Summary of Dissertation Recitals Three Programs of Piano Music

Three piano recitals were given in lieu of a written dissertation. In this series of programs I have demonstrated various ways that American composers have organized their music into large-scale structures in the twentieth century, whether following or differing from recognizable European models. The first recital presented Beethoven’s Piano Sonata op. 106 as a European model of large-scale formal construction. The second lecture-recital explored the music of Australian-American Percy Grainger, juxtaposing shorter works and transcriptions with his multi-movement suite, In a Nutshell. The third recital presented Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata, paired with a short arrangement which provided an introduction to simple bitonality, useful for understanding Ives’s musical language. Sunday, October 18, 2015, 5:00 p.m., Walgreen Drama Center, Stamps Auditorium, The University of Michigan. John Luther Adams, Nunataks; Franz Schubert, Drei Klavierstücke D. 946, no. 2, in E-flat major; Ludwig van Beethoven, Sonata in B-flat Major, op. 106. Saturday, February 20, 2016 5:30 p.m., Earl V. Moore building, Britton Recital Hall, The University of Michigan. Lecture and recital on Percy Grainger, Blithe Bells; In a Nutshell; Irish Tune from County Derry; Ramble on the Last Love-Duet in Richard Strauss’s Opera “The Rose-Bearer”; “One more day, my John” from Sea Chanty Settings; In Dahomey “Cakewalk Smasher.” Sunday, April 10, 2016, 5:00 p.m.; Walgreen Drama Center, Stamps Auditorium, The University of Michigan. Stephen Foster (arr. Cole Anderson), Old Folks at Home; Charles Ives, Piano Sonata no. 2 “Concord, Mass., 1840—1860.”AMUMusic: PerformanceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147551/1/coleand_1.pd

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationIron is a critical micronutrient required for nearly all organisms to live. It is an important cofactor in proteins involved in DNA replication, cellular energy production, and oxygen transport. Nonphysiological levels of iron have pathological consequences ranging from iron deficiency that affects billions worldwide, to the iron overload disorder Hereditary Hemochromatosis that causes debilitating organ failure. Considering the dual nature of iron in healthy and diseased states, organisms have evolved elegant mechanisms to regulate iron homeostasis. This thesis examines the cellular mechanisms involved in controlling cellular iron uptake and storage, and highlights the importance of iron in the innate immune response and endocrine function of the mammalian pancreas. Using C. elegans as a model to study iron metabolism, we show that the nuclear receptor, NHR-14, is a potent repressor of intestinal iron uptake through the iron importer SMF-3. In addition to iron import, NHR-14 regulates a transcriptional response to bacterial infection that is dependent upon the insulin/IGF-1-like signaling (IIS) pathway transcription factor PQM-1. In mammals, cellular iron is maintained by the Iron Regulatory Proteins (IRPs). Mice lacking Iron Regulatory Protein 2 (IRP2) were shown to develop fasting hyperglycemia as a result of defective insulin biosynthesis that likely stems from mitochondrial dysfunction and Endoplasmic Reticulum (ER) stress

Sex Trafficking of Minors in Kentucky

From executive summary: Findings presented in this report are from telephone surveys conducted from July 2012 through April 2013 with 323 professionals who worked in agencies that serve at-risk youth and/or crime victims across Kentucky. Respondents were from all geographic and demographic communities in Kentucky, with the highest number serving Bluegrass metropolitan communities including Louisville, Lexington, and Northern Kentucky

The climate deception dossiers: internal fossil fuel industry memos reveal decades of corporate disinformation

This report presents seven “deception dossiers”—collections containing some 85 internal company and trade association documents that have either been leaked to the public, come to light through lawsuits, or been disclosed through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. While many of these documents have been analyzed by others (Oreskes 2011; Oreskes and Conway 2010; Gelbspan 1998), these dossiers offer the most complete and up-to-date collection yet available. Excerpts of the documents are provided in the report’s appendices; the complete dossiers—totaling some 336 pages— are available online. Each collection of internal documents reviewed here reveals a separate glimpse of a coordinated campaign underwritten by the world’s major fossil fuel companies and their allies to spread climate misinformation and block climate action. The campaign began decades ago and continues today. The fossil fuel industry—like the tobacco industry before it—is noteworthy for its use of active, intentional disinformation and deception to support its political aims and maintain its lucrative profits. The following case studies show that: Fossil fuel companies have intentionally spread climate disinformation for decades. The roots of the fossil fuel companies’ deception and disinformation run deep. Internal documents dating back to the early 1990s show a series of carefully planned campaigns of deception organized by companies and by trade groups representing the industry. As the scientific evidence concerning climate change became clear, some of the world’s largest carbon producers—including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Shell—developed or participated in campaigns to deliberately sow confusion and block policies designed to reduce the heat-trapping emissions that cause global warming. Fossil fuel company leaders knew that their products were harmful to people and the planet but still chose to actively deceive the public and deny this harm. The letters, memos, and reports in the dossiers show that company executives have known for at least two decades that their products—coal, oil, and natural gas—cause harm to people and the climate. The campaign of deception continues today. With documents made public as recently as 2014 and 2015, the evidence is clear that a campaign of deception about global warming continues to the present. Today, most major fossil fuel companies acknowledge the main findings of climate science. Many even say they support policies to cut emissions. And yet, some of these same companies continue to support groups that spread misinformation designed to deceive the public about climate science and climate policy

The Effect of Oriented Cracks on Seismic Velocities

We have considered the problem of elastic wave velocities in a matrix containing aligned ellipsoidal fluid-filled cracks. This problem is relevant to a variety of geophysical applications, including crustal and mantle seismology and the behavior of stressed and dilatant rock. When the cracks are ellipsoids of revolution, the composite is transversely isotropic and is describable with five elastic constants. For aligned oblate spheroids the major reduction in velocity occurs along the axis of symmetry. The opening of new cracks, the widening of old cracks, or the reduction of pore pressure accompanying crustal dilatancy can be expected to cause a large decrease in compressional velocity and considerable compressional wave anisotropy

Mean age gradient and asymmetry in the star formation history of the Small Magellanic Cloud

We derive the star formation history in four regions of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) using the deepest VI color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) ever obtained for this galaxy. The images were obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the Hubble Space Telescope and are located at projected distances of 0.5-2 degrees from the SMC center, probing the main body and the wing of the galaxy. We derived the star-formation histories (SFH) of the four fields using two independent procedures to fit synthetic CMDs to the data. We compare the SFHs derived here with our earlier results for the SMC bar to create a deep pencil-beam survey of the global history of the central SMC. We find in all the six fields observed with HST a slow star formation pace from 13 to 5-7 Gyr ago, followed by a ~ 2-3 times higher activity. This is remarkable because dynamical models do not predict a strong influence of either the LMC or the Milky Way (MW) at that time. The level of the intermediate-age SFR enhancement systematically increases towards the center, resulting in a gradient in the mean age of the population, with the bar fields being systematically younger than the outer ones. Star formation over the most recent 500 Myr is strongly concentrated in the bar, the only exception being the area of the SMC wing. The strong current activity of the latter is likely driven by interaction with the LMC. At a given age, there is no significant difference in metallicity between the inner and outer fields, implying that metals are well mixed throughout the SMC. The age-metallicity relations we infer from our best fitting models are monotonically increasing with time, with no evidence of dips. This may argue against the major merger scenario proposed by Tsujimoto and Bekki 2009, although a minor merger cannot be ruled out.Comment: 30 pages, 16 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Star Formation History in two fields of the Small Magellanic Cloud Bar

The Bar is the most productive region of the Small Magellanic Cloud in terms of star formation but also the least studied one. In this paper we investigate the star formation history of two fields located in the SW and in the NE portion of the Bar using two independent and well tested procedures applied to the color-magnitude diagrams of their stellar populations resolved by means of deep HST photometry. We find that the Bar experienced a negligible star formation activity in the first few Gyr, followed by a dramatic enhancement from 6 to 4 Gyr ago and a nearly constant activity since then. The two examined fields differ both in the rate of star formation and in the ratio of recent over past activity, but share the very low level of initial activity and its sudden increase around 5 Gyr ago. The striking similarity between the timing of the enhancement and the timing of the major episode in the Large Magellanic Cloud is suggestive of a close encounter triggering star formation.Comment: 30 pages, 22 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Radial velocities of five globular clusters obtained with AAOmega

Using the recently commissioned multi-object spectrograph AAOmega on the 3.9m AAT we have obtained medium-resolution near-infrared spectra for 10,500 stars in and around five southern globular clusters. The targets were 47 Tuc, M12, M30, M55 and NGC 288. We have measured radial velocities to +/- 1 km/s with the cross correlation method and estimated metallicity, effective temperature, surface gra vity and rotational velocity for each star by fitting synthetic model spectra. An analysis of the velocity maps and velocity dispersion of member stars revealed systemic rotation in four of the target clusters.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication by Astronomische Nachrichte