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Three Essays In The Sociology Of Violence: Repertoire Paralysis, Localized Diffusion, And Emotional Interventions In De-Escalation
Get PDFThe essays in this dissertation apply a micro-first sociology of violence to three topics operating at several different timescales–decades, years, days, and minutes.
The first paper considers the evolution of collective violence over fifty years. This study asks whether the emergent nature of violence prevents violent forms of contention from evolving as quickly as others. Using a custom algorithm, I matched entries in a database of ethno-religious violence in India with source articles from the Times of India archive. I categorized and counted the verbs in these articles, and the same verbs in a random sample of 10,000 articles from the same time period. I find that verbs related to violence show more stability than verbs related to other forms of collective action.
The second paper considers two processes of diffusion–a years-long process of violence diffusion constituting a wave of ethno-religious violence in India from 1977 to 1992, and a days-long process of diffusion where one incident of collective violence may spark others. I use an event-history framework and a recently-developed GIS data crosswalking procedure to compare demographic, electoral, economic, and diffusion variables across India at the level of parliamentary constituencies. The large- and small-scale diffusion variables are strong predictors of violence. In particular, diffusion patterns are consistent with regional language media as a vector for violence, with uptake more likely where the majority group’s economic or demographic dominance is less pronounced.
The third paper considers a thirty-minute process of de-escalation after a gunman threatened to commit a school shooting. Using audio and video recordings along with a memoir, I analyze how the school bookkeeper, acting as hostage and negotiator, convinced the gunman to surrender. The turning point resulted from two emotional processes, one bolstering thebookkeeper, the other exhausting the gunman. These processes created an opening for processes of deliberation, identity repair, and rapport-building to proceed
Penn Library\u27s LJS 412 - [Four treatises on astrolabes and astronomy]. (Video Orientation)
No full texthttps://repository.upenn.edu/sims_video/1165/thumbnail.jp
Feeling and Judgment in Kant
No full textThis dissertation examines the relationship between the power of judgment and the faculty of feeling in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. Chapter 1 traces the development of Kant’s account of the power of judgment from the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Chapter 2 offers an account of the relationship between feeling and judgment in aesthetic judgment and defends a novel interpretation of Kantian aesthetic judgment (the “performative view”). Chapter 3 addresses the role of feeling in empirical judgment and argues that feeling can guide empirical judgment if the judging subject aims solely at attaining empirical knowledge
ETF Primary Market Structure and Its Efficiency
No full textThe primary market of many US registered ETFs exhibits an oligopolistic structure, which is shown to have relevant implications for the pricing efficiency of those financial products. I show that the entry of an additional Authorized Participant (AP) corresponds to a decrease in the magnitude of ETF price deviations from Net Asset Value (NAV) of at least one basis point in ETFs with high primary market concentration. I build a dynamic equilibrium model of ETF primary market arbitrage that describes the trade-off faced by monopolistically competitive APs between waiting for mispricing to widen and pre-empting competitors from eliminating it. In the model, the creation unit size is shown to be an important friction driving the entry decision and, therefore, the magnitude of mispricing. Indeed, in the data, around one-third of all primary market transactions amount to one creation unit, suggesting that it is often a binding constraint. ETF split events and the creation unit size changes help to identify shocks to the dollar value of creation unit size empirically. I show that by cutting the creation unit size in half, mispricing decreases by almost two basis points, a magnitude consistent with that implied by my quantitative model
Penn Library\u27s LJS 430 - [De urinarum judiciis]. (Video Orientation)
No full texthttps://repository.upenn.edu/sims_video/1177/thumbnail.jp
Armenian Speech Reports: Blurring the Quotative Line
Get PDFModern Eastern Armenian has two complementizers, vor and te. When used to introduce speech reports, those complementizers differ as to the discourse status of the speech event they introduce; most notably, te possesses an evidential meaning that vor lacks. Using the model of discourse update suggested in Portner (2006), I provide an analysis of te that explains its evidential properties. I also provide evidence that MEA thwarts the traditional dichotomy assumed in the literature between direct and indirect speech by allowing a form of loose quotation
Taken by Storm: The Rise and Fall of Tau from Microtubule-Associated to Aggregated to Degraded
No full textTau 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
Private Federated Analytics at Scale
No full textCollecting distributed data from millions of individuals for the purpose of analytics is a common scenario – from Apple collecting typed words and emojis to improve its keyboard suggestions, to Google collecting location data to see how busy restaurants and businesses are. This data is often sensitive, and can be overly revealing about the individuals and communities whose data is being analyzed en masse. Differential privacy has become the gold-standard method to give strong individual privacy guarantees while releasing aggregate statistics about sensitive data. However, the process of computing such statistics can itself be a privacy risk. For instance, a simple approach would be to collect all the raw data at a single central entity, which then computes and releases the statistics. This entity then has to be trusted to not abuse the raw data; in practice, it can be difficult to find an entity with the requisite level of trust. In this thesis, we describe a new approach that uses cryptographic techniques to collect data privately and safely, without placing trust in any party. Although the natural candidates, such as secure multiparty computation (MPC) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) do not scale to millions of parties on their own, our key insight is that there are ways to refactor computations in such a way that they can be done using simpler techniques that do scale, such as additively homomorphic encryption. Our solution restructures centralized computations into distributed protocols that can be executed efficiently at scale. The systems we design based on this approach can support billions of participants and can handle a variety of real queries from the literature, including machine learning tasks, Pregel-style graph queries, and queries over large categorical data. We automate the distributed refactoring so that analysts can write the query as if the data were centralized without understanding how the rewriting works, and we protect against malicious parties who aim to poison or bias the results
Financial Regret at Older Ages and Longevity Awareness
Get PDFOlder people often express regret about financial decisions made earlier in life that left them susceptible to old-age insecurity. Prior work has explored one outcome, saving regret, or peoples’ expressed wish that they had saved more earlier in life. The present paper extends attention to five additional areas regarding financial decisions, examining whether older Americans also regret not having insured better, claimed benefits and quit working too early, and becoming financially dependent on others. Using a controlled randomized experiment conducted on 1,764 respondents age 50+ in the Health and Retirement Study, we show that providing people objective longevity information does alter their self-reported financial regret. Specifically, giving people information about objective survival probabilities more than doubled regret expressed about not having purchased long term care, and it also boosted their regret by 2.4 times for not having purchased lifetime income. We conclude that information provision can be a potent, as well as cost-effective, method of alerting people to retirement risk