Education policy and funding increasingly foster the creation of school partnerships with external stakeholders, such as parents, neighborhood organizations, school district offices, and universities, as a strategy in improving student outcomes. In three independent but related studies, this dissertation sheds light on the specificities rarely addressed by the rhetoric championing...
The brain has a remarkable ability to rapidly adapt behavior. On the scale of development, the brain learns to control the complex dynamics of our limbs by forming and pruning synaptic connections. However, the motor system also learns on much shorter timescales, such as when learning to hit the bullseye...
Plasmonic chemistry is an emerging field of research that contains great promise for new chemical reactivity, but thus far has been improperly observed. The goals of using plasmonic chemistry typically revolve around the use of nonequilibrium charge carriers that migrate to the surface of a plasmonic substrate to perform redox...
Vegetation in dryland environments is often patchy in response to water limitation. This patchiness can take the form of periodic patterning at length scales much larger than that of an individual plant. Instances of patterns resembling leopard spots and tiger stripes are widespread in dry regions of Africa, Australia, and...
The mouse visual system has recently been shown to possess many of the properties observed in the visual systems of the classically studied carnivores and primates. An ever-expanding genetic toolkit has given researchers who study vision in mice many advantages unavailable in other species.
In this thesis I study the...
Since Spanish colonial rule to the present, mining has been one of the main economic activities in the Andes. Taking this fact into account, my dissertation explores how two major Andean countries’ cultural production reacted to mineral wealth exploitation from 1880 to 1930. By analyzing foundational novels and influential journalistic...
Polarized emission from aligned interstellar dust is both a crucial tool for studies of magnetism in the interstellar medium (ISM) and a troublesome contaminant in studies of the polarized cosmic microwave background. In each case, an understanding of the significance of the dust polarization signal requires well-calibrated models that accurately...
The tools of computational chemistry allow researchers to gain insight into chemical systems that would be difficult or impossible to gain experimentally. This dissertation discusses the application of several of these computational tools to chemical systems of interest. First, we present several studies of plasmon resonance in Ag nanoclusters using...
To check that changes in prevalence rates over time were not the result of changes in measurement, we conducted sensitivity analyses. We created a set of adjusted scoring algorithms to maximize comparability among the DISC- 2.3, DISC-IV, and DIS-IV criteria while minimizing alterations. This file shows the adjustments made to...
Inability to understand speech in the presence of background noise is one of the most common complaints of individuals with hearing impairment. Two hearing aid processing strategies specifically recommended for improved speech perception in noise include: digital noise reduction (DNR) and cognition-based wide dynamic range compression (WDRC) speed. While previous...