Economic growth in contexts of state weakness presents a puzzle. If the state’s provision of property rights is necessary for financial investment and related pro-growth behaviors, then why do we observe private investment and commercial transactions in settings where state institutions are far from reliable property guarantors? This study addresses...
Water vapor condenses into liquid water when it encounters a cold surface. If the surface temperature is sufficiently low, freezing follows the condensation step, and the process is holistically referred to as condensation frosting. Both phase change processes are fundamental to many industries ranging from water harvesting, thermal management, solar...
Directed energy deposition (DED) has pushed the frontiers of manufacturability by enabling the creation of multi-material, functionally graded components, the repair or modification of existing components, and the addition of wear resistant coatings. This additive manufacturing method creates a 3D object by depositing powder directly into a small molten pool...
As social media are intricately woven into the fabric of everyday life, people are increasingly expressing their emotions, feelings, and thoughts on these platforms. Particularly, social media have become an outlet for sharing negative emotions and stressful experiences. This dissertation examines factors that influence how and why people share negative...
Recent advances in high-performance computing have resulted in massive databases of materials properties calculated with techniques such as ab initio density functional theory. In fact, some of the largest of such databases have calculations of nearly all distinct, ordered, experimentally-reported compounds. This thesis discusses the application of data in one...
Selective attention enables people to focus on a small number of objects, features, or events with good resolution. Sometimes attention may also be less selective and distributed across numerous items, which allows more information to be processed at a lower resolution. The degree to which attention is more or less...
Polymers occupied nearly every facet of our daily lives, and enhancing their mechanical and fracture properties has long been an important topic in the field of polymer science. Based on the various need in applications, polymers are designed to have a range of characteristics such as tackiness, optical properties, mechanical...
The dissertation builds on my current research to demonstrate the connection between affect and learning through machine learning and qualitative analysis of interactions where players use a complex systems game. The project is threefold: First, I developed a thinking and learning intervention, the agent-based modeling simulation Ant Adaptation. I showed...
Central nervous system (CNS) regeneration is one of the most challenging regenerative medicine targets in mammals due to the natural inhibitory mechanisms that occur in response to injury. In the case of spinal cord injury (SCI), the initial inflammatory response protects damaged tissue, but over time creates a hostile microenvironment...
Abstract This dissertation aims to understand how the domestic high courts in Latin America rely on the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The “relationship between courts” is a phenomenon that happens in domestic and international politics when domestic high courts start to resist or follow international jurisprudence....