The biology of modern life predicts the existence of an ancient RNA world. A phase of evolution in which organisms utilized RNA as a genetic material and a catalyst. However, the existence of an RNA organism necessitates RNA’s ability to self-replicate, which has yet to be proven. In this thesis, we utilize computational modeling to address some of the problems facing RNA replication. In chapter 2, we consider a polymerase ribozyme replicating by the Qβ bacteriophage mechanism. When bound to a surface, limited diffusion allows for survival so long as the termination error rate is below an error threshold. In Chapter 3, we consider the replication of short oligomers through an abiotic mechanism proposed in prebiotic experiments. When limited by substrate availability, competition results in the emergence of uniform RNA polymers from a messy prebiotic soup containing nucleotides of different chirality and sugars. In chapter 4, we consider the possibility of an RNA world lacking cytosine. Without cytosine, the ability of RNA to fold to complex secondary structures is limited. Furthermore, G-U wobble base pairing hinders the transfer of information during replication. Nevertheless, we conclude that an RNA world lacking cytosine may be possible, but more difficult for the initial emergence of life. In chapter 5, we analyze abiotic and viral mechanisms of RNA replication using known kinetic and thermodynamic data. While most mechanisms fail under non-enzymatic conditions, rolling-circle replication appears possible. In chapter 6, we extend our analysis of the rolling-circle mechanism to consider the fidelity of replication. Due to the thermodynamic penalty of incorporating an error, rolling-circle replication appears to undergo error correction. This results in highly accurate replication and circumvents Eigen’s paradox. Rolling-circle replication therefore presents an appealing option for the emergence of RNA replication in an RNA world. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Imperceivable World is an immersive multi-media exhibition that allows the audience to explore the imperceivable micro world of various organisms. These microorganisms occupy a space within our world that is so minuscule that it might seem like fiction. A series of short animations are an exploration into how these organisms behave and interact, giving the viewer a brief glimpse into this micro world. Imperceivable World utilizes the Cyclorama, which is a massive cylindrical screen that can display 3D stereoscopic animations which provide the audience a larger than life perspective of these microorganisms. Along with cyclorama Imperceivable World uses the Cube's audio space to give the audience a fully immersive experience. / Master of Fine Arts

Design / My work explores methods of creating illusions that make the imaginary and the real worlds appear to co-exist. More specifically, my animations look at ways of connecting the real and fantastical by using “low tech” materials. This report discusses existing work that combines animation with video-installation, live-performance, and advertisements; analyzes my research trajectory, explains my methodology for producing new hybrid work in animation; and then describes my projects. Each project is derived from a matrix I developed that forces integrations between two sets of criteria: (1) physical world action, objects and space, and (2) computer-generated images, representational images in an imaginary state and objects in physical space in an imaginary state. / text

Since the beginning of the twentieth century missionary leaders have become aware of the national church as the focal point of their difficulties. The church on the mission field is a victory in itself, but with it comes an awareness of problems both new and old. The purpose of this thesis is to discuss and analyze these problems and draw certain conclusions. The procedure will follow this outline: (1) Definition (2) The Problems Involved (3) Origin of the Problems (4) Efforts Toward Resolution of the Problems.

O presente trabalho propõe uma nova análise de negócio para avaliar a importância de classes de consumidores para o modelo de negócio de aplicações de negócio eletrônico para a WWW. Esta avaliação é feita através do agrupamento dos consumidores em classes e da medição da receita gerada e do consumo de recursos de cada uma das classes. Este trabalho também propõe a modelagem e a implementação de uma ferramenta para a medição do consumo de recursos computacionais de cada uma das classes de consumidores. Para medir o consumo de recursos foi criada uma nova técnica baseada na proposta por Menasce et al. (1999).que permite a medição do consumo de recursos de servidores WWW através da monitoração de uma aplicação de negócio eletrônica durante a operação ou através da extração dos dados necessários para medir o consumo de recursos de arquivos de log. Para realizar a medição do consumo e para validar a técnica proposta foi projetada e construída uma ferramenta que, uma vez passada a forma de identificação de classes de consumidores e a navegação desses consumidores em arquivos de logs ou em banco de dados, permite contabilizar os recursos computacionais consumidos pelos mesmos. A ferramenta e o seu correto funcionamento foram validados através da aplicação da ferramenta sobre dados de navegação simulados para grupos pré-definidos de consumidores cujo resultado obtido foi comparado ao resultado esperado. / This work describes a new business analysis to evaluate the importance of individual customer classes to the business model of a web-based electronic business application. This can be accomplished by breaking the customer base into classes and measuring the monetary income and the resource consumption for each class. This work also proposes a software tool modeling to measure the computer resource consumption for each customer class and each individual application module. To measure the resource consumption, a new technique based on the one proposed by Menasce et al. (1999) was created to allow the proper breakdown of the resource consumption by the customers in a WWW server through monitoring the business software application during its operation or through the extraction of the data needed to measure the resource consumption from the log files generated by the WWW servers hosting the application. To perform the measurement and to validate the proposed technique, it was designed and built a software tool that is able to evaluate the resource consumption of a customer group when it receives the way to identify the group of a customer and the navigation of these customers in the form of a navigation database or in a log file. This software tool was validated by applying it over some simulated customer navigating data based on the expected behavior of some predefined customer groups and comparing the data obtained with the expected result.

Drawing on Ottoman and British archival sources as well as published materials in Arabic and modern Turkish, this dissertation analyzes how the Hijaz and the hajj to Mecca simultaneously became objects of Ottoman modernization, global public health, international law, and inter-imperial competition during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that from the early 1880s onward, Ottoman administrators embarked on an ambitious redefinition of the empire’s Arab tribal frontiers. Through modern engineering, technology, medicine, and ethnography, they set out to manage human life and the resources needed to sustain it, transform Bedouins into proper subjects, and gradually replace autonomous political life with more rigorous forms of territorial power. At the same time, with the advent of the steamship colonial regimes identified Mecca as the source of a “twin infection” of sanitary and security threats. Repeated outbreaks of cholera marked steamship-going pilgrimage traffic as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from diasporic networks of anti-colonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. In contrast to scholarship framing biopolitical surveillance over the hajj as a colonial project, I emphasize the interplay between European and Ottoman visions of quarantines, medical inspections, steamship regulations, passports, and border controls. As with other more overtly strategic projects, such as rail and telegraph lines, I argue that the Ottoman state sought to harness the increasing medicalization of the hajj, Hijazi society, and the Arabian environment as part of a broader assemblage of efforts to consolidate its autonomous southern frontiers. Although historians have frequently held up the Hijaz and the pilgrimage to Mecca as natural assets for the invention of Hamidian tradition and legitimacy, they have often failed to recognize or clearly articulate how the very globalizing technologies of steam, print, and telegraphy, which made the dissemination and management of the Sultan-Caliph’s carefully curated image possible, were only just beginning to make the erection of more meaningful structures of Ottoman governmentality, biopolitical security, and territorial sovereignty in the Hijaz possible. And while modern technologies clearly lay at the very heart of the Hamidian impulse to reform, develop, and modernize the empire, concomitantly these very same technologies were also extending British India’s extraterritorial reach into the Hijaz. Thus, as an alternative to the traditional “Pan-Islamic” framing of the late Ottoman Hijaz, this study seeks to identify the assemblages of legal, documentary, technological, scientific, and environmental questions, the “everyday details” and quotidian “mechanics,” which were actually escalating and intensifying Anglo-Ottoman and wider international clashes over the status of the Hijaz and the administration of the hajj. In a sense, this dissertation is also a history of negation, absence, and contradiction. In order to better understand the possibilities and the limits of late Ottoman rule in the Hijaz, I spend much of this study detailing the enormous obstacles to territorial sovereignty and modern governmentality through an investigation of their Janus-faced inversions, autonomy and extraterritoriality. I argue that the autonomous legal status, exceptions, and special privileges enjoyed by both the Sharifate of Mecca and the Hijazi population (Bedouin and urban) laid bare the compromised nature and limits of Ottoman sovereignty and provided both the gateway and the rationale for the extension of the Capitulations and European extraterritorial protection into corners of the Ottoman world and Muslim spiritual affairs, which prior to the late-nineteenth century had been inconceivable.

O presente trabalho propõe uma nova análise de negócio para avaliar a importância de classes de consumidores para o modelo de negócio de aplicações de negócio eletrônico para a WWW. Esta avaliação é feita através do agrupamento dos consumidores em classes e da medição da receita gerada e do consumo de recursos de cada uma das classes. Este trabalho também propõe a modelagem e a implementação de uma ferramenta para a medição do consumo de recursos computacionais de cada uma das classes de consumidores. Para medir o consumo de recursos foi criada uma nova técnica baseada na proposta por Menasce et al. (1999).que permite a medição do consumo de recursos de servidores WWW através da monitoração de uma aplicação de negócio eletrônica durante a operação ou através da extração dos dados necessários para medir o consumo de recursos de arquivos de log. Para realizar a medição do consumo e para validar a técnica proposta foi projetada e construída uma ferramenta que, uma vez passada a forma de identificação de classes de consumidores e a navegação desses consumidores em arquivos de logs ou em banco de dados, permite contabilizar os recursos computacionais consumidos pelos mesmos. A ferramenta e o seu correto funcionamento foram validados através da aplicação da ferramenta sobre dados de navegação simulados para grupos pré-definidos de consumidores cujo resultado obtido foi comparado ao resultado esperado. / This work describes a new business analysis to evaluate the importance of individual customer classes to the business model of a web-based electronic business application. This can be accomplished by breaking the customer base into classes and measuring the monetary income and the resource consumption for each class. This work also proposes a software tool modeling to measure the computer resource consumption for each customer class and each individual application module. To measure the resource consumption, a new technique based on the one proposed by Menasce et al. (1999) was created to allow the proper breakdown of the resource consumption by the customers in a WWW server through monitoring the business software application during its operation or through the extraction of the data needed to measure the resource consumption from the log files generated by the WWW servers hosting the application. To perform the measurement and to validate the proposed technique, it was designed and built a software tool that is able to evaluate the resource consumption of a customer group when it receives the way to identify the group of a customer and the navigation of these customers in the form of a navigation database or in a log file. This software tool was validated by applying it over some simulated customer navigating data based on the expected behavior of some predefined customer groups and comparing the data obtained with the expected result.

The present study examines the promotion of Holocaust denial since 1945 with a particular focus on the works of David Irving. It specifically examines the contribution to Holocaust denial of Irving's ideological beliefs as expounded in his published works and his many public speeches. My thesis also presents evidence and an argument about Irving's crusade to promote Holocaust denial. This thesis will chart a changing consciousness about the established history of the Holocaust, in which conventional historical discussion is gradually losing ground. Deborah Lipstadt argues that these attacks on history and knowledge have the potential to alter the way established truth is transmitted from generation to generation. Lipstadt points out that according to some post-structuralist scholars no fact, no event, and no aspect of history any longer has any fixed meaning or content. Any truth can be retold. Any fact can be re-cast. Lipstadt defines this as bigotry. I tend to agree. This thesis will examine the genesis and context of holocaust denial. Here I shall evaluate significant contemporary denial writings and offer some perspectives about the controversy; I will consider general aspects of David Irving's background, personality and the major steps in his intellectual development; Irving will be examined as an author of historical books and an historian of the Second World War; examine Irving as a Holocaust denier; examine both Irving's political agenda, his propensity to associate with extreme right groups and individual and his alleged capacity to incite violence. / Master of Arts (Hons)

This study focuses on one source of sex tourism diaries: posts on the World Sex Guide written about tourists who had sex while in Latin America. My interest is in exploring how posters on the World Sex Guide make sense of their involvement in sex tourism. Starting from the premise that the diaries constitute a forum in which a hegemonic masculinity is created and perpetuated I ask: what types of relations are valued and reproduced by the posters? How do the tourists construct the women whose services they seek? What do their narratives reveal about their own sense of selfhood in the process? I situate the diaries as pornographic representations or rhetorical strategies that are constituted by their context, interpretations, and inscriptions. I then undertake a discursive analysis to reveal their purpose and implications. In particular, I argue that the performances posted on the World Sex Guide reinforce lines of gender, race, economics, status, nationality, and ethnicity in a way that bolsters Western hegemonic masculinities, the implications of which have import not only in online settings but offline as well. / February 2009