2002). Consequently, an understanding of the disorder is critical for future intervention and prevention efforts. Previous research attempting to clarify family...
Background: The tripartite model (Clark & Watson, 1991) has been used to represent the substrates of general distress in both depression and anxiety (Negative affectivity [NA]), while also characterizing specific features of decreased positive affectivity (PA) in depression and increased physiological hyperarousal (PH) in anxiety. Core affect characterizes affect by...
The National Institute of Mental Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality convened an expert panel to identify the top research priorities in the field of behavioral intervention technology (BIT) research. The panel determined that if BIT research is to evolve in an effective way to reach and...
Neurocognitive dysfunction, while common among those with schizophrenia, is thought to be exacerbated in violent individuals with schizophrenia and contribute to the commission of violent acts. Few studies have compared performance on neurocognitive measures between violent and nonviolent schizophrenia samples. Better understanding neurocognitive dysfunction in violent individuals with schizophrenia could...
DNA methylation in repetitive elements (RE) suppresses their mobility and maintains genomic stability, and decreases in it are frequently observed in tumor and/or surrogate tissues. Averaging methylation across RE in the genome is widely used to quantify global methylation. Methylation of RE in humans is considered a surrogate for global...
The patent system seeks to strike the ideal balance between competition and the rate of innovation – not to maximize innovation unconditionally. Clearly there must be limits on the manner and degree to which patents are used to diminish competition. A critical complication, however, is that this boundary is often...
In the last twenty years, memory entrepreneurs have proliferated memories of Communism from Central and Eastern Europe transnationally across Europe, but for some an invisible Iron Curtain persists. How has the European memory field changed in the last two decades, and more broadly, what determines which mnemonic actors are successful...
Using cross-sectional and 90-day discharge follow-up data from child welfare residential treatment, this study investigates gender differences in characteristics, needs, and strengths at entry to residential treatment. Specifically, this analysis examines trauma experiences, trauma-related symptoms, internalizing and externalizing behaviors, and strengths, in relation to length of stay and discharge status...
The over-a-decade quantitative study of the flexion synergy has provided concrete evidence that the stereotypical movement coupling of shoulder abduction with elbow flexion and wrist/finger flexion (i.e. flexion synergy) significantly affects the ability to perform functional upper extremity movements that are essential for activities of daily living (e.g. reach-to-grasp an...
Woodstock—the word is shorthand for the spirit of the 1960s counterculture. Yet the assumption that the 1960s dawned a “New Age” neglects contributions made by earlier generations of Woodstock artists in advancing a utopian vision of emancipated art, life, and labor. From 1902 onwards, Woodstock—a small Dutch hamlet in upstate...
Climate change may be one of the most important puzzles the world has attempted to solve and one of the greatest challenges in this area is to improve our understanding of how atmospheric aerosol particles impact climate processes. We seek to overcome this challenge by focusing on the chemistry and...
This dissertation describes the relationship between the surface chemistry of colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals (quantum dots, QDs) and their optoelectronic properties, such as photoluminescence and degree of quantum confinement. We primarily focus our efforts on one particular subset of ligands known to couple strongly to the inorganic core of the QD...
Neisseria gonorrhoeae is the causative agent of the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea and is adapted to survive in humans, its only host. The N. gonorrhoeae cell wall is critical for maintaining envelope integrity, resisting immune cell killing, and production of cytotoxic peptidoglycan (PG) fragments. Deletion of the N. gonorrhoeae genes...
Understanding the nature of quantum effects in dense biological systems is of great interestto many scientists today. It seems that the question is not does quantum mechanics dictatebiological processes, but rather by how much and to what extent. A big challenge though in thisfield is how to properly test and...
Nucleosome organization influences gene activity by controlling DNA accessibility to transcription machinery. In this thesis, we have developed a chemical biology approach to determine mammalian nucleosome positions genome-wide. Using this strategy, we uncover surprising new features of nucleosome organization in mouse embryonic stem cells. In contrast to the prevailing model,...
Across all levels of education, persistent academic achievement gaps exist between students from higher and lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Despite these daunting odds, many students from lower-SES backgrounds manage to maintain high levels of academic motivation and persist in the face of difficulty. One factor that has been shown...
Individuals with severe motor impairments often have a difficult time performing daily activities, and thus rely heavily on assistive devices to restore some functional independence. The two main limitations of the current controllers for assistive devices are: 1) controllers that do not require coordinated hand movement provide a limited vocabulary...
This dissertation examines various means by which the profit motives of media firms can directly result in biased information transmission. In the first two chapters, I analyze to what extent conflicts of interest in expert review industries may result in artificially inflated reviews, with a particular application to the video...
Metabolic abnormalities of cancers provide opportunities for novel tumor-specific therapies. Isocitrate dehydrogenases (IDHs) catalyze the oxidative decarboxylation of isocitrate to α-ketoglutarate (αKG) and the reduction of NAD(P)+ to NAD(P)H. Oncogenic mutations in two IDH-encoding genes (IDH1 and IDH2) have been identified in acute myelogenous leukemia, low-grade glioma, and secondary glioblastoma...
I use the current accounting rules for earnouts and the previous changes in the accounting rules for earnouts to examine three research questions. My first research question is whether accounting regulation has real effects on the use of earnouts. My second research question is whether the earnout liability represents the...
Organizations comprise of groups who share and compete for resources. During organizational change, resources are often redistributed. Although change messages highlight overarching benefits for the organization, recipients of the message are interested in knowing how they will be affected at the group level, and this affects the way the message...
Education researchers have recently highlighted income achievement and behavior gaps – differences between children from high versus low income families in achievement scores and teacher-rated behavior. To date, scholars in this research stream have not considered the possibility that, compared to white students, non-white students may receive differential returns to...
AIMS: This study investigated the longitudinal effects of internal and external housing quality problems on child mental health outcomes, as measured by child internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. The study also aimed to elucidate the mechanisms through which housing quality problems affect child mental health by testing the mediating effects...
This dissertation studies fictionalized diasporic subalternity, how it is represented by the authors (of the same social status or a cosmopolitan writer), and how different types of agency layered onto the characters influence each other. The choice of texts includes Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke (2011), Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of...
Graphene offers promising opportunities for applications in printed and flexible electronic devices due to its high electrical and thermal conductivity, mechanical flexibility and strength, and chemical and environmental stability. However, scalable production and processing of graphene presents a critical technological challenge preventing the application of graphene for flexible electronic interconnects,...
Early Modern Matters of Life and Death” argues that the political ecology of living, dead, and (in)animate beings in early modernity elucidates the claims of humanism and human exceptionalism that evolved in the period and that still inform present-day anthropogenesis
A number of nonclassical MHC Ib molecules recognizing distinct microbial antigens have been implicated in the immune response to Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). Due to the low polymorphism of MHC Ib molecules within the human population, these molecules and Mtb antigens are attractive targets for better vaccine development. Among these, HLA-E...
The objective of this study was to determine the relationship between descending motor pathway reorganization and abnormal coordination, defined as a reduced set of muscle coactivation patterns between shoulder and elbow muscles in hemiparetic chronic stroke subjects, using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Specifically, we wanted to 1) determine the relationship...
Analytical lower and upper bounds for the average error probability in M-ary quantum detection are derived. The upper bound is valid when the state ensemble, which can consist of pure or mixed states, satisfies a certain linear independence condition. The lower bound is generally valid and also has a classical...
In Chapter 1, a series of "constrained geometry" organoactinide complexes, (CGC)An(NMe)2 (CGC = Me2Si(h5-Me4C5)(tBuN); An = Th, 1; U, 2), prepared via efficient in situ, two-step protodeamination routes in good yields and high purity, is presented. Both 1 and 2 are quantitatively converted to the neutrally charged, solvent-free dihalides (1-Cl2,...
The dissertation analyzes five well-known “Bildungsromane” published roughly between 1785 and 1914 (Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser (1785), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795), Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (1879), Franz Kafka’s Der Verschollene (1914), Thomas Mann’s Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1913/1955)) and investigates the ways...
Four series of doped CdO thin films have been grown on both amorphous glass and single-crystal MgO(100) substrates by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD), and their phase structure, microstructure, electrical, and optical properties investigated. Epitaxial films grown on single-crystal MgO(100) exhibit biaxial, highly textured microstructures. These as-deposited doped CdO thin...
This dissertation is an ethnography that uses semi-structured interviews, field notes, and participant observation to explore how two religious congregations respond to survivors of domestic violence. I interviewed twenty-two parishioners including domestic violence survivors, clergy and bystanders. I transcribed these interviews verbatim using Agar's method of transcript handling. I used...
The polymerization of the microtubule-associated protein, tau, into insoluble filaments is common to Alzheimer's disease (AD) and in a variety of dementias. The conformational change required for tau to transition from soluble monomers to filamentous AD pathology involves the extreme N-terminus of tau coming into contact with other regions of...