This dissertation investigates "geological" literature in the 19th century, and aims to describe a poetics of the earth sciences. Focusing on the work of Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), whose literary experiments translate and transform scientific knowledge, the dissertation argues that the…

Over the course of the twentieth century, how were real estate developers and architects involved in transforming their own professional practices and the built form of American cities? My dissertation uses historical, architectural, and urban analysis to show how real…

In healthy cells, cytochrome c (cyt c) acts as an electron transport protein peripherally bound to the inner mitochondrial membrane lipid cardiolipin, but it has an important role in apoptosis - upon apoptotic stimuli, it is released from the mitochondria…

Michel Foucault, Thomas Mann, and more recently, Sven-Olov Wallenstein have argued that the modern European hospital of the early twentieth century acted as a research laboratory for a new way of governing human populations. This dissertation studies a subsequent phase…

Despite earlier evidence to the contrary, recent inquiries appear to reach a consensus that the poor
pay more for food. However, these studies utilize samples drawn on the basis of prior
knowledge of unfair pricing strategies, proximity of volunteer surveyors,…

To investigate the influence of input from fellow group members in a constrained decision-making context, we develop four 2-armed bandit tasks in which subjects freely select one of two options (A or B) and are informed of the resulting reward…

This dissertation concerns itself with the effects of education and wealth on health in Africa. The first two chapters focus on the impact of adult education levels on the HIV epidemic in four sub-Saharan countries. The last chapter turns to…

The limitations common to linear imaging techniques were formalized succinctly by Ernst Abbe in 1873. In his theory, each Fourier component of a signal propagates independently from the source to the detector, and the corresponding feature can be detected only…

This paper empirically examines the role of social networks in welfare participation. Social theorists from across the political spectrum have argued that network effects have given rise to a culture of poverty. Empirical work, however, has found it difficult to…

The central goal of compressed sensing is to capture attributes of a signal using very few measurements. The initial publications by Donoho and by Candes and Tao have been followed by applications to image compression, data streaming, medical signal processing,…