Electronic Thesis or Dissertation

In the elections of 2018, Brazilians chose Jair Messias Bolsonaro, the first Far-Right candidate, to be the future President of Brazil. In a 28-year political trajectory, he changed political parties eight times. The constant change demonstrates his ability to use rhetorical devices and adapt to new appeals. The researcher of this work outlined Bolsonaro’s rhetorical rise, tested his rhetorical personae, “mito” and “Tropical Trump” based on the work of Ware in Linkugel (1982). No other foreign candidate mirrored Trump as much as he did. Bolsonaro also used US imagery in videos, borrowing images and terminologies found in the US culture. By analyzing his rhetorical strategies, the researcher identified Bolsonaro’s representative anecdote in his appeals that led to his rhetorical motivation as outlined by Burke’s dramatism.

I used empirical data to inform spatially- and temporally-explicit predictions of time-integrated habitat availability (TiHAB), quantify spatiotemporal patterns of resource selection by Little Blue Herons (Egretta caerulea), and evaluate foraging activity as function of resource availability and prey dynamics. Evaluating resource availability over time accounts for the magnitude and duration of resource change. This approach is useful for understanding mechanisms that underlie resource selection in dynamic environments and for guilds that are sensitive to changes in prey availability like wading birds. I found that average TiHAB varied interannually whereby gains and losses in Little Blue Heron foraging habitat at the landscape scale (1-8 km) occurred from slight differences in annual tidal cycles otherwise imperceptible with water depth data alone. Local patterns of resource selection by Little Blue Herons were temporally consistent but spatially variable across tidally influenced environments. TiHAB was the most important habitat attribute over time and space and was superior to other environmental features and prey density as a predictor of Little Blue Heron resource selection. Foraging activity did not show a clear association with probability of resource selection, but foraging metrics were best described by changes in TiHAB consistent with changes in foraging strategy. I conclude that spatiotemporal variation in resource availability reliably predicts patterns of dynamic habitat selection and supports an energy-maximizing foraging strategy for wading birds in tidally influenced habitats. This modeling framework can be applied to quantify the spatiotemporal availability of resources in real-time or under hydrologic restoration regimes and sea level rise scenarios, and track species responses to hydrologic and other environmental fluctuations.

Throughout the 21st century, some artists, athletes, and politicians began to use their platforms to speak out against the issues of systemic racism and police brutality that continue to affect black Americans to this day. While this outpouring of support for the black community has helped move the needle in terms of equity and inclusion initiatives, critics have often labeled these figures and movements too public or loud, conflating the concepts of talking and loudness with resistance to the status quo. Yet, in an era when “silence is not an option” and “quietness is complicity,” African American authors and artists have taken a subtle and quiet approach to depicting the lives of enslaved men and women. More specifically, novels, films, and art from the past two decades portray resistance as not only a public and physical phenomenon, but a mental and ideological one. This dissertation project comes at the intersection of African American literary, religious, and historical studies to argue that quiet and internal acts, such as surrender, memory, and visions, throughout contemporary representations of slavery provide an effective form of resistance to white hegemonic authority, ideology, and values. It asks readers to look beyond the public and the loud, to think about resistance that is not merely physical, to consider the possibilities present in reticence.

Social validity of interventions is often conceptualized as a triad of the social significance of goals, the acceptability of procedures, and the importance of intervention outcomes (Wolf, 1978). Social validity measurement is considered an essential part of quality single-case design studies. Yet, the practice has been inconsistently reflected in behavioral and educational journals. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the state of social validity in scholarly journals, published by the Council for Exceptional Children and its divisions between 2016 and 2020. The focus of the study was not only on the prevalence of social validity assessments in these journals, but also on possible relations between social validity and other elements of the study. The results indicate that 71.9% (220 of 306) of all single-case design studies published by the Council for Exceptional Children contained an assessment of social validity. Less prevalent was the assessment of Total Construct social validity, which included the measurement of social validity of goals, procedures, and outcomes. Participants’ ages were positively correlated with the presence of social validity assessments; however, studies involving both children and adults tended to favor adult voices in social validity reporting. The results also indicate that while the journals in the study compared favorably to other journals regarding social validity practices, there remains some room for improvement. Efforts should be made to diversify participants’ voices, elicit social validity responses from younger participants, improve the depth of social validity reporting, and broaden the range of tools to assess the social validity of interventions.

Early face-sensitive event-related potentials (ERPs) are modulated by age and race-of-face. Individual differences in implicit bias and race experience influence such race effects, but this remains largely unexplored. Thus, we examined children’s and adults’ P100s and N170s to own- and other-race faces and their relation with race experience and implicit racial bias. Children showed larger and more delayed P100s and N170s than adults. Also, 8- to 10-year-olds displayed earlier P100s to other-race faces, while 5- to 7- year-olds showed earlier left N170s to own-race faces. In adults, greater own-race experience was associated with delayed left N170s to own-race faces. Greater own-race bias was associated with earlier right P100s to own-race faces in 5- to 7-year-olds and smaller left P100 to N170 peak-to-peak amplitudes to own-race faces in 8- to 10-yearolds. Individual differences in age, race experience, and implicit racial bias should be considered when examining ERPs to own- and other-race faces.

Chronic illness increases each year in the United States with about 117 million people living with a chronic condition (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018). There are more than 100 autoimmune conditions (AARDA, 2019). This particular study focuses on a very specific population, which is women with systemic lupus erythematosus; in which women compose 50.9% of the population (United States Census Bureau, 2010). The specific variables being evaluated are marital satisfaction with a special focus on partner intimacy (sexual relations) and the relationship that exists between these variables in women who have the condition. The study aims at forming a marriage between the medical field and the counseling field to have better understanding and ultimately provide a more comprehensive treatment from the findings of this research. Prior studies suggest that marital satisfaction and partner intimacy are affected when a person has a chronic condition, albeit very little research has been done in the last decade that focuses on this particular population with these specific variables.
Seventy six (N=76) women with systemic lupus erythematosus participated in this study. There were 76 females. The diverse participants had an age mean of 44.16 and a standard deviation of 10.59. There were African American (n=7), Asian (n=3), Caucasian (n=55), American/Alaskan Native (n=1), Native Hawaiian (n=1), Pacific Islander (n=3), NA’s (n=6). Education levels were high school (n=17), bachelor’s (n=33), master’s (n=15), doctorate (n=4), other (n=6) and NA’s (n=1). There were employed (n=64) and not employed (n=12). From the Midwest (n=8), Northeast (n=11), Northwest (n=6), Southeast (n=37), Southwest (n=14), NA’s (n=4). The participants were diagnosed varying years from 1992 until 2021, with NA’s (n=7). Flare up mean was 2.7, with a standard deviation of 2.3. The household income mean was $87,784.10 with a standard deviation of 49063.08. The relationship between marital satisfaction, partner intimacy and resiliency in women with lupus was measured by using bivariate regression analysis. The implications of the findings, study limitations and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Mass transport is important for all biological functions to protect the cell’s environment and to keep its balance of nutrients, proteins and keep the organism alive. We are motivated to study two different types of mass transport, glucose and oxygen that are critical in human system. Specifically, this study focused on mass and oxygen transport in human placenta and oxygen transport in transfusion of artificial oxygen carriers. Studying these processes in vivo or ex vivo are difficult due to ethical or technical challenges.
In this dissertation, Organ-on-a-chip devices were used to simulate placental barrier and blood vessels. In first device, 3D placenta–on-a-chip device consists of a polycarbonate membrane and two Poly dimethylsiloxane microchannels was used. Human umbilical vein endothelial cells were cultured in microfluidic devices and mass transport was measured. In the second device, 3-lane OrganoPlate was used to develop the placental barrier model. The human umbilical vein endothelial cells and trophoblast cells cultured in two microchannels compartmented by polycarbonate membrane (first device) and extracellular matrix gel (second device) to mimic the placental barrier in vitro. Finally, the glucose transfer across the placental barrier affected by malaria parasite was investigated. The results of this study can be used for better understanding of placental malaria pathology and drug efficacy testing.

Medical professionals use CT images to get information about the size, shape, and location of any lung nodules. This information will help radiologist and oncologist to identify the type of cancer and create a treatment plan. However, most of the time, the diagnosis regarding the types of lung cancer is error-prone and time-consuming. One way to address these problems is by using convolutional neural networks. In this Thesis, we developed a convolutional neural network that can detect abnormalities in lung CT scans and further categorize the abnormalities to benign, malignant adenocarcinoma and malignant squamous cell carcinoma. Our network is based on DenseNet, which utilizes dense connections between layers (dense blocks), so that all layers are connected. Because of all layers being connected, different layers can reuse features from previous layers which speeds up the process and make this network computationally efficient. To retrain this network we used CT images for 314 patients (over 1500 CT images) consistent of 42 Lung Adenocarcinoma and 78 Squamous Cell Carcinoma, 118 Non cancer and 76 benign were acquired from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST). These images were divided to two categories of Training and Validation with 70% being training dataset and 30% as validation dataset. We trained our network on Training dataset and then checked the accuracy of our model using the validation dataset. Our model was able to categorize lung cancer with an accuracy of 88%. Afterwards we calculated the the confusion matrix, Precision (Sensitivity), Recall (Positivity) and F1 score of our model for each category. Our model is able to classify Normal CT images with Normal Accuracy of 89% Precision of 94% and F1 score of 93%. For benign nodules Accuracy was 92% precision of 97% and F1 score 86%, while for Adenocarcinoma and squamous cell cancer the Accuracy was 98% and 93%, Precision 85% and 84% and F1 score 92% and 86.9%. The relatively high accuracy of our model shows that convolutional neural networks can be a valuable tool for the classification of lung cancer, especially in a small city or underdeveloped rural hospital settings and can play a role in achieving healthcare equality.

We introduce a novel geometric approach to characterize entanglement relations in large quantum systems. Our approach is inspired by Schumacher’s singlet state triangle inequality, which used an entropic-based distance to capture the strange properties of entanglement using geometric-based inequalities. Schumacher uses classical entropy and can only describe the geometry of bipartite states. We extend his approach by using von Neumann entropy to create an entanglement monotone that can be generalized for higher dimensional systems. We achieve this by utilizing recent definitions for entropic areas, volumes, and higher dimensional volumes for multipartite which we introduce in this thesis. This enables us to differentiate systems with high quantum correlation from systems with low quantum correlation and differentiate between different types of multi-partite entanglement. It also enable us to describe some of the strange properties of quantum entanglement using simple geometrical inequalities. Our geometrization of entanglement provides new insight into quantum entanglement. Perhaps by constructing well motivated geometrical structures (e.g. relations among areas, volumes ...), a set of trivial geometrical inequalities can reveal some of the complex properties of higher-dimensional entanglement in multi-partite systems. We provide numerous illustrative applications of this approach.

Pro-migration scholars and advocates for stricter immigrant legislation alike tend to rely on an economic framework to measure the value migrants bring toward the nation they’ve immigrated to and whether that value constitutes their right and ability to attain citizenship. By analyzing the influence and value found within Vladimir Nabokov’s use of the aesthetics of displacement, as well as other migrant writers since Nabokov, such as Cristina Garcia and Claudia Rankine that have expanded the racial and ethnic perspective of what can be considered “American,” I argue the criteria for citizenship within the United States should extend beyond traditional economic justifications and encompass the cultural capital immigrants produce through means of artistic labor and participation, influencing what is defined as American culture by being representations of what comprises the nation’s literature and the nation itself.