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History of Baltimore, 1729-1920
No full textUnfinished manuscript of a chronological history of Baltimore, Maryland, from the city's founding in 1729 to 1920. Written by Dr. Joe Arnold (1937-2004), History professor at UMBC. Chapter introductions written by Dr. Elizabeth M. Nix.Manuscript made available from a partnership between UMBC departments of History, the Center for Digital History Education, the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, and the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery. Copyediting and formatting completed 2014
Setting the Welfare Agenda: a qualitative analysis of the reauthorization of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)
No full textThe 1996 passage of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) was made possible by a unique confluence of factors including the work of organized political entrepreneurs, a bipartisan government, the negative construction of welfare recipients by elected officials, the public, and the media, and a booming economy. However, since the inception of TANF, the economic and political context has changed, likely affecting the agenda-setting stage for reauthorization of the legislation. The debates about and actions regarding TANF reauthorization and/or the role of cash-assistance welfare in general occurs within the changing economic and political context at any given time. Using John Kingdon's multiple-streams agenda-setting theory, this study examined welfare discourse to analyze how the policy community viewed the role of TANF within the deep recession in the first decade of the twenty-first century and which specific factors have influenced the tone and direction of its reauthorization. The study also integrated review of social construction and the economy into the multiple-stream agenda-setting framework in order to explore how these two factors were related to the agenda-setting process in the post-2010 reauthorization discourse. The research data was collected through the conduct and coding of informant interviews and the review of a sampling of Congressional hearings. I conducted 14 stakeholder interviews between September 2012 and November 2012: 8 participants were from inside the government (the Administration, Civil Servants, and Congress) and 6 participants were from outside the government (interest groups, media, academic/researchers/consultants, social movement). I cross-compared a sample of reauthorization-related committee hearings from 2001-2006 (the 107th-109th Congresses) with a sample of reauthorization hearings from 2007-2011 (the 110th - 112th Congresses). To provide a larger context, I analyzed relevant scholarly articles and public opinion polls and included ethnographic information gathered from interview field-notes. The three research objectives included: (1) to determine if the social construction of TANF recipients was related to the placement of TANF reauthorization on the governmental agenda; (2) to determine if the state of the economy was related to the placement of TANF reauthorization on the governmental agenda; and (3) to determine what factors (in addition to, or instead of) were related to the placement of TANF reauthorization on the political agenda. Results from this study indicate that the TANF reauthorization effort in this time period was far removed from an open policy window. There was no identified problem: extensions continued to maintain funding, cases were not increasing, and the public was not demanding action. Additionally, past entrepreneurs became fragmented or concerned with different topics, the implementation of the policy became standardized and incorporated into administrative practice, and the policymakers were wary about expending their political capital on a still divisive topic. Regarding research objective one, results show that the negative social construction of the welfare program, if not the welfare recipients themselves, remained a barrier to reauthorization. While the participants in the interviews expressed a sympathetic tone when describing TANF recipients, they asserted that those accepting cash-based assistance continued to be negatively constructed by both the public and politicians. For research objective two, results show that another barrier to reauthorization in this period was the depressed economy. Despite the state of the economy and increased unemployment there was not considerable support for increasing TANF spending in the recession, in part due to the negative social construction still attributed to this target population and competition among social programs. Finally, while the research was designed to specifically pull out themes associated with the social construction of TANF recipients and the state of the economy, an exploratory research objective was utilized to examine what other factors contribute to why the TANF program had not been reauthorized. As a result of this analysis, 4 themes that influenced the likelihood of change were identified: 1) the existing TANF policy was popular; 2) the welfare community (of states, administrators, and advocates) feared that any changes made might be punitive; 3) there were no identified active entrepreneurs; and 4) the topic of welfare was too politically divisive. The study intended to further inform the field of welfare agenda-setting practices by exploring the effects of multiple factors, including an economic recession, on the agenda-setting stage of welfare. Additionally, the study added to the theoretical understanding of the social construction of public assistance policy
Waiting for Supertrain: Trains, Technocracy, and the Great Society
No full textThe High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965 was the first federal legislation to support the construction of a high-speed passenger railroad network. Historians and public policy scholars tend to dismiss this act as a half-measure that did not achieve its intended goals. This thesis re-examines the 1965 law in light of the career of Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, who had sparked the debate with the introduction of his own passenger railroad service plan in 1962. This thesis also contends that technocratic thinking profoundly influenced federal policymakers' embrace of high-speed rail over conventional solutions. Traditionally studied with respect to defense and space projects, institutionalized technocracy was also, as witnessed by the present treatment of federal high-speed rail initiatives, an integral part of domestic policymaking. Technocracy was thus a leitmotif of both the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations' policy initiatives, promising to deliver a better life to Americans through technology and thus underscoring the New Frontier and the Great Society
DEATH OR HIGHER RESOLUTION: AN EXPERIMENTAL TREATISE ON PROCESSES OF INVERSION IN ART HISTORY AND DIGITAL IMAGE-MAKING IN THE CONTEXTS OF WOMEN, LOBSTERS, AND THE VANITY OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL PRECIPICE.
No full textThrough mass-produced custom objects, print and video that function as markers of performance, performance that functions as sculpture and documentary, and an art practice enacted through the body of a doppleg�nger named Lexie Mountain, my work explores crossings, inversions and systems of representation. In this document, I examine existing visual and critical structures that reinforce authenticity and authority, and bring into question methods by which meaning is placed upon the human female figure. I address issues of digital resolution and definition in image-making and comprehension, how detail informs aesthetic comprehension using examples in traditional oil painting and contemporary art, and the complex conjunctions where revisions of meaning can be made
Progressive Band Processing for Hyperspectral Imaging
No full textHyperspectral imaging has emerged as an image processing technique in many applications. The reason that hyperspectral data is called hyperspectral is mainly because the massive amount of information provided by the hundreds of spectral bands that can be used for data analysis. However, due to very high band-to-band correlation much information may be also redundant. Consequently, how to effectively and best utilize such rich spectral information becomes very challenging. One general approach is data dimensionality reduction which can be performed by data compression techniques, such as data transforms, and data reduction techniques, such as band selection. This dissertation presents a new area in hyperspectral imaging, to be called progressive hyperspectral imaging, which has not been explored in the past. Specifically, it derives a new theory, called Progressive Band Processing (PBP) of hyperspectral data that can significantly reduce computing time and can also be realized in real-time. It is particularly suited for application areas such as hyperspectral data communications and transmission where data can be communicated and transmitted progressively through spectral or satellite channels with limited data storage. Most importantly, PBP allows users to screen preliminary results before deciding to continue with processing the complete data set. These advantages benefit users of hyperspectral data by reducing processing time and increasing the timeliness of crucial decisions made based on the data such as identifying key intelligence information when a required response time is short
The Vietnam War: Communist Mass Mobilization at the National and Provincial Level in the Mekong Delta
No full textThe following study is an examination of Communist and Nationalist mass mobilization tactics during the Second Indochina Conflict. How did the use of violent and non-violent methods of mass mobilization and population control vary from region to reion in the context of local and national events, and what effect did these patterns have on communist and revolutionary efforts to gain popular support? How did these local practices influence the outcome of the conflict? The present study examines macro-level political trends and local case studies to investigate the development of communist mass mobilization strategy. The present study argues that Communist and Nationalist revolutionary leaders adapted mass mobilization techniques to the particular geographic and political realities of different regions, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of their efforts amongst the peasantry. The role of the Central Committee, the National Liberation Front, and the Southern Communist will be analyzed against the backdrop of national and local circumstances facilitated by the Republic of South Vietnam and the United States of America
ENGLISH LEARNERS WITH LIMITED OR INTERRUPTED FORMAL EDUCATION: RISK AND RESILIENCE IN EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES
No full textThis dissertation examined the educational outcomes of high school English learner (EL) students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE) to evaluate theories that explain their educational resilience. School system data and survey results from 165 high school ELs were analyzed to determine the degree to which ELs' homeland schooling had influenced their academic outcomes in the U.S. Educational outcomes included English proficiency attainment and gains as well as scores on standardized tests of algebra, biology, and English language arts. Limited formal schooling (LFS) was operationalized with three indicators for students on arrival in the U.S.: (1) gaps in years of schooling relative to grade, (2) low self-reported first language schooling, and (3) beginner-level English proficiency. Bivariate and multivariate regression analyses were used to estimate the relationships between the LFS indicators and the educational outcomes as well as the degree to which school-based protective factors and personal risk factors had influenced the relationships. Protective factors included perceived pedagogical caring, social integration with non-immigrant peers, ESOL classes, out-of-school help, and extra-curricular activities. Risk factors included high social distance, past traumatic experiences, a lack of authoritative parental support, separations from loved ones, and hours spent working in employment. This study also examined the role students' academic self-concept played in mediating and moderating the influence of protective and risk factors in the resiliency process. The findings showed that SLIFE had lower achievement on the standardized tests, but that it was largely due to having lower English proficiency at the time of the test. Lower English proficiency at the time of the test was mainly attributed to arriving with lower English proficiency and lower first language literacy. ESOL classes appeared to help students acquire English faster. After controlling for differences in English proficiency, students' perceptions of social distance appeared to predict their academic achievement on standardized tests better than their academic self-concept and the other protective or risk factors. This study contributes to our understanding of risk and resilience among SLIFE and may help inform interventions to support them better
Schema Free Querying of Semantic Data
No full textDeveloping interfaces to enable casual, non-expert users to query complex structured data has been the subject of much research over the past forty years. We refer to them as schema-free query interfaces, since they allow users to freely query data without understanding its schema, knowing how to refer to objects, or mastering the appropriate formal query language. Schema-free query interfaces address fundamental problems in natural language processing, databases and AI to connect users' conceptual models and machine representations. However, schema-free query interface systems are faced with three hard problems. First, we still lack a practical interface. Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) are easy for users but hard for machines. Current NLP techniques are still unreliable in extracting the relational structure from natural language questions. Keyword query interfaces, on the other hand, have limited expressiveness and inherit ambiguity from the natural language terms used as keywords. Second, people express or model the same meaning in many different ways, which can result in the vocabulary and structure mismatches between users' queries and the machines' representation. We still rely on ad hoc and labor-intensive approaches to deal with this ``semantic heterogeneity problem''. Third, the Web has seen increasing amounts of open domain semantic data with heterogeneous or unknown schemas, which challenges traditional NLI systems that require a well-defined schema. Some modern systems gave up the approach of translating the user query into a formal query at the schema level and chose to directly search into the entity network (ABox) for the matchings of the user query. This approach, however, is computationally expensive and has an ad hoc nature. In this thesis, we develop a novel approach to address the three hard problems. We introduce a new schema-free query interface, SFQ interface, in which users explicitly specify the relational structure of the query as a graphical skeleton and annotate it with freely chosen words, phrases and entity names. This circumvents the unreliable step of extracting complete relations from natural language queries. We describe a framework for interpreting these SFQ queries over open domain semantic data that automatically translates them to formal queries. First, we learn a schema statistically from the entity network and represent it as a graph, which we call the schema network. Our mapping algorithms run on the schema network rather than the entity network, enhancing scalability. We define the probability of observing a path on the schema network. Following it, we create two statistical association models that will be used to carry out disambiguation. Novel mapping algorithms are developed that exploit semantic similarity measures and association measures to address the structure and vocabulary mismatch problems. Our approach is fully computational and requires no special lexicons, mapping rules, domain-specific syntactic or semantic grammars, thesauri or hard-coded semantics. We evaluate our approach on two large datasets, DBLP+ and DBpedia. We developed DBLP+ by augmenting the DBLP dataset with additional data from CiteSeerX and ArnetMiner. We created 220 SFQ queries on the DBLP+ dataset. For DBpedia, we had three human subjects (who were unfamiliar with DBpedia) translate 33 natural language questions from the 2011 QALD workshop into SFQ queries. We carried out cross-validation on the 220 DBLP+ queries and cross-domain validation on the 99 DBpedia queries in which the parameters tuned for the DBLP+ queries are applied to the DBpedia queries. The evaluation results on the two datasets show that our system has very good efficacy and efficiency
Polarized Imaging Nephelometer Development and Applications on Aircraft
No full textSatellite remote sensing is the only method that is able to measure climate forcing atmospheric constituents on a global scale. Aerosols have large impacts on climate, through influencing radiation directly and through their effects on clouds. Remote sensing algorithms that deduce aerosol properties from satellite measurements of scattered sunlight rely on information about scattering patterns of aerosols. Chapter 1 places the work in context through a literature survey, and introduces and clarifies theoretical constructs necessary for understanding the remaining chapters. In order to improve our understanding of light scattering by aerosol particles, and to enable routine in situ airborne measurements of aerosol light scattering to calibrate and validate satellite algorithms, at LACO (Laboratory for Aerosols Clouds and Optics) we have developed an instrument called the Polarized Imaging Nephelometer (PI-Neph). We designed and built the portable PI-Neph instrument at UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore County); it directly measures the ambient volume scattering coefficient and the phase matrix elements P11, phase function, and -P12/P11, polarized phase function. Chapter 2 introduces the PI-Neph instrument, while chapter 3 lays out the calibration and data reduction algorithm. The PI-Neph employs illuminating lasers and polarization control, sampling of ambient air through an inlet, and wide field of view detection of scattered light in a scattering angle range of 3� to 176�. The instrument does not employ any moving parts, therefore it is robust and fast enough for airborne measurements. The PI-Neph first measured at a laser wavelength of 532nm, and was first deployed successfully in 2011 aboard the B200 aircraft of NASA Langley during the DEVOTE (Development and Evaluation of satellite ValidatiOn Tools by Experiments) project. In 2013, we upgraded the PI-Neph to measure at 473nm, 532nm, and 671nm nearly simultaneously. LACO has deployed the PI-Neph on a number of airborne field campaigns aboard three different NASA aircraft. This dissertation describes the PI-Neph instrument, the measurement approach, algorithm, and calibrations. Chapter 4 is a validation and error analysis case study, which quantifies the exceptionally good agreement of artificial polystyrene sphere data with Mie theory. The PS sphere validation data was collected during the 2012 deployment for the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC3) field campaign. Residuals between Mie fit and PS data (angular mean and population standard deviation) in case of the cross fits were the following. The differences of P11 data and P11 fit (predicted by fit to -P12/P11), relative to the P11 data, was -1.9% � 5.5%. The differences of -P12/P11 data versus -P12/P11 fit (predicted by the fit to P11) was 0.028 � 0.062. Chapter 4 also quantifies the P11 and -P12/P11 calibration errors through a Monte Carlo simulation. At an ambient aerosol scattering coefficient of 100 Mm-1, it is estimated that the PI-Neph will measure P11 (at individual scattering angles) with relative systematic error of approximately 2.3%, and -P12/P11 with absolute systematic error of approximately 0.033. Chapter 5 presents highlights from field measurements. The DEVOTE project enabled the initial PI-Neph results, such as scattering coefficient validation via comparison to other measurements, comparison of polystyrene sphere data to Mie theory, a comparison to AERONET derived phase function, and retrieval of microphysical properties of aerosols in collaboration with Dr. Oleg Dubovik. Chapter 5 also provides an overview of DC3 data, an assessment of data quality, and quantifications of PI-Neph capabilities and noise levels. This dissertation demonstrates the capability of the PI-Neph to measure ambient levels of aerosols down to 10 Mm-1, by measurement examples from the DEVOTE and DC3 aircraft deployments. As a conclusion, an itemized list of accomplishments is given in chapter 6, along with promising future research directions