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The acquisition of vocabulary is an important aspect of young children's development that may impact their later literacy skills (National Reading Panel, 2000; Cunningham & Stanovitch, 1997). Deaf children who are American Sign Language users, however, often have smaller vocabularies and lower literacy levels than their hearing peers (Lederberg & Prezbindowski, 2001; Schirmer & McGough, 2005). Despite the importance of teaching vocabulary for young deaf children, there are very few investigations on this important topic (Luckner & Cooke, 2010). This study examines the nature of vocabulary instruction by four early childhood teachers of deaf children (TODs) from two classrooms through a qualitative collective case study. Findings indicated that the Four-Part Vocabulary Program (Graves, 2006) could account for the nature of vocabulary in these classrooms; however, within this framework TODs used qualitatively different language strategies to address the unique aspects of teaching a visual language. Furthermore, there was interplay of teacher knowledge about learners, curricula, and pedagogy that informed their instructional planning and decision-making. Implications of this study include the varying roles of teacher knowledge, experience, and evidence in guiding ASL vocabulary instruction for TODs. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The world became hardly recognizable throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as the normal state of the world was disrupted. In addition to affecting everyday life, the pandemic touched every industry, especially that of cybersecurity. To properly remediate for the future of cybersecurity, the trends in cybercrime seen throughout the pandemic warrant further investigation. An overall increase in cybercrime was clearly observed with no signs of plateauing. This trend was paired with developing sophistication of cybercrime means and methods. In response to this, a defense-in-depth strategy focusing on a layered defense approach strengthens an organization’s security posture. Focusing on every policy and technology implementation to limit attacker impact is the path to security in this post-COVID era. A proactive focus on how to leverage future technologies and methodologies will pave the way to securing the future.

The purpose of this quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest, nonequivalent control group study was to evaluate the effectiveness of morphological instruction that includes word matrices and word sums with middle school students. This study compared the overall reading performance growth as measured by the Northwest Evaluation Association: Measure of Academic Performance (NWEA MAP) scores of students who received morphological instruction with word matrices and word sums with the growth of students who did not receive morphological instruction that included word matrices and word sums. A convenience sample of 100 students English-speaking students from a rural, public middle school in northwest Pennsylvania was used for the study. Data were collected using the NWEA MAP assessments that the students took during their English Language Arts classes. The treatment group consisted of seventh-grade students who were instructed using word matrices and word sums in the vocabulary lessons they received. The control group consisted of seventh-grade students who received vocabulary instruction that did not include word matrices or word sums. Reading performance results were analyzed using ANCOVAs to compare the treatment groups’ pretest and posttest results with the control groups’ pretest and posttest results. The researcher hypothesized that statistically significant differences would exist in overall reading RIT scores, information text RIT scores, and/or vocabulary RIT scores. Results indicated that a statistically significant difference for all three components as described above did not occur during this study.

From the moment of its first publication in March 1836, Charles Dickens's first serial novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-37) was re-purposed extensively by the newspaper press. From acting as innocuous filler material, to making strategic political statements, Pickwick was used in a variety of rich and tactical ways: it was plundered for its anecdotes, which were liberally excerpted for literary and 'Varieties' columns; its characters and scenes were adapted to form political commentaries; and it was disguised as spurious news items or self-help pieces under new headings. Its individual scenes and characters became familiar bywords for both journalists and readers, deployed and absorbed as part of political discussion and debate, and appearing in a wealth of different columns - from leaders and letters to the editor, to reports of public readings and political gatherings. This project examines the motivations behind and impact of this extensive journalistic phenomenon, reading Pickwick's remediation as a valuable index to a considerable and critically understudied area of nineteenth-century media history. Crucially, the thesis demonstrates that literature can be found at the very heart of newspapers' political strategies, as in their columns they carved out political identities both for themselves and for their communities of active readers. Using a replicable, data-driven methodology, the thesis examines digitised newspapers in the British Newspaper Archive in order to draw new connections between the literary, journalistic and political realms. In doing so, it reads Pickwick's words and tropes as rhetorical devices that were successfully mobilised in, and that drew together, all three of these spheres, as part of a networked, trans-genre debate. The project brings new material to light, including previously uncatalogued reviews and excerpts, evidence of dozens of public readings for which Pickwick became part of a programme of entertainment or education, and two politically strategic newspaper adaptations of the serial that have as yet eluded critical notice. Across its three chapters, which respectively examine the excerpting, adaptation and evocation of Pickwick both during its initial serialisation and throughout Dickens's lifetime, the project questions what the re-use of Pickwick in the newspaper press can tell us about the role played by popular literature in nineteenth-century political discourse; in what ways the serial's style and structure influenced the nature and extent of its use in the press; and how attention to journalistic remediation can nuance our understanding of Dickens's relationship with the reception of his works.

The acquisition of vocabulary is an important aspect of young children's development that may impact their later literacy skills (National Reading Panel, 2000; Cunningham and Stanovitch, 1997). Deaf children who are American Sign Language users, however, often have smaller vocabularies and lower literacy levels than their hearing peers (Lederberg and Prezbindowski, 2001; Schirmer and McGough, 2005). Despite the importance of teaching vocabulary for young deaf children, there are very few investigations on this important topic (Luckner and Cooke, 2010). This study examines the nature of vocabulary instruction by four early childhood teachers of deaf children (TODs) from two classrooms through a qualitative collective case study. Findings indicated that the Four-Part Vocabulary Program (Graves, 2006) could account for the nature of vocabulary in these classrooms; however, within this framework TODs used qualitatively different language strategies to address the unique aspects of teaching a visual language. Furthermore, there was interplay of teacher knowledge about learners, curricula, and pedagogy that informed their instructional planning and decision-making. Implications of this study include the varying roles of teacher knowledge, experience, and evidence in guiding ASL vocabulary instruction for TODs.

In this thesis we study nonlinear and breaking deep-water surface waves. First, we consider the vorticity generated by an individual breaking wave, drawing on classical literature on vortex generation by impulsive forcing. We employ this theory to develop a scaling argument for the relationship between the generated circulation and the variables characterizing the breaking wave. This model is then compared to limited laboratory experiments, and good agreement is found. We next pursue a related problem, namely the partitioning of energy in the breaking induced currents, between the turbulent and mean flow. This is the inverse problem to the vortex generation model, as we work backwards from the structure of the induced flow, using existing results on vortex dynamics to find the energy necessary to generate the (half) vortex ring induced by breaking. This yields a theoretical model for the ratio of the energy in the mean flow currents to the total energy lost from the wave field, in terms of the characteristic variables of the breaking wave. This relationship is then examined numerically, using a direct numerical simulation of the two-phase air-water Navier-Stokes equations, and agreement between the model, the numerical experiments, and limited available laboratory data is found. One approach to breaking is through the focusing of wave packets. Here, we theoretically and numerically examine weakly nonlinear narrow-banded wave packets. By employing moment evolution equations of the modified nonlinear Schrodinger equation (MNLSE), we derive new predictions for the geometry, kinematics, and dynamics of focusing wave packets. In particular, we predict that as the wave group focuses: the group velocity increases; the packet leans forward; and the energy equipartition (between kinetic and potential) breaks down. These results are then corroborated by numerical integration of both the MNLSE and the fully nonlinear evolution equations for irrotational inviscid deep-water surface gravity waves. Finally we present several ongoing projects related to nonlinear and breaking surface waves. First, we present a Lagrangian for deep-water surface gravity waves and discuss its numerical implementation. Next, a virial theorem for surface gravity waves is derived. Finally, we derive the criterion for the Benjamin-Feir instability based on a variance identity for the nonlinear Schrodinger equation.

"Solid Air" argues that representations of the atmosphere in novels by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Thomas Hardy transform the physical and psychological stability of female protagonists. My examination of Bleak House, Jane Eyre, Villette, The Return of the Native, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles participates in a recent turn in literary scholarship that focuses on physical atmospheres in British poetry and prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whereas many of these studies adopt an ecocritical approach by looking back to literary engagements with what we now term the Anthropocene (the geological period defined by human influence), "Solid Air" examines the indelible imprint atmosphere leaves on literary representations of the human. My historical research on Victorian science--including physiological psychology, meteorology, and molecular physics--demonstrates that women in the mid-to-late nineteenth century were often understood in relation to the weather. Current narrative theory tends to understand characters as physically delineated subjects. By contrast, I argue that the hazy environments in Victorian fiction emphasize the dissoluble coherence of the female body and its surprisingly omniscient knowledge. My examination of theories of hysteria, "periodicity" (the biological fluctuations thought to govern female subjectivity from puberty to childbirth and beyond), and women's limited energy reserves demonstrates that the close relationship between gender and climate science forms the basis of innovative--and often empowered--representations of the female self. The forms of solid air this project examines dissolve the distinction between in-here (character interiority) and out-there (atmosphere). This elusive, often opaque, characterization urges us to reconsider the transparent consciousness and embodied subjectivity critics often associate with the "round" or fully developed Victorian protagonist. Paradoxically, seemingly restrictive categories of scientific study allowed novelists to imagine a new diegetic subjectivity: one as diffuse as the air itself.

Escalating maternity litigation costs threaten the stability of any health system and are unsustainable. Improving patient care and reducing preventable harm during childbirth remain crucial in overcoming this litigation crisis. In order to make the widespread improvements in obstetric care required to alleviate this litigation burden, a system- based approach, acknowledging all levels (micro, meso and macro) of a health system, may be needed. This thesis explores the use of a system-based approach to improve maternity care and tackle the increasing cost of litigation in obstetrics. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to the thesis. Part 1 of the thesis adopts a 'bottom-up' approach and focusses on the health economics of multi-professional simulation training for obstetric emergencies. Chapter 2 demonstrates that adults with obstetric brachial plexus injuries (OBPIs) and caregivers of children with permanent OBPIs have a worse quality of life compared to the general population. Chapter 3 highlights the cost of a multi-professional simulation training programme for obstetric emergencies. Chapter 4 investigates the cost-utility of simulation training for obstetric emergencies with particular regard to its impact on reducing OBPIs. This study demonstrates that national implementation of multi- professional obstetric training can be both cost-effective and cost-saving. Part 2 of the thesis uses a 'top-down' approach and focusses on the role of the state- based medical indemnifier (MI) in influencing and improving patient care. Chapter 5 explores how MIs engage with clinical staff and offers some recommendations for how they could have a more effective role in patient safety. Chapter 6 demonstrates that obstetric simulation training is associated with a reduction in the maternity claim rate and mean monthly litigation cost. Chapter 7 identifies the rate of low 5-minute Apgar scores as a predictor of future litigation. Finally, Chapter 8 provides an overall summary of the thesis and its key messages.