thesis

In my thesis I will argue that the source of the major conflict in Jude the Obscure - the traumatic relationship between Sue and Jude - is Jude's viewing of his cousin's photograph early in the novel. Because of his tendency to idealize the individuals around him, Jude projects a desired image onto a photograph of Sue before meeting her in real life. This projection takes on an aspect of reality for Jude which he can not escape, despite Sue's efforts to disillusion him and introduce him to her actual self. Since his projection starkly contrasts to Sue's actual being, not only does Jude believe that the two are compatible when they are not, but he believes that Sue's attempts to disillusion him are in fact deceitful. Thus the initial impetus of the photograph eventually leads to their conflicted relationship and the tragedy of the novel overall.

Governments across the country have been outsourcing traditional government services at an ever-increasing rate. Researchers debate the efficiency of privatization, and evidence exists both for and against increased private production of public goods. At the local level of government, a growing trend is privatization in the form of public-private partnerships. To determine the efficiency of these partnerships between municipal governments and private companies, this study examines the "most" privatized city in the United States, Sandy Springs, Georgia. I compared spending in Sandy Springs to five similar nearby cities and derived cost estimates of government services. I found that the "Sandy Springs Model" of local government lowered costs and increased efficiency when compared to traditional municipalities.

A generally illegal form of short selling in United States equity markets, called "naked shorting," occurs when a seller of stock sells shares that do not exist. This type of short selling has negative consequences that result from the tactic's ability to be used as a tool to artificially inflate an issuer's stock supply, which introduces significant harm to the integrity of the market's natural forces of supply and demand. Newly adopted amendments to the Securities and Exchange Commission's short sale governance regulation, called Regulation SHO, required the mandatory purchasing of shares by certain market participants in order for those participants to close-out previously excused delivery failures, called "grandfathered" failures. This study examines the consequences of this new regulation, in terms of share price and volume, for those few securities that had the most persistent delivery failure problems. Because the regulation mandates the purchase of shares by certain influential market participants, I examine if the stock markets of these securities exhibited unusual volatility which may be indicative of the market maker trying to cover at low cost. Using technical analysis techniques, such as volume surge detection (using moving volume averages), the performance of the target securities will be compared with appropriate benchmark indices for the purpose of detecting unusual activity. Unusual activity may be consistent with my hypothesis that market makers may encourage additional volatility to cause liquidity problems for marginal investors which forces them to sell part or all of their position. As discussed in great detail, the extra marginal shares injected into the market by the action of forced selling by these marginal investors may be used by the market makers to lower their cost of regulation compliance.

Within three months of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which allowed military commanders to establish zones of military importance within which they could remove any person considered dangerous, specifically those of Japanese descent. The Tolan Committee, a House committee examining the logistics of the new wartime economy, was immediately sent to the West Coast in order to evaluate the merit of the President's policy. They were presented with the most complete set of arguments both supporting and opposing internment, and were therefore in a unique position to make a well-informed decision regarding the internment of over 100,000 persons. Despite the strength of the arguments of the opposition, the Committee abdicated their power and submitted to the will of the President and the military. In succumbing to fear, the Committee legitimized the policy of internment without making a truly objective decision.

Through a critique of Satan's misuse of language, John Milton's Paradise Lost makes the greater argument that language should coincide with God's creation narrative. The poem proposes a theory of how language should be used: to connect the mutable world of humans to the immutable world of God. I propose that Milton uses Satan to portray both a fear and a faith in the power of language. Satan makes language the accomplice to his sin, attempting to use language, which has the power of creating a world that seems true, to replace God's Truth. Milton's poem neither solely endorses the theory that language points directly to absolute Truth, nor does it endorse the theory that language is an arbitrary system of signs which impose meaning the world. Milton blends these two theories of language, connecting the Idealist system to what will be Friedrich Nietzsche's.

Dynactin is a multifunctional protein complex composed of at least 11 different subunits. Dynactin functions as a cofactor for cytoplasmic dynein facilitating long-range vesicle movements, microtubule anchoring, endomembrane localization, and mitotic progression. Previous studies have shown that dynactin binds to microtubules at the centrosome maintaining a radial array in interphase. The p150Glued subunit contains two distinct microtubule-binding sequences named CAP-Gly and Basic. While both domains can interact with microtubule, CAP-Gly has a much greater affinity for binding to microtubules, suggesting that the two domains may be active for different dynactin-based functions within the cell. Using siRNA, we found that knockdown of p150Glued was sufficient to alter the maintenance of radial microtubule arrays, cause an increase in centrosome number and mitotic index. In the future we will replace the endogenous protein with versions lacking the CAP-Gly or Basic domains to investigate the contribution of each to microtubule anchoring and cytoskeletal architecture.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was approved by Congress on November 16, 1990 after years of American Indian lobbying due to the unfair treatment of American Indian remains. Since the enactment of NAGPRA there have been multiple complaints from the archaeological community that the way in which they conduct their jobs has been severely limited by the implementation of NAGPRA. In this study I compare data from the Secretary's Report to Congress questionnaire, conducted by the National Park Service's Federal Archaeology Program, to determine whether NAGPRA has caused an increase or decrease in the amount of archaeological administrative, laboratory, and fieldwork completed between 1985 and 2005. The comparison shows that there was a significant increase in specific archaeological practices in the years following the implementation of NAGPRA. Looking at the changes in work patterns of archaeologists allows us to assess the success of NAGPRA and it provides empirical evidence to evaluate the claims made by parties affected by the act.

Anticancer drugs, including nocodazole and vinblastine, work by disrupting the dynamics of microtubules. Unfortunately, these drugs often produce numerous side effects, including nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, loss of hair, increased chance of infection, and fatigue. My thesis research evaluated the efficacy of using repeated low doses of microtubule drugs instead of a single high dose, in an attempt to minimize side effects. Using nocodazole and vinblastine, I first established the minimum effective concentration that disrupts the microtubules in normal human cells grown in vitro and treated cells with those concentrations over a period of several days. I found that microtubules were increasingly depolymerized as the days progressed. Next, I tested a combination of nocodazole and vinblastine at low concentrations.

There is a debate among scholars regarding how courts should judge defendants caught in government decoy and sting operations. As a retributivist, I believe we should only punish those who are culpable. Following this assumption, I argue that courts should punish entrapped people if they are culpable and that the subjective test, which holds that a defendant is culpable if he was predisposed to commit the crime, should be the standard by which courts judge defendants who claim entrapment. The objective test, which focuses on the propriety of the government conduct, fails to accurately assess culpability because, under this test, the guilt of the defendant depends largely on what the average person would have done under the same circumstances. I also propose that if government conduct reached the level of outrageous, defendants found to be predisposed may claim that the government violated their right to due process.

Telomerase is associated with telomere production and nDNA protection. However, studies by Santos et al. have demonstrated that human telomerase has a mitochondrial entry sequence and in the presence of hydrogen peroxide it has been found inside the mitochondrion and may cause mitochondrial DNA mutations. Saccharomyces cerevisiae contains telomerase, but it does not have the mitochondrial entry sequence. To determine if the presence of telomerase in the mitochondria can induce mutations an experiment was developed in which a mitochondrion entry sequence would be fused to the S. cerevisiae telomerase enzyme. This fusion could then be screened in S. cerevisiae with an ade2 mutation for a simple color assay of mitochondrial activity. To date, no successful transformant has been identified. The frequency of incorrect ligations has been recognized and may indicate that the desired fusion is lethal to E. coli cells.