A current challenge to the civil/environmental engineering field is to assist full-scale wastewater treatment facilities through wider use of advances in modeling methods and analytical techniques. To address this challenge I applied modeling tools and, with assistance, the molecular biology analytical method of Fluorescent In-Situ Hybridization (FISH) to the high...
Consumers' willingness-to-pay can change over time and can change differently for different consumers. Rational and forward-looking consumers incorporate this into their decision making. This dissertation examines the implication of such change in several dynamic IO settings.
The first chapter looks at a durable goods monopoly setting where consumers' valuations decline...
This dissertation focuses on the contribution of Joseph Addison and his London newspaper The Spectator to the modern "social imaginaries" (Charles Taylor) of public, market and nation. Addison's championing of perspicacity in prose and detachment in aesthetic judgment created protocols of "stranger sociality" (Michael Warner) that made participation in these...
How can political challengers avoid co-optation and other forms of moderation? This dissertation illuminates how institutional participation led to the co-optation of the Indigenous Australian movement and the factors which equipped the Ecuadorian Indígena movement to elude a similar fate. Most contestants in political struggles must at some point consider...
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...
A major challenge in the field of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of safety-critical structures is how to effectively and efficiently detect fatigue damage, especially before there is macrocrack initiation. In this dissertation, a local ultrasonic technique is developed to assess pre-crack fatigue damage in structures. The novel feature of this...
Despite three decades of intense research into small diameter blood vessel tissue engineering, constructs developed to date lack the elastin necessary for long term patency and the prevention of aneurysms. The suboptimal biochemical composition suggests that new biochemical and mechanical culture methods must be developed. In addition, current biomaterials for...
PilD is an enzyme that processes prepilins that are part of the type II protein secretion apparatus and the type IV piliation machinery. Using a <em>Legionella pneumophila pilDlacZ</em> fusion strain to measure transcription, we observed a 20% increase in beta-galactosidase levels at 30°C vs. 37°C. At 25°C and 17°C vs....
Consumption of CO2 by chemical weathering is one of the major fluxes in the global carbon cycle that drives long-term climate. In an effort to understand silicate weathering, which is a net sink of CO2 over geological time scales, as a function of environment (e.g., exposure of parent rocks, climate,...
This dissertation addresses the structure of the group of interval exchange transformations. The two primary topics considered are:
a) the classification of interval exchange actions for certain groups; and b) properties of the interval exchange group which are reflected in the dynamics of interval exchange maps.
In Chapter 3 a...