The patent system seeks to strike the ideal balance between competition and the rate of innovation – not to maximize innovation unconditionally. Clearly there must be limits on the manner and degree to which patents are used to diminish competition. A critical complication, however, is that this boundary is often...
According to Lisjak, Lee, and Gardner (2012), a threat to a brand can elicit the same response as a threat to the self. The current research examined whether people react differently to brand threats as a function of East Asian versus North American culture and as a function of whether...
Drill rap, a subgenre of hip-hop intimately connected to Chicago street life and brought into the nation’s musical mainstream by Chicago rapper Chief Keef, sounds and means differently than traditional forms of hip-hop. Unlike most hip hop, drill is outwardly unconcerned with mobility. This project explores drill’s departure from hip-hop’s...
The National Institute of Mental Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality convened an expert panel to identify the top research priorities in the field of behavioral intervention technology (BIT) research. The panel determined that if BIT research is to evolve in an effective way to reach and...
Heterogeneous catalysts play a prominent role in our society, used in applications that range from the production of plastics to the catalytic cracking of crude oil. Industrial catalysts are typically made of mixed metal oxides or nanosized metal particles deposited on high surface area supports. Industrially relevant catalytic materials are...
This dissertation examines the situated and interactional nature of cultural experiences. Drawing on the literature on materiality, place, and space, the study analyzes how the physical and spatial characteristics of art galleries and art museums in Accra, Ghana, and Johannesburg, South Africa, lead people to engage with culture, and derive...
This dissertation focuses on exploring novel light steering and spectral engineering functionalities by flat optics, which includes photonic architectures of flat plasmonic metasurfaces, nanoparticle arrays, and thin film coatings. We have designed, fabricated and characterized different plasmonic metasurfaces (trapezoid-shaped antennas, nanorings/nanowires, etc.), nanoparticle arrays (single-layered or multilayered nanocubes and nanodisks),...
Web users suffer from security and privacy threats. According to Symantec, 430 million new unique pieces of malware have been discovered in 2015, and over half a billion personal records were stolen or lost in the same year. Defense mechanisms can be classified as reactive approach and proactive approach. Reactive...
How do independent artists use social media and e-commerce websites to support their creative businesses? This dissertation examines independent artists’ participation in the peer economy for selling handmade goods, a hybrid economy that combines sharing content on social media and selling goods on e-commerce platforms. While a multidisciplinary array of...
Ecological restoration is vital to the conservation of biodiversity and provision of ecosystem services in a changing world. Biodiversity is often a goal of restoration, and species to be planted for restoration are often selected based on diversity objectives. But species are not independent; they are related to one another...