University of Maryland, Baltimore County
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Longing for Theory: Performance Debate in Action
No full textThis study richly describes the practice of performance debate, a largely race-based style of policy debate, a competitive forensics event for high school and college students. I examine participants' interpretations and experiences of performance debate practice in order to explore the interplay of agency and structure within this particular social context. To do so, I explore the following questions: What structures of economic, social, and cultural capital relate to the reproduction of the debate community as white and privileged? How do performance debate participants, including coaches and debaters, interact with concepts and practicethat bring issues of oppression and power, especially regarding race, to the surface of the debate world, as being always already there, reveal student social location as pertinent, given that race and class are always already there, and explore structural explanations for racial disparities? How do performance debaters creatively enact a radical practice that performs difference within the policy debate world, rejecting assimilation but insisting on participation and agency? In this dissertation, I discuss the role of various forms of capital in the reproduction of the policy debate community. This reproduction continues to reproduce whiteness and other forms of privilege in the community, the creation of UDLs notwithstanding. Structures, then, restrict access to debate in ways that disproportionately affect students of color. While acknowledging these structures, however, I also describe the ways the practice of performance debate directly challenges whiteness in debate in order to create a counterhegemonic community that works toward liberation. This community uses performance debate as a creative, agentic, racialized response to white dominance that has a different social action: the creation of space for leadership training and critical voices. This response focuses on positive racial identity development and the development of the sociological imagination, specifically around racialized structures. Further, the performance debate community's collaborative nature is necessary not just for emotional support but because this is a Black nationalist practice as opposed to an individualistic, color-blind practice. Finally, the practice sees debate as doing: performing the Black body, performing the cultural styles of people of color, and in general attempting to do within the social space rather than playing games or just talking
Lexington's Grandsons: The Northern Response to the Pratt Street Riot
No full textThis thesis adds a new take to the extensive historiography on the Pratt Street Riot, an early Civil War event in which one of the first Northern regiments sent to defend the capital was attacked by a mob in Baltimore as it marched through the city on April 19, 1861. The focus is not on the Pratt Street Riot as it related to the people and events in Baltimore, but instead on how the riot affected Northern public opinion as it related both to Baltimore and the Massachusetts regiment that was attacked. The Sixth Massachusetts is at the center of this narrative, and its status in the public before, during, and after the riot is used to show how seminal events in history like the outbreak of Civil War can affect public memory of a random volunteer state militia regiment or any other institution. The controversy over how the Pratt Street Riot should be remembered in the days, years, and decades after April 19, 1861 is also used to show how public memory is contested and can remain static or change dramatically over time. Newspaper articles, letters, and unit histories were used along with secondary sources to build the argument of this thesis
Calculating Representativeness of Geographic Sites Across the World
No full textGLOBE is a global correlation engine, a project to study the effects on Land Change based on a set of parameters that include temperature, forest cover, human population, atmospheric parameters and many other variables. The aim of this research is to understand, how a study or a set of studies of specific geographic areas is representative of other areas of the world. The generic form of the question is, given a set of data points with a set of variables, how to determine how much a selected subset of points represents the rest of the distribution. The research aims to answer a set of questions which include the definition of representativeness of a geographical site and how the representativeness can be computed. Researchers studying land change will dynamically select a subset of variables which they would like to study. Hence the method developed not only computes representativeness, but does so in an efficient manner. For this purpose, we apply dimension reduction techniques to reduce the size of computation and analyze the effectiveness of using these techniques to calculate representativeness
PAH Transport in Amended Sediment Caps
No full textBy isolating contaminated sediments, capping can effectively reduce exposure to contaminants and the potential for contaminant transport into the food chain. However, typical sand caps have little sorption capacity to retard the transport of hydrophobic contaminants such as PAHs that can be mobilized by groundwater flow. The overall objective of this research was to develop and improve engineering tools for more efficient cap designs by enhancing the scientific understanding of organic contaminant transport through sediment caps and the role of sorbent amendments in enhancing cap performance. Laboratory column experiments were performed using contaminated sediments and capping materials obtained from a creosote contaminated EPA Superfund site. The study examined activated carbon and peat amendments to the cap as ways to enhance contaminant retardation and evaluated the effect of biological activity in the cap on PAH transport. A major contribution of this research was the measurement of very low concentrations of a range of PAHs in cap pore water using a recently developed solid phase microextraction analytical technique. Azoic laboratory column experiments demonstrated rapid breakthrough of lower molecular weight PAHs when groundwater seepage was simulated through a column packed with coarse sand capping material. After eight pore volumes of flow, most PAHs measured showed at least 50% of initial source pore water concentrations at the surface of 65 cm capping material. PAH concentration in the cap solids was low and comparable to background levels typically seen in urban depositional sediment, but the pore water concentrations were high. Thus, performance monitoring of sand caps need to include measurement of PAHs in cap porewater. Column experiments with a peat amendment delayed PAH breakthrough. The most dramatic result was observed for caps amended with activated carbon at a dose of 2% by dry weight. PAH concentrations in the pore water of the activated carbon amended caps were 3-4 orders of magnitude lower (0.04�0.02 �g/L for pyrene) than concentrations in the pore water of the source sediments (26.2�5.6 �g/L for pyrene) even after several hundred pore volumes of flow. Enhancing the sorption capacity of caps with activated carbon amendment even at a lower dose of 0.2% demonstrated a significant impact on contaminant retardation suggesting consideration of active capping for field sites prone to groundwater upwelling or where thin caps are desired to minimize change in bathymetry and impacts to aquatic habitats. The major trends of PAH transport through sorbent amended caps were reasonably predicted using standard approaches used in groundwater transport modeling Azoic caps were also compared with biologically amended caps. The biodegradation potential of PAHs in sand caps used for sediment remediation was high in the presence of oxygen and nutrients. An initial lag phase in the biological amended cap allowed the early breakthrough of some low molecular weight PAHs; however, over time PAH degradation occurred in the column reducing the concentrations through the cap. When pore water concentrations of 10 parent PAHs and 14 alkyl clusters were measured, the surface of the biological cap remained toxic (based on the US EPA's narcosis model). Results from this study indicate sorbent amended caps combined with biological activity may lead to long-term sustainable cap designs even in areas prone to groundwater upwelling
The Use of Agent-Based Models as Virtual Laboratories for Exploring Human-Environment Interactions in Land-Use Systems
No full textLand-cover changes from human land-uses are seen as primary sources of global environmental change. The multitude of forces influencing land change and the complexity of their interactions present substantial challenges for connecting land-use changes to their causes at and between local, regional, and global scales. Due to this complexity, simulation modeling is a primary tool for conceptualizing land-use system structure and testing causal explanations of observed patterns of land changes. Inductive modeling methods, which have been the dominant approach in land change science, have advanced understanding of global patterns and driving forces of land-use and -cover change (LUCC). However, because land-use systems exhibit nonlinear dynamics driven by adaptive responses of human decision-makers, deductive modeling methods that build process-based understanding of land change are also needed. Using two different agent-based models as virtual laboratories, this dissertation explores how individual land users' decision-making processes translate into observed land-use patterns across a spectrum of different land-use systems. The first model represented the decision-making models and interactions of consumer, farmer, and developer agents in land and housing markets in an expanding ex-urban land-use system, which produced development patterns characteristic of 'urban sprawl' from the bottom-up. The same modeling framework was adapted to experimentally test alternative developer decision-making models, and results indicated cognitive biases and credit constraints may lead to inefficient land-use patterns and impediments to adopting ecological subdivision designs. The second model tested mechanistic explanations of empirically-based, system-level patterns of agricultural change due to individual land-user responses to changing environmental, demographic, and economic conditions. Results demonstrated threshold transitions between alternative livelihood strategies defined by interactions between market influence and population pressure. The model was then expanded and applied to a range of real land-use systems. Comparisons across six sites illustrated the varying effects of common processes driving land-use change, and revealed important mechanisms that influenced agents' land-use decisions and resulting patterns of LUCC. Ultimately, agent-based virtual laboratories made explicit and testable connections between individual decision-making processes and system-level patterns of LUCC. I conclude with a synthesis of the insights gained from model experiments, and put forth a framework for a general land systems theory
PROVENANCE-BASED APPROACHES TO SEMANTIC WEB SERVICE DISCOVERY AND USAGE
No full textThe World Wide Web Consortium defines a Web Service as a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Web Services have become increasingly important both within and across organizational boundaries. With the recent advent of the Semantic Web, web services have evolved into semantic web services whose components are described using machine understandable semantics. However, the discovery of semantic web services, the matching of user requirements to available services, still has a number of unanswered questions. In particular, there is criticism that current discovery methods focus exclusively on service inputs and outputs and ignore how services actually perform their tasks. This lack of information regarding how a service operates can also severely impact understanding of web service results. We show how ideas from data provenance - capturing the history and lineage of data - can be applied to web services. We describe our approach to capture service provenance using Semantic Web technologies and subsequently design a new web service discovery algorithm around it. Further, we present a framework for capturing and integrating provenance in multi-service workflows
THE THERAPEUTIC BOND AS A MODERATOR OF BASELINE PROCESS VARIABLES AND CLIENT CHARACTERISTICS IN THE COMBINE STUDY
No full textThe interaction between client characteristics and client perception of bond and its effect on drinking during treatment has not been well researched. This study conducted secondary data analyses using the COMBINE Study data to explore: 1) the relation between client perception of bond and drinking outcomes during treatment and 2) client perception of bond as a moderator of the effects of baseline readiness to change, abstinence self-efficacy, and psychological distress on during treatment drinking. Separate analyses were run for the individuals receiving Medication Management (N = 974) and a subsample who also received the Combined Behavioral Intervention (N = 459). Regression analyses were conducted to determine if client perception of bond was a significant predictor of PDA and DDD during 16 weeks of treatment, followed by a series of moderated hierarchical multiple regression models to examine client perception of bond as a moderator of the effects of baseline readiness to change, abstinence self-efficacy, and psychological distress on drinking outcomes. The three key baseline variables were analyzed separately to facilitate interpretation of the results. No significant results emerged from these analyses. Future research may consider more inclusive measures of the alliance and trials that do not include pharmacotherapy interventions to further assess the relations between the alliance, baseline client characteristics, and drinking during treatment
Automatic Detection of Adrenal Gland Abnormality using the Random Forest Classification Framework combined with Histogram Analysis
No full textDespite the fact that PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication Systems) has been available commercially for more than 15 years, few decision support tools exist for routine image interpretation. We believe that characterization of adrenal abnormality is an excellent candidate for such a decision support tool. Adrenal abnormalities are commonly identified on CT (Computed Tomography) and are seen in at least 5% of CT examinations of the thorax and abdomen. Previous studies have suggested that evaluation of Hounsfield units within a region of interest or a histogram analysis of a region of interest can be used to determine the likelihood that an adrenal gland contains an adenoma. However, the selection of a ROI (Region of Interest) can be arbitrary and operator dependent. We hypothesize that segmenting the entire adrenal gland automatically without any human intervention and then performing a histogram analysis to detect adrenal abnormality can not only improve accuracy but can also be achieved without any additional work or time demands on the radiologist. Three techniques are evaluated to perform automatic segmentation of the adrenal glands which include the GVF (Gradient Vector Flow) Snake approach, Random Regression Forest approach and the Random Classification Forest approach. We finally use the Random Classification Forest framework to automatically perform a pixel-wise classification of an entire CT volume into three classes namely right adrenal, left adrenal and background. Once we obtain this classification we then perform histogram analysis to detect adrenal abnormality
3D (2012)
No full textPromotional materials produced for 3D, performed by the UMBC Theatre Department in October 2012. Includes playbill, program, and ten publicity photographs.October 16-October 20, 201
Fabulous Presto (2012)
No full textPromotional materials produced for Fabulous Presto, performed by the UMBC Theatre Department in November and December 2012. Includes playbill, program, and ten publicity photographs.November 29-December 2, 201