In Muslim West Africa, food-producing villages also produced literate scholars. This study examines how such unlikely intellectuals acquired and gave meaning to Islamic knowledge through one village's experience from 1900 to the 1960s. Unlike the colonial sources underlying conventional approaches to West African Islam, libraries and oral sources from Ruumde...
The purpose of this mixed methods study was to learn about the ways that instrumental music teachers in Chicago navigate the urban landscape. The design of the study most closely resembles Creswell and Plano Clark's (2007) two-part Triangulation Convergence Mixed Methods Design, with the addition of an initial exploratory focus...
We consider two problems in low Reynolds-number, interfacial fluid mechanics: the rupture of thin liquid films on chemically patterned solid substrates, and the engulfment of foreign particles by a solidification front progressing through a binary alloy.
First we investigate the stability and rupture of thin liquid films on patterned sub-...
This dissertation formulates, solves and estimates dynamic stochastic games to answer various questions that arise in Industrial Organization. First chapter is a "theoretic" investigation of learning-by-doing and organizational forgetting that shows them to be distinct economic forces whose interplay gives rise to aggressive pricing behavior, market dominance, and multiple equilibria....
In this dissertation we analyze the decision process of firms and individuals along two dimensions which are central to the field of asset pricing and macroeconomics. In the first chapter, we study the pricing decision of the firm in a framework where customer base matters. Surveys of managers show that...
B_s mixing studies provide a precision test of Charge-Parity violation in the Standard Model. A measurement of deltaMs constrains elements of the CKM quark rotation matrix, providing a probe of Standard Model Charge-Parity violation.
This thesis describes a study of B_s mixing in the semileptonic decay B_s -> D_s mu...
This study examines rhetorical practices through which disenfranchised women developed tenable political identities and integrated themselves into the public realm in the Pacific Northwest between 1868 and 1912. Through close analysis of rhetorical activities in which thousands of women participated--including club discourse, public commemoration, legal advocacy, petition work, and publication--it...
Embryonic stem cells have the potential to differentiate into ectodermal, mesodermal and endodermal derivatives. This property makes them a valuable source of tissue specific progenitor and differentiated cells that can be used for cell replacement therapy. The first goal of this thesis is to test if cardiogenesis from embryonic stem...
Rare events are studied in an increasing number of areas, ranging from lightwave and optical communication systems, to industrial routing problems, to rogue ocean waves, to financial asset pricing, to the rare failure of something as common as Gaussian elimination, as well as numerous others. In optical communication systems, a...
The homotopy groups of bo^tmf are shown to be isomorphic to the homotopy groups of a wedge of suspensions of spectra related to integral Brown-Gitler spectra. We will then restate Mahowald's proof of the topological splitting of bo^bo and subsequently apply similar techniques to construct a map that realizing the...