Browsing Duke Dissertations by Submit Date
Now showing items 1-20 of 4919
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Consistency and Adaptation of Gaussian Process Regression, Bayesian Stochastic Block Model and Tail Index
(2021)Bayesian methods offer adaptive inference via hierarchical extensions and uncertaintyquantification automatically with corresponding posterior distribution. Frequentist evaluation of Bayesian methods becomes a fundamental ... -
From Crisis to Restoration: Technical Intellectuals and the Politics of Italy's Post-war Development
(2021)Development has been studied as a project pursued by imperialist nations to strengthen the social and economic order of empire and to curb communism. It was deployed just as frequently, however, in sovereign spaces. This ... -
Flood Risk Analysis on Terrains
(2021)An important problem in terrain analysis is modeling how water flowsacross a terrain and creates floods by filling up depressions. This thesis examines a number of flood-risk related problems. One such problem is answering ... -
Micro-Viscoelastic Properties of the Human Conventional Outflow Pathway and Their Evolution in an Early Ocular-Hypertension Model.
(2021)Primary OAG (POAG) is the second leading cause of irreversible blindness in the US and its prevalence is expected to worsen in the coming years. Major pathological changes have been attributed to the Juxtacanicular Tissue ... -
Variable wordforms, adaptable learners: evidence from real-time word comprehension and naturalistic corpora
(2021)When learning a language, typically-developing infants face the daunting task of learning both the sounds and the meanings of words. In this dissertation, we focus on a source of variability that complicates the one-to-one ... -
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Statistical Analysis of Response Distribution for Dependent Data via Joint Quantile Regression
(2021)Linear quantile regression is a powerful tool to investigate how predictors may affect a response heterogeneously across different quantile levels. Unfortunately, existing approaches find it extremely difficult to adjust ... -
Can a Hindu be Black?: A Study of Black Americans and Hinduism
(2021)Nearly half a century ago, acclaimed jazz musician Alice Coltrane (1937-2007), marital partner of saxophonist John Coltrane, began disseminating Hindu (Vedanta) teachings and jazz-inflected bhajans (songs of praise) in her ... -
Art in the Interregnum: The Aesthetics of Transition, 1973-Present
(2021)Art in the Interregnum: The Aesthetics of Transition, 1973-Present adopts the interregnum, a concept imported into critical usage by Antonio Gramsci, as a periodizing framework for understanding cultural production today. ... -
Differential Geometry Tools for Data Analysis
(2021)The thesis is divided into two parts: the moving anchor parameterization method and the comparative morphology through Willmore-type functionals. In the first part we show that parametrizing points on curves or surfaces ... -
Paul’s Philonic Opponent: Unveiling the One Who Calls Himself a Jew in Romans 2:17
(2021)This dissertation offers a solution to several interpretive problems arising at the beginning of Paul’s letter to the Romans, particularly from Rom 1:18–3:20. Why do these chapters evince a distinct account of the knowledge ... -
Multimodal Probabilistic Inference for Robust Uncertainty Quantification
(2021)Deep learning models, which form the backbone of modern ML systems, generalize poorly to small changes to the data distribution. They are also bad at signalling failure, making predictions with high confidence when their ... -
mRNA Partitioning to the Endoplasmic Reticulum
(2021)The signal recognition particle (SRP) pathway has long been regarded as the primary mechanism of transcriptome and translatome partitioning to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). This co-translational targeting mechanism is ... -
Consequences of Extended Early-Life Starvation in Adult Caenorhabditis elegans
(2021)The roundworm C. elegans reversibly arrests larval development during starvation, but extended early-life starvation reduces reproductive success. Maternal dietary restriction (DR) buffers progeny from starvation as young ... -
Genomic Basis for a Developmental Life History Switch in the Sea Urchin Heliocidaris erythrogramma
(2021)Lecithotrophic (non-feeding) larval development has independently evolved numerous times in marine invertebrates from an ancestral, planktotrophic (feeding) larval state. The evolution of this developmental mode in a species ... -
Improving Clinical Prediction Models with Statistical Representation Learning
(2021)This dissertation studies novel statistical machine learning approaches for healthcare risk prediction applications in the presence of challenging scenarios, such as rare events, noisy observations, data imbalance, missingness ... -
A Meta-Physics of Sexual Difference: The Quantum Gravity Matrix and Embryogenesis of Our Universe
(2021)This dissertation makes a case that sexual difference, to date, has been a deeply misconceptualized philosophical concept. Too often reduced to only one expression of itself—the difference between the sexes—critiques of ... -
Energy Transduction By Electron Bifurcation
(2021)Electron bifurcation oxidizes a two-electron donor, using the two electrons to reduce high- and low-potential acceptors. Thus, one electron may move thermodynamically uphill, being kinetically coupled to the downhill flow ... -
Efficient and Generalizable Neural Architecture Search for Visual Recognition
(2021)Neural Architecture Search (NAS) can achieve accuracy superior to human-designed neural networks, because of the easier automation process and searching techniques.While automated designed neural architectures can achieve ... -
Connecting morphology to physiology in the mouse tactile sensory system
(2021)The sensation of touch is constructed from multiple types of unique sensory receptors acting in parallel. How the structure of different mechanoreceptors in the hair and skin relates to the functional output of their accompanying ...
