The push for electronic devices on smaller and smaller scales has driven research in the direction of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD) as new ultra-thin semiconducting materials. These ‘two-dimensional' (2D) materials are typically on the order of a few nanometers in thickness with a minimum all the way down to monolayer. These materials have several layer-dependent properties such as a transition to direct band gap at single-layer. In addition, their lack of dangling bonding and remarkable response to electric fields makes them promising candidates for future electronic devices. For the purposes of this work, two 2D TMDs were studied, MoS2 and MoTe2. This dissertation comprises of three sections, which report on exploration of charge lifetimes, investigation environmental stability at elevated temperatures in air, and establishing feasibility of UV laser annealing for large area processing of 2D TMDs, providing a necessary knowledge needed for practical use of these 2D TMDs in optoelectronic and electronic devices. (1) A study investigating the layer-dependence on the lifetime of photo-generated electrons in exfoliated 2D MoTe2 was performed. The photo-generated lifetimes of excited electrons were found to be strongly surface dependent, implying recombination events are dominated by Shockley-Read-Hall effects (SRH). Given this, the measured lifetime was shown …

Although the recent annual growth rate in the US paramedic field has been 4%, Latino and African American men have been significantly underrepresented in the field compared to their proportion in the US population at large. This problem threatens both the quality and quantity of available emergency health care. The purpose of this study was to describe how men of color (MOC) in community college paramedical programs experienced their awareness, interest, and proactive choice of paramedicine as a course of study. Using a qualitative phenomenological approach and social cognitive career theory as a theoretical framework, I interviewed 23 MOC enrolled during one semester across three community college paramedical programs in the southwestern US: 9 Latino and 14 African American, aged 18-29 with mean age 22 years. The focus of the interviews was the participants' lived experiences at various career points, as well as the enablers and disablers they had encountered. I identified three primary themes for possible use in enhancing recruitment of MOC to the paramedic field: strategic use of new digital media, promotion of the vocation's quasi-familial characteristics, and augmentation of neighborhood-based outreach. Identified areas for further research included recruitment dynamics of female paramedics, MOC persistence issues, and MOC …

My experiment concerned the influence of chronobiological (circadian) rhythm on fatigue, effort, and cardiovascular (CV) response. It evaluated responses of morning people (Larks) presented an easy or difficult recognition memory task at a time congruent or incongruent with their rhythm. Based on an extension of a conceptual analysis of fatigue influence, my central prediction was that circadian rhythm would combine interactionally with task difficulty to determine effort and associated CV responses. Specifically, effort and associated CV responses were expected to be (1) positively correspondent to task difficulty in the morning (stronger where difficulty is high), but (2) negatively correspondent to difficulty in the evening (stronger where difficulty is low). Preliminary results showed concerning gender effects on difficulty appraisal of the task, thus we examined women and men's data separately. CV findings for women were broadly, but not completely, consistent with predictions. Analyses revealed no group differences in CV response for Lark men.

Isolating novel phages using Streptomyces azureus, which produces antibiotic thiostrepton, as a host, and characterizing the genomes may help us to find new tools that could be used to develop antibiotics in addition to contribute to the databases of phages and specifically, Streptomyces phages. Streptomyces phages Alsaber, Omar, Attoomi, Rowa, and ZamZam were isolated using during this study. They were isolated from enriched soil and sequenced by Illumina sequencing method. They were isolated from three different geographical regions. They are siphoviridae phages that create small clear plaques with a diameter of approximately 0.5-1 mm, except for Rowa which has cloudy plaques, and they have varied sizes of their heads and tails. ZamZam was not characterized at this time. The sequencing shows that they are circular genome with 3' sticky overhang and various genomes' sizes with high percentage of GC content with the average of 66%. Alsaber was classified under sub-cluster BD3, while Omar was categorized under sub-cluster BD2. They share the same cluster of Cluster BD. Rowa was placed in Cluster BL and Attoomi is currently a singleton that does not fit into an established cluster. Alsaber yields 76 putative genes with no tRNA, Omar 81 putative genes with 1 …

John Ireland is one of the most important British composers of the twentieth century. Many scholars believe the works of his early period were deeply influenced by Brahms. After graduating from the Royal College of Music, Ireland went on to develop a much more individual musical language, with influence from contemporary French composers. However, the young composer found himself confronted with the challenge of finding a new and personal style without turning wholly to impressionism or to chromaticism. In Ireland's Piano Sonata, Ireland adopted several of Brahms' compositional techniques. This piano sonata is an excellent example of one of Ireland's mature works that still demonstrates Brahms' influence.

This qualitative multiple case study aims to describe the experiences of two Black women who chose to leave the classroom and transition to other roles within the field of education. Using metaphorical analysis, this study employed the four-capital theoretical framework. This framework connects human capital, structural capital, social capital, and positive psychological capital as factors related to teacher attrition and retention. This study illustrates how the participants' experiences fit into the four-capital theoretical framework and highlights the metaphors the participants use to describe their transition. The researcher conducted two semi-structured open-ended interviews in which the participants were asked to describe their experiences in the classroom as well as their experiences in their new positions. The researcher analyzed the metaphors used by the participants and categorized their responses based on the four capitals. The identified metaphors offered a vivid description of the participants' experiences. The results indicated that although the experiences of the participants are similar to those found throughout the literature, the four-capital theory helps describe their experiences more holistically. Rather than having isolated reasons for leaving the classroom, the attrition of the participants can be explained by examining the interconnectedness of the various capitals. These findings suggest that teacher …

This dissertation analyzed court decisions in injuries on school grounds cases under the Louisiana Governmental Claims Act. The question addressed was: How have the Louisiana courts interpreted the Louisiana Governmental Claims Act in litigation against Louisiana school districts and their employees? The intent of this study was to show how Louisiana's legal system has evolved, and how that evolution affected tort cases involving school boards and school board employees. Doctrinal legal research was the methodology used to answer the research question. To limit the number of cases analyzed, this study only focused on tort claims involving injury on school property. In order to gain a broad perspective, tort claims cases filed prior to the 1974 Louisiana Constitution, cases filed after the 1974 Louisiana Constitution, and cases filed after the 1995 Louisiana Liability Limits Amendment, and the Louisiana Governmental Claims Act of 1996 were analyzed. By analyzing the tort claims brought against Louisiana school districts and employees during the various time-periods, it was clear to see how the case rulings reflected the frequent changes of the Louisiana Constitution and its' laws. In the end, the state continued to control who could sue them and how much they would pay in damages.

This thesis documents the grammatical processes and semantic impact of innovative ways to pejoratively reference individuals through adjectival nominalization. Research on nominalized adjectives suggests that when meanings shift from having one property (1) to becoming a kind with associated properties (2), the noun form often encodes stereotypical attributes: [1] "Her hair is blonde." (hair color); [2] "He married a blonde." (female, sexy, dumb). Likewise, the linguistic phenomenon of genericity refers to classes or kinds and different grammatical structures reflect properties in different ways. In 1 and 2 above, the shift from adjectival blonde to indefinite NP a blonde moves the focus from the definitional characteristic to the prototypical. Similarly, adjectival gay [3] is definitional, but the marked, nominal form [4] adds socially-based conceptions of the "average" gay (example from Twitter): [3] jesus christ i make a joke and now im a gay man? (sexuality) [constructed]; [4] jesus christ i make a joke and now im a gay? … (flamboyant, abnormal). To investigate innovative reference via nominalization, two corpus studies based in human judgment were conducted. In the first study, a subset of the corpus (N=121) was annotated for pejoration by five additional linguists following the same guidelines as the original …

This dissertation examines the effects of micro-level inequality on political preferences and voting behavior.

Act one of The Metamorphosis is based on the novella by Franza Kafka of the same title. In the writing of the act, George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill and Oliver Knussen's Where the Wild Things Are provide a model of using musical material as a storytelling device. Benjamin emphasizes the parallel nature of Crimp's text through the manipulation of similar music between the acts. Knussen uses form and color to emphasize Max's childlike energy and his desire to return home. In act one of The Metamorphosis these approaches are combined to enhance Kafka's absurd narrative through a rapid collage of texture and form that is influenced by both events and characters in the opera.

This paper presents a discussion of functional silence in contemporary classical music with a particular focus on the music of Salvatore Sciarrino and Jürg Frey, two composers whose drastically-contrasting bodies of work both occupy the interstitial space between the audible and inaudible. To begin, I address three main questions: what are the functions of silence in a musical context, how do the characteristics of a work affect our perception of these silences, and how do these functions relate to our perception of music on the edge of silence. In answering these first two questions, I discuss three categories of silence---temporal, spatial, and gestural---which I use in a silence-centric analyses of Sciarrino's Let me die before I wake, Allegoria della notte, and Infinito Nero, as well as Frey's Streichquarttet III. To further apply these concepts to music on the edge of silence, I provide a fourth category---timbral silence---which describes the perception of absence or silence within the presence of sound and allows for the application of existing functional principles of silence to sounding events. In turn, this allows us to understand the music of Sciarrino and Frey in terms of timbral completion and timbral dissolution, respectively. Having established a theoretical framework …

The dwindling supply of castrati created a crisis in the opera world in the early 19th century. Castrati had dominated opera seria throughout the 18th century, but by the early 1800s their numbers were in decline. Impresarios and composers explored two voice types as substitutes for the castrato in male leading roles in serious operas: the contralto and the tenor. The study includes data from 242 serious operas that premiered in Italy between 1800 and 1840, noting the casting of the male leading role for each opera. At least 67 roles were created for contraltos as male heroes between 1800 and 1834. More roles were created for tenors in that period (at least 105), but until 1825 there is no clear preference for tenors over contraltos except in Naples. The Neapolitan preference for tenors is most likely due to the influence of Bourbon Kings who sought to bring Enlightenment values to Naples. After the last castrato retired in 1830 and the casting of contraltos as male heroic leads falls out of favor by the mid-1830s, the tenor, aided by a new chest-voice dominant style of singing, becomes the inheritor of the castrato's former role as leading man in serious Italian …

In this dissertation, I examine the role of private sector engagement in environmental governance. The relationship between mainstream environmentalism and the private sector has moved from one of general hostility to one of constructive engagement in recent times. As a result, the traditional distinctions between environmental non-governmental organizations and private corporations have become blurred, making way for public-private hybrids, facilitated by frameworks of philanthropy, sponsorship, and corporate social responsibility. Connected to these broader reconfigurations in environmental governance are simultaneous alterations in the normative framework of mainstream environmentalism. Ideologically, environmental policy and neoliberalism are now intertwined, entangling assumptions about nature and culture, and reflected in the popularization of environmental protection mechanisms that are deeply embedded in the values of the market economy. Analyzing particular examples of such engagements, and informed by Gramscian theory, I analyze the connections between rising corporate presence in mainstream environmentalism and broader normative and practical change, focusing, in particular, on the frameworks of ecomodernism and the Green Economy. I argue that contemporary private sector engagement in environmentalism leads to the support, production and construction of powerful environmentalisms: environmental ideologies and practices that gain power from, not in spite of, prevailing dominant interests. As such, these powerful environmentalisms …

The non-resonant bounded uniserial representations of Vec(R) form a certain class of extensions composed of tensor density modules, all of whose subquotients are indecomposable. The problem of classifying the extensions with a given composition series is reduced via cohomological methods to computing the solution of a certain system of polynomial equations in several variables derived from the cup equations for the extension. Using this method, we classify all non-resonant bounded uniserial extensions of Vec(R) up to length 6. Beyond this length, all such extensions appear to arise as subquotients of extensions of arbitrary length, many of which are explained by the psuedodifferential operator modules. Others are explained by a wedge construction and by the pseudodifferential operator cocycle discovered by Khesin and Kravchenko.

This study examines changes over time in 40 different Sherlock Holmes films and 39 television series and movies spanning from 1900 to 2017. Quantitative observations were mixed with a qualitative examination. Perceptions of law enforcement became more positive over time, the types of crime did not vary, and representation of race and gender improved over time with incrementally positive changes in the representation of queer, mentally ill, and physically handicapped individuals. The exact nature of these trends is discussed. Additionally, the trends of different decades are explored and compared. Sherlock Holmes is mostly used as a vehicle for storytelling rather than for the salacious crimes that he solves, making the identification of perceptions of crime in different decades difficult. The reasons for why different Sherlock Holmes projects were created in different eras and for different purposes are discussed.

A collection of poems that seeks the balance between imagination and reality that Wallace Stevens calls for in art, with a preface exploring Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just through the work of two contemporary poets.

There is great expectation that oil development in Ghana will catapult the nation towards prosperity and lead to drastic improvement in the wellbeing of Ghanaians. However, there is also concern that Ghana could fail to achieve these due to the resource curse notwithstanding the fact that scholars of the curse have yet to agree on the inevitability of the curse. Resource curse scholars adduce different reasons for its occurrence or absence. One thing common among the scholars, however, is that none discusses environmental justice in the context of the curse. In this dissertation, I examine Ghana's attempts at avoiding the resource curse through policymaking and implementation using the Guidelines on Environmental Assessment and Management of Ghana's offshore oil sector as a case study. I argue that a strong environmental justice frame is required to avert the curse in Ghana. Specifically, I assess the policy process in Ghana's oil sector, the institutional framework for managing the sector, and analyze the perception of environmental justice for policymaking. The outcome of these assessments show that although the policy process requires broadening for full and effective participation, Ghana has checks and balances policies to avert the resource curse and to deliver environmental justice in …

Rank one subshifts are dynamical systems generated by a regular combinatorial process based on sequences of positive integers called the cut and spacer parameters. Despite the simple process that generates them, rank one subshifts comprise a generic set and are the source of many counterexamples. As a result, measure theoretic rank one subshifts, called rank one transformations, have been extensively studied and investigations into rank one subshifts been the basis of much recent work. We will answer several open problems about rank one subshifts. We completely classify the maximal equicontinuous factor for rank one subshifts, so that this factor can be computed from the parameters. We use these methods to classify when large classes of rank one subshifts have mixing properties. Also, we completely classify the situation when a rank one subshift can be a factor of another rank one subshift.

Factors currently at the forefront of human in vitro fertilization (IVF) that collectively influence treatment success in the form of blastocysts development were investigated during early mammalian embryology with concentration on infertile patients presenting with diminished ovarian reserve or preliminary ovarian failure. A novel experimental technique, Graft Transplant-Embryonic Stem Cells (GT-ESC) was introduced in the mouse model, as the first inclusive approach for embryo selection in IVF treatments resulting in successful graft integration of sibling cells, stage-dependent (day 4) blastocysts. E-Cadherin-catenin bonds play an integral role in trophectoderm cell viability and calcium removal, inducing disruption of cell-to-cell bonds at the blastocyst stage was detrimental to continued blastocyst development. One of the leading methods for embryo selection for uterine transfer in human IVF is application of pre-implantation genetic screening (PGS) methods such as next generation sequencing (NGS). Female patients <35 y do not benefit from this treatment when outcome is measured by presence of fetal heart beats at 10 weeks of gestation. Patients 35-37 y benefit from PGS with no significant difference of outcome based on form of PGS method utilized. Therefore, small nucleotide polymorphism array (snp-array) or targeted-NGS should be selected for this age range to lessen the financial burden …

"Orchestral Excerpts for Conductors" is a compilation of sixty-five full score excerpts from the orchestral repertory arranged for string quartet and piano. The purpose of this collection is to provide conducting students with a pedagogical resource for learning how to handle technically challenging excerpts in orchestral music. This dissertation serves as a plan for the final publication of the excerpts book; while it includes the full score excerpts, it does not include the arrangements for string quartet and piano.

Viola pedagogy has historically been closely intertwined with and highly dependent upon violin repertoire. As the viola emerged as an instrument worthy of independent study, many still rely on transcriptions of violin etudes. Fortunately, the efforts of performers, teachers, and scholars have brought forth discoveries of original viola literature and thus shifted toward the perception that viola should begin to embrace its individual pedagogy. Viennese composer and violist Marco Frank contributed three volumes of Viola-Etuden and a method book, Praktische Viola-Schule, which are suitable for the intermediate violist. This document explores and analyzes the usefulness of an original viola series in comparison to the ‘tried and true' violin transcriptions.

Using a mixed-methods approach, the current study examined the relationship between early childhood preservice teachers' cultural awareness and their self-efficacy in equitable science education. It further aimed to determine if the relationship between these two constructs was moderated by their race/ethnicity or the number of languages they speak. Finally, it sought to identify preservice teachers' understanding of equity in science education, as well as how they planned to incorporate the equity concept into their future science teaching practices for diverse learners in early childhood classrooms. Data for this study were drawn from 380 preservice teachers who self-enrolled in a science methods course as part of a teacher preparation program. To measure the preservice teachers' cultural awareness and self-efficacy in equitable science education, two Likert-scale instruments, Cultural Diversity Awareness Inventory (CDAI) and Self-Efficacy Beliefs about Equitable Science Teaching and Learning (SEBEST), were employed. Qualitative data were collected by administering six open-ended questions. For quantitative results, statistically significant findings indicated that when the participants were more aware of creating a multicultural environment and instruction and/or when they were less biased and were more sensitive/knowledgeable about diversity of students and families, their expectations about science learning of students from diverse backgrounds would be …

Korean composer Young Jo Lee (b.1943) is considered a precursor of Korean fusion music. In his works, he interlaces elements of traditional Korean music with compositional styles and performances techniques from western musical traditions. This dissertation provides an analysis of Lee's Dodri for Cello and Janggo (1995), one of his most representative works of fusion music. As indicated by the title Dodri (which in Korean means a "movement back and forth"), Lee intended to showcase a friendly interplay of the janggo and the cello, with each instrument playing a leading role that helps bring out the essence of traditional Korean traditional music. In this piece, Lee writes a number of melodies and uses traditional Korean performance techniques for the cello intended to imitate the sound and sentiments of traditional Korean instruments, all while preserving its inherent nature. This kind of fusion, where different musical elements are merged with each other but remain separate enough to maintain their own uniqueness, is significant to Lee's philosophy. This dissertation also describes Lee's efforts to preserve the integrity of traditional Korean music within fusion music and lend new insights regarding traditional Korean musical practice to musicologists, composers, and audiences. Furthermore, this study is intended …

Se Enkhbayar (b. 1956) is one of the most important contemporary Mongolian composers in China. His choral tone poem, Önchin Botog, integrates the traditional Mongolian musical elements Urtiin Duu (long song) and Khöömii (throat singing) with modern choral music and is one of the most representative works in the genre of modern Mongolian choral music. The purpose of this study is to provide a performance guidance for non-Mongolian musicians on Se Enkhbayar's work, Önchin Botog, by presenting his biographical and cultural backgrounds, discussing the use of traditional Mongolian singing styles, special rhythmic patterns (horse-step rhythm) and Chinese pentatonic scales. For conductors, this guide can shorten preparation time by providing musical analysis for artistic interpretation and practical points for sound effect creation. For solo singers, this guide will enable a Bel Canto singer to sing Urtiin Duu in Mongolian singing style. For Khöömii singers, this guide provides supplementary practical suggestions.