The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has expanded health coverage for thousands of Illinois residents. Expanded coverage, however, does not guarantee appropriate health care. Diabetes and its ocular complications serve as an example of how providers in underserved urban areas may not be able to keep up with new demand for...
Quantum frequency conversion (QFC) of photonic signals preserves quantum information while simultaneously changing the signal wavelength. A common application of QFC is to translate the wavelength of a signal compatible with the current fiber-optic infrastructure to a shorter wavelength more compatible with high-quality single-photon detectors and optical memories. Recent work...
Weak interactions in ligand-receptor
pairs are important in biological systems.
However, the energetics of these interactions
are often difficult to quantify for ligandreceptor
pairs. Weak interactions are a part
of reorganization energy, which plays a role
in electron transfer reactions. Under certain
conditions the rate of electron transfer
can be...
This dissertation proposes an oracle efficient estimator in the context of a sparse linear model. Chapter 1 introduces the penalty and the estimator that optimizes a penalized least squares objective. Unlike existing methods, the penalty is differentiable – once, and hence the estimator does not engage in model selection. This...
This dissertation examines topical humor produced by "Late Night with David Letterman," "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," "Saturday Night Live," and The Onion for the period of one year after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Three phases emerge: the purgation of extreme emotions like anger, acceptance or...