18693 research outputs found
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Decay, Destruction and the Moebius Aesthetic
No full textFor my thesis, my masteries are destruction, dynamic material, and style matching to Moebius. This project took around one year to complete. The scene takes place in an abandoned, lost clinic, where molds and fungus have escaped, parasitizing and killing the doctor. The clinic is overrun with these growths, which serve as the central focus of the scene. The fungi spread across walls, floors, and furniture. One level of the scene has a peaceful yet hopeless early morning atmosphere at its core, while the other closely matches the style of Moebius’s (Jean Giraud) artwork.
The destruction is explored through the main elements: the corpse, organs, and architecture. Extensive sculpture, modeling, and texturing techniques were used to study the breakdown of different models, ensuring that the destruction elements integrate seamlessly into the scene, enhancing its storytelling.
In terms of style matching to Moebius, I focused on learning the workflow for stylized game art. By adjusting textures and shaders, I balanced realistic and stylized aspects without changing the geometry, achieving a unique aesthetic that fits the Moebius style.
Dynamic material plays a key role in bringing the scene to life. The movement of various elements enhances storytelling, making the environment feel more vivid and interactive. Through a multiply method, different dynamic elements were created, adding depth and complexity to the scene.
This project has contributed to my growth by refining my ability to blend realism with stylization and enhance environmental storytelling. It also underscores the importance of creating immersive, dynamic worlds in the gaming industry, offering valuable insights for future creative and technical projects
Making the Golden World: Allegories and Alchemies of Material Wealth in Early Modern Literature and Drama
No full textThis dissertation argues that early modern poets and philosophers retained the names of classical virtues but transformed them to serve materialistic ends of empire and individual lucre. Despite a tendency in early modern studies to sequester the poet’s golden world—as Sir Philip Sidney conceives of it in his Defence of Poesy—from the land of gold Sir Walter Ralegh claims to have discovered in the Americas, poetic invention yokes together the fashioning of moral virtue and the pursuit of endless profits. Through close readings of Sidney’s poetics and poesy, Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s drama, and Ben Jonson’s plays and masques, Making the Golden World juxtaposes two golden worlds to show that material profits and imperial conquest motivated the fashioning of moral virtue in early modern poetry and drama. Although early modern poets frequently represent the desire for gold and the development of moral virtue as antithetical to each other, one cannot ignore the impact of early modern Europe’s insatiable desire for New World gold on the production of literature. Making the Golden World tells the story of how the early modern world was fashioned in poetry through competing conceits of allegorical and alchemical counterfeiting, in which allegory conceals and alchemy exposes the subordination of moral virtue to profit
Essays in Applied Microeconomics
No full textThis dissertation contributes to three interconnected areas of economic research: microeconomics, behavioral economics, and urban economics. Each chapter examines how individual decision-making processes may produce more pronounced economic patterns, while highlighting the role of psychological factors and spatial considerations in shaping outcomes. Chapter 1 studies the causes and dynamics of segregation in US neighborhoods. A conditional instrumental variables estimator allows for unbiased estimation of preferences for past neighborhood minority shares by addressing endogeneity concerns present in my theoretical model. I use estimated preference parameters to simulate neighborhood population dynamics for Texas. I regress measures of racial animus and xenophobia on estimated preference parameters for every US state. Within-group preferences are identified for both Whites and Minorities for four working age population cohorts. These preferences can partially be explained by racial animus and xenophobia. The results of my model predict a worsening of segregation trends driven by discrimination. These findings are robust to socioeconomic controls and county fixed effect estimations. Chapter 2 investigates hurdle rate contracts, risk taking, and search behavior. Entrepreneurial risk taking is well documented, despite the classic notion that individuals are risk-averse. Typical behavioral explanations for this are unsatisfactory, as entrepreneurs often risk investors’ funds, not their own. Venture capital firms investing their funds into entrepreneurs often use hurdle-rate contracts to pay managers. We conduct a laboratory experiment to evaluate these hurdle-rate contracts and their role in promoting risk taking and search by managers. We find that contracts with high hurdle-rates may be harmful to the risk exposure and profits of investors. Conversely, moderately set hurdle rates may improve a manager’s search behavior and choices. Our results contribute to the literature’s understanding of the entrepreneurial risk taking puzzle, and provide guidance for venture capital firms using hurdle-rate contracts. Chapter 3 is a study of language in referee reports written about Economics manuscripts. Data on letters from Economic Inquiry provide a rich setting to study the role of language in editorial decisions, and test for gender differences in how language is used. The editorial data is bolstered by demographic variables produced by a large language model. Text analysis allows for a study of the intensity of language used in referee reports. We observe referee recommendation and the ultimate editorial publication decision. Results point to significant communication differences between genders, with females speaking more objectively. Furthermore, female’s referee reports recommendations carry more weight in editorial decisions. This study contributes to our understanding of how language relates to career outcomes. These three chapters collectively examine how social dynamics, corporate contracts, and communication patterns shape economic outcomes across different domains. Chapter 1 reveals how discriminatory preferences drive neighborhood segregation patterns, while Chapter 2 demonstrates how hurdle rate contracts influence the risk-taking behavior of venture capital fund managers. Chapter 3 studies professional communication, showing language differences between genders and gaps in recommendation outcomes. Together, these studies illuminate ways social preferences, institutional structures like compensation contracts, and communication styles can generate adverse economic outcomes, offering insights into mechanisms that operate at the neighborhood, firm, and professional levels
Essays in Immigration Economics and Immigrant Location Choice
No full textAcross the chapters of this dissertation, I analyze the drivers of immigrant location choice in host countries. I specifically contrast the sorting patterns of refugee and nonrefugee immigrants, and explore how the influence of ethnic networks, economic conditions, and other host-country and origin-country characteristics contribute to the distinct location choices observed across these groups. Prior research suggests that immigrants are drawn to both economic fundamentals and ethnic networks. However, places that have good fundamentals–in terms of employment, wages, and desirable house prices–often have disproportionately large ethnic networks, making it difficult to disentangle the contributions of economic fundamentals and ethnic networks in driving immigrant location choices. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I exploit variation in ethnic networks and economic conditions arising from the allocation of refugees by resettlement agencies, which creates geographically dispersed ethnic networks and substantial cross-variation between ethnic networks and economic fundamentals. I then track refugee secondary migration to estimate the relative importance of ethnic networks and economic fundamentals in determining refugees’ relocation decisions. I find that refugee secondary migration responds strongly to co-ethnic networks and, surprisingly, tends to flow toward cities with lower employment and wages after accounting for ethnic networks. These findings contrast with previous studies which find disproportionately large immigrant inflows to high-wage, high-cost cities. While the first chapter contrasts the role of ethnic networks and economic fundamentals more broadly, the second chapter of my dissertation studies the relative importance of two distinct economic factors, employment opportunities and house prices, for refugees and nonrefugee immigrant groups. While existing research generally concludes that immigrants are primarily motivated by employment and wage characteristics of locations, it often fails to distinguish between refugees and non-refugee immigrants–groups that face distinct migration contexts and may exhibit systematically different sorting patterns upon arrival. I study the relocation decisions of refugees in the US in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008-9, which saw house prices plummet and employment fall throughout the country. I reproduce earlier findings showing Mexican immigrants relocating to cities with relatively strong labor markets. Contrastingly, I find that refugees’ relocation decisions were largely motivated by relative house price declines across cities rather than favorable employment opportunities. The effect is substantial–a 10 percent disproportionate decline in city house prices relative to the mean decline across cities is associated with a 13 percent disproportionate rise in the refugee population of the city. While seemingly at odds with the existing literature, I propose a mechanism to reconcile these differences based on the strength of ties to the home country of different immigrant groups
Multi-Agent Translation Team (MATT): Enhancing Low-Resource Language Translation through Multi-Agent Workflow
No full textLike humans, large language models (LLMs) benefit from revision and refinement, especially for complex tasks requiring critical thinking. Inspired by human collaborative problem-solving, this study introduces a novel multi-agent workflow designed to enhance LLM translations from English to low-resource languages. Multi-Agent Translation Team (MATT) involves the collaboration of agents that are assigned specific roles, such as translator, evaluation coordinator, and various levels of editing, to refine the initial translation into the most desired version possible. The agents work collaboratively in an iterative loop until the translation loss meets a satisfactory threshold. It stands out from other multi-agent workflows by combining the strengths of LLMs and Google Translate (GT) to achieve higher translation quality. This approach shows promise in translating short sentences and long chunks from English to languages such as Vietnamese, Hindi, and Malayalam
Organizational Forms, Taxation, and Capital: New Evidence
No full textRelative to noncorporations, corporations\u27 double taxation rates in the US have declined since 1987, predicting that investors will reallocate capital among organizational forms. To test the prediction, we investigate a special sample of noncorporations: publicly-traded partnerships (PTPs). As noncorporate tax efficiency declines, measures of PTP capitalization within industries decline, but only after institutional investors obtain passthrough taxation for partnership income after 2004. PTP equity first day returns following initial public offerings are greater after 2004 than before, consistent with underpricing hypotheses. External to PTPs, mergers and acquisitions show capital flows from noncorporations to corporations as corporate taxes decline
NESSCA: A Meditative Process from Dis-Ease to At-Onement
No full textIn the beginning was the verb. I asked a coworker whose native language is Spanish how is John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word…” translated in the Santa Biblia. The Greek word logos translates to “word,” and many of us are familiar with the squeezing of the logos into English. Is it “word” the way that we use word-units to speak, write, communicate? This would be palabra in Spanish. Is it word as “reason,” logos as logic, as an ability to think through and make sense of and bring order to the seemingly chaotic existence we behold? This would be razon. I asked, “Is it palabra, the Spanish word for word? That doesn’t make much sense.” He thought for a second and said, “En el principio era El Verbo.” In the beginning was the verb
Dangers from Regulatory Vacuums in Outer, Inner, and Near Space
No full textSpace, “the final frontier,” has become an attractive but increasingly risky market for both public and private investments. Gold rush enthusiasm anticipates solutions to the digital divide via small low earth orbiting satellites, extraction of valuable minerals from asteroids, a vibrant space launch and tourism industry, and expanding earth observation opportunities. Such entrepreneurial boldness juxtaposes with a severe lag in government oversight, consumer safeguards, and essential operational guardrails. The ambitious plans of Elon Musk and other space entrepreneurs could fail—despite recent market success—as SpaceX’s plans for 148 rocket launches in 2024.
Without substantial refinement of global space treaties and effective national regulation, expanding and imprudent use of space resources could render the most valuable regions of space unusable. Satellites could collide or crash into orbiting debris at extremely high speeds, most likely in a crowded orbital region, such as 200–1,200 miles above Earth where low earth orbiting satellites operate.
Even more costly calamities would occur when a valuable, fully operational satellite collides with space debris––such as a deactivated satellite––or when it becomes a target in a test of anti-satellite (ASAT) technology. The likelihood of spacecraft collisions increases substantially when spacefaring nations and private ventures do not nudge useless objects upward, farther into deep space, or on a downward trajectory toward Earth that usually results in complete vaporization. The testing and future use of ASAT technology risks weaponizing space, despite treaty-level commitments to use it solely for peaceful purposes benefitting everyone.
This article explains how national governments have generated or tolerated the proliferation of space debris to potentially dangerous levels without penalty. It further explains that intergovernmental agreements, such as the five space treaties administered by the United Nations and the space resource and spectrum management agreements of the International Telecommunication Union, have neither required space debris mitigation nor sanctioned operators responsible for generating more waste.
The failure to address and resolve proliferating space debris from ASATs and abandoned space objects will increase the potential for calamities that would render space access too risky. The article identifies how intergovernmental agreements can mandate space debris mitigation, impose sanctions for noncompliance, and create financial incentives for recycling and removing existing debris