This thesis argues that Chinese firms can catch up with the technological frontier in the scope of new climate friendly energy technologies and provides a detailed study of the case of wind power.

Existing surveys demonstrate that in the United States, most homeowners believe that their home insurance coverage will cover the complete costs to rebuild their home in the event of a total loss. Yet, most dwellings are insured for an amount…

GPUs are flexible parallel processors capable of accelerating real applications. To exploit them, programmers rewrite programs in new languages using intimate knowledge of the underlying hardware. This is a step backwards in abstraction and ease of use from sequential programming.…

Childhood obesity is heavily documented as a public health crisis in the United
States. Today, more than one-third of American youth can be medically classified as
overweight or obese. Of those children, a disproportionately high number are Hispanic.
There is…

The United States education system is not meeting the needs of today’s youth, and
this is especially the case for minority and low socio-economic status youth. Although
there are a number of policy proposals that could improve youth academic performance,

In numerous animal groups, individuals within the group often wish to impose
their preferences and guide the group in a certain direction. Conflicting preferences are
common in these situations and, in order to maintain group cohesion, collective decisionmaking
needs to…

In this dissertation I examine the conceptions of opinion (<italic>doxa</italic>}), knowledge (<italic>gnosis</italic>), and understanding (<italic>episteme</italic>) that are presented by the character Socrates in Plato's <italic>Meno</italic> and <italic>Republic</italic>. A central claim I make, and one that sets my interpretation apart from…

This dissertation is a history of astronomy in three cultural locations in late Ottoman Egypt: the scholarly culture of Muslim ulama, the state institution of the Viceregal Observatory, and the Arabic press. Through an interwoven history of these cultures, the…

This dissertation is an initial attempt to historically contextualize the Ottoman alchemical literature and those who produced it. Starting in the late fifteenth century, the Islamic tradition of alchemy was transmitted and vernacularized by learned Rumis who would make significant…

In the United States, healthcare-associated infections are a huge source of medical and
economic burden. Annually, there are 1.7 million cases of healthcare-associated infection in
U.S. hospitals, which cause an estimated 98,987 deaths. Direct medical cost is also massive,
estimated…