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The purpose of this thesis is to present an overview of the origins and uses of dreams and dream interpretation through the years. This is accomplished in two main sections. The first section traces the ancient history of dreams and their uses in various cultures. It begins with the first written evidence of dreams found in the Egyptian culture and is carried through the Babylonian, Greek and Roman Eras. The history also includes the use of dreams as documented in the Biblical Records, the Oriental cultures and during the era of Christianity. The superstitions about dreams during the Medieval era through to the Middle Ages is discussed.

This thesis explores how the complex interplay between gender and technology significantly shaped the popularization of commercial aviation in the United States during the 1920s and 30s. As technological innovations improved both the safety and efficiency of airplanes during the early part of the twentieth century, commercial aviation industries increasingly worked to position flight as a viable means of mass transportation. In order to win the trust and money of potential passengers, however, industry proponents recognized the need to separate flight from its initial association with danger and masculine strength by convincing the general public of aviation’s safety and reliability. My work examines the efforts made by industry executives, pilots, and popular news sources to remake the public image of flight by specifically positioning women—as pilots, wives, and mothers—as central to the popularization of commercial aviation. More specifically, this thesis investigates the ways in which female popularizers of commercial aviation effectively mediated the boundaries between technologies and society, and how women’s positions as technological boundary workers often required them to redefine the social meanings and expectations of their gender.

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Around the turn of the twenty-first century, universities in the United States extended their longstanding history of cross-border activities by not only moving professors, students, and scholarship abroad but programs and campuses, as well. This trend towards transnationalization has especially involved polytechnics due to international demand for American technoscientific higher education driven by markets that favor its perceived socioeconomic utility. Using a method called "focal point analysis" that builds on the approaches of microhistory, the dissertation argues that these transnational polytechnics are globally traded commodities as well as international sociotechnical systems. They involve diversely situated users who co-configure these systems and the cultural, economic, and scientific flows moving through them. By analyzing historical moments tied to four trans/national locations (China, Ireland, India, and UAE) and institutions (MIT, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, and NYIT) using a variety of online and offline archives, the dissertation shows how these users reengineer these contexts as well as globalization, the knowledge economy, and academic capitalism. as individual and group users reimagine their identities through engagement with transnational polytechnics, they also reconfigure the identities of these institutions and their contexts. The dissertation concludes that these trans/national users have blurred the national identity, financial imperatives, and scientific logics of the exported American polytechnic through stabilizing and destabilizing cultural configurations.

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This paper examines the education, events, and experiences of the Wright brothers in order to determine how they developed the necessary skills to engineer the first viable aircraft. Without high school diplomas, and with no advanced formal education, the Wright brothers were able to develop aircraft that far exceeded the capabilities of aircraft designed and built by professional engineers that had worked on the problem of flight for much longer and with substantially larger research budgets. I argue that the Wright brothers’ success resulted from their experiences in the printing and bicycle industries as well as their formal and informal educations at school and in the home. In the printing business it was their experiences designing and building printing presses, printing newspapers, and operating a job printing shop that taught them how to build machinery and work efficiently and methodically. These same skills were perfected as the Wright brothers managed their second business venture: The Wright Cycle Exchange.While working at the bicycle shop the Wrights learned to be proficient machinists as well as expert mechanics and frame builders. This industry provided them with many skills such as brazing and machining that would be directly applicable to aircraft fabrication. In addition to these skills, building bicycle frames and wheels taught them practical material limits and structural design that informed their aircraft design decisions. Moreover, bicycle design influenced their approach to aircraft control and aerodynamic theory that gave them an edge over other aeronautical experimenters in their race to the sky. When these skills were combined with their rigid religious upbringing, the Wright brothers were uniquely prepared to solve the complex problem of practical human flight. It was the combination of their fabrication skills, understanding of material limits, dogged determination, methodical testing procedures, and their unique approach to aircraft control that was informed by their experiences with bicycles that made them the first in flight.

<p>This dissertation explores the social history of genetic counseling in the United States between 1930 and 2000. I situate genetic counselors at the interstices of medicine, science, and an increasingly “geneticized” society. My study emphasizes two central themes. First, genetic counselors have played a crucial role in bridging the “old eugenics” and the “new genetics” as mediators of genetic reproductive technologies. Genetic counselors negotiated the rights and responsibilities of genetic citizens in their patient encounters. Discourses of privilege and duty were also extrapolated outward to public debates about the new genetics, demonstrating the highly-politicized contexts in which counselors practice and women make reproductive choices. Second, I interrogate the professionalization process of genetic counseling from a field led by male physician-geneticists in the 1940s and 50s, to a profession dominated by women with Masters degrees by the 1980s and 90s. This transformation is best understood through the framework of a “system of professions,” and counselors’ professional position between “sympathy and science.” These frameworks similarly structured the client-counselor relationship, which also centered on concepts of risk, the promotion of patient autonomy, and the ethics of non-directiveness and client-centeredness. These principles distanced counselors from their field’s eugenic origins and the traditional doctor-patient relationship. I emphasize the voices of genetic counselors based on 25 oral history interviews, and hierarchies of gender, race, and educational status at work in the profession’s history. A study of genetic counseling is an important contribution to the histories of health and medicine, medical sociology, bioethics, disability studies, and gender and women’s studies.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The most important programming languages are the ones that manage to capitalize on emerging frontiers in computing. Although JavaScript started its life as a toy language, the explosive growth of the web since 1995 and the invention of the web application have transformed the language’s syntax, potential and importance. JavaScript today is powerful and expressive. But is the language good enough to power the future of the web? How does the messy political past of JavaScript affect web development today, and how will it affect web development in the future? The paper first examines the political history of JavaScript from its origins at Netscape through today. Then a case study of pure JavaScript web development using the NodeJS and AngularJS is presented and analyzed. Finally, several potential paths forward for the language are considered, including a discussion and analysis of Microsoft’s TypeScript, Mozilla’s ASM.js and Google’s Dart.