Standard accounts of women's relationship with technology stress women's need to overcome anxiety to achieve competence with computers. Recent studies provide evidence that this woman-anxiety-technology connection is an oversimplification of the relationship between women and computers. New literature also suggests that making computers more appealing will help girls overcome computational...
My dissertation focuses on the factors that influence variation in female reproductive success in plethodontid salamanders and in toads. Variation in reproductive success fuels evolutionary change. Although, females often have been overlooked in studies of reproductive success due to perceived lower levels of variation when compared to variation in male...
In recent years there has been a growing debate in the field of public administration over whether public employees are essentially self interested. Public choice theory contends that all people are self-interested utility maximizers, and as a result that public employees would seek to use their position for personal gain....
Pacific sardines (Sardinops sagax) are an economically and ecologically important forage fish which transfer energy from planktonic primary producers and secondary consumers to upper trophic predators. Previous genetics studies of Pacific sardine suggested a panmictic population with a shallow genetic structure. However, more than one subpopulation within the Central California...
Since 1980, the prevalence of obesity among U.S. adults has more than doubled, accompanied by increases in chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes. This high prevalence and associated disease burden continues to be a threat to public health. Despite years of efforts to stem the tide of obesity, successful...
The fashion industry is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Overconsumption of clothing, exacerbated by fast fashion, is worsening the environmental impact of both the production and disposal of clothing. Clothing reuse, particularly thrifting, is gaining popularity, yet most donated clothes still never get sold. I have developed a plan for a small...
After the 1996 national welfare reform known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was enacted with more stringent eligibility and work requirements for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program, a plethora of analyses have followed assessing the...
Systems biology is a powerful approach which considers and sheds light on all of the puzzle pieces which make up complex biological processes, and is an effective alternative to unraveling these processes using traditional molecular approaches alone. It is a natural companion approach for computational biology, which leverages the power...