Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder has garnered controversy in the United States since it became a widely diagnosed disorder in American schoolchildren in the 1970s. Both diagnosis and treatment are sites of controversy. Some believe the disorder is a contrivance of parents and teachers who do not want to deal with hardly exceptional childhood difficulties, or a contrivance of pharmaceutical companies taking advantage of such parents and teachers. Others believe that a neurobiological basis for the disorder will eventually be discovered, and thus will legitimize both the diagnosis and the practice of prescribing medication for treatment. I utilize the Science, Technology, and Society approach of actor network theory to show that these multiple understandings of ADHD can coexist, since ADHD is a complex product of external and internal agents. This will demonstrate how cultural shifts and values cause parents, teachers, and doctors to evaluate childhood in a way that frames certain behaviors as harmful. I also evaluate how cultural values of medicalization center issues in the individual rather than in external factors, and assess the values that psychiatric treatment appeals to and whether they primarily serve the needs of children. I conclude that ADHD is a heavily context-dependent disorder, but that that does not delegitimize harmful effect on children who exhibit ADHD-associated behaviors. I also conclude that the current dominant medicalized approach to ADHD is not optimal because it focuses on only a few of the total factors that make ADHD a pathological disorder for children in the contemporary United States.

In this paper, I analyze Bitcoin price formation and adoption rates at a global and national level. In determining Bitcoin prices, I consider contemporaneous and lagged values of traditional determinants of currencies, such as inflation and industrial production, and digital currency specific factors, primarily public interest. Using monthly time-series data across five years (2011 – 2016), I find that global public interest in Bitcoin, measured by Google searches for the keyword ‘Bitcoin,’ has a positive and significant impact on Bitcoin prices. I extend the analysis to a country level by employing a proxy for adoption rates, represented by the number of local Bitcoin client downloads, which is a useful predictor of prices. I examine pooled data across 12 countries to show that searches for ‘Bitcoin’ can be used to predict adoption rates and, consequently, prices. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first academic article to study Bitcoin usage at a national level. I find that contemporaneous values of traditionally used macroeconomic determinants of currency prices, except inflation, do not have a significant impact on Bitcoin prices.

Energy use and production have become highly salient within both national and international policy. This reflects an international recognition of the need to cut emissions in order to mitigate the threats of climate change. Within the UK there is significant policy support for renewable energy development generally, and wind power in particular. Nevertheless, the UK is not expected to meet its targets for renewable energy production. This is often portrayed as being the result of localised public opposition to particular proposed developments. However, this thesis challenges the notion that local objectors are powerful actors within renewable energy deployment. A detailed, multi-method case study of one planning application for a wind power development was conducted in order to explore how the planning process is experienced and perceived by various different actors involved (i.e. representatives of the developers, local objectors, local supporters). The findings refute the assertion that localised opposition presents significant obstacles for the development of renewable energy; they instead highlight the limited influence of objectors. In order to understand the many different forms of power which may be exercised the research employs Lukes’ three-dimensional view of power as a framework of how the concept is to be understood. Through this framework, the thesis does not only consider the power of objectors, but also of prospective developers and the forms of power that are found within the structures of the planning system. Power is considered to be visible not only in the outcomes of decision-making processes but also in the processes themselves. It is shown that whilst planning processes are presented as being public and democratic, considerable power is exercised in controlling the participation that is allowed and ultimately the range of outcomes which can be achieved.

This PhD seeks to explore the development of a bio-molecular (i.e., genomic) map as a sovereign resource in Mexico. The basic analytical thread of the dissertation is related to the circulation of genomic variability through the policy/legal and scientific social worlds that compose the Mexican medical-population genomics arena. It follows the construction of the Mexican Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), the notion of genomic sovereignty, and the Mexican Genome Diversity Project (MGDP).The key argument for the construction of the INMEGEN relied in a nationalist policy framing, which considered the Mexican genome as a sovereign resource, coupling Mexican “uniqueness” to the very nature of genomic science. Nevertheless, the notion of genomic sovereignty was nothing similar to a paradigm, and was not based on shared visions of causality, since the very “nature” of the policy object —Mexican Genome— was, and still is, a disputed reality. It was through the rhetoric upon independence, emancipation and biopiracy: i.e. experiences of dispossession “in archaeology, botany or zoology” (IFS 2001: 25) that the novelty of population genomics became amenable to be understood as a sovereign matter. Therefore, the strategic reification of Mexicanhood fuelled the whole policy and the legal agenda of the INMEGEN as well, which permitted cooperation without consensus and opened the process of policy innovation. Conversely, scientists considered genomic sovereignty an unfounded exaggeration, but anyhow they cooperated and even created a new policy and scientific enterprise. Genomic sovereignty exemplifies the process of cooperation without consensus on its most extreme version .So, as the notion circulated and gradually became a law to protect Mexican genomic patrimony, the initial coalition of scientists, lawyers and policy makers disaggregated. Many of the original members of the coalition now think of genomic sovereignty as a strategy of the INMEGEN to monopolise genomic research in the country. This dissertation additionally explores the way in which the MGDP is constructed in mass media, in INMEGEN´s communication and in the laboratory practices. These different dimensions of the MGDP depict the difficulties that emerge between the probabilistic, relative and multiple constructions of population genomics and the rhetorical strategies to continually assert the existence of the unique “Mexican Genome”. I argue that the Mexican case study provides an entry point to what I and others (Benjamin 2009; Schwartz-Marin 2011) have identified as a postcolonial biopolitics in which the nation state is reasserted rather than diluted. However the relation between sovereignty, race and nation is not mediated by the biological purification of the nation (Agamben 1998; Foucault 2007), or the active participation of citizens looking to increase their vitality (Rose 2008, Rose & Rabinow 2006), but on an awareness of subalternity in the genomic arena and a collective desire to compete in the biomedical global economy.

Currently, over 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes; among them are nearly 21 million refugees. Thus, the discussion of refugees and refugee camps on a global scale is ever more salient given the recent heightened attention to the global crises. This thesis uses an interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Society (STS) approach to analyze the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) policies, refugee camps, and their implication in the greater society.

How might new technical verification capabilities enhance the prospects of success in future nuclear arms control negotiations? Both theory and evidence suggest that verification technologies can influence the dynamics of arms control negotiations by shaping and constraining the arguments and strategies that are available to the involved stakeholders. In the future, new technologies may help transcend the specific verification challenge of high-security warhead authentication, which is a verification capability needed in future disarmament scenarios that address fewer warheads, limit new categories of warheads, and involve nuclear weapons states other than the United States and Russia. Under these circumstances, the core challenge is maintaining the confidentiality of the classified information related to the warheads under inspection, while providing transparency in the verification process. This analysis focuses on a set of emerging warhead authentication approaches that rely on the cryptographic concept of zero-knowledge proofs and intend to solve the paradox between secrecy and transparency, making deeper reductions in warhead arsenals possible and thus facilitating future nuclear arms control negotiations.

The purpose of this paper is the examination of previous STS-based frameworks for rational risk evaluation and the role of Fukushima residents as co-creators of new technical codes in safety and risk. To accomplish this task, the causes of nuclear refugees’ uncertainty and distrust towards the industry and the applicability of frameworks for scientific proceduralism and democratic rationalization by Kristin Shrader-Frechette and Andrew Feenberg to this issue will be discussed.

The current research uses mail survey methodology to measure Indiana residents’ perceived optimism that emergent science and technologies will be beneficial to them and their families. A structured questionnaire was developed specifically for use in this study. After field-testing, the questionnaire was mailed to 4,500 Indiana households through a stratified random sampling design. Up to three contacts were made with subjects, resulting in receipt of usable responses from 1,003 households, or a 26% response rate.

This dissertation examines how certain epidemic outbreaks become "global threats", that is, diseases that become the focus of international regulations and organized responses while others do not. To answer this question, this dissertation draws upon archival data collected at the World Health Organization (WHO) archives in Geneva, the Western Cape Archives in Cape Town, the British Library, British National Archives, the Wellcome Library Archives in London, and twelve qualitative interviews with senior global health actors in order to analyze five cases when disease threats were prioritized internationally as well as how these constructions patterned responses to outbreaks. I begin by exploring the formation of the first international disease controls in the 19th century, the International Sanitary Conventions, created to prevent the spread of three diseases- plague, cholera and yellow fever. I probe how these earliest conventions patterned responses to diseases covered under them and limited responses to those beyond their scope. Examining how these conventions transformed, I explore why the same disease priorities were maintained by the WHO in their International Sanitary Regulations of the 1950's. Finally, I analyze the transformation of the International Health Regulations in 2005 and its effects on the assessment of disease threat. This dissertation shows that three factors structure the construction of disease threat: epidemic orientalism, economic concerns and field dynamics. Epidemic Orientalism, a discourse motivating the construction of disease threat that first emerged in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, positioned the colonized world as the space from which Europe and the Imperial powers needed to be protected. This orientalist gaze prioritizes the control of diseases emanating from colonial sites that threaten international trade and commerce and has been re-inscribed in all past and present regulations. These factors explain how and why plague, cholera and yellow fever came to be maintained as the primary diseases of international concern until the 21st century. As the WHO has recently been challenged in its authority to manage disease threats, these two factors are also mediated by the WHO's manipulation of symbolic power within a new field of infectious disease management which conditions responses to outbreaks today.

The purpose of this research is to empirically investigate flow front void formation rates and post-formation bubble mobility behavior for composites produced via resin transfer molding (RTM).For this study, in situ observation of bubble formation and migration was accomplished by photographing resin flow progression during infusion tests of carbon reinforcements. An analysis strategy for use in batch processing sequential image sets is presented. The use of MATLAB to process and analyze binary images of infusions for void content has garnered satisfactory results and has shown that analysis of progressive image sequences can greatly enrich the volume of in situ measurements for a given study without compromising the data quality.Semi-automated MATLAB software analysis employed the representative image area (RIA) method to evaluate v0. It was found that the shorter the RIA length, and the more it follows the true flow front shape, the more representative the measured v0 was of the void formation at the flow front.Experimental evidence of in situ bubble formation and mobility behavior is presented. Stitch architecture of NCF reinforcements is shown to influence bubble formation at the flow front. Bubble mobility mechanisms (such as escape and entrapment) are related to stitch orientation relative to the fluid flow direction. Different stitching orientations exhibited different effects on post-formation mobility.Void formation is presented as a function of flow front velocity. Despite differences in preform configurations (stitch orientation with respect to flow) and injection flowrates, bubbles seem to form in a similar fashion for the 3 infusions of carbon fiber NCF reinforcement analyzed in this study. It is observed that bubbles form at stitch lines, regardless of stitch orientation.Bubble migration is documented for infusion of NCF reinforcement with stitching at different orientations. Qualitative observations of bubble migration during infusions of a dense preform of STW, plain weave fabric are discussed. Recommendations are given for future studies involving image-based analysis of in situ bubble formation and migration.