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Foreign Debt Becomes Foreign Influence
Get PDFThis paper examines the relationship between foreign debt as a percentage of GDP and its correlation with domestic fiscal policy in Latin American economies from 1990 to 2024. Specifically, the paper tests and finds a relationship between debt obligations held by foreign lenders and domestic fiscal austerity measured by government social spending. The paper also tests whether Latin American economies respond to credit ratings given by the World Trade Organization. The paper fails to find a statistically significant relationship here. This failure does not indicate conclusively that Latin American economies do not reference credit ratings. Instead, it may suggest that other channels, such as the debt obligations themselves, are sufficient to move policy in Latin American economies. That notwithstanding, the paper provides empirics that indicate statistically significant relationships between foreign debt holdings and domestic austerity. This follows theories laid out in previous literature, in which developing economies will act in the interest of their future reputation. They do this by paying off foreign debts even when it is politically costly at home. Governments operate in this accordance to keep lines of credit open to future governments, whether the current administrations will be in charge or not
Navigating Federal Threats: Implications for the Illinois Finance Authority
No full textAmong the multi-faceted goals of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act rests a cornerstone mission with broad implications for the environmental sector: to proliferate domestic investments into clean energy in a broader goal to mitigate the increasingly pernicious effects of climate change. Similarly, the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill aims at strengthening the domestic clean energy sector. One avenue in which investments are facilitated are through federal grants provided to state-level organizations, which in turn can translate grants into financing packages for organizations and enterprises that meet federal and state guidelines associated with these new environmental initiatives. Within the state of Illinois, organizations such as the Illinois Finance Authority serve as the intermediary in connecting local organizations to such forms of funding. However, these rather nascent initiatives have been jeopardized in light of President Trump’s inauguration as president earlier this year; his goal to freeze federal funding that has been both promised and partially or fully distributed presents unprecedented circumstances for both the IFA and the organizations that it serves. Given these recent developments, there is ample room to unpack the imminent challenges that organizations like the IFA face within the context of changing political powers
George Henry Evans and the Intersection of Labor and Anti-Slavery
Get PDFAn exploration of America's first labor newspaper The Working Man's Advocate, and specifically its editor George Henry Evans. An under-sung part of American history, Evans played a part in the shaping and ideology of the Free Soil Party that would eventually become the Republican Party. The peculiarity of Evans position on slavery and the abolitionist movement, underscores the complexity of antebellum politics. Evans had a close connection to prominent abolitionist Gerrit Smith and they often wrote to one another in an attempt to bring their two movements closer. Through examining the ways that Evans' views on both slavery and the abolitionist change throughout his lifetime we can understand the complexity of the politics of the early labor movement and its complex relationship with abolitionists
Neglected Diseases and Patients: The NIH Funding Crisis
Get PDFThe role of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its partnership with academic research institutions has come under threat, attributed to meager funding and inequities in research devoted to diseases that primarily affect marginalized groups. This paper aims to probe the shortcomings of the NIH that led to one such event that devastated the U.S. and the world to an unparalleled extent, the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper will then transition to a study of the implications of current NIH funding cuts on medical research, particularly for patients afflicted by traditionally underfunded chronic diseases. I utilize data from a variety of sources, including interviews conducted by myself and others, federal laws, news articles, academic journals, and published numeric data. This compilation of evidence will build toward the thesis that the effects of a now-gutted NIH constitute the final blow of a prolonged attack on disparate health care, and cannot be ascribed to the actions of any singular presidential administration. Academic research institutions are now situated in an exceedingly vulnerable position, and the future of the medical field is uncertain. As a matter of course, Americans have become more prone to lethal diseases
Duotai as Public and Private Language in Republican China, 1911-1949
No full textThis paper primarily traces the multivalent usage of the term 堕胎duotai (“falling fetus”), the standardized term for abortion, across Republican period Chinese newspapers (1911-1949). 堕胎 duotai encompassed multiple meanings during this period: voluntarily procured abortions, forced abortions, miscarriages, and induced miscarriages. Although abortion was criminalized in the Republican era through legal transplants from Japan-adapted European continental law, Republican newspapers demonstrate that not only were abortions a common occurrence, but that abortion and birth control were subjects that permeated the cultural imagination. In addition to newspapers, this paper draws on memoirs, legal cases and codes, medical articles, women’s journals and a gynecology handbook to show how duotai became a site of contestation between late imperial and modern ideas. Abortion was mediated in the Republican era through different public and private languages: the family, law, medicine, and the media. It served as a discursive site of both consent and resistance to modernizing ideals of marriage, family, sexuality, and ideal womanhood. These negotiations were often shaped by dynamics of intimate coercion, and at times, intimate and intergenerational solidarity. As a space where both public and private social languages intersected, discourses on duotai reflected, negotiated, and reconfigured the social spheres of the Chinese family, the conjugal unit, and late imperial definitions of reproduction, gender, and intimate body politics. I argue that despite rising biopolitical governance in the Republican era, the family continued to play a crucial interlocutory role in arbitrating abortions. This paper centers the intimate politics of family life and conjugal and kinship relations as an important locus for studying reproduction in twentieth century China
Death and Life They Did Establish, The Day of Death They Did Not Reveal: A Reconstruction and Analysis of Denied Funerary Rites in Southern Mesopotamia
Get PDFThe historical sites of Kish and Ur both exhibit the societal, cultural, religious, and political hallmarks of the Early Dynastic Periods. Excavations have uncovered several thousand deposits of human remains between the two. From these deposits, ranging from the Jemdet Nasr to the Ur III periods (3100–2095 BCE), we can see the mortuary culture of their respective times. Ur’s Royal Cemetery displays the wealth and grandeur of royalty and conceptions of the afterlife. Kish and Ur’s private burials exhibit the typical mortuary processes of the average individual. Burial Y426 at Kish and burial PG390 at Ur both exhibit variation of the “typical” mortuary process in patterns of denied funerary rites. The individuals interred in burial Y426 and burial PG390 lack the necessary and expected preparation, positioning, grave goods, and treatment of the deceased. Using Archaeothanatological methodology allows for the reconstruction of the individuals and grave goods of Y426 and PG390 to their original composition at the time of deposition, thereby revealing the intentional denial of expected funerary rites and subsequent rejection of post-funerary rites, such as kispum
Stronger Anticipation, More Attention? The Predictive Role of Early Mu Desynchronization in Infants' Later Attention to Actions
No full textMu desynchronization, the decrease of mu rhythm in the sensorimotor cortex, as measured by electroencephalography (EEG), is believed to reflect increased activation of the sensorimotor system in the brain. This neural phenomenon has also been observed prior to the execution of an action, suggesting its involvement in action anticipation. Previous research has shown that infants who exhibited stronger mu desynchronization while observing the initial phase of a reaching-to-grasping action also demonstrated higher functional connectivity between their motor and visual regions by the end of the action. However, it remains unclear whether this predictive relationship extends beyond neural activity to behavior—specifically, whether mu desynchronization before an action can predict infants’ attention to the subsequent action. To investigate this, the current study examined whether infants’ mu desynchronization at the beginning of an action could predict their attention to the subsequent action. Results revealed that when infants exhibited stronger mu desynchronization before the onset of an action, they were more likely to look away while watching the subsequent action. Further analysis on looking duration revealed a weak but significant association between mu desynchronization and shorter looking duration. Overall, stronger mu desynchronization before the onset of an action was associated with reduced attention to later action, which might be explained by their decreased interest in the action after forming the prediction that an action would happen. These findings support the notion that mu desynchronization plays a role in action prediction and can predict infants’ later attention to actions
Development and application of advanced cone-beam CT acquisition strategies for image-guided therapies
Get PDFIn addition to its traditional role in diagnostics, CT has recently been increasingly utilized as a guidance tool in therapeutic procedures. This has been driven, in a large part, by advances in flat-panel x-ray detector technologies that have enabled the rapid development of flat-panel cone-beam CT (CBCT). Guidance systems typically consist of a flat panel detector mounted opposite a kilovoltage x ray tube often on a C-arm in interventional radiology or image-guided surgery or mounted directly to linear accelerator for image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT). These systems have enabled new therapies and made existing therapies more accurate and safer for the patient. However, CT imaging involves additional x ray exposure to the patient and we must consider the “As low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) principle of the USNRC and the AAPM Task Group 75 report that states it is no longer safe to consider imaging dose negligible and “that strategies for reducing the imaging dose and volume of exposed anatomy be pursued wherever possible, even when they require developing new image acquisition and reconstruction techniques.” In that regard we have developed four targeted image acquisition strategies, enabled by a custom dynamic collimation device, that contain sufficient information to have clinical utility with substantially lower dose away from the target region than conventional methods. The design, development and verification of the dynamic collimator are described followed by the first imaging strategy, dynamic collimation of fluoroscopy for tracking implanted lung fiducials. The second imaging application, conformal ROI imaging in CBCT, reconstructs a region of interest (ROI) from restricted illumination data with the chord based BPF algorithm. This approach accurately recovers the ROI, but only the ROI, with highly targeted imaging dose. Additionally this approach is limited to certain peripheral ROIs. To overcome these limitations we developed the intensity weighted ROI (IWROI) imaging method that uses filters to spatially vary the intensity of the beam instead of opaque blades to collimate the beam. In this way we acquire complete data of the patient that allows for reconstruction of the whole volume with standard reconstruction algorithms and is not limited to peripheral regions. However, the parts of the projection data measured with the low intensity (filtered) beam have higher noise which propagates back in to the reconstructed image during reconstruct resulting in a high quality image within the ROI and a lower quality, noisy image of the rest of the patient. The lower quality region can still be useful in image guidance, e.g. for alignment to high contrast structures such as bone or the skin surface. This technique has been developed with both statically mounted filters on the x ray source and with dynamic filtration with the collimator
U.S. Asylum Policy: Reconceptualizing “Fundamental Fairness,” Due Process, and the Right to an Interpreter
Get PDFThis thesis argues that the U.S. asylum system systematically denies non-English-speaking applicants the constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection by failing to provide adequate language access. Through an applied legal analysis of immigration case law, statutory mandates, and agency policies, it demonstrates how the interpreter requirement for affirmative asylum interviews—specifically, the burden placed on applicants to supply their own interpreters—creates a two-tiered system of adjudication. While individuals in removal proceedings are afforded government-funded interpretation, those pursuing affirmative claims through USCIS are not, resulting in an inequitable and inconsistent experience of justice. This disparity reflects a broader failure to treat language access as fundamental to fairness, instead relegating it to a procedural convenience. Situating the issue within anti-discrimination frameworks and international refugee law, the paper contends that interpreter access must be redefined as a right, not a privilege. The analysis is especially timely considering recent 2025 policy changes under President Trump’s second administration, which have weakened federal language access mandates and reduced interpreter availability—amplifying structural exclusion. The thesis ultimately calls for statutory and regulatory reforms to establish interpreter access as an essential safeguard of linguistic equity in asylum adjudication
A More Robust Monetary Policy Shock: A Natural Language Processing Approach of Thailand’s Monetary Policy Reports
No full textThis study develops a more robust strategy for identifying monetary policy shocks in Thailand by incorporating both quantitative forecasts and qualitative sentiment extracted from central bank communications, specifically Monetary Policy Report. Building on Romer and Romer, 2004 framework, I apply Ridge regression to estimate the policy rate using a rich information set, combining macroeconomic forecasts with sentiment indices derived through topic modeling and dictionary-based analysis of Monetary Policy Reports from 2013 to 2023. The residuals from this model are interpreted as exogenous monetary policy shocks. Impulse response functions (IRFs), estimated via a Vector Autoregression (VAR) model, show that a contractionary shock leads to a decline in inflation and appreciation of the real effective exchange rate, consistent with theoretical expectations. However, real GDP growth initially rises and unemployment briefly falls, suggesting short-run deviations possibly due to anticipatory effects or delayed transmission. These dynamics gradually align with standard macroeconomic theory over time. Compared to shocks identified using ordinary least squares (OLS), Ridge-based shocks generate more stable and plausible responses across macroeconomic variables. Exogeneity tests confirm that the shock series is not predicted by lagged macroeconomic indicators. These findings highlight the value of integrating natural language processing and machine learning to enhance monetary policy analysis in emerging market economies