This dissertation shows how early modern (1603–1868) Japanese Buddhist ritual performances created forums for the transmission of religious knowledge across lay and clerical divides within the Shingi Shingon school. Analyses of liturgical manuscripts, commentaries, temple records, and denominational scholarship reveal the emergence of registers of reception, or distinct levels of social, linguistic, and performative apprehensions of doctrinal knowledge, during the delivery of ceremonial lectures (kōshiki 講式) before mixed audiences at the Shingon temple Chishakuin in Kyoto. Ceremonial Lecture [on the Merits of] Relic Offerings (Shari kuyō shiki 舎利供養式), written by the medieval monk Kakuban 覺鑁 (1095–1143), drew in a variety of actors who participated in related ways. Laity witnessed hymnal versions of the ritual during the same performative sequence, scholar-monks repurposed the ritual as commentaries which circulated among novices, the ritual shared calendrical space with other ceremonies for clerical advancement, and it met new curricular concerns during periods of sweeping educational reform. In each of these cases, the Shari kuyō shiki offered opportunities for heuristic engagement among laity and clerics alike. This research shows how approaches to socially inclusive rituals can destabilize dominant tendencies to treat lay and clerical liturgical experiences as disconnected. In an effort to draw greater attention to false dichotomies that shape conceptions of “authentic” religious experience, this dissertation shows how the delivery of kōshiki offered not only performers and observers, but also readers, note-takers, publishers, and teachers opportunities to enact a religious and denominational discourse on a spectrum of experience.

This thesis introduces a kinematic and dynamic framework for creating a representative model of an individual. Building on results from geometric robotics, a method for formulating a geometric dynamic identification model is derived. This method is validated on a robotic arm, and tested on healthy subjects to determine the utility as a clinical tool.

The proposed framework was used to augment the five-times sit-to-stand test. This is a clinical test designed to estimate an individual's stability by timing the total time to stand/sit five times. Using the proposed framework, a representative kinematic and dynamic model was obtained which outperformed conventional height/mass scaled models. This allows for rapid, quantitative measurements of an individual, with minimal retraining required for clinicians.

These tools are then used to develop a prescriptive model for developing assistive devices. The recovered models can be used to formulate an optimisation to determine the actuator types and parameters to provide augmentation.

This framework is then used to develop a novel system for human assistance. A prototype device is developed and tested. The prototype is lightweight, uses minimal energy, and can provide an augmentation of 82% for providing hammer curl assistance. The modelling framework is used to analyse the effect this assistance has on compensatory actions of the shoulder.

Principals are expected to be instructional leaders. Research on instructional leadership indicates that when principals visit classrooms they can positively impact student achievement, teacher practice, and teacher attitudes. The literature also indicates that principals spend little time on this instructional leadership activity. To address this issue, the superintendent of Skyline Unified School District (SUSD) mandated that all principals spend at least five hours a week visiting classrooms. This design study is an attempt to provide SUSD principals guidance in productively meeting the five-hour visit requirement. I developed a design to help principals lead classroom visits that support teacher development and indirectly contribute to a school wide learning community. The design emphasizes classroom visits to support teacher learning because there is extensive evidence that enhancing instructional quality is essential to improving student learning.

For this study, I developed a theory of action to guide the design. Drawing from the literature, I identified three key design elements of classroom visits with a learning orientation: reducing defensiveness, taking a developmental approach, and providing meaningful feedback. I incorporated these elements into a classroom visit process that two SUSD principals engaged in at their schools. The principals also acted as co-developers of the design. During the course of this study I investigated the impact of the design on the principals' practice as well as the design process itself. Overall, the design contributed to the principals improving in leading classroom visits focused on teacher learning. Based on the findings, I argue that the design's theory of action is basically sound, although principal learning needs to be enhanced. There were also limitations to the impact of the design and to the principals' acting as co-developers. These findings inform potential design modifications to the classroom visit process as well as implications this study has for instructional leadership.

This dissertation draws upon the curatorial tenets of Istanbul, the 2005 Istanbul Biennial. The dissertation aims to make observations about visual art reception in the early twenty-first century. To this end, the focus is audience: namely, how it collectively absorbs and formulates meaning when faced with art in offsite exhibitions removed from the traditional enclosure of the art museum. Audience members in urban exhibitions such as 2005's Istanbul Biennial resemble older forms of urban wandering central to history modern art, embodied in the figure of the flaneur. As Istanbul exemplifies the globalized visual art distribution system by the cultivating an ambulant and recurrent audience, it also characterizes visual art's progressive elements. Istanbul stands as a model for how itinerant communities and unconventional exhibitions can displace artworks themselves as primary resources. Unlike art movements defined by historical objects, the affective dispersal of reception has redefined contemporary art in the last two decades.

In \cite{BS}, the authors constructa spectral sequence which converges to the homology groups of the graph configuration space. This construction requires a characteristic $0$ field to ensure a commutative model for the cochain algebra. For arbitrary coefficients a commutative model may not exist and we suggest a different approach. Each vertex of a graph $G$ is colored by a copy of $C_{N}^{*}(M;R)$, the normalized cochains, where $R$ is a commutative ring with unity of any characteristic. We construct a complex similar to the Bendersky-Gitler complex in \cite{BG}. Its differential involves sums over sequences of collapsing edges of the graph: for a single collapsed edge multiplication of tensor factors in $C_{N}^{*}(M;R)$ is used, while for general sequences one uses the sequence operations of McClure and Smith, cf. \cite{MS}. If the graph $G$ has at most 5 vertices with a planar-type labelling and $Z_{G} \subset M^{\times n}$ is the closed subspace of diagonals built from the graph $G$, we show this computes the relative cohomology groups $H^{*}(M^{\times n},Z_{G};R)$. These are isomorphic to the homology groups of the graph configuration space $H_{nm-*}(M^{G};R)$ if $M$ is a compact oriented manifold. When $G$ is the complete graph on $n$ vertices, these are the homology groups of the usual (labelled) configuration space.

Sound design is a comparatively young member of the theatrical design family. Computer technology for sound and music, much of which emerged over this past decade, continues to become cheaper and more widely available, making intricate sonic designs more accessible now than in the past for designers and theaters alike. While this is a big step for the art of sound design, the field is still adolescent in comparison to the scenic, costume, and lighting design fields. Sound design has become a regular part of the creation of modern theatre; that said, modern sound designers might collaborate with other theater professionals who trained without significant collaboration with or influence from sound designers and sound design. As such, collaborative practices between a sound designer and the rest of a theatrical team continue to develop. Through this thesis, I hope to provide a comprehensive snapshot of the role of sound design and sound designers in modern theatre, and to illuminate important strategies for successful collaboration between sound designers and a theatrical team.

Understanding the genomic architecture of speciation remains a challenge in evolutionary biology. Among broadcast-spawning marine invertebrates, reproductive isolation is thought to be established and maintained by the divergence of gamete recognition proteins located on the surfaces of sperm and egg cells. However, it remains unclear whether gametic isolation has been an effective barrier to gene flow during and/or following speciation. In this dissertation, I characterized the history of introgression among the North Pacific sea urchin species of the family Strongylocentrotidae to deepen our understanding of their diversification and evaluate the importance of gametic isolation in speciation. Using whole-genome sequencing data from each strongylocentrotid species and cutting-edge phylogenomic approaches, I documented widespread introgression in both extant taxa and ancestral lineages, demonstrating that gametic isolation did not effectively limit introgression. I implemented a phylogenetic hidden Markov model to locate the specific regions of the genome affected by introgression, finding evidence of strong selection against introgression across much of the genome. Although introgressed variation has predominantly persisted in slowly evolving, low-divergence genomic regions, numerous protein-coding genes showed both introgression and historical positive selection, suggesting an adaptive role for introgression. Finally, I showed that the two gamete recognition proteins responsible for species-selectivity in sea urchin fertilization, sperm protein bindin and its egg receptor, EBR1, have experienced historical adaptive introgression, a pattern inconsistent with expectations for barrier loci. My findings contribute to the body of literature evaluating the biological consequences of introgression and question the importance of gamete recognition proteins in the evolution of reproductive isolation among incipient strongylocentrotid sea urchin species.