This dissertation has two objectives. The first objective is to determine where best to situate the study of mentoring (i.e. the 'making of scientists') on the landscape of the history of science and science studies. This task is accomplished by establishing mentoring studies as a link between the robust body...
Professional software engineers have an arsenal of techniques such as unit testing and assertions to check their specifications, but these techniques require tools, motivation, experience and training that programmers without professional software engineering training may not have. As a result, professionals in other fields, such as scientific modelers, face greater...
The major historical studies that have examined American
biology have emphasized the development of experimental biology at
the end of the nineteenth century. In this characterization, the
descriptive branch of biology has often been treated as less than
important and, in several cases, as a hindrance in the application
of...
Microbial ecology has been transformed by metagenomics, the study of the genetic in-formation in entire communities of organisms. In the following we develop metagenomic tools arising from the classic Wasserstein metric as applied to questions regarding the diversity between microbial communities. We provide a novel proof of the characteriza-tion of...
Substantial scientific investment has been directed towards understanding factors that influence distribution patterns and animals' remarkable ability for precise orientation and navigation, yet fundamental gaps in our knowledge remain. In my dissertation, I applied emerging genetic technologies to conduct a top-down and bottom-up investigation of animal movement and cue perception....
Until recently, research has not considered whether the design of end-user programming environments, such as spreadsheets, multimedia authoring languages, and CAD systems, affects males and females differently. As a result, we began investigating how the two genders are impacted by end-user programming software and whether attention to gender differences is...
Global environmental change is causing local extinctions of species. When species depend on one another, as in the mutualistic relationship between plants and pollinators, loss of one interaction partner may cause cascading effects within the community – such as additional extinctions and reduced pollination services. Network theory provides a way...
Seventy-two species of Blennocampinae in 21 genera and six tribes
are known from the Nearctic region. The adults and known larvae of
all species and genera are keyed, described and illistrated. A
definition of the subfamily, a review of previous work, a table of
host-plant associations, and a discussion of...
End users' programs are fraught with errors, costing companies millions of dollars. One reason may be that researchers and tool designers have not yet focused on end-user debugging strategies. To investigate this possibility, this dissertation presents eight empirical studies and a new strategy-based end-user debugging tool for Excel, called StratCel....
Instruction in a University Honors College was evaluated using Small Group Instructional Diagnosis (SGID), a qualitative evaluation process. Fifty-one class sections were evaluated over a three-year period to determine what worked to help students learn, what did not work, and suggestions for improvement. Seven instructors used both SGID and an...