"transgression" is a poetry collection with claws and nail polish. Across four acts, Reres uses a chorus of voices to interrogate the role of the transgressing woman—both present and past, privately and publicly. Transgressing, for Reres, is a performance. Moreover, it is a performance in which women have been asked, coerced—even forced—to participate for millenia. By stepping into the role of the transgressing woman deliberately, Reres turns this tradition on its head. In these pages, she shows that there is power in putting on masks and costumes, just as there is power in taking them off. The difference—between performance as power and performance as prison—resides in the freedom to choose. / Master of Fine Arts / "transgression" is a poetry collection.

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The physical origin of the so-called chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect has puzzled experimental and theoretical researchers over the past few years. Early experiments were interpreted in terms of unconventional spin–orbit interactions mediated by the helical geometry. However, more recent experimental studies have clearly revealed that electronic exchange interactions also play a key role in the magnetic response of chiral molecules in singlet states. In this investigation, we use spin-polarized closed-shell density functional theory calculations to address the influence of exchange contributions to the interaction between helical molecules as well as of helical molecules with magnetized substrates. We show that exchange effects result in differences in the interaction properties with magnetized surfaces, shedding light into the possible origin of two recent important experimental results: enantiomer separation and magnetic exchange force microscopy with AFM tips functionalized with helical peptides.

Most people don’t usually conjure the image of American policing methods in the Swedish police. The early-to-late 1990s would oversee a push to tackle what was then seen as rising crime and a battle over the subway a decade before in New York City. This style of policing, called Broken Windows would become mythicized in certain political circles about how it was able to reverse the trends of societal decline. It wasn’t soon after that Broken Windows had found itself in two Swedish law enforcement models over a span of fifteen years. By using the theory of Americanization, or how this transatlantic exchange of ideas had impacted important newspaper discourse–we can learn how once-American ideas, like Broken Windows, become new cultural concepts in Swedish journalistic discourse over time.

The problem of this investigation was to make a rating of the following factors which pertain to boys in three distinct residential districts of the W. C. Stripling Junior High School, Fort Worth, Texas: (1) intelligence quotient, (2) civic attitude, (3) academic achievements, (4) Sunday school attendance, (5) club membership, (6) after-school employment, and (7) the number of broken homes.

This project explores how a Meta Attack Language based Domain Specific Language for web applications can be used to threat model web applications in order to evaluate and improve web application security. Organizations and individuals are targeted by cyberattacks every day where malicious actors could gain access to sensitive information. These malicious actors are also developing new and innovative ways to exploit the many different components of web applications. Web applications are becoming more and more complex and the increasingly complex architecture gives malicious actors more components to target with exploits. In order to develop a secure web application, developers have to know the ins and outs of web application components and web application security. The Meta Attack Language, a framework for developing domain specific languages, was recently developed and has been used to create languages for domains such as Amazon Web Services and smart cars but no language previously existed for web applications. This project presents a prototype web application language delimited to the first vulnerability in the top ten list provided by Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP), which is broken access control, and tests it against the OWASP juice shop, which is an insecure web application developed by OWASP to test new tools. Based on the results it is concluded that the prototype can be used to model web application vulnerabilities but more work needs to be done in order for the language to work on any given web application and vulnerability. / Detta projekt utforskar hur ett Meta Attack Language baserat Domän Specifikt Språk för webbapplikationer kan användas för att hotmodellera samt undersöka och förbättra webbapplikationssäkerhet. Organisationer och individer utsätts dagligen för cyberattacker där en hackare kan få tillgång till känslig information. Dessa hackare utverklar nya och innovativa sätt att utnyttja dem många olika komponenterna som finns i webbapplikationer. Webbapplikationer blir mer och mer komplexa och denna ökande komplexa arkitekturen leder till att det finns mer mål för en hackare att utnyttja. För att utveckla en säker webbapplikation måste utvecklare veta allt som finns om webbapplikations komponenter och webbapplikations säkerhet. Meta Attack Language är ett ramverk för att utveckla nya språk för domäner som till exempel Amazon Web Services och smarta fordon men innan detta existerade inget språk för webbapplikationer. Detta projekt presenterar en webbapplikations språk prototyp som är avgränsad till den första sårbarheten i top tio listan av Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) vilket är broken access control, och testar den mot OWASP juice shop, vilket är en sårbar webapplikation som utveckalts av OWASP för att testa nya verktyg. Baserat på resultaten dras slutsatsen att prototypen kan användas för att modellera webbapplikations sårbarheter men att det behövs mer arbete för att språket ska fungera på vilken webbapplikation och sårbarhet som helst.

With the advent of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART), people with the human immune deficiency virus (HIV) infection are increasingly enjoying longer and relatively healthy lives, particularly in developed countries. However, black Africans and African-Caribbean people in the United Kingdom and other developed countries are not yet enjoying the full benefits of HAART, essentially as a result of delayed diagnosis. Delayed diagnosis, in addition to affecting the health of infected individuals, also creates a community reservoir for the spread of the infection; thereby hampering prevention and control strategies by international and NHS guidelines. The delayed diagnosis may be grounded in individual, societal and health service factors that guide help-seeking behaviours of black African and African-Caribbean populations. This study set out to investigate the help-seeking behaviours to diagnose HIV and AIDS among UK based black African and African-Caribbean people, and to investigate the dynamics in those behaviours by place of origin (Africa vs. Caribbean) and by gender. A qualitative methodological approach involving semi-structured interviews was used to explore help-seeking behaviours to diagnose HIV and AIDS among black Africans and African-Caribbean populations in the UK and compared by gender. Thirty (30) purposively selected individuals from patients attending two sexual health clinics in the city of London were interviewed. These included 16 black Africans and 14 African-Caribbean people, and 16 men and 14 women. The symbolic interactionist perspective, and the concepts of broken narratives/silences, biographical disruption and biographical abruption guided the study and interpretation of findings. One main theme ‘Africanness’ and two sub-themes (“African way” and “African thing”) emerged from the findings. The “African way” embodies the risk factors involved in contracting or transmitting HIV and the “African thing” represents the HIV status itself. This is a cultural construction of HIV and AIDS within the acceptable context of participants which helped them to talk about HIV and AIDS without addressing it by the biomedical idiom. The notion of ‘Africanness’ provided a ‘marker’ for African identity. The “African thing” represented a new landscape for naming HIV without necessarily calling it by name and provided a comfortable platform for participants to seek help. The “African way” described the risk behaviours by participants that resulted in the “African thing”. Three sociological concepts; ‘broken narratives or silences, biographical disruption and biographical abruption were key issues in HIV and AIDS diagnosis at a late stage and have formed the basis for the development of a model of help-seeking for diagnosis by participants. Apparently, the main determinants of help-seeking for diagnosis of HIV and AIDS are dependent on cultural factors. Stigma is reinforced by the national health care system practices as well as health professionals themselves. This potentially increases the reluctance among black African and African-Caribbean populations to voluntarily test for HIV. An HIV diagnosis is seemingly a challenging experience because of the impending uncertainties associated with it. Seeking help for diagnosis may even be more difficult because of the anticipated and unpleasant experiences along the path to diagnosis. This may guide the individual to consider other alternatives outside the biomedical pathway, potentially; the biomedical path becomes the least likely choice, especially with black African and African-Caribbean populations. An insufficient cultural understanding is likely to result in inadequate recognition of alternative medical practices, insufficient attention to alternatives to biomedical health systems and potential distortion of the meaning of health messages linking them to practice.

The rapid neutron-capture process, known as the r-process, is responsible for the origin of about half the stable nuclei heavier than iron observed in nature. Though the r-process is believed to take place in explosive stellar environments and to involve a large number (few thousands) of exotic nuclei, this nucleosynthesis process remains poorly understood from the astrophysics as well as nuclear physics points of view. On the nuclear physics side, the nuclei are too exotic to be studied in the laboratory, even though great efforts are constantly made to extend the experimental limits away from the eta-$stability region. Therefore, theoretical models are indispensable to estimate the nuclear properties of interest in the r-process nucleosynthesis modelling. So far, models used to predict the properties of the exotic nuclei were based on parametrized macroscopic-type approaches the reliability of which is questionable when extrapolating far away from the experimentally known region. This work is devoted to the improvement of nuclear predictions, such as the nuclear ground- and excited-state properties, needed as input data to model the r-process. In order to give the predictions a reliable character, we rely on the microscopic mean-field Hartree-Fock theory based on the Skyrme-type interaction. Pairing correlations play an important role in the description of nuclei, and become essential for nuclei located near the drip lines, since the scattering of pairs of quasi-particles into the continuum increases significantly. In this work, we brought to the Hartree-Fock model the self-consistent treatment of the pairing correlations within the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) theory. Further improvements are made in the restoration of symmetries broken by correlations added in the form of additional degrees of freedom in the wave function. These include the translational invariance restored by calculating the recoil energy, the particle-number symmetry by an exact projection after variation, the rotational symmetry by an approximate cranking correction and the parity symmetry for reflection asymmetric shapes. In addition, the renormalization of the HFB equations has been studied as well and allows to eliminate the dependence of the total energy with respect to the cutoff energy. The effective nucleon-nucleon interaction is determined by adjusting its parameters on all available experimental masses, with some constraints derived from fundamental nuclear matter properties. A systematic study of the influence on mass predictions for each of the above cited improvements as well as of some uncertainties affecting the particle-hole and particle-particle interactions has been conducted. In spite of quite important differences in the input physics, we find a great stability in the mass predictions for exotic neutron-rich nuclei, though local mass differences can be significant. Each of the Skyrme force derived in the present work has been tested on the predictions of basic ground-state properties (including charge radii, quadrupole moments, single-particle levels), fission barriers and electric dipole $gamma-$ray strengths. The HFB predictions globally reproduce experimental data with a level of accuracy comparable with the widely-used droplet-like models. The microscopic character of the approach followed in the present work makes however the predictions for exotic neutron-rich nuclei involved in the r-process more reliable. The influence of such improved nuclear mass predictions on the r-process abundance distribution is studied in the specific scenario of the prompt supernova explosion mechanism.

La Théorie de la Fonctionnelle de la Densité (DFT) combinée avec le formalisme de la Symétrie Brisée (BS) est aujourd'hui très utilisée dans le domaine du magnétisme moléculaire pour le calcul des constantes d'échange magnétique. Dans le but d'améliorer la compréhension des contributions qui participe à l'interaction d'échange caractérisant les systèmes magnétiques, nous avons mené une étude théorique systématique basée sur l'étude de deux types de modèles. Ces complexes binucléaires de cuivre(II) reliés par divers groupements pontant de type hydroxo, azoture, et chloro, ainsi que des bis-nitroxydes modèles constitués de deux groupements nitroxydes reliés par un système conjugué sont caractérisés par des couplages ferro- et anti-ferromagnétiques variés. Nous avons développé une approche théorique basée sur l'utilisation d'orbitales gelées permettant d'étudier la décomposition de l'interaction d'échange magnétique en différentes contributions telles que l'échange direct, l'échange cinétique et le mécanisme de polarisation de spin. Dans un second temps, nous avons étendu ce travail de rationalisation aux effets de solvant à l'aide de modèles implicites ou explicites. Grâce à une analyse basée sur l'approche de Hoffmann, nous avons pu déterminer les paramètres caractérisant dans les mécanismes d'échange direct et d'échange cinétique. / Density Functional Theory (DFT) combined with the Broken Symmetry (BS) method is today widely used in the field of molecular magnetism for the computation of magnetic exchange coupling constants. In order to improve the understanding of the contributions involved in the exchange phenomena characterizing some magnetic systems, we propose a study based on two types of models. Copper(II) binuclear complexes connected with various bridging groups like hydroxo, azide, and chlorine, as well as small bis-nitroxide composed of two nitroxide moieties linked by a conjugated system show various ferro- and anti-ferromagnetic couplings. We have developed a theoretical approach based on the use of frozen orbitals to decompose the magnetic exchange interaction in different contributions such as the direct exchange, the kinetic exchange and mechanism of spin polarization. In a second part, we have extended this work to rationalize the solvent effects using implicit or explicit models. Through an analysis based on the Hoffmann's approach, we have determined some parameters characterizing the mechanisms of direct exchange and kinetic exchange.

Tato diplomová práce zmapuje románovou tvorbu současného italského spisovatele Alessandra Baricca. Úvodem bude představen autor v kontextu současné italské prózy. V další části práce nastíníme charakteristiku postmoderního románu, zejména pokud jde o tříštění či dekompozici prostoru, času, příběhu a s tím související žánrovou heterogennost textu. V centrální části práce rozebereme jednotlivá díla, přičemž se budeme soustředit jak na příběh, jeho hlavní motivy a témata, tak na jeho kompozici a strukturu. Ve čtvrté kapitole využijeme dílčích analýz jako východiska ke komparativnímu přístupu k textům a pokusíme se najít společné i odlišné konstrukční principy jejich výstavby a návratná témata či motivické konstanty Bariccových próz. Závěrem zhodnotíme přínos tvorby Alessandra Baricca pro současnou italskou prózu.