William Warners Syrinx, or a Sevenfold History, may be the first English novel. Unlike others of the time, though, Warner wrote a realistic novel whose ancestors include the adventure stories of Alexandrine romance, and focus not on the tales of an aristocratic class but on the lives of middle-class individuals....
Ruth M. Amess The Fulfillment of Scriptures approaches Langlands key medieval text, Piers Plowman, using critical literary methods developed in interdisciplinary programs that explore the intersections of religion and literature. Ames draws on the history of the development of Christian doctrine as she explores the ways that the allegory of...
The richness, variety, and complexity of the culture of the Hausa city-states are illustrated in microcosm in Glossary of Hausa Music and Its Social Contexts, in which several hundred Hausa terms for music are collected. David W. Ames and Anthony V. King concentrate on the kingdoms of Zaria and Katsina,...
Paul Kent Alkons Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline provides reading of Johnson that emphasizes his moral discourse. Shortly after its publication, Alkons book became first of all the standard reading of Johnsons essays, contrasting them with the moral ideas Johnson discussed in his sermons, as moral writings, and second, as...
With the advent of a variety of novel nanometer-scale diagnostic techniques such as DNA micro- and nanoarrays, increasing focus has been placed on developing methods to quickly and accurately create these nanometer scale patterns. One promising technique for depositing DNA, proteins, and other liquid molecular "inks" with submicron resolution is...
Weak optical signals, e.g., Raman scattering, fluorescence emission, etc., are typically enhanced by increasing both the excitation field and the collection efficiency. Near a surface, signals can be resonantly enhanced using either surface plasmon polaritons or a resonant dielectric waveguide, provided the sources lie within an evanescent decay length of...
Activin, a member of the TGF-b superfamily, controls a variety of physiological events from the cell cycle to reproductive health. Activin activates the Smad signaling pathway through ActRII/B and ALK4 receptors. The regulation of activin signaling is carried out in part by the inhibitor protein follistatin. The mechanistic details of...
Because soft materials, particularly polymer gels, are playing a greater role in industrial and biotechnological applications today, the exploration of their mechanical behavior over a range of deformations is becoming more relevant in our daily lives. Understanding these properties is therefore necessary as a means to predict their response for...
The present studies aimed at developing a lie detection paradigm immune to countermeasures, while the theoretical issues of top-down influence of task requirement on subliminal semantic priming were investigated. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented supraliminal acquaintance and non-acquaintance names, which were subliminally primed by another acquaintance or non-acquaintance names....
The self-assembly of quantum dots (QDs) in thin solid films is an important area of nanotechnology with many relevant applications. In the present thesis, three problems related to the growth and self-assembly of QDs are investigated.
In Chapter 1, a new instability mechanism for the formation of QDs associated with...