Browsing Duke Dissertations by Issue Date
Now showing items 1-20 of 5648
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The Early Life Environment and Adult Cognitive and Mental Health
(2023)Many diverse adult diseases, from diabetes to dementia, are increasingly viewed as arising, in part, from early life environmental influences. The so-called Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) research paradigm ... -
The Political Determinants of Corruption
(2023)Political factors play a big role in influencing the ebbs and flows of corruption. The literature seems unanimously in agreement that, even in places where corruption is entrenched and systemic, the political calculations ... -
Video Motion Analysis with Limited Labeled Training Data
(2023)The introduction of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has significantly advanced the performance of many computer vision systems on benchmark data sets, including those for motion analysis. However, impressive performance ... -
Essays on Shareholder Voting
(2023)This dissertation consists of two essays on shareholder voting. In the first chapter, I develop a structural model of shareholder voting in the presence of blockholders. I show theoretically that there is an ambiguous ... -
CAUSAL INFERENCE FOR HIGH-STAKES DECISIONS
(2023)Causal inference methods are commonly used across domains to aid high-stakes decision-making. The validity of causal studies often relies on strong assumptions that might not be realistic in high-stakes scenarios. Inferences ... -
The Structural and Social Determinants of Intergenerational Health Inequities: How State Policy Contexts and Discrimination Shape Birth Outcomes
(2023)In the United States, geographic and racial-ethnic disparities in adverse birth outcomes have increased over the past decade. High and rising rates of low birth weight, preterm delivery, and infant mortality are concentrated ... -
Stress, the Superwoman Schema, and Cardiovascular Wellbeing Among Rural and Medically Underserved African American Women
(2023)Cardiovascular disease in the leading cause of death among African American women. CVD risk factors that contribute to poorer health are higher among rural and medically underserved communities; highlighting racial and geographic ... -
Revealing parallel modulation on the sensory-motor decoder for smooth pursuit eye movements.
(2023)Primates use smooth pursuit eye movements to track moving objects. Pursuit is driven by visual commands to accelerate and supported by eye velocity feedback. We show that degraded motion reliability caused by reduced coherence ... -
Causal Inference for Natural Language Data and Multivariate Time Series
(2023)The central theme of this dissertation is causal inference for complex data, and highlighting how for certain estimation problems, collecting more data has limited benefit. The central application areas are natural language ... -
Context-Specific Adjustments of Cognitive Flexibility
(2023)The stability-flexibility dilemma describes the challenge of balancing the antagonistic goals of focusing on the current task-set (cognitive stability) and updating that task-set in response to changes in the environment ... -
INFORMATION DESIGN IN CONTROLLING EPIDEMICS
(2023)This dissertation studies the use of information design to reduce the spread of an infection. In particular, I investigate whether central planners (senders) with more information can leverage the information advantage to ... -
Integration of Trapped Ion System and Sympathetic Cooling with Multi-isotope Ions
(2023)This dissertation addresses challenges in quantum computing with trapped ions, including system integration of the trapped ion hardware, heating-induced decoherence, and efficient cooling mechanisms, by investigating ... -
Multisector Mitigation of Plastic Pollution: Approaches from Biology, Policy, Law and Industry
(2023)Plastic pollution is ubiquitous in the ocean. Researchers are actively determining how plastic pollution harms marine animals and which measures should be used to reduce pollution. I use the four pathways to global sustainability ... -
Vulnerability Analysis of Cyber-Physical Systems
(2023)Cyber-physical systems (CPS) consist of computing and physical components, such as sensors, actuators, and processors, and these components communicate through network to control and monitor the physical processes. Although ... -
Trends in the Practices and Rhetoric of Religious Organizations and Leaders in 21st Century America
(2023)This dissertation investigates three areas where religious leaders have confronted changes in the modern world. In Chapter 2, I investigate trends in congregational worship towards more enthusiastic and contemporary styles ... -
Injectable Ablation Technique for Cancer Treatment Across Clinical Settings
(2023)Cancer treatment regimens often include surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Though the World Health Organization (WHO) Essential Medicines List includes many globally accessible chemotherapies, surgery and radiation are ... -
Essays in Labor Economics
(2023)Skills are central to many questions in labor economics ranging from the causes of rising wage inequality to understanding how individuals make decisions about their career. However, skills are typically measured incompletely ... -
Dynamic Models of Innovation and Learning
(2023)This dissertation analyzes three dynamic models of innovation. The primary focus of the analysis of each model is to highlight the role of endogenous mechanisms---such as observational learning and product market competition---in ... -
Essays on How Consumers Respond to Positive Brand-to-brand Interactions
(2023)With the current digital age and the rise of social media, consumers are privy to a wide variety of content from brands and media figures (e.g., celebrities, content creators, athletes, influencers). I focus on investigating ... -
Configuring Local Resilience to Coastal Erosion in Togo
(2023)The West African coast is prey to an erosion washing away communities’ houses, livelihoods, and ancestral temples. By studying locals’ lived experiences and state resilience efforts my research investigates environmental ...
