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We the People, in Order to Form a More Perfect… Electoral College An analysis into electoral reform problems, proposals, and possibilities
Get PDFGiven the structure of our Electoral College, there are places in the United States in which votes simply matter more. Many Americans believe the Electoral College is unfair, antiquated, and in desperate need of reform. However, alternative electoral proposals designed to reform our current system may not provide the benefits we seek from an ideal electoral process. In my thesis, I compare and contrast the current winner-takes-all method of allocating a state’s electoral votes to one of its most similar and realistic alternatives—the district plan. I compare the two systems against several criteria that are vital to a well-functioning and healthy democratic process: legitimacy, inclusiveness, neutrality, simplicity, equality, participation, and feasibility. Overall, my results demonstrate that while the district plan might offer certain advantages—for example, increased electoral legitimacy, an expanded campaigning map, and the possibility for higher rates of voter turnout nationwide—these benefits are neither numerous nor profound when considering the immense hurdle of passing an electoral reform amendment. Ultimately, the future of electoral reform rests either on an emphatic embrace of the current system or an abolishment of the Electoral College and complete restructuring of the electoral process—no in-between compromise is worth the price
Three Essays On Migration And Family Change
Get PDFThe global population of international migrants has grown significantly over the past several decades—from 153 million in 1990 to 272 million in 2019—while the population of international migrants as the share of the world’s total population has remained quite steady. At the same time, the political importance of migration has increased, especially in the US and Western European countries. As a result, studies of immigrant incorporation have become critical for shaping public opinions and informing policymaking. While researchers have explored many facets of migrants’ adaptation and assimilation processes, we still do not fully understand how migration affects their family behavior. This dissertation examines migrant childbearing behavior in West Germany and Turkey, two contexts that have experienced fundamental social change as a result of migration and are also intimately linked by migration. I draw from two data sources, the 1984-2016 German Socio-Economic Panel and the 2013 Turkish Demographic and Health Survey. First, I examine how fertility behavior differs across migrant cohorts in West Germany. I find variation in the patterns of entry into childbearing across arrival cohorts from Turkey and Southern Europe, driven by women’s changing marriage/migration histories. I also find differences at higher parities, including reduced third birth propensities among recent Turkish arrivals, likely a result of changing exposures within origin and destination contexts. Second, I examine contraceptive behavior among internal migrants in Turkey. I find that migration is significantly associated with modern contraceptive use—particularly short-acting contraception—for rural-to urban and urban-to-urban migrants and that this may be explained by the fact that migration, depending on the group, is also associated with changes in economic resources, access to and knowledge of healthcare, mobility and social norms. Third, I look at the impact of urban migration on fertility in Turkey. Results demonstrate that rural-to-urban migrants in urban areas experience accelerated transitions into childbearing, consistent with migration for marriage purposes, despite general adaptation to lower fertility norms. Ultimately, my dissertation deepens our understanding of the complex social processes that underlie migrant fertility behavior
Queer With The City: Gender, Race, Environment And The Poetics Of Urban Change
Get PDF“Queer with the City” traces how urban and environmental context have shaped the commitments of queer cultural production in the United States. This dissertation articulates an urban environmental lineage of queer cultural production through a literary and visual approach to the redevelopment of New York City from the early 1950s to 2020. The project argues that the losses of the early era of AIDS to which much queer cultural production responds are inextricable from mounting public anxieties about climate change in the late 1980s and from the aftermath of a program of urban renewal that demolished nearly 7.5 million residences in the U.S. between 1950 and 1980. The project reads the entanglement of queer, environmental, and urban experiences of loss in the postwar United States through a cultural archive that brings those forms of loss into contact with one another in its attention to New York’s postwar redevelopment. “Queer with the City” begins with writing by James Baldwin, James Schuyler, and June Jordan that directly grapples with urban renewal in New York in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. It then follows the geography of renewal to the landscape of AIDS activism and climate anxiety in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the writing and visual art of David Wojnarowicz and Eileen Myles. The project’s final chapter and coda attend to these entangled conditions of queer, urban, and environmental loss through the late-2000s trans ecological poetics of Julian Talamantez Brolaski and N.K. Jemisin’s speculative writing in the late 2010s and early 2020s. This alternate lineage of queer cultural production models how urban and climate futures invested in justice can draw upon queer theory’s decades of analysis of the inextricability of racial, sexual, and gendered marginalization. How urban and climate planning and policy distribute life chances depends upon their understanding of how structural inequality manifests. “Queer with the City” argues that a cultural history of postwar redevelopment in the most populous city in the U.S. demonstrates the connection between queer, urban, and environmental loss. This cultural history contributes to an understanding of how structural inequality mediates processes of urban change
Becoming American: The Social And Political Incorporation Of Latinos
Get PDFAs a group comprised of mostly immigrants and their descendants, Latinos’ eventual “assimilation” and the place they occupy in American society remains an open question. Despite the immigrant incorporation literature’s emphasis on intermarriage as symbolizing the erosion of group boundaries, this dissertation examines incorporation more broadly. I argue that Latino incorporation is tied to racialization. First, I evaluate the position Latinos occupy in the racial hierarchy, which I examine by comparing the perceptions that Latinos have of various groups—White, Black and other Latinos, through a survey of the group’s racial attitudes in Durham, North Carolina. Second, I examine whether Latinos are perceived to be full participants in American society, from the perspective of White and Black Americans, which I explore in two ways. I examine whether Latinos are seen as American through a conjoint survey experiment. Next, I explore whether the benefits of a shared group identity are extended to Latinos, by comparing support for redistribution toward Latino and White owned businesses in the aftermath of COVID-19 through a survey experiment. This dissertation highlights the importance of the group’s racialization in shaping their path to incorporation. Unlike European migrants from the 20th century, the overall picture is that Latinos are not neatly assimilating into American society by gravitating closer to whites. At the same time, this dissertation shows how the heterogeneity of the group should be explicitly considered. Latinos will have different incorporation pathways depending on their immigration status, family background, skin color, contact with others, perceived insecurity, among other factors. This dissertation also emphasizes the importance of considering social incorporation to fully understand the experiences of Latinos in the United States, as full structural incorporation is likely to be influenced by Latinos’ experiences of discrimination and exclusion
Expanding The Breadth Of Drug Discovery Through Experimental And Computational Techniques
Get PDFDrug discovery and design is extremely important in today’s world in order to treat andcure diseases which have encountered resistance and those that have not yet had a cure. Different methodologies and techniques are necessary to discover these new therapeutics. The goal of this thesis is to explore a variety of drug discovery methods and their effectiveness in designing new drugs and to expand on their capabilities. Firstly, solvent mapping was modified for use in Reverse Micelle NMR (RM NMR) to determine its effectiveness in locating small molecule hotspots on protein surfaces. The results of this study showed weakly binding molecules productively interacting with the smooth surface of Interleukin-1β, a drug target for inflammatory diseases. Their binding location and ability varied among the molecules with varying functional groups. These small molecules may act as building blocks for future therapeutics. Secondly, a RM NMR Fragment Based Drug Discovery method was used to explore the binding of hydrophilic fragments typically missed in standard screenings on Interleukin-1β. A ‘hit’ rate of ~10% of the total library was achieved, with fragments binding as weakly as 200 mM, surpassing the detection limit of current screening methods. These hits comprised a total surface coverage of two-thirds, showing it’s possible to effectively screen proteins without tight-binding pockets. Additionally, the surface coverage illustrates it is possible to design an inhibitor based on most desired surface locations. Lastly, Molecular Dynamics and docking simulations were used to uncover the binding pose and mechanism of action of the GTx-560, a potential drug for Aldo-Keto Reductase 1C3 (AKR1C3), an important prostate cancer target. GTx-560 was found to bind in the opposite orientation of the ‘cognate pose’, with the trifluorobenzene ring in the oxyanion hole of the binding pocket. Pump-probe molecular dynamics determined allosteric effects from GTx-560 biding may contribute to the loss of coactivator function in AKR1C3 by preventing its binding to the Androgen Receptor. The work presented here shows the future of drug discovery and how modifications to existing methods can open the door to a wider range of drug targets as well as the molecules used in drug design
Aspects Of Deregulated Glucose Metabolism In Liver And Kidney Cancer
Get PDFDeregulated glucose metabolism is a critical component of cancer growth and survival, as is clinically evident by FDG-PET imaging of enhanced glucose uptake in tumors. However, the efficacy of direct pharmacological intervention of glycolysis, a critical biochemical pathway that catabolizes glucose, has yet to be realized. As an alternative approach, we explored the potential therapeutic value of two physiological pathways that oppose glucose catabolism in either liver or kidney cancer: gluconeogenesis and glycogen synthesis, respectively. In liver cancer, I hypothesized that gluconeogenesis could be stimulated by glucagon signaling to antagonize glycolysis and reduce tumor cell growth. Upon supraphysiologic overexpression of the glucagon receptor, GCGR, glucagon treatment of the liver cancer cell line, SNU398, reproducibly decreased cell viability, but without transcriptionally inducing gluconeogenic gene expression, regardless of the epigenetic landscape. In kidney cancer, we hypothesized that disrupting glycogen breakdown could prevent release of glucose under stress conditions and inhibit tumor cell proliferation. Through genetic knockout of key enzymes and carbon-13 labeling, we observed that glycogen metabolism does not affect tumor growth, despite metabolic utilization of glycogen-derived glucose in culture conditions without glucose. In conclusion, we describe context-specific approaches to targeting glucose metabolism in cancer that warrant further investigation
Structures Formed By Colloids By Capillarity On Curved Interfaces
Get PDFThe trapping and interaction of nano- and micro-particles at fluid interfaces is broadly important in technology, including established technologies like froth flotation to recover ores and emulsion stabilization by adsorbed particle layers, or the formation of Pickering emulsions. Particle trapping and organization at interfaces is also important in advanced materials processing, for example, in the formation of ordered nanoparticle structures at fluid interfaces in Langmuir troughs. Capillary interactions are ubiquitous between microscale colloids trapped at fluid interfaces. These interactions are particularly interesting because they depend on the shape of the interface shape and the shape of the particle’s contact line. This latter quantity depends on the particles’ shape, its surface chemistry and topography, but not on its bulk materials properties. Thus, these interaction are “materials agnostic”, and can be used to organize finely divided materials of diverse bulk properties.
Generally, colloids become trapped at fluid interfaces because upon adsorption, they eliminate a patch of liquid-liquid or liquid-vapor interface, significantly reducing the free energy of the system. Particles trapped at fluid interfaces generally have pinned, undulated contact lines that distort the interface around them. To minimize the area, and therefore the energy of these distortions, colloids interact and assemble. These interactions are significant at planar interfaces, and depend strongly on the shape of the host interface. In particular, on curved fluid interfaces, capillary interactions direct isolated colloid motion along paths defined by deviatoric curvature gradients. This directed motion relies on the leading order, long-ranged quadrupolar distortions made by the colloids\u27 undulated pinned contact lines, and the underlying “saddle-like” shape of the interface that is also described by a quadrupolar term in the limit of small interfacial slopes. While the importance of curvature for isolated particles on curved interfaces is now well appreciated, its role in guiding structure formation has not been well studied.
In my thesis, I study the organization of microparticles trapped on curved interfaces using theory and experiment. I first focus on pair interactions between particles with pinned contact lines trapped on interfaces with curvature gradients. I derive closed-form expressions for the interaction potential between spherical or disk-like particles with nearly circular contact lines. Gradients in this potential predict the forces on the particles and hence particle paths. The particles are attracted to each other, and are also attracted to zones of high deviatoric curvature. Depending on the relative magnitudes of their attraction and the strength of the local curvature gradient, particle pairs are predicted to dimerize, co-migrate without dimerization but in each other’s influence, or to migrate independently. On curved oil-water interfaces, I study pair interactions and dimer formation of spherical microparticles. These particles induce significant nanometric deformation on the interface. Particles are attracted to each other and come to apparent contact. I use the analytical pair potentials to understand dimerization and to identify criteria for dimers to form.
When many particles are present on the curved interface, they organize in nearly trapped structures that reflect the underlying curvature field. To model this process, I use Monte Carlo simulations in which the energy landscape is determined by the analytical pair potential in the curved interface, extended to have higher order modes in the particle contact line undulation and in the local expansion of the interface. By randomly adding particles with given contact line undulations, the Monte Carlo simulations generate structures with qualitative features similar to those formed in experiment.
Lastly, I address pair interactions of elongated particles on curved fluid interfaces. The leading order disturbance made by each particle in the interface is a quadrupole in elliptical coordinates. The analytical pair potential now captures the alignment of the particle’s major axis with respect to the underlying curvature field. I compare prediction to the paths taken by cylindrical microparticle pairs in a curvature field. The study of structure formation by Monte Carlo is left for future work
The Role Of Active Dna Demethylation In Mammalian Epigenetic Reprogramming
Get PDFDNA methylation in the form of 5-methylcytosine (5mC) is an essential epigenetic regulator of gene expression and cellular identity in mammals. As a dynamic epigenetic feature, DNA methylation can be reversed through several distinct pathways. Whereas global DNA demethylation is achieved through the suppression of DNA methyltransferase (DNMT) enzymes, targeted demethylation at individual CpG sites is regulated through the activity of Ten-eleven Translocation (TET) family enzymes. TET enzymes mediate the sequential oxidation of 5mC to 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC), 5-formylcytosine (5fC), or 5-carboxycytosine (5caC). These oxidized residues are poorly recognized by maintenance methyltransferase DNMT1, allowing their steady dilution over several rounds of cellular division. Alternatively, 5fC and 5caC may be targeted for excision by thymine DNA glycosylase (TDG), restoring the unmodified cytosine through the base excision repair pathway. While these two mechanisms are collectively referred to as “active DNA demethylation”, little is known about their relative contributions to DNA demethylation in vivo. Here, using newly discovered “5hmC-stalling” TET mutants with impaired 5fC and 5caC oxidation, we tested the requirement of the fC/caC branch of active DNA demethylation for epigenetic reprogramming in two model systems. First, using an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) model, we demonstrate that the fC/caC activity of TET2 is essential for DNA demethylation at reprogramming enhancers during iPSC induction, and that loss of this activity reduces the reprogramming potential of mouse embryonic fibroblasts. Next, we used CRISPR/Cas9 engineering to generate two new mouse models of TET1 activity: a 5hmC-stalling Tet1T1642V mutant, and a catalytically inactive Tet1HxD mutant. Our preliminary results indicate that the fC/caC activity of TET1 is critical for epigenetic reprogramming in the developing mouse germline, and that loss of TET1 catalytic activity in the adult mouse cortex leads to hypermethylation in promoters of genes involved in neurodevelopment and maintenance. In total, our studies represent the first in vivo characterization of the multiple activities of TET enzymes and the roles they play in regulating genomic 5mC levels and shaping cellular identity
Team Formation And Incentives
Get PDFThis dissertation analyzes the incentives of workers in organizations that utilize teams.
In Chapter 1, I study a moral hazard in teams model in which a principal knows that the agents she compensates are identical and independent, but does not know all of the actions they can take. In the face of this uncertainty, the principal chooses a symmetric contract that yields her the highest worst-case expected profit. I show that, counterintuitively, any such contract exhibits joint performance evaluation — each agent\u27s pay is increasing in the performance of the other — and is nonlinear in team output.
In Chapter 2, Carlos Segura-Rodriguez and I study profit-maximizing matching in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard. We show that when productive complementarities between workers are weak and effort costs are high, expected wage payments increase in the assortativity of the matching the manager implements. Hence, either random or negative assortative matching can be profit-maximizing, even when positive assortative matching is efficient.
Finally, in Chapter 3, Carlos Segura-Rodriguez, Peng Shao, and I study the efficiency of decentralized team formation inside research organizations through the lens of a one-sided matching model with non-cooperative after-match information production. Our equilibrium analysis identifies two inefficiencies observed inside of non-hierarchical organizations. First, productive teams composed of workers producing complementary information may form at the expense of excluded workers who must form relatively unproductive teams consisting of workers producing substitutable information. Second, even when productive teams are efficient, they need not form; a worker in such a team may prefer to join a less productive team if she can exert less effort in this deviating team
Lyric Witness: Intergenerational (re)collection Of The Holocaust In Contemporary American Poetry
Get PDFThis dissertation is a cross-genre project that blends creative and scholarly writing to challenge the conventional modes through which academic argumentation can occurs. It looks at published and archived late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century poetry about the Holocaust, analyzing not only its recollection within the American context but also the underrepresentation of the extermination that took place in the Soviet territories. The poet-scholar argues that lyric witness is a necessary compositional mode and interpretive lens for grappling with the impossibilities of witnessing and remembering the Holocaust at large, as well as addressing the particularities of the Holocaust in the East. Each chapter—“Glossary,” “Sonnet,” and “Translated Archive”—is an experiment in mimesis, whereby scholarly analysis adopts some of the formal and generic elements of its literary objects. The chapters focus on contemporary poetry collections by Ilya Kaminsky and Jehanne Dubrow, as well as an archive of poetic translations from Yiddish into Russian housed in the United States Holocaust Museum. The project concludes with its own archive of contemporary poetry of lyric witness related to the Holocaust