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Indigenous and State Justice in Ecuador
No full textSince the establishment of the 2008 constitution in Ecuador, the country has recognized two justice systems, both the state and the indigenous justice system. The two systems are distinct due to the cultural context in which they emerged, their operation and their purposes. The state justice system, which arose within the context of legal positivism, relies more on punitive logic, in which prison is the solution to crime, while indigenous justice is based on the ancestral practices of each community to restore harmony and inner peace. This study will attempt to analyze the practices of the two systems and the strategies they use to resolve conflicts in very different contexts. In the first section, the practices and functioning of state justice will be analyzed, with a focus on both the historical context and the present day situation. The second part will focus on the Kichwa communities, primarily those of the Saraguro people, and a comparative analysis will be made with the first chapter. The third part will compare these two systems to the theories of restorative justice and criminal abolitionism, with the ultimate goal of imagining justice practices that are focused on strategies for offenders to assume responsibility for offenses committed, restore the damage done to the victim, and reintegrate the offender into the social fabric after serving their sentence
Why Does Propaganda Succeed? Using Cognitive Linguistics to Analyze White Supremacist Propaganda and its Features in American Politics
No full textThis presentation seeks to analyze the use of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Strict Father framework in alt-right propaganda. First, I will detail definitions of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Strict Father Framework, as proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Turner. The Strict Father framework comes out of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which posits that metaphors become ingrained as conceptual once they are conventionalized in our daily speech. Because metaphors become ingrained in the mind, when they are taken up by bad actors they can be used to persuade someone towards a particular position, often without them knowing. Using an alt-right propaganda novel as a case study, I will examine the use of the Strict Father framework in political messaging. By taking a historical approach to provide context and situate the novel in the contemporary political moment, I found that Strict Father frameworks were readily apparent, contributing to the novel\u27s persuasive success. The novel’s use of metaphor frameworks has resulted in tangible, real-world effects, from the Oklahoma City bombing to the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Future research should focus on how to harness conceptual metaphor frameworks in order to increase the efficacy of progressive messaging
Characterizing Brain and Behavioral Changes in a Mouse Model of Parkinson’s Disease
No full textParkinson’s Disease (PD) is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disorder, characterized by the loss of SNc dopamine (DA) neurons, α-Synuclein protein aggregation, and progressive motor deficits. Available treatments for PD patients include DA replacement and other therapies that alleviate motor symptoms. However, these treatments have short-term effectiveness and do not modify disease progression. Additionally, although α-Syn clearance has been extensively researched as a potential target for PD treatment, the origin of α-Syn pathology remains unknown and mounting evidence suggests that α-Syn aggregation may be a symptom of PD, rather than a cause. For instance, heightened oxidative stress, including mitochondrial dysfunction and production of reactive oxygen species, has been implicated in α-Syn aggregation and may initiate the shift toward pathological α-Syn production. However, interventions that ameliorate these upstream pathways are largely underexplored. The goal of this project is to establish a scientific protocol that will allow us to investigate interventions that treat later-stage PD by modifying the underlying mechanisms of PD pathology. To do this, we will first use wild type mice to establish a workflow for assessing motor deficits on the rotarod and in an open field test. We will also demonstrate that we can replicate long-established techniques for characterizing nigrostriatal dopamine cell abundance, including Western blot and immunohistochemistry. Looking ahead, we hope to implement this protocol to characterize neurodegeneration in the MitoPark mouse, a cutting-edge mitochondrial dysfunction model of PD. Our future studies will explore the effect of oxidative stress-targeting treatments on altering disease progression in the MitoPark mouse
Multi-abled Community in a Precarious World: Living, Funding, and Caring in Camphill Village
No full textCamphill is a multi-abled intentional community located in upstate New York. I lived and worked there for eight months during the pandemic, and I returned in October of 2022 to conduct interviews with Camphill residents about their experiences in the community. Grounded in these interviews as well as precarity, care, and disability studies scholarship, my thesis uplifts Camphill\u27s multi-abled practices of living that render binaries between disability and ability largely irrelevant to life at Camphill. I uplift these practices of living and being in their wholeness, while also revealing how Camphill contends with the imminent threat of the re-inscription of these binaries in the form of state-mandated documentation and bureaucracy. This thesis argues that new systems of funding–ones that let communities self-determine how they care for, talk about, and live with each other–are necessary to create spaces like Camphill where people of all dis/abilities are able to, as Judith Butler says, “live and live well” (“Bodies Matter” 52:57)
MultiPL-E: A Scalable and Polyglot Approach to Benchmarking Neural Code Generation
No full textLarge language models have demonstrated the ability to generate both natural language and programming language text. Although contemporary code generation models are trained on corpora with several programming languages, they are tested using benchmarks that are typically monolingual. The most widely used code generation benchmarks only target Python, so there is little quantitative evidence of how code generation models perform on other programming languages. We propose MultiPL-E, a system for translating unit test-driven code generation benchmarks to new languages. We create the first massively multilingual code generation benchmark by using MultiPL-E to translate two popular Python code generation benchmarks to 18 additional programming languages. We use MultiPL-E to extend the HumanEval benchmark (Chen et al., 2021) and MBPP benchmark (Austin et al., 2021) to 18 languages that encompass a range of programming paradigms and popularity. Using these new parallel benchmarks, we evaluate the multi-language performance of three state-of-the-art code generation models: Codex (Chen et al., 2021), CodeGen (Nijkamp et al., 2022) and InCoder (Fried et al., 2022). We find that Codex matches or even exceeds its performance on Python for several other languages. The range of programming languages represented in MultiPL-E allow us to explore the impact of language frequency and language features on model performance. Finally, the MultiPL-E approach of compiling code generation benchmarks to new programming languages is both scalable and extensible, making it straightforward to evaluate new models, benchmarks, and languages
When is a Numerical Semigroup A Quotient?
No full textA natural operation on numerical semigroups is taking a quotient by a positive integer. If S is a quotient of a numerical semigroup with k generators, we call S a k-quotient. We give a necessary condition for a given numerical semigroup S to be a k-quotient and present, for each k \u3e= 3, the first known family of numerical semigroups that cannot be written as a k-quotient. We also examine the probability that a randomly selected numerical semigroup with k generators is a k-quotient
Knitted origami
No full textTechniques are presented for embedding horizontal, vertical, and 45(circle) diagonal crease lines into garter stitch knitted fabric. While these are mostly based on standard lace knitting stitches, the horizontal creases use double-cable-crossed elongated stitches in a non-standard way. This crease library suffices to knit a model of a square twist, a foundational origami tessellation unit
Target Enrichment and Extensive Population Sampling Help Untangle the Recent, Rapid Radiation of \u3ci\u3eOenothera\u3c/i\u3e Sect. \u3ci\u3eCalylophus\u3c/i\u3e
No full textOenothera sect. Calylophus is a North American group of 13 recognized taxa in the evening primrose family (Onagraceae) with an evolutionary history that may include independent origins of bee pollination, edaphic endemism, and permanent translocation heterozygosity. Like other groups that radiated relatively recently and rapidly, taxon boundaries within Oenothera sect. Calylophus have remained challenging to circumscribe. In this study, we used target enrichment, flanking noncoding regions, gene tree/species tree methods, tests for gene flow modified for target-enrichment data, and morphometric analysis to reconstruct phylogenetic hypotheses, evaluate current taxon circumscriptions, and examine character evolution in Oenothera sect. Calylophus. Because sect. Calylophus comprises a clade with a relatively restricted geographic range, we were able to extensively sample across the range of geographic, edaphic, and morphological diversity in the group. We found that the combination of exons and flanking noncoding regions led to improved support for species relationships. We reconstructed potential hybrid origins of some accessions and note that if processes such as hybridization are not taken into account, the number of inferred evolutionary transitions may be artificially inflated. We recovered strong evidence for multiple evolutionary origins of bee pollination from ancestral hawkmoth pollination, edaphic specialization on gypsum, and permanent translocation heterozygosity. This study applies newly emerging techniques alongside dense infraspecific sampling and morphological analyses to effectively reconstruct the recalcitrant history of a rapid radiation
Political Minds of Disabled America: The Importance of Disabled Social Identity in the Political Choices of Disabled Voters
No full textAlthough 1 in 4 Americans experience some form of disability, the roles of disability status and identity strength in the development of political attitudes have long gone overlooked. This project, through the frameworks of the social-relational model of disability and social identity theory, aims to offer insights into the role of disabled social identity in the party affiliation, liberal-conservative ideology, and public policy attitudes of disabled people in the United States. Using data from an online survey, I find that strong disabled social identities are associated with higher rates of affiliation with the Democratic party and more egalitarian policy preferences among disabled Americans. Interestingly, my results also indicate that objective disability status alone does not have strong associations with most dimensions of political attitudes measured here, especially when taking this component of identity strength into account. I discuss the implications of these results, and the centrality of identity found in them, for both practical areas of social movement organizing and party politics and for how we conceptualize disability and identity within the field of political science more broadly