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HOTLangBench, a Tiny Benchmark Suite for Higher-Order Statically Typed Languages
No full textThis work in progress aims to compare various HOT (higher-order and statically typed, a term coined by Phil Wadler) through reproducible course-grained, wall-time benchmarks. Our overall goals include simplicity, agility, and reproducibility.
There is currently only one benchmark, but it brings out substantial performance differences among the various languages and platforms. It uses function composition and other higher-order constructs to build a pipeline of transformations, along with a brute-force iteration that is computationally expensive for input files specifying large ranges as function domains. We currently include versions in Modern C++, C#, Go, Haskell, Kotlin, Modern (stream-based) Java (24), OCaml, Scala 3, and Swift.
It is easy to add versions of this benchmark in other languages not yet covered, and we plan to make it easy to add other algorithms to be benchmarked across languages
Practitioners’ perspectives on preventing environmental gentrification in Chicago, Illinois, USA
No full textPollution cleanup, green space creation, and other improvements to environmental quality in cities are important to urban sustainability. However, because they occur within a political economic context characterized by structural racism, urban greening initiatives can intentionally or unintentionally reproduce racial, economic, and social inequities through environmental gentrification. We explored possibilities for improving environmental quality without displacing or excluding long-term residents including people of color, the poor, and members of other marginalized groups. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with community organizers, environmental justice advocates, urban planners, housing specialists, and others who held deep expertise through their lived and professional experience in relevant fields in Chicago, Illinois. Five interrelated themes emerged through inductive analysis of the interview data that offer guidance for leaders of environmental improvements: (1) co-construct knowledge and share decision-making power, (2) design inclusive community engagement that centers marginalized voices, (3) implement multi-issue interventions, (4) disrupt structural racism and other causes of disparities, and (5) coordinate policies and programs across local, state, and federal scales. These findings reinforce and extend established knowledge about the need to design inclusive, community-driven, intersectional, multi-scalar environmental decision-making processes that help disrupt the systemic drivers of environmental injustice to achieve equitable outcomes
“A bond as strong as a lock and chain”: Youth of color in low-income communities use photovoice to theorize developmentally nurturing processes of their cross-age mentoring programs
No full textYouth of color experiencing low-income in the United States face multiple human rights violations: over-policing, community violence, racial discrimination, and insufficient voice in the programs and policies that impact their current and future lives. To accomplish transitional justice, participatory processes are needed that elicit youths’ cultural strengths and wisdom about themselves, their social conditions, services they find helpful, and why those services are helpful. This study highlights findings from a photovoice that elicited youths’ perspectives about a crossage mentoring out-of-school-program. Responding to “What does mentoring mean to you?” 147 youth took photographs in their communities and wrote narratives about the photographs’ meanings. The research team, including youth co-researchers, conducted a thematic and content analysis of the participants’ narratives. Youth were highly articulate about the specific program elements that would uplift their peers, and why those elements are impactful. Through qualitative analysis of youths’ photographs and narratives, this study reveals the youths’ “folk theories” about their program’s mechanism of action. Youth described mentoring as a nurturing family, friendship, community, care, love, acceptance, trust, communication, and vulnerability. They thoughtfully described culturally relevant “folk theories” of how cross-age mentoring fosters children\u27s development, counteracting stressful high-burden contexts. Analyzing youths’ metaphors for the nurturing process in cross-age mentoring indicated how much they valued caring for each other, creativity, and supporting positive life trajectories for each other while overcoming poverty and discrimination. When offered opportunities for creative self-expression such as photovoice, youth can be insightful partners in resisting the downward pull of human rights violations and theorize interventions and nurturing processes that develop their resilience
Give People Money: The Effect of Perceived inequality in Everyday Life and Previous Cash-Transfer Programs on Support for Universal Basic income
No full textEconomic inequality is a global concern with many adverse consequences for people across class divides. These consequences vary in scope—from negative effects on individual’s physical, mental, and social health to large-scale economic shifts which result from climate change (Galbraith & Hale, 2008; Hiesh & Pugh, 1993; Kaplan et al., 1996; La Ferrara & Alesina, 2000; Solt, 2008; Vilhjalmsdottir et al., 2016; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2007). Policy solutions meant to address the negative effects of economic inequality include government redistribution of wealth. Universal Basic Income (UBI), a specific and actionable policy of government redistribution, is a promising method of economic inequality alleviation (Gibson, 2018). However, not all people, politicians or otherwise, see economic inequality as a problem (Bobzien, 2019). As a result, many may see no need for government redistribution, let alone UBI (Choi, 2021). This proposal is interested in 1) the mechanisms underlying an individual’s perception of objective and subjective economic inequality, 2) attitudes toward the value of decreasing economic inequality, and 3) the support or opposition to policies seeking to reduce economic inequality—specifically Universal Basic Income. Prior work on the relationship between perceived economic inequality, personal tolerance for inequality, and support for redistribution provides evidence that experience with or exposure to inequality on a day-to-day basis predicts one’s tolerance for inequality (García-Castro et al., 2019). This in turn may motivate one to support policies to reduce economic inequality (Garcíaix Sánchez et al., 2018). In Study 1, I propose a replication of these studies with the goals of 1) providing evidence toward the replicability and reliability of the relationship between these variables, 2) expanding generalizability through conducting this experiment with a U.S. population, and 3) using support for the specific, actionable policy of Universal Basic Income as the dependent variable. In Study 2, I propose a method of intervention to increase support for UBI across political ideologies using personal experience with government redistribution as an intervention method
Drawing the Curtain: A Grounded theory Analysis of the Conceptualizations of Culture, Ethnicity and Race in Professional Training Materials for Child Life Certification
No full textObjectives: Certified Child Life Specialists (CCLS) are pediatric healthcare professionals primarily working in hospital settings to support children and families in navigating the developmental challenges of hospitalization, illness, and enduring medical treatment. Recognizing the presence of racial and ethnic health disparities, coupled with the field’s notable lack of diversity (98% White female), the child life workforce is increasingly acknowledging the undeniable evidence that discriminatory behaviors adversely affect a child’s life and well-being. As advances in the social sciences increasingly reveal that discrimination functions as a socially transmitted disease in a child\u27s life, I predict that the failure of child life certification materials to prepare CCLSs to identify racial bias in clinical practice risks perpetuating discriminatory healthcare practices. Such practices may lead affected children to observe, experience, and internalize racism. This, in turn, can result in numerous harmful effects, including poor health outcomes and the development of maladaptive behaviors that persist throughout a child’s lifespan. To mitigate these impacts, it is crucial to systematically address the role of discrimination in shaping child life outcomes and to ensure that future child life professionals are thoroughly prepared to actively engage in societal antiracism. Methods: Anchored in Garcia Coll and colleagues’ (1996) integrative model of child development, a qualitative, grounded-theory research design was employed to examine how cultural constructs were conceptualized in the professional training materials recommended for mastery in child life certification. A total of 14 documents were reviewed, with the analysis identifying limited segments of text addressing the social constructs under study: “culture,” “ethnicity,” and “race,” as well as emerging concepts aimed at alleviating discrimination through professional training. Results: There were a total of 87 out of 2017 pages (.04%) that mentioned the constructs in this study. Results demonstrate that the cultural-deficit model is deeply embedded in the historical narratives of the child life field, a perspective which attributes a child’s maladaptive development to his/her culture rather than to failures or limitations of the education and training system or to prevalent socio‐positional factors. A discussion on how to draw the curtain on higher-level concepts in professional training materials across the pediatric healthcare continuum is offered, ultimately channeling the child life infrastructure into a direction of critical consciousness and improved cultural praxis
Apocalyptic Masculinity: Messiahs, Monsters, and Men Out of Time
No full textWith their often other-worldly settings and larger-than-life themes, apocalyptic texts are regularly thought of as “dramatic” texts. These texts have inspired large swaths of popular media considering the end times, but rarely have performance critical projects within biblical studies considered how these texts would have been received in performance in antiquity. To expand thinking around performance and apocalypse, this project examines not only these categories, but also adds in a consideration of gender. This work is concerned with answering the question “is there such a thing as apocalyptic masculinity?” This project uses performance and performativity as a method to read apocalyptic texts to delineate a particular masculinity distinctive to apocalypses. I bring these threads together through three themes: (1) messianic figures in apocalypses, (2) the relationship between the monstrous and the masculine, and (3) the place of pseudepigraphy and what happens when major male historical figures are pulled out of their historical locations to be used in other contexts. This book argues that there is a particular strand of masculinity that is prevalent in apocalypses: one that is fluid and unstable. In talking about fluid apocalyptic masculinity, we can make sense of the shifting and reframing of the masculinity standards that were a part of the culture at-large when the narratives were created
Cyclical Matters: Black Labor, Temporality, and the Incomplete Reconstructions within African American Literature
No full textThis dissertation examines the role literature plays in understanding black life post-reconstruction and post-civil rights movement. Specifically, I explore the continuation of injustices and mistreatment for black workers, the role black labor plays during the first and second post-reconstructions, and how literature can be used in framing this discussion. The similarities between these periods help us to better understand the cycle of racist societal expectations and the challenges black workers face integrating into society, discriminatory mandates required of black workers, the unfair job market, and forced labor. These periods interact cyclically in that the second post-reconstruction models the first post-reconstruction. Both periods contain moments of hope and progression as demonstrated through nationwide ordinances and moments of hopelessness and regression due to minimal or no change. I argue that literature is a complex aesthetic construction whose relation to social reality must be investigated. My focus on temporality and narratives provides a way that literature uniquely speaks to the questions regarding black labor and workers
Perverse Convergences: Aelred of Rievaulx and the Queerness of Waiting
No full textABSTRACT Using Aelred of Rievaulx’s (1110-1167) treatise Spiritual Friendship and his fundamental insight, “God is friendship,” this dissertation seeks to understand how the divine arrives woven into the dynamics of human relationships. I bring together social media research, critical theories of language, queer phenomenology, queer temporalities, and liberation theologies into a cross-temporal erotic narrative between Aelred and me. The first part establishes the imaginative distemporal space of Sodom, based on a shared homosexual identity. It critiques historical and theological disciplines as familiarizing discourses that compel arrivals of the other through structures authentication and the social magic of professionalization. In the second part, Aelred’s own desires confront me when I wander the ruins of his twelfth-century abbey. Listening to these ‘echoes of the past,’ I find myself complicit in familiarizing discourses. The final chapter situates all definitive claims about the other, whether theological, historical, or relational, within temporal structures of teleological stability, as if we already know to be true what will be true about God, Aelred, or another. Desiring stability, we risk leaving behind others, whose experiences of the divine may disalign with what theologians already know to be true. They become remainders to our systems and ideological claims, and, in leaving these persons in the past, we ignore when the divine fails to act according to our desires for liberation. I propose a method of theological wandering (pervagatio) following Aelred’s dialogical method that flips the roles of student and teacher, that prefers and gives voice to the opinions, needs, concerns, and (failed) desires of the non-professional. It is, in brief, about noticing those who remain silent
Genetic Architecture of Complex Traits in African Ancestries Across Diverse Environments
No full textGiven genetic and environmental diversity, genetic prediction based on African- ancestries individuals in the US or UK may not transfer well to other African diaspora regions. The Modeling the Epidemiological Transition Study (METS) is a longitudinal study of cardiometabolic health in five African-ancestry populations. We performed genome-wide genotyping in METS participants from the US, Jamaica, South Africa, and Ghana. We aimed to explore how genetic models for the transcriptome and body mass index (BMI) built using US- based African-ancestries populations perform in these four diverse populations. A subset of METS participants also had whole blood RNA-Seq data. For these, we predicted gene expression from genotypes using published African-ancestries transcriptome models, which were built in the US-based TOPMed MESA study. Next, we used the three largest populations in All of Us to build cross-validated polygenic risk score (PRS) models for BMI with PRS-CSx, a Bayesian method that combines genetic effects across populations via a continuous shrinkage prior. We then tested our PRS models in METS participants. PRS performance varies between these four groups, roughly following the trend in their countries’ human development index levels, suggesting the influence of environmental differences in genetic prediction of BMI. Transcriptome prediction performance also varies significantly between the US and Ghana. Overall this work supports the importance of global representation in genetics research for more accurate healthcare
Examining Pyroptosis in Neutrophil-Like Differentiated Hl-60 Cells
No full textThe innate immune system is the first line of defense against pathogens. Innate immune cells, such as macrophages and neutrophils, recognize pathogens through the recognition of pathogen associated molecular patterns or damage associated molecular patterns (PAMPS & DAMPS). When a pathogen is recognized, innate immune cells will start clearing the pathogen and secreting pro-inflammatory cytokines, such as interleukin-1β (IL-1β) to initiate the innate immune response. Release of IL-1β occurs through an unconventional secretory pathway triggered by inflammasome activation. Activation of the NLR family pyrin domain containing 3 (NLRP3) inflammasome cleaves both pro-IL-1β into mature IL-1β, and full length gasdermin-D (GSDMD) into a pore-forming N-terminal fragment (NT-GSDMD). In macrophages, the secretion of IL-1β is mediated through NT-GSDMD pores that form on the plasma membrane. Plasma membrane NT-GSDMD pores also allow the influx of water leading to cell lysis in a process called pyroptosis. In macrophages, pyroptosis occurs rapidly after inflammasome activation due to the immediate localization of NT-GSDMD to the plasma membrane. However, in neutrophils, pyroptosis is not a rapid process, rather they seem to be resistant to pyroptosis even under the same inflammasome activation conditions as macrophages. Previous studies have shown that NT-GSDMD localizes to intracellular vesicles in neutrophils directly after inflammasome activation and not the plasma membrane. The regulation of pyroptosis and NT-GSDMD subcellular localization is poorly characterized in neutrophils. To investigate the basis of neutrophil pyroptosis resistance and NT-GSDMD trafficking, we first identified a genetically tractable cell line model that mimics the pyroptosis phenotype observed in primary neutrophils. We determined that the HL60 cell line, when differentiated into neutrophil-like cells, recapitulates the pyroptosis-resistance phenotype observed in primary neutrophils upon NLRP3 inflammasome activation. We then employed pharmacological inhibition of secretory pathways and microscopy-based localization studies to characterize NT-GSDMD localization and trafficking in differentiated HL60 cells. We also established a doxycycline-inducible, flag-tagged NT-GSDMD expressing HeLa cell line, to investigate NT-GSDMD trafficking in a reductionist setting independent of upstream inflammasome activation. These complementary cell line tools now allow for dissection of NT-GSDMD localization and pyroptosis regulation. Determining how neutrophils regulate NT-GSDMD localization and resist lytic death may reveal novel approaches of therapeutic intervention for controlling neutrophil-driven inflammation in pathological contexts