Over the past decade and a half, there has been considerable interest in the effect confinement and interfaces have on the properties of glass forming materials. With the emergence of nanotechnology, some glass formers, in particular polymeric glass formers, will be used at increasingly smaller length scales. An understanding of...
When considering his pioneering and innovative role in broadening the tonal palette of the piano, as well as his tireless efforts to promote his own and other composers’ music, it is not surprising that a large percentage of Franz Liszt’s compositional output for that instrument is made up of transcriptions....
Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) are fabricated and characterized on anodes modified by a variety of surface treatments. OLED performance response is correlated to the treatment conditions with current-voltage (I-V) measurements and impedance spectroscopy. Small-scale OLED arrays are fabricated using a novel shadow mask approach and are characterized with electrical...
Separation of DNA molecules by electrophoresis through entangled polymer solutions continues to be an important tool for genetic analysis, especially Sanger-based DNA sequencing. Separations of DNA on microfluidic devices are much more efficient than in capillary electrophoresis (CE) systems, such that the implementation of DNA sequencing onto microchips promises to...
This dissertation explores the factors that influence the creation and interpretation of novel denominal verbs in English. Of particular focus is the potential influence of one factor, termed here the Semantic Category Distribution Effect. The Semantic Category Distribution Effect involves the type frequency distribution of existing forms of a given...
The last two decades in nineteenth-century West Africa witnessed a two-fold movement, namely the territorial expansion of French colonial empire and the first attempts to extend biomedicine through mass vaccination to control smallpox epidemics. This study provides both a deep history and conceptual framework to analyze the relationship between the...
Chapter 1 describes the homopolymerization of styrene and the copolymerization of ethylene and styrenic comonomers mediated by the single-site bimetallic "constrained geometry catalysts" (CGCs), (µ-CH2CH2-3,3'){(η5-indenyl)[1-Me2Si(tBuN)](TiMe2)}2 [EBICGC(TiMe2)2; Ti2], (µ-CH2CH2-3,3'){(η5-indenyl)[1-Me2Si(tBuN)](ZrMe2)}2 [EBICGC(ZrMe2)2; Zr2], (µ-CH2-3,3'){(η5-indenyl)[1-Me2Si(tBuN)](TiMe2)}2 [MBICGC(TiMe2)2; C1-Ti2], and (µ-CH2-3,3'){(η5-indenyl)[1-Me2Si(tBuN)](ZrMe2)}2 [MBICGC(ZrMe2)2; C1-Zr2], in combination with the borate activator/cocatalyst Ph3C+B(C6F5)4- (B1). Under identical styrene homopolymerization conditions,...
This dissertation examines the development of a black theater aesthetic in Jamaica as the colony prepared for independence. I define my theory of myalisation to explain how middle class theatre audiences participated in the Afro-Jamaican religious rituals of the lower class and how their participation signaled the development of a...
This dissertation describes the invention and development of a new nanolithographic method: On-Wire Lithography (OWL). OWL is a simple, reproducible, and high-throughput procedure for the synthesis and lithographic processing of metal nanowires (i.e. Au, Ag, Pt, Ni, and Cu) that allows researchers to control the morphology and feature size of...
With the advent of a variety of novel nanometer-scale diagnostic techniques such as DNA micro- and nanoarrays, increasing focus has been placed on developing methods to quickly and accurately create these nanometer scale patterns. One promising technique for depositing DNA, proteins, and other liquid molecular "inks" with submicron resolution is...