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THREE ESSAYS ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF NONVIOLENT ACTION
Get PDFThis dissertation elucidates peaceful grassroots pathways to institutional reform, illuminating alternatives to violent regime change that may foster greater economic prosperity and human flourishing. Synthesizing literature across disciplines, the first chapter underscores how nonviolent movements emerge to challenge perceived crisis and injustice, highlighting implications for economists. The second chapter explores nonviolent action as a mechanism for constitutional change, bridging gaps between research on revolutionary social change and constitutional political economy. The final chapter evaluates the institutional legacy of violent versus nonviolent revolutions, elucidating tradeoffs reformers and societies confront in political struggle. Chapter one, co-authored with Christopher Coyne, provides an overview of key thinkers and writings on nonviolent action, a bottom-up approach to addressing illegitimacy crises that have implications for economics and governance. By outlining the history and key features of nonviolent movements that sought policy changes or institutional reforms without using force, the chapter introduces readers to an alternative means of dispute resolution and social change separate from top-down state actions. Examples cited underscore how nonviolent campaigns have aimed to combat threats to economic activities, property rights, and other market-supporting institutions. The chapter ultimately argues that the study of nonviolent action can inform economists and policymakers on productive approaches to crisis response that leverage civic mobilization and cooperative, voluntary action instead of coercive interventions. It concludes by identifying areas for further research on the economics of nonviolent movements. This chapter, Nonviolent Action, was published in \textit{Bottom-up Responses to Crisis}. Chapter two examines the role of civil resistance and nonviolent action in catalyzing constitutional change, situating these bottom-up movements within the framework of constitutional political economy. Tracing key concepts from founding thinkers like James Buchanan, the author outlines how ``constitutional entrepreneurs" leverage civilian mobilization and coercive non-cooperation to reform pre-existing rules, norms, and governing pacts without bloodshed. Examples cited across recent decades highlight attempted transitions following mass protests, from the largely successful post-Communist constitution-building in Estonia to the turmoil in post-Arab Spring Algeria. While noting mixed outcomes, the chapter argues that studying civil resistance through a constitutional political economy lens can inform theories on the complex blend of individual interests, shared beliefs, and coordination dilemmas underpinning transformational political change. Chapter three analyzes the long-term institutional impacts of violent versus nonviolent revolutions and regime changes. While existing research shows nonviolent movements often succeed more frequently than violent ones in achieving political turnover, less studied are the downstream effects on democracy, security forces, courts, and wellbeing. Tracing consequences across transformation cases via mass nonviolent uprising, terrorism, civil war, and foreign invasion, the chapter suggests neither violent nor nonviolent routes consistently yield ``goods" regarding economic and human development. Instead, both methods risk generating institutional ``bads" like cronyism, instability, and state repression. However, the examination of the literature shows that nonviolent movements are more likely to result in liberal democratic institutions than violent revolts. By examining subsets of institutions affected, including electoral systems, courts, civil liberties, and more, the chapter aims to elucidate tradeoffs revolutionaries and societies face in struggles over the basic rules governing political and economic life
Ground-based Light Curve Follow-up Validation observations of TESS object of interest TOI 5907.01
Get PDF“The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) observes large parts of the sky and creates candidate exoplanets called TESS Objects of Interest (TOIs). TOIs need to be validated with other telescopes and exoplanet observation methods.2 The goal of this research effort was to validate the existence of TOI-5907.01 as well as its orbital characteristics. Data from the 0.8 meter telescope at the George Mason University Fairfax Campus was used in the investigation. Data was collected on 2023/7/10 and 2023/7/11 local using the telescope. 228 science images, 10 science darks, 10 flat darks, and 10 flat fields were collected. AstroImageJ was used to remove bad frames, reduce the data, perform aperture photometry, create a light curve, and perform a nearby eclipsing binary (NEB) check.3 Unfortunately, we were not able to observe a detection. Our transit depth was within our model RMS and only twice that of our transit depth uncertainty. In addition, our NEB check was inconclusive due to data that was too noisy.
Imagining Acadiana: Cajun Identity in Modern Louisiana
No full textThis work is embargoed by the author and will not be publicly available until May 2029.This dissertation tells the history of how a modern Cajun identity developed in 20th century Louisiana. I argue that upwardly mobile Cajun community leaders renegotiated their own collective identity by engaging directly with mass culture and modernity. This identity is rooted in two competing perceptions. First, since at least the late the 19th century, outsiders perceived Cajuns as an isolated and ignorant group, due to their largely lower-class status and Franco-Catholic Acadian ethnicity. Second, beginning in the 1920s, Cajuns began to be seen as whiter and their Acadian ethnicity more refined which resulted in increased economic, social, and political power. This tension between a mythical and whiter Acadian identity and a historical and more ethnic Cajun identity would come to define the region of Southwest Louisiana that became known as Acadiana. This history disrupts assumptions that Cajun traditions survived through cultural tenacity and isolation as well as narratives that position modernity as only a harbinger of cultural degradation by blurring the line between tradition and modernity itself. The term Acadiana captures this paradox: it linguistically weaved the memory of the Acadian past into Louisiana’s modern cultural and economic landscape but was popularized by a local television company to describe its modern Cajun viewership. By examining key moments in the development of the region’s cultural identity from the 1920s-1970s, this dissertation shows how Acadiana emerged through the creation of regional Cajun culture industries that responded to new social, political, and technological forms. The work of these local community leaders makes clear that Acadiana’s traditional cultures did not survive in spite of modernity, but by engaging with the opportunities it presented for power, profit, and preservation.2029-05-1
Comprehensive Microsensor Load Monitoring In NCAA Division I Women's Basketball
Get PDFThis dissertation seeks to fill a gap in the current literature of load monitoring via microsensor technology in NCAA D-I WBB. Load monitoring may be categorized as external or internal. External load monitoring represents the mechanical work the athlete endures, while internal load monitoring represents the physiological response to the mechanical work performed. Microsensors are wearable devices such as GPS units or heart rate monitors that collect objective external and internal load monitoring data, respectively. It is well established in the literature that implementing a comprehensive load monitoring program may assist in improving athletes well-being and sport performance. However, in basketball, much of the research has been conducted utilizing male semi-professional or professional athletes. NCAA D-I WBB is the highest level of collegiate competition in the USA for women basketball athletes, yet minimal load monitoring research exists in this population
Essays on the Market for Residential Solar
Get PDFThis dissertation explores how laws and ordinances at the state and local levels impact the market for residential solar photovoltaics. It investigates how investment in residential solar is affected by upfront costs such as permitting fees, the choices made by households and solar developers as net generation revenues are threatened, and how reducing transaction costs through standardizing solar permitting processes encourages investment in solar. The first chapter focuses on the effects of California SB1222, which capped permitting fees on new residential solar installations in localities across California. The passage of SB1222 increased the number of solar panel installations within the state due to the decrease in upfront costs. Difference-in-difference techniques are used to estimate the effects of the legislation. Localities with initial high fees had intermediate-run effects in their respective solar installation markets consistent with the theory of demand. The market responded by increasing the number of systems installed and the relative size of those systems. Capping permit fees reduced up-front costs and transaction costs for owners and leasers but was not enough to have a long-lasting effect on demand for residential solar. The second chapter looks at the impacts on investments in residential solar when there are restrictive changes made to net metering policies and time-of-use rates. Revenue earned through net metering is a vital aspect to consider for those investing in solar power. This chapter describes the institutional framework of California's net metering policies and then uses the transition from Net Metering 1.0 to Net Metering 2.0 as a natural experiment, exploring the effects the transition had on the market for residential solar. After the transition, the short- and long-term solar investment costs increased while revenues from net generation decreased. Households increased installations after the implementation of less profitable time-of-use rates while developers decreased their investments. Both firms and households reduced their investment in residential solar after the switch to Net Metering 2.0, but to varying degrees. Differences in what firms and households maximize can explain these disparate effects. The third chapter examines the effects of permitting and inspection processes on new solar installations through a transaction costs approach. Most authority-having jurisdictions require new solar photovoltaic systems to undergo permitting and inspections while being installed. Before the implementation of standardized solar permitting, each of California’s 540 authority-having jurisdictions had its own permitting and inspection process. The variation in permitting processes across the state increased costs for developers and consumers by creating uncertainty in expectations, enforcing barriers to entry in local markets, and delaying the interconnection date. I exploit the passage of AB 2188 in 2014, which standardized solar permitting across the state and reduced transaction costs for developers. AB 2188 had no enforcement mechanism, and not all localities passed the ordinance. Two-way fixed effects and unbiased staggered difference-in-difference estimators are used to test the effects of AB 2188, using cities that did not pass the ordinance as controls. Following the implementation, localities that passed the ordinance saw increases in the number of new solar installations and the number of solar developers providing installations within their boundaries. The results suggest lowering transaction costs caused by red tape and bureaucratic hurdles could increase investment in residential solar
Dialogic Rhetoric: How Publics Emerge, Meaning is Created, and Governments Are Structured as Localized Solutions to Public Problems
Get PDFThis work takes up the call for further intellectual discourse and empirical research into social justice by conducting a rhetorical analysis of texts that advocate for systemic changes to local government and present those changes as solutions to the identified problem of social justice in the context of American municipalities. By applying a dialogic rhetorical approach, this research brings together voices from the fields of rhetoric, public administration, technical communication, and democratic theory along with a case study of the charter review process in Portland, Maine to inform our understanding of how publics emerge, meaning is created, and governments are structured as localized solutions to public problems
Womb Space: Examining the Role of Black Women's Online Experience-Sharing in Their Journeys with Fibroids
Get PDFThis Black feminist qualitative study considers the role Black women’s online narratives play in our care-seeking for fibroids, and what might be learned about how Black women gather information, make meaning, produce knowledge, and resist the challenges of navigating illness and the U.S. healthcare system. An estimated 80 percent of Black women will be diagnosed with fibroids by the age of 50. Still, the uterine tumors are under-researched and underdiscussed. Increasingly, however, Black women have taken to YouTube to raise public awareness and share their experiences. This research examined this YouTube space as a “digital counterpublic,” which previous scholars have defined as a site of resistance that validates the experiences of marginalized groups. Using biopolitical framing, this study also argues that the disproportionality in fibroid-related adverse outcomes is a contemporary example of state harm against the Black female body and selfhood, and it necessitates the formation of a counterpublic space
Efficient Deep Learning and Data Processing with Flex-Enabled Reconfigurable Processing-in-Memory Architectures
Get PDFMachine learning (ML) algorithms like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are now widely used in a variety of applications, from simple prediction applications to computer vision applications. Consequently, envisioning a future with smart devices that are able to monitor, decide, and take action seems reasonable. However, it's important to note that DNNs are both computation and power-hungry, which makes deployment of them into the computing system challenging. These DNN tasks are memory-bound and even high-throughput, off-the-shelf von Neumann architectures struggle to meet today’s big-data processing requirements. Processing and analyzing large datasets drive the demand for increased computation and place even greater demands on memory and storage infrastructure. Simultaneously, the performance gap between processing units and memory is increasing, creating significant performance bottlenecks for memory-bound, data-intensive applications. Addressing these challenges and enabling the next generation of data-intensive applications necessitates performing computation as close to the data as possible, leveraging massive bandwidth and scalable parallelism. Hence, recent research focus of computer architect researchers is towards Processing in memory (PIM) also known as In-Memory Computing (IMC), where computations are performed within the memory device itself. A majority of the IMC works focus on performing faster computations, often overlooking the reconfigurability and networking concerns of the accelerators. Consequently, the functionality of these architectures is almost exclusively limited by their application, reconfigurability, overheads, and latency.This thesis studies the root cause of inefficiency in modern computing systems when handling modern applications’ data demand, and aims to fundamentally address such inefficiencies. To maximize efficiency and minimize data movement, we design an adaptable system that handles data effectively. We propose a novel programmable processing-in-memory architecture that utilizes Look-Up Tables (LUTs) to perform the logic/arithmetic operations required by ML algorithms within the memory system. By using LUTs, we achieve functional flexibility to perform any operation with any data precision. Taking advantage of data available to the system during the training process of the architecture, we leverage data-driven approach and design dataflow-tailored architecture to perform online learning. Doing so we enabled codesign across algorithms, architectures, and devices, centering data and its processing within the design framework. Further enhancing functional flexibility, modularity, and design scalability. With the new challenges brought by large-scale ML/AI models we explored design space by adapting heterogeneous core and clusters to maximize computational parallelism. This combination forms an efficient hardware/software methodology that enables high-performance and energy-efficient data processing for modern workloads, exploiting different semantic properties of application data and adopting a data-driven approach to PIM based on the characteristics of data. By innovatively combining machine learning algorithms with flexible, reconfigurable, data-aware PIM architectures, we pave the way for efficient, scalable and sustainable AI deployment across diverse modern and future applications. This work addresses current challenges and sets the foundation for future research directions that promise further breakthroughs in this dynamic and transformative field
The Syntax of Wh-Questions: A Minimalist Account of the Optional Wh-Movement in Jazani Arabic
Get PDFThis is a Qualifying Paper for Ph.D in linguistics.This study investigates the optional wh-movement in Jazani Arabic, a southern Saudi Arabian dialect spoken near Yemen. Optionality in wh-movement occurs when a language allows wh-phrases to remain in situ or be optionally fronted. This challenges the Minimalist Program, which predicts that no language permits both mechanisms simultaneously. Focusing on simple wh-questions, the study examines this optionality from a Minimalist perspective, employing the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995), the Split-CP Hypothesis (Rizzi, 1997), and Contrastive and Information Focus (Kiss, 1998).
Data were collected via questionnaires and interviews with 17 Jazani speakers in the USA, who judged the grammaticality of various wh-phrases. The findings reveal that SVO is the default word order in Jazani Arabic, while VSO is the marked word order. Regarding wh-questions formation, simple wh-questions include argument and adjunct wh-phrases, which can either remain in situ or move to the left periphery. Their positions, however, are not entirely optional but are motivated by distinct syntactic and semantic triggers.
In-situ wh-phrases exhibit a less costly movement process due to their weak [+wh] feature, which prevents them from moving overtly to the CP domain. Instead, they involve the covert movement of an Operator to the CP for interpretation as wh-questions. Conversely, fronted wh-phrases are driven by the need to check a strong contrastive focus feature, attracting them to the Focus Projection. These findings provide a Minimalist-compatible analysis of wh-movement, demonstrating that both in-situ and fronted wh-phrases can coexist in the same dialect, thereby refining our understanding of wh-movement optionality
ENHANCING TRANSLATION SYSTEMS FOR LOW-RESOURCED SETTINGS
Get PDFThere are around 7000 languages that are alive worldwide; among them, only 50-200 languages are well-resourced. In many regions of the world, there are languages and dialects with limited resources, which are at risk of disappearing due to sociopolitical problems and a lack of attention. As a result, those communities need more technologies that could significantly impact areas such as education, healthcare, and emergency response. Low-resource translation addresses this problem by developing translation systems and tools for languages and dialects with limited resources to revive those languages. The traditional translation method requires the collection of bilingual text-to-text resources. Low-resourced languages lack these resources because more than 3000 languages are oral; even if a writing system exists, most people are illiterate; even if literate, most communities do not have a robust online presence, which is the primary source of data acquisition; even if they have an excellent online presence, the resource is often too noisy. This work aims to solve specific problems that arise in the low-resource scenario due to the minimal annotated resources available for that particular scenario. The problems that we tackle cover different sectors of translation:• Translating L2-speaker variation: The translation model should understand the L2-speaker’s errors (e.g., grammatical and spelling). • Translating dialectal variation: The translation model should be able to handle dialectal input (or output) to/from other languages. • Translating low-resourced African languages: Creating translation models for low-resourced languages focusing on African languages (e.g., Zulu, Wolof, Hausa, Igbo, Bemba). • Translating terminology: The translation model should generate domain-specific terminology (e.g., Medical, Law). • Translating low-resourced languages using a dictionary: Creating translation models using other clean, available data sources (e.g., dictionary, books) • Translating speech-to-text: Half of the low-resourced languages in the world are oral, and most of the speech data are noisy. Filtering and augmenting speech data are crucial for creating translation systems