British composer Peter Racine Fricker (1920-1990) is known among violists for his masterly Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, Op. 18, dedicated to and premiered by the famous Scottish violist William Primrose. He wrote two other works that feature the viola: Three Movements for Viola Solo, Op. 25, and Fantasy for Viola and Piano, Op. 44. Fricker was a well-respected and prolific composer, one of the foremost young composers to emerge in England after World War II. After his move to the United States in 1964, the prominence he had established in his homeland virtually disappeared, and he never became a household name in America. Despite this, it is my contention that his music deserves study and a place in our repertoire. The above-mentioned Concerto has remained available in print since its initial publication. Fantasy for Viola and Piano was published in 2014 by the American Viola Society. This essay gives an introduction to these two works which are currently in circulation. The Concerto is considered from the standpoint of viola technique and pedagogy, while the Fantasy is briefly analyzed in terms of Fricker’s stated compositional ideals. The culmination of this work is a performance edition of the Three Movements, to be published later this year by the American Viola Society.

L2 (second or foreign language) research indicates that vocabulary knowledge is not only the “single best predictor of text comprehension,” but also a strong indicator of listening, speaking, and writing proficiency (Alderson, 2000, p. 35). Understanding the development of vocabulary knowledge, including both vocabulary size and vocabulary depth, or quality of vocabulary knowledge—is therefore essential to the building of an overall insight into L2 proficiency. This study aims to explore the developmental status of vocabulary depth among postsecondary CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) learners of higher proficiency levels who have studied Chinese for over four years. In particular, it focuses on these learners' identification of two types of word association—synonym and collocational associations and how factors such as association type and target-word frequency impact association identification. The process and strategy use that are involved in the inference of word association are also explored. For these purposes, this study employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Cross-sectional data were collected through a paper-and-pencil test of Chinese word associates from seventeen learners within five postsecondary CFL programs in the U.S. Each participant worked on two test booklets assessing synonym and collocational associates respectively for the same 44 adjectives selected from the three word frequency levels of below 1000, between 1000 and 5000, and above 5000. A two-factor within-subjects ANOVA revealed both significant main effects for association type and word frequency on association identification and a significant interaction between the two. Simple effect analysis and pair-wise comparisons further revealed that association identification became increasingly stronger with the increase of word frequency for collocational association, yet remained non-impacted by frequency before reaching the mid- to high-frequency transition for synonym association. Meanwhile, CFL learners' collocational knowledge was significantly higher than synonym knowledge at mainly the medium- and high-frequency levels. These reslts indicate that synonym knowledge seemed to lag behind in development as familiarity with words increased, but began to catch up at higher-frequency levels. Interview data collected from six CFL learners show that they employed a wide variety of knowledge sources, such as radical knowledge, morphological knowledge, contextual clues, sound information, or L1 in inferring word association. Inference success seemed to be influenced not only by their preexisting word knowledge, but also an integrated and flexible use of linguistic and contextual information in the inference process. Implications of these findings are discussed in relevance to curriculum and pedagogical development of CFL teaching and the understanding and definition of CFL proficiency in general. This study fills a gap in CFL vocabulary research by building a tentative measure of vocabulary depth and bringing greater insights into the developmental status of higher-level CFL learners in synonym and collocational association as well as the process that is involved in inference of word association.

Particulate matter expelled from tunnel-ventilated animal feeding operations (AFOs) is known to transport malodorous compounds. As a mitigation strategy, vegetative environmental buffers (VEBs) are often installed surrounding AFOs in order to capture particulates and induce lofting and dispersion. Many farmers are or are interested in implementing VEBs, yet research supporting their efficacy remains sparse. Currently, point measurements, often combined with models, are the primary means by which emission rates from AFOs and VEB performance has been investigated. The existing techniques lack spatial resolution and fail to assign the observed particulate reduction to capture, lofting, or dispersion. In recent years, lidar has emerged as a suitable partner to point measurements in agricultural research. Lidar is regarded for its ability to capture entire plume extents in near real time. Here, a technique is presented for estimating the capture efficiency of a VEB using lidar. An experiment was conducted in which dust was released upwind of a VEB at a known rate, and the emission rate downwind of the VEB was estimated using an elastic scanning lidar. Instantaneous lidar scans showed periodic lofting well above the VEB, but when scans were averaged over several hours, the plumes appeared Gaussian. The experiment revealed a capture efficiency ranging from 21-74β, depending on the time of day. The methodology presented herein addresses deficiencies in the existing techniques discussed above, and the results presented add to the lacking body of research documenting VEB capture efficiency.

An operator-theoretic formulation of the interpolation problem posed by Nevanlinna and Pick in the early twentieth century asks for conditions under which there exists a multiplier of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space that interpolates a specified set of data. Paul S. Muhly and Baruch Solel have shown that their theory for operator algebras built from W*-correspondences provides an appropriate context for generalizing this classic question. Their reproducing kernel W*-correspondences are spaces of functions that generalize the reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. Their Nevanlinna-Pick interpolation theorem, which is proved using commutant lifting, implies that the algebra of multipliers of the reproducing kernel W*-correspondence associated with a certain W*-version of the classic Szegö kernel may be identified with their primary operator algebra of interest, the Hardy algebra. To provide a context for generalizing another familiar topic in operator theory, the study of the weighted Hardy spaces, Muhly and Solel have recently expanded their theory to include operator-valued weights. This creates a new family of reproducing kernel W*-correspondences that includes certain, though not all, classic weighted Hardy spaces. It is the purpose of this thesis to generalize several of Muhly and Solel's results to the weighted setting and investigate the function-theoretic properties of the resulting spaces. We give two principal results. The first is a weighted version of Muhly and Solel's commutant lifting theorem, which we obtain by making use of Parrott's lemma. The second main result, which in fact follows from the first, is a weighted Nevanlinna-Pick interpolation theorem. Other results, several of which follow from the two primary results, include the construction of an orthonormal basis for the nonzero tensor product of two W*-corrrespondences, a double commutant theorem, the identification of several function-theoretic properties of the elements in the reproducing kernel W*-correspondence associated with a weighted W*-Szegö kernel as well as the elements in its algebra of mutlipliers, and the presentation of a relationship between this algebra of multipliers and a weighted Hardy algebra. In addition, we consider a candidate for a W*-version of the complete Pick property and investigate the aforementioned weighted W*-Szegö kernel in its light.

While the intersection of sport and the Civil Rights era has been well documented from a number of angles and approaches, perhaps no athlete has been so thoroughly connected to this period in history as Muhammad Ali. His stances on Vietnam, race relations and religion during this period have provided a fountain of historical research and narratives on this very turbulent period. However, what about the political and social activities of Ali’s contemporaries? Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman were not just heavyweight champions, but also individuals who were profoundly affected by the mass exodus of Blacks out of the South and into the cities of the North and West. Known to history as the Great Migration, this movement not only affected these men physically, but also helped to shape their ideas and understandings about racial identity, civil rights and race relations in their adult lives. The purpose of this research is to examine the political and social activities and experiences throughout the lives of Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman. In addition to exploring the narratives surrounding their migration experiences, it will display the differences in opinion each man had regarding issues such as segregation and how they defined themselves against Ali’s largely ignored, hardline segregationist stance. Finally, it will explore the possibilities for reexamining not just the popularly accepted narratives of these four men, but also of Ali himself.

The American older adult population is rapidly growing and projected to double by 2030. There is high proportion of completed suicides in later life subsequent to several biopsychosocial variables. Medical populations, particularly Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Heart Failure (HF), have greater risk of depression, suicidality, and lower quality of life. Current geropsychology suicide research tends to focus on risk factors, a deficit approach. In contrast, the present study utilized a strength-based approach to study late life suicide by predicting life sustaining cognitions, reasons for living (RFL). This study explored the influence of physical health related quality of life (HRQOL) and depression on RFL in a sample of 75 depressed and chronically ill middle aged and older adults enrolled in a randomized clinical trial. The results indicate insignificant relationships between demographic variables (e.g. age, gender, and illness type) and reasons for living. Despite the statistically significant negative correlations between depression and physical and mental HRQOL at baseline and week five, only week five depression significantly predicted RFL (Β = -1.369, ΔR2 = .063, p= .034), after the effects of age and baseline depression were held constant. In conclusion, the present study supports integrative primary care modalities of treatment for late life depression and highlights the importance of incorporating protective factors in suicide risk assessments. Future research should consider utilizing population specific instruments and alternative medical and social variables.

Regulator of G Protein Signaling 4 (RGS4) mediates motor defects in Parkinson's disease. Small molecule RGS4 inhibitors (e.g. CCG-50014) modify buried cysteine residues, but the structural and dynamic mechanisms underpinning specificity of inhibitors for RGS4 within the RGS family are poorly understood. We used NMR and other biophysical methods to examine ligand-induced structural changes and the dynamics of unliganded RGS4 and RGS8 that allow ligand binding. NMR and fluorescence spectroscopy data reveal details of the hidden, excited conformational state of RGS4 that exposes Cys148, one of the buried cysteines bound by inhibitors. We further show that specificity of RGS4 inhibitors is driven by differential accessibility of the target cysteine compared to its equivalent in RGS8. Cys148 is buried beneath the lid at the center the α4-α7 helix bundle, and this bundle is destabilized in RGS4 compared to RGS8. Notably, helix 6 is highly destabilized in RGS4 compared to RGS8 and is likely the key mediator of access to Cys148. Our findings provide key insight into the mechanism of allosteric RGS4 inhibition and show that dynamics drive inhibitory specificity among RGS proteins.

This dissertation applies ethnographic research to answer a question in the field of religious studies: to what degree does the prevailing world religions paradigm illuminate the interpretation of religious material that cannot easily be fit into a single major religious tradition. Indian Catholicism generally and Tamil Catholicism in particular have been deeply neglected both by scholars of India (who generally assume that Christianity in India is a "foreign" religion more-or-less indistinguishable from the Christianity of European missionaries) and by theologians and historians of Christianity (who often treat non-Western expressions of Christianity as somehow "compromised" by influence from alien religions such as Hinduism). By interrogating the early modern origins of the world religions paradigm and questioning its applicability to the particular case of Tamil Popular Catholicism, I intend to bring about a shift within religious studies and allied theological fields that will allow popular Catholicism to take a more central place within scholarship. The major issue I pursue in this dissertation is the manner in which European expectations about the nature of Christianity as a world religion impede the understanding of non-conforming expressions of Christianity, such as Tamil Popular Catholicism. My primary research agenda is a matter of ethnographically surveying a representative Tamil Catholic site to determine the characteristics of Tamil Popular Catholicism which most differentiate it from European expectations, and later to integrate these these findings with the theological self-definition of Catholic Christianity. Methodologically, my approach combines ethnography with oral history, aiming at a "thick description" of Tamil Popular Catholicism in its various manifestations which can be later used as a basis for theological reflection. Drawing on extensive field research at the St. Antony Shrine at St. Mary's Co-Cathedral in Chennai, I argue that popular, non-Western expressions of Christianity in Tamil Nadu differ from elite interpretations primarily with respect to the questions of exclusivity, openness to other communities, and the place of "magical" or supernatural healing traditions. There are concrete social and political consequences to the proliferation of Western religious categories in India, namely, the unraveling of the previously integrated Tamil religious culture into separate "Catholic" and "Hindu" identities and the social and political marginalization of Tamil Catholics. At the St. Antony Shrine, the local expression of Tamil Popular Catholicism defies description in terms of the prevailing world religions paradigm, which differentiates absolutely between "Christianity" and "Hinduism" and posits the existence of two hermetically-sealed religious communities ("Catholic" and "Hindu") where I argue there is but one (the popular religion of the Tamil people, in which "Hindu" and "Catholic" differ primarily by virtue of caste rather than religious classification or practice). The usual strategy within the world religious paradigm for describing non-conforming Catholic sites is to appeal to the concept of "syncretism," which refers to the mixture of two or more of the world religions into an incoherent third. This term carries heavy pejorative overtones and marginalizes religious phenomena so described, redirecting scholarly attention to religious phenomena that can be described using existing categories. By demonstrating how Western religious categories impede the understanding of a typical, non-eccentric Asian site, I show that the prevailing categories used by Western scholars to analyze religions are Orientalist in origin and logic and in need of drastic redefinition, which I provide in my conclusions by taking recourse to a premodern, Augustinian construction of "religion" which rejects the pluralization of "religions" in favor of a singular definition, circumventing the theological charge of "syncretism" and the legitimization of nationalist or communalist factions formed on the basis of pluralized religious identities.

Skeletal muscle atrophy is a debilitating condition that commonly occurs as a secondary consequence of many acute and chronic medical conditions, including muscle disuse, heart and renal failure, starvation, cancer, HIV/AIDS, and aging. Though it leads to weakness, falls, and fractures, and reduces independence and quality of life for millions of Americans annually, no effective pharmacologic therapies for muscle atrophy exist. This is largely due to a poor understanding of the pathogenesis of skeletal muscle atrophy at a molecular level. In this thesis, I describe my studies into the molecular pathogenesis of skeletal muscle atrophy. Using mouse models, I showed that the gene encoding the pro-atrophy nuclear protein Gadd45a is regulated by distinct pathways after muscle denervation and fasting, and also identified a novel protein regulating skeletal muscle fiber size. First, we demonstrated that denervation-induced muscle atrophy, unlike atrophy mediated by fasting, does not require the bZIP transcription factor ATF4. However, the lysine deacetylase HDAC4 is sufficient to induce Gadd45a mRNA and necessary for Gadd45a mRNA induction after denervation, but not after fasting. Taken together, these data show that Gadd45a is a central convergence point for muscle atrophy caused by several stimuli, and also demonstrate that distinct pathways mediate Gadd45a induction in different models of skeletal muscle atrophy. Second, we identified spermine oxidase as a critical regulator of muscle fiber size. We observed that spermine oxidase mRNA and spermine oxidase protein were reduced by several distinct causes of muscle atrophy (i.e. immobilization, denervation, fasting, and aging). Furthermore, spermine oxidase overexpression increased muscle fiber size, while spermine oxidase knockdown caused muscle fiber atrophy. Restoring spermine oxidase expression significantly attenuated muscle atrophy after limb immobilization, denervation, and fasting. Finally, we identified p21 as a key upstream regulator of spermine oxidase expression, and spermine oxidase as a required mediator of p21-mediated skeletal muscle fiber atrophy. Collectively, these findings greatly advance our understanding of the molecular pathogenesis of skeletal muscle atrophy. These data demonstrate that Gadd45a is a convergence point for multiple pro-atrophy pathways and identify spermine oxidase as a novel therapeutic target for the treatment of skeletal muscle atrophy. These discoveries suggest several important new areas for future research, and further our understanding of this common, debilitating condition.

Osteoporosis is one of the most common diseases experienced in the older adult population. This condition is not only costly to manage and treat, particularly so when osteoporotic fractures occur, but also negatively impacts functional health and health-related quality of life for many individuals. This indicates the need for more to be done to prevent osteoporosis from developing initially. While bone mineral density (BMD) testing recommendations are in place for women aged 65 and older and men aged 70 and older to diagnose osteoporosis, there currently are no BMD testing recommendations for preventive or screening purposes in the general, healthy, adult population. One potential screening tool for bone strength is a peak vertical jump test. Peak vertical jump height can be used as a proxy for lower body muscle power, which has been identified as an influential factor in determining bone mass and geometry, both of which are critical aspects of bone strength. This study ascertained the relationship between muscle power and bone strength, as well as the capacity of a peak vertical jump test to identify young adults with below-average areal BMD (aBMD). A total of 303 young adults (18 to 22 years, n=136 males, n=167 females) participated in these cross-sectional analyses. DXA was used to assess aBMD for total hip and femoral neck, and DXA images were used to calculate femoral neck section modulus (FN Z) values. Peripheral quantitative computed tomography (pQCT) was used to assess indices of bone strength at the tibia. Cortical bone area (CoA) and density-weighted polar section modulus strength-strain index (SSIp) were assessed at the 38% midshaft site, and bone strength index (BSI) was assessed at the 4% midshaft site. Lower body muscle power was predicted using peak vertical jump height and the Sayers et al. (1999) equation. Data were analyzed using Pearson bivariate and partial correlations to examine associations among bone strength outcomes and muscle power. Logistic regression was used to examine the probability of below-average bone strength based on muscle power. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was used to show the tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity and to display the accuracy of a peak vertical jump test as an assessment tool for aBMD. Logistic regression indicated the odds ratio of below-average height-adjusted femoral neck aBMD decreased 5.4% for females and 3.6% for males per 50 Watts of power. ROC curve analysis showed the best sensitivity-specificity trade-off for identifying individuals with and without below-average aBMD was 5,038 Watts in males (sensitivity = 73.7%; specificity = 62.4%; AUC = 0.709, 95%CI = 0.572 - 0.847) and 3,261 Watts in females (sensitivity = 71.4%; specificity = 58.9%; AUC = 0.708, 95%CI = 0.586 - 0.829). These cut off values correspond to a vertical jump height of 54.39 cm and 36.16 cm for males and females, respectively. Taken together, the results of these analyses suggest acceptable sensitivity and specificity and moderate discriminate ability for using a measure of muscle power, assessed with a peak vertical jump test, to identify young adults with below-average aBMD.