Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by Title
Now showing items 524-543 of 6136
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Blind to Their Blindness: A History of the Denial of Illness
(2014-06-06)For many historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of medicine, "disease" and "illness" are not equivalent. Whereas "disease" denotes the physician's ostensibly objective criteria, "illness" emphasizes the patient's ... -
Blocked Algorithms for Neural Networks: Design and Implementation on GPUs
(2020-10-06)The recent emergence of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for machine learning has been largely enabled by the widespread availability of massively parallel computing devices. In particular, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) ... -
Blood and Treasure: Money and Military Force in Irregular Warfare
(2013-03-15)Among the most important choices made by groups fighting a civil war -- governments and rebels alike -- is how to allocate available military and pecuniary resources across the contested areas of a conflict-ridden territory. ... -
Blueprints for Smell: Defining the Architecture of the Necklace Olfactory System
(2016-09-14)Animals must extract salient information from complex environments in order to generate adaptive behaviors. Mice have evolved multiple olfactory subsystems that enable detection and discrimination of a vast range of chemical ... -
Blueswarm: 3D Self-organization in a Fish-inspired Robot Swarm
(2021-07-12)Animals team up to collectively address challenges they could not overcome individually. Several species self-organize into large groups to leverage vital behaviors such as foraging, construction, or predator evasion. Ants, ... -
Bodies of Books: Literary Illustration in Twentieth Century Brazil
(2017-01-26)This dissertation explores the nature and role of literary illustrations twentieth century Brazil, not just in relation to their companion texts, but also in what ways they reflect defining characteristics of Brazilian ... -
Bodies of Knowledge: Medicine, Memory, and Enhancement in Medieval Islam
(2021-07-12)In this dissertation I study the privileged place of medical erudition in the ethical literature (ādāb) written by Muslim scholarly elites (ulema) from the tenth through fourteenth centuries. Authors of ādāb in this period ... -
Bodies, Technology, and Emerging Notions of Subjectivity in the Poetry of Thomas Kling, Ulrike Draesner, and Durs Grünbein
(2022-06-06)In the works of the 20th-century German poets Thomas Kling, Ulrike Draesner, and Durs Grünbein, modern developments in medical technology, such as tomography, transplant surgery, and discoveries in areas such as neuroscience, ... -
The Body and the Building: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris
(2014-06-06)This dissertation examines the transformation of the French built environment alongside medical discourses of the body in the early 19th century, arguing that emerging theories on health and hygiene comprised a politically ... -
Body, Subject, Self: The Art of Piero Manzoni
(2014-06-06)Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) is one of the best-known and under-theorized artists in all of postwar Europe. His body of work includes a range of practices from monochrome painting to readymade objects, from participatory ... -
Books and Their Readers in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul
(2016-05-17)This study contributes to the cultural and intellectual history of the early modern Middle East by analyzing how books were produced and circulated, and which audiences existed for various types of books in the Ottoman ... -
The Books of Numa: Writing, Intellectuals and the Making of Roman Religion
(2013-09-30)This dissertation provides an intellectual and social history of learned writing on Roman religious culture during the late Republic and early Empire. I examine the ways in which an elite learned literature, for which I ... -
Border Listening: A Global Hermeneutics of Gustav Mahler and His Music
(2022-11-23)This dissertation posits a praxis of border listening enunciated in Gustav Mahler’s music as an intercultural theory of listening through such topics as truth, ontology, translation, and affect. The praxis of border ... -
Boundary Issues in Three Twentieth-Century Russian Poets (Mandelstam, Aronzon, Shvarts)
(2019-01-07)This dissertation examines works by three twentieth-century Russian poets in which the construction, dismantling, crossing, and blurring of boundaries plays an important role. Boundaries are understood in a variety of ... -
Boundary Notions: A Sonic Art Portfolio
(2013-09-19)I offer this dissertation as a survey and a story: a survey of my work across the field of sonic art and a story of my progressive compulsion toward sound that conveys touch. This haptic sensibility sharpens from Susurrus ... -
Boundary, Artefact, and Presence in Recent Work
(2022-05-16)This dissertation describes compositional techniques and theoretical background for works composed during my time at Harvard. Two compositions predating this time are provided for context, laying out the problems I seek ... -
Bounded Rights: Citizenship in Non-Ideal Settings
(2021-08-03)Enforcing rights under non-ideal settings poses moral challenges. When, if ever, is a society justified in circumventing the ordinary enforcement of human and civil rights, to address problems, especially those that undermine ... -
The Brain Has an Innate Immune Response That Can Limit Virus Spread
(2016-05-17)The brain has a tightly regulated environment that protects non-regenerating post-mitotic neurons and limits inflammation, which led to its description as a site of ‘immune privilege’. For example, viral and bacterial ... -
Brain-Wide Neural Dynamics Underlying Looming-Evoked Escapes and Spontaneous Exploration
(2015-05-15)Behavior is generated via brain-wide coordination of neural circuits. But until recently, it was difficult to analyze neural dynamics at cellular resolution throughout the brain during behavior. With the genetic and optical ...