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The Dissemination and Availability of Western Ideas of the Agrarian in Modern China
No full text20th-century Chinese history has been widely interpreted as part of a perennial search for modernity. While city-making has undoubtedly played a significant part in China’s path to modernization, there were also key moments when reformers—such as Zhang Jian, Sun Yat-sen, Zhou Zuoren, Zhang Yongnian, Liu Shaoqi, and Mao Zedong—repeatedly turned their commitments to rural alternatives. Instead of following the dominant city-centered paradigm, a range of reformist projects demonstrated a shared belief that an agrarian modernity could be realized through mobilized localities and dedicated professionals. Although these rural reforms have left a notable imprint on China’s modern history and have been dealt with extensively across many disciplines, architecture and planning disciplines have remained largely disengaged from these agrarian topics, focusing instead on the more legible—and at times even ceremonious—results of urban development. This dissertation addresses this gap, focusing on the often-neglected rural reforms and the history of ideas that took shape well before the reforms themselves. It argues that a range of ideas, images, and models of the agrarian modern—though largely unfamiliar to most Chinese by the turn of the 20th century—were disseminated from the West and ultimately made available to relevant audiences in China. In doing so, this dissertation offers a more nuanced understanding of the often-overlooked notion of agrarian modernity in the design disciplines and, more importantly, situates modern rural schemes and practices in China within a global intellectual framework that transcends the conventional East-West divide.Advanced Studies Progra
Spatial multiomic landscape of the human placenta at molecular resolution
No full textAuthor's Origina
Creating Educational Borderlands: Civic Learning in a Syrian School in Lebanon
No full textAbstract
Limitations on membership and participation in host societies sharply constrain refugee young people's civic development. Especially when refugees attend national schools, they find themselves submerged in civic learning that does not include them or represent their experiences and realities. To explore possibilities for civic learning among refugees, we examine the education created by a Syrian community inside the structures of a Lebanese private school in Beirut. We conceive of this school as a 'borderlands' and find that it supports civic membership and participation in three ways: through adaptations to the Lebanese structures, curricula, and languages of schooling; through pedagogies focused on pragmatism; and through opening limited spaces for students to practice civic skills. We argue that the borderlands space created by this school holds lessons for both refugee and national teachers and school systems seeking to foster civic learning among refugees.Accepted Manuscrip
Neuronal subtype-specificity of ribosomal complexes during cerebral cortex circuit formation
No full textDuring brain development, immensely diverse subtypes of projection neurons establish precise long-range axonal projections, forming distinct functional circuits that control specific behaviors. While transcriptional regulation of circuit formation is increasingly well understood, the role of translational control remains poorly characterized, particularly how it might be specialized in distinct neuronal subtypes during establishment of long-range axonal projections. This dissertation investigates specialization of translational machinery - specifically ribosomes and their associated proteins (collectively called "ribosomal complexes") - between distinct subtypes of cortical projection neurons in vivo. Combining labeling of circuit-specific somata for purification by fluorescence-activated cell sorting, pulldown of ribosomal complexes, and ultra-low input proteomics, this research reveals distinct protein compositions of ribosomal complexes between two closely related subtypes with strikingly distinct axonal connectivity - cortical output “subcerebral PN” (SCPN) and interhemispheric “callosal PN” (CPN). These findings provide new insight into how translational control might contribute to the precise establishment of neural circuits during development, identify several candidate proteins for functional investigations of roles in translation and subtype-specific circuit formation, and contribute to understanding of how ribosomes are employed in distinct biological contexts.Biology, Molecular and Cellula
Oro
No full textIf a piece of gold could talk, what story would it tell?
Set in three distinct periods, the 1500s, 1700s and present day, Oro is a novel that weaves three tales that tell the story of gold's movement and influence across the world and through time. As Christopher Columbus once said: "Gold is a treasure, and he who possesses it does all he wishes to in this world."
Oro is a novel based on true historic events and people. It is a story that traces a single piece of gold from man's first discovery in the New World to the depths of the sea and back to man. It captures the power of gold to create riches, drive countries into battle, and entice many to their death in its pursuit. Gold has funded empires and fueled the demise of leaders and laymen alike. Part historical-reality, part adventure and tragedy on the high seas, part familial love story that transcends time and place, Oro is the tale of one piece of gold, in the hands of three storytellers over the span of 500 years.Extension Studie
Characterizing how social contexts shape risky decision making across adolescence
No full textAdolescence has been a focus in scientific research due to the dynamic social and cognitive development that unfolds during this transitional period between childhood and adulthood, as individuals begin to navigate a more complex social environment. Two of the characterizing features of this period are heightened rates of risk taking and elevated importance of peer relationships. While adolescent risk taking and susceptibility to peer influence are often viewed as negative and potentially harmful, this dissertation examines risk as a neutral concept, adopting the definition of risk as outcome variability from the judgment and decision making literature. Papers 1 and 2 used an economic decision making paradigm and computational modeling to assess age-related changes in risk preferences and the underlying decision processes, while Paper 3 used longitudinal data to expand our understanding of how fluctuations in social support in real life may impact adolescent risk taking, using both behavioral experiments and self-report survey measures. Paper 1 found early adolescence to be a window of heightened sensitivity to social contexts that require adjudicating between self- and peer-interest in risky decisions. Peer observation over Zoom did not evoke additional age-related differences in risk preference. Paper 2 found that individuals in general overestimated their friends’ risk preferences, and that older adolescents and young adults were more adept at flexibly taking friends’ perspectives in decision making. Paper 3 found that within-person fluctuations in perceived close friend support were not associated with levels of risk preference in adolescents, whereas between-person levels of perceived close friend support had a stronger association with risk preference among younger adolescents. Taken together, these findings shed light on social and cognitive mechanisms that unfold at different stages during adolescence that underlie individuals’ risky decision making.Psycholog
Harmony and Rupture in Desdemona: Toni Morrison's Remaking of Shakespeare's Othello
No full textIn Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, a theatrical remaking of Shakespeare’s Othello, two characters are wholly reconfigured: the white Venetian Desdemona, and a barely mentioned figure in the Shakespearean text, Barbary, Desdemona’s Black maid of African descent. In Morrison’s portrayal, Barbary, through deft storytelling, becomes a conduit for Desdemona to access other contexts, other worlds and other multivoiced discourses. In the play’s broad strokes imagery, the tension between the two characters becomes deeply symbolic of conflictual white/Black relations in America as Morrison sees them, a state of affairs she dramatizes as allegorically existing in a Dantean purgatorial state, or midway station, or state of undecidability. This ambiguity arises from the continued presence in the play of master/slave histories. But Morrison’s Desdemona goes beyond the context of America and slave histories of the American South, extending her interrogation, widening her angle to the Caribbean, but also to England, France, Spain and other European contexts, as well as to West African rulers and slave traders associated with the four-hundred-year history of transatlantic slaveries. That the character of Barbary has always been performed by an African tale-teller/singer in African narrative style is the central dramatic device giving the play global aesthetic and historical scope. The multi-locale setting extends Morrison’s interrogation to a more global level. This immense expansion of scope making Desdemona an intertextually rich work influenced by prior works, may also –indeed, almost certainly will— influence future texts, performances and theater criticism of the canonical Othello.Extension Studie
Watch Your Language: Detecting and Quantifying Political Bias In Large Language Models
No full texts large language model use begins to infiltrate academic and professional applica-
tions, it’s important to understand their biases and idiosyncracies as they could have
demonstrable effects on produced work that can reverberate throughout a field.
This paper takes the unique approach in measuring aggregate biases through com-
paring urtext to summarized text–a distinct technique that allows us to measure the
true effects in a natural setting. Our corpus of data comes from oral arguments from
Supreme Court cases, other miscellaneous texts associated with these cases and deci-
sions, and speeches from the Congressional Record. This data is useful as it contains
inherent proxies for political leaning. This data is also unique in how the political bias
is less explicit and instead resides in interpretation, allowing the study to probe at the
question at whether or not these languages models are conscious of their implicit po-
litical biases. From an initial set of results from applying naive techniques and existing
methodologies from political science literature, there were measurable differences be-
tween urtext and summarized text in regard to their leanings and confirm those behav-
iors through a second set of experimental techniques focused on more explicitly politi-
cal speech. From these results, the paper also presents a preemptive policy solution for
possible future harms presented by these models.Computer Scienc
Capturing Obscura: Toward a Participatory Framework for (Re)making of Space of Liminality
No full textCapturing Obscura intends to identify and activate the space of liminality—a residual space resulting from top-down capital planning production—through a participatory methodology that supports the continuous (re)making of the urban landscape. Liminality is adopted here for its ability to address both time and space—its transitional, temporal, and ephemeral qualities reflect a relationship with time, while its informality and lack of prescribed function underscore its spatial ambiguity.
Cambridge, MA is selected as the site for its accessibility and potential for fieldwork. The project identifies liminal spaces through ethnographic observation and develops a guidebook of toolkits that activate liminal space as an inclusive public space, supporting community participation and engagement throughout the design process.
The crux of the thesis is to explore a reciprocal design methodology by examining the space of liminality and inviting communities to engage in the design process for a cohesive and vibrant urban landscape experience.Department of Landscape Architectur