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For a long time, I have struggled with my origins, with my Korean-ness, with who I am. Whenever I finish a project, I often feel that there is still something that needs to be explained. In this thesis I attempt to explain precisely my ideas of design as these reflect my Korean-ness. Defining the city and its architecture as existing boundaries, I translate my Korean-ness and origins into an idea I call, metaphorically, "metamorphosis." This "metamorphosis" has to do with the way space is transformed from one thing into something else, as is the case when one walks from an airy Korean courtyard, in a traditional Korean house, into the house's shadowy interior. It is ambiguous, this metamorphic transformation, and for each individual visitor always a somewhat different experience, and sometimes a vastly different experience from that of anyone else, a familiarity with the unfamiliar nevertheless shaped by the uniquely personal prior life each visitor brings to the architectural space. / Master of Architecture

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Tiger salamanders, and especially the Mexican axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), are important model organisms in biological research. This dissertation describes new genomic resources and scientific results that greatly extend the utility of tiger salamanders. With respect to new resources, this dissertation describes the development of expressed sequence tags and assembled contigs, a comparative genome map, a web-portal that makes genomic information freely available to the scientific community, and a computer program that compares structure features of organism genomes. With respect to new scientific results, this dissertation describes a quantitative trait locus that is associated with ecologically and evolutionarily relevant variation in developmental timing, the evolutionary history of the tiger salamander genome in relation to other vertebrate genomes, the likely origin of amniote sex chromosomes, and the identification of the Mexican axolotl sex-determining locus. This dissertation is concluded with a brief outline of future research directions that can extend from the works that are presented here.

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by Wan-kan Chin. / Includes passages in Chinese. / Thesis (M.Ph.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1988. / Bibliography: leaves 164-184.

My dissertation reevaluates medieval concepts of body and identity by analyzing literary depictions of metamorphosis in romance. Focusing on examples such as the hag-turned-damsel in the Wife of Bath's Tale, the lump-turned-boy in The King of Tars and the demon-saint of Sir Gowther, I take as my starting point the fact that while those texts pivot on instances of physical transformation, they refrain from representing such change. This pattern of undescribed physical metamorphosis has broad implications for recent work on evolving notions of change and identity beginning in the high Middle Ages. While Caroline Walker Bynum has read the medieval outpouring of tales about werewolves and hybrids as imaginative responses to social upheavals, I consider why such medieval writings ironically focused on shape-shifters but avoided metamorphosis itself. I argue that we can understand why Chaucer and other writers resisted imagining bodies in the process of transforming by examining the history of ideas regarding metamorphosis in the medieval west. While the foremost classical writer on transformation, Ovid, reveled in depictions of metamorphosis, by the late Middle Ages a new religious discourse on change enjoyed prominence, the doctrine of transubstantiation. In its effort to separate substance and accidents, Eucharistic theory strove to detach identity from physical change and exhibited a certain level of repugnance over images of physical transformation. I argue that medieval secular writings address that anxiety over bread-turned-God in moments such as the close of the Wife of Bath's Tale. In a scene that recalls the place of veiling in Eucharistic ritual, the hag uses the bed curtain first to cloak then reveal her newly young and beautiful physique. Ultimately, the corpus of medieval literature on change--a body of work that engages both Ovidian and Eucharistic writings--suggests that identity intertwines with physical metamorphosis in a productive, if problematically unstable, manner.

Currently there are three companies producing bitumen from the Athabasca Oil Sands Region located near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Extraction of bitumen produces solid (sand) and liquid (water with suspended fine particles) tailings material, called oil sands process affected-materials (OSPM). These waste materials are stored on site due to a zero discharge policy and must be reclaimed when operations end. The OSPM is known to contain naphthenic acids (NAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and has high pH and salinity. A possible method of reclamation is the wet landscape approach, which involves using OSPM to form wetlands that would mimic natural wetland ecological functioning. This study investigated the effects of wetlands formed with OSPM on wood frog larvae (<i>Rana sylvatica</i>), using endpoints including survival, growth, time to metamorphosis, hormonal status, and detoxification enzyme induction [ethoxyresorufin-o-dealkylase (EROD) activity].<p> <i>In-situ</i> caging studies were completed in 2006 and 2007. Four wetlands were studied in 2006 and 14 wetlands were studied in 2007. The 2006 season saw a host of problems that were resolved for the 2007 season. In 2006, tadpole survival did not differ among reference wetlands and old OSPM-affected wetlands but there was 100% mortality of tadpoles in the young OSPM-affected sites that contain the highest concentration of toxic components. Results were similar in 2007, with tadpoles raised in young OSPM-affected wetlands having 41.5%, 62.6%, and 54.7% higher tadpole mortality than old OSPM-affected, young reference, and old reference wetlands, respectively. In 2007, tadpoles from young OSPM-affected sites had delayed metamorphosis (12 days longer than tadpoles from old reference wetlands and 18 days longer than tadpoles in old OSPM-affected wetlands). The thyroid hormone ratios of tadpoles in young OSPM-affected wetlands were between 25% and 42% lower than tadpoles in all other wetlands groups. The EROD activity of tadpoles in young OSPM-affected wetlands was an average 223% higher than those in old OSPM-affected wetlands, showing us that tadpoles were responding to higher levels of contaminants in young OSPM-affected wetlands. Size differences were only noted in 2007, most likely not as a result of exposure to OSPM, but due to differences in population density. The results of this study lead us to believe that toxicity due to OSPM decreases as wetlands get older and OSPM-affected wetlands could support native amphibian populations if they are allowed to mature. Since we considered wetlands to be old if they were seven years or older and the fact that old-OSPM wetlands showed effects on tadpoles similar to those of reference wetlands and showed much less toxicity than young OSPM-affected wetlands, we believe wetlands that are at least seven years old would sustain amphibian life.

Before his death, Michael Jackson arguably was one of the most famous living celebrities to walk the planet. Onstage, on air, and onscreen, he captivated the attention of millions of people around the world, whether because they loved him or loved to hate him. In an attempt to explain his popularity and cultural influence, I analyze certain theoretical and methodological approaches found in recent scholarship on western hagiographic and teratological texts, and apply these theories and methods to selected biographies written on Michael Jackson. By interpreting the biographies in this way, I suggest why saints, monsters, and celebrities have received considerable attention in their respective communities, and demonstrate how public responses to these figures are contextual, constructed, and often contradictory.