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Lost in Translation: The Impact of Language Barriers on Health Care in Texas
Get PDFFrom gaps in communication to cultural barriers, patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) face unique challenges when navigating the U.S. health care system. The disparity in the quality-of-care received by LEP patients and that of patients whose preferred language is English is especially significant in Texas, where a large proportion of residents speak languages other than English. Despite this, limited research has been conducted on the experiences of LEP patients in the state. This thesis aims to investigate the impact of language barriers on the delivery of health care in Texas, with a focus on the experiences of health care professionals, patient behaviors and health outcomes, and potential courses of action for addressing the challenges LEP patients face. Health care professionals with a variety of areas of expertise were interviewed about their perspectives on the provision of care for patients with LEP in Texas. The findings of the study demonstrate that language barriers impact the relationships health care professionals form with their patients as well as their ability to effectively communicate medical information to others. Such factors shape the experiences of patients with LEP, their attitudes toward the health care system, and their willingness to seek essential medical care. While recent advancements in technology have yielded significant improvements in the quality-of-care that patients with LEP receive, the consideration of larger-scale solutions that ensure the distribution of such resources across the health care system is necessary for the promotion of equitable access to care for LEP patients.Liberal Art
Orientalism in Dune: A literary analysis of the use of Orientalism and Orientalist tropes in Frank Herbert's Dune
Get PDFAn investigation into the use of Orientalism in Dune and the political/philosophical critiques of Frank Herbert.Plan II Honors Progra
A Treaty Like Others, Israeli-Saudi Peace by Infrastructure
Get PDFThe Israeli-Saudi narrative over the past decades oscillates between public estrangement and covert pragmatism. According to this thesis, genuine normalization will not result from a single White House lawn handshake. However, a thick network of interdependence spun from the web of infrastructure-based mutual dependence makes reversal expensive, undesirable, and politically hazardous. Based on Walt's balance-of-threat logic, Nye's soft-power arithmetic, and the middle-power diplomacy commonly practiced by the two states, I map seven decades of covert intelligence exchanges, oil-for-leverage tussles, and shared concerns about Iran.
The analysis hinges on three mutually supporting pillars.
U.S.-facilitated Infrastructure Diplomacy. Mega-projects such as IMEC's rail-to-port backbone, the Blue Raman fiber corridor and an Israeli Red-to-Med corridor, bind Saudi and Israeli destinies together in concrete and bring a plausible, rule-based counterbalance to Beijing's BRI.
Defense and cyber integration. A CENTCOM-based network of standard radars, stacked shields of missiles, and cooperative R&D ties Israel's innovation ecosystem to the Saudi scale. With sensor inputs and command channels fused into a single backbone, "walking away" becomes too costly in strategic and financial terms.
Space Cooperation. A shared human-crewed mission - or a Gulf launch facility using Israeli avionics and Saudi funds -would broadcast collaboration to the world and sow twin-use ventures in earth observation, resilience to climate, and secure communication.
Methodologically, I cross-match Knesset minutes, Vision 2030 reports, archival cables, and interviews in the field to map the hidden logic behind this alignment. The proof is unequivocal: Complex infrastructure accomplishes what government memorandums never quite can - it rewires, incentivises, infuses reciprocity, and creates a self-perpetuating peace dividend.
If Washington continues its 3-D scaffolding - defense, diplomacy, development - and private capital tracks public commitments. Israeli-Saudi collaboration can become the Middle East's most potent and exportable antidote to the region's conflicts.Plan II Honors Progra
Towards Fast Interprocess Communication
Get PDFModern web browsers implement site isolation [29], an extension of
earlier multiprocess architectures [4] designed to mitigate speculative ex-
ecution attacks. In this architecture, each website origin (for example,
google.com) is isolated within its own process, limiting the potential dam-
age that an attacker can inflict on the process of that specific site origin.
Because this approach separates the main browser process from the web
content processes, browsers rely heavily on interprocess communication
(IPC) mechanisms to facilitate necessary interactions. This thesis exam-
ines the performance characteristics of many Linux IPC primitives and
investigates the performance impact of IPC latency on Firefox’s main IPC
subsystem (IPDL) [14]. Additionally, we have preliminary experiments on
decomposing the cost of IPC on Linux. Our IPC microbenchmarks reveal
that while most common IPC primitives exhibit overheads in the range
of 10-15 μs, utilizing shared memory (mmap) synchronized with atomic
instructions incurs substantially lower overhead, approximately 0.1-1 μs.
Implementing IPC using shared memory pages with atomic instructions
and busy-waiting achieves up to 150 times lower latency than Unix do-
main sockets when communicating processes are not executing on the
same CPU core. Our Firefox page load benchmarks, using the Raptor
framework, demonstrate that first contentful paint times are not conclu-
sively affected by artificially increased IPDL message delivery delays of up
to 100 μs. Additionally, our preliminary analysis of the write system call
for Unix domain sockets indicates that scheduler overhead likely accounts
for a significant portion, potentially around 50%, of the total cost. We
also find that the ring transition cost, which precedes the kernel write
syscall handler, is 38.7% of the cost of the syscall write handler itself.Computer Scienc
The Interplay of Psychosocial Factors in Predicting Allostatic Load: A Multidimensional Analysis
Get PDFThis study (n=663) investigates the relationship between psychosocial factors and high allostatic load in adult males and females, with a particular focus on marital status, childhood trauma exposure, and meditative practices using data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS 3) Biomarker Project. Through bivariate analysis and sex-stratified logistic regression models, the study seeks to identify significant predictors of high allostatic load. Results reveal marital status as the most salient predictor of high allostatic load— specifically with widowed males and never-married females showing higher odds of high allostatic load compared to their married counterparts. Furthermore, exposure to fewer areas of childhood trauma was significantly associated with lower odds of high allostatic load in across sexes. Contrary to expectations, participation in meditation and/or prayer was not significantly associated with lower odds of high allostatic load scores in either sex. Additionally, the study found that males and females who are married or who were exposed to five areas of trauma during childhood were significantly more likely to engage in meditative practices, along with post-retirement age females, widowed females, and females with high affectual solidarity toward family. These findings contribute to our understanding of how social relationships and early life experiences become biologically embedded differently across sexes, with implications for targeted interventions to reduce allostatic load and subsequent negative health outcomes.Health and Societ
Representing Dyslexia in Children’s Literature: Comparing the School/Diagnosis Story with the Fantasy
Get PDFRepresentations of dyslexia in children’s literature are sparse, much like the presence of
disability in children’s literature at large. Of the examples we do have of characters with dyslexia in
children’s literature, most are in the school setting. Almost all the depictions of dyslexia in
children’s literature are realistic school stories and diagnosis narratives where the protagonist is
diagnosed with dyslexia and subsequently is shown navigating their challenges with reading and
with their community, ultimately culminating in a happy ending that involves improvement in their
reading ability and/or acceptance by their community. While these stories are compelling, their
dominance in the corpus creates a lack of diverse stories, making dyslexia stories seem one-
dimensional. The ubiquity of these stories can also seem like a passive endorsement of the current
school institution and ignores valid criticisms of school as a disabling setting for students with
dyslexia.
Children’s fantasy offers an opportunity to provide alternative narratives for characters
with dyslexia. Fantasy escapes the restrictions imposed by the realistic school story. However,
despite being one of the most popular genres of children’s literature, characters with disability
rarely appear as the protagonists of fantasy novels. This thesis will explore the reasons for this and
establish why diversification from the school story is essential.Plan II Honors Progra
Essays on spatial economics and trade
Get PDFChapter 1 answers the question explores what the local and aggregate dynamic effects of regional migration flows are. To address this question, I combine a panel SVAR framework with a shift-share instrument based on lagged birth rates to analyze the short-, medium-, and long-term impacts of a 1% increase in migration to U.S. commuting zones. My estimates indicate that these inflows raise wages and output per worker, with effects peaking between 0.2% and 0.3% over time. However, the most substantial impact is observed in housing prices, which reach a long-run level 0.9% higher than pre-shock levels. To assess whether these local effects translate into significant aggregate outcomes, I examine labor "deportation" and "relocation" through the prism of a dynamic spatial model that I estimate through impulse response matching to the empirical findings. The deportation scenario removes workers unevenly across regions, resulting in a long-term reduction in aggregate output of 1%. In contrast, the relocation scenario redistributes these workers across other regions in the country. Although this redistribution does not alter the steady state, it can lead to a temporary output decline of up to 1%, with recovery times exceeding 50 years, depending on the skill composition of relocated workers. Chapter 2 examines the extent to which insurance market dynamics shape migration patterns generating a climate-resilient spatial distribution of population. Using state-level data, I analyze the interactions between private and government-provided HOI markets and their relationship to household migration decisions. To identify the causal impact of insurance availability on migration, I employ an instrumental variable approach utilizing exogenous storm events affecting neighboring counties. Results demonstrate that a 1% increase in insurance non-renewals within a county leads to a 0.1% rise in the outflow rate, while inflow rates remain largely unaffected. These findings suggest that, although disruptions in HOI markets directly influence households' decisions to leave climate-vulnerable areas, they have limited effect on disincentivizing new residents from moving to these regions. This highlights a crucial mechanism through which climate risk can reshape regional population dynamics. Finally, Chapter 3 examines whether supply chain shocks eventually dissipate, with transitory effects on aggregate variables in small open economies. It investigates the macroeconomic effects of maritime transportation shocks in the case of Chile. Leveraging high-frequency customs data and port-level statistics, I identify these shocks using a strategy based on the inelastic short-term supply of vessels embeded in a SVAR framework. I then use local projections to estimate the dynamic impact of shipping disruptions on trade flows, industrial production, employment, and prices. The results reveal that maritime shocks significantly affect both port operations and broader macroeconomic aggregates, with notable implications for trade patterns, producer prices, and sectoral output.Economic
Deep reinforcement learning in RoboCup Keepaway
Get PDFThe central theme in multi-agent reinforcement learning often involves the coordination of agents to accomplish a common task. However, in complex environ- ments, the agent action space scales exponentially with the number of agents. As a result of this complexity, the coordination graph formalism allows the construction of a joint policy by decomposing the joint action values into an aggregation of local action-value functions. This approach is concerned with maximizing the joint opti- mal action of coordinating agents. In this thesis, we demonstrate and analyze how coordinated reinforcement learning can be used to learn a multi-agent policy on the RoboCup Keepaway domain, a sub-task of the RoboCup 2D soccer domain. This the- sis contributes to the enhanced implementation of the RoboCup Keepaway in Python and the Analysis of the Deep Coordination Graph and Deep Implicit Coordination Graph Algorithms.Computer Scienc
Essays on macro finance and corporate finance
Get PDFThe financial market plays a crucial role in shaping the decisions of both firms and households. Exogenous shocks originating in financial markets can transmit to the broader economy through various channels. As a result, understanding the link between financial market conditions and macroeconomic outcomes has remained a central topic in the literature. This dissertation comprises three chapters that examine: (i) the macroeconomic implications of corporate debt maturity for inflation dynamics; (ii) the causal effects of local credit supply shocks on individual fertility choices; and (iii) firms’ hiring responses to local public health shocks.
Chapter 1, coauthored with Geunyong Park, studies the effect of firms’ debt maturity composition on their product pricing behavior. To empirically examine this relationship, we construct a novel micro-level dataset by linking manufacturers’ product-level price data with detailed information on their debt maturity schedules. Leveraging both a quasi-exogenous credit supply shock and a monetary policy shock, we show that firms with higher short-term debt ratios increase product prices more substantially when refinancing maturing debt becomes more costly and refinancing options are limited. Our findings suggest that firms respond to refinancing challenges by strategically raising prices to mitigate rollover risk. To rationalize these results, we develop a dynamic firm model in which firms issue both short- and long-term debt to finance operations in the face of negative cash-flow shocks. In the model, firms set prices strategically, which in turn affects the accumulation of customer capital. The results indicate that under increased debt repayment pressure and unfavorable refinancing conditions, firms raise product prices to manage rollover risk, even at the cost of losing future customers. Overall, the findings underscore the critical role of debt maturity profiles in shaping firms’ pricing decisions.
Chapter 2, coauthored with Bokyung Kim and Narae Park, focuses on the fact that the Great Recession marked the beginning of a historic downward trend in U.S. fertility rates. However, little is known about the role of credit supply shocks in explaining this decline. This chapter investigates whether, and to what extent, negative credit supply shocks contributed to falling fertility rates. We construct county-level credit supply shocks using variation in year-to-year changes in small business and home mortgage lending. Using exogenous shocks derived from Bartik (1991)’s shift-share design, we find that negative credit supply shocks reduce fertility rates both in the short and long run. Counties that experienced an average-sized credit contraction in 2009 saw a 3.17% long-term decline in fertility rates between 2009 and 2019. Our heterogeneity analysis shows that white individuals and those under age 30 responded most strongly to adverse credit conditions. These findings highlight that credit availability plays a key role in fertility decisions and that negative credit supply shocks can have long-lasting demographic consequences.
Chapter 3, coauthored with Bokyung Kim and Geunyong Park, explores how the opioid crisis has affected firms’ recruitment decisions. Using data on the near universe of U.S. job vacancies, we examine the impact of the opioid crisis on employers’ job skill requirements. Specifically, we study the effect of the 2010 reformulation of OxyContin, which substantially reduced the availability of abusable prescription opioids and triggered a transition toward more dangerous illicit opioids. Using a difference-in-differences event study design that exploits firm-level variation in exposure to the reformulation, we show that this shift reduced employment at the firm level. Furthermore, we find that firms increased requirements for cognitive and computer-related skills in response to the crisis.
Finally, we document that the reformulation led to declines in local store sales, firm revenue, and capital stock, illustrating how the opioid crisis can affect firms’ hiring decisions by altering a broad set of operational constraints and economic considerations.Economic
The development of imidazolium-based anion recognition functional materials and perfluorinated anion removal from water
Get PDFImidazolium quaternary salts are a versatile class of cationic building blocks that allow for anion recognition chemistry, ionic liquids, and N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs), making them suitable motifs for designing systems in a broad range of applications. In this dissertation, I present the application of the anion-recognition chemistry of an imidazolium-based ‘Texas-box’ macrocycle and show how it may be used to develop a stimuli-responsive materials. I also describe my efforts towards developing a new class of imidazolium-based receptors for the removal of perfluorinated anions from water.Chemistr