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FLOOD INSURANCE DECISION-MAKING IN SACRAMENTO COUNTY, CA
No full textThere is widespread research on how individual levels of risk perception and protective behaviors are impacted by flood control policy and structural mitigation measures. Despite this wealth of knowledge, there is a limited understanding of flood control policy impacts insurance uptake decisions, particularly when mandatory purchase requirements are in effect. Using the National Flood Insurance Program [NFIP] in Sacramento County, CA as a case study, this research addresses this gap. The present study uses aggregated data on policies in force, flood risk maps, and demographic data to compare how insurance uptake decisions differ between officially designated Special Flood Hazard Areas [SFHAs] with mandatory purchase requirements and non-SFHA with voluntary insurance participation. In the context of this study, the number of insurance policies in force will be measured by take-up rates and policy retention. Additionally, insurance policy quality will be measured by coverage levels and deductible amounts at the building and contents levels. Using Ordinary Least Squares [OLS] regression, the present study finds that mandatory purchase requirements in SFHAs increase take-up rates as hoped. However, these SFHA policies have lower coverage levels, and higher deductibles, and are in effect for less time. The findings of this study indicate that future research needs to focus on policy enforcement and the role of risk perception in insurance decisions
Administrative Burdens or Psychologically Directed Rhetoric: The Driving Force Behind Civic Voting Behavior
No full textM.P.P.Conservative presidential candidates have espoused rhetoric that is contemptuous of federal benefits and skeptical of the federal government’s ability to disseminate benefits. I hypothesize that the combination of administrative burdens associated with accessing benefits, in conjunction with GOP rhetoric, affect American’s civic voting behavior and incentivize Americans to vote Republican. My framework, on how administrative burdens affect people’s behavior, stems from Donald Moynihan et. al’s research on how administrative burdens impose a “psychological cost” on those seeking to access welfare benefits, which impacts their perception of politics. I hypothesize that those on welfare, as well as those who dislike welfare spending, have lower faith in US democracy. To test my hypothesis, I use NORC’s GSS survey data and regress respondents’ attitudes on welfare spending on their voting behavior. My regression results, however, counter my hypothesis: those most likely on welfare benefits are 1.12 times more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans for president. However, my regression results do show that those who harbor disdain for welfare programs are 1.365 times more likely to vote for GOP presidential candidates and are 1.97 times more likely to have less faith in American democracy. Ultimately, my research shows that GOP rhetoric is more salient with those who assume what accessing welfare benefits is like, rather than welfare recipients. As such, I recommend policymakers make concerted efforts to illustrate, via an Internet portal, how to access benefits and what benefits someone is eligible for from all federal agencies
Book Review: Literatures of the World: Beyond World Literature, by Ottmar Ette, translated by Mark W. Person
No full textReview of - Literatures of the World: Beyond World Literature, by Ottmar Ette, translated by Mark W. Person. Leiden: Brill, 2022, 486 p., ISBN 9789004395541https://doi.org/10.57928/brwf-f67
Intrastate Conflict: The Human Factor
No full textD.L.S.Since the end of World War II, the number of large-scale interstate conflicts and wars has declined. However, acts of terrorism and territorial, and other disputes continue to occur. Some of those internal disputes escalate into intrastate conflicts that threaten United States interests. Escalation normally occurs when peaceful resolutions fail or are not implemented; alternatively, parties in conflict choose to raise and bear arms. For instance, the presence and activities of the Islamic State in Egypt not only threaten the national government but U.S. operations in the Sinai Province. Residents protest and complain about unresolved complaints of marginalization and mistreatment. Concurrently, in the Sinai, militants exacerbate anti-government violence which threatens the U.S. government’s interest in Egypt and regional stability. Therefore, it is important for the U.S. government, military leaders, and others who are responsible for employing the U.S. instruments of national power to maintain awareness of the international environment and importantly, the emergence of intrastate conflicts. This thesis primarily explores the role of human factors manifest in selected attributes and behaviors of opposition leaders in the evolution of social-political conflicts into armed conflicts. In doing so, intrastate conflicts are analyzed to better understand their causation and to help policymakers develop better strategies to address them. Intrastate conflicts are internal armed clashes between a government and a non-governmental party. The rationale for focusing only on intrastate conflicts is to limit the scope of the research and to target the genesis of conflict before they extend across borders becoming interstate crises with additional policy implications. Importantly, general conflict and war causation factors identified in the survey of literature provide foundational perspectives, however, the literary contributions surveyed do not sufficiently address the intricacies and impact of the human element associated with conflict causation. To fill this gap, this research examines the human factors of government adversary leaders in intrastate conflicts to determine how they influence others to engage in conflict against their governments.The result of the analysis fulfills the aim of the research: to explore the role of human factors manifest in selected attributes and behaviors of opposition leaders in the evolution of social-political conflicts into armed conflicts and to develop an intrastate conflict forecasting model based on those factors. Finally, through interpretive analysis of adversary leaders that are engaged in conflict against their governments, I conclude that human factors can contribute to our understanding of the causes of such conflicts. The human factors-based intrastate conflict forecasting model developed in this thesis is offered as a format for thinking about and making estimates about whether particular ongoing or future conflicts are more or less likely to progress to armed conflict, given the characteristics of the opposition leadership examined
Negotiating Belonging and Securitization in a Community Language School
No full textPh.D.Belonging is essential for the cognitive and socioemotional wellbeing and successful schooling of all children and youth (Abawi & Berman, 2019; Halse, 2018). For students from immigrant backgrounds, belonging is often constrained by stereotypical images of their racialized subjectivities and dominant discourses that silence and devalue their perspectives in school spaces (Guo, Maitra & Guo, 2019; Russell & Mantilla-Blanco, 2022; Wang & Hoffman, 2021). These dynamics are further complicated for immigrant and immigrant-origin children and youth whose languages are implicated in securitization discourses (Collins, 2022; Perera & Makoni, 2019) and who are forced to navigate institutionally authorized feelings of threat, apprehension, and suspicion in a range of social settings (Rampton & Charalambous, 2020; Zakharia, 2020). The bulk of scholarship on belonging has confined itself to mainstream schooling experiences in K-12 schools and is yet to account for how securitization functions as an antithesis to belonging in community-based education spaces. This dissertation is a two-year critical ethnography (Fitzpatrick & May, 2022) designed to investigate the educational experiences, policies, and practices in a community Arabic language school located in a public school facility in the U.S. I drew on new materialism as an onto-epistemology (Barad, 2007; 2013) and analyzed two years of evidence from on-line and in-person classroom observations as well as interviews and conversations with school administrators, teachers, students, and parents. The goal was to interrogate the manner by which dynamics of (non)belonging are negotiated in the context of the school. Findings suggest that securitization processes functioned to hamper belonging in the experiences of teachers and students at this Arabic school. In particular, securitization discourses were articulated through spatial regimes and acts of spatial policing enacted by public school actors against the community schoolteachers and students. These acts sanctioned how spaces (e.g., classrooms, whiteboards) could or could not be used by the community schoolteachers and students. I argue that the regulation of micro-level spatial practices served to socialize teachers and students at the Arabic school into invisible and apolitical subjectivities within the indexical order of the White public space (Hill, 1998). However, I also show how school actors at the Arabic school employed a socio-material understanding of language pedagogy to navigate the racialization and silencing effects of securitization discourses and challenge the normative discourses that impact their students’ emotions of belonging in English-dominated settings. Overall, the findings highlight the interface between mainstream and community schooling in the lives of immigrant and immigrant-origin children and youth , and the role that home language education can play in supporting (and sometimes obstructing) belonging. I discuss the implications of these findings, focusing on the need to establish interinstitutional connections between mainstream and community schools as fundamental to the socio-emotional wellbeing and educational equity of racialized children and youth and offer recommendations for researchers and educators
Characterizing the Impact of Chronic Filarial Infections on Viral-Specific Immunologic Memory: Mechanisms of Bystander Immune Regulation
No full textPh.D.Filarial infections alter the immune environment through a variety of mechanisms including shaping the T cell subset repertoire and by affecting the function of antigen presenting cells. This, in turn, leads to diminished production of CD4+-associated cytokine production in response to parasite antigen and to non-parasite bystander antigens and pathogens. We investigated how bystander memory responses to virus antigens are altered in filarial/viral co-infections. We discovered that filarial-induced downregulation of human dendritic cell (DC) -function was largely due to extracellular vesicles (EVs) and EV-containing excretory/secretory (E/S) products. Through RNASeq, we were able to identify the pathways regulated in DCs by EV conditioning and could show – using SARS-CoV2-specific T cell lines (TCLs) as indicators that EV conditioned DC markedly downregulated antigen-induced T cell effector function. Finally, we characterized the viral history of a large cohort of Loa loa-infected subjects using VirScan to catalog the IgG response to all viruses in the human virome. We found that there were notable differences in the complexity of viral immune repertoires among filarial-infected and -uninfected individuals and that some of these reflected altered binding specificity to particular viral epitopes. Our findings suggest that chronic filarial infections can have significant impacts on viral-specific immune responses through multiple mechanisms. This impact has the potential to affect viral-specific bystander memory and the nature of the response to particular viral species
. Order, In re Carter W. Page, a U.S. Person, No. 16-1182, 17-52, 17-375, 17-679, GID.C.00298 (FISA Ct. June 9, 2023)
No full text[MD]
### Description
June 25, 2020 Order (i) required 6-month reporting on retention, use, disclosure of any Page FISA information; (ii) consistent with 50 USC 1809(a)(2) and 1827 (a)(2) (which make it a criminal offense to disclose/use information obtained through FISA Titles I, III but not authorized by statute) prohibited further use or disclosure of such information, except as provided for in the order. FISC only permitted use/disclosure of Page FISA information insofar as necessary to disciplinary reviews of government personnel/necessary to investigate/prosecute potential crimes relating to conduct of Page/Crossfire Hurricane investigations.
Special Counsel Durham Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns contained Classified Appendix with limited amount of Page FISA information. Gov’t wanted to distribute to Members/certain staff of HPSCI/SSCI, Judiciary committees and gang of eight [ID’d in covert action statute: 50 USC § 3093(c)(2)]. Court approved. Order required gov’t to submit copy of the Motion suitable for public release, including any redactions gov’t believes necessary. If redactions, have to provide written explanation of why necessary.First page of documen
Literary Communities Shaping Democratic Values in Authoritarian Regimes: Censorship and Civil Society in South Korea, 1960s-1980s
No full textM.A.The South Korean authoritarian governments of Park Chung Hee (1961-1979) and Chun Doo Hwan (1979-1988) each established stringent censorship regimes. Though many accounts generally focus on censorship of journalistic information and reportage, this article seeks to expand upon existing scholarship by focusing on the political function of literary texts, literary communities, and the interaction between literary and journalistic censorship. Building upon theories of civil society and authoritarian censorship, the author argues that literary communities can create readership communities that ascribe literary value to certain works over others, shaping reader norms. As seen with South Korea, figures recognized within literary communities become costly individuals for authoritarian regimes to silence, activating avenues of political dissent if persecuted. Additionally, they may act as representatives of literary readers and publishers, forming alliances with other sectors of civil society such as religious groups and student groups. Lastly, literary communities may inspire collective or atomized action against the state. Literary communities were able to perform all such functions during the first half of the Park Chung Hee regime, forcing serious revision in state censorship policies. In the second half of Park Chung Hee’s rule, strengthened media censorship policies lessened the incidence of political resistance linked to persecuted literary figures. Literary communities were less effective in countering persecution of literary figures under the Chun Doo Hwan’s even more thorough censorship regime. Despite concerted state efforts to nullify their impact, however, literary communities were still successful in circulating regime-critical texts and were able to affect the democratic movement by cooperating with other anti-regime organizations and inspiring collective and atomized political action
Conewago Church
No full textDraft of a Constitution for the Improvement of Conewago Church**Former finding aid locations: 119_17_4_2; 55.25 A*