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Working Paradise: An ethnographic study of tourism labor in the 21st century Caribbean
Get PDF“Working Paradise: An ethnographic study of tourism labor in the 21st century Caribbean” used critical ethnography to examine the lived experience of the staff of a luxury resort in the Bahamas. This project spanned five years with 70 oral histories, interviews and participant observations performed of the staff, consultants and tourists of the resort. This project used tourism to expose how wage laborers are exploited into doing work beyond their wages through coercive tactics, wage theft and affective labor in order to fashion a notion of paradise rooted in Black subserviency. Using Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and Christina Sharpe the dissertation argued that due to the racial caste system arranged in the colonial period, the tourism industry serves as a hospitality pipeline that is inescapable for many Black Bahamians
Project 6: Racial Disparity in Intestine-Alone and Liver-Intestinal Transplants
Get PDFThis project included two anonymous students who wish to remain anonymous.Objective: The study looks at racial disparities in intestine alone and intestine-liver transplants in the United States. This will be done through comparative studies and statistical analysis between different race groups and transplant success rates
Ground-Based Follow-up Observations of TOI 3736 a
Get PDF“Ground-based follow-up observations of exoplanet candidates observed by the TESS mission are crucial to ruling out false positives and confirming exoplanet properties. In this paper, we analyze and interpret observations made by the George Mason University Observatory 0.8m telescope of TESS TOI 3736 a. An argument for the exoplanet status of TOI 3736 a is presented alongside several lines of evidence, including the observed transit depth, duration, and periodicity, which are consistent with the presence of a large, hot-jupiter-like planet in close orbit around its host star. In addition, we highlight differences and similarities between the target and similar exoplanets. To further verify the planetary status of TOI 3736 a, we outline potential future work, including high-resolution spectroscopy.
Evaluation of the MJO-ENSO Relationship Using UFS Reforecasts and the Impact of Skin Layer Variability on This Relationship
Get PDFThis study investigates the performance of the Unified Forecast System (UFS)
global coupled model to forecast the relationship between the Madden-Julian Oscillation
(MJO) and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) through the calculation of the MaKE
and MaKI indices, developed in the ocean-atmosphere energetic framework. The MaKE
index describes the covariability of MJO, Kelvin wave activity, and ENSO. The MaKI
index characterizes the influence of MJO and Kelvin wave activity on ENSO through the
wind power. The indices are calculated as a multivariate EOF analysis of the MJO
components of meridional and zonal wind stress and the Kelvin components of
meridional and zonal ocean surface currents combined as the MJO wind power, and sea
surface temperature daily anomalies. UFS reforecasts of two prototypes for April 2011 -
March 2018 are used. Each reforecast has 35-day forecast leads, which poses challenges
for isolating the intraseasonal component of the wind stress. To address this limitation, a novel filtering approach using a convolutional neural network (CNN) artificial
intelligence model was applied to capture the intraseasonal variability of the wind stress
anomalies. Prototypes 6 and 8 are selected due to the exclusion/inclusion of the near -
surface sea temperature model (NSSTM).
The results show that the UFS prototypes predict the MJO-ENSO interaction for
the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 El Niño events as seen in the verification data. The
deterministic forecast skill of the model predictions of MJO, ENSO, and the MJO-ENSO
relationship compared to the observations are analyzed using pattern correlation and
RMSE. The addition of NSSTM results in improved MaKE indices, but worsened MaKI
indices for both El Niño events
Expert Collaboration in Development of Ontological Knowledge: Topics Elicitation in Curriculum Development for Cybersecurity Courses
Get PDFCurriculum development is currently being done in a variety of ways: individually, with peers, through an academic committee that may or may not have an industry representative, or through workshops. But the current ways of developing curriculum have challenges and inefficiencies, specifically when using groups and committee (logistical challenges, lack of idea generation or contributions, reaching consensus on the curriculum’s contents, and lack of professional diversity). These inefficiencies and challenges can lead to relevant content being potentially left out of the curriculum, and a longer than necessary curriculum development process. These challenges can then negatively impact the program (missing relevant or outdated content), instructors (spending time creating content that may not be as impactful to the students as it could be), and students (not learning the industry-relevant or the latest and greatest). While others have utilized crowdsourcing to enhance the curriculum development process and elicit more inputs from external experts, their efforts were time consuming when it came to arriving at a consensus, some comments from the participants were difficult to interpret, and did not have a good balance between academic and industry participation. In this dissertation, the Expert Crowdsourcing for Curriculum Content Construction (EC4) Framework is developed and experimentally validated, emphasizing four capabilities: the dynamic crowdsourcing of domain experts to provide their inputs directly in the EC4 toolset and build ontological knowledge about the curriculum; the use of a super-majority consensus building method; the incorporation of a configurable professional diversity factor; and as a result an ontological representation of the curriculum. Through four experiments and over 80 participants from across academia, private industry, and government organizations, the research effort was able to demonstrate that the use of dynamic crowdsourcing with the consensus building function produces better overall curriculums; and when applying the Professional Diversity Factor to the Consensus Building Function, it provides curriculum with better breadth, industry demands, and information currency
Ground-based Light Curve Follow-up Validation observations of TESS object of interest TOI 5191.01
Get PDF“On ground-based light curve follow-up observations we report for TESS object of interest TOI 5191.01. We verified the TESS Transit Event by using the 0.8m telescope at George Mason University. These observations confirmed a transit event seen in the TESS light curve that resulted in a transit depth of 0.7% and a transit duration of 3 hours. These results are within ballpark estimates from TESS, supporting its classification as an exoplanet candidate which verifies it is about right for TOI 5191.01 according to previous knowledge by TESS. We still need more observation to be sure on this one though.
DOMAIN SPECIFIC LANGUAGES FOR GEOMETRY PROCESSING
No full textGeometry processing holds a foundational position within the realm of computer graphics, with advancements in this field regularly published at SIGGRAPH annually. The journey from writing the paper to implementing the algorithms is a meticulous and error-prone process, demanding significant dedication and attention to detail. Authors frequently encounter challenges, including inadvertent typos within formulas that can introduce discrepancies between the paper and the actual code. This discrepancy can pose a significant hurdle for readers, especially new researchers and graduate students, aiming to reproduce the results. Even when authors release their code, readers may desire versions in their preferred programming languages. My dissertation focus is on mitigating challenges faced by researchers throughout scientific computing according to a suite of domain-specific languages (DSLs). The goal is to enable authors to easily try new research ideas and compose papers with these DSLs, automating the generation of algorithmic code across diverse backend languages like C++, Python, and MATLAB. I have developed three instrumental tools with my collaborators to handle those sections in papers: I❤️LA for compiling the implementation, I❤️MESH for compiling the discretization, and H❤️rtDown for compiling linear algebra papers into interactive documents
Children’s Goal-directed Behavior: Across Contexts, in Applied Settings, and Relations with Adaptive Functioning
No full textThis work is embargoed by the author and will not be publicly available until May 2026.Executive function (EF) plays a crucial role in child development across various contexts and domains. In paper 1, I meta-analyze early childhood EF's associations with social, health, and behavioral outcomes across the lifespan, highlighting its positive links with emotion understanding, emotion regulation, and prosocial skills, as well as negative associations with internalizing and externalizing behaviors. In paper 2, I investigate the impact of less structured time on children’s EF development, finding that such time fosters self-directed EF in younger children. In paper 3, I explore gender differences in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) engagement using a tabletop “Sink or Float” science persistence paradigm, finding no significant evidence of an impact of gender on children’s science task persistence, despite evidence that children held gender- science stereotypes favoring boys. These findings underscore the importance of EF in several adaptive developmental contexts across early childhood and beyond.2026-05-1
Ground-based Light Curve Follow-up Validation observations of TESS object of interest TOI 5907.01
No full text“The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is designed to discover thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest dwarf stars in the sky [1]. Possible exoplanet candidates are marked as Objects of Interest and selected for follow-up ground-based observation. The goal of this research study was to conduct further ground-based observations, analyze data, and further classify TESS Object of Interest (TOI) 5907.01 as an exoplanet. Our observations showed that the transit occurred with all the expected characteristics. This indicates that TOI 5907.01 is likely an actual exoplanet.
Three Essays on the Role of Productivity in Firm Dynamics
Get PDFThis dissertation explores the significance of productivity in shaping firm dynamics. It illustrates how productivity affects the likelihood to survive the COVID-19 pandemic, the performance of businesses that survived during the pandemic, and how productivity is affected by lack of credit in the informal sector. The contribution of this study is to further enhance the understand of the factors that affect firm dynamics. The first essay investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted less productive firms, observing a Schumpeterian cleansing effect. Utilizing data from 34 economies, the study finds that less productive firms are more likely to permanently close during the crisis. Moreover, it uncovers negative relationships between firm exit, digital presence, and innovation, particularly among small firms. The study also reveals that a burdensome business environment exacerbates the probability of firm exit, especially for small firms, and that insolvency moratoriums disrupt the cleansing process. In the second essay, the focus shifts to examining the sales decline gap between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large firms in developing countries post-COVID-19 outbreak. SMEs experienced 12.2 percent larger sales decline relative to large firms. Using Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder and quantile decomposition methods, the findings indicate that lower initial labor productivity and greater input supply disruptions of SMEs widen the sales gap. The gap is larger at the relatively high quantiles of sales decline distribution, indicating that relative to large firms, SMEs were much less resilient to large shocks than small shocks. The analysis underscores disparities in resilience across different levels of sales decline distribution. The third essay delves into the relationship between access to finance and labor productivity in the informal sector. It reveals a substantial productivity gap between credit-constrained and unconstrained firms. The results are robust using various tests. Gender heterogeneity is present in the findings, highlighting the need for nuanced policy considerations to enhance productivity in the informal sector