DigitalGeorgetown
Not a member yet
425578 research outputs found
Sort by
Lessons Learned and Neglected: Germany and the Viability of the Offensive Before World War I
No full textDrivers of HIV treatment interruption: Early findings from community-led monitoring program in Haiti
No full textAffiliated with the Center for Global Health Policy & PoliticsBackground
Failure to retain people living with HIV (PLHIV) in care remains a significant barrier to achieving epidemic control in Haiti, with as many as 30% lost from care within one year of starting treatment. Community-led monitoring (CLM) is an emerging approach of improving healthcare and accountability to service users, through a cycle of monitoring and advocacy. In 2020, a CLM program was launched in Haiti to identify barriers to retention and advocating for better health services.
Methods
Data from the community-led monitoring program in Haiti were analyzed, from a sample of 65 healthcare facilities in the Nord, Artibonite, and Ouest departments collected from April 2021 to February 2022. Qualitative data from six community-based focus groups and 45 semi-structured individual interviews were analyzed.
Results
Confidentiality and stigmatization emerged as barriers to care, particularly due to the separation of PLHIV from other patients in view of community members. To avoid identification, patients described traveling long distances, with the reimbursement of transportation costs described as being insufficient or unavailable. Costs of non-HIV clinical services were a frequent concern and respondents described a need for clinics to provide food during all patient visits. Stock-outs were a regular challenge; by contrast, treatment literacy did not emerge as a major barrier to retention.
Conclusions
These findings represent the first instance, to our knowledge, of original data from a community-led monitoring program being published in any country. These findings suggest that improving treatment retention for PLHIV is dependent on improving the acceptability and affordability of healthcare services. Ensuring confidentiality is critical, particularly where stigma is high. Retention could be improved by systematically strengthening patient confidentiality protections throughout the healthcare system, providing patients with sufficient travel compensation and other incentives, and delivering wraparound services provided for free. Addressing these challenges will require ongoing advocacy for community-developed recommendations and solutions
TLISI 2023: Teaching Anti-Racism in Italian Language Courses- Fighting Social Bias
No full textCan anti-racism be taught in the foreign language class? Topics such as homophobia, gender discrimination, and racism in Italian society can be integrated in the foreign language curriculum by engaging students in meaningful interpersonal cultural activities. Resources and materials of the modules developed will be shared with the participants
UNDERSTANDING AND LEVERAGING UNAFFILIATED VOLUNTEERS IN DISASTER
No full textIn any disaster event it is a near certainty that individuals will arrive wishing to help with response and recovery efforts who are not associated with a government or official volunteer agency. Managing the arrival of these individuals, known as ‘unaffiliated volunteers’, required deliberate advanced planning, but if successful, these personnel can be leveraged to attain unique capabilities often otherwise of limited availability to emergency management efforts. However, the capabilities, best management practices, and overall state of unaffiliated disaster volunteers has changed with recent technological shifts to create a fundamentally altered type of volunteer in the modern day. This paper examines the state of unaffiliated disaster volunteers today, examines trends emerging in disaster case studies, identify best practices for their management, and discusses relevant considerations for emergency management personnel seeking to manage and utilize this resource
Dupont East Civic Association, et al. v. District of Columbia Office Planning, Historic Preservation Office, Mayor's Agent for Historic Preservation and Mayor Muriel Bowser, et al. v. Dupont East Civic Association, et al.
No full text[MD]
*Title: Dupont East Civic Association, et al. v. District of Columbia Office Planning, Historic Preservation Office, Mayor's Agent for Historic Preservation
*Citation: No. 20-AA-0693
*Decided date: 24 August 2023
*Title: Mayor Muriel Bowser, et al. v. Dupont East Civic Association, et al.
*Citation: No. 2019-CA-004130-B
*Decided date: 24 August 202
The Catcher in the Rye: Performing Class Authenticity
No full textM.A.This thesis discusses class performance in The Catcher in the Rye. Namely, Holden Caulfield is a class performer whose quest for authenticity exemplifies the innate stratification of society that produces corrupt dynamics between rich and poor. His performance makes clear Catcher’s display of social order and the body through consumption, portrayal of the self, social transformation, and class costume. On his journey, Holden seeks to see more of the world, more of what he does not get at “home.” Ironically, this journey for enlightenment and authenticity displays his innate privilege and power. While readers and critics have long understood Catcher, rather idealistically, as the story of Holden’s search for authenticity, I argue that his search takes the form of class performance that results, materially, in the degradation and exploitation of poor bodies
Cross-Paragraph Discourse Structure in Rhetorical Structure Theory Parsing and Treebanking for Chinese and English
No full textPh.D.Hierarchical discourse structures benefit Natural Language Understanding tasks, such as text summarization and sentiment analysis. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is particularly significant at the macro levels, such as between paragraphs. Moreover, RST parsing at the macro level is more challenging than at the micro level – where intra-sentential relations are the easiest to identify.Despite a dozen RST datasets available in multiple languages, a sizeable Chinese RST corpus still needs to be created. Moreover, there awaits an in-depth analysis regarding how much RST associates with macro-level structures and how much parsing performance deteriorates at the macro level and across genres. Using English and Chinese as examples, this dissertation examines how macro-level discourse relations are presented in RST and whether state-of-the-art RST parsers capture them properly.Firstly, I create the largest Chinese RST Corpus – Georgetown Chinese Discourse Treebank (GCDT) – an open-source treebank with 50 medium-to-long documents from five different genres. I present basic statistics and highlight annotation decisions for Mandarin Chinese. I believe this sizeable multi-genre RST corpus can promote discourse analysis and RST parsing in Chinese and across languages.Secondly, I examine the association between paragraphs and RST trees from three aspects: a) studying how the lengths of EDU, sentence, and paragraph segments differ across genres and corpora; b) assessing whether or not paragraphs are fully contained in RST subtrees and 3) analyzing the distribution of intra- versus inter-paragraph relations across corpora and genres.Thirdly, I conduct parsing experiments on Chinese GCDT and English GUM using a state-of-the-art multilingual RST parser. I present both datasets' benchmark monolingual and multilingual parsing scores and boost the performance by pretraining and automatic translation. Moreover, I show that SOTA parsers are unsatisfactory in some genres and the inter-paragraph scenario
Essays on Mortgage Curtailment
No full textPh.D.This dissertation examines mortgage curtailment, an important household deleverage channel that has received little attention in the literature. In Chapter One, using Fannie Mae single-family loan performance data, I show that more than 20% of mortgage borrowers opt to curtail their mortgage payments in a given quarter if their mortgage was originated after 2009. These borrowers pay an additional 223 more per month than before they enter the program, which isequivalent to 18.7% of the monthly required mortgage payment. Additionally, higher income, higher credit scores borrowers, and mortgages with lower origination LTV ratios tend to contribute more. To address the endogeneity issue, I use the quasi-experiment setup of the HARP program’s eligibility condition. The results suggest that HARP eligibility leads borrowers to curtail $37.7 more than ineligible borrowers, with high original LTV borrowers being more likely to contribute more. Households increase curtailment while both income effect and intertemporal substitution effect are at play, indicating that they are more sensitive to changes in liquidity than to changes in mortgage rates
Hope in the Iron Cage: The Muslimist Discourse
No full textD.L.S.Max Weber described the human condition in modern times as alienated by the utter impersonalism of rationalized culture. The path towards rationalization ultimately caused the displacement of the historical God of the Christian faith as the ultimate source of meaning and order and the collapse of the religious ethos of brotherly love. A polytheism of values was restored in the form of a battle between impersonal forces in the soul of modern man. In this Weberian framework, modern man’s freedom rests on the possibility to take genuine responsibility for a choice between competing values and sources of authority. It is argued that cultural conflict stems from a failure to acknowledge the incommensurability of value claims articulated within different worldviews, as well as from a lack of awareness of one’s culturally determined biases. Weber’s analysis of the cultural pre-conditions for cultural conflict is applied to a modern Islamic discourse which has gained visibility in the Turkish public sphere after the 1980s economic liberalization. This thesis proposes this discourse as an example of successful engagement of irreconcilable value claims along a path of hermeneutical circularity. Because it enables genuine dialogue, this discourse suggests a possibility beyond cultural warfare
The Technologically Enhanced Mind and Party Lines: The Effects of Political Polarization on Adoption and Opinion of Brain-Computer Interfaces
No full textM.P.P.Artificial intelligence is exponentially allowing humanity to push the boundaries of what is possible. This is especially true when considering brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which open doors for communication between computers and the human mind. While BCI development is expanding in the United States, there is little empirical research that examines how differences in political ideology may impact the adoption of these devices into society. Using survey data from 2016 provided by the Pew Research Center, this thesis examines how political affiliation and other demographic variables may predict individuals who are more likely to use BCIs in the future and those who favor BCI integration into society in general. Through conducting two logistic regressions, evidence from this thesis suggests that political affiliation is a significant predictor in determining adoption and opinion of BCIs, with Democrats being more willing than Republicans to adopt BCIs and support their integration into society. Further research can build on these studies to help predict where BCIs may most likely be adopted in the United States, and as such, help policymakers prepare for the socioeconomic effects BCIs will have on society