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The purpose of the study was to discover and give voice to the perceptions of Black and Latino adolescent males regarding their school attitudes (attitudes toward school, attitudes towards teachers, motivation/self-regulation, goal valuation, and academic self-perception) and their level of hope (agency and pathways) for the future. This mixed methods study used an explanatory sequential approach to understand the quantitative and qualitative data. The results of a multiple linear regression revealed that four independent variables: motivation/self-regulation, agency, attitudes towards teachers, and pathways, R = 0.729, R[superscript 2] = 0.532, F(4, 242) = 68.256, p < 0.001, effect size = 1.137, large, predicted academic self-perception. Qualitative themes included the following: intrinsic motivators support overall success, students want to be supported by educators to succeed, role models are essential, and schools should offer courses, clubs, and career tracks that will interest students. These results should be used to construct a positive school culture and inform teaching practice. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The goal of this study is to provide a plan for nonprofits to provide a succession plan for their organization. The action plan to be utilized is the career development of the existing staff. The transferability of this study can be used in for profit organizations. The implications of this study are that the organization can utilize the data obtained to support and sustain the growth of services provided to the population served and to attract talent to the organization. This provides a strategic advantage to organizations that compete to attract talent as well as sustain their organizational growth. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Despite the growing body of research about the experiences of rural students, much of the literature does not address the experiences of this population at the intersection of race and higher education success. More specifically, Black students, particularly Black men, are less represented in the literature. Black men have been explored at the intersection of their urban identities and their experiences within urban environments. This phenomenological study examined the lived experiences of eight rural Black men and the critical factors that cultivated their success and ability to persist toward earning undergraduate degrees from four-year Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). The anti-deficit achievement and rural cultural wealth frameworks guided this study. Data was collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews and analyzed through a coding process. The data analysis process developed four themes. Analysis of the results suggests that rural Black men experience success in college and persist toward degree completion when they leverage cultural capital from their rural upbringing, make personal investments in their undergraduate career to be successful, become involved on-campus, and utilize their social capital gained in college. Implications for policy, practice, and future research are discussed in the final chapter. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This dissertation consists of three essays that use and develop econometric methods to causally investigate topics in education and development economics. In the first chapter, I develop an econometric framework to correctly and efficiently draw inference in models where estimated value-added (VA) is an explanatory variable (and models where it appears as the dependent variable). Estimated VA measures have become increasingly popular metrics of worker and institutional quality, and they are now widely used in regressions by researchers seeking to establish links between worker quality and a broad range of outcomes. Although consistent standard errors are crucial to obtain correct confidence intervals and assess the validity of conclusions drawn by studies using VA measures in regressions, the literature has not yet tackled this issue. I contribute to this literature by setting up an econometric framework that allows me to show why naive standard error estimators are inconsistent in such models, derive consistent standard error estimators, propose a more efficient estimator for models using VA measures as explanatory variables, and propose a testable condition under which naive standard errors are consistent for models that use VA measures as dependent variables. Then, in an application using data from North Carolina public schools, I find that the increase in standard errors resulting from the required correction that I propose is larger than the impact of clustering standard errors. In the second chapter, based on joint work with Serena Canaan and Pierre Mouganie, we use VA measures to provide the first causal evidence on the impact of college advisor quality on student outcomes. To do so, we exploit a unique setting where students are randomly assigned to faculty advisors during their first year of college. We find that having a higher grade VA advisor reduces time to complete freshman year and increases four-year graduation rates by 2.5 percentage points. It also raises high-ability students' likelihood of enrolling and graduating with a STEM degree by 4 percentage points. The magnitudes of our estimated effects are comparable to those from successful financial aid programs and proactive coaching interventions. We also show that non-grade measures of advisor VA predict student success. In particular, advisors who are effective at improving students' persistence and major choice also boost other college outcomes. Our results indicate that allocating resources towards improving the quality of academic advising may play a key role in promoting college success. In the third chapter, based on joint work with Clement de Chaisemartin, we consider the case of a randomized controlled trial with individual-level treatment assignment, and we allow for individual-level and cluster-level (e.g. village-level) shocks to affect the units' potential outcomes. We show that one can draw inference on two estimands: the ATE conditional on the realizations of the cluster-level shocks, using heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors; the ATE netted out of those shocks, using cluster-robust standard errors. We show that by clustering, researchers can test if the treatment would still have had an effect, had the stochastic shocks that occurred during the experiment been different. Then, the decision to cluster or not depends on the level of external validity one would like to achieve. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Investment law is a rapidly moving and increasingly debated area of international law. Shifts in international economic relations, the broad nature of investment standards, the role played by arbitral tribunals and the guarantees granted by law to foreign investors are the object of many comments and disagreements. In particular, it is often feared that contractual stability commitments taking the form of stabilisation clauses are excessive and detrimental to states in terms of sovereignty. This thesis does not focus on the sovereignty debate but proposes a contextual analysis of those stabilisation clauses. Because stabilisation clauses implement FDI protection policies, it suggests that the sustainability of a stabilisation clause essentially depends on whether the FDI protection policy remains compatible with host states' future public policies and development needs. The sustainability of stabilisation clauses is thus considered at three different levels: in terms of (a) political and economic ideology, (b) policymaking and Cc) in terms of contractual commitments. The thesis finds that the current FDI framework suffers from significant ideological tensions because it defends liberal values and imposes liberal standards which tend to ignore national interests. At the same time, it suggests that the policies are not legally unsustainable: they provide broad standards of treatment, do not breach the debated 'right to development' and do not prevent host states from setting up 'valid' policies and regulatory measures as long as a due process of law is observed. Investment contracts, in turn, are often criticised for their negative impacts on states' regulatory powers, but they provide little reliable guarantees of stability to foreign investors and justify a need to rely on contract stabilisation commitments, especially since the role and interpretation of 'legitimate expectations' under the Fair and Equitable standard of treatment is changing. Current contract stabilisation methods, however, create unreasonable expectations, make FDI policies legally unbalanced and must therefore be reviewed to allow for more policy space and to create more 'legitimate' predictability expectations.

The proportion of Black psychologists is exceptionally small which may limit the accessibility of culturally competent mental health services for Black clients. The current project was an attempt to understand factors that help recruit, retain, and graduate Black doctoral students in psychology. This exploratory investigation probed of the lived experiences of Black doctoral psychology students in predominantly White Psy.D. programs. Thirteen current Black students in two Psy.D. doctoral participated in semi-structured interviews that explored the protective factors that had enabled them to pursue their studies. They were also asked to recount their experiences as a Black student in their classes or field sites and to recall any experiences of microaggressions they have faced during the course of their training. Interviews were analyzed for recurrent themes using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Eleven of the 13 participants spoke to the support they had received from family and friends as essential to their perseverance in their doctoral program. Several participants also talked about the importance of mentors as well as other factors such as gender, racial identity and spirituality. Ten participants spontaneously commented on the pressure they felt as one of few Black students in their program. They were often called upon to be a spokesperson for the entire Black community and some felt a compelled to excel as a positive token for the Black community. All but two of the participants described microaggressions they had experienced over the course of the program. The findings indicated the importance of social support networks and the presence of mentors in insuring recruitment, retention, and program completion. Recommendations included insuring that Black doctoral students have multicultural competent mentors and that the school administration and community make an active commitment to authentic cultural awareness. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This study analyzed the effectiveness of a minority male mentoring program at a public two-year institution of higher education in South Carolina. To assist in investigating the successfulness of African American males at the institution, data regarding graduation rates, grade point averages, developmental course completion, and campus involvement from 2001-2015 was analyzed to determine if African American males who participate in a minority male mentoring program are more successful than African American males not in a minority male mentoring program. Data sources for this study included a focus group of African American males in the minority male mentoring program and one-on-one interviews with African American males not in the minority male mentoring program. As African American males continue to enroll in institutions of higher education, two-year institutions must evaluate support services to determine if African American males are being prepared to become academically successful. Results indicated no significant difference in grade point averages and developmental course completion rates, but a significant difference in African American male retention. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Advances in technological uses within public schools provide increased methods to collect and store non-public personal information (NPI) or personally identifiable information (PII) from both students and employees. Consequently, the sensitive information collected is susceptible to unauthorized disclosure, as various public school employees are trusted to manage and safeguard information. Although the use of technology assists in the protection of public school NPI/PII, the personnel who operate, manage, and access the information must protect the information. However, personnel may not fully understand the various aspects of protecting the information articulated through an information security awareness (ISA) training program. The problem explored in this qualitative holistic multiple case study was ISA-training to reduce the unauthorized disclosure of information within public schools. The purpose of this study was to explore ISA-training through the experiences of public school personnel to reduce the unauthorized disclosure of NPI/PII. The protection motivation theory was the theoretical framework used for this study. Data collection methods for study included 15 interviews from public school teachers and administrators and a review of openly available public school documents related to information security. Interviews were conducted over the telephone using open-ended questions. NVivo 11 software was used to analyze the data. Themes were identified by a cross-case analysis. Results provide valuable knowledge about methods to reduce unauthorized disclosure of information in the public school system. The themes identified included Securing and Effective Training Reduced Unauthorized Disclosure and Becoming Informed Increased Awareness and Compliance. The study results from this study support existing literature on the effectiveness of user training in reducing the unauthorized disclosure of information. It is recommended for future studies to use a quantitative or a mixed-method research design. Additionally, it is recommended that a future study encompass another set of participants with different experiences. The next recommendation for future studies is to assess the factors associated with and the decisions made by education administrators on whether or not an ISA-training program is offered to employees. The last recommendation is to assess behavior exhibited by employees when confronted with an information security dilemma on the handling of NPI/PII. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This study investigated whether there was a correlation between first language proficiency as measured by the Mississippi Curriculum Test (MCT II) Reading and Language Arts and foreign language proficiency as measured by the French Language Proficiency Test. Data for the independent variable, first language proficiency, was collected from the cumulative folders of 81 students enrolled in a French II class at a high school in central Mississippi. To obtain data for the dependent variable, foreign language proficiency, the French Language Proficiency Test was administered to the 81 participants who provided data for the independent variable. The Gamma Coefficient Test was used to calculate the strength and the direction of the correlation between first language proficiency and foreign language proficiency. The data analysis revealed a significant negative correlation between both variables in all the seven subgroups that made up the sample population. This led to the conclusion that first language proficiency alone does not guarantee successful learning of and proficiency in a foreign or second language. Other variables may have to be taken into consideration. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Jade County Public Schools has provided school-based therapeutic day treatment in its public schools for more than 10 years. This program was adopted by the school system to provide an intervention in the school and classroom to address the challenging behaviors of students with emotional and behavioral disorders. Currently, three human services agencies provide school-based therapeutic day treatment services to students in Jade County Public Schools with the goals of increasing academic achievement, increasing school attendance, reducing undesirable behaviors and increasing desirable behaviors. Until now, there has not been a formal evaluation of the program to determine if improvements were needed to meet the established goals to meet the challenges of students with emotional and behavioral disorders, as intended. This formative program evaluation of Jade County Public Schools' School-Based Therapeutic Day Treatment program (DTX) was designed to provide school administrators, staff, parents, students and the agencies providing the school-based program with evidence-based information on the merit, worth, and value of the school-based mental health intervention and to identify areas of improvement needed to increase academic and behavioral outcomes for students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) at Jade County Public Schools. The methods utilized to conduct this evaluation sought to determine to what extent participation in the school-based day treatment program decreased behavior referrals, number of days of suspension, and number of suspensions and increased attendance and grade point averages for students with emotional and behavioral disorders. Also, participants' perceptions and lived experiences pertaining to the benefits, challenges or concerns, and aspirations for the program if it were to operate at its highest potential were explored. The results from analyzing quantitative and qualitative data collected to answer the five questions are addressed in this program evaluation. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This phenomenological investigation focused on the exploration of the lived experiences of students who had dropped out of traditional four year colleges and returned to complete their degree by e-Learning. The goal of this investigation was to gain a new understanding of the psychological, motivational, and ethical aspects of continuing a four year college education through an e-Learning environment. The data included in-depth interviews with the participants on their perceptions and experiences in achieving a baccalaureate degree by e-learning after dropping out of a traditional four year college program. To enhance the rigor and trustworthiness of the study, the researcher engaged in member checking, reflexive and methodological journaling, and analysis. Phenomenological data analysis procedures followed recommendations by Creswell (2005) and Moustakas (1994). Specifically, the analysis was conducted using the modified van Kaam method proposed by Moustakas (1994), with a semi-structured interview format (Leedy & Ormrod, 2010). Results of the study are presented as descriptions of how participants perceived the impact of e-Learning on their educational, personal and professional lives. Five thematic categories emerged from the interviews: (a) flexibility; (b) academic integrity; (c) satisfaction; (d) the importance of the teacher; (e) a diminishing need for support as the learner proceeds through the e-Learning process. Categories consisted of one or more related themes. Consideration is given as to how the researcher's experiences and beliefs played a role in the study. Strengths, weaknesses, and considerations of the study findings are offered as are implications of the study for practice and for future research. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This dissertation is a historical study of the life and work of French-Canadian architect and engineer, Ernest Cormier (1885-1980), who is considered to be among the most important Canadian architects of his generation, yet about whom relatively few scholarly studies exist. In light of the range of issues raised by Cormier’s work and their degree of importance to an understanding of Canadian culture at large during the first half of the twentieth century, this dissertation argues that no other architect operating in Canada during the interwar period made a contribution that touched on so many salient issues as Cormier did. A cosmopolitan figure who tapped into everything available to him, Cormier’s multidisciplinary practice spanned over five decades in his native city of Montréal, and reflects his synthesis of diverse influences, his role as an agent of cultural transfer, and his remarkable degree of savoir-faire in everything he undertook. Entrusted with important commissions at local, national and international levels, Cormier’s contribution merits further study both as a milestone in the development of architecture in Canada, and for what it reveals about the charged sociocultural dynamics of Montréal at that time, which was then the cultural and economic capital of the country. Cormier was particularly active during the interwar period, which was an important time in the advent of cultural modernity in the province of Québec, and in the development of a national consciousness among French Canadians. Focused primarily on the close study of two very different yet interrelated projects by Cormier that date from this period, this dissertation contends that the house he designed for himself (1930-31) and the main pavilion of the Université de Montréal (1924-43) are his most important works, both for what they reveal about his sustained commitments as well as for the innovative ways in which they address the conditions of modernity, and thus, critically illuminate the opportunities and constraints of their time and place. Heavily reliant on the study of archival materials alongside empirical analyses of the buildings, and readings from a range of interdisciplinary sources in order to take account of the work’s meaning and significance within and beyond architecture culture, a central leitmotif of this study is the theme of ‘construction’ construed both as a preoccupation internal to Cormier’s oeuvre and as a theoretical orientation driving my analysis of his work. In the first instance, the figure of the constructeur [constructor] is incorporated into Cormier’s professional title to better align himself with French architecture and engineering culture, particularly with the work of Auguste Perret, whom he greatly admired. As well, for Cormier, construction in the sense of building things, is inseparable from design, and finds sustained expression in his deep curiosity for how things are made, his investment in making at all scales across diverse métiers and media, and his exacting standards for all of his work to be well executed. Finally, keenly attendant to architecture’s communicative function, this dissertation examines the profound representational role played by the Cormier residence and the Université de Montréal in the construction of identity at the respective scales of the individual and that of a collective., Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning

Between 1918 and 1932, a number of European modern architects described their work as “scientifically managed” or “taylorized”, and as “laboratory work” or “practical experiments”, all of which were approaches attributable to the principles of organization used in American industry. Scholars would later dismiss these claims as “ideological” or “propagandistic”, since many of the architectural works of this period were in fact neither fabricated like industrial products nor did they perform as efficiently. However, relying on recent scholarship regarding the history of American industrial organization between 1880 and 1918, this dissertation reassesses the claims of these architects, revealing a more nuanced and thorough comprehension of the principles of American industrial organization, particularly scientific management, than has been previously acknowledged. While many modern architects admired the tools, products and spaces of industry, a select group also showed interest in scientific management’s central ontological theory, the “laboratory method”, which called for the fusion of inquiry and material production within a single space. While the laboratory method is most closely associated with Frederick Taylor, who developed this approach specifically for use in the industrial plant, it was Frank Gilbreth, who, by 1918, had translated this theory for use in a different space of production, the construction site. Frank and his partner, Lillian Gilbreth, developed a “multi sensory” approach to projecting processes in “space-time”, one that combined orthographic projection with data mapping and new media, such as photography and film. Their “visualization theory” offered modern architects assistance in an already defined design problem, namely the projection of architectural artifacts at the scale of the pre-modern urban unit, the village or settlement, with the intricacy of a pre-modern manufactured product, such as a door or window, all while considering the perception of a moving subject. Utilizing the principles of modern management, architects sought to rationalize their own “mental work”, the production of drawing sets, as well as to participate in the bureaucratization or standardization of material parameters and social conventions, occurring at the municipal, national and international scales, during this period. While an interest in scientific management among interwar architects was widespread, this dissertation will show that there were few actual examples of the application of these principles to the process of architectural production; the most notable examples were those conducted by Peter Behrens (1918-1920), Le Corbusier (1923-26), Martin Wagner (1924-1929), Walter Gropius (1926-1929) and Ernst May (1926-1930). In all five cases, the primary goals were the same as they had been for Taylor and Gilbreth, the derivation of novel tentative standard methods, and not solely increase in the efficiency of material production. The application of the laboratory method to settlement-building by these architects was not revolutionary so much as it was evolutionary, with Hermann Muthesius’ notion of typological evolution and adaptation, summarized in Kleinhaus und Kleinsiedlung (1920), as well as a set of projection instruments included in Raymond Unwin’s design manual, Town Planning in Practice (1909), providing a crucial foundation for the interwar work. This interwar work was further informed by a series of American experiments in industrialized settlement-building, including the Atterbury, Harms and Small, and Unit Systems. The laboratory method and visualization theory of scientific management required a particular balance of control and feedback, which proved difficult to achieve in architectural production, helping to explain the relatively few applications of these principles. Expanding conjecture from the atelier onto the construction site and into use itself, exposed architects to a myriad of problems that they were not entirely equipped to handle. The unique context of Weimar Germany afforded architects like Wagner, Gropius and May a framework that combined the degree of bureaucratization necessary to support experimentation without the “over-bureaucratization” that would define the postwar period. A similar framework of control and feedback afforded a team of architects, working within in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, between 1957-1964, an opportunity for applying the laboratory method to architectural production. This work would in turn attract the attention of an international group of artists and theorists, the New Tendencies movement (1961-1973), who saw in it the architectural equivalent of “programmed art”. As one of the most frequently cited books at these conferences, Norbert Wiener, explained in 1952, “the notion of programing” was itself rooted in the “work of Taylor and the Gilbreths on time study”, before it was “transferred to the machine”. This research will serve to show that modern architects had translated the principles of industrial organization well before programing became digitized., Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which the new mode of industrial organization associating mass production with mass consumption in the early twentieth century--what we call Fordism--had profound cultural repercussions on urban spatial practices. I address Fordism as a mode of socialization that deployed industrial techniques to reconstitute the very nature of social relations. This attempt at broad socialization through technological means reflected a type of technical thought coalescing in the industrial practices of the early twentieth century that both brought spatial practices into its service and radically altered existing social relations. As such, Fordist ideas formulated to address efficiency in industrial production extended to the city, its architecture, and its inhabitants, construing them as technological artifacts subject to the same economies of scope and scale, and requirements of production and consumption as the manufacture of automobiles, demonstrating that Fordist modes of production permeated not just manufacturing processes but also the organization of management structures, the architectural layout of factories and offices, the social spaces of the city, and popular conceptions of individuality, subjectivity, and the body.

This dissertation examines architectural engagements with communication technologies, within the framework of mid-twentieth-century efforts to institute a global community and engineer media democracies. I interrogate the sound modernities that architects constructed in collaboration with engineers, officials, and acousticians, and I demonstrate the architectural strategies that informed them: the theater, the concert hall, the cinema. These interiors, I argue, reconfigured the international community as a networked audience, and the institutions of world organization as the main stages of international diplomacy.

This dissertation provides an account of how computing left behind its origins in academic and military research to become part of the hospital's equipmental setting. I examine the efforts of reformers, including administrators, planners, architects, and computer consultants, to provide appropriate accommodation for modern biomedicine. I explore three stories in order to untangle the admixture of architecture, medicine, and computation as they intertwined through a mutual engagement with automation, operations research, cybernetics, and biomedical research in the postwar hospital. In Boston, pioneering research consultants Bolt Beranek and Newman collaborated with the Massachusetts General Hospital on an experimental total information system known as the Hospital Computer Project. In London, architects Llewelyn Davies Weeks used computer algorithms to help design Northwick Park Hospital. And in Canada, the Montreal Neurological Institute adopted computing to transform its expertise in clinical brain imaging research. When possible, I emphasize specific computers, arguing that attention to the presence of the machine itself contributes to our understanding of hospital life.

This dissertation examines the transformation of the French built environment alongside medical discourses of the body in the early 19th century, arguing that emerging theories on health and hygiene comprised a politically charged subtext in the design of spaces where gender and class identities were formed. Following the military defeats that led to the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, fears over national decline spurred medical thought on the regeneration of French citizens. The ensuing debates about the body and hygiene gave rise to new architectural programs - such as gymnasiums, swimming schools, and public gardens - where emergent practices for rehabilitating the bourgeois body, both male and female, were implemented. I trace the translation of these spatial forms and practices across a range of military, educational, and recreational settings, to analyze the role of architecture in shaping 19th-century embodiments and expressions of gender, class, and citizenship.

The influenza virus hemagglutinin (HA) surface protein is a primary antigenic target for neutralization of viral infection. HA also mediates membrane fusion between the virus and a cell, which is the first critical step during infection. Traditional techniques to study infection neutralization by antibodies or the membrane fusion process rely on ensemble measurements, confounding the precise mechanism of infection neutralization and obscuring transient conformational intermediates. This dissertation describes advances made in a fluorescence microscopy-based single-particle fusion assay to overcome the limitations of ensemble measurements in these types of studies. Virus particles are labeled to visualize lipid mixing between a virus and a target membrane formed upon a glass or polymer support. Optionally, the viral lumen can be labeled to visualize the subsequent release of viral contents.

This dissertation theorizes the genre of the urban database documentary, a mode of media art practice that uses structural systems to uncover new perspectives on the lived experience of place. While particularly prominent in recent decades, I argue that the genre of the urban database documentary arises at the turn of the 20th century in response to the rise of the metropolis and the widespread adoption of new media technologies such as photography, cinema, and radio. This was a time when the modern city engendered significant disorientation in its inhabitants, dramatically expanding horizontally and vertically. The rampant pace of technological development at this time also spawned feelings of dehumanization and the loss of connection to embodied experience. The urban database documentary emerges as a symptomatic response to the period's new cultural conditions, meeting a collective need to create order from vast quantities of information and re-frame perception of daily experience. The design of structural systems became a creative method for simultaneously addressing these vast new quantities of information, while attending to the particularities of individual experience. For media artists, building a database into the aesthetic design of a work itself offers an avenue for creatively documenting the radical multiplicity of urbanized environments, preserving attention to the sensory experience of details while aspiring to a legible whole. Crucially, I argue that the design of these systems is a vital form of authorial agency. By reading these artists' work in relation to contemporary practice, I aim to make transparent the underlying, non-technical ambitions that fuel this distinctive mode of media art practice.

Around the world, the number of air passengers has quintupled since 1980. During the same time, air traffic in the Pearl River Delta--the urban region that includes Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou--has risen by a factor of 50. Scholars have typically studied that expansion by analyzing mega-projects like 'starchitect' passenger terminals and high-speed airport railways. Yet they have ignored the emergence of parallel transport systems designed to plug less privileged people and places into the infrastructure of global mobility. Cheaper, rattier, and more geographically diffuse, these networks cater to passengers whose movement across international borders is limited by their income, citizenship, or place of birth. These incipient air travelers, and the so-called "transborder" systems that they use, have radically reordered the cross-border flow of goods and people in the Pearl River Delta. Focusing on Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA), the dissertation examines how the airport has been redesigned to accommodate larger and more diverse passenger flows. Tracing the movement of different types of passengers--the retiree, the toddler, the migrant worker--it demonstrates how each traveler’s trajectory is determined by intersecting political, logistical, and financial considerations. The dissertation also investigates a network of airport check-in terminals that allow passengers to fly through HKIA without applying for a Hong Kong visa. Located deep inside Mainland China, these "upstream" check-in facilities cater to passengers who have difficulty obtaining a visa; such as Chinese tourists with a rural hukou, or African businessmen. A sealed ferry transports passengers from Mainland China to HKIA, where they are shuttled via an underground train to their departure gate. Isolated from other passenger flows, upstream travelers thus technically never enter Hong Kong. Through interviews, photographs, and digital mapping techniques, Airport Urbanism documents how HKIA--as well as the boundary between Mainland China and Hong Kong--have been reconfigured to abet the global circulation of capital and labor. In so doing, the dissertation posits airport infrastructure as a useful lens for interpreting broader changes in the regulation of cross-border mobility and the spatial articulation of national frontiers.

DNA replication is a fundamental cellular process. However, the structure and dynamics of the eukaryotic DNA replication machinery remain poorly understood. A soluble extract system prepared from Xenopus eggs recapitulates eukaryotic DNA replication outside of a cell on a variety of DNA templates. This system has been used to reveal many aspects of DNA replication using a variety of ensemble biochemical techniques. Single-molecule fluorescence imaging is a powerful tool to dissect biochemical mechanisms. By immobilizing or confining a substrate, its interaction with individual, soluble, fluorescently-labeled reactants can be imaged over time and without the need for synchrony. These molecular movies reveal binding parameters of the reactant and any population heterogeneity. Moreover, if the experiments are imaged in wide-field format, the location or motion of the labeled species along the substrate can be followed with nanometer accuracy. This dissertation describes the use and development of novel single-molecule fluorescence imaging techniques to study eukaryotic DNA replication. A biophysical characterization of a replication fork protein, PCNA, revealed both helical and non-helical sliding modes along DNA. Previous experiments demonstrate that the egg extracts efficiently replicate surface-immobilized linear DNA. This finding suggested replication of DNA could be followed as motion of the replication fork along the extended DNA. However, individual proteins bound at the replication fork could not be visualized in the wide-field due to the background from the high concentration of the fluorescent protein needed to compete with the extract’s endogenous protein. To overcome this concentration barrier, I have developed a wide-field technique that enables sensitive detection of single molecules at micromolar concentrations of the labeled protein of interest. The acronym for this method, PhADE, denotes three essential steps: (1) Localized PhotoActivation of fluorescence at the immobilized substrate, (2) Diffusion of unbound fluorescent molecules to reduce the background and (3) Excitation and imaging of the substrate-bound molecules. PhADE imaging of flap endonuclease I (Fen1) during replication revealed the time-evolved pattern of replication initiation, elongation and termination and the kinetics of Fen1 exchange during Okazaki fragment maturation. In the future, PhADE will enable the elucidation of the dynamic events at the eukaryotic DNA replication fork. PhADE will also be broadly applicable to the investigation of other complex biochemical process and low affinity interactions. It will be especially useful to those researchers wishing to correlate motion with binding events.

This dissertation is developed around questions of how cultural fascinations with seeing the city from above are intertwined with the birth and development of the city planning profession. To explore this question, I examine three contexts linked to already-familiar episodes from the history of city planning: Paris in the aftermath of Haussmann-ization, the visual approach of proto-planner Daniel H. Burnham, and the New York region in advance of the rise of master-planner Robert Moses. These settings serve as a basis for a reoriented approach to understanding how and why a new category of experts tasked with intervening in urban conditions emerged. Among other views, Paris is seen from the height of a tethered hot air balloon; San Francisco and Chicago from Twin Peaks and the roof of the Railway Exchange Building, respectively; and New York from the lens of a Fairchild aerial camera, as well as from the 86th story of the Empire State Building. The sublime experience facilitated by such vistas undergirds the discussion. It is employed to recast existing historical accounts of the birth of the city-planning profession at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries to more deeply reflect its interaction with the proliferation and subsequent breakdown of a visual culture of "the city" from above shared amongst experts and citizens alike.

The studies discussed in this thesis unify experimental and theoretical techniques, both established and novel, in investigating the problem of how a protein that binds specific sites on DNA translocates to, recognizes, and stably binds to its target site or sites. The thesis is organized into two parts. Part I outlines the history of the problem and the theory and experiments that have addressed the problem and presents an apparent incompatibility between efficient search and stable, specific binding. To address this problem, we elaborate a model of protein-DNA interaction in which the protein may bind DNA in either a search (S) mode or a recognition (R) mode. The former is characterized by zero or weak sequence-dependence in the binding energy, while the latter is highly sequence-dependent. The protein undergoes a random walk along the DNA in the S mode, and if it encounters its target site, must undergo a conformational transition into the R mode. The model resolves the apparent paradox, and accounts for the observed speed, specificity, and stability in protein-DNA interactions. The model shows internal agreement as regards theoretical and simulated results, as well as external agreement with experimental measurements. Part II reports on research that has tested the applicability of the two-mode model to the tumor suppressor transcription factor p53. It describes in greater depth the experimental techniques and findings up to the present work, and introduces the techniques and biological system used in our research. We employ single-molecule optical microscopy in two projects to study the diffusional kinetics of p53 on DNA. The first project measures the diffusion coefficient of p53 and determines that the protein satisfies a number of requirements for the validity of the two-mode model and for efficient target localization. The second project examines the sequence-dependence in p53's sliding kinetics, and explicitly models the energy landscape it experiences on DNA and relates features of the landscape to observed local variation in diffusion coefficient. The thesis closes with proposed extensions and complements to the projects, and a discussion of the implications of our work and its relation to recent developments in the field.