There is much at stake with the smart city. This urban governance movement is

predicated on infusing information-and-communication technology into nearly all aspects of the built environment, while at the same time transforming how cities are planned and managed. The smart city movement is global in scale with initiatives being rolled out all over the planet, driven by proponents with deep pockets of wealth and influence, and a lucrative opportunity with market projections in the billions or trillions of dollars (over the next five to ten years). However, the smart city label can be nebulous and amorphous, seemingly subsuming unrelated technologies, practices, and policies as necessary. Yet, even with this ambiguity, or perhaps because of it, the smart city vision is still able to colonize urban landscapes and capture the political imaginations of decision makers. In order to know just what the smart city entails I work to bring analytic clarity to the actions, visions, and values of this movement.

In short, the arc of this project moves from diving into the "smart city" discourses; to picking apart the ideologies at its heart; to engaging with the dual logics—control and accumulation—that drive the smart city; and finally to imagining what an alternative techno- politics might look like and how we might achieve it. My goal is that by analyzing the techno- politics of the smart city we will be better equipped to understand these urban transformations— what logics drive them, what they herald, and what our role should be in how they develop.

Human protein diversity arises as a result of alternative splicing, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and posttranslational modifications. Because of these processes, each protein can exists as multiple variants in vivo. Tailored strategies are needed to study these protein variants and understand their role in health and disease. In this work we utilized quantitative mass spectrometric immunoassays to determine the protein variants concentration of beta-2-microglobulin, cystatin C, retinol binding protein, and transthyretin, in a population of 500 healthy individuals. Additionally, we determined the longitudinal concentration changes for the protein variants from four individuals over a 6 month period. Along with the native forms of the four proteins, 13 posttranslationally modified variants and 7 SNP-derived variants were detected and their concentration determined. Correlations of the variants concentration with geographical origin, gender, and age of the individuals were also examined. This work represents an important step toward building a catalog of protein variants concentrations and examining their longitudinal changes.

Deposits of dark material appear on Vesta’s surface as features of relatively low-albedo in the visible wavelength range of Dawn’s camera and spectrometer. Mixed with the regolith and partially excavated by younger impacts, the material is exposed as individual layered outcrops in crater walls or ejecta patches, having been uncovered and broken up by the impact. Dark fans on crater walls and dark deposits on crater floors are the result of gravity-driven mass wasting triggered by steep slopes and impact seismicity. The fact that dark material is mixed with impact ejecta indicates that it has been processed together with the ejected material. Some small craters display continuous dark ejecta similar to lunar dark-halo impact craters, indicating that the impact excavated the material from beneath a higher-albedo surface. The asymmetric distribution of dark material in impact craters and ejecta suggests non-continuous distribution in the local subsurface. Some positive-relief dark edifices appear to be impact-sculpted hills with dark material distributed over the hill slopes.

Dark features inside and outside of craters are in some places arranged as linear outcrops along scarps or as dark streaks perpendicular to the local topography. The spectral characteristics of the dark material resemble that of Vesta’s regolith. Dark material is distributed unevenly across Vesta’s surface with clusters of all types of dark material exposures. On a local scale, some craters expose or are associated with dark material, while others in the immediate vicinity do not show evidence for dark material. While the variety of surface exposures of dark material and their different geological correlations with surface features, as well as their uneven distribution, indicate a globally inhomogeneous distribution in the subsurface, the dark material seems to be correlated with the rim and ejecta of the older Veneneia south polar basin structure. The origin of the dark material is still being debated, however, the geological analysis suggests that it is exogenic, from carbon-rich low-velocity impactors, rather than endogenic, from freshly exposed mafic material or melt, exposed or created by impacts.