My dissertation examines the question of how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects social welfare spending across countries. To date, there have been three important challenges to studies of the globalization-welfare state nexus. First, most scholars understand market internationalization in terms of the trade of goods and services while minimizing how other aspects of globalization fit into this discussion. Second, scholarly attention to economic globalization has been mistaken when understanding the relationship between demand- and supply-side mechanisms for social welfare provision. Thus, the argument that trade stimulates demand for social welfare has been incorrectly used to oppose the argument that capital mobility significantly undercuts a government's capability to fund welfare states. Lastly, existing studies on this topic mostly center around affluent democracies; various theories of welfare states require further elaborations to increase their external validity. My dissertation aims to overcome these challenges. For this purpose, I focus on one of the most important aspects of globalization, FDI, which bears meaningful implications for both demand- and supply-side functions of social welfare provisions when explaining variations of social welfare spending across countries. I argue that since the late twentieth century, FDI has been a major cause of the "globalization dilemma,'' proposed by (Rodrik1997), who argues that in an age of globalization governments face increased demand for social welfare and decreased capabilities to supply it. In other words, FDI has conflicting influences on welfare states. On the one hand, FDI works for welfare states as the ensuing economic insecurity increases demand for social welfare. At the same time, however, FDI works against welfare states because governments will experience reductions in capital taxation due to competition among themselves to attract and retain production capitals. I further argue that there is an interesting consequence of this dilemma. Due to the conflicting influences of FDI on welfare states, the expansion of social welfare provisions requires governments to secure additional revenues. Governments will address this concern through a strategy that is both effective and politically less expensive: an increased reliance on indirect taxation. As indirect taxes are mostly born out of labor and thus notoriously regressive, the very effort to supply social welfare provisions goes against the fundamental principle of welfare states: the redistribution of income from the rich to the poor.

The emerging field of spintronics relies on the manipulation of electron spin in order to use it in spin-based electronics. Such a paradigm change has to tackle several challenges including finding materials with sufficiently long spin lifetimes and materials which are efficient in generating pure spin currents. This thesis predicts that two types of material families could be a solution to the aforementioned challenges: complex oxides and bismuth based materials. We derived a general approach for constructing an effective spin-orbit Hamiltonian which is applicable to all nonmagnetic materials. This formalism is useful for calculating spin-dependent properties near an arbitrary point in momentum space. We also verified this formalism through comparisons with other approaches for III-V semiconductors, and its general applicability is illustrated by deriving the spin-orbit interaction and predicting spin lifetimes for strained SrTiO3 and a two-dimensional electron gas in SrTiO3 (such as at the LaAIO3/SrTiO3 interface). Our results suggest robust spin coherence and spin transport properties in SrTiO3 related materials even at room temperature. In the second part of the study we calculated intrinsic spin Hall conductivities for bismuth-antimony Bi1-xSbx semimetals with strong spin-orbit couplings, from the Kubo formula and using Berry curvatures evaluated throughout the Brillouin zone from a tight-binding Hamiltonian. Nearly crossing bands with strong spin-orbit interaction generate giant spin Hall conductivities in these materials, ranging from 474 ((ћ/e)Ω-1cm-1) for bismuth to 96((ћ/e)Ω-1cm-1) for antimony; the value for bismuth is more than twice that of platinum. The large spin Hall conductivities persist for alloy compositions corresponding to a three-dimensional topological insulator state, such as Bi0.83Sb0.17. The spin Hall conductivity could be changed by a factor of 5 for doped Bi, or for Bi0.83Sb0.17, by changing the chemical potential by 0.5 eV, suggesting the potential for doping or voltage tuned spin Hall current. We have also calculated intrinsic spin Hall conductivities of Bi2Se3 and Bi2Te3 topological insulators from an effective tight-binding Hamiltonian including two nearest-neighbor interactions. We showed that both materials exhibit giant spin Hall conductivities calculated from the Kubo formula in linear response theory and the clean static limit. We conclude that bismuth-antimony alloys and bismuth chalcogenides are primary candidates for efficiently generating spin currents through the spin Hall effect.

The most common comorbid disorder for adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is depression, with more severe symptoms demonstrated in those with high cognitive ability. Feelings of loneliness are associated with depression. There is a dearth of information regarding pertinent variables for loneliness of friendship quality, friendship motivation, and social skills in high ability adolescents with ASD. This study employs a multiple case study design with 10 twice-exceptional adolescent males with high cognitive ability and ASD (ages 13-9 to 18-11) to investigate these variables. Adolescent, parent, and teacher interviews were completed, transcribed, and analyzed using Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR). Results describe friendship quality for these youth, with particular contributions to current understanding of companionship, security, help, closeness and balance. Findings inform friendship motivation, as well, and etiologies of amotivation are documented. Results indicate positive and negative influences of high intelligence on interpersonal functioning, along with immaturity and symptoms of rigidity affecting friendships, as well. Pathway analyses reveal twice-exceptional youth with insecure friendships experience loneliness and introjected motivation for friendships, along with increases in peer dyadic relationships and decreases in loneliness. Those with insecure friendships and perseverative interest in peers also present with suicidal ideation and/or attempts. Future research should expand the use of individual therapies (i.e., cognitive behavioral therapy for depression) for these twice-exceptional teens, particularly in middle school, with modifications to accommodate difficulties with perseveration on negative emotions, as well as explore coping strategies of engaging with fictional characters when lonely.

This study sought to examine the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and intimate partner violence in adult committed, monogamous, same sex female relationships. Participants included lesbian or queer cisgender women, age 18 or over, who were in a current committed relationship of at least six months. Partnerships with local and national lesbian advocacy groups allowed electronic access to participants. A total of 87 participants completed the Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire and the Abusive Behaviors Inventory. All participants were anonymous. The three examined variables included emotional/psychological abuse, sexual abuse, and physical abuse. These variables were entered into the Software Program for Statistical Analysis (SPSS) using correlational matrices, hierarchical regression, and one-way ANOVA analyses. Results from the data analysis will provide insight into the relationship of each variable on the presence of intimate partner violence in adult committed, monogamous, lesbian or queer cisgender relationships.

A Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model was developed for the Iowa-Cedar River Basin (ICRB), a 32,660 km2 watershed dominated by agricultural land cover (∼70%) to simulate hydrology and water quality for the prediction of stream discharge, nitrate loads, and nitrate concentration under climate and land use change scenarios. Iowa exports as much as 20% of the nitrogen entering the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi, contributing to Gulf hypoxia as well as local threats to water quality in the ICRB. The model utilized a combined autocalibration and sensitivity procedure incorporating Sequential Uncertainty Fitting (SUFI) and generalized additive models. This procedure resulted in Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) goodness-of-fit statistics that met literature guidelines for monthly mean stream discharge (NSE≥0.60) and daily nitrate load (NSE≥0.50). Artificial neural networks coupled with SWAT stream discharges aided in the simulation of daily mean nitrate concentrations that met the literature guideline (NSE≥0.50). The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) provided an ensemble of 11 climate change scenarios. NARCCAP is a multi-institutional effort to simulate climate change at the mesoscale by downscaling global circulation models (GCM) with regional climate models (RCM). The resulting GCM-RCM produced synthetic precipitation and temperature time-series that drove the SWAT simulations and scenarios. The land use scenarios were a collaboration with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, using a rule-based GIS method to generate scenarios that (1) maximized agricultural productivity, (2) improved water quality and reduced flooding, and (3) enhanced local biodiversity. The SWAT simulations and ensemble climate change scenarios resulted in a warmer and wetter climate with greater and more extreme discharge in all seasons except summer where the models indicate a somewhat higher probability of extreme low flows (p-value<0.05). The land use scenarios for SWAT showed that nitrate load and discharge positively and linearly scale with percent of agricultural land area (p-value<0.05).

Motivated by the management of sales representatives who visit customers to develop customer relationships, we present a stochastic orienteering problem on a network of queues, in which a hard time window is associated with each customer and the representative may experience uncertain wait time resulting from a queueing process at the customer. In general, given a list of potential customers and a time horizon consisting of several periods, the sales representative needs to decide which customers to visit in each period and how to visit customers within the period, with an objective to maximize the total reward collected by the end of the horizon. We start our study with a daily orienteering problem, which is a subproblem of the general problem. We focus on developing a priori and dynamic routing strategies for the salesperson to implement during a day. In the a priori routing case, the salesperson visits customers in a pre-planned order, and we seek to construct a static sequence of customers that maximizes the expected value collected. We consider two types of recourse actions. One is to skip a customer specified by an a priori route if the representative will arrive late in the customer's time window. The other type is to leave a customer immediately after arriving if observing a sufficiently long queue (balking) or to leave after waiting in queue for a period of time without meeting with the customer (reneging). We propose customer-specific decision rules to facilitate the execution of recourse actions and derive an analytical formula to compute the expected sales from the a priori route. We tailor a variable neighborhood search (VNS) heuristic to find a priori routes. In the dynamic routing case, the salesperson decides which customer to visit and how long to wait at each customer based on realized events. To seek dynamic routing policies, we propose an approximate dynamic programming approach based on rollout algorithms. The method introduces a two-stage heuristic estimation that we refer to as compound rollout. In the first stage, the algorithm decides whether to stay at the current customer or go to another customer. If departing the current customer, it chooses the customer to whom to go in the second stage. We demonstrate the value of our modeling and solution approaches by comparing the dynamic policies to a priori solutions with recourse actions. Finally, we address the multi-period orienteering problem. We consider that each customer's likelihood of adopting the representative's product stochastically evolves over time and is not fully observed by the representative. The representative can only estimate the adoption likelihood by meeting with the customer and the estimation may not be accurate. We model the problem as a partially observed Markov decision process with an objective to maximize the expected sales at the end of the horizon. We propose a heuristic that decomposes the problem into an assignment problem to schedule customers for a period and a routing problem to decide how to visit the scheduled customers within the period.

Sexually transmitted diseases affect millions of lives every year. In order to most effectively use prevention resources epidemiologists deploy models to understand how the disease spreads through the population and which intervention methods will be most effective at reducing disease perpetuation. Increasingly agent-based models are being used to simulate population heterogeneity and fine-grain sociological effects that are difficult to capture with traditional compartmental and statistical models. A key challenge is using a sufficiently large number of agents to produce robust and reliable results while also running in a reasonable amount of time. In this thesis we show the effectiveness of agent-based modeling in planning coordinated responses to a sexually transmitted disease epidemic and present efficient algorithms for running these models in parallel and in a distributed setting. The model is able to account for population heterogeneity like age preference, concurrent partnership, and coital dilution, and the implementation scales well to large population sizes to produce robust results in a reasonable amount of time. The work helps epidemiologists and public health officials plan a targeted and well-informed response to a variety of epidemic scenarios.

Tumor-necrosis factor (TNF)-receptor (R) associated factor 3 (TRAF3) is an important adaptor protein that plays a variety of context-dependent regulatory roles in all types of immune cells. In B cells, TRAF3 mediates signaling downstream of CD40, B cell activating factor (BAFF)-R, and toll-like receptors (TLR)s to restrain B cell survival and function. Downstream of CD40 and BAFF-R, TRAF3 negatively regulates NF-κB2 activation through NF-κB inducing kinase (NIK) stabilization. NF-κB2 activation is important for B cell-homeostatic survival. However, the constitutively active NF-κB2 in other TRAF3 deficient immune cell types does not lead to increased cell survival. More importantly, loss-of-function mutations of the TRAF3 gene are found at relatively high frequencies in B cell malignancies such as multiple myeloma and B cell lymphoma. Therefore, TRAF3 plays a critical and unique role in B cells to restrain cell survival and differentiation that contributes to B cell malignancies. In this study, we aim to identify TRAF3 modulated survival pathways that contribute to homeostatic B-cell survival and B-cell differentiation. We found that TRAF3 degradation was not sufficient or necessary to induce NF-κB2 activation. We also showed that TRAF3 degradation is dependent on association with TRAF2 and cytoplasmic tail of CD40 or BAFF-R. TRAF3 regulation of NIK is important for mature B cell development; however, NIK only partially contributes to TRAF3-mediated B cell survival. TRAF3 also regulates the protein level of proviral integrations of Moloney virus (Pim2), a pro-survival serine/threonine protein kinase encoded by the Pim2 gene, to restrain B cell survival; this regulation can operate independently of the NF-κB2 pathway. Furthermore, we showed that TRAF3 negatively regulates IL-6R signaling, a pathway that contributes to expansion of the plasma cell compartment and to the pathogenesis of multiple myeloma, a plasma cell malignancy. We found that TRAF3 facilitates recruitment of PTPN22, a tyrosine phosphatase, to associate with Jak1 following IL-6 binding to the IL-6R complex. This regulation by TRAF3 restrains plasma cell differentiation, and also provides the first demonstration that PTPN22 regulates cytokine receptor signaling. Collectively, these findings highlight the importance of TRAF3 in the regulation of B cell-specific survival and differentiation pathways. This information could be exploited for more precise and effective therapeutic choices in treatment of B cell malignancies with TRAF3 deficiencies.

Sizhu was written for the standard Pierrot ensemble though with percussion replacing the singer. This particular ensemble is capable of producing a multitude of colors while maintaining the balance inherent to a chamber group. The Chinese name, si’zhu, is a literal and figurative metaphor for these elements of the ensemble. Literally translated “silk” (sī) and “bamboo” (zhú), the word is a generalization for Chinese classical music developed in the Jiangsu province (Jiāngnán sīzhú) that utilizes strings, or “silk” instruments, and flutes, or “bamboo,” instruments in combination. A typical work involves two or more players of either ilk. In reference to the work presented here, Sizhu is a metaphor for the western instruments (flute and clarinet as “bamboo,” and violin and cello as “silk”) that are employed within the piece. It also refers to my use of a Chinese melody in the compositional process. The song, Er Quan Ying Yue (The Moon Reflected In Second Spring), was composed and performed regularly on the streets by the blind erhu player A Bing. The song has been fragmented, stretched, and varied to the point of near inscrutability, though it becomes more comprehensible following the mid-point. It inspires both structural and local events. The work also employs aspects of the spectral style. The first section is a slow distortion and transformation of the A harmonic spectrum; specific partials are emphasized as the spectrum expands and contracts. Additionally, fragments of the Chinese melody appear within the confines of each specific harmonic structure. The second part completely diverges utilizing assimilated pentatonic scale permutations. Finally, the third section synthesizes these two elements of musical material within the piece as the instruments morendo into silence.

Comparative experiments, in which subjects are randomized to one of two treatments, are performed often. There is no shortage of papers testing whether a treatment effect exists and providing confidence intervals for the magnitude of this effect. While it is well understood that the object and scope of inference for an experiment will depend on what assumptions are made, these entities are not always clearly presented. We have proposed one possible method, which is based on the ideas of Jerzy Neyman, that can be used for constructing confidence intervals in a comparative experiment. The resulting intervals, referred to as Neyman-type confidence intervals, can be applied in a wide range of cases. Special care is taken to note which assumptions are made and what object and scope of inference are being investigated. We have presented a notation that highlights which parts of a problem are being treated as random. This helps ensure the focus on the appropriate scope of inference. The Neyman-type confidence intervals are compared to possible alternatives in two different inference settings: one in which inference is made about the units in the sample and one in which inference is made about units in a fixed population. A third inference setting, one in which inference is made about a process distribution, is also discussed. It is stressed that certain assumptions underlying this third type of inference are unverifiable. When these assumptions are not met, the resulting confidence intervals may cover their intended target well below the desired rate. Through simulation, we demonstrate that the Neyman-type intervals have good coverage properties when inference is being made about a sample or a population. In some cases the alternative intervals are much wider than necessary on average. Therefore, we recommend that researchers consider using our Neyman-type confidence intervals when carrying out inference about a sample or a population as it may provide them with more precise intervals that still cover at the desired rate.