This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library.

You're a mouse, and you've been invited by your friend to a mouse party (which you're a bit nervous about)! Of course, every good mouse party needs cheese. Explore the house, befriend or avoid the cat, and get that cheese!

Writing assessment has developed along two separate lines, one centered in professional organizations for writing teachers and the other centered in professional organizations for the broader assessment community. As the controversy about automated scoring continues to develop, it is important for writing teachers and researchers to become fluent in the discourse of the broader assessment community. Continuing to label the work of the broader assessment community as positivist and continuing to ignore it will only result in a continuing sense of defeat as automated assessment is adopted more widely. On the other hand, an examination of the literature on educational assessment will reveal that the theoretical base for assessment is quite consistent with the principles adopted by the writing assessment community.

Rather than starting with physical form as "state"- centered theories do, a more useful theoretical model should begin with the content of political units. Specifically, this model should examine a crucial element of the content of a political unit, the "source of transcendent credibility," and analyze the effects this has on the physical form of political units in a given system. Hence, this dissertation hypothesizes that the boundaries between political units in a given system will be relatively more distinctive as the number of sources of transcendent credibility within that system increases. A source of transcendent credibility is an unseen (transcendent) force that a critical mass of the population in a territory believes to be acting on behalf of and in favor of the "faithful." To more efficiently and effectively generate compliance from the people, a ruler will link his own credibility to this inherently credible source. Competing sources of transcendent credibility within a system increase the perceived threat to the ruler's source of efficient compliance generation. The cost-effectiveness of this means of generating compliance creates large incentives for the investment of resources to protect the source's efficacy. One potential threat arises from the fact that an international rival can improve its' bargaining power vis-à-vis a ruler by undermining the ruler's source of transcendent credibility, provided the two rivals rely on different sources of transcendent credibility. Second-tier variables, geopolitics and military capabilities, can exacerbate the perceived threat from an international rival that depends on a different source of transcendent credibility. The dissertation tests this hypothesis using case studies that vary in both time and space: the unification of northern and southern China under the Sui and T'ang, the eighth century rivalry between China and Tibet, the rise of the Shiite Safavid Empire alongside the Sunni Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, and the European continent from the medieval period to the present. The extended European case examines the dynamic of changing numbers of sources of transcendent credibility in a system and responses to these changes. The conclusion discusses the implications for the future global system and the discipline of Political Science

During development, neural cells must migrate from progenitor pools to their final position.During this migration, they interact with each other and the extracellular matrix (ECM). Thefamily of Cas-adaptor proteins is part of the adhesion signaling pathway that is activated whenintegrin receptors bind to substrates in the ECM. Three Cas paralogs (p130Cas, CasL, and SIN)are expressed in the cortex and cerebellum during development. Previous work showed that Casproteins are required to form the retinal ganglion cell layer, coordinate somatosensory axonfasciculation in the spinal cord, and organize the layers of the neocortex. Preliminary datasuggest that Cas genes are also expressed in the developing cerebellum, raising the possibility ofa functional requirement for these genes during cerebellar migration. During cerebellardevelopment, Purkinje cells and granule cells use Bergmann glial processes as a guide to migrateto the proper layer, a process called lamination. Using a triple conditional knockout (TcKO)model, we will conditionally delete Cas from the cerebellum which will help us determine thefunction of Cas-adaptor proteins during cerebellar migration and lamination. Using thesemethods, we have found that Cas genes are broadly required for the formation of the cerebellarlobules. However, further studies will be required to determine if Cas genes affect cerebellarstructure formation by regulating primary cerebellar fissure formation, Purkinje cell migration,and/or glial scaffold formation.