Liouville phenomena in smooth ergodic theory

Windsor, Alistair James The Pennsylvania State University 2002 해외박사(DDOD)

This thesis is dedicated to investigating a number of phenomena that arise in systems that admit fast periodic approximation. In the first chapter we use a method of construction involving fast periodic approximation to construct a smooth minimal diffeomorphism with finitely many ergodic measures. In the second and third chapters we analyze special flows over rotations. In the second chapter we show that when the rotation in the base is Liouville we can construct functions for which the special flow has mixed spectrum. Generically special flows over Liouville rotations are weak mixing. In the third chapter we exhibit a class of functions for which the behavior of the special flow is constrained. Depending on the rotation number the special flow is either <italic> L</italic><super>2</super> conjugate to a suspension flow or is weak mixing.

Definitions of success: Girls at Miss Porter's School share their hopes, dreams, and fears

Windsor, Katherine Gladstone University of Pennsylvania 2010 해외박사(DDOD)

This study explores how girls currently enrolled and recently graduated from Miss Porter's School, Farmington, Connecticut, define success and the role gender plays in their definition(s). Data were collected from semi-structured student interviews, written responses by the students to a prompt designed to elicit personal conceptions of success, and data collected from the Admissions and College Counseling Offices at Miss Porter's School. These were used to conceptualize and construct a greater understanding of how girls at Miss Porter's School consider, understand, and ultimately envision success. Findings will be used to inform the school's leadership and programming. Furthermore, the results inform a more focused understanding of the educational and psychological development of girls. Miss Porter's is committed to providing an ideal educational experience for girls, but there has been a tendency to rely on external definitions of success for the graduates, such as selective college placement and adult/faculty perspectives on courses and programming that best fulfill the school's mission. Miss Porter's School has not systematically engaged girls in understanding how they envision their lives beyond college. Consequently, the goal of providing a unique experience for girls is at risk of becoming diluted. This study sheds light on a topic explored frequently from the perspective of girls in comparison to boys, or students as a gender-neutral group, rather than from the perspective of girls exclusively. Psychologist Carol Gilligan, in her 1993 work, In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, argued that there is an ongoing struggle for young girls between their rights and responsibilities assigned by their gender. Such a struggle raises questions about the development of young women. How do girls conceptualize being successful given their potential responsibilities as mothers or as wives? How do young women construct choices regarding personal and professional success? What is the range and internal variation among their views, understandings, and choices?. Researchers have not adequately studied adolescent girls' definitions of success from their own individual perspectives. In addressing this under-examined area, this study will positively inform Miss Porter's School, all educators of girls and, of course, young girls themselves.

Surviving oppression under the Rock: New York drug laws and the lived experiences of African American women in distressed households

Windsor, Liliane Cambraia The University of Texas at Austin 2008 해외박사(DDOD)

Drawing on standpoint and intersectionality theories, this study explores the degree to which New York State's Rockefeller Drug Laws and interactions between criminal, educational, and welfare policies have contributed to the maintenance of a culture of surveillance in which the lives of African American women in distressed households are overseen and influenced by oppressive policies and governmental institutions. Qualitative secondary analysis of longitudinal ethnographic data was conducted. Two detailed family cases are the focus of the study. Findings demonstrate multiple disadvantages that impoverished African American families struggling with alcohol and/or other drugs (AOD) use and/or sale experience. These disadvantages accumulated intergenerationally, in a snowball effect making it difficult for participants to maintain stable lives. For instance, oppressive policies, discrimination, poverty, AOD use, and violence hindered many participants' ability to obtain a high school degree which in turn contributed to the obstacles they faced finding meaningful employment. Findings explored the tension between participants' experiences with oppression and the multiple ways they either assimilated or resisted their oppression. While the Rockefeller Drug Laws assume that harsh sentences deter people from AOD use/sale, none of the participants mentioned imprisonment as a motivator to avoid AOD. Participants' classification of crack, cocaine, and heroin as the most dangerous AOD were congruent with the Rockefeller Drug Laws' classification of AOD. However, the way the law dispensed prison sentences reduced people to their AOD use because it disregarded all other aspects of their lives. Unlike the Rockefeller Drug Laws, participants found drug use to be sometimes a functional activity insofar as it was an additional source of income and a coping strategy in dealing with oppression. Findings indicate that simply addressing problematic AOD use among impoverished African American families in New York at the micro level is not sufficient or feasible. While it is important to examine and address individual needs and problems associated to AOD use, macro forces such as lack of meaningful employment for unskilled workers must be addressed. Social workers must foster critical thought, support an operational definition of AOD abuse/dependence, and advocate for social justice within the field of AOD use.

Cycloaromatization studies of C10H4 ene-tetraynes and their derivatives

Windsor, Katherine The University of Wisconsin - Madison 2010 해외박사(DDOD)

We investigate cycloaromatization reactions of C10H4 enediyne isomers and their derivatives. These reactions are of interest in the fields of organic chemistry, combustion chemistry, and astrochemistry. Using NMR and GC-MS, we show that heating a solution of tetraethynylethene in the presence of a trapping agent affords naphthalene via a double Bergman cyclization process; this is the first demonstration of a tetrayne undergoing a Bergman cyclization. When no trapping agent is present, tetraethynylethene isomerizes through a Bergman rearrangement upon heating. We demonstrate that heating a solution of unsymmetrical tetrayne in the presence of 1,4--cyclohexadiene trapping agent facilitates cycloaromatization to 1,4-diethynylbenzene. Because the Bergman rearrangement of the unsymmetrical tetrayne is a degenerate rearrangement, a deuterio-labeled analogue was synthesized to enable further investigation of this reaction. In a computational study of the aforementioned cycloaromatization reactions, we describe optimized structures of four C10H4 tetraynes, 1,2-diethynylbenzene, and cis-hex-3-ene-1,5-diyne and calculate potential energy surfaces for related cycloaromatization pathways using density functional theory methods. Based on general good agreement of our calculations with literature precedents, B3LYP/6-3 1G* appears sufficient for developing relative trends in structural properties and cyclization parameters for our systems. All of the diradical intermediates in the corresponding Bergman cyclization reactions are predicted to have singlet ground states. Trends in calculated c-d distance and predicted cyclization barriers generally agree with preliminary experimental results of cycloaromatization studies in our laboratory. We synthesize a symmetrical tetrabromotetrayne in one step from a tetrakis(trimethylsilyl) precursor. Heating a solution of the symmetrical tetrabromotetrayne at 170°C in the presence of 1,4-cyclohexadiene trapping agent enables a double cycloaromatization to yield 2,3,6,7--tetrabromonaphthalene. The tetrabromo-substituted tetraynes and the corresponding trapping products are potential building blocks for highly-conjugated networks. We have also synthesized three tetraphenyl and one tetrakis(trimethylsilyl)-substituted tetrayne and four corresponding trapping products. Because of these synthetic efforts, we are poised to expand and define the scope of cycloaromatization reactivity of a series of tetraethynylethene derivatives.

The Association of Tennessee Promise and Post Secondary Trends in One Rural East Tennessee High School

Windsor, Kristi C ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Lincoln Memorial U 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

Effects of a Caregiver-Implemented Intervention on the Motor and Communication Outcomes of Infants and Toddlers with Significant Disabilities

Windsor, Kelly S Vanderbilt University ProQuest Dissertations & The 2016 해외박사(DDOD)

Abstract not available.

Catching the mind's eye: The effect of internal distraction on external attention

Windsor, Matthew University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2014 해외박사(DDOD)

Most studies of human attention focus on how individuals are able to allocate their attention to various perceptual sources in the environment. Yet, the internal processing of information, such as holding or manipulating information in working memory, speech comprehension, and long-term memory retrieval, are also attentionally demanding. If attention is to be conceptualized as a general pool of resources that gives processing priority to some sources over others, then both stimuli in the external and internal environments must both draw from this pool. Furthermore, if some externally sourced stimuli are able to capture attention due to their potential behavioral relevance, then the processing of significant internal information may be able to capture attention as well. The ability for speech to impact attention, specifically the processing of incongruous or highly meaningful speech, was investigated in a series of six experiments. Experiment 1 examined how one-liner jokes, a stimulus with affective qualities as well as the need to manipulate information, could impact performance on an unrelated visual attention task. Experiments 2 and 3 looked at how being presented with a semantically inconsistent word in a stream of non-sentential, category-consistent words could affect visual attention task performance. Experiments 4, 5, and 6 assessed the impact of hearing taboo words on visual task performance. Experiment 1 opened the door to the possibility of speech processing related visual attention disruption, with individuals showing reduced performance in a visual task when concurrently processing the punch-line of a joke. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed no visual task disruption as a result of hearing non-sentential, semantically incongruent information, and actually trended toward showing a slight performance boost when hearing category-inconsistent words. Auditory presentation of taboo words in Experiments 4, 5, and 6 was consistently able to disrupt performance on an unrelated visual attention task, delaying responses to visual targets when presented immediately following taboo words. As a whole, the current data suggest that when attention is split between the internal processing of auditory information and an external visual task, surprising or meaningful auditory information can impact visual attention and that the effects vary as a function of the nature of the surprising information.

Development of a beta-Peptide Retroaldolase and Efforts Toward Other Catalytic Foldamers

Windsor, Matthew Alan The University of Wisconsin - Madison 2011 해외박사(DDOD)

Proteins are biological macromolecules with a diverse set of complex functions. Well defined structures are fundamental to the numerous functions exhibited by proteins (e.g., cell signaling, catalysis). However, design of these complex molecules has been challenging. One approach to creating molecules with functions similar to those of proteins is to reduce the molecular complexity of the molecules. Such simplification eases the difficulty inherent in designing any complex molecule, but often at the cost of functional efficiency. One class of simplified protein mimics, foldamers, has had success in mimicking natural (and manifesting unnatural) structures and functions. This thesis describes our work on expanding the universe of known foldamer functionality using beta- and alpha/beta-peptides. Chapter 2 evaluates a combinatorial approach to designing an alpha/beta-peptide that binds to the anti-apoptotic proteins Bcl-xL and Mcl-1; Mcl-1 had proven incompatible with previously-designed foldamer ligands. The focus then shifts to the development of the first catalytic foldamer with the discovery of a beta-peptide with retroaldolase activity (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 describes efforts aimed at designing a unique bifunctional foldamer organocatalyst. Chapter 5 returns to the principles learned in Chapter 3 to search for additional enzyme-catalyzed reactions that would be amenable to beta-peptide catalysis. Chapter 6 summarizes and translates the work presented in the previous chapters into language more accessible to non-scientists.

Dynamic locality improvement techniques for increasing effective storage performance

Hsu, Windsor Wee Sun University of California, Berkeley 2002 해외박사(DDOD)

As the processor-disk performance gap continues to widen and computer systems become ever more complex, increasingly aggressive and automated methods are needed to improve I/O performance. This work concerns mechanizable ways to effectively increase I/O performance. Our specific contributions are as follows. First, we introduce our thesis that it is useful and practical for the storage system to be introspective and to automatically Optimize disk block layout in response to the dynamic reference behavior. Based on the technology trends, we posit that a promising approach to improving I/O performance is to replicate selected disk blocks and to lay them out to increase the spatial locality of reference. Next, we characterize how storage is used in real personal computer and server systems. Among the things we analyze are the overall significance of I/O in the workloads, how the I/O load varies over time, and the interaction of reads and writes. We find that there are idle resources that can potentially be used to perform any optimization, and that optimizing the disk block layout is likely to achieve useful benefit. Based on our workload analysis, we next develop a simulation methodology that more accurately models the timing of I/O arrivals than previous practice. Using this methodology, we study I/O optimization techniques such as read/write caching, sequential prefetching, opportunistic prefetching, request scheduling, striping and short-stroking to understand their actual effectiveness, and to establish an optimized baseline configuration for subsequent experiments. We also examine disk technology trends to quantify their performance effect. Next, we introduce Automatic Locality-Improving Storage (ALIS), a storage system that automatically replicates and reorganizes selected disk blocks based on their usage patterns. Using trace-driven simulations, we demonstrate that the techniques we develop for ALIS are relatively insensitive to disk technology trends and are extremely effective, improving average read performance by up to 50% for servers and by about 15% for personal computers. Finally, we consider the additional use of processing power in the storage system to handle application processing such as running decision support queries. Our results suggest that highly scalable parallel software systems are needed for this to be effective.