Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by Title
Now showing items 1070-1089 of 6097
-
Democracy Beyond Disclosure: Secrecy, Transparency, and the Logic of Self-Government
(2017-01-19)"Transparency" is the constant refrain of democratic politics, a promised aid to accountability and integrity in public life. Secrecy is stigmatized as a work of corruption, tolerable (if at all) by a compromise of democratic ... -
Democratic Equality in the Misinformation Age
(2022-11-23)Conventional wisdom blames the “epistemic crisis” of American politics on the leveling force of social media and the collapse of traditional gatekeepers. This dissertation argues democracy’s vulnerability to misinformation ... -
Democratic Performances: How Theater Creates the People
(2023-06-01)This work offers the concept of “democratic performance” as a corollary of “people’s theater.” “People’s theater” is a branch of the performing arts that aims to engage a particular audience, which is made of new spectators, ... -
Democratic Theory and the Question of Character
(2013-02-12)This dissertation uses the history of political thought to shed light on the disconnect between the prominent place of judgments about the character in American democratic life, and the marginalized place of those judgments ... -
Democratizing Money: A Political Theory of Policymaking
(2022-06-06)Political theorists have long wrestled with the appropriate role for experts in democracy. Several recent popular movements have sought to reject expert rule by promising to “take back control” or “topple neoliberal elites.” ... -
Demonic (Dis)Possessions: Indigenous Gold from the Colombia-Panama Borderlands
(2024-03-12)This dissertation takes a long view at the marginalization in archaeological models of pre-Conquest metallurgy from northern Chocó and Urabá in the Colombia-Panama borderlands. It was here, where Europeans found—in the ... -
Dendrite Patterning as a Model for Self-Organizing Systems
(2018-01-05)Biological systems self-organize into complex well-ordered structures and can evolve new patterns when perturbed. To identify principles underlying self-organization, I turned to the model organism C. elegans for its ... -
Dendritic branch structure compartmentalizes calcium-dependent plasticity signals and supports the acquisition of complex tuning functions
(2022-05-12)Life as an organism depends on flexible and intelligent neural activity for perceiving the sensory world, constructing models of the environment, and generating adaptive behaviors. It is evident that the collective activity ... -
Denotational Translation Validation
(2013-01-02)In this dissertation we present a simple and scalable system for validating the correctness of low-level program transformations. Proving that program transformations are correct is crucial to the development of security ... -
Density-Based Separations in Aqueous Multiphase Systems: Tools for Biological Research and Low-Cost Diagnostics
(2014-06-06)Cells often exist in heterogeneous mixtures. Density provides a property to separate several types of cells from the mixed sample in which they originate. Density-based separation methods provide a standard method to ... -
Dental-aspirate presents in Greek and Indo-European
(2023-01-18)This work examines the class of Greek presents in -θε/ο- and, by comparison with cognate formations in the other Indo-European daughter languages, attempts to recover the form and function of the dental aspirate suffix in ... -
Dependence on Persons and Dependence on Things in Rousseau's Social, Psychological, and Aesthetic Theory
(2018-03-02)Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often associated with a certain political form of relating to another as a person, where a person is seen as a locus of enforceable demands. Nevertheless, as I argue in this dissertation, Rousseau ... -
Deploying Affect-Inspired Mechanisms to Enhance Agent Decision-Making and Communication
(2012-12-20)Computer agents are required to make appropriate decisions quickly and efficiently. As the environments in which they act become increasingly complex, efficient decision-making becomes significantly more challenging. This ... -
Derivative synthesis of the transcriptional inhibitor α-amanitin and the translational inhibitor cycloheximide
(2021-08-19)The following work focuses on my efforts towards the synthesis of the transcriptional inhibitor a-amanitin and the translational inhibitor cycloheximide as a means to exploit the potential of these natural products as ... -
Derived categories and birational geometry of Gushel-Mukai varieties
(2016-05-17)We study the derived categories of coherent sheaves on Gushel-Mukai varieties. In the derived category of such a variety, we isolate a special semiorthogonal component, which is a K3 or Enriques category according to whether ... -
Deriving Indistinguishability from Unpredictability: Tools and Applications in Pseudorandomness
(2020-09-10)Proving that a distribution P is “close to uniform” is an integral part of many problems in pseudorandomness, and is often defined either in terms of indistinguishability—no algorithm (possibly required to be efficient) ... -
Descent of the Deities: The Water-Land Retreat and the Transformation of the Visual Culture of Song-Dynasty (960-1279) Buddhism
(2013-09-24)This dissertation identifies a paradox at the heart of the visual culture of Song-dynasty (960-1279) Buddhism. On the one hand, as the celestial pantheon expanded, it was conceptualized in ever more bureaucratic ways, ... -
Design and Assembly Considerations in the Engineering of Vascular Tissue
(2014-02-25)Native vascular tissue functions are highly dependent on structural organization at the super-cellular, cellular, and sub-cellular spatial scales. We hypothesized that the structure-function relationship of vascular tissues ... -
Design and Characterization of Hybrid Biological-Inorganic Systems
(2023-03-14)Hybrid biological-inorganic systems have been designed to drive fine chemical syntheses and to interrogate fundamental biology. These systems couple electronic signals to cellular activity, allowing the unique chemistries ... -
Design and Locomotion Studies of a Miniature Centipede-Inspired Robot
(2013-10-08)Many applications, such as search and rescue missions, hazardous environment exploration, and surveillance, call for miniature robots capable of agile locomotion in a variety of unpredictable environments. Recent advances ...