Until the late twentieth century, the American small town at the turn of the century was popularly conceived as the quintessential nostalgic object: an "ideal" moment of lost "innocence," albeit one never existing in reality. This conception is belied, however, by my study of its representation in film and television...
Preventing the build-up of indoor pollutants represents an emerging goal in environmental chemistry. Heterogeneous catalysis provides an attractive method of remediating indoor air pollution, but optimization through rational catalyst design requires a detailed understanding of the catalytic surface and surface-pollutant interactions. In this work, a chemical ionization mass spectrometry (CIMS)...
Packaging of DNA into nucleosomes and chromatin not only enables DNA to fit within the nucleus, but it also protects and organizes DNA. However, the wrapping of DNA around histones occludes DNA from binding proteins in solution. Proteins that regulate, express and repair DNA are able to function only when...
What is the nature of the relation between a verb and its arguments? In this dissertation, I look to evidence from language acquisition for answers.
Any theory of ditransitives must explain certain structural asymmetries noted for both double-object (DO) datives (e.g. Alfonso gave Derek the bat) and prepositional datives (Alfonso...
This work investigates children's early semantic representations of gradable adjectives (GAs) and proposes that infants perform a probabilistic analysis of the input to learn about abstract differences within this category. I first demonstrate that children as young as age three distinguish between relative (e.g., 'big', 'long'), maximum standard absolute (e.g.,...
Nelson and Staum derived ranking-and-selection procedures that employ control-variate (CV) estimators instead of sample means to obtain greater statistical efficiency. However, control-variate estimators require more computational effort than sample means, and effective controls must be identified. In this dissertation, we present a new CV screening procedure to avoid much of...
This thesis contains four essays on the organization (both internal and external) of health care in the US. The first essay examines a mechanism through which individual workers acquire (or maintain) competence, namely that of experience. Specifically, I analyze whether cardiac surgeons who perform more procedures experience an improvement in...
In the Old Northwest, networks of activists across dispersed communities took controversial direct action against prejudice and slavery. By largely eschewing the growing cities that disproved the Old Northwest rule, this is a study of reform as it would have impacted most people, at the local level in the smaller...
Angiogenesis, the formation of blood vessels from a pre-existing vasculature, is a process whereby capillary sprouts are formed in response to chemical stimuli that can be either supplied externally or produced locally.
Understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that govern angiogenesis suggests a powerful therapeutic approach that will allow to combat...
Encouraging honest behavior and discouraging deceptive behavior has become a very important issue with respect to ethics and moral behavior in the workplace. As such, a critical practical and theoretical goal has been to directly study the likelihood of individuals punishing deception and rewarding honesty. The growing assumption within the...