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Intentional Communities, Counterculture, and Alternative Living: America\u27sReturn to Communal Living
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Syracuse Application Forensics: Is Orange Safe , Safe?
Get PDFThis research conducted a static forensic analysis of Orange Safe , the safety application developed by Syracuse University, and confirmed its safety as currently used. The objective of the research was to analyze how much personal data was collected, how the data was utilized, and to evaluate whether it was used appropriately. The results indicated that “Orange Safe” collected only the minimal amount of personal data, gathered information only with user permission, and removed it immediately after use. Therefore, the research supported that this application ensured user privacy and safety, making it a reliable safety application for the Syracuse university community
Initiated Reading: Occult Hermeneutics in Helena Blavatsky\u27s Isis Unveiled
Get PDFIn this dissertation, I argue that Theosophical Society co-founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s first major work, Isis Unveiled (1877), describes an occult hermeneutic of myth based on the privileging of intuition, theorized especially in Neoplatonic terms, and premised on a tripartite spirit-soul-body constitution of the human being. Her hermeneutic also privileges initiation, construed as experiential gnosis often produced by ritual, and she opposes both intuition and initiation to reason and empiricism. Theorizing global myths as allegories revealing elements of a universal religion, or secret doctrine, traceable to India, she brings together an esotericism premised on a combination of Indian religion and thought with the Renaissance amalgamation of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism and Kabbalah. My elucidation of the hermeneutics espoused in Isis also includes explications of Blavatsky’s ideas about the nature of human beings, the world, and the divine, indicating the degree to which reading is imbricated with all facets of her thinking, and I demonstrate the ways in which magical ability and readerly ability are of a piece in her thinking. I also highlight Blavatsky’s significant engagement in polemic with and citation of natural scientists and textual scholars of the nineteenth century. In doing so, I argue that she engages in what I call para-academic argument, meaning that she argues partly in the terms of philological scholars, whose concerns with comparison and origins she genuinely shares, in order to make a partially public case for truths only fully accessible through intuitive and initiatory means. Significantly for the study of religion, Blavatsky engages and opposes Friedrich Max Müller, often remembered as the founder of the modern academic study of religion, in his arguments about the epistemological superiority of the scholar over emic interpreters. Through Blavatsky’s engagement with and positioning of the occult vis-à-vis such scholarship and the impact of Isis Unveiled and the Theosophical Society, I argue that the academic study of religion becomes constitutive of modern occultism
Investigating the cellular localization, trafficking, and biological function of ghrelin O-acyltransferase
Get PDFGhrelin O-acyltransferase (GOAT) catalyzes the acylation and activation of ghrelin, a peptide hormone involved in a range of physiological pathways and therapeutic target for metabolism-linked diseases such as obesity and diabetes. GOAT was determined to be localized in the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) in early cell-based studies, but recent patient studies detected this integral membrane enzyme in blood plasma and urine. These findings challenge the current understanding of GOAT’s cellular localization, and it may provide a potential mechanism for ghrelin re-acylation by plasma membrane-resident GOAT. The work described in this dissertation aimed to define the intracellular trafficking mechanism and subcellular localization of GOAT and provide insight on the biological function of the enzyme. We identified a conserved C-terminal dilysine (KxKxx) sequence in GOAT and hypothesized a potential trafficking mechanism mediated by coat protein complex I (COPI), which binds this dilysine motif and traffics target cargo proteins between the Golgi and endoplasmic reticulum (ER). We engineered novel GOAT fluorescent fusion proteins and generated a cell line stably expressing a B’-COPI fusion protein to co-express and visualize proteins in cells, we investigated the role of the dilysine motif in a cellular context. Co-localization analysis support a binding interaction between GOAT and B’-COPI. To profile subcellular distribution, we investigated a panel of cancer cell lines expected to overexpress GOAT and performed pair-wise co-immunostaining studies to assign GOAT distribution to organelles through the secretory pathway. These studies are key to advancing our understanding of GOAT, its cellular trafficking, and the impact of cellular localization on ghrelin signaling in different cellular and organismal contexts, such as that of a therapeutic target for cancer cells that express the enzyme
Domestic Exertions: Soldier-Servants, Military Elites, and Securitized Labor in India
No full textThis dissertation explores the politics of gender, labor, national security, and social class in India through an examination of a coercive domestic labor regime in the Indian Army. Previous scholarship has focused on the neoliberal state-sponsored global care chains and immigrant women workers from formerly colonized nations, many in Asia, catering to wealthy ‘civilian’ households in the global North. However, little is known about the roles, relationalities, and infrastructures of servitude, inhabited primarily by racialized men, that endure within the domestic life of postcolonial state institutions long after the retreat of European colonial regimes. I present an intervention by providing a case study of the sahayak system, a system of stratified labor in the world’s second-largest defense force, which employs an estimated forty thousand soldier-servants in officers’ homes across India. Specifically, I spotlight the figure of the sahayak (translated from Hindi as “assistant/helper,” formerly referred to as “batman/orderly”), a combatant soldier in the Indian Army, officially responsible for providing operational support to officers in the field service, but who functions, in a practical sense, as a state-sponsored domestic servant. I argue for analytically attending to the sahayak’s twin work roles as soldier and servant, straddling the liminal spaces between free/unfree, martial/menial, and masculinized/feminized labor, to understand the adaptability of (caste/racial, colonial, militarized) patriarchal social systems in fulfilling their prescribed domestic roles, thus, challenging institutionalized binary labor distinctions between voluntary enlistment and conscription, and combatant and noncombatant, as well as assumptions about the fixedness of men’s dominance and women’s subjugation in heteropatriarchal institutions like the military. Based on a combination of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, I propose a theory of “securitized labor,” which analyzes the sahayak system within the social, political, and historical context of India’s colonial and pre-colonial stratification systems. This analytical lens explains the relationship between social class and security as contingent upon and sustained through the institutionalized capture of subordinated groups’ labor through mechanisms of coercion to benefit the Indian state and its military elites. It highlights how ideologies of labor are encoded and reproduced in nationalist discourses of/about the military and the Indian Army’s sahayak system. Moral constructions of work befitting the combatant status are central to these discourses rooted in gendered, caste, racial, and colonial logics. As the first study to examine the postcolonial Indian Army through a critical ethnographic and feminist lens, Domestic Exertions contributes to three ongoing scholarly dialogues: the emerging critical and feminist scholarship on militarism and the everyday, the growing body of scholarship on the politics of gender and security regimes in contemporary Asia, and anthropological dialogues on work, labor, and value in South Asia. At the heart of the project is the claim for a domestic turn in these fields, compelling attention toward the hidden, everyday labor practices that sustain and reproduce security institutions in the region and beyond. Furthermore, the project addresses broader questions about human security, highlighting the conditions of containment, constraint, and dependency that produce structural violence across the household and geopolitical realms, and soldiers’ struggles for agency within these structures. Ultimately, the research illuminates the ways in which the recent sahayak controversy threatens the historically revered status of the jawan as the symbolic protector of the nation, bringing to the fore moral anxieties about citizenship, masculinity, and India’s postcolonial trajectory
Prompt Learning for Video Understanding
No full textVideo understanding is a challenging task that requires models to effectively interpret and generalize from complex visual data. Traditional approaches often rely on deep neural networks to encode and decode video content, but these methods can struggle with generalization, particularly when faced with data imbalance or the need to recognize rare events. In this thesis, we explore a semantics-centered approach to video understanding, leveraging prompt learning to enhance model robustness and adaptability across various video domains. Our research demonstrates that integrating human-like logic and language prompts into video understanding models significantly improves their performance. We show that these prompt-based models not only enhance general video understanding but also excel in specific applications, such as egocentric action recognition and autonomous driving. By incorporating semantic information, these models can better recognize and interpret actions from a first-person perspective, understand complex driving scenarios, and generalize across diverse video datasets. We also explore the data fusion strategy of multi-modal input for egocentric video understanding based on CapsNet architecture, and subsequently develop a better CapsNet, PT-CapsNet, for deeper architectures. Through extensive experimentation, we highlight the advantages of our approach, including its ability to mitigate data imbalance and improve the recognition of uncommon objects and actions. However, we also acknowledge certain limitations, such as the need for evaluation across multiple random seeds and comprehensive dataset splits. Future work will focus on addressing these limitations, refining the models\u27 sensitivity to structural variations, and expanding their applicability to new domains and real-time scenarios. Overall, this thesis advances the field of video understanding by introducing a novel framework that bridges the gap between human semantics and machine learning, paving the way for more nuanced and reliable AI-driven video analysis
