Clientelism has been largely defined as an electoral strategy in which politicians distribute resources to voters to gather their support. This study proposes a new framework to understand clientelism by inverting the perspective of this practice, focusing on voters rather than politicians. This study proposes that clientelism should be understood...
Individuals following a stroke suffer from a host of movement impairments that affect the upper extremity. Hand use is often significantly compromised, especially in individuals with more severe impairments, which makes it difficult for individuals to participate in activities of daily living. One of the major goals of rehabilitation is...
This dissertation has two main aims. The first is to show that relying on the testimony of others is not as “epistemically special” as many epistemologists have made it out to be. More specifically, I argue that relying on someone’s testimony neither provides us with a non-evidential, epistemic reason to...
This dissertation addresses the property of amenability of discrete groups and their actions. In Chapter 2, following the introduction, all necessary definitions are given to introduce amenable groups, elementary amenable groups, random walks, topological full groups, Thompson's group $F$ and to show connections between them. The chapter also briefly covers...
Young children can sometimes acquire new vocabulary words—even property terms—through indirect learning (e.g. Carey & Bartlett, 1978). We explore two factors that contribute to this ability—perceptual alignment and linguistic contrast. We propose that spontaneous comparison processes lead children to notice key commonalities and differences that facilitate indirect property word learning....
This dissertation traces the historical development of diasporic Filipino American activism after the watershed 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and during the military dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Philippines. Using multi-country archival research and approximately sixty oral history interviews, it analyzes labor, student, anti-dictatorship, and human rights activists...
Intestinal immunity is a critical contributor to host health. The immune system in the intestine maintains both defense against pathogens and homeostasis of intestinal tissue, which is exposed to environmental influences, including microbes and ingested foods. Proper regulation of the immune response is required to prevent damage to the host....
This dissertation explores our understanding of corporate credit ratings. In the first chapter I examine the issue of split ratings. S&P and Moody’s often differ in their initial ratings at bond issuance, producing what is referred to as a split rating. The consensus view in the literature and in practice...
Additive manufacturing is a promising process that has the capability to build components with complex geometries for structural and biomedical applications. Due to the rapid and localized directional solidification of molten metallic alloys, unique phase transformations occur at the melt pool that can provide for components with greater strength and...
This thesis describes a series of fundamental studies that address the role of electrostatic interactions in modulating i) the permeability of the ligand shell of a colloidal quantum dot (QD) to an anionic redox probe; ii) the resulting yield of photoinduced electron exchange within the QD ‒ redox probe complex;...
Knee injury causes a loss of stability in the joint and frequently leads to secondary degeneration of the cartilage in the months and years after injury, which can further impair joint function and cause pain and disability. Moreover, the secondary damage to the joint appears to be worse for females...
As national, state, and local educational leaders grapple with how to effectively address the needs of gender-expansive students, more research is needed to inform policy. Gender-expansive youth experience high rates of chronic social stressors such as victimization, discrimination, and rejection. These stressors have academic, mental and physical health consequences; however,...
Neural networks have revolutionized the field of computer vision since they provide solutions to a number of previously unsolved problems and achieve promising performance both in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. It has increasingly become recognized as providing high performance for applications as diverse as image classification, object detection,...
This dissertation examines connections between North and South Korean art during the late Cold War period. Despite the radical social and political differences between the two countries, in the 1980s and early 1990s conspicuous connections emerged between the work of state-sponsored North Korean artists and South Korean artists associated with...
This dissertation argues that black women’s literature on black-white multiraciality critiques public debates that celebrate the racially ambiguous multiracial child as the solution to racial conflict. Under this framework, this project investigates the popularization of multiracial identity in late 20th and 21st century United States, United Kingdom, and Jamaica, and...
In the early part of the 20th Century, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union implemented a program of rapid industrialization under the slogan, “the conquest of nature by man.” Ambitious engineering projects such as the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Northern river reversal sought to restructure...
Oxide/aqueous and metal/metal oxide interfaces are essential for environmental remediation, catalysis, and corrosion inhibition, in addition to their potential implementation as energy transducers, consumer electronics, and coating products. While these interfaces are critically important, they are difficult to access experimentally under aqueous flow conditions. This thesis describes results obtained with...
This dissertation is a social and cultural history of the body and the beauty industry in the Japanese Empire from 1868 to 1945. The emphasis is on the thoughts and actions of state and private actors such as doctors and the first generation of Japanese cosmetic product developers. When these...
Rhythmic fluctuations of electrical activity in the brain provide insights into the proposed mechanism by which we encode experiences and then maintain, forget, modify, and retrieve them. Yet there is still much to learn about how neural oscillations relate to memory function. The purpose of this research is to discover...
The fields of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology have emerged in recent years with the heavily overlapping goals of sustainable bioproduction of chemical goods and predictable and precise engineering of biological function.1 However, efforts to reach commercially relevant titers have stalled.2 Many challenges arise during optimization of each production platform,...