48670 research outputs found
Sort by
Closing The Institutional Gap: Protecting Technology In Foreign Direct Investment
No full textHow does foreign direct investment (FDI) affect a state\u27s domestic property protection regime and rule of law? Existing literature argues that foreign investors seek outside institutional guarantees to substitute for weak property protection in host countries. I argue that this external option is limited, especially for intangible components of foreign direct investment. I theorize that multinational corporations (MNCs) can seek property protection through host country domestic institutions rather than bypassing them, even in countries with relatively weak rule of law. Further, I argue that MNCs seek protection for their assets through leveraging home government strengths and host government channels for institutional change. I draw on original country and firm-level data, supplemented by survey experiments, interviews, and archival documents to test the empirical implications of my theory. I find that MNCs are able to influence host country institutional outcomes in intellectual property protection. MNC strategies that directly engage with the host country government is more likely to achieve targeted changes to enforcement (de facto effect), whereas home country engagement with the host country at the state-to-state level is more likely to achieve broad-based legal changes (de jure effect). Further, the strength of the home country channel is conditional on the degree to which a home state has economic leverage over a host state. MNC political strategies in the host country can bring about better property protection outcomes but face political and legal constraints. Overall, foreign direct investment “closes the gap” between levels of intellectual property protection of home and host countries, thereby contributing to rule of law in the latter. This dissertation brings international investment into an account of how domestic institutions evolve and provides new insights into how foreign direct investment can contribute to rule of law in developing countries
A Book For All Seasons: Reading Habits And Material Reception Of Dante’s “divina Commedia” In Early Modern Italy .
No full textThroughout the fourteenth century, Dante\u27s Commedia was the poem of the Italian high bourgeoisie and university culture. However, the early fifteenth-century Italian humanists looked with suspicion at vernacular literature, and particularly at Dante’s work. By contrast, in that same period, a popular cult for Dante began to develop. My dissertation investigates the habits and attitudes of a great variety of early modern readers in relation to the text that today is considered the greatest literary work in the Italian language. Through a comparative investigation of the data derived from the analysis of manuscript marginalia contained in early printed copies of the Commedia, my dissertation assesses how ordinary and less-ordinary readers in the broad geographic and social Italian context read and assimilated Dante’s poem in the early modern age. My close examination of marginalia suggests that the first typographic readers used the Commedia both as a literary text that conveyed various levels of knowledge—e.g., poetry, astrology, theology, philosophy—and a work of extensive political and moral value that, especially after Charles VIII’s invasion of the Italian peninsula in 1494, assumed a prominent role in shaping the emerging Italian national consciousness. Moreover, the dissertation will show also how intellectual readers from the 17th-19th centuries, to get close to Dante’s world, used the early printed copies of the poem, at that point easily available and “cheap.” My dissertation, therefore, tells the history of the post-medieval reception of Dante as a form of diachronic material exchange by mapping the reading attitudes of men and women of different social classes that influenced the creation of modern Italian cultural identity
Making Information Modeling And Systems Ecology: A Non-Hylomorphic Toolkit For Building In The Anthropocene
No full textThis dissertation proposes a form of environmental performance analysis for buildings called Making Information Modeling and Systems Ecology (MIMSY). MIMSY analysis combines aspects of exergy analysis and e[m]ergy analysis with making information modeling – a technique proposed for mapping and quantitatively measuring the flow of information across the design and construction of buildings. Making information modeling combines the concept of making grammars with graph theory and information theory to model designing and building as material computations. Graphs of making computations are used to trace the sources of information that influence building performance. A making information model shows the source and amount of information processed at each step of design and construction. Making information is shown to quantify economic use-value of decisions taken during design and construction in relation to stated performance objectives. The thermodynamic relationship between information and exergy is used to express making information as an exergy value. The exergy of making information is combined with exergy measures of other factors that contribute to the total use-value of a making process, such as the chemical and physical exergies of the materials and the exergy equivalent of the money exchanged for them. The ratio of the total exergy of a making process to its e[m]power (which measures the planetary-scale energy inputs to the process) is termed exformation. Exformation is proposed as a measure of the environmental performance of building relative to its use. Applying these concepts and techniques to a diverse range of hypothetical and real-world architectural projects demonstrates how environmental performance is related to various socio-economic issues
Chronic Pain Outcomes In Veterans With Obstructive Sleep Apnea
No full textChronic noncancer pain (CP) and sleep disorders are highly prevalent and impactful conditions among U.S. adults. Veterans, defined as adults who were discharged from previous active service in the United States (U.S.) military forces, are uniquely vulnerable to both sleep disorders and CP. Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) ranks as the most common sleep disorder among veterans. Veterans experience greater prevalence and severity of CP than the general population. CP is also commonly reported among people with OSA. Current estimates indicate a high frequency of comorbid OSA and CP; however, no estimates are available in veterans. When CP and sleep disorders coexist, sleep is further disrupted, and worsened disability and quality of life outcomes may occur. In this context, this dissertation research: 1) systematically assessed the influence of sleep disturbances and sleep disorders on pain outcomes among veterans with CP (Chapter 2); 2) estimated the frequency of pre-existing CP (≥ 3 months) and multidimensionally characterize CP among veterans with OSA in terms of location, duration, severity, interference on daily activities, and type (neuropathic symptoms versus not) (Chapter 3); and, 3) examined differences in sleepiness (Epworth Sleepiness Scale [ESS]), insomnia symptoms (Insomnia Severity Index [ISI]), and quality of life (Short Form-20 health survey [SF-20]) in veterans with OSA with or without pre-existing CP (Chapter 4). An observational, cross-sectional study was conducted to characterize the frequency and type of CP and to assess differences in sleep and quality of life outcomes in veterans with OSA and with or without pre-existing CP. Results from this study indicate the importance of clinically prioritizing screening for and diagnosing OSA in CP conditions and recognizing the multiplicative symptom burden when OSA and CP co-exist that may or may not be fully ameliorated with OSA treatment. A highlight includes the importance of a research agenda that examines if a single, non-pharmacological treatment for OSA can improve CP outcomes in adults with comorbid OSA and CP
Time Is Many: The Anthropocene, Literary Form, And The New Contemporary
No full textThis dissertation reads contemporary Anglophone novels as a technology for managing the temporal (dis)order of the Anthropocene. I label five temporal categories that inform the four chapters and the coda making up the dissertation: 1) a speculative imperative, 2) species time, 3) geo-cosmic time, 4) the premodern contemporary, and 5) the end of time. I pay attention to certain types of novels, and I promote a specific and timely mode of writing. I read recent prose and graphic “multitemporal” novels by contemporary authors from the US (Jennifer Egan and Richard McGuire), England (David Mitchell and Jeanette Winterson), Canada (Claire Cameron), and Scotland (Ali Smith). These are neither only historical nor entirely speculative, but time-travelling, dual-narrative, multi-period, or post-era works of fiction that multiply times and scales and narratives. Collectively, they wed the present to several historical, prehistorical, cosmic, and speculative temporalities, thus manifesting ways in which the Anthropocene disrupts our experience of time, adds to our temporal imaginary, expands it, or mixes multiple temporal registers and scales, and ultimately changes the dimensions of what we deem our contemporary.
The Anthropocene is an ecological crisis just as it is a new geological epoch, and its temporal disorientations stand as major impediments to political, ethical, intellectual, emotional, and agential engagement with this crisis. By enlisting certain kinds of novels to navigate the Anthropocene times, this dissertation in turn promotes literary form as a mode of environmentalism, and it aims to contribute to a turn from genres and themes in ecocritical studies to an attention to time and the affordances of narrative form. Environmentalism in this dissertation goes beyond traditional environmental concerns with a specific place or problem, and it rather points to a newly urgent need for thinking differently about time and across times, including attention to evasive patterns of environmental time
The Strongly Coupled E8xe8 Heterotic String: Geometry & Phenomenology
Get PDFWorking within the context of the strongly coupled E8 x E8 heterotic string theory, we analyze the B-L MSSM, a realistic supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model, from both a low-energy phenomenologyand high-energy string perspective. From a formal point of view, we examine different constructions of string vacua, which satisfy a series of theoretical and phenomenological constraints. Such vacua configurations are anomaly-free, preserve N = 1 SUSY at the compactification scale and yield the correct value for the SO(10) unification scale and gauge coupling in the visible particle sector. Furthermore, we analyze a possible SUSY-breaking mechanism for the type of vacua we construct, via gaugino condensation in the hidden sector. In an attempt to connect these findings to experiment, we study the prospects of detecting the B-L MSSM at the LHC in the near future. Within this specific context, we show that R-parity violating decays of supersymmetric particles could be amenable to direct detection at the ATLAS and CMS detectors. Detection of these processes would not only be an explicit indication of Beyond the Standard Model physics, but would also hint strongly at the existence of N=1 SUSY with spontaneously broken R-parity
Earnings Extrapolation And Predictable Stock Market Returns
Get PDFThe U.S. stock market’s return during the first month of a quarter correlates strongly with returns in future months, but the correlation is negative if the future month is the first month of a quarter, and positive if it is not. These effects offset, leaving the market return with its weak unconditional predictive ability known to the literature. The pattern accords with a model in which investors extrapolate announced earnings to predict future earnings, not recognizing that earnings in the first month of a quarter are inherently less predictable than in other months. Survey data support this model, as does out-of-sample return predictability across industries and international markets. These results challenge the Efficient Market Hypothesis and advance a novel mechanism of expectation formation
Extracting The Frequency Fluctuation Correlation Function From Two-Dimensional Electronic Spectra Via The Dynamic Stokes Shift
No full textThe dynamic Stokes shift is a common means to characterize the ultrafast solvation dynamics of excited electronic states. Under the linear response approximation, the extracted dynamic Stokes shift is equivalent to the normalized frequency fluctuation correlation function (FFCF). Two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy is a powerful tool for investigating the ultrafast solvation dynamics as it provides both high temporal and spectral resolution. General procedures for extracting the dynamic Stokes shift from 2DES spectra have been developed by our group and I extend the procedures to systems with prominent vibrational coherences. Cresyl violet, a well-studied test system for the ultrafast community, exhibits strong oscillatory components and a larger Stokes shift and as such was chosen as a model system to test and extend the analysis of the dynamic Stokes shift to 2DES with oscillatory features. For the 2DES of cresyl violet, the well-characterized oscillatory modes are incorporated into the fitting of the Stokes shift function so as to extract the ultrafast timescale associated solvation dynamics. The excitation frequency dependence of the ultrafast response is examined through analysis of the Stokes shift function obtained from slices taken at different excitation frequencies of the 2DES spectra. Through comparison of the extracted timescales, we find that the fastest timescales are extracted over a range of excitation frequencies, where contributions from vibrational relaxation and spectral diffusion can be minimized. In addition, we conduct a comparison to test our procedure for extracting the FFCF from analysis of the dynamic Stokes shift against other spectral line shape analysis methods, such as the center line slope, ellipticity and inhomogeneity index. To test the analysis procedures 2DES spectra were simulated with varying Stokes shifts and with the incorporation of vibrational relaxation. The simulated spectra were analyzed using different lineshape analysis procedures and the extracted FFCF were compared to the FFCF from the input model. We find that the analysis of the dynamic Stokes shift from a slice taken from the center of the 2DES spectra was generally more effective for extracting the correlation function from 2DES for systems with larger Stokes shifts. To conclude, the dynamic Stokes shift is an effective method to extract FFCF from the 2DES when the system has a larger Stokes shift
Taken By Storm: The Rise And Fall Of Tau From Microtubule-Associated To Aggregated To Degraded
Get PDFTau is a microtubule-associated protein, which promotes neuronal microtubule assembly and stability. Accumulation of tau into insoluble aggregates known as neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) is a pathological hallmark of several neurodegenerative diseases, known as tauopathies. Aggregated proteins are normally degraded by the cell’s protein degradation mechanisms, autophagy or the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS). In tauopathies, however, the efficiency of these degradation pathways becomes challenged by the abnormal accumulation of the tau protein, which consequently, does not get fully degraded. The current hypothesis is that small, soluble oligomeric tau species preceding NFT formation cause toxicity. However, thus far, visualizing the spatial distribution of tau monomers and oligomers inside cells under physiological or pathological conditions has not been possible. Moreover, it is unclear whether certain tau aggregate species are more resistant to degradation. Here, using single-molecule localization microscopy, we show that tau forms small oligomers on microtubules ex vivo. These oligomers are distinct from those found in cells exhibiting tau aggregation and could be precursors of aggregated tau in pathology. Furthermore, using an unsupervised shape classification algorithm that we developed, we show that different tau phosphorylation states are associated with distinct tau aggregate species. Using machine learning, we also show that autophagy and UPS target distinct classes of tau aggregates for degradation. More specifically, we propose a model where tau fibrils are targeted by UPS for degradation and NFTs are mostly degraded by autophagy, generating more tau monomers and oligomers as well as small fibrils. Our work elucidates tau’s nanoscale composition under nonaggregated and aggregated conditions ex vivo and further informs our understanding of how tau aggregates become degraded by the cell’s degradation pathways
Through The Doors - An Opera In One Act For Mixed Ensemble With Electronics
No full textThrough the Doors is an opera in one act for three singers – soprano, tenor, baritone –, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion, and piano with electronics. The work continues my explorations in working with words and time, and lies at the intersection of music, narration, text, visuals, philosophy, and technology. It’s a coming-of-age story that invites the audience to ponder existential questions through the lens of a young girl, Odessa, who discovers a strange and abstract universe she lives in, and the extent of freedom and control she has within it. Her life circumstances push her to go look for her father, which ultimately becomes a journey of finding herself. Some questions she (and hopefully the audience) will be grappling with are: how much control and freedom do we have in our lives? How free are we and how much of our lives is predetermined? Is life just made of a series of choices? Do we have a choice whether we want to make a choice? Is there such a thing as objective reality? How does time play a role in everything? Could everything already be predetermined, and just a matter of time