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Moralist Reformation or Institutional Practicality: Coerced Confessions in Qing Courts of Law
No full textM.A.In cases as diverse as livestock theft to patricide, there was little deviation in the importance attached to confessions and admissions of guilt in the Qing legal system. Court cases were often resolved only when a local judicial magistrate successfully extracted a confession from the accused. Scholars have previously explained this importance of confessions as either a function of Confucian ideals of internal moral self-reformation or a function of beliefs in traditional Chinese medicine. This study offers a new perspective. Based on qualitative analysis of both translated and untranslated Qing archival material, I argue that the weighty importance of forced confessions is instead better understood as a result of what I deem “practical considerations.” A perceived unreliability of witness testimonies, a need for “real” evidence to prove “factual” guilt, and state capacity issues in the form of bureaucratic bottlenecks all forced magistrates to rely on speedy confessions to resolve cases and avoid lengthy legal procedures. Magistrates’ emphasis on coerced confessions was thus a calculated response to legal provisions and requirements. Understanding the reasons for the heightened importance of forced confessions may dispel pejorative beliefs that the use of coerced confessions in imperial China stems from inherent cultural or even racial attributes that distinguish Chinese justice from Western justice
"Going the Full Length": Authorial Shamelessness in the Work of Roth, Adichie, and Miller
No full textM.A.A long line of traditional criticism sees writing as a shameful act. “Going the Full Length” argues that creating fiction is in fact an act of shamelessness on behalf of the author. The authorial shamelessness found in fiction is dependent upon the author’snarcissism, self-indulgence, and willingness to expose themselves and others. This thesis develops a spectrum of shamelessness, and points to metafiction as one of the most shameless literary genres. The occurrence of shamelessness and its resistance is explored in three metafictional texts: Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979), Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie’s 2006 short story “Jumping Monkey Hill,” and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934). Authorial shamelessness is one crucial way in which an author claims their own authenticity and thus works as an act of resistance or de-stigmatization of widely held beliefs or societal norms
Topologically Associating Domains: At the Crossroads of Genome Structure and Function
No full textPh.D.Understanding the 3D architecture of the genome is crucial for elucidating its role in gene regulation and expression. The complex organization of the genome within the cell nucleus plays a pivotal role in gene expression. Topologically associating domains (TADs) are a prominent and ubiquitous architectural feature of genomes in higher organisms, defined as genomic regions that interact more frequently with each other than with their neighboring regions. It has been suggested that TADs function to facilitate the interaction of regulatory elements with their target genes located in the same TAD. However, the relationship between the structure of TADs and the function of the genes they contain remains unclear. This thesis explores the relationship between chromatin domain architecture and gene expression by application of single-cell and single-allele imaging approaches. I have developed innovative single-allele, high-throughput imaging assays, combining DNA and RNA fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) to simultaneously probe the structure of individual TADs and the transcriptional activity of their genes. My analysis revealed that transcriptional activity at the allele level is independent of TAD boundary pairing. Notably, variations in TAD boundary distances between alleles within the same nucleus did not correlate with gene activity. Moreover, my results show that global transcription inhibition does not alter TAD structure, whereas the degradation of cohesin, a key TAD architectural protein complex, leads to reduced transcriptional activity alongside the loss of TAD boundary interactions. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about the functional roles of TAD structure. They underscore the complexity of genomic regulation and open avenues for further research on the mechanisms governing gene expression and the potential of targeting genome architecture for therapeutic purposes
The Relationship Between Medicaid Expansion and Student Homelessness: A Matched Border-County Pair Analysis
No full textM.P.P.In addition to providing health insurance for low-income Americans, Medicaid acts as an effective anti-poverty tool by protecting households against financial shocks and increasing disposable income among its beneficiaries. Previous scholarship has found that these second-order effects extend into the realm of housing stability, revealing a correlation between Medicaid expansion and decreased rates of eviction. No research to date, however, has examined the relationship between Medicaid expansion and a broader range of housing outcomes, such as doubled-up and literal homelessness. This paper contributes to the literature by estimating whether the adoption of Medicaid expansion affects student homelessness at the county level. Using a unique panel dataset and a quasi-experimental border-county analysis design, my results find no significant relationship between Medicaid expansion and student homelessness. However, my results also suggest heterogenous impacts based on county characteristics. Notably, I find evidence of a negative, substantial, and statistically significant relationship between Medicaid expansion and student homelessness in counties where the baseline levels of uninsurance, student homelessness, and rent burden fall at or above the within-sample 75th percentile
Welcome & Opening Panel on Georgetown's Race, Power & Justice Course Pilot
No full textJoin CNDLS Executive Director Edward Maloney for an official welcome to TLISI 2024, followed by a moderated panel with faculty and students who piloted Georgetown's new Race, Power & Justice seminar, part of the new Pathways to Social Justice curriculum. Panelists will share their experiences and lessons learned from this innovative 1-credit course that all entering Georgetown students will take starting this fall
The Cost of Non-Compliance: Code Enforcement and Rental Housing Quality in Detroit, Michigan
No full textM.P.P.Despite strict enforcement of rental codes through tickets since 2018, it is clear that Detroit still faces issues with actually ensuring that properties become compliant. What part of the system is not working? What is the relationship between Detroit’s rental code enforcement and compliance rates? What can be done to make the system more efficient? This paper investigates the relationship between the total number of rental-related violations and the number of Certificates of Compliance issued in Detroit. Through my research, I establish an understanding of how the quantity of violations issued by Detroit to landlords is related to whether rental properties are brought into compliance. My dependent variable is total Certificates of Compliance in a census tract, and my independent variable is the number of rental property-related tickets given in a census tract. I find that there is a statistically significant, positive correlation between the number of violations and total compliance certificates in a census tract, though the magnitude of the relationship is minimal
Quantum Complexity, Simulation, and Random Access Memory
No full textPh.D.Quantum computers can potentially transform the landscape of computing by harnessing the distinct properties of quantum mechanics. In this dissertation, we deepen our understanding of quantum computing, exploring its capabilities, algorithmic design, and hardware architecture. Specifically, we- show an improved quantum query complexity lower bound for k-distinctness function;
- give a better analysis of the error bound of the product formula which is used in digital quantum simulation;
- demonstrate two discretization schemes to simulate lattice quantum chromodynamics on quantum computers;
- show a quantum algorithm computing the ground state energy of physical systems with low-depth circuits;
- develop a quantum lookup table that unifies all previous quantum RAM models
The Various Effects of Privacy Literacy on Users' Privacy Protection Behaviors
No full textM.P.P.Technological innovation outpaces regulation at an exceptional rate in the United States. This is extremely apparent in the realm of data privacy protections. In the past decade, much of this innovation is driven by the collection of “big data”. Companies use big data in a variety of ways including to improve product development, targeted advertising, and revenue through the sale of data. However, to do so, companies collect users personal, behavioral, engagement, and attitudinal data. This includes sensitive personal information like credit card numbers, home addresses, cell phone numbers, etc. While many users benefit from the companies’ use of this data, there is also inherent danger in aggregating individuals’ personal information. For example, in 2021 Wells Fargo suffered a data breach in which thousands of customers’ social security number, names, contact information, and data of births were removed from Wells Fargo’s private servers. Recently, California and thirteen other states passes comprehensive data privacy legislation to regulate companies’ data collection practices as well as to inform and protect users of these practices. Since then, companies have complied with such legislations by employing consent notifications. This paper explores the effects of privacy literacy on users’ privacy protection behaviors, in part by looking at user engagement with such notifications. This paper utilizes a critical thinking framework operationalized with knowledge and skill-based questions to show that privacy literacy improves users’ privacy protection behaviors. The solution to apathy about privacy protections is improved education to restore individuals’ senses of autonomy over their personal data
The Political Economy of Urban Health Security: Essays on Local-Level Pandemic Preparedness and Response
No full textPh.D.Recent trends in governance have emphasized the global nature of infectious disease threats and lead to the growth of health security models and frameworks that prioritize nation-states and supranational organizations. While the responses to these types of threats certainly require global governance and cooperation, this emphasis prioritizes the security aspects of these events, which are generally managed by national governments, as opposed to the health aspects, which are generally handled by subnational governmental units. Using the COVID-19 pandemic and mpox epidemic as case studies, this dissertation explored the political economy of local governments in cities to engage in pandemic preparedness and response activities. More specifically, it investigated several empirical sites of research, including the governance structures, historical and economic contexts, and the implementation of select processes underlying urban health security. Results suggested that local-level officials in cities perceived their participation in preparedness efforts before the COVID-19 pandemic to be relatively limited. Urban health security models exhibited heterogeneity according to the contexts in which cities operated, but results indicated that national governments are the entity generally accountable and responsible for a majority of preparedness and response activities, with local officials retaining a substantial role in overseeing and implementing policy operationalization, risk communication activities, and community coordination. Other results relating to the associations between pre-pandemic local-level public health financing and mortality outcomes in large cities in the United States found no relationship between financing and mortality. Finally, a year-long investigation into the use of a social media platform by the Chicago Department of Public Health revealed that most of the communications were unidirectional, focused on communicable diseases, were posted in English, and during the standard workday; communications containing additional media, those posted in English, those posted during the workday, and discussing certain health topics received significantly higher levels of public engagement. Additionally, a majority of communications related to mpox sought to inform the public, as opposed to explicitly attempting to influence behavior. In a world characterized by increasing urbanization and infectious disease risk, these results hold important implications for the theory and practice of health security and urban health