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The Baha’i Faith Vision of Nature and its Relevance for a Conservation Ethic
Get PDFI begin this research by identifying the root of the ecological crisis to be the dominant Western instrumentalist view of nature, which rejects the inherent value of natural objects in favor of a value based on their utility for humans. This worldview has transformed nature into an inanimate resource to be used in the pursuit of economic growth and social progress. Drawing primarily on Lynn White’s renowned 1967 article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” I propose that the solution may lie in a spiritual approach to relating with the natural world, based on the recognition of common divine origins. Within this framework, nature derives its value from God rather than from humans. I then introduce the role of religion in shaping the human view of the environment and mediating the relationship between them. Religion has always been present in human society and has served as a guide for ascribing value to certain things—like human life—and inspiring moral obligation, making it a possible tool for conservation. Following this discussion, I provide an overview of the Baha’i faith and its core environmental tenets, examining the interplay of themes such as interconnectedness, responsibility, and respect as they relate to the natural world. Lastly, I look at how these teachings bring forth an ethic of care towards nature, despite the absence of animism. I use these various scriptures to show how the Baha’i attitude of care and respect toward the natural world can exist alongside the belief that humans are exceptional beings possessing souls that are essentially distinct from nature
Democratic Ensembles: Spoken Art and Politics at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890–1920
No full textThis dissertation investigates the ways in which volunteers and participants at Chicago settlement houses used the spoken arts to bridge social boundaries and develop a collaborative approach to democratic participation. In Progressive Era Chicago, groups of working-class, immigrant, and Black community members of all ages took advantage of the venues and resources offered by settlement houses to establish self-governing clubs with social, artistic, and political agendas. At meetings, receptions, and performances, club members innovated a shared repertoire of speaking practices, ranging from storytelling and ensemble-based drama to political oratory and debate. When they transferred their artistic philosophy—which centered on the concepts of “give and take” and “with, not for”—to political organizing, the result was a form of reciprocal exchange across social divides that settlement leaders identified as a model for collective decision-making at the organizational and governmental levels. Ultimately, the creative experiments conducted at settlement houses served as a rehearsal for reimagining city governance as a collective project in service of the common welfare. Generations of scholars have explored the ways in which Chicago settlement leaders codified neighborhood service into new academic and professional fields, claimed a role for women in federal policymaking, and contributed to pragmatist philosophy and democratic theory. This dissertation uncovers the full “ensemble cast” of Chicago Progressivism by introducing two previously unexamined settlement constituencies: student volunteers from local universities, who drew on their interdisciplinary training in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to facilitate settlement pedagogy; and, most significantly, the neighborhood families who embraced settlement programming and made it their own. Weaving together thousands of fragmentary archival materials, including texts produced by neighborhood young people and families, “Democratic Ensembles” contends that through everyday acts of cultural production, Chicagoans rehearsed a more participatory and inclusive civic culture. This dissertation joins an interdisciplinary scholarly conversation concerning how political, social, and artistic speaking genres have generated theories and practices of democracy, and it applies analytical frameworks drawn from book history, rhetoric, and theatre and performance studies. Combining archival research, interdisciplinary methods, and process-oriented theatre pedagogy, the project constructs a social and political history of spoken arts education, which adds to scholarly inquiry in urban history, gender history, and the history of childhood and youth and offers an actionable model for current practice. The chapters that follow reconstruct the day-to-day operations of settlement programs; the lived experiences of participants and volunteers; the links between settlements and institutions of higher learning; and the ways in which experiments in artistic methodology—emphases on process, reciprocity, improvisation, and ensemble—became metaphors for urban reform. I use institutional publications to investigate the content, methods, intentions, and interactions in settlement clubs, and I highlight the perspectives of neighborhood participants by mining oral history interviews, meeting minutes, club newspapers, and memoirs. The project places on-the-ground activity in conversation with theories of education, recreation, and democracy through analysis of published primary source texts, including university elocution curricula; articles and books written by prominent reformers, educators, and theorists; and contributions to reform periodicals. “Democratic Ensembles” tells the story of enfranchisement through cultural experiences and, in so doing, contributes a new conception of the role of the spoken arts in civic life.</p
Sense of Agency Across Scales and Implications for Self-Awareness
Get PDFTo produce effective behavior, it is critical that an organism be able to identify which parts of its sensory world are caused by its actions. On one hand, successful assignment of sensory outcomes to specific actions is critical for sensorimotor learning. Any organism that learns motor behaviors from sensory feedback must have a biological solution to the “hindsight credit assignment” problem, assigning temporally distal outcomes to self-generated actions. On the other hand, we also have a salient conscious experience of causing events in the world through our actions – that is, a sense of agency. The degree to which conscious agency is derived from the same neurocognitive operations that support sensorimotor control has been the subject of extensive debate, with far-reaching implications from the philosophy of self-awareness to motor rehabilitation and embodied interface design. This work examines the relationship between inferences of self-causation made at different scales of cognition. Chapter 1 illustrates the nontriviality of low-level hindsight credit assignment in the context of human speech production, where the nonlinear physics of the vocomotor periphery decouples the timings of acoustic events from that of articulatory movements. Moreover, it presents electrophysiological evidence for a mechanism to restore temporal coherence between neural activity and sensory feedback, the implications of which are elaborated by parallels to findings from the birdsong system. Chapter 2 presents an experiment in which the timing of electrical muscle stimulation is manipulated, using a novel adaptive paradigm, to reliably elicit self-reported agency over externally-actuated muscle movements. Claims of self-agency over externally-caused movements are predictable from the early sensorineural response to muscle stimulation, firmly rooting the origins of bodily sense of agency in sensorimotor processes while also reinforcing a dissociation between conscious and objective agency. Chapter 3 examines the relationship between individual differences in sensorimotor-level control judgments and high-level declarative beliefs about agency. A relationship is confirmed but found to be mediated by conscious introspection (i.e. metacognition), suggesting a preferential role of consciously accessible mental contents in the formation of self-agency beliefs. Taken together, findings suggest that aspects of low-level movement control impact the sense of agency, even at levels of behavioral organization which are not explicitly motor in nature. The dissertation closes with a critical Discussion of the theoretical assumptions underlying current approaches to cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, I argue that to accomplish the goal of identifying those motor and cognitive processes that impinge upon conscious agency, we must dispense with the categorical error of conflating (especially macroscopic) neural dynamics with direct encodings of mental representations
Machine Learning for Econometrics: Theoretical Foundations and Empirical Insights
Get PDFMachine learning techniques have been increasingly adopted in economics and finance for forecasting, policy evaluation, and structural modeling. Despite their empirical success, a key question remains: can machine learning methods—originally developed for tasks in computer science—effectively address the unique challenges posed by economic data, such as weak signals, cross-sectional dependence, and temporal dependence? This dissertation explores the theoretical foundations and empirical relevance of modern machine learning methods in econometric applications. Chapter I examines the performance of several popular machine learning estimators in high-dimensional regressions with low signal-to-noise ratios. We show that Ridge regression and ℓ2-regularized neural networks can effectively exploit weak and possibly nonlinear signals, while Lasso may fail to outperform a zero benchmark due to its reliance on sparsity. Both theoretical analysis and empirical studies across multiple economic datasets highlight that signal weakness, rather than lack of sparsity, may be the main bottleneck in prediction. Chapter II develops non-asymptotic guarantees for deep autoencoders within a highdimensional nonlinear factor model. We show that autoencoders can consistently recover latent structures, with approximation errors diminishing as dimensionality and sample size increase. These results justify the use of autoencoders in tasks such as asset return prediction and structured matrix completion for causal analysis. Chapter III studies the application of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in modeling nonlinear time series. Under a nonlinear autoregressive and moving-average model with exogenous variables, we establish finite-sample error bounds for RNN-based predictions. These bounds reveal the role of function smoothness, input dimensionality, and process dependence in shaping prediction accuracy. Our analysis shows that RNNs are particularly effective in capturing nonlinear dynamics in noise, offering advantages over traditional nonparametric methods. Together, these essays contribute to a deeper understanding of the conditions under which machine learning methods are both theoretically sound and practically useful for econometric modeling and economic prediction
Lost in Translation: <i>Mahr</i>-Agreements, US Courts, and the Predicament of Muslim Women
Get PDFAs a reciprocal contract, Islamic marriage (nikāḥ) furnishes rights and obligations for both spouses. Usually split into two portions, the deferred part of the bridal dower (mahr muʾakhkhar)—a one-time financial liability that both spouses agree on during the wedding proceedings—is customarily received by the Muslim wife where her husband seeks to divorce her unilaterally (ṭalāq). However, US courts faced with construing mahr-agreements have been reluctant to enforce the financial promises stipulated in such agreements. Based on evidence gathered from case law, this article argues that a combination of several factors, most importantly, the judicial anxiety to get involved in religious doctrinal interpretation, as well as the misinformed analogizing of bridal dowers to prenuptial agreements, adversely affects Muslim women as courts increasingly adhere to the presumption that mahr-agreements are non-enforceable, squarely placing the burden of proof to the contrary on women. Moreover, women's financial hardship is often the immediate result of the court's refusal to uphold a husband's commitment to pay dower. As a critical feature of Islamic marriage, the agreed-on dower payment assures financial stability after divorce, predictability, and women's bargaining power throughout a marital relationship. Since 2013, state legislators' partially successful endeavors to bar state courts from applying Islamic law under comity function as a compounding factor that has created dire prospects for the future of mahr-agreements in the US, posing a substantial risk not only to the institution of Islamic marriage, but also the parties’ freedom of contract
Perspective on distributed direct air capture: What, why, and how?
Get PDFDirect air capture (DAC) is widely considered as a critical negative emission technology to not only mitigate but reverse global climate change. While commercially expanding, its efficiency is limited by energy-intensive sorbent regeneration. Here, we highlight distributed DAC as a complement to centralized systems, analyzing the regeneration energy demands and carbon footprints of various sorbents. A comprehensive evaluation of distributed DAC’s impact is crucial for maximizing its potential
Examining the Nationalistic Propaganda Narrative of Chinese State Media on Developed "Western" Countries
No full textHow does Chinese state media construct nationalistic propaganda against developed Western countries, and what drives its variation over time? This thesis explores this question by applying topic modeling and regression-based causal analysis to over 40,000 nationalistic paragraphs from People's Daily, published between 2000 and 2024. It identifies two major strands of nationalist narratives—one rooted in insecurity and the other in superiority—and examines how international conflict, diplomacy, and domestic protest shape their evolution. The findings show that propaganda systematically responds to both domestic and international dynamics, but in differentiated ways depending on narrative type and geopolitical context. This study offers a new framework for understanding how authoritarian regimes strategically adapt nationalist messaging in response to global events
Beyond the Anarchical Society: Bounded Anarchy and Bounded Society
No full textScholars have long sought to explain the nature of the international system by studying the concept of order as one of its main drivers. Despite their efforts, however, they often rely on rigid theoretical frameworks or overlook the coexistence of multiple orders within the international system. This paper challenges these limitations and calls for a broader study of order that moves beyond singular schools of thought. It does so by examining the evolution of orders since the Peace of Westphalia through a realist-constructivist approach. Building on the history of orders and contrary to mainstream international relations theories, which often depict orders as static or purely material constructs, this paper argues that orders evolve, with socialization playing a key role—an element these theories often overlook. Furthermore, acknowledging the decline of the Liberal International Order, it introduces two new concepts to the field of international relations—bounded anarchy and bounded society—as analytical tools for understanding the nature of orders in international politics from a systemic perspective
EXPLORING THE WATER-ENERGY-FOOD (WEF) NEXUS THROUGH AN INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE ON NEW TECHNOLOGY
Get PDFThis study explores the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus through an industry-focused lens highlighting how innovations in these spaces can go from lab to market. Based on data collected from 70+ customer discovery interviews and literature research, this paper presents interconnected issues, trends, opportunities, challenges, and industry analysis among these three areas. Also detailed are the ramifications of global climate change, the culture inside and outside the WEF, and regulations on innovation in these areas
Utilising Human Myometrial and Uterine Fibroid Stem Cell-Derived Three Dimentional Organoids as a Robust Model System for Understanding the Pathophysiology of Uterine Fibroids
Get PDFUterine fibroids (UFs) are the most common benign gynecologic tumours affecting women of reproductive age. This study aims to deepen the understanding of UFs complex aetiology through harnessing the power of 3D organoid models derived from human myometrial stem cells to emulate the in vivo behaviour of these tumours. Isolated SCs were cultured over 7 days under a defined culture system. Immunohistochemistry, Immunofluorescence, organoid stiffness, RNA Sequencing was conducted, and differential gene expression was assessed using RT-PCR. The derived organoids exhibited diverse populations of cells, including stem cells, smooth muscle, and fibroblasts. Excessive ECM deposition was shown via Collagen and Fibronectin expression. We confirmed that our organoids expressed oestrogen receptor in a pattern similar to that in their corresponding tissue, as well as responded to steroid hormone. Interestingly, we revealed significant racial disparities in ECM accumulation within organoids derived from different racial groups. This augmented ECM deposition is theorised to enhance tissue stiffness, as assessed using Young's modulus. Additionally, our research demonstrated significant decreases in fibrotic markers upon treatment with Vitamin D3 and Doxercalciferol. Furthermore, the pro-fibroid effects of environmental phthalates further elucidate the potential factors contributing to UF pathology. The 3D organoid model can serve as a robust platform to study the underlying molecular mechanisms of UFs, besides offering invaluable insights for potential therapeutic interventions