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In this thesis I place the intellectual and practical work of Samuel Hartlib and his associates in its appropriate imperial and global settings, notably in the Atlantic World of mid-seventeenth-century English colonialism. I argue that the participation of the Hartlib Circle in the improvement programme that contributed to the construction of English colonies has been insufficiently recognised, either in scholarship on the Hartlibians or in the general literature on early modern English colonial expansion. This study addresses this issue through a detailed examination of private and official correspondence, chronicles, sermons, legislation, journals, and other texts that directly or indirectly related Hartlib and his allies to the Early English Empire. In order to properly address the full extent of the participation of Hartlib and his network in English imperialism, the thesis draws on approaches in the history of science and imperial history to examine four Atlantic English colonial regions during the period 1630-1660. As a result, this thesis reveals for the first time Hartlib's extensive participation in efforts to use empirical practical methods to improve Ireland, New England, Virginia, and the West Indies from the reign of Charles I, through the civil wars, Commonwealth and Protectorate, and to the Restoration.

This study presents a detailed analysis of the liturgical music of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976). In addition to several pieces Britten wrote for the Anglican liturgy and one for the Roman Catholic Church, a number of other works, not originally composed for liturgical purpose, but which function well in a liturgical setting, are included, providing a substantial repertory which has hitherto received little critical commentary. Although not occupying a place of central importance in the composer’s musical output, it is argued that a detailed examination of this liturgical music is important to form a fuller understanding of Britten’s creative character; it casts additional light on the composer’s technical procedures (in particular his imaginative exploitation of tonal structure which embraced modality, free-tonality and twelve-tone ideas) and explores further Britten’s commitment to the idea of a composer serving society. The importance of church-going in Britten’s early life and the influence it exerted on his music for the church is considered. It is argued that ‘Tradition’ is a key concept in the music of the Anglican Church. The presentation of an adumbration of the Church of England’s history shows what the totems of this Tradition are and that they are clearly recognisable in the music of composers at the heart of it. It is shown that Britten both respected and fed off Tradition and that his liturgical music clearly relates to the Anglican Church Music Tradition in a specific way. This study concludes that Britten’s liturgical music can most intelligently be viewed in relation to a specific branch of the Tradition: the Parish Church Musical Tradition. It is a context that has not previously been clearly recognised in previous critical studies and this has therefore led, it is argued, to an insufficient understanding of its particular aesthetic characteristics.

This thesis describes a generative model for representing disfluent phenomena in human speech. This model makes use of observed syntactic structure present in disfluent speech, and uses a right-corner transform on syntax trees to model this structure in a very natural way. Specifically, the phenomenon of speech repair is modeled by explicitly modeling the partially completed constituent structure, building up phrasal structure as it is read in, and allowing incomplete constituents as part of the final structure of an utterance. This model is then implemented in a working system for parsing transcribed text. This system maps transformed syntax trees to a hierarchical time-series model, which is able to parse in linear time by implementing a fixed-depth stack. The results of this system dramatically improve parsing and repair detection over standard baselines, and are approaching the performance of models that are not constrained by incremental processing and psycholinguistic plausibility. These results are then analyzed, and the parameters to this parser are varied systematically to examine the effect of various settings and models of repair. Several extensions to the model are introduced which incorporate additional features such as lexical identity while remaining incremental, suggesting suitability for extended models of disfluency as well as providing a starting point for psycholinguistic models of disfluency. Finally, this thesis concludes by laying out several possible future research directions, and by summarizing the work produced so far. [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 project had two main goals: (1) to investigate to what extent planetary nebulae (PNe) are chemically homogeneous; and (2) to provide physical constraints on the central star properties of each PN. The first goal was accomplished by using HST/STIS spectra to measure the abundances of up to seven elements in numerous spatial regions within each of seven PNe (IC 2165, IC 3568, NGC 2440, NGC 3242, NGC 5315, NGC 5882, and NGC 7662). The second goal was achieved by computing a photoionization model of each nebula, using the observed emission line strengths as constraints. The major finding of this study is that the nebular abundances of He, C, N, O, Ne, S, and Ar are consistent with a chemically homogeneous picture for each PN. Additionally, it was found through experimenting with three different density profiles (constant, Gaussian, and Gaussian with a power-law) that the determination of the central star's temperature and luminosity is only slightly sensitive to the profile choice. Lastly, post-AGB evolutionary model predictions of temperature and luminosity available in the literature were plotted along with the values inferred from the photoionization model analysis to yield initial and final mass estimates of each central star.

Organisms can alter traits plastically in response to the biotic and abiotic environment in ways that potentially increase fitness, however not all plasticity is adaptive. Despite much study, the effects of plasticity on mating systems, species interactions, and responses to novel environments need further exploration. In this dissertation I study plasticity in an annual plant, Clarkia concinna (Onagraceae) by using a combination of greenhouse experiments and field observations and manipulations. In chapter one I investigate the plastic responses of multiple traits in a greenhouse droughting experiment, comparing the adaptive value of plasticity among plants from eight populations that varied widely in precipitation. Surprisingly, none of the measured traits show adaptive plasticity, and less plastic genotypes show a smaller reduction in fitness in the stressful drought treatment. Plants from locations with greater and more variable annual precipitation tend to show less plasticity in response to drought. In chapter two I focus on the causes of plasticity in floral traits and seed production. Hand-pollinating early flowers on a plant reduces total flower number as well as floral longevity in later flowers. This effect is independent of the abiotic resource conditions (water or nutrient availability). While pollen quality (self or outcross) does not affect floral traits, later fruits on plants with early outcrossed flowers have fewer seeds than fruits on plants with a background of selfing. In chapter three I examine the effects of floral display on pollination. Most pollinators were more likely to move pollen between flowers on the same plant when floral display size was large, increasing the deposition of self pollen. However, the predicted pollinator attraction benefit of large displays is absent in this species, even when there are few surrounding plants. Exploring plasticity in one species though the use of multiple techniques promotes a comprehensive understanding of the subject and leads me to propose potentially fruitful avenues of new research.

Discovered in 1933 after having been hidden from the academic world for 271 years, the Hartlib Papers have been called the greatest 17th century research revelation of the 20th century. Yet 81 years later the author and collector of the papers remains a mystery and the content of the papers have been little appreciated. Who was this auctor prudens and what do his voluminous papers have to say about his time? This thesis argues that Hartlib is a critical link in a long chain of scholars who formed and shaped the development of science. An evolution which began with Roger Bacon, more fully developed into a new epistemology with Francis Bacon, is passed on by Hartlib to others who were founding members of the Royal Society. This new system of understanding, then known as experimentalism, is the empirical method which impacted the entire spectrum of modern academic disciplines.

Television news media can be a beneficial part of society. It allows for individuals to gain knowledge about what is occurring around them. When child abduction cases are presented to the public through television news media, is can be difficult for the television news outlet to not give in to sensationalism and present stories that will keep its audience tuning in time after time. This research determines if television news media disproportionately reports on nonfamily abduction (specifically stereotypical kidnappings) rather than abductions that are committed by family members. The type of victims portrayed in these cases that are reported are also determined. Reporting on non-family child abduction can give the viewer a false sense of how his or her reality truly is. A content analysis of child abduction cases from five major television news media outlets are analyzed during the period of 1970 to 2013. Demographics of the victims as well as cases are collected to determine what types of cases are more likely to be reported within television news media. The findings are then compared to statistics from the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children.

In the past several years, technology scaling has reached an impasse, where performance has become limited not by transistor switching delays but by hard limits on power consumption brought on by limits on power delivery, cooling and battery capacities. Although transistors have continued to scale down in size, power density has increased substantially. In the future, it may become impractical to power an entire chip at nominal voltage. The main tool designers have to avoid this power wall is to lower supply voltage, but this combines with the increasing effects of process variation to make semiconductors slower and less reliable. We propose several solutions to these problems.For logic faults, we provide a tunable reliability target, where the tradeoff between reliability and energy efficiency can be adjusted dynamically for the system, application, and environment. For faults in memories, we develop a new, low-latency forward error correction technique that is a practical solution to the high bit cell failure rate of caches at low voltage. As voltage is lowered, performance is reduced both by generally increasing transistor delay and also by amplifying the effects of process variation; we mitigate the effects of variation through the use of dual voltage supplies and clock dividers. For efficiency, we propose two dual-voltage and dual-frequency techniques for increasing performance of unbalanced workloads. For reliability, we propose an intelligent processor wake-up schedule to eliminate voltage emergencies that can arise from sudden increases in current demand, particularly those associated with common synchronization primitives.

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a common genetic disease among Caucasians, caused by lesions in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator gene, CFTR. This defect leads to the inability to transport chloride through the apical membrane, particularly in epithelia lining the airway. A hallmark of CF is the hyperabsorption of sodium across the airway epithelia, leading to decreased airway surface liquid volume and the inability to clear sticky, mucous plugs from the airway surface. This contributes to the smoldering inflammation and excessive growth of pathogenic bacteria typically seen in the lungs of CF patients and is often the primary cause of mortality. Although the exact link between CFTR defects and the inability to clear trapped, pathogenic bacteria remains unclear, it has been postulated that increased sodium absorption and decreased airway surface liquid are critical modulators of disease pathogenesis in the lung. Transepithelial sodium absorption begins with entry through the epithelial sodium channel (ENaC) in the apical membrane and exits through the Na,K-ATPase in the basolateral membrane. We identified FXYD5, also known as Dysadherin, as a gene upregulated in CF airway epithelia. FXYD5 belongs to a family of tissue-specific regulators of the Na,K-ATPase, and thus we hypothesized that FXYD5 may modulate Na,K-ATPase activity and contribute to disease pathogenesis in CF.Therefore, we determined the effects of FXYD5 overexpresison on Na,K-ATPase activity in an epithelial cell model. FXYD5 significantly increased the apparent affinity for Na+ 2-fold, and decreased the apparent affinity for K+ by 60% with a 2-fold increase in Vmax(K+), a pattern that would increase activity and Na+ removal from the cell. To test the effect of increased sodium uptake on FXYD5 expression, we analyzed MDCK cells stably transfected with an inducible vector expressing all three ENaC subunits. Na,K-ATPase activity increased 6-fold after 48-hour ENaC induction, but FXYD5 expression decreased 75%. FXYD5 expression was also decreased in lung epithelia from mice that overexpress ENaC, suggesting that chronic Na+ absorption by itself downregulates epithelial FXYD5 expression. However, we counterintuitively found that FXYD5 was significantly increased in the lungs and nasal epithelium of CF mice as assessed by RT-PCR, immunohistochemistry and immunoblot analysis (Pinh-172) confirmed that loss of CFTR function correlated with increased FXYD5 expression (PFXYD5 expression and was blocked by a separate chemical inhibitor of NF-κB. We also found that overexpression of FXYD5 increased wound healing in airway epithelial cells, which was modulated by negative charge at S163, suggesting a role for FXYD5 in epithelial motility and regeneration in the airway. Collectively, these data show that FXYD5 is upregulated in CF epithelia and this change may exacerbate the Na+ hyperabsorption and surface liquid dehydration observed in CF airway epithelia.

Abstract not available.

This study examined the perceptions of administrators, teachers, and parents regarding the attributes of an effective elementary bilingual education program. The following research questions were the focus of this study: (1) What are the perceived attributes of an effective elementary bilingual education program according to parents of elementary bilingual education students, elementary bilingual education teachers, principals of schools with elementary bilingual education programs, the district administrator of the bilingual education program, and the district superintendent? (2) How are the perceived attributes similar or different between administrators, teachers, and parents? Utilizing a qualitative multiple case study with a critical race theory approach, surveys, direct observations, focus group interviews, individual interviews, and document vii reviews were used to collect data in this research study. Open, axial, and selective coding were used to analyze the qualitative data that was collected. This study supported the majority of the components that made up the attributes of effective elementary bilingual education programs that have been identified through current research. These seven attributes included: (a) program articulation; (b) parental and community involvement; (c) district, school, and classroom climate; (d) quality people; (e) curriculum and instruction; (f) leadership, vision, and goals; and (g) organization, accountability, and assessment. This study also supplemented the existing research with additional themes that emerged from the individual interviews, surveys, and focus group interviews. These emergent themes included: (a) materials, (b) staffing, (c), translation of materials (d) funding, (e) socioeconomic status, (f) homework, (g) educational systems, and (h) class size. The perceptions of administrators, teachers, and parents are more different than similar regarding the most prevalent, confirming, and concerning attributes and emergent themes. However, the perceptions are more similar than different regarding the least prevalent attributes and emergent themes. The results of this study can assist educational leaders in the formulation of effective policy and practice to create equity and excellence for all students.

In the past, emergence of right-wing conservative moral reform movements has resulted in profound changes for our society. Two of the most visible examples would be the 18th amendment establishing the prohibition of alcohol and the movement to destroy communism in America, McCarthyism. since the mid-1970’s, a movement in America has been gaining strength to once again morally reform America. Some of the issues now on the new right agenda are: banning abortion, getting prayer back in school, and defeating the Equal Rights Amendment. In this study, we first draw an historical comparison between the current moral reform movement and one of the past (e.q. McCarthyism). Second, we test the relative explanatory power of two different theories that attempt to account for the origins of moral reform ideas using data 1977 and 1982.