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published_or_final_version / abstract / Statistics and Actuarial Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

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6 pp. / Firewise Series / This bulletin describes the specific characteristics and fire history of Arizona interior chaparral which distinguish it from California chaparral, and provides landscaping guidelines both to mitigate structural damage from wildfire and to maintain the health of this important vegetation type.

Narrative data enable evaluators to understand other people's viewpoints without predetermining those viewpoints by using preselected questionnaire categories. Narrative data yield rich detail, insight, and information. However, reducing narrative data into meaningful conclusions is difficult and time consuming, and requires attention, commitment, and skill on the part of trained coders. The personal and situational characteristics of the coders (called value inertia and cognitive limitation biases) affect data reduction. The effects of coder exposure to expected project outcomes and the level of coder research methodology sophistication were investigated. Coders considered either sophisticated or naive in research methodology were exposed to positive, ambiguous, or negative project outcome expectations. The coders reduced, or categorized, 25 open-ended interview response sets into previously established positive, negative, and ambiguous statement-type, content-code categories. The effectiveness of coder training was also explored by computing generalizability (reliability) coefficients. High generalizability coefficients were found, regardless of level of exposure to project outcome expectations. This indicates that coders were able to code the same statements the same way and is an indication of the coders' ability to reproduce the results. Results of this study also indicate that evaluators should use sophisticated coders for the reduction of narrative data, given that option. Sophisticated coders appear more resistant to the effect of exposure to project outcome expectations, coding narrative data more positively with less variability than naive coders when exposed to positive outcome expectations.

Many biologically important electron transfer reactions involve iron-sulfur centers and flavosemiquinones. Laser flash photolysis and stopped-flow spectrophotometry has been utilized to investigate factors influencing transient kinetic oxidation of free and protein-bound flavosemiquinones by various types of oxidants, but primarily high potential iron-sulfur proteins (HiPIP) and rubredoxin classes of Fe-S proteins. Studies of free flavosemiquinone analog oxidation by Fe-containing redox proteins and inorganic oxidants have found the reactivity of the anionic flavosemiquinone to be greater than that for neutral flavosemiquinone. The second order rate constants of oxidation of various flavosemiquinone analogs by either redox proteins or non-biological oxidants correlate with the difference in redox potential of the reactants according to the Marcus exponential equation. For the protein-flavin analog reactions, deviations from the theoretical Marcus curve are interpreted in terms of the effects of the different exocyclic substitutions on intrinsic anion semiquinone reactivity. Electrostatic effects on FMN and C. pasteurianum flavodoxin semiquinone oxidation by HiPIP can be quantitated yielding the rate constant at infinite ionic strength (k∞) and the charge product for reaction. The magnitude of the electrostatic effects are larger for flavodoxin semiquinone oxidation than for FMN semiquinone oxidation which is consistent with the larger electrostatic charge for flavodoxin. The k∞ values obtained from the electrostatic analysis for FMN semiquinone and flavodoxin semiquinone oxidation indicate a dependence on the redox potential difference between the reactants (ΔE). The ΔE effect is larger in magnitude for the flavodoxin reaction than for the FMN reaction. Deviations from the theoretical curves for the FMN and flavodoxin reactions suggest that factors other than redox potential and electrostatics, such as sterics, could be having an important influence on reactivity. The results suggest that electrostatics, redox potential, and perhaps sterics could have an important role in determining the biological specificity of protein/protein redox reactions. C. pasteurianum rubredoxin forms a 1:1 complex with spinach ferredoxin:NADP+- reductase (FNR) at low ionic strengths. The reduction of Rdₒₓ by lumiflavin semiquinone is unaltered in the complex. Evidence is presented for a rapid (2 x 10³s⁻¹) intracomplex electron transfer from FNR semiquinone to oxidized rubredoxin.

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