This dissertation explores the factors that influence the creation and interpretation of novel denominal verbs in English. Of particular focus is the potential influence of one factor, termed here the Semantic Category Distribution Effect. The Semantic Category Distribution Effect involves the type frequency distribution of existing forms of a given...
The last two decades in nineteenth-century West Africa witnessed a two-fold movement, namely the territorial expansion of French colonial empire and the first attempts to extend biomedicine through mass vaccination to control smallpox epidemics. This study provides both a deep history and conceptual framework to analyze the relationship between the...
This study examined the effects of swallow task on swallow physiology, respiratory phase relationships, and oxygen saturation in healthy adult males. This study hoped to provide a building block to clinically relevant research with individuals with compromised swallowing and respiration. Subjects included 40 healthy adult males with no history of...
High-performance scientific computing in a modern age uses parallel techniques at a scale of hundreds of thousands of processors. These large-scale applications have I/O system workloads that are primarily driven by small, sparse I/O operations. While parallel file systems have provided application developers with scalable peak I/O bandwidth for large,...
This dissertation explores a seventy-year period of community growth and activism among African Americans in nineteenth-century Iowa, showing how citizenship was defined, contested, expanded and confined. Antebellum black migrants lived on the margins of a hostile society and struggled for equal citizenship using their labor, their community institutions, the legal...
The three empirical analyses in this dissertation study the effects of workers' compensation benefits on individual behavior and household consumption as well as the impacts of workplace injuries and illnesses on economic outcomes for affected workers.
In Chapter 2, I study incentive effects of state workers' compensation programs, exploiting substantial...
Leakage currents limit the operation of high performance type II InAs/GaSb superlattice photodiode technology. Surface leakage current becomes a dominant, limiting factor to the ideal performance of a photodiode, especially at the scale of a focal plane array pixel (< 25 µm), and must be addressed. A reduction of the...
During movement, the dendrites of spinal motoneurons receive steady excitatory and inhibitory synaptic input from supraspinal sources, interneurons, and sensory afferents. Motoneurons also have dendritic voltage sensitive ion channels. Most notable is a persistent inward current (PIC), which can enhance the amplitude of synaptic input by several fold. PICs are...
Filopodia play a central role in proper cell navigation; they extend from the cell surface and scan the local environment to guide the cell to its proper destination. These dynamic events require precise mechanisms for the turnover of key molecules which determine the morphology of filopodia. As of yet, such...
Chapter 1 describes the homopolymerization of styrene and the copolymerization of ethylene and styrenic comonomers mediated by the single-site bimetallic "constrained geometry catalysts" (CGCs), (µ-CH2CH2-3,3'){(η5-indenyl)[1-Me2Si(tBuN)](TiMe2)}2 [EBICGC(TiMe2)2; Ti2], (µ-CH2CH2-3,3'){(η5-indenyl)[1-Me2Si(tBuN)](ZrMe2)}2 [EBICGC(ZrMe2)2; Zr2], (µ-CH2-3,3'){(η5-indenyl)[1-Me2Si(tBuN)](TiMe2)}2 [MBICGC(TiMe2)2; C1-Ti2], and (µ-CH2-3,3'){(η5-indenyl)[1-Me2Si(tBuN)](ZrMe2)}2 [MBICGC(ZrMe2)2; C1-Zr2], in combination with the borate activator/cocatalyst Ph3C+B(C6F5)4- (B1). Under identical styrene homopolymerization conditions,...