cometadata/datacite-titles-descriptions-related-identifiers huggingface dataset:
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-365954
title: An outperforming non-traditional urban school: a qualitative case study on a visual and performing arts high school

description: There is an educational paradigm shift in which there are more options for learning whereas non-traditional schools are becoming more prevalent and effective. The purpose of the study was to identify organizational practices in a school that narrowed the achievement gap in an outperforming non-traditional urban visual and performing arts secondary school sustaining success. This five-chapter qualitative case study examined organizational practices that narrow the achievement gap in outperforming non-traditional urban schools. An introduction and summary of the achievement gaps within the educational systems are discussed. Data collection was conducted via surveys, staff interviews, document analysis, and classroom and campus observations. ❧ The data was triangulated to identify organizational practices that narrowed the achievement gap through the lens of instructional practices, leadership practices, and school culture. The results of the study addressed the following research questions: (1) What instructional practices exist in outperforming non-traditional urban schools; (2) What leadership practices exist in outperforming non-traditional urban schools that address the achievement gap; (3) What is the school culture in outperforming non-traditional urban schools? ❧ The findings demonstrated high levels of student achievement and success through a systematic approach that encompasses specific actions that meet students’ needs. In this case study, four tangible themes were found: shared leadership and collaboration that promotes psychological safety, thematic instructional strategies to stimulate cognitive development, creative passion that drives institutional success, and quality community partnership and endorsement. The themes are grounded in a growth model approach that focuses on creating an atmosphere of high student achievement and academic success.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-43730
title: Train-the-trainers: A follow-up study: Staff development and the role of the nurse aide in the long-term care setting
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-624472
title: Molecular dynamics simulations of nanoindentation of nickel aluminides

description: Molecular dynamics simulations have been performed to study nanoindentation of NiAl and Ni3Al crystals on three surfaces: (100), (110), and (111). Obtained load-displacement curves show discrete drops at certain depths, indicating dislocation bursts in Ni3Al and structural phase transformation in NiAl underneath the indenter. The hardness values of the two systems are found to depend significantly on the crystallographic plane. We have used the common neighborhood parameter to study slip systems and quantify plastic activities such as the BCC to BCT martensitic phase transformation in NiAl, and found that the orientation-dependent plastic activities explain the observed hardness anisotropy.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-627975
title: Bayesian dynamic latent trait models with mixed hidden Markov structure extension for mixed longitudinal outcomes

description: In studying how air pollution affects children’s respiratory health, the joint behavior of a sequence of related longitudinal outcomes such as lung function measurements and associated asthma incidence is of main interest. In longitudinal studies, such as Southern California Children Health Study (CHS), multiple mixed outcomes are often collected to characterize some underlying biological responses, which are generally not observable or difficult to measure directly. It is natural to assume that some outcomes measure an underlying quantity of main interest from different perspectives. For example, in CHS, the widely used five lung function measurements (FVC, FEV₁, FEF₇₅, MMEF and PEFR) depict the underlying pulmonary function development. Asthma incidence information is often based on the children or parent’s recall. The recall bias should be taken into account in joint modeling. ❧ In this dissertation, we propose and implement a flexible dynamic latent trait model with multiple mixed outcomes from exponential family, allowing for possible misclassification among some categorical outcomes. The new method combines components of three types of latent variable modeling: Mixed Hidden Markov Model, Generalized Linear Mixed Effect Model and Latent Dynamic Transition Model. We first explore the children reported asthma at each time point while considering the misclassification in multi-level modeling setting using the Mixed Hidden Markov Model. We then integrate it into dynamic latent trait models. Because of the difficulties due to the high dimensional integration involved when using EM or Monte Carlo EM algorithm to obtain parameter estimates, this proposed approach relies on Bayesian methods using Markov Chain Monte Carlo, especially Gibbs Sampling, for posterior distribution computation. Simulation studies are used to validate the estimation procedures and compare with traditional models in order to illustrate the gains from our methods. We apply our models to the Southern California Children Health Study data.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-651218
title: The public eye: celebrity and photojournalism in the making of the British tabloids, 1904-1938

description: My dissertation locates the origins of photojournalism in the tabloid newspapers that proliferated in early twentieth-century London, and interrogates the role of tabloid photography in the transformation of ideas of celebrity, publicity, and publicness. The tabloids were the world’s first newspapers to make extensive use of the snapshot photograph as a vehicle of mass communication. The snapshot image documented a fleeting moment in time, and could be taken with or without the consent of the subject, which intensified the pressures of life in the public eye. The tabloids made the photographic exposure of unguarded moments part of their mass appeal. In this way, the proprietors, editors and photographers of the first tabloids helped produce a new way of consuming images of famous people that significantly altered the nature of celebrity culture and stoked debate about photographic intrusion into private life. In its focus on celebrity, my research contributes to debates regarding what historians have identified as Britain’s unique tensions between the rise of mass democracy and the endurance of traditional social and cultural hierarchies. As a mass cultural medium focusing on aristocratic and royal figures, the British tabloids express some of the paradoxes of British democratic culture. The tabloids simultaneously underscored the cultural centrality of traditional elites, as well as representing a challenge to their social dominance by seizing control over what kinds of information could be made public through the mediation of the camera. My project illustrates the global significance of British visual culture. Because of Britain’s international influence – both in and beyond the Empire – the tabloid format pioneered in London penetrated the journalistic culture of most of the globe.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-659151
title: Illuminating Watts: stories from Los Angeles' ever-changing neighborhood

description: Watts was built around a train station, and like the cars that continue to travel its tracks, the community is constantly changing.  The most prominent of those changes is that of its population.  A stopping ground for several immigrant populations on their way into Los Angeles, the demographics of the neighborhood have shifted from a predominantly white community to an African American.  Today, it is a diverse community with a majority of Latino residents. Many immigrant populations migrate to Watts because of its four public housing developments and affordable housing units.  The neighborhood is home to two urban high schools, each embroiled in the district-wide movement for education reform.  Watts is notorious for its gang-activity, but efforts by the Watts Gang Task Force and the Los Angeles Police Department have decreased crime significantly.  This collection of multimedia stories sheds light on aspects of life in Watts.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-666811
title: The importance of Dfp1 in alkylation damage response and meiosis

description: In Schizosaccharomyces pombe, the DDK complex is a conserved, essential kinase complex consisting of a catalytic subunit, Hsk1 (Cdc7), and its regulatory subunit Dfp1 (Dbf4). Over the years, it has become apparent that the DDK complex has additional roles that go beyond its function in initiation of DNA replication that now include damage checkpoint response and fork stabilization, promotion of centromeric cohesion and chromosome segregation, and induction of prDSBs. ❧ The focus of my research has been to dissect the different roles the DDK complex has outside of DNA replication. Chapter Two describes the role of the DDK complex in maintaining genome stability. We found that the DDK complex has overlapping roles with components of the fork protection complex in stabilizing the fork, but also unique contributions in response to alkylation damage that place it in the translesion synthesis repair pathway. ❧ Chapter Three describes a functional dissection of the importance of the C-terminus in meiosis. I show that the C-terminus of Dfp1 is important for a regulated meiotic program, induction of prDSBs, and proper chromosome segregation by affecting Rec8 cohesin stability. ❧ Chapter Four concludes with a search for new protein-protein interaction partners that suggest a future research path in elucidating further mechanisms the DDK complex may be involved in.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-669010
title: Beclin1-interacting autophagy protein Atg14L targets SNARE-associated protein Snapin to coordinate endocytic trafficking

description: Autophagy is a highly regulated membrane remodeling process that allows the lysosome-mediated degradation of cytoplasmic entities by sequestrating them into double-membrane autophagosomes, indicating that autophagy is highly intertwined with endocytic trafficking pathway for the concomitant lysosomal fusion by sharing similar molecular machinery. A mammalian Atg14L, also known as Beclin 1-associated autophagy-related key regulator (Barkor), directly interacts with Beclin 1 through its coiled-coil domain and activates phosphatidylinositol 3-phosphate kinase class III (PI3KC3) to induce autophagosome membrane nucleation, highlighting the essential role of Atg14L in the early stage of mammalian autophagy. In the first part of this study, we report a novel function of Atg14L in the endocytic trafficking pathway where Atg14L binds and colocalizes with the fusogenic SNARE effector protein Snapin to facilitate endosome maturation process. Atg14 specifically interacts with Snapin through its C-terminal BATS domain and this interaction effectively facilitates endosomal maturation without affecting autophagic cargo degradation. Consequently, atg14l knockdown significantly delayed the late stage of endocytic trafficking, evidenced by the retarded kinetics of internalized surface receptor degradation, which was effectively complemented by the Atg14L wildtype but not by its Snapin-binding mutant. Taken together, our study demonstrates that Atg14L functions as a multivalent trafficking effector that regulates endosome maturation as well as autophagosome formation, reflecting the complexity of the crosstalk between autophagic and endocytic vesicle trafficking processes in higher eukaryotes. ❧ A growing body of evidence suggests that the autophagy pathway and/or autophagy genes play pleiotropic functions in the host’s intrinsic, innate, and adaptive immune response against viruses. In order to counteract this, some viruses have evolved to encode virulence factors that either evade or exploit the autophagy machinery for their replication and pathogenesis. In the second part of the study, we report the pleiotropic roles of Atg14L and Snapin in two different types of RNA viruses, VSV and influenza A virus. Analogous to an essential autophagy gene Atg3, ablating expression of Atg14L and Snapin promoted VSV replication. In contrast, lack of their expression hindered the replication capacity of influenza A/PR8 virus, while other autophagy genes including Beclin1 and UVRAG failed to do so, suggesting that the actions of Atg14L and Snapin in viral life cycle are independent of autophagy pathway. A comprehensive understanding of the roles of autophagy pathway and autophagy genes during viral infection may enable the discovery of novel antiviral drug targets.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-103691
title: Battered women: A psychosocial profile
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-635361
title: Fault zone structure and evolution at continental plate boundaries

description: Decades of research has illustrated that the continental lithosphere, particularly the crust within it, is compositionally evolved and heterogeneous. The compositional heterogeneity is clearly associated with rheological layering, yet the precise rheological behavior of each layer has proven difficult to quantify. In particular, two important questions have remained unresolved for several decades.  1) What is the integrated and peak strength of the continental lithosphere and where does the peak strength reside? 2) To what degree is deformation localized into faults and shear zones at different depths? A variety of sub-disciplines in the earth sciences, including geology, geodesy, and geophysics have focused on these issues for both modern and ancient continental orogens. In this thesis, I address these two questions, both directly and indirectly, but from two quite separate subdisciplines: active tectonics and structural geology. Chapter 2 focuses on whether discrepancies in geologic vs. geodetic slip rates are real, given the uncertainties in geologic slip rate estimates. In Chapters 3 and 4 the magnitude of stress within the middle and lower crust is quantified for two separate tectonic settings: the Whipple Mountains in eastern California (Chapter 3), representing post-collisional extension, and the Sierra Alhamilla in southern Spain (Chapter 4), representing syn-collisional extension. The stress profiles differ in detail, but lead to the same overarching conclusions: 1) the magnitude of stress at the brittle-ductile transition is high, consistent with the extrapolation of Byerlee’s law at hydrostatic pore fluid pressures; and 2) the decreases in stress with depth and the associated strain rates are consistent with weak quartzite flow laws, but inconsistent with strong ones. In Chapter 5 I show that measurements of dynamic stress from pseudotachylites, are within error of measurements of static stress from brittle-to-ductile shear zones, suggesting that the formation of melt along the fault may have triggered seismic arrest, rather than lubrication. Chapter 6 is a methods chapter demonstrating that NIST 6XX glass standards can be used to quantify the Ti contents of quartz if the matrix effect between these glasses and nearly pure quartz can be corrected.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-644551
title: Subset selection algorithms for prediction

description: In this dissertation, we study the subset selection problem for prediction. It deals with choosing the “best” or “most informative” k-subset from a large set of n &gt; k observable variables, to predict the value of a function or another variable of interest that is related to the observable variables. Natural applications of this problem abound in areas as diverse as medicine, social sciences, economics, numerical analysis, signal processing and sensor networks. There are various mathematical formulations for this problem, depending on the characterization of the best subset and of the dependencies between variables. We study two versions: the first version is a stochastic framework for subset selection of random variables using linear regression, and the second is an adversarial framework for estimating aggregate statistics of a function in the presence of metricspace induced spatial constraints. ❧ The goal of this dissertation is to perform an algorithmic analysis of the subset selection problems, characterize natural conditions which make these problems tractable, and explore polynomial-time algorithms with guaranteed optimal or near-optimal solutions. For the stochastic subset selection problem, we explore two broad approaches for designing efficient approximation algorithms. The first approach uses a graph-theoretic framework to characterize the covariance structure of the problem instance, and design efficient algorithms for several classes of covariance graphs. The second approach uses an algebraic framework based on spectral and submodular analysis, to identify conditions under which greedy algorithms can obtain good performance guarantees. ❧ For adversarial subset selection, we provide efficient deterministic and randomized sampling strategies and corresponding prediction functions to approximate some commonly used aggregate statistics. For the deterministic setting, we show an interesting connection with common clustering problems, and obtain constant factor approximation algorithms for predicting the average and maximum statistics. For the randomized setting, we obtain a polynomial-time approximation scheme for the problem of finding the optimal randomized algorithm for choosing a single sample to predict the average statistic. We also solve the interesting special case of estimating the integral of a univariate Lipschitz-continuous function over the [0, 1] interval using one sample, and design an optimal randomized algorithm in this setting. ❧ For several of our subset selection algorithms, we also experimentally validate our theoretical analysis on several real-world data sets.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-656751
title: The role of bone morphogenetic protein receptors in commissural axon guidance and growth

description: A correctly functioning nervous system requires that neural circuits be precisely wired during development. A growing axon must travel through a constantly changing environment, bypassing inappropriate targets to make the correct synapse. To accomplish this feat, axons are directed along the proper path by attractive and repellent cues in the embryonic environment. In addition to directional information, it is critical that axons receive such guidance input at the appropriate time to correctly advance. ❧ Morphogens, signaling molecules that specify cell identity, have been found to also act as axon guidance cues, raising the possibility that the mechanisms that establish neural cell fate are also utilized to assemble neuronal circuits. In the embryonic vertebrate spinal cord, Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMPs) initially induce the identity of dorsal interneuron type 1 (dI1) commissural neurons, then subsequently repel their axons – two biologically distinct processes. Specification of cell fate requires nuclear transcription, whereas axon guidance occurs through the rapid reorganization of the cytoskeleton within the growth cone. It remains unresolved, however, how neurons differentially transduce the cell fate specification and guidance activities of morphogens. Do BMPs signal through the same components to accomplish these two diverse functions? ❧ We investigated whether the canonical BMP signaling pathway also mediates axon guidance, and our results suggest that the type I BMP receptors (Bmprs) are responsible for both the morphogenetic and chemorepellent activities of the BMPs in rodent and chick spinal cords. However, while both type I Bmprs, BmprIa and BmprIb, have redundant roles in specifying commissural cell fate, axon guidance is chiefly mediated by only BmprIb. Therefore, the diverse activities of the BMPs are not transduced by different receptor complexes as has been shown for other morphogens. Rather, the canonical receptor complex transduces both activities presumably by the differential activation of the type I Bmprs. Furthermore, we found BmprIb to have an additional role in mediating “temporal” information to commissural axons to specify their rate of growth. Modulation of BmprI activity in commissural neurons indicated BmprIb, and not BmprIa, is required to control the rate of commissural axon outgrowth by regulating the activity of the actin-severing protein cofilin through a non-canonical pathway. Thus, BMPs have the dual function of repelling commissural axons and controlling their rate of outgrowth, such that axons arrive at subsequent guidance points at the correct developmental time.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-667904
title: Nutrition and body composition in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia

description: Intensification of treatment for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) has improved survival but has also led to large increases in treatment-related toxicity (TRT).  Weight and body composition are well-recognized mediators of chronic disease whose impact in childhood cancer is still being determined.  Previous studies and pilot data have demonstrated that children with ALL undergo significant changes in body composition during therapy that may have  a significant effect on  TRT and outcome. ❧ We therefore undertook a two-part investigation into body composition and its effect on TRT in childhood ALL.  Children's Oncology Group (COG) CCG-1961 was a large cooperative group clinical trial in high-risk ALL.  We conducted a secondary analysis of the study that demonstrated either weight extreme, severely underweight or obese, was associated with increased TRT.  Outcome as measured by event-free survival (EFS) was worse in both weight extremes but this did not reach statistical significance on multivariate analysis.  The second half of our investigation is ongoing and explores a common complication of ALL therapy.  Poor bone health affects approximately one in four children during treatment and also has the  potential for long-term sequalae and reduced quality of survival.  As Vitamin D insufficiency is prevalent in this population and known to be a key mediator of bone health, we therefore designed a prospective, randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled interventional clinical trial of Vitamin D supplementation in the context of body composition.  This will also provide an in-depth description of bone metabolism during treatment for ALL that will help identify other targets for future intervention. ❧ These two studies represent only the surface of the likely impact of weight and body composition on TRT in the treatment of childhood ALL and other cancers and further research is required to continue to characterize their effect on different morbidities.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-159779
title: Stress impact on foster family systems
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-47505
title: Hooking the terminal up with the system: The Los Angeles Jewish community's response to the terminally ill
DOI: 10.25549/krieger-c64-1100
title: Shooting commercial for The Gap, Los Angeles, 2004

description: Shooting commercial for The Gap, Los Angeles, 2004. Bowling Alley at San Vicente Boulevard and Venice Boulevard, Los Angeles.
DOI: 10.25549/krieger-c64-3973
title: Artsons Manufacturing Company, Cudahy, 2004

description: Artsons Manufacturing Company, Cudahy, 2004. 4915 Cecelia Street, Cudahy. They are listed under: Tool and die makers, wholesale wire and cable, baling equipment and supplies manufacturers. -- http://losangeles.citysearch.com/profile/108074/cudahy_ca/artsons_manufacturing_co.html; http://www.yellowpages.com/cudahy-ca/mip/artsons-manufacturing-co-21940527; http://www.manta.com/c/mmcly7r/artsons-manufacturing-co.
DOI: 10.25549/krieger-c64-5190
title: Detail 2 of 31, Around USC as a bureaucracy, 2004

description: Around USC as a bureaucracy, 2004 October 25. Offices.
DOI: 10.25549/krieger-c64-5191
title: Detail 10 of 12, Shooting commercial for The Gap, Los Angeles, 2004
DOI: 10.25549/krieger-c64-5192
title: Detail 11 of 12, Shooting commercial for The Gap, Los Angeles, 2004
DOI: 10.25549/krieger-c64-5193
title: Detail 12 of 12, Shooting commercial for The Gap, Los Angeles, 2004