Researchers have long recognized that schools are powerful environments for shaping students' worldview and identity. The structured content, activities, and resultant culture of schools profoundly impact the way in which students learn to make sense of the world around them. In the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community this function of schooling is...
This project argues that displays of humanist learning in diplomacy served to demonstrate the extraordinary good will of the Florentine regime towards a host ruler. I call this act of surpassing previous oratorical gestures a "cultural gift". Although the singular goal of humanism in diplomacy remained offering cultural gifts in...
The use of cluster randomized experiments to study the effects of treatments on groups of subjects has increased in recent years. Many of these experiments lack the necessary statistical power to detect practically meaningful effects of treatment. One method for improving power in cluster randomized experiments that has been advanced...
We present several multiscale quantum mechanical (QM), molecular mechanical (MM), and continuum mechanical (CM) schemes to study the strength properties of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene sheets. A bridging domain method based on overlapping domain-decomposition schemes using the Lagrange multipliers field is developed to couple an atomistic domain with a...
As manufacturing technology moves toward fundamental limits of silicon CMOS processing, it is increasingly important to utilize the full potential of available transistors and interconnects. While manufacturing technology faces fundamental limits inherent in physical laws or material properties, design and verification technology faces fundamental limitations inherent in the computational intractability...
This dissertation comprises three chapters, each focusing on a different question in economic theory. The first two chapters focus on repeated games and reputations, while the third is about large games. In "Cooperation and Community Responsibility", I study whether cooperation can be sustained between communities where members interact repeatedly but...
The small heat shock protein αB-crystallin is expressed primarily in lens and muscle tissue, but it is also found in lung, kidney and many cancers. Regulators of αB-crystallin have been identified almost exclusively using mouse muscle and lens specific models. It has been well documented that αB-crystallin is expressed in...
The first chapter of this dissertation studies a continuous-time agency model where the agent controls the drift of the geometric Brownian motion firm size. The changing firm size generates partial incentives, analogous to awarding the agent equity shares according to her continuation payoff. When the agent is as patient as...
One of the most commonly used techniques for classification problem is logistic regression. For example, logistic regression for a binary response assumes that the odds Pr(y = 1|x)/Pr(y = 0) = exp(a+bx). However, in reality, the pattern of the data can be so complicated that logistic regression model often fails,...
N-Heterocyclic carbene catalysis has recently emerged as an important field in organic chemistry. Two new strategies have been developed to advance the use of N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs) as Lewis-base organic catalysts. The first approach utilizes NHCs to catalyze the generation of homoenolates and the conjugated Breslow intermediate is added to...