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Over the last three decades, Chinese society has experienced dramatic social change. China is now turning into a global superpower, both economically and militarily but not necessarily politically. Western media often embarrass Chinese political leaders for their suppression on free speech and deviation from political democracy. This is the wider social context in which this thesis locates its enquiries. The Chinese media are deeply involved in this social transition. This thesis intends to provide an up-to-date investigation into journalistic culture in contemporary China, where journalism undergoes political suppression, commercial imperatives, and technological upgrades. This thesis examines the key tenets of practising journalism. It focuses on three areas: (1) the norms of practising journalism under political suppression, (2) the main forms of and roots of journalistic corruption that have brought forth by media commercialisation, and (3) the changes and continuities in journalistic practices associated with social media. This research is mainly based on six individual interviews and six focus group interviews, carried out between January 2012 and February 2012 in Beijing and Shanghai. The research is also supported by materials gained through personal communication in these cities. The research concludes that self-censorship and journalistic corruption are two prominent features of contemporary Chinese journalism. Social media have brought both changes and continuities to journalistic practices and media control methods. In analysing the factors shaping contemporary journalism, journalists tend to highlight the impact of traditional Chinese culture. This research, however, suggests that culture does not always play a determinative role. Political, economic and cultural factors, alongside other elements, all contribute to shaping journalism. We need a more dynamic and comprehensive perspective in examining journalism, which should be spatial-temporally constructed.

For two decades, state financing of higher education has been on the decline and the situation has exacerbated since the onset of the economic recession, where the US state systems have resorted to a substantial cut of funding for higher education. Faced with the challenges of limited resources for financial pressure and an increasing demand, community colleges either have taken or are considering taking a series of cost-saving strategies. Some of the most prominent trends seen in the past decades include sharp expansions in distance education offerings through online coursework, an increasing reliance on part-time adjunct faculty, and a heated discussion about slashing expenditures on remedial education. Yet, many researchers argue that these strategies might be implemented at the cost of poorer educational quality and less desirable student outcomes. My dissertation assesses the impacts of several important strategies that community colleges are engaged in an era of financial constraints on student academic outcomes and educational equality. In Chapter One, Shanna Smith Jaggars and I examine the fast growth of distance education and its impacts on student outcomes relative to traditional face-to-face delivery format. Based on a large administrative data set from Washington State, we found robust negative estimates for online learning in terms of both course persistence and course grade. While all types of students in the study suffered decrements in performance in online courses, we also identified strong variations across subpopulations and academic subject areas. Chapter Two is prompted by the spiraling increase in part-time faculty hiring in open-access two-year community colleges. Based data from a large community college system, I identified a positive impact of taking one's first course in a subject area on his contemporaneous course performance but negative impacts on subsequent course outcomes and enrollment patterns. Finally, Chapter Three is inspired by the heated debate related to the effectiveness of college remediation. Exploiting discontinuities in students' probability of receiving remediation both around the college-level cut off and the cut off for short versus long sequence of remediation, I found small and insignificant impacts of remediation for students on the margin of needing remediation, but significantly negative influence on students receiving long sequence of remediation compared to those who received short sequence. These results suggest that some cost-saving strategies that colleges are recently engaged may bring negative impacts on student learning outcomes, and therefore policymakers and college administrators may need to take steps to ensure the quality of education offered to students before enacting policies that would incentivize an accelerated expansion of online enrollments, and overreliance on adjunct instructors. Additionally, the insignificant and negative impact of remediation suggests that the huge investment in remediation may not have been effectively utilized to serve its purpose and colleges will need to explore ways to improve its effectiveness. [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.]

We consider a set of questions in the Standard Model, motivated by questions about QCD. These questions take us to issues beyond the Standard Model physics, especially dark matter and axions. Even our studies of Standard Model physics in some cases involve tools developed for Beyond the Standard Model Physics.

Three dimensional (3D) photonic crystal has attracted enormous interest in the last decade in both science and technology communities. Its unique capability to trap photons offers an interesting scientific perspective and can be useful for optical communication and sensing. However, the fabrication of large-scale 3D photonic structures at sub-micron scale with optimal photonic bandgap (PBG) remains a great challenge. Considerable efforts have been dedicated to develop fabrication techniques to produce large area defect-free 3D photonic structures toward device applications. This part of research need to develop a CMOS-compatible, laser interference lithography technique to produce 3D photonic structure on-chip using single- or multiple- layer diffractive optical elements (DOE). The DOEs can be incorporated into phase/amplitude masks used in optoelectronic circuit fabrications to enable a full integration of 3D photonic structures on-chip. Presented in this dissertation is the study of novel fabrication approaches of 3D photonic crystal. Compare to others, our studies utilize phase masks to fabricate 3D diamond-like photonic crystal templates in SU8 photoresist. 3D woodpile structures were fabricated by a double-exposure of SU8 to a three-beam or five-beam interference pattern generated by phase masks. Lattice structures and the PBG can be controlled by the rotational angles and relative displacement of the phase mask between exposures. Also, by using a single optical element such as special designed prism or phase mask, we demonstrate the phase tunability in the laser holographic patterning of 3D photonic crystal and quasi-crystal lattice structures. Photonic band gap computation predicts the existence and optimization of a full band gap in fabricated structures. The current studies demonstrate a simple and flexible approach to fabricate 3D photonic crystals with complex structures. It also lays solid ground work toward integrated fabrication of 3D photonic crystal structures on other optoelectronic components.