This dissertation argues that royal nomadism, the custom whereby medieval rulers moved between many castles in a predetermined cycle, fundamentally affected the floorplan, use, and adornment of courtly built environments. This argument is a new departure for the study of castles. Scholars of medieval castles acknowledge that rulers passed through...
Proper spatiotemporal expression of genes is essential during development. One method of regulation of signaling-responsive genes is at the level of transcription. In this work, I present the adaptation of single molecule fluorescent in situ hybridization for use in Drosophila imaginal disc tissues in order to more precisely quantify transcript...
This dissertation documents the centrality of emotion to Americans’ understanding of, participation in, and critiques of the expanding economy in the first half of the nineteenth century. By then, many people viscerally understood that white men’s attempts to procure credit and escape debt could produce fear, anger, guilt, and sadness....
Bitcoin is a decentralized payment system proposed in 2008 by Nakamoto, who remains anonymous to date. It offers an effective alternative to fiat money or centralized payment systems with advantages on privacy, anonymity, and low international remittance fees. The transactions in Bitcoin payment system are sent through a peer-to-peer network,...
Supervised learning model is one of the most fundamental machine learning models. It can provide powerful capability of prediction by learning complex patterns hidden in many, sometimes thousands, predictors. It can also be used as a building block of other machine learning tasks, like unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning. Such...
Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) has emerged as a transformative paradigm that enables the co-design of products, materials, and their manufacturing processes. A gamut of computational tools, such as manufacturing process simulations and multiscale materials analyses, have been developed henceforth by their respective research communities. However, it remains challenging to...
“American Sediments” is a study of Black, white, and Indigenous literatures and complementary visual culture centered on the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, in texts written after Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—still the archetypal version of the Mississippi, but inevitably unaligned with historical changes, cultural diversities, and economic shifts...
Religious buildings have always faced the threat of fire, but an unusual number of church fires occurred in northern France during the 12th century. Despite this prevalence, a sustained study on medieval church fires -- including how and why they started, how people responded when they occurred, theological reckonings with...
Thermoelectric materials have attracted widespread attention in recent decades because of their ability to directly convert thermal energy into electrical energy. Given that waste heat is the primary source of lost energy in the world, the implications of developing better thermoelectric materials are both immediate and far-reaching. Admittedly, large progress...
Dual-phase (DP) steels have been widely applied in automobile industry, and are famous for continuous yielding in their corresponding stress-strain curves. The appearance of yield-point phenomena, or discontinuous yielding, is considered undesirable for DP steels. Herein, we take advantage of the undesirable appearance of yield-point phenomena in DP steels as...