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ADDICTION AND THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF TIME
No full textAddiction and the Social Production of Time seeks to broaden the discussion of how the social impacts the lives of those who identify as addicted. This thesis pulls from qualitative interviews to answer the question, “How do addicted people seeking services in Carroll County, Maryland experience the multiple temporalities placed on them through treatment requirements, drug court requirements, public transportation, poverty, and the needs of physiological drug dependency?” Paying attention to the ways people navigate time based demands of physical addiction, treatment requirements, and drug court requirements, alongside temporal demands of daily life, reveals new insights into the lived-experience of the addicted. This thesis argues that opioid agonist treatment clinics and drug courts use time as a linear measurement of a person’s progress towards socially constructed ideas of normalization. This practice of linear measurement veils the socially constructed temporal demands that addicted people must navigate on a daily basis. This results in individuals becoming stuck and unable to meet institutional requirements, thus exacerbating their continued suffering from structural and institutional inequalities.Public healthSocial researchAddiction, Drug Use, Opioids, Time, TreatmentAnthropologyDegree Awarded: M.A. Anthropology. American Universit
Empathy as a predictor variable of bullying, aggression, and anger control: An analysis of children with ASD and children with conduct problems
No full textA presentation that was delivered in the Fifth University Research Day at the Catholic University of America in 2020.This research was collaborated with Kim Ellio
The virtual reference service and its impact on LIS
No full textA presentation that was delivered in the Fifth University Research Day at the Catholic University of America in 2020
A Non-Collision Criterion for a Generalized Camassa-Holm Equation
No full textThe b−Camassa-Holm equation, referred to as (bCH), is a one-parameter extension of the much-studied Camassa-Holm (CH) equation that also contains the Degasperis-Procesi (DP) equation. While these two particular members of this one parameter are integrable and model certain physical phenomena, all members of the bCH family have the special property that they admit multi-peaked soliton, or peakon, solutions. The well-posedness of the bCH equation has previously been established in Sobolev spaces with exponents corresponding to the usual embedding with s > 3/2. Ill-posedness was discovered for the bCH equation via the use of two-peakon collisions where the b−parameter was taken to be strictly greater than one. The particular nature of the collisions depended on s and b, and either generated the phenomenon of norm-inflation or allowed for the construction of non-unique solutions. This work demonstrates that when b ≤ 1, the entire character of the equation changes. Given any two-peakon initial data, the dynamics of the corresponding solution never has these waves collide. In particular, the two-peakon solutions are in fact global solutions, and the aforementioned ill-posedness arguments do not apply for these choices of b.MathematicsMathematicsDegree Awarded: M.S.--Mathematics. The Catholic University of Americ
Diocesan Synod: Event of Communion and Action of Governance for the Archdiocese of San Francisco
No full textPope John Paul II referred to a synod as an event of communion and an action of governance. In light of the renewed communio ecclesiology and its incorporation into the revised Code of Canon Law as well as the Instruction on Diocesan Synods (1997), a contemporary diocesan synod should be properly planned and implemented so as to achieve these two facets of communion and governance within the Archdiocese of San Francisco.Canon lawCommunion Ecclesiology, Diocesan Bishop, Diocesan SynodCanon LawDegree Awarded: J.C.L. Canon Law. The Catholic University of Americ
Regime Type and Its Effect on Bilateral Relationships: How Democratization Changed the Relationships Between the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan
No full textInternational relations theory tends to treat the state as a black box; a state is a rational actor and regardless of the domestic politics, it will make the rational choice. This is a convenient choice that helps to create grand theories, but intentionally provide little insight for policy. States have a vested interest in knowing all the factors that affect relationships. While there is research into how different regime types work together, it is often limited to two democracies or two autocracies. States changing their regime types is a very under-researched area. If democracies do work better together, then a democratic state has an interest in encouraging democratization for a better bilateral relationship. However, if autocracies work better together or a mixed-relationship, then states might not wish to encourage regime changes. These possible conclusions, of course, are hypothetical. Firstly, it must be assessed if regime type has any effect on these relationships. This thesis examines how the change from autocracy to democracy affected South Korea’s and the Philippines’ relationships with each other and with Japan. Two of the relationships improve when both states are democracies, while one declines. Thus, while regime type does have an effect on a bilateral relationship, this thesis does not prescribe an ideal regime type(s) for the best relationship.Political sciencePoliticsDegree Awarded: M.A.--Politics. The Catholic University of Americ
Perception of Emotion in Speech: The Role of Content and Tempo
No full textHuman speech represents an auditory medium through which emotion can be portrayed (e.g., Steinbeis & Koelsch, 2008a). Speech has emotional content, which is denoted by the literal meaning of certain emotion words (joy, contentment, happiness, mournfulness, melancholy etc.) used in the utterance. But, interestingly, even when low-pass filtering is applied to produce utterances that lack denotative meaning, these utterances can still be classified to convey different emotions according to the prosodic tone of the speaker (e.g., Pell, Jaywant, Monetta, & Kotz, 2011). In studies to date, researchers have examined the role of prosody only on its own, however; content has almost always been ignored, eliminated, obfuscated, or masked, through low-pass filtering or clever experimental design (e.g., Mozziconacci, 2001; Banse & Scherer, 1996 ). Further, when the interactive effects of prosody and content have been studied, the different elements of prosody (e.g., loudness, pitch level, timbre, or tempo), have been confounded (e.g., Mozziconacci, 2001). The purpose of the present research is to examine how the variable of content meshes with just a single, but prominent, element of prosody, that of tempo, and interacts with it in modulating the degree of emotion conveyed in speech utterances. When isolated as such, how tempo modulates emotion in music has already been explored and the results show that faster tempos evoke happier emotions and slower tempos evoke sadder emotions (e.g., Thompson & Ilea, 2006). Additionally, although there is no inherent semantic meaning in music, there is structural meaning, that is conveyed through musical elements, including modality (e.g., Meyer, 1956). In terms of emotion, for instance, minor excerpts often evoke sadder emotions and major excerpts often evoke happier emotions (Kastner & Crowder; 1990; Hunter, Schellenberg, & Schimmack; 2010). Researchers have found interactive effects of tempo and mode in music such that when these cues are consistent (e.g., fast-tempo, major-mode) feelings for the target emotion (both perceived and felt) were particularly pronounced (Hunter, Schellenberg, & Schimmack; 2010). Of interest in the current study is whether we will replicate the effects of varying just tempo in music within the realm of speech excerpts, and further, whether the effects will also be dependent on content established by semantically meaningful words. In Experiment 1, we used both speech and musical excerpts, varying levels of tempo (slow, normal, fast) and content (happy or sad; or major or minor), and found that not only did they both matter but they also interacted with one another in emotion ratings. Both speech and music showed the same patterns of results. Sad material became happier as tempo increased, but happy material showed no difference between different tempos. With musical materials, we also replicated previous findings in that major mode was happier than minor mode, fast tempos were happier than slow tempos, and music with consistent cues in the sad realm elicited particularly sad ratings, although we did not replicate the finding that music with consistent cues in the happy realms elicit particularly happy ratings (cf. Hunter, Schellenberg and Schimmack, 2010). In Experiment 2, we used only speech excerpts and exaggerated the variations in tempo to explore the boundary conditions of its effects in evoking emotions, and also added a neutral content to the sad and happy contents. Again, both tempo and content mattered, and they interacted with one another in that exaggerated increases in tempo still made sad content happier without exception, and still made happy content less happy. The results are discussed within the framework of perception of emotions in general.PsychologyContent, Mode, Music, Speech, TempoPsychologyDegree Awarded: Ph.D. Psychology. American Universit
Knowledge coproduction improves understanding of environmental change in the Ethiopian highlands
No full textEcology and Society, Volume 25, Issue 2, June 2020, Article number 2, Pages 1-11.Knowledge coproduction that draws on local and scientific knowledge presents opportunities for more holistic understanding of environmental change. We describe our use of a multiple-evidence based approach to investigate the causes and consequences of environmental change in a community-protected grassland and its surrounding landscape in the Ethiopian highlands. We explore the interaction of biophysical change (precipitation and vegetation) and social change (political and management institutions), and discuss potential impacts for ecosystem service provisioning. We quantified current distributions of locally defined land use/cover classes using a supervised classification, with an overall accuracy of 87.1%. Local community members then described and ranked the ecosystem services associated with each land class according to their perceived importance for society. Vegetation and precipitation changes were assessed using satellite time series beginning in the early 1980s, while local narratives describe changes back to the 1970s. The knowledge coproduction process brought together ethnographic and remote sensing approaches, revealing both complementary and contradictory findings across knowledge systems. Results with high agreement across knowledge systems clarify and reinforce understanding of certain threats and changes to the area, such as the rapidly declining native forests, the disappearing belg rainy season (p = 0.01), and the impact of insecure land tenure on natural resource extraction. Compelling areas of disagreement point to topics in need of further investigation, including increased attention to the spatial and temporal variability of change across a seemingly homogeneous cultural landscape, and the process of shrub encroachment into the protected grassland
A sheaf theoretical approach to uncertainty quantification of heterogeneous geolocation information
No full textSensors (Switzerland), Volume 20, Issue 12, 2 June 2020, Article number 3418, Pages 1-36.Integration of multiple, heterogeneous sensors is a challenging problem across a range of applications. Prominent among these are multi-target tracking, where one must combine observations from different sensor types in a meaningful and efficient way to track multiple targets. Because different sensors have differing error models, we seek a theoretically justified quantification of the agreement among ensembles of sensors, both overall for a sensor collection, and also at a fine-grained level specifying pairwise and multi-way interactions among sensors. We demonstrate that the theory of mathematical sheaves provides a unified answer to this need, supporting both quantitative and qualitative data. Furthermore, the theory provides algorithms to globalize data across the network of deployed sensors, and to diagnose issues when the data do not globalize cleanly. We demonstrate and illustrate the utility of sheaf-based tracking models based on experimental data of a wild population of black bears in Asheville, North Carolina. A measurement model involving four sensors deployed among the bears and the team of scientists charged with tracking their location is deployed. This provides a sheaf-based integration model which is small enough to fully interpret, but of sufficient complexity to demonstrate the sheaf’s ability to recover a holistic picture of the locations and behaviors of both individual bears and the bear-human tracking system. A statistical approach was developed in parallel for comparison, a dynamic linear model which was estimated using a Kalman filter. This approach also recovered bear and human locations and sensor accuracies. When the observations are normalized into a common coordinate system, the structure of the dynamic linear observation model recapitulates the structure of the sheaf model, demonstrating the canonicity of the sheaf-based approach. However, when the observations are not so normalized, the sheaf model still remains valid
Closed sign at the Cleveland Park Metro Station
No full textA closed sign at the entrance to the Cleveland Park Metro Station