thesis

This paper tests the religious economy model for predicting Church behavior which predicts that religious firms will become more politically active on behalf of potential members in areas where competition for those members is most fierce. An analysis of data from a survey of 106 U.S. Catholic dioceses and archdioceses on outreach to Hispanic immigrants does not support this hypothesis. Religious competition and Church activism on immigration issues did not correlate. Rather, demand for services (measured as Hispanic presence within each diocese) was a better predictor of Church activism on immigration issues. This finding suggests that the "inelastic demand" assumption of the religious economy model must be dropped, re-opening demand side explanations for Church behavior across national and local contexts.

International development literature suggests that Internet marketing has the potential to play an important role in rural development. Despite the abundant theoretical support for incorporating Internet marketing into development strategies, there is little empirical evidence regarding whether Internet marketing actually generates development. This thesis helps fill this gap in the literature by investigating whether one Internet marketing application associated with development, competitive-online auctions (COAs), contributes to growth and poverty reduction. An analysis of price premiums earned in Latin American specialty coffee auctions and interviews with participating coffee farmers suggest that this application's strength lies in its ability to catalyze development; it provides the foundation from which farmers can pursue above-market prices, access new markets, and improve local living conditions. However, evidence also emphasizes that COAs do not inevitably advance development goals because their ability to do so is contingent on external factors, including the actions taken by individual farmers.

This thesis is a study of the empirical significance of sentencing information on jury decision-making. A challenge in conducting jury behavior research is that direct observation of jury deliberation is either illegal or impractical. Thus most studies of jury behavior are conducted using archival analysis and mock jury questionnaires. And while we have some information on the issue of jury instruction complexity on jury decision-making, we know very little about the specific role of sentencing information on jury decision-making. My research combines aspects of the jury decision-making literature with the sentencing literature, and thus fills a crucial gap in the literature. While we know much about jury decision-making and much about the process of sentencing--this research directly tested whether these two phenomena are related. Mock trials of 100 participants were used to collect the data for this thesis study. The results provide clear evidence that there is a significant effect on jury decision-making when the jurors are provided with sentencing information.

Dynein is a motor protein responsible for microtubule-based minus-end directed trafficking in eukaryotic cells. Dynactin is a protein complex involved in mitosis, embryonic development, intracellular trafficking and anchoring microtubules at the centrosome. While dynactin is widely recognized to improve the array of cargo with which dynein can associate, there has been some dispute over whether dynactin, which binds both dynein and microtubules, improves the distance that dynein can travel processively in the act of cargo trafficking before it dissociates from its microtubule. In this study, we compare movement parameters of wild type dynein-based vesicle movements with movements in cells where expression of dynactin's microtubule binding subunit, p150glued, has been knocked down. We find that dynactin does act as a processivity factor for dynein by increasing the distance that dynein can travel smoothly in a single movement event, but does not increase dynein's velocity.

This project considers the dual nature of early English thinker Francis Bacon as both a man of science and a devout Christian, through the texts Advancement of Learning, A Confession of Faith, and Of Gardens. Regardless of Bacon's preaching that the progression of scientific knowledge brings one closer to God, in fact human dominance over the natural world undermines religious faith. In particular, Bacon's own interest in early English gardening is used to illustrate the degradation of religious mysticism due to the rise of scientific discovery. Historically, Bacon has been credited as the catalyst of the scientific revolution due to his proposition of a new system of scientific inquiry based on empirical and inductive principles and the development of new arts and inventions. However, Bacon's embrace of the physical sciences and support for human advancement contradicts his alignment with religion. This tension is at the heart of the paper.

This thesis considers the role and function of God the Son within the anti-Trinitarian system John Milton envisions in his epic poem, Paradise Lost. In the poem, God the Father frequently acts independently of His Son, and the divine attributes that traditionally describe the Son, including His timelessness, no longer apply to the character Milton constructs. Despite this apparent degradation, Milton still elevates the Son and considers Him to be a character worthy of our respect. To account for this seeming paradox, I propose a reading of Paradise Lost that does not dismiss Milton's heretical belief in a subjected Son, but rather uses it as a way envision a new form of power. To do so, I compare the relationship between God the Father and His Son in terms of light and sun imagery, to demonstrate how power is divided and distributed between the two, according to the scientific principles of Milton's day. In addition, I consider how Michel Foucault's concept of the docile body both applies to the Son and explains His deference to the Father. Through these analyses, I hope to demonstrate that the Son's power exists as the result of properly exercising His free will, a will that would not have been His own had He been one with His Father.

While critics have argued that the Gothic moments in Emily Brontèe's Wuthering Heights merely illuminate the psyches of her characters, I show that these moments allow Brontèe to reveal a unique tension and overflow of emotion that arises between her two main protagonists. Blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, these displays --scenes of ghostly hauntings, bloody violence, and excessive emotion--create a desirable uncertainty about the limits of life and love in this novel. This uncertainty constitutes an escape from and an alternative to the conventional romantic relationship prescribed by social and narrative standards in which two people fall in love, get married, have children and die. In my thesis, I argue that the revelation of this desired uncertainty is made possible by Brontèe's use of Gothic devices and could not have been as successfully achieved by any other literary mode.

In 2005, the United States Supreme Court found the execution of juvenile offenders to be unconstitutional, based in part on a "national consensus" against the death penalty for juveniles. The purpose of this project was to demonstrate the flaws in existing methods of measuring public opinion and to determine the correlation between the age of an offender and the sentencing recommendation received. It was the hypothesis of my project that there would not be a statistically significant correlation between the offender's age and sentencing recommendation. To test this hypothesis, I asked 156 Florida Atlantic University students. This method of analysis was considered the best way to accurately determine public sentiment towards the juvenile death penalty, after a thorough review of existing methods revealed significant flaws. My results suggest that there is no correlation between the age of an offender and sentencing recommendations.

The heroine of Charlotte Brontèe's Jane Eyre is torn between her physical desire to remain close to Mr. Rochester and her psychological need for distance from him. Jane's need for distance tends to dominate her desire for closeness, and this internal conflict is reproduced externally in her relationship with Rochester, with Rochester's desire for physical proximity conflicting with Jane's desire for distance. These internal and external power struggles create a healthy sense of tension necessary both to Jane, and to her relationship with Rochester because it prevents either of them from being fully satisfied, and ensures that both remain in a perpetual state of self-inflicted suffering. The suffering these characters impose on themselves and each other is necessary for the preservation of desires, which would be destroyed by fulfillment. Through my reading of the novel we gain a greater understanding of how the pain of unfulfilled desires becomes synonymous with pleasure, and the beneficial role pain, tension and unfulfilled desires plays in the text.

Talin is a ubiquitous, high-molecular-weight, flexible protein that plays a critical role in focal adhesions by activating, as well as connecting, integrins to the actin cytoskeleton. Talin's inactive auto-inhibitory state is speculated to be one of its modes of regulation inside the cell and is achieved through its head-tail interactions. In order to decipher the stability of this interaction, the head domain (residues 206-405) was cloned into a modified pET28m vector while the tail domains (residues 1654-2344 and 2225-2344) were cloned into the pET32a vector to obtain octa-histidine tagged and un-tagged peptide, respectively. Neither co-expression nor pull-down using the His-tagged head domain was successful in purifying a stable head-tail complex. Our results indicate rather weak interactions between the talin head and rod domains and hence, under our experimental conditions, do not lead to a stable auto-inhibitory complex that can be purified for further studies.