Previous scientific research has documented channel narrowing on the Green River near Green River, Utah, but the exact timing, rates, and causal mechanisms of that narrowing have been the source of disagreement in the scientific literature. This thesis demonstrates that the Green River has narrowed in two separate periods during the last 100 years. The narrowing is driven primarily by changes in the hydrologic regime and not by the invasion of saltcedar. The channel narrowed between 1930 and 1938, when a shift from wetter than normal conditions to a period of draught led to a reduction in river discharge. Channel width then remained relatively stable until construction of Flaming Gorge Dam in 1962, despite the presence of saltcedar. Narrowing has occurred since dam construction. Detailed analysis of the formation of an inset floodplain deposit indicates that it formed by a process of vertical accretion, during incremental events. Inset bank deposits within the study area are composed primarily of particles smaller than 0.125 mm. Measurement of suspended sand distribution within the water column shows that particles of this size are carried in suspension by the 2-yr flood. Continued vertical accretion over time elevated the floodplain surface until inundation rarely occurs.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Chemistry / Ryszard J. Jankowiak / Low-temperature laser-induced fluorescence spectroscopy has various applications in analytical, physical, and biophysical chemistry. This technique provides information on the fluorescence origin band, zero-phonon lines and phonon-sidebands, inhomogeneous broadening, electron-phonon coupling strength, and ground- and excited-state vibrational frequencies of studied molecules. Examples discussed in this work include studies of DNA/metabolites and monoclonal antibody (mAb)/antigen interactions. The structural basis for the increased reactivity of BPDE towards guanines at 5-methylcytosine ([superscript]M[superscripte]eC):G sites in DNA was investigated by low temperature laser-based spectroscopy, studying the nature of physical complexes of benzo[a]pyrene tetraol in a series of 5-methylcytosine structural DNA analogs. We found that the presence of a C-5 substituent on cytosine and related structural modifications influences the conformation of BPT in DNA analogs, and could explain the increase in guanine reactivity at [superscript]M[superscript]eC:G sites of the p53 tumor suppressor gene that contains endogenenous 5-([superscript]M[superscript]eC. It has been demonstrated that various mAbs can bind a particular cross-reactant by adopting two distinct "red" and "blue" conformations of its binding sites. We showed that the blue conformation of pyrene in several mAbs (including 4D5 mAb) is consistent with [pi]-cation interactions, underscoring the importance of [pi]-cation interaction in ligand binding. We propose that considerable narrowing of the fluorescence origin band of the ligand in the protein environment could be regarded as a simple indicator of [pi]-cation interactions. It is also shown that time-resolved delta fluorescence line-narrowing ([delta]FLN) spectroscopy, using excitation within the (0,0)-transition band, provides more reliable information of the frequency dependence of the electron-phonon coupling (Huang-Rhys factor, (S < 1). Finally, analytical formulas were developed to describe FLN spectra with excitation energy transfer present. Our calculated FLN spectra are compared with spectra obtained by a simple convolution method (SC) and a more rigorous treatment using Redfield theory. We demonstrate that, under the condition of weak coupling between pigments (i.e., the coupling constant is smaller than the reorganization energy) and weak electron-phonon coupling strength (S < 1), our analytical formulas provide an excellent approximation of the SC and Redfield methodologies. We argued that our approach could also model FLN spectra obtained for very complex biological systems.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of the landmark educational reform legislation, No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) on four specific areas within the local educational setting: (1) local curriculum decisions (2) teaching decisions as they relate to daily instruction (3) potential narrowing of the curriculum and (4) teacher job satisfaction. All public schools in the United States are now subject to the mandates of NCLB. This legislation marked a profound change in the relationship between the federal government and state and local educational agencies. NCLB represents an expansion of the federal role in education where federal control of education has reached deeper than ever before into the heart of state and local educational operations. As a result, NCLB has direct implications for what takes place educationally in the individual classroom. The local educational setting and the individual classroom is where this study focused its efforts. This study suggests that NCLB has had, and will continue to have, a major impact on curriculum decisions at the local level as well as classroom instructional decisions made either by the teacher or enforced upon the classroom teacher by local administrative or local school district mandates. The study also suggests that this impact will be driven by the requirement that schools achieve a specified rate of progress in the areas of mathematics and reading as measured through the use of standardized tests. Under NCLB a school's performance on state reading and mathematics tests will determine if the school and its district make adequate yearly progress, commonly referred to as AYP. Schools that fail to meet the annual achievement goals are subjected to an escalating series of sanctions. This study sought to determine if curriculum decisions at the district and administrative level have been driven by NCLB and the AYP component. The study sought to determine if curriculum decisions and classroom practices on the part of teachers were influenced by NCLB. Additionally the study sought to determine if NCLB and the AYP component have caused a narrowing of the curriculum and if so, to what extent. Finally, this study sought to determine if NCLB and the AYP component had any impact on teacher job satisfaction as it pertains to classroom instructional decisions and teacher autonomy.

El problema de la integración d ela programación lógica y funcional estaá considerado como uno de los más importantes en el área de investigación sobre programación declarativa. Para que los lenguajes declarativos sean útiles y puedan utilizarse en aplicaciones reales, es necesario que el grado de eficiencia de su ejecución se aproxime al de los lenguajes imperativos. Para ello, es imprescindible el desarrollo de herramientas potentes para el análisis y transformacón de los programas, capaces de optimizar las implementaciones existentes. Esta tesis se centra en el desarrollo de tales técnicas, adoptándose la aproximación conocida como "reglas + estrategias" para la optimización de programas en un tentexto lógico-funcional unificado. Las reglas básicas que se usan son el plegado y el desplegado que aquí se definen en términos del Narrowing y sus refinamientos. Gracias a la propagación bidireccional de parámetros realizadas por el mecanismo de unificación del narrowing, se obtienen optimizaciones apreciables y es posible explotar la sinergía existente entre la sintaxis funcional (anidamientos funcionales, evaluaciones perezosas, etc.) y el uso de variables lógicas. Esta fisión unificada de ejecución y transformación de programas nos permite explotar los resultados conocidos en ambos campos, funcional y lógico, y desarrollar un esquema simple y potente para mejorar un programa con respecto a su capacidad para computar tanto valores a funciones como respuestas a objetivos. Presentamos algunas aplicaciones de las reglas de plegado y desplegado (semánticas formales pr desplegado y relaciones con las técnicas de evalación parcial). Además, mostramos que su combinación con otras reglas para la introducción y eliminación de difiniciones y reglas de abstracción permite obtener programas eficicientes cuando son dirigidas por estrategias adecuadas como son la composición o la formación de Tuplas. El esquema presentado constituye la primera aproximación correcta y completa .... / Moreno Valverde, GD. (2000). Reglas y estrategias de transformación para programas lógico-funcionales [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/4701 / Palancia

In their first year, infants’ ability to follow eye gaze to allocate attention shifts from being a response to low-level perceptual cues, to a deeper understanding of social intent. By 4 months infants look longer to uncued versus cued targets following a gaze cuing event, suggesting that infants better encode targets cued by shifts in eye gaze compared to targets not cued by eye gaze. From 6 to 9 months of age infants develop biases in face processing such that they show increased differentiation of faces within highly familiar groups (e.g., own-race) and a decreased differentiation of faces within unfamiliar or infrequently experienced groups (e.g., other-race). Although the development of cued object learning and face biases are both important social processes, they have primarily been studied independently. The current study examined whether early face processing biases for familiar compared to unfamiliar groups influences object encoding within the context of a gaze-cuing paradigm. Five- and 10-month-old infants viewed videos of adults, who varied by race and sex, shift their eye gaze towards one of two objects. The two objects were then presented side-by-side and fixation duration for the cued and uncued object was measured. Results revealed 5-month-old infants look significantly longer to uncued versus cued objects when the cuing face was a female. Additionally, 10-month-old infants displayed significantly longer looking to the uncued relative to the cued object when the cuing face was a female and from the infant’s own-race group. These findings are the first to demonstrate that perceptual narrowing based on sex and race shape infants’ use of social cues for allocating visual attention to objects in their environment.

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The Master's Thesis deals with the common property of spouses in a case of business activities of one of the spouses. The main goal of the Master's Thesis is to summarize the main information concerning the topic of the common property of spouses in a case of business activities of one of the spouses and a presentation of several practical cases. Except for introduction and conclusion the Master's Thesis contains three parts. The first one describes the historical development. The second part defines the main concepts of common property and enterpreneur. The third part contains several practical cases regarding the chosen topic.

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The focus of this doctoral thesis is the atomic level design of photocatalysts and gas sensing materials. The band gap narrowing in the metal oxides for the visible-light driven photocatalyst as well as the interaction of water and gas molecules on the reactive surfaces of metal oxides and the electronic structure of kaolinite has been studied by the state-of-art calculations. Present thesis is organized into three sections. The first section discusses the possibility of converting UV active photocatalysts (such as Sr2Nb2O7, NaTaO3, SrTiO3, BiTaO4 and BiNbO4) into a visible active photocatalysts by their band gap engineering. Foreign elements doping in wide band gap semiconductors is an important strategy to reduce their band gap. Therefore, we have investigated the importance of mono- and co-anionic/cationic doping on UV active photocatalysts. The semiconductor's band edge position is calculated with respect to the water oxidation/reduction potential for various doping. Moreover, the tuning of valence and conduction band edge position is discussed on the basis of dopant's p/d orbital energy. In the second section of thesis the energetic, electronic and optical properties of TiO2, NiO and β-Si3N4 have been discussed to describe the adsorption mechanism of gas molecules at the surfaces. The dissociation of water into H+ or OH- occurs on the O-vacancy site of the (001)-surface of rutile TiO2 nanowire, which is due to the charge transfer from Ti atom to water molecule. The dissociation of water into OH- and imino (NH) groups is also observed on the β-Si3N4 (0001)-surface due to the dangling bonds of the lower coordinated N and Si surface atoms. Fixation of the SO2 molecules on the anatase TiO2 surfaces with O-deficiency have been investigated by Density Functional Theory (DFT) simulation and Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. DFT calculations have been employed to explore the gas-sensing mechanism of NiO (100)-surface on the basis of energetic and electronic properties. In the final section the focus is to describe the optical band gap of pristine kaolinite using the hybrid functional method and GW approach. Different possible intrinsic defects in the kaolinite (001) basal surface have been studied and their effect on the electronic structure has been explained. The detailed electronic structure of natural kaolinite has been determined by the combined efforts of first principles calculations and Near Edge X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (NEXAFS).