UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Tightness-Looseness in the United States: Ecological Predictors and State Level Outcomes
    (2014) Harrington, Jesse Ryan; Gelfand, Michele J; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This research demonstrates wide variation in tightness-looseness (strength of punishment and degree of permissiveness) at the state level in the United States, and its association with various ecological and historical factors, psychological characteristics, and state-level outcomes. Consistent with theory and past research, ecological and man-made threats--more natural disasters, greater disease prevalence, fewer natural resources, and greater external threat--predict increased tightness at the state level. Tightness is also associated with higher trait conscientiousness and lower trait openness. Compared with loose states, tight states have more social stability, indicated by lowered drug and alcohol use, lower rates of homelessness, and lower social disorganization. However, tight states also have relatively higher incarceration rates, greater discrimination and inequality, lower creativity, and lower happiness. In all, tightness-looseness provides a parsimonious explanation of the wide variation seen across the 50 states of the United States of America.
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    Highly Scalable Short Read Alignment with the Burrows-Wheeler Transform and Cloud Computing
    (2009) Langmead, Benjamin Thomas; Salzberg, Steven L; Pop, Mihai; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Improvements in DNA sequencing have both broadened its utility and dramatically increased the size of sequencing datasets. Sequencing instruments are now used regularly as sources of high-resolution evidence for genotyping, methylation profiling, DNA-protein interaction mapping, and characterizing gene expression in the human genome and in other species. With existing methods, the computational cost of aligning short reads from the Illumina instrument to a mammalian genome can be very large: on the order of many CPU months for one human genotyping project. This thesis presents a novel application of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform that enables the alignment of short DNA sequences to mammalian genomes at a rate much faster than existing hashtable-based methods. The thesis also presents an extension of the technique that exploits the scalability of Cloud Computing to perform the equivalent of one human genotyping project in hours.