The intersection of race, rhetoric and public policy, particularly pertaining to Latino politics, is a growing area of development. Albeit historically, most immigrants to America faced similar questions of cultural and linguistic allegiance, the case regarding Latinos is unique. Given their continual demographic growth, now occupying the nation’s largest “minority” group, much political debate and commentary has arisen regarding the nations state of national unity and identity. For instance, is there a negative correlation between increasing levels of Latino immigration and the stability of the English language as lingua franca? Alternatively, does increasing levels of Latino immigration threaten the sustainability of “American” values and beliefs? Named and defined as a policy “problem,” Latinos, Latino immigration and the Spanish language have become framed as policy “problems” needing solutions. In efforts to unpack this rhetorically rich debate over national identity, race, culture and language, the canon of invention is analyzed insofar as the creation of Latinos as policy “problems,” with close attention drawn also toward policy makers supposed “solutions.” Engaged in both past and present attempts toward declaring English the national language on both the state and federal level, this project largely concerns itself within the 2006 Senate English as the national language debate, along with the growth of one of the nation’s most out-spoken limited-immigration, English-only proponents, Tom Tancredo.

In the research of focus on intonation languages, it is generally assumed that the stress not only signals the focus but also contributes to the different truth condition in sentences containing focus particle only. This phenomenon is known as ¡¥association with focus¡¦ (Jackendoff, 1972; Rooth, 1985, 1992, among others). However, this phenomenon has not been comprehensively studied in tonal languages such as Chinese. To further investigate whether the stress signals the focus in triadic sentences with zhi ¡¥only¡¦ and whether there is a preferred default focus interpretation, the study probes into the issue with respect to younger participants, i.e., teenagers in junior high schools. The study contains triadic sentences such as dative construction, double object construction and ba construction. Participants were asked to choose the focus which zhi ¡¥only¡¦ is associated with in a multiple choice questionnaire after the stories and test sentences were shown by a powerpoint file in the computer. There were three experiments in this study. In Experiment 1, 116 participants in the regular classes judged a contrastive stress awareness task and a modified Truth Value Judgment (TVJ) Task. Experiment 2 (TVJ task only) followed Experiment 1 except for using unfamiliar Cartoon figures. Experiment 3 (the contrastive stress awareness task and the TVJ task) reduplicated Experiment 2 in English. The participants in Experiment 2 and 3 were the same 30 participants in the gifted class. The results, first, further confirmed that even though Chinese teenagers were aware of the contrastive stress, they did not use it for disambiguating sentences with zhi ¡¥only¡¦ in both Chinese and English. Second, the participants tended not to choose the default wide VP focus but narrow focus. However, contrary to the default narrow DO focus that Chinese adult speakers preferred, the teenager participants favored the narrow focus which usually falls on the neutral stress (sentence-final) position. The phenomenon is even more salient in ba construction. Third, in English, contrastive stress was not used for disambiguation although they were aware of the stress. The interpretation of English focus particle only was similar to that of Chinese, so it was ascribed to L1 transfer.

Regulation of apoptosis is critical for cell survival during mild stress and for proper removal of damaged cells during severe stress including hyperthermia. Previous studies have shown that knockdown of the BH3-only protein Noxa prevents hyperthermia-induced Mcl-1 degradation and activation of apoptosis. Noxa is a pro-apoptotic BH3-only protein that is able to selectively bind to and disable anti-apoptotic Mcl-1. Phosphorylation of Noxa on serine-13 by the cyclin-dependent kinase CDK5 inhibits the apoptotic function of Noxa. In this study I investigated whether hyperthermia is able to induce apoptosis by preventing Noxa phosphorylation, due to reduced CDK5 activity, leading to activation of Noxa. I was able to demonstrate that both the phosphorylation status and solubility of CDK5 is reduced during hyperthermia. Furthermore, overexpression of a non-phosphorylatable Noxa (S13A) resulted in a significant decrease in cell viability and increase in caspase-3 activity compared to overexpression of wild-type Noxa at 37°C. However, I was unable to detect in vivo phosphorylation of Noxa serine-13 in lymphoid cells and therefore was unable to conclude whether or not hyperthermia affects the phosphorylation status of Noxa.

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Typescript. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-94). Also available online in Scholars' Bank.

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There has been little scientific evidence to suggest that abstinence-only-until-marriage education programs are effective in preventing or reducing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. There is also little scientific evidence to suggest that comprehensive sex education programs are as or more effective in preventing or reducing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease than their abstinence-only counterpart. The following study compares the teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease rates among minors in Virginia that participate in abstinence-only programs with rates among minors participating in comprehensive sex education programs. I hypothesize that counties implementing comprehensive sex education programs in schools will typically have lower pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease rates among minors than counties implementing abstinence-only education programs. I test these hypotheses with data on the 16 Virginia counties and county equivalents which could be verified as having either comprehensive or abstinence-only sex education programs in public schools during 1998-2003. The data confirm the hypotheses. On average, comprehensive program counties showed greater declines in pregnancy rates among females aged 15-17 than abstinence-only program counties. Comprehensive counties experienced declines in Chlamydia and Gonorrhea rates among males and females aged 15-17, whereas abstinence-only counties' Gonorrhea and Chlamydia rates increased. These findings underscore the need for statewide -- indeed, nationwide -- public reporting of school systems' sex education program types to permit a more thorough comparison and evaluation of program outcomes. In the meantime, these results challenge Virginia advocates of abstinence-only education programs to empirically defend their claims. / Master of Science

This work presents a measurement model designed for multiple observers (space-based and/or ground-based) for cislunar orbit determination and estimation for space domain awareness (SDA). The measurement model is able to rely solely on angles-only measurements by defining the line between the observer and the target object as the intersection of two non-parallel planes. There are two primary applications for the measurement model related to cislunar SDA: (1) It provides a new initial orbit determination (IOD) technique that does not require any knowledge of the dynamical environment, and (2) It is adopted into a sequential estimation scheme to provide continuous orbit tracking. The present measurement model is studied and demonstrated for both Earth orbits and cislunar space applications. While the goal is to operate in cislunar space, evaluating the measurement model in Earth orbits allows for the comparison against established IOD and estimation methods, resulting in a more rigorous analysis of the performance. Within this work, several different aspects of the present measurement model are studied, both analytically and computationally, to understand their effect on the orbit determination and estimation problems. By methodically varying the location of the observers, relative to the target, it is shown that the error produced by the IOD solution to the measurement behaves in a predictable manner. The IOD solution model can then be compared against similar IOD methods for Earth orbit. For orbit estimation, the measurement model is used in a modified extended Kalman filter that incorporates Analytic Continuation, allowing it to propagate the perturbed orbit dynamics to increase estimation accuracy. The measurement model is then incorporated in both an extended Kalman filter and unscented Kalman filter, comparing the resulting accuracy and computational time as the measurement frequency and nonlinearity of the dynamics are varied. For cislunar space, the measurement model is used to perform IOD and tracking of objects in orbits with relevance to future space missions. Finally, the present measurement model is shown to be capable of fusing other measurement methods from heterogeneous sensors to perform accurate orbit estimation. Overall, it is shown that the measurement model produces highly accurate results for IOD and orbit estimation. The results of the IOD solution have the same level of accuracy as other Earth orbit IOD methods and is shown to be able to easily translate to cislunar orbits without any modification, while maintaining that accuracy. For orbit estimation, the measurement model is shown to converge to an accurate estimate quickly and maintain that level of accuracy even in the absence of measurements, which is to be expected due to the vastness of cislunar space. The present approach will have future applications in space-based space surveillance networks for on-orbit cislunar SDA operations.

Ensemble techniques have recently been used to enhance the performance of machine learning methods. However, current ensemble techniques for classification require both positive and negative data to produce a result that is both meaningful and useful. Negative data is, however, sometimes difficult, expensive or impossible to access. In this thesis a learning framework is described that has a very close relationship to boosting. Within this framework a method is described which bears remarkable similarities to boosting stumps and that does not rely on negative examples. This is surprising since learning from positive-only data has traditionally been difficult. An empirical methodology is described and deployed for testing positive-only learning systems using commonly available multiclass datasets to compare these learning systems with each other and with multiclass learning systems. Empirical results show that our positive-only boosting-like method learns, using stumps as a base learner and from positive data only, successfully, and in the process does not pay too heavy a price in accuracy compared to learners that have access to both positive and negative data. We also describe methods of using positive-only learners on multiclass learning tasks and vice versa and empirically demonstrate the superiority of our method of learning in a boosting-like fashion from positive-only data over a traditional multiclass learner converted to learn from positive-only data. Finally we examine some alternative frameworks, such as when additional unlabelled training examples are given. Some theoretical justifications of the results and methods are also provided.

This study examines the performance of long-short equity trading strategies from January 1990 to December 2010. This study combines two financial screens that will yield candidates for both long and short positions for each month during the aforementioned time period. Two long-short strategies are tested: (1) perfectly-hedged, or equal allocation to long and short positions, and (2) net-long. The results of this thesis reveal that if a long-short equity manager is able to successfully determine what companies are overvalued and undervalued and actively rebalance their portfolio, perfectly-hedged and net-long strategies can generate superior risk-adjusted alpha.