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Essays on state capacity and development
No full textThis work is embargoed by the author and will not be publicly available until August 2033.Chapter one argues that political and market concentration level explains why developing economies often under-invest in institutional infrastructure and legal capacity. Economic growth challenges this equilibrium and incentivizes rulers to invest in institutional infrastructure complementary to physical infrastructure. Rulers make joint investments to expand market entry and size if they can secure greater rents and preserve institutions favoring concentration. Instrumenting market concentration level with the share of coal mining industry in local industrial output, the difference-in-differences analysis of Chinese data from 1997 to 2006 shows that the fiscal expenditure ratio of physical to institutional infrastructure rose 42% faster in provinces with market concentration indexes in the top quartile in 2000 (the year before China acceded to the World Trade Organization). The paper also presents a theoretical model proposing that investment in physical infrastructure rises faster than institutional infrastructure when the market concentration level increases. Chapter two suggests that monopoly serves as the de facto institution for protecting private property rights in the absence of formal ones. Analysis of China data from 1992 to 2006 reveals that high-skilled workers are motivated to work in the state sector not primarily for wage differentials (and sometimes not at all for high-skilled managers), but rather for rent differentials. These differentials, measured by the asset per employee ratio, can reach as high as 26.6 percent for high-skilled managers, in the state sector compared to the non-state sector. Higher-skilled workers join the state sector for better positions with richer monopoly rents and higher capacity protecting them from being taken away.2033-08-1
Debt and Decisions: Student Debt as a Predictor of Graduate Student Institutional Choice
Get PDFAs student debt continues to climb, outstripping all other forms of personal debt and topping off at $1.7 trillion nationally, previous research has shown that the amount of anticipated debt has an impact on graduate student career choices. However, there is a dearth of information that shows if student debt is impacting student’s choices before they enroll in graduate programs. This research applies Perna’s (2006) College Access and Choice and Kallio’s (1995) framework examining factors that influence graduate student choice to explore graduate student institutional control choice using data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) between 2008-2016, and whether student debt, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, alters the probability of institutional control enrollment. Results show that the probability of enrolling at a public or private for-profit institution increases when undergraduate and graduate student debt is factored into the model, particularly for Black or African American students
Synthesis and Conformational Analysis of a Standardized Peptidyl Prolyl Cis-Trans Isomerase Ligand
Get PDFPeptidyl prolyl cis-trans isomerases (PPIases), which catalyze the interconversion of cisand trans-prolyl peptide bonds, play an important role in protein folding and serve as versatile molecular switches, making these motifs a potentially important drug target; however, their activity is difficult to study. PPIase activity is measured with an enzyme coupled assay using chymotrypsin, which exclusively cleaves the trans-prolyl peptide bonds in the substrate to liberate a chromophore. To increase assay sensitivity, a solventjump is performed by dissolving the substrate in 2,2,2-trifluoroethanol (TFE) with lithium chloride to increase the relative abundance of the cis conformer. We describe a simple solution phase synthesis of the standardized PPIase assay substrate, N-succinyl- Ala-Ala-Pro-Phe-p-nitroanilide, to allow customization of the peptide substrate in-house. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy was used to verify the effects of the LiCl and TFE system, the effects of water contamination on this system, as well as a selection of other salts across the Hofmeister series of anions and cations, on the cis-trans prolyl equilibrium of the substrate
Understanding the Promotion of Peace by NGOs through the Use of Documentaries: Case Studies of Three US Non-profit Organizations
Get PDFNGOs have been using documentary films for peace for the past few decades. However, negligible studies are present that explore the phenomena of peace promotion through documentaries. Therefore, this study is conducted to analyze how NGOs seek to promote peace at personal, interpersonal, and structural levels through the use of documentary films. It is based on the case study research methodology and multiple case study research design. Three United States-based NGOs, Just Vision, Working Films, and Peace Is Loud, are the cases for the research. The study discusses that these NGOs use documentaries for social justice by witnessing the injustice experienced by grassroots communities and presenting narratives of inspirational non-violent social action of the local people. Truthful documentary narratives developed through accountable, transparent, and equitable processes can facilitate personal transformation among its audience by depicting an honest portrayal of the lived experiences of people facing injustice, making them reflect on their role in perpetuating injustice and transforming them enough to take action for social justice. Moreover, ethical documentary filmmaking also develops in its participants the feeling of justice and freedom regarding their ability to share their stories freely. The NGOs seek interpersonal, structural, and cultural transformation through documentaries by placing them among the ongoing social justice movements at the grassroots, national, and global levels, hoping that the social movements’ participants will mobilize films to enhance the scope and efficacy of their actions for social justice. In addition, they place the documentary into the mainstream media to counter mainstream media discourses about peace and social justice. Some of these NGOs offer training and technical and financial support to the underrepresented filmmakers who identify themselves as people of color, women, LGBTQ+, and other gender-expansive filmmakers, and grassroots mobilizers so that they can better mobilize films for purposes of social justice. The NGOs are working to shift the culture of documentary filmmaking toward ethical and accountable culture to do no harm through films. The evaluation methodologies deployed by these NGOs assist them in adequately assessing the perceptional change experienced by the audience members upon watching the documentary films. Only limited anecdotal evidence is collected on behavioral, interpersonal, structural, and cultural change. Therefore, it is recommended that to evaluate better the large-scale structural and cultural change catalyzed through documentary films, it is worth it for these NGOs to seek assistance from third-party evaluation experts
Historia del miedo
No full textHistoria de los miedos vinculados a la infancia: el secuestro infantil en México en el siglo X
Analyzing Accessibility to Essential Facilities During Hurricane Ian: Lee County in Florida
Get PDFDisasters such as hurricanes cause serious damage to the community lifeline infrastructure systems especially the transportation infrastructure system which is vital to the well-being of the community and requires a good restoration planning to maintain the community lifeline without any interruption. During restoration and recovery phase, residents of affected areas must have access to essential facilities to meet their daily needs, otherwise it will be a chaos and the death toll will increase. To ensure accessibility to essential facilities, alternative routes that serve as substitutes for damaged routes must be identified by local authorities for the residents. As well as identifying vulnerable roads for future restoration prioritization in terms of scheduling to have a disaster resilient road network which is the ability to adapt to changing infrastructure conditions and decrease the impacts on the accessibility. However, it is not always the case, the communication between the local government and the designated agencies such as FDOT is quite challenging as they both have different priorities and different time schedules. In addition, road network disruptions and road closures change rapidly in the post disaster phase, in which it will increase the inspection time of roads and bridges status.
Different data of pre/post disasters became available because of the advanced communication technologies such as traffic data, geographical data, physical data and sociodemographic data. These data must be transformed to a suitable form and integrated into an analysis framework to help in identifying alternative routes to access essential facilities, and to identify vulnerabilities in the road network. Maintaining access to essential facilities is crucial as not all communities have the same level of preparedness for disasters. To achieve this, a strong communication between the local government and designated agencies is required for communities’ awareness of alternative routes and critical roads. Therefore, this research aims (1) to integrate modeling techniques to assess and visualize spatial data of facilities, road network, sociodemographic and road closures; (2) to improve the overall network accessibility to essential facilities by alternative routes identification; and (3) to quantify the impacts of transportation damage on the network accessibility for future restoration optimization.
This research contributes to build disaster resilient transportation infrastructure systems by (1) evaluating accessibility to essential facilities during disasters using highway network modeling; and (2) identifying vulnerabilities in the road network for future restoration prioritization and resource (facilities) allocation taking into consideration real-world capacity, facilities connectivity and travel distances. The findings of this research can be a strategic guide for emergency management teams and governmental authorities to
improve the county’s resilience and preparedness in the case of future disasters, and protecting the community’s lifeline. This can be achieved by (1) mitigating the post disaster impacts on the transportation infrastructure in terms of accessibility to essential facilities; (2) providing invaluable insights to design disaster resilient road network or improve the existing network; (3) improve local authorities’ response to disasters; (4) help policy makers initiate plans for future roadway constructions and facilities construction; and (5) generate ranking criteria for restoration prioritization in terms of scheduling by highlighting critical road
Condition State-Based Decision Making in Evolving Systems: Applications in Asset Management and Delivery
Get PDFDecision making in stochastic dynamic systems is significantly different from decision making in deterministic systems in that agents need to make multiple management or operational decisions along a time horizon, and each decision considers not only current influences, but also temporal impacts on the system. The evolving nature of conditions in a dynamic system over time and uncertainty in condition transition and observation increase the difficulties associated with making good decisions in these environments. This dissertation investigates aspects of decision making for evolving systems with two applications in the transportation domain: roadway asset management and meal delivery. To this end, it:(1) proposes a bilevel, stochastic, dynamic program with embedded Markov decision process (MDP) and traffic user equilibrium, along with an actor-critic-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) solution method, for prioritizing and scheduling potential roadway improvement actions across asset classes given evolving condition state; (2) models a maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) scheduling problem given only partially and imperfectly observed conditions and nonstationary condition deterioration probabilities as a partially observable MDP and, through a DRL solution methodology, investigates the potential gains from scheduling roadway M&R actions in response to continuously updated, low-quality sensor- and intermittent, high-precision, inspection-based condition-state information; (3) develops a chance-constrained, bilevel mathematical model that with condition value at risk (CVaR) approximation determines an optimal roadway maintenance and resurfacing scheduling that ensures an acceptable level of reliability for traffic network users; (4) builds on a stochastic, discrete-event simulation (DES) platform with tabu search heuristic and embedded ejection chain approach for optimal meal delivery job bundling, routing and assignment over a rolling horizon to replicate the dynamics of the meal delivery setting and, through a CVaR measure, evaluate risk of late delivery due to the use of an at-will workforce; and (5) conceptualizes the problem of determining whether an at-will driver working in a meal delivery environment should accept an order offer or wait for a better offer, and whether and where to move when idle as an MDP, and tests two DRL methodologies to determine the courier’s best decisions to take as the courier’s shift progresses. These contributions build on cutting-edge methods of DRL, stochastic optimization and stochastic simulation to push the boundaries of current knowledge in decision-making in dynamic and stochastic systems toward enhanced performance, efficiency and reliability. The dissertation provides the mathematical and algorithmic underpinnings to support decision-making in real-world, complex environments, where condition states evolve stochastically and making good decisions is very difficult
The Emergence of Relationality: The Ontology of Personhood and Age-Based Identity in the Mortuary Practices of Archaic Indian Knoll, Kentucky
Get PDFThis thesis examines the embodiment of biosocial age identity in the mortuary practices of the Late Archaic site, Indian Knoll (ca. 4600-3500 BP), in Kentucky. Utilizing bioarchaeological biosocial approaches and mortuary theory, the mortuary practices of Indian Knoll inhabitants were examined to determine persistent practices of biosocial mortuary identity, in which the embodiment of age-based identity is attributed to the cultural ontology of personhood. Lower mandibular radiographs were used to conduct biological age assessment on a preadult sample population in order to establish maturity-based dental age rather than chronological age assessment. Burial positioning, orientation, interment number, and grave good presence were compared across site between biological age groups. High correlation in burial form between biologically immature and mature individuals demonstrates that social identities were ascribed early in life in association with like-status individuals and reinforced over the life course. The inclusion of specific grave goods in select burial contexts emphasize hunter-gatherer identities across the mortuary landscape, which suggests that Indian Knoll biosocial identities revolved around inherent ontological relationships with non-human agents that are negotiated through persistent socioecological interactions throughout Indian Knoll’s occupation
Geophysical Feature Extraction and Spatiotemporal Analysis of Polar Sea Ice Using High Spatial Resolution Imagery
Get PDFThe Arctic sea ice region has become an increasingly important study area since it is not only a key driver of the Earth’s climate, but also a sensitive indicator of climate change. To model and validate sea ice changes, it is crucial to extract geophysical features of sea ice from high-resolution remote sensing data. We collected a large volume of remote sensing images from multiple platforms such as airborne Digital Mapping System (DMS) and Worldview series satellite in the Arctic region during melting season. Processing such a large volume of imagery poses a significant challenge for extracting sea ice spatiotemporal patterns in a timely manner. Additionally, high spatial resolution (HSR) has been largely ignored due to its complex and heterogeneous nature in both space and time, and Arctic operational missions can routinely produce hundreds of gigabytes of data. The advancement of drone technologies keeps adding rapidly to the volume of sea ice aerial-survey-based observations. In summary, processing such big sea ice data includes challenges such as: 1) the big data challenges in HSR image product, e.g., the big data volume and the heterogeneous formats of a variety of sea ice HSR image data collected by different platforms or agencies; 2) the lack of standard sea ice feature extraction procedure from HSR imagery; 3) the ability for managing, visualizing, and processing HSR sea ice image data, and extracting geophysical properties or attributes. I propose a reliable and effective high-accuracy and high-performance approach to extract sea ice geophysical features from a large amount of HSR remote sensing data to support scientists and allow them to gain new insights from the spatiotemporal analysis on big data process. The objectives of this research are to 1) develop an efficient geophysical feature extraction workflow based on object-based image analysis (OBIA) method for HSR image data to classify different sea ice features and extract the relevant geophysical parameters such as sea ice leads, sea ice floe, melt pond and ice ridge; 2) design a practice workflow to analyze spatiotemporal patterns of sea ice geophysical features; and 3) design and develop a prototype of an on-demand web service for the cyberinfrastructure, providing a publicly available portal for various data owners and users. In order to achieve these objectives, an on-demand sea ice HSR imagery management and processing service is developed, and a scientific case study is demonstrated for geophysical feature extraction and spatiotemporal analysis of sea ice leads. This research on geophysical feature extraction and spatiotemporal analysis of sea ice from high spatial resolution data is innovative for: 1) the practical OBIA classification workflow in a distributed environment for large datasets; 2) the extracted geophysical features could serve as ground references in sea ice research; 3) the developed arctic cyberinfrastructure provides a data service prototype for polar community. The results of this research can be helpful for the understanding of sea ice processing and utilization of climate modeling and verification at different scales
Examining Associations Among Aspects of Ethnic-racial Identity Development and Peer Network Integration in Adolescence
Get PDFEthnic-racial identity (ERI) development unfolds as a series of interrelated processes in which adolescents explore what it means to be a member of their ethnic-racial group, often in the context of peer relationships. This study examines how ERI exploration, ERI resolution, and ERI affirmation are associated with social network prestige and centrality, and tests whether this relationship differs as a function of grade and ethnic-racial background. The sample consisted of 279 sixth and 435 ninth graders from four public schools in a large metropolitan area in the Southwestern United States. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the associations between ERI exploration, resolution, and affirmation and the three measures of social integration derived from social network analysis (SNA). Results indicated that the number of mutual friendships was positively associated with ERI resolution and ERI affirmation. ERI affirmation was negatively related to proximity prestige, which is based on incoming ties and captures individuals’ degree of popularity within their social network . Additionally, ERI resolution and ERI affirmation were positively associated with Bonacich centrality, which is based on outgoing ties and captures individual’s level of centrality within their social network . Moderation analyses were used to determine whether these associations varied as a function of grade (sixth or ninth) and self-reported ethnicity (White, 'other,' and Hispanic). Four significant interaction effects were found: (1) The relationship between ERI resolution development and the number of mutual friendships was stronger for sixth grade students compared to ninth grade students; (2) The relationship between ERI exploration development and the number of mutual friendships was stronger and positive for participants who identified as Hispanic ethnicity than participants who identified as White or ‘other’ ethnicity; (3) The relationship between ERI resolution development and proximity prestige was stronger and negative for participants who identified as other ethnicity, which encompassed participants who self-identified as Black or African American, Asian, American Indian, Pacific Islander, or 'other' ethnicity, compared to participants who identified as Hispanic or White ethnicity; and (4) The relationship between ERI resolution development and Bonacich centrality was stronger and negative for participants who identified as other ethnicity than participants who identified as Hispanic or White ethnicity. These results underscore the utility of social network analysis (SNA) in developmental research to elucidate the associations between specific aspects of ERI development and adolescents' integration within their peer social networks