33760 research outputs found
Sort by
The Beckett Family and The Re-Signification of Widowhood Post-Emancipation
No full textThe 1856 Project is a University of Maryland initiative that investigates the ties between slavery and the founding of the Maryland Agricultural College. Just three miles south of campus is the historic Bostwick House in Bladensburg, the town’s oldest surviving building (1746). It is also a house in which hundreds of people were enslaved until the late 1860’s. The last family that held enslaved people were the Stephens with Nichola C. Stephen as the last enslaver. After the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 many enslaved people in Maryland, ran away to seek their freedom to the District of Columbia. One of the families that likely chose this route, were the Becketts. They were mentioned in the ‘Runaway Servants’ list submitted by Stephens in 1864. This list contained 35 enslaved people's names and at least 6 families. Due to the presence of Beckett’s at the Riversdale Plantation, owned by Charles Benedict Calvert, the founder of the Maryland Agricultural College, this research project aims to tell the story of the Beckett family in Bladensburg. Highlighting the critical role of Black women in shaping post-emancipation life. To conduct this research, census, historical newspapers, genealogy methodologies, archival research, and data bases like Ancestry.com and Family Search were used. The findings revealed that the post-emancipation life of the Becketts was build, and maintained by three widowed Black women Alice, Marcellina and Minerva Beckett. Women who were born enslaved or from enslaved parents yet became matriarch of their households and lived independently until their death. This research portrays the narratives of three Black women who change the perspective upon what widowhood meant by becoming leaders of their family and their community
CONSTRUCCIÓN DE IDEOLOGÍAS LINGÜÍSTICAS SOBRE BILINGÜISMO EN REDES SOCIALES: UN ANÁLISIS MULTIMODAL DE VIDEOS DE TIKTOK
No full textEn esta tesina se documentan los tipos de ideologías lingüísticas sobre el bilingüismo inglés-español que sostienen adolescentes y jóvenes de México y los Estados Unidos, así como los recursos multimodales empleados para comunicarlas. Las ideologías lingüísticas no se limitan a las valoraciones que hace una comunidad acerca de un individuo y su forma de hablar, sino que establecen una jerarquía entre las variedades lingüísticas presentes en el entorno de un individuo o comunidad, determinando sus posibilidades de aprendizaje y uso. Sin embargo, no necesariamente son reconocidas de manera explícita por quienes las sostienen, puesto que pueden subyacer en representaciones visuales, en el comportamiento de los individuos o en las estructuras de determinadas instituciones sociales (Woolard, 2022; Kroskrity, 2003; Irvine, 1989; Woolard y Schieffelin, 1994).Además, la naturaleza multimodal de TikTok que combina el habla, la música, los efectos visuales, etc. permite que estas ideologías se comuniquen de manera no verbal. Para esta tesina se analizaron las ideologías lingüísticas y los recursos multimodales de un total de 45 videos de TikTok publicados por tres influencers: una estadounidense, una mexicana y una méxico-americana. La mayor parte de los videos dependía del modo verbal para comunicar sus ideologías lingüísticas; no obstante, aquellas comunicadas de manera no verbal corresponden a juicios negativos, centran el discurso ideológico en el hablante o presentan ideologías que van en contra de las ideologías lingüísticas dominantes de un contexto.
Por otra parte, los contextos sociolingüísticos offline de las influencers influyen en las formas en que se articulan y reproducen las ideologías lingüísticas en línea. Estos dos factores llaman la atención sobre la necesidad de incorporar la perspectiva multimodal en el diseño de actividades que requieran interactuar con textos transnacionales en contextos pedagógicos.
This dissertation documents the types of linguistic ideologies about English-Spanish bilingualism held by adolescents and young adults in Mexico and the United States, as well as the multimodal resources used to communicate them. Langauge ideologies are not limited to the evaluations that a community makes about an individual and his or her way of speaking; they establish a hierarchy among the linguistic varieties present in an individual's or community's environment, determining the possibilities for learning and using each variety. However, they are not necessarily explicitly recognized by those who hold them, since they may underlie visual representations, the behavior of individuals or the structures of certain social institutions (Woolard, 2022; Kroskrity, 2003; Irvine, 1989; Woolard and Schieffelin, 1994).In addition, the multimodal nature of TikTok that combines speech, music, visuals, etc. allows these ideologies to be communicated nonverbally. For this dissertation, the language ideologies and multimodal resources in a total of 45 TikTok videos posted by three influencers were analyzed: one American, one Mexican, and one Mexican-American. Most of the videos relied on the verbal mode to communicate language ideologies; however, those communicated nonverbally correspond to negative judgments, focus the ideological discourse on the speaker, or present ideologies different to the ones that dominate the social context.
On the other hand, the offline sociolinguistic contexts of the influencers influence the ways in which language ideologies are articulated and reproduced online. These two factors call attention to the need to incorporate the multimodal perspective in the design of activities that require interacting with transnational texts in pedagogical contexts
RECONCEPTUALIZING RESILIENCE: TRAJECTORIES OF GROWTH AND FAMILY SUPPORT FOR CENTRAL AMERICAN IMMIGRANT YOUTH
No full textLatino immigrant youth are the fastest-growing segment of the Latino population in the United States. Despite facing profound traumatic experiences related to migration, including family separation, socio-economic instability, and legal precarity, many demonstrate remarkable mechanisms of growth, and resilience. This study explores the ways in which Latino immigrant youth from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala navigate these adversities and the strategies they employ to thrive in the U.S. context. Using a grounded theory approach, this study draws on 34 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Latino immigrant youth (ages 15–26), conducted between 2019 and 2024. Framed within life course theory, the analysis theorizes how resilience unfolds as a dynamic process shaped by migration-related disruptions and contextual enablers. Findings reveal two distinct post-migration trajectories: a thriving trajectory, characterized by determination, agency, and giving back behaviors, and a navigating trajectory, in which youth continuously struggle against structural and interpersonal barriers but persist in their efforts to move forward. Across both trajectories, participants identified key enablers to thriving at the individual, relational, and community levels, highlighting the role of both family and non-family sources of support. Additionally, this study critically examines familismo, a widely regarded protective factor among Latino communities. While familismo is often idealized as a source of cohesion and emotional support, findings reveal a significant familismo gap, wherein migration-induced separations and reunifications often disrupt family bonds, leaving some relationships fractured beyond repair. The concept of linked lives, central to life course theory, further underscores how the experiences of immigrant youth are deeply intertwined with those of their family members, yet these connections do not always translate into sustained support post-migration. Ultimately, this study argues that resilience among Central American immigrant youth should be understood as an ongoing process rather than a static outcome. A more nuanced, individualized conceptualization of resilience is necessary to accurately capture the ways in which these youth navigate adversity. The findings have significant implications for policy, program development, and intervention efforts aimed at safeguarding immigrant youth from the harmful effects of restrictive immigration policies. A youth-centered strengths-based approach that acknowledges their lived experiences and support needs is essential in fostering pathways to stability and psychological well-being
A Rabbi in Letters: The Multi-Genre writings of Rabbi Samuel Aboab and the Early Modern Mediterranean
No full textThis dissertation examines the life and writings of Rabbi Samuel Aboab (1610–1694). It
positions Aboab—from his birth into a powerful converso family in Antwerp to his four-decade
tenure as rabbi of the wealthy Portuguese community in Venice—as a gateway to broader
questions relating to converso identity, communication, the formation of a rabbinic “Republic of
Letters," and the evolving contours of rabbinic authority during the early modern period. Aboab
served for nearly six decades as a rabbi in Verona and Venice, authored close to four hundred
halakhic responsa, and maintained a wide network of rabbinic correspondence across Italy and
the Mediterranean. This study constitutes the first sustained scholarly engagement with his life
and works. In reconstructing his biography with particular attention to his converso origins and
rabbinic trajectory, our study complicates prevailing narratives of post-converso religious
identity and integration. The dissertation analyzes Aboab’s responsa and employs network
mapping to reconstruct his role in a rabbinic “Republic of Letters," and explores how this
communications network sustained rabbinic careers and reinforced rabbinic authority across
geographic boundaries. This study also offers the first systematic justification for the attribution
of the Sefer ha-Zikhronot to Aboab. It defines the work as Aboab’s guide for rabbinic leadership
and situates it within the broader context of shifting models of rabbinic authority, thus
contributing a new perspective to the study of the early modern rabbinate. Finally, the
dissertation examines Aboab’s commitment to the Jewish religious life in the land of Israel,
focusing on his stewardship of the Beit Midrash Aboab in Safed, originally established by his
father, Abraham Aboab. It explores the spiritual and religious motivations that may have inspired
diasporic, and particularly Portuguese, Jews to engage with the Jewish communities in the lan
LEARNING INTERACTION BEHAVIOR IN DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS
No full textThis dissertation develops a formal framework for learning robust, state-dependent interaction behaviors in distributed intelligent systems. While learning-based approaches are increasingly used in multi-agent systems applications such as robotics and crowd-aware navigation, they often lack theoretical guarantees of stability and robustness, particularly under state-dependent or asymmetric interaction topologies. Inspired by the adaptability seen in human collaboration, this work aims to bridge data-driven methods and control-theoretic foundations to address key challenges in systematic modeling and learning effective interaction strategies. We begin by drawing an analogy between human motor synergies and consensus algorithms, showing that human collaboration in motor tasks can be modeled via decentralized control laws. Empirical validation using static finger force matching data demonstrates that consensus algorithms over fixed undirected graphs capture key features of human coordination. Next, we introduce a geometric Graph Neural Network (GNN) model for complex human interactions in crowds. By connecting the structure of GNNs to weighted consensus dynamics and designing edge weights inspired by psychological studies on pedestrian behavior, we show how human-inspired topological priors improve predictive performance and interpretability. The simulation results show the sensitivity of these models to the interaction topology, highlighting the need for principled edge weight design in learned models. To generalize beyond static and handcrafted graph structures, we develop a consensus framework over graphs that support directed, signed, and state-dependent edge weights. Through Lyapunov-based edge agreement analysis, we derive sufficient conditions for stability and robustness—even under nonlinear and antagonistic interactions. Building on these results, we formulate an optimal control framework to learn optimal, state-dependent interaction strategies from observations. We derive optimality conditions for recovering interaction weights, investigate data richness requirements for successful learning, and validate the effectiveness of the framework through numerical simulation. Overall, this work integrates theoretical insights with data-driven solutions, aiming to provide useful perspectives toward safer, more intuitive, and reliable cooperative distributed systems
A Field Theory of Localization
No full textIn general wave-functions spread and propagate. However, there are certain situations where they cease to do so. Those situations are equivalently interpreted as frozen or localized quantum particles. In the context of condensed matter physics, this localization---the vanishing of the group velocity for a large class of states---is related to the appearance of flat bands in the band structure of a quantum system. The flat bands are important occurrences for multiple reasons, one of them being that on a flat band the kinematics of a system is non-existent and therefore the physics is completely governed by the interaction terms which are responsible for many exotic states of matter. Therefore, one expects that a flat band is a bedrock for finding exotic states. The appearance of flat bands is also, at times, a puzzling phenomenon. For example, the recurrent flat bands in twisted bilayer graphene for different twist angles are not yet completely understood, even at the single particle level, and they are surprising enough that the angles at which they appear are called ``magic'' angles. Here, the field theoretic approach to these interesting phenomena is presented
Disability-Specific Personal Factors and Academic Performance in Higher Education
No full textThe number of students with disabilities entering higher education in the U.S. has dramatically increased over the last decade. The World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the bio-psycho-social model of disability which focuses on a variety of disability factors contributing to performance in higher education, including personal factors. Higher education disability research has relied primarily on student narrative and questionnaire responses to gather information on personal factors. The Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) provides guidelines for higher education disability offices. These guidelines currently emphasize the importance of collecting and analyzing student narratives, particularly about perceived functional limitations of the disability, to guide accommodation decisions. The data for this study were obtained through the university’s disability registration process, which captured quantitative and qualitative (narrative) information in keeping with the AHEAD guidelines. The study aimed to explore how disability-specific personal factors impact student academic performance (GPA) in a given semester and across an academic year. Disability-specific personal factors are those that exist for a student with a disability and are non-academic in nature. This study examines the following disability-specific factors: onset of receiving disability services, type of disability, description of functional limitations, narratives about the impact of disability and accommodations on student experience, and accommodation access in higher education. Findings showed that students whose narratives expressed more complex and organized connections between their disability and their experiences as a student, received a higher GPA at the end of the spring semester. This finding supports the importance of examining the organization and complexity of student narratives about the impact of their disability and of their accommodations on their experience as a student. Future implications and limitations are discussed for determining how to measure disability specific personal factors to meaningfully understand how they impact academic performance and success for students with disabilities in the higher education setting
Labor Market Returns to Audit Experience
No full textHuman capital theory suggests that the potential to accumulate a portfolio of skills thatcan yield subsequent labor market returns is an important consideration in individuals’
career decisions. This paper provides the first large-sample empirical evidence on the
labor market returns to audit experience by examining how auditors’ subsequent career
advancement compares to that of other professionals. Using individuals’ employment
profile data to track their career progress, I document that ex-auditors who transition
to accounting or finance-related roles outside the public accounting sector advance more
quickly than their peers who start in the same roles without an auditing background. This
pattern is more pronounced for ex-auditors who move to companies with complex finances
or operations, work in familiar industries or local markets, have prior BigN experience, or
have three to five years of audit tenure. To explore the mechanism behind ex-auditors’
accelerated promotions, I develop a simple principal-agent model that shows employees’
contributions to the company can be inferred from the company-level performance measures
that the employer uses to determine their promotions. Based on this model, I empirically
document that ex-auditors contribute not only to the performance of the accounting or
finance function but to the company’s overall profitability. Collectively, these findings
suggest that auditing offers a competitive career path for human capital accumulation,
providing important insights for individuals to make informed career decisions
SYMMETRY AND MOTION: GEOMETRIC CONTROL OF HUMAN AGENTS
No full textThis dissertation develops a geometric framework for modeling and control of human agents through the use of Lie groups. Recognizing that traditional models of robotic systems with rigid body components based on the special Euclidean group (SE(3) for manipulator joint kinematics and dynamics, SE(2) for planar wheeled mobility) are ill-suited to capture the inherent complexities in human motion (e.g. planar locomotion, handwriting, 3D arm movements), we investigate an alternative approach focused on treating human agents as moving points on the special affine (or equi-affine) group SA(2). In particular, we exploit the idea that trajectories of agents in the affine plane with constant equi-affine speed naturally satisfy the two-thirds power law, a well-documented regularity observed in human movement (e.g. handwriting, planar locomotion).
We begin by discussing existing models of human motion, and then using Cartan’s method of moving frames, we set up control systems on the Lie groups SE(2) and SA(2), with geometric invariants such as Euclidean curvature and affine curvature as controls.
Next we use the constructed motion models to solve optimal control problems on SA(2) and its subgroup SL(2) for a single agent by appeal to the maximum principle of Pontryagin and coworkers, and Lie-Poisson symmetry reduction. The resulting hamiltonian systems on duals of Lie algebras are analyzed (using the structure of co-adjoint orbits and associated Casimir invariants) to compute extremals which respect the two-thirds power law. We compare these extremals with ones for robotic agents modeled on SE(2).
Extending these results, we explore multi-agent systems, specifically the landscape of relative equilibria for pairs of agents in SA(2) (and make comparisons with earlier results for SE(2)). We then construct feedback control laws based on the indirect method of Lyapunov to stabilize a multi-agentsystem to a specific relative equilibrium. Again we make comparisons between SA(2) and SE(2) settings.
This work lays a mathematical framework for designing motion algorithms for robotic systems that emulate the underlying geometry of human movement, thereby contributing to the broader goal of achieving effective human-robot collaboration
What the Conversation on Autism and Tylenol Gets Wrong
No full texthttps://www.baltimoresun.com/2025/09/27/trump-autism-tylenol