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The Reconstruction of Riesman's Social Character Social Types: Loss of Indigenous Cultural Identity
No full textThe Navajo tribe is one of the largest Indigenous tribes in the United States. With the continuous issues that the Navajo population faces, the loss of cultural identity is a primary concern. Applying David Riesman's theory of social characters, the three recontextualizations: tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed, have yet to be done. Applying and recontextualizing David Riesman's theory will continue to identify and explore Indigenous cultural identity. David Riesman writes mainly about white American suburban society (other-directed) and applies his neglected concepts on traditional directedness. Applying ancestral traditions through the recontextualization of tradition-directed and inner-directed can cause the loss of connection between the Navajo tribe, cultural roots, and cultural identity. Applying Riesman theory to Indigenous tribes will reflect that the difference between the white population (other-directedness) and the Indigenous tribes (traditional-directedness) continues to fit even today. It will return to full circle and follow Riesman's concepts to a certain extent. The other recontextualization is the struggle between each type of social character's three social traits and the direction of modernization
Effects of Information on Markets and Behavioral Economics
No full textThe dissertation systematically analyzed the effect of information in various aspects of economic and social systems. Specifically, it focused on tax information on food markets, market information on strategic decisions, and social information on decision-making in economic games.
The first essay investigated the effects of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) tax in the city of Berkeley and Philadelphia. We constructed a difference-in-difference (DID) model to examine the effects of the tax on the consumption and retail prices using Nielsen retail scanner data. The finding suggested that SSBs tax had no significant effect on consumption and prices in Berkeley, while the tax significantly increased the price and decreased the consumption of SSBs in Philadelphia. The opposite results in the city of Berkeley and Philadelphia suggested that geographical and social demographic characteristics would affect the effectiveness of a policy, and SSBs tax works better in large territories with diverse population.
The second essay analyzed transaction data from eBay to explore sellers��� strategies in online auctions. We focused on three selling formats on eBay: fixed-price listings, auctions, and BIN(Buy it Now)-auctions, comparing new products and outdated products for electronics. A probit model and Heckman correction procedure were applied to examine the effect of seller���s selling strategy on transaction success rate, final transaction price, and the seller���s revenue. Results indicate that fixed-price listings are preferred. Selling formats significantly influence outcomes for new products, while they show minimal effects for outdated ones. Moreover, we identify key price determinants for each listing format. The BIN price is crucial for fixed-price listings. For auctions and BIN-auctions, the duration and starting price emerge as key factors influencing transaction outcomes.
The third essay explores cooperation in social dilemmas, focusing on the impact of inequality on cooperation in public goods dilemmas. Our study evaluate cooperation in metrics of efficiency (total contribution) and equality (contribution from the wealthy). Incorporating 32 articles with 50 experiments, we found that heterogeneous endowments do not significantly affect equality, but it negatively impact efficiency, leading to decreased total contributions. Overall, heterogeneous endowments detrimentally affect cooperation. Furthermore, moderator analyses show that iteration numbers could negatively moderate the relationship between heterogeneous endowments and cooperation, indicating a greater detrimental effect on cooperation in public goods games with more iterations
The Role of Chondrocyte Transdifferentiation in Midpalatal Sutural Growth in Response to Altered Dietary Load
No full textThe biological mechanism for growth of the midpalatal suture is not fully understood. Chondrocyte transdifferentiation into bone cells has been shown to occur in the condylar cartilage but no study has shown this process to occur in the midpalatal suture.
Twelve Acan-CreErt2; R26RTomato;2.3 Col1a1-GFP (Acan mice) and twelve Col10a1-Cre; R26RTomato; 2.3Col1a1-GFP (Col10a1 mice) were randomly allocated into two groups, respectively; a soft and hard food diet (n=6), fed for 6 weeks and then sacrificed for data collection. One-time tamoxifen injections were given to the Acan mice at 3 weeks. MicroCT, palatal widths, chondrocyte cell proliferation, chondrogenic activity and chondrocyte transdifferentiation were all analyzed and compared between dietary loading groups.
There were no significant differences in palatal widths but a significant decrease in bone quality in the soft diet group. Histologically, there were no significant changes in chondrocyte proliferation, and aggrecan expression. However, soft food diet mice had significantly (p<0.05) lower collagen 10a1 expression, and number of chondrocyte derived bone cells, from the early to late stages of maturation, in the midpalatal suture compared to the control.
Altered dietary loading affects midpalatal sutural bone quality, chondrogenesis and chondrocyte transdifferentiation, which may explain differences in postnatal maxillary transverse development
Management Decisions for U.S. Ranches
No full textRanchers face many challenging decisions impacting operational longevity. This dissertation examines rancher decisions regarding 1) generational transfer of a family-operated ranch and 2) cow herd rebuilding strategies after drought. Chapter 1 provides an analysis of survey responses from U.S. ranchers regarding plans to transition their ranch to the next generation. Less than 40% of survey participants have a transition plan in place. Participants shared the details of their ranch transition plans or the roadblocks preventing them from developing a plan. Transition plan scenarios were developed based on producer responses to the survey.
In Chapter 2, transition plan scenarios from Chapter 1 were imposed on representative ranches, and financial performance was evaluated under each scenario. Ranch transition scenarios considered the use of business entities vs. sole proprietorships; willingness of parents to relinquish management or ownership to heirs; gifting vs. selling assets to heirs; buyouts between siblings; and asset balancing between on-farm and off-farm heirs.
For Chapter 3, different scenarios for cow herd rebuilding after drought were imposed on the representative ranches. The most common drought management response was partial liquidation of the cow herd. In this analysis, each representative ranch liquidated 20% of their mature cows during the drought. Post-drought herd rebuilding scenarios included slow-rebuild versus quick-rebuild strategies and strategies to rebuild with ranch-raised replacements versus rebuilding by purchasing females. Ranch financial performance was evaluated under each scenario, and results showed the optimal scenarios included retained replacement heifers during drought. For scenarios that did not include retained replacements during drought, quick-rebuild scenarios with purchased females were considered optimal; ranches under these scenarios were able to capitalize more on high cattle prices in the early post-drought years
Becoming the (Invisible) Sixth Resident: Cultural Myths and Parasocial Engagement in the Medical Drama Grey's Anatomy
No full textGrey���s Anatomy is one of the longest-running and most successful television medical dramas of all time. Some scholars have investigated the show���s representations of gender, depictions of medical professionalism, and reception of viewers. However, it is still unclear why Grey���s Anatomy resonates with so many viewers, and what cultural messages it may convey.
To address these gaps, I explored the sociohistorical context, cinematic crafting, narrative content, and audience reception of Grey���s Anatomy. Methods include textual and interpretive analysis along with thematic content analysis, structuralist film analysis, narrative discourse analysis, and audience reception analysis of 20 semi-structured interviews.
My results suggest that Grey���s Anatomy is especially immersive when compared to other American medical dramas, partly due to cinematic crafting that encourages viewers to feel immersed within the daily lives of flawed yet glamorous medical professionals. Patient-doctor interactions may effectively portray positive interpersonal communication skills for medical professionals, particularly when navigating patient experiences with suffering and trauma. Complicated and nuanced representations of gender roles and sexual orientation appear to resonate with many viewers. Some dedicated viewers also appear to form parasocial bonds with main characters who function as peer role models for navigating gender identity and sexual orientation.
Overall, I conclude that Grey���s Anatomy encourages parasocial bonds that may provide educational and vicarious emotional support to viewers as they adopt new cultural models related to constructing new personal and professional identities. This research adds to the body of anthropological knowledge by highlighting that parasocial interactions with mass media texts may reflect or reinforce cultural gender values while conveying feelings of friendship, familiarity, and belonging
The Experiences of Queer Undergraduate Students in Engineering at Two Predominantly White Research Institutions
No full textLGBTQ+ students in engineering are an underrepresented group that is often treated differently in the field. In this study, I use the term queer throughout to describe this population. Engineering is a male dominated discipline comprised of white, cisgender, heterosexual males, and those who differ from this demographic are often perceived as the outsider. While the literature gives attention to queer students in STEM as a whole, few studies address engineering specifically. Progress has been made for the queer population, such as gender-neutral bathrooms and anti-discrimination policies, however, more work is needed across higher education and within STEM for this vulnerable population. This qualitative study examined the experiences of 14 queer undergraduate engineering students at two predominantly white institutions in Texas, 10 from one PWI and four from the other. The study sample consisted of participants who represented a variety of ethnicities, gender identity or expression, sexual identities, and engineering disciplines.
This study used Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Queer Theory (QT) frameworks to understand how power and privilege either make or hinder academic experiences and choices. Participants shared their perceptions of the engineering discipline as a whole, such as interactions between and among students and professors, and how the major is taught compared to other courses outside of engineering. Participants expressed feeling unlike their peers, invisible in the classroom, and how their gender and sexual identities interfered with their daily lives. Administrators, faculty, families, and peers can learn from the findings to understand the needs of and create safe spaces for queer students in engineering where their identities are affirmed, valued, and heard. They found support during their academic journeys, shared how politics in Texas influenced their perceptions and educational experiences, and described what institutions could do better to help students succeed in engineering. Findings from this study draw implications for systemic change to make queer undergraduate students in engineering feel like they belong
Disparities of Flood Risk in Urban Areas and Historically Marginalized Populations in Sarasota County, FL
No full textDisaster vulnerability and risk assessments typically focus on socioeconomic characteristics and physical hazards, often omitting factors such as risk perception. Assessing disaster risk using physical and standardized demographic data (i.e., census data) can limit risk assessment accuracy, as the results do not fully encapsulate the complexity of disaster vulnerability, risk, and resilience contexts. Risk perception is essential when planning for disasters because it directly affects how people and communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. Examining how a community perceives and reacts to a hazard can help planners develop more accurate risk assessments and help decision-makers more equitably allocate disaster resources and develop/implement community-relevant mitigation strategies. Flooding is the most common natural hazard and the leading cause of natural hazard fatalities in the US. For these reasons, it is crucial to develop a more accurate baseline of flood risk identification in addition to analyzing the geosocial relationships to vulnerability by analyzing risk perception, socioeconomic demographics, and urban growth. Finally, the capacity to recover from disasters is often directly correlated to socioeconomic inequality, historic marginalization, and the current structure of the political system. Communities with higher percentages of black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) or low income per capita are often the last to see disaster recovery or risk reduction resources and, even then, are often underfunded and underserved. Historically marginalized demographics are also more likely than their white, affluent counterparts to live with higher exposure and vulnerability to flood hazard. Findings within this study have identified discrepancies within FEMA DFIRMs within smaller urban communities, and a reclassified floodplain better represented underestimated areas within Sarasota County. This reclassified floodplain allowed a further analysis into a geocoded risk perception survey to observe disparities of vulnerability based on sociodemographic variables and exposure to flood. This analysis showed significant positive correlation between perceived vulnerability to damage from flood and women exposed to flood. Additionally, while statistical significance was lacking for multiple relationships, regression models succeeded in showing relationship trends between marginalized groups and how their vulnerability to flood is affected by exposure to flood
Contact Mechanics and Tribology of Thermal and Electrostatic Friction Modulation for Surface Haptics
No full textHaptics, an integral part of human-machine interaction, offers a crucial sense of touch for immersive user experiences in many applications, such as virtual and augmented reality. While audio-visual interfaces have been significantly developed, seamlessly integrating touch sensation into these interfaces encounters hurdles due to mechanical and neurophysical complexities of the interaction of human skin with the physical world.
Surface haptics presents a promise for integrating touch into the audio and video interfaces, particularly with the widespread use of touchscreens. Various forms of haptic feedback have been explored in the surface haptics field. Among them, friction modulation-based haptic feedback has been demonstrated as an effective way to offer users a sense of virtual shapes and textures on surfaces. This method, however, has challenges such as variability in frictional performance. This variability hampers consistent user feedback and impedes device commercialization. To address the variability issue, this research aims to elucidate the impact of humidity on friction under electroadhesion based on the electrowetting effect and provides insight into the device design for more consistent haptic feedback. Understanding the intricate surface topography of the human fingerpad, which significantly influences contact mechanics, is another critical aspect. We examine the surface topography of the fingerpad in detail across scales and investigate its impact on contact mechanics studies. Moreover, the surface temperature is another factor that causes the variability of the frictional performances in the surface haptic devices. This work aims to understand the underlying mechanism of the surface temperature effect on friction to provide insight into device design for more consistent haptic feedback and propose a new method to modulate localized friction at lower operating voltages.
Additionally, the development of the 'Touchbot,' a wearable intermediary device, aims to overcome limitations in current surface haptics by providing localized tactile feedback in both lateral and normal directions across the contact patch, thus enhancing the realism of 3D rendering of virtual features. This study will focus on the building block of the Touchbot, an electroadhesive (EA) puck with high EA shear stress and high durability. We look into a more in-depth electromechanical point of view of EA devices, which offers a foundation for EA devices beyond this project
A mm-Wave Concurrent Dual-Band Dual-Beam Phased Array Receiver Front-End in 22 nm FDSOI CMOS
No full textA mm-Wave concurrent dual-band (28 and 39 GHz) dual-beam phased array multi-input���multi output (MIMO) receiver front end with mid-band rejection was designed and fabricated in 22 nm Fully Depleted Silicon on Insulator (FDSOI) CMOS process. This phased array receiver front end has 4 inputs and 2 output streams with fully connected configuration where takes advantage of sharing LNA and quadrature network and using a unique PS structure which allows power and area saving. The measured 3-dB gain bandwidth is from 23 to 30 GHz for the lower bandwidth a peak gain of 21 dB at 29 GHz, and 36 to 40 GHz for the upper bandwidth a peak gain of 18 dB at 38.5 GHz, and a NF minimum of 6 and 7 dB at 28 and 37 GHz, respectively. The 21 dB mid-band rejection at 33.5 GHz is provided by the LNA to attenuate the out-of-band unwanted interference helping the relaxing the linearity requirement. The entire single-channel receiver front end achieves IIP3 varying from -18 dBm to -11 dBm, and input 1-dB compression point varying from -25 dBm to -18 dBm. The front end has 5-bit phase control and 7-dB gain control achieving the RMS phase and gain errors less than 6 deg and 1.2 dB, respectively, enabling orthogonality. This array demonstrates the concurrent functionality, and carrier aggregation for over-the-air beam steering and EVM measurements. The chip has a length of 2738 ��m, a width of 1808 ��m, and an area of 4.95 mm2 including all DC, RF pads, and decoupling capacitors
Essays in Climate Risk, Residential Mobility, and Housing Security
No full textThe combination of climate change and economic growth in disaster-prone regions increasingly exposes the population to extreme weather events. In Chapter 1, I use property-level data to quantify the magnitude of climate risk across Texas, highlighting regional variation in exposure that challenges individuals, businesses, and industries across the state.
While the aggregate impacts of natural disasters are well documented, much less is known about the individual responses to these environmental shocks. In Chapter 2, I estimate the average treatment effects of flood damage using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design in the context of Hurricane Harvey, which damaged more than 200,000 homes in Houston, Texas in 2017. I leverage the relationship between flooding and a home���s elevation, exploiting a discontinuous increase in damage from 48,000 once water reaches the first floor. I provide evidence that disaster damage induces homeowners to relocate from their pre-storm residence while simultaneously preventing their decision to sell their property. The impacts on residential mobility attenuate over time, but I document a persistent divergence in the location and type of housing selected by damage-induced movers. My results indicate that flood damage makes people more likely to move shorter distances, and damage-induced movers are more likely to transition out of homeownership. Despite the combined shock to shelter and wealth, I find that flooded households are more likely to sort into higher-income census tracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.
Housing security is a critical component to wellbeing that extends beyond the context of environmental shocks. In Chapter 3, I explore how housing security relates to tenants��� criminal activity by analyzing the final stage of the eviction process. In particular, I exploit quasi-random variation in eviction executions to identify the impact of extending or shortening the enforcement process on tenants��� arrest propensity. I find no evidence that extending this process affects the likelihood of arrest, but statistical noise from data constraints may contribute to the uncertainty