This dissertation analyzes the transformation of fantasy sports from a deviant, outside-the-mainstream fan culture to a billion-dollar industry that comprises almost 20 million North American participants. Fantasy sports are games in which participants adopt the simultaneous roles of owner, general manager, and coach of their own teams of real athletes...
Inactivation of tumor suppressors genes, which encode regulatory proteins critical for maintaining normal cellular function, is a common occurrence in cancer. Ikaros is a hematopoietic-specific zinc finger protein that functions as a differentiation regulator and has properties of a tumor suppressor. Ikaros functions to regulate gene expression as a component...
A comprehensive understanding of how image processing occurs in the primary visual cortex (V1) requires learning what aspects of neuronal responses are driven by strong feed-forward input from the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), and what aspects arise due to the densely recurrent network operating within the cortex itself. From an...
The first chapter of this dissertation investigates the pricing of systematic variance risk in the equity options market. Cross sectional tests on synthetic variance swap returns reveal no evidence of a negative market variance risk premium. Furthermore, we show that a class of linear factor models cannot simultaneously explain index...
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.,...
Surfaces and interfaces, which are ubiquitous in the environment, control the mobility,speciation, and ultimate fate of groundwater species. The presented work provides insight into the interfacial behavior of three environmental pollutants: hexavalent chromium, oxytetracycline, and morantel. Model surfaces are employed for these studies, including (1-102) α-Al<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> and a carboxylic acid-terminated...
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...
This study investigates the causes and welfare consequences of unravelling in two-sided matching markets. "Unravelling" arises when agents contract with one another at an early stage, before much of the relevant information is available. Such early matches may lead to ex-post inefficiencies and are perceived as socially harmful. This study...
Local structure determination in amorphous and disordered systems, which are crystallographically intractable, is critical for gaining an understanding of their properties. X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is an excellent tool for local structure determination in amorphous and disordered environmental materials. Amorphous manganese oxides produced by the freshwater bacterium Leptothrix discophora SP6...
This dissertation presents submillimeter polarimetry methods and scientific results. The scientific results focus on revealing the magnetic field structure of giant molecular clouds (GMCs). The basic principles, instrumentation, observing strategy, and data analysis methods of submillimeter polarimetry are introduced. The scientific data were acquired by SPARO during the observing campaign...