Browsing Duke Dissertations by Issue Date

Now showing items 41-60 of 1771

Cerebral Cavernous Malformations: From Two-Hit Mechanism to Developing a Targeted Therapy

McDonald, David Andrew (2013)

Cerebral cavernous malformations (CCMs) are multicavernous vascular lesions affecting the central nervous system. Affected individuals have a lifetime risk of recurrent headaches, focal neurological deficits, seizures, ...
Role of Non-myocytes in Engineering of Highly Functional Pluripotent Stem Cell-derived Cardiac Tissues

Liau, Brian (2013)

Massive loss of cardiac tissue as a result of myocardial infarction can create a poorly-conducting substrate with impaired contractility, ultimately leading to heart failure and lethal arrhythmias. Recent advances in ...
Hallmarks, Sigils & Colophons

Ruccia, Daniel Domenico (2013)

This dissertation contains two related documents: a piece of music entitled <italic>Hallmarks, Sigils & Colophons</italic> for three female singers and chamber orchestra setting excerpts from Christian Bök's ...
Radio Frequency Spectroscopy Of a Quasi-Two-Dimensional Fermi Gas

Zhang, Yingyi (2013)

This dissertation presents the first experiments on radio frequency (rf) spectroscopy of a quasi-two dimensional strongly interacting ultracold atomic Fermi gas. A 50-50 mixture of spin-up and spin-down atoms is confined ...
Diverse Ways of Knowing in Water Quality Conservation in North Carolina

Freitag, Amy (2013)

Diverse ways of knowing have been recognized by scholars in many disciplines to contribute creative perspectives and novel problem-solving approaches. In the environmental sciences, those dependent on natural resources ...
The Role of Phosphatidylinositol-3 Kinases and Phosphatidylinositol Phosphatases in T Cell Intracellular Homeostasis and Autophagy

McLeod, Ian Alexander (2013)

The homeostasis of naïve T lymphocytes is maintained by several mechanisms involving basal TCR and cytokine signaling, and nutrient factors. One of the common net results of these input signals is the production and ...
Family Structure and Child Malnutrition in China: Three Essays

He, Wei (2013)

Over the past three decades, the phenomenon of children's health in China has been marked by a co-existence of overweight and underweight. As the primary institution for a child, family is an opportune place for child ...
Last Wave Reached and Register, Harmony, and Phrase Design in Webern's Op. 24 and Op. 27

Hambourger, Timothy Robert (2013)

Last Wave Reached:Last Wave Reached is a setting of poems by Kay Ryan , U.S. poet laureate, 2008 - 2010, for three female singers and large chamber ensemble. Ryan writes compact, intricate miniatures full of ...
All That Twitters Is Not Gold: How Verbally Documenting or Reflecting During or After an Experience Can Affect Enjoyment

Wolfe, Jared (2013)

Social media and mobile technology now provide consumers with the opportunity to continuously document or reflect on their moment-to-moment internal and external experiences. For instance, "tweets" are often written ...
Determinants of Distractibility in the Rhesus Macaque

Ebitz, Robert B. (2013)

The visual world is full of potentially important information, but only a subset of the world can be evaluated at any time. An essential function of the central nervous system is to rapidly and adaptively select which ...
International Financial Reporting Standards and Accounting Comparability

Siciliano, Gianfranco (2013)

This thesis includes three papers that consider the effects of IFRS adoption on accounting comparability in the European Union (EU). In the first paper, I use actual financial statement data to create a measure of ...
On-Board Imaging of Respiratory Motion: Investigation of Markerless and Self-Sorted Four-Dimensional Cone-Beam CT (4D-CBCT)

Vergalasova, Irina (2013)

To date, image localization of mobile tumors prior to radiation delivery has primarily been confined to 2D and 3D technologies, such as fluoroscopy and 3D cone-beam CT (3D-CBCT). Due to the limited information from these ...
Computational Optical Imaging Systems for Spectroscopy and Wide Field-of-View Gigapixel Photography

Kittle, David S. (2013)

This dissertation explores computational optical imaging methods to circumvent the physical limitations of classical sensing. An ideal imaging system would maximize resolution in time, spectral bandwidth, three-dimensional ...
Tightrope Walkers: An Ethnography of Yoga, Precariousness, and Privilege in California's Silicon Valley

Bar, Neta (2013)

This dissertation offers an account of precarious neoliberal subjectivity by examining the suffering of the privileged as it relates to the practice of Western yoga in California's Silicon Valley. Yoga culture underlines ...
Unfolding Ambition: Strategic Candidacy Decisions in Senate Primary Elections

King, Aaron (2013)

Theories of ambition have taught us that higher offices are valuable commodities to certain politicians, and under the right circumstances, the benefits of running for an office outweigh the associated risks. Yet some ...
The Evolution of Genre and Narrative in Mahler's Vocal-Orchestral Works, from Das klagende Lied to the Eighth Symphony

Joyner, Elizabeth (2013)

Narrative symphonic music dominated much of Mahler's compositional output during his early career. His early symphonic cantata,<italic>Das klagende Lied</italic> (1880-1901), and the <italic>Wunderhorn</italic> Symphonies ...
Genetic Predictability Accompanies the Repeated Evolution of Red Flowers in Penstemon

Wessinger, Carolyn Alyson (2013)

Examining the genetic basis across repeated origins of the same phenotypic adaptation allows us to address several questions pertaining to the genetic basis of adaptation. First, whether the genes and types of mutations ...
Fanny Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and the Formation of the "Mendelssohnian" Style

Mace, Angela Regina (2013)

Fanny Hensel wrote much of Felix Mendelssohn's music. Or so goes the popular misconception. It is true that Felix did publish six of his sister's Lieder under his own name, in his Op. 8 and Op. 9, but there is no evidence ...
Infrared Metamaterials for Diffractive Optics

Tsai, Yu-Ju (2013)

Intense developments in optical metamaterials have led to a renaissance in several optics fields. Metamaterials, artificially structured media, provide several additional degrees of freedom that cannot be accessed with ...
On-chip Labeling via Surface Initiated Enzymatic Polymerization (SIEP) for Nucleic Acids Hybridization Detection

Tjong, Vinalia (2013)

Current techniques for nucleic acid analysis often involve extensive sample preparation that requires skilled personnel and multiple purification steps. In this dissertation, we introduce an on-chip, isothermal, ...