Experimental alterations of morphological traits during development can reveal life history tactics and resource allocation patterns. I examined effects of amputation of a structure directly involved with mating compared to one that is less associated with fitness. I amputated one of the paired external copulatory organs (palps) of juvenile male black widow spiders Latrodectus hesperus), and compared changes in life history traits and fitness to males with amputated legs and controls. I show that palps are more likely to be regenerated than legs, smaller juveniles are more likely to regenerate, and mating success is adversely affected in all adults that suffered early amputation. The pre-existing relationship between juvenile size and development was a critical determinant of regeneration, however no life history costs of regeneration were evident. I conclude that plasticity in life history facilitates regeneration, and that this may mask trade-offs involved in compensatory effects at the population level.

Experimental alterations of morphological traits during development can reveal life history tactics and resource allocation patterns. I examined effects of amputation of a structure directly involved with mating compared to one that is less associated with fitness. I amputated one of the paired external copulatory organs (palps) of juvenile male black widow spiders Latrodectus hesperus), and compared changes in life history traits and fitness to males with amputated legs and controls. I show that palps are more likely to be regenerated than legs, smaller juveniles are more likely to regenerate, and mating success is adversely affected in all adults that suffered early amputation. The pre-existing relationship between juvenile size and development was a critical determinant of regeneration, however no life history costs of regeneration were evident. I conclude that plasticity in life history facilitates regeneration, and that this may mask trade-offs involved in compensatory effects at the population level.

This study is a field survey of the dialect of the Black college students of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. The data were gathered from hundreds of students over a period of eight years. The verifying data were taken from a group of fifty subjects who completed five different information-gathering instruments. These instruments included fifty sentences which the students wrote from dicatation, and read into a tape recorder. The subjects also wrote from dictation twenty-five sentences and read these sentences into a tape recorder. The subjects also taped a one-page story. All instruments were composed by the researcher and were designed to elicit dialectal deviations which had previously been noted in the examples taken from the students' free expression writing. The fifty subjects also responded to demographic questionnaires.This study is divided into three different sections, morphology, phonology, and syntax.Under morphology are two sections which deal with the leveling of inflections, the [-S] inflections on nouns and the third person verb, and the [-d] inflections on the past tense and past participle.The examples from the free expression writing of the primary population, and the fifty subjects, and the tabulation of the data from the other instruments, show clearly that leveling of these inflections is a true feature of the dialect of the population.The section on phonology demonstrates the lack of phonemic differentiation between the pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants, confusion between other consonants and consonant blends, and the shifting of certain vowel sounds.Included under phonology are two other sections, the first dealing with intrusive letters and sounds, notably an r, phonetically r , and the second dealing with deleted letters and sounds, including medial sounds, and the deletion of ending consonants.The third section notes five syntactical deviations from Standard English, the embedded question, the use of be to substitute for am, are, is, was, and will be, the 0 copula, the substitution of it for there, and the substitution of until for that.This study is a field survey only. It categorizes dialect items, but makes no comparison with any other survey of dialect, nor attempts any explanation, historical or otherwise, for the items presented here.

Far from simply playing music, the turntable has, in recent decades, been transformed into a musical instrument. Those that play these new instruments, called Turntablists, alter existing sounds to produce new sonic arrangements, exceeding the assumed use value of the turntable. The turntable’s transformation from record player to instrument captures one of the ways in which Afrosonic sound making activities refuse to conform to existing paradigms of music making in the western world. Throughout the African diaspora, it has been the musics from various regions and nations that continually capture the attention of the world’s music connoisseurs. This dissertation examines the ways in which careful consideration of the sonic innovations in Afrodiasporic cultures produce alternative paradigms through which we might analyze contemporary life. The following chapters interrogate turntablism, remix culture and hip hop music as subtexts that elaborate a foundational narrative of Afrodiasporic life. These subtexts are used as tools to examine the various ethnoscapes of Black Canadian life, official multiculturalism and notions of home within the African diaspora in Canada. The dominant narrative of the African diaspora explored in this work, housed within the sonic, elaborates a relational conception of freedom and modernity born out of the particularities of Afrodiasporic life in the west. In this sonic narrative, participation becomes the key index by which freedom is understood, embodied and enacted. Consequently, a notion of relationality, deeply indebted to the Afrodiasporic experience, is utilized throughout this dissertation to access a conception of the human that lay outside of western Europe’s enlightenment definition.

The production of axisymmetric initial data for distorted black holes at a moment of time symmetry is considered within the (3+1) context of general relativity. The initial data is made to contain a distorted marginally trapped surface ensuring that, modulo cosmic censorship, the spacetime will contain a black hole. The resulting equations on the complicated domain are solved using the piecewise linear finite element method which adapts to the curved surface of the marginally trapped surface. The initial data is then analyzed to calculate the mass of the space time as well as an upper bound on the fraction of the total energy available for radiation. The families of initial data considered contain no more than few percent of the total energy available for radiation even in cases of extreme distortion. It is shown that the mass of certain initial data slices depend to first order on the area of the marginally trapped surface and the gaussian curvature of prominent features.

This thesis examines exact solutions to gauged and ungauged supergravity theories in space-time dimensions D⩾5 as well as various instabilities of such solutions. I begin by using two solution generating techniques for five dimensional minimal ungauged supergravity, the first of which exploits the existence of a Killing spinor to generate supersymmetric solutions, which are time-like fibrations over four dimensional hyper-Kähler base spaces. I use this technique to construct a supersymmetric solution with the Atiyah-Hitchin metric as the base space. This solution has three independent parameters and possesses mass, angular momentum, electric charge and magnetic charge. Via an analysis of a congruence of null geodesics, I determine that the solution contains a region with naked closed time-like curves. The centre of the space-time is a conically singular pseudo-horizon that repels geodesics, otherwise known as a repulson. The region exterior to the closed time-like curves is outwardly geodesically complete and possesses an asymptotic region free of pathologies provided the angular momentum is chosen appropriately. The second solution generating technique exploits a hidden G2 symmetry in five dimensional minimal supergravity. I use this hidden symmetry approach to construct the most general black string solution in five dimensions, which is endowed with mass, angular momentum, linear momentum, electric charge and magnetic charge. This general black string satisfies the first law of thermodynamics, with the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy being reproduced via a microstate counting in terms of free M-branes in the decoupling limit. Furthermore it reduces to all previously known black string solutions in its various limits. A phase diagram for extremal black strings is produced to draw conclusions about extremal black rings, in particular why supersymmetric black rings exhibit a lower bound on the electric charge. The same phase diagram further suggests the existence of a new class of supersymmetric black rings, which are completely disconnected from the previously known class. A particular limit of this general black string is the magnetically charged black string, whose thermodynamic phase behaviour and perturbative stability were previously studied but not very well understood. I construct magnetically charged topological solitons, which I then show play an important role in the phase structure of these black strings. Topological solitons in Einstein-Maxwell gravity, however, were previously believed to generically correspond to unstable "bubbles of nothing" which expand to destroy the space-time. I show that the addition of a topological magnetic charge changes the stability properties of these Kaluza-Klein bubbles and that there exist perturbatively stable, static, magnetically charged bubbles which are the local vacuum and the end-point of Hawking evaporation of magnetic black strings. In gauged supergravity theories, bubbles of nothing are stabilised by the positive energy theorem for asymptotically anti-de Sitter space-times. For orbifold anti-de Sitter space-times in odd dimensions, a local vacuum state of the theory is just such a bubble, known as the Eguchi-Hanson soliton. I study the phase behaviour of orbifold Schwarzschild-anti-de Sitter black holes, thermal orbifold anti-de Sitter space-times, and thermal Eguchi-Hanson solitons from a gravitational perspective; general agreement is found between this analysis and the previous analysis from the gauge theory perspective via the AdS/CFT correspondence. I show that the usual Hawking-Page phase structure is recovered and that the main effect of the soliton in the phase space is to widen the range of large black holes that are unstable to decay despite the positivity of their specific heat. Furthermore, using topological arguments I show that the soliton and orbifold AdS geometry correspond to a confinement phase in the boundary gauge theory while the black hole corresponds to a deconfinement phase. An important instability for rotating asymptotically anti-de Sitter black holes is the superradiant instability. Motivated by arguments that the physical end point of this instability should describe a clump of scalar field co-rotating with the black hole, I construct asymptotically anti-de Sitter black hole solutions with scalar hair. Perturbative results, i.e. low amplitude boson stars and small radius black holes with low amplitude scalar hair, are presented in odd dimensions relevant to gauged supergravity theories, namely D=5,7. These solutions are neither stationary nor axisymmetric, allowing them to evade the rigidity theorem; instead the space-time plus matter fields are invariant under only a single helical Killing vector. These hairy black holes are argued to be stable within their class of scalar field perturbations but are ultimately unstable to higher order perturbative modes.

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In this dissertation, we systematically construct non-extremal charged rotating anti-de Sitter black hole solutions in four, five and seven dimensions. In four dimensions, we first obtain the rotating Kerr-Taub-NUT metric with four independent charges, as solutions of N = 2 supergravity coupled to three abelian vector multiplets by the solution generating technique. Then we generalise the four-dimensional rotating solutions to the solutions of gauged N = 4 supergravity with charges set pairwise equal. In five dimensions, the most general charged rotating black hole solution has three charge and two rotation parameters. We obtain several special cases of the general solution. To be specific, we obtain the first example of a non-extremal rotating black hole solution with two independent rotation parameters, which has two charge parameters set equal and the third vanishing. In another example, we obtain the nonextremal charged rotating black hole solution with three charge parameters set equal and non-equal rotation parameters. We are also able to construct the single-charge solution with two independent rotation parameters. In seven dimensions, we obtain the solution for non-extremal charged rotating black holes in gauged supergravity, in the case where the three rotation parameters are set equal. There are two independent charges, corresponding to gauge fields in the U(1) × U(1) abelian subgroup of the SO(5) gauge group.