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FARMS, FLEA MARKETS, AND FACEBOOK: PERSPECTIVES ON REGULATION, BIOSECURITY, AND INFECTIOUS DISEASE RISK AMONG PRODUCERS AND POULTRY VENDORS IN MULTIPLE SETTINGS
Get PDFFlea markets, trade days, and social media groups are used by backyard farmers to buy and sell poultry and provide a means of connection between members of these communities. Poultry are common reservoirs of zoonotic diseases; proper biosecurity practices are critical in preventing outbreaks of infectious disease among flocks and in humans. However, biosecurity regulations in these informal marketplaces range from marginal to nonexistent, and thus an exploration of current knowledge, biosecurity practices, and perceptions on regulation can be useful in developing policy and interventions to ensure good biosecurity and thereby protect animal and public health.
This dissertation represents an exploration of the perceptions of regulation among producers and backyard poultry farmers, as well as a survey of current infectious disease and biosecurity knowledge and practices as they relate to selling poultry at informal markets. Formative qualitative research with 31 members of the agricultural provides insight into perceptions on regulation and the role of government in protecting human and animal health, demonstrating perceived sense of overregulation, distrust for the motives of policymakers, and a desire to be included in decision making.
These findings were extended through two studies that assessed the knowledge, attitudes, practices, and risk perceptions of poultry sellers at informal marketplaces. We conducted surveys (n=31) and supplemental interviews (n=5) with poultry sellers at flea markets in Texas, and then adapted the survey to backyard flock owners on social media poultry groups (n=83). In both groups, knowledge of infectious disease was moderate, attitudes were positive toward biosecurity and were negative toward government; risk perceptions for infectious diseases were low; and biosecurity behaviors were moderately good, except for key practices such as vaccination and reporting notifiable diseases.
This research represents a foundational step towards improved biosecurity in informal poultry marketplaces; the findings suggest that interventions might be more successful through 1) a combination of education, risk communication, and mentoring programs to address knowledge gaps in infectious disease and biosecurity, and 2) an appreciation of the lived experience of poultry vendors. In these ways, informal marketplaces can become safer venues for poultry sales that prioritize and protect animal and human health
JUDICIAL REFORM IN LATIN AMERICA: THE COLOMBIAN NON-CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND THE INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS
No full textThis thesis explores the path of non-criminal court reforms in Colombia by tracing the influence of: (a) the various political drivers of this court subsystem; and (b) the value added by the International Financial Institutions. To that end the thesis focuses on the two main elements of Colombia’s 1991 reforms: (i) the Superior Judicial Council’s governance and management role; and (ii) the protection of constitutional rights through the tutela, a procedure that allows universal citizen access to justice. Based on an analysis of the historical evolution of the Colombian non-criminal justice determined by a combination of big-P politics (external) and small-p politics (internal), with an emphasis on the post-1991 period, the thesis found that Colombia has made substantial progress around institutional strengthening in terms of independence and access, but service delivery has not achieved sustainable performance improvements regarding management and responsiveness. Following different approaches, during the last twenty years the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank have helped Colombia developing capabilities for improving performance at various levels of the non-criminal courts, especially around the transition to oral proceedings, the national decongestion plan and digital transformation. The results record is mixed because sometimes the overly ambitious technical solutions proposed by the Institutions were not aligned with the dynamics of external and internal politics
Unveiling Frustrated Magnetism and Topological Phenomena in Rare-Earth Pyrochlores through Inelastic Light Scattering
Get PDFIn this dissertation, we present a comprehensive investigation into the magnetic and electronic properties of pyrochlore materials, with a focus on three different compounds: Pr2Zr2O7, Pr2Ir2O7, and Nd2Ir2O7. Utilizing Raman scattering spectroscopy, this study delves into the complex magnetic behaviors exhibited by these materials, elucidating the underlying mechanisms that govern their magnetic interactions. The first part of the thesis focuses on Pr2Zr2O7 and Pr2Ir2O7, examining the coupling between lattice, electronic, and magnetic degrees of freedom in these compounds. The comparison of Raman phonon spectra unveils magnetoelastic coupling in Pr2Zr2O7 and characterizes phonon-electron scattering in the semimetallic Pr2Ir2O7. The second part explores the dynamic interactions between the crystal lattice and magnetic degrees of freedom in Pr2Zr2O7. We investigate crystal electric field excitations and observe unconventional behavior in the splitting of the non-Kramers ground state doublet of Pr3+. The results suggest the possibility of static or dynamic deviations of Pr3+ from the ideal crystal structure position as the origin of this effect. Finally, the third part uncovers the unique magnetic behavior of Nd2Ir2O7, showcasing the lowest temperature of all-in-all-out (AIAO) Ir moments ordering and the highest temperature at which AIAO order of rare-earth Nd ions is detected. The presence of characteristic spin ice fluctuations in the temperature range between 14 K and 33 K suggests a strong enhancement of magnetic interactions between Nd ions, resulting from the interplay of spin-orbit coupling, electronic correlations, and geometric frustration. Raman spectroscopy reveals specific one-magnon Raman modes associated with the AIAO order and a broad mode characteristic of spinon continuum arising from Nd spin ice fluctuations
Making Migrant Illegality: Vagrancy, Indentured Labor, and the Policing of Mobility in Germany
Get PDFThe 1920s saw the emergence of the figure of the illegal migrant in Germany. To target Jewish migrants fleeing the pogroms in present-day Poland and Ukraine, the German government built its first immigration detention camps and attempted to control its external borders and deport those that had been categorized as ‘nuisance foreigners’ – the poor, those without a job or a permanent abode, and those who had been found guilty of a crime. While the expansion of migration control is typically associated with the post-1945 era, I argue that to understand the making of migrant illegality we need to study this pre-World War II history and the connections between the global colonial and local histories of mobility controls it reveals. Through a historical case study of Germany as an under-studied case of the impact of the logics of colonialism, I show how the making of migrant illegality is as much rooted in the domestic control of vagrants and Roma people as it was influenced by the transnational efforts to manage colonized subjects. Based on one year of archival research, I trace the making of migrant illegality in Germany across four cases: Internal mobility controls against vagrants and Roma people; the policing of Polish seasonal laborers in Prussia and Chinese laborers in the German colonies in the Pacific from the 1890s to 1914; the use of camps to control foreign labor during World War I; and the targeting of Jewish migrants in the 1920s. Through these local and colonial institutions, Germany was able to build the legal framework that defines who can be excluded; the bureaucratic apparatus to track and surveil those on the move; and the enforcement arm to detain and deport those targeted. The story that these cases tell is one that maps how rules, practices, and tools came into being in response to different historical demands. It is a story that shows how across different eras, people, and contexts the expansion of mobility controls was driven by the desire to police the racialized boundaries of belonging and efforts to turn the racial and colonial poor into easily exploitable labor
Teaching Academic Discourse in Subject Areas to Students of English as an Additional Language
Get PDFNon-native speakers of English increasingly pursue secondary and tertiary education through the medium of English instruction (EMI). However, secondary subject teachers, such as science or history teachers, in international settings are rarely prepared to teach explicitly the subject area academic discourse necessary for English as an additional language students (EAL students) to continue subject area studies in English. A needs assessment conducted at XYZ School, a pre-K to 12, International Baccalaureate, EMI school in South Korea, found that secondary teachers indicated moderate to high self-efficacy for teaching EAL students, but struggled to find time for training and collaboration to support EAL teaching. Native English-speaking teachers found that promoting Korean-speaking students’ use of oral English in a context where Korean is the majority language was a particular challenge. Therefore, an intervention was designed to help teachers adapt oral English teaching strategies to their subject area classes and to incorporate knowledge of Korean educational and school-going culture into their adapted strategies. The five-week intervention with two science and two English teachers was conducted in May-June 2023 and used the Plan-Do-Study-Act model of professional development. A mixed methods, convergent parallel evaluation with a case study focus revealed that devoting time to collaboration using a flexible format that allowed teachers to adapt materials to their own subjects was a useful approach to professional development for teachers, as was incorporating knowledge of Korean school-going culture and student feedback to inform teachers’ development of classroom pedagogy. Teacher self-efficacy for teaching subject area discourse appeared to change little after the intervention, but two teachers successfully adapted EAL strategies to student needs resulting in greater levels of oral English language than usual, and enthusiastic student participation in these activities. This suggests the usefulness of considering local school-going culture when planning instruction for EAL students. Teachers appreciated the time to collaborate and experiment, and valued the structure that helped them do so by incorporating student feedback. All teachers indicated interest in continuing to reflect on intervention content in order to further promote Korean students’ use of oral English
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ADVANCED IMAGING TECHNOLOGY AND THE REVEALED SPATIOTEMPORAL REGULATION OF RIBOSOMAL DNA REPAIR
No full textRibosomal DNA (rDNA) comprises repetitive gene sequences responsible for producing the RNA components essential for the translation machinery in eukaryotic cells, specifically, ribosomes. Maintaining the stability of the rDNA genome against double-strand breaks (DSBs) is of paramount importance in addressing cellular aging-related conditions like Werner Syndrome and Lewy body dementia, as well as in preventing tumor development. This significance arises due to the repetitive nature of rDNA and its distribution across multiple chromosomes. Previous research has unveiled that DSBs occurring within the rDNA region trigger several cellular responses, including the repression of rDNA transcription and a structural rearrangement termed nucleolar segregation. During nucleolar segregation, a multitude of proteins associated with transcription and DSB repair gather at the periphery of the nucleolus, forming what is known as the nucleolar cap region. However, despite these findings, the precise architecture of the nucleolar cap, the kinetics governing the repair process, and the interrelationships between these phenomena remain inadequately understood.This is likely due to the resolution limit of conventional imaging tools and the absence of proper system that can rapidly induce DSBs specific to rDNA region with accurately controlled timing. To resolve these limitations and provide deeper insights on how rDNA DSB repair response is regulated, I firstly developed and improved advanced fluorescence imaging systems, which allow us to visualize nucleolar structures beyond the diffraction limit (Stimulated Emission Depletion microscopy, STED microscopy), and to monitor fast kinetics of the repair process with minimal photo-induced disturbance (Lattice Light Sheet Microscopy, LLSM). These systems were also applied to various biological investigations, including the exploration of liquid-liquid phase separation and the study of single- molecule dynamics in neurons under different conditions. Secondly, combined with a recently invented rapidly-inducible photo-caged CRISPR-Cas9 system (very fast CRISPR, vfCRISPR) and genomic visualization tool in our lab, I studied the spatiotemporal coordination of the rDNA DSB repair factor assembly, and anticipate its important role in regulating pathway choice and outcome fidelity
Novel Optimization-based Methods for Downscaling Power Sector Emission Projections and Compensating Reliability Contributions of Power Supply
Get PDFThis dissertation proposes novel optimization-based methods for energy and environmental system modeling to address two broad questions. The first question is: how can we consider economic fundamentals and the rapid growth of renewable energy when linking power system and pollutant transport models to conduct integrated studies of energy transitions and air quality? The second question is: how can we evaluate the contributions of emerging clean electricity technologies (e.g., energy storage, solar and wind plant, demand response) to power supply reliability?
This dissertation contains three essays, with the first two addressing the first question. The first essay introduces the "Site-&-Grow" spatial downscaling framework, linking the Electricity Market Module of the National Energy Modeling System with the Sparse Matrix Operator Kernel Emissions model for use in air quality models. This innovative downscaling approach explores spatial emissions changes stem-ming from power plant additions or retirements, system operation under increasing wind and solar en-ergy, and regional policies such as renewable portfolio standards. Unlike conventional methods that of-ten simplify or disregard these factors, the SAG approach offers a comprehensive representation of eco-nomic and technology fundamentals that drive power sector emissions.
The second essay introduces a new temporal downscaling framework to convert annual/time-block emissions into hourly profiles. This method systematically accounts for long-term climate effects on temperature, wind/solar output, and load timing using future meteorology from the Weather Research and Forecasting model. Unlike existing methods that depend on historical patterns of power emissions, it realistically captures how power system operation and emissions interact with short-term weather variations, considering long-term changes due to climate impacts.
The third essay tackles the second question. I propose a new capacity credit definition (called EREC) that more accurately credits how variable renewable energy and storage enhance power system "adequacy", and therefore should be compensated in electricity capacity markets. Applying these capacity cred-its in such markets can offer financial incentives supporting the same optimal resource mix as in an energy-only market without price caps. Numerical experiments demonstrate this proposition via a generation expansion model with convexified unit commitment and battery storage constraints
Exploring the Nature and Outcomes of Genetic Counseling Students' Nonverbal Behaviors During Simulated Telehealth Visits
Get PDFObjective: To examine the relationships between nonverbal communication, verbal communication, and patient satisfaction during telehealth sessions with standardized patients and genetic counseling students.
Methods: From 2021-2022, 59 genetic counseling students from the U.S. and Canada completed video-recorded standardized patient sessions via Zoom. Session recordings were coded using the Roter Interaction Analysis System (RIAS) and standardized patients completed post-session satisfaction questionnaires. Nonverbal communication coding methods were developed to measure several nonverbal behaviors (nodding, smiling, hand gesturing, eye gaze, forward lean, distance from the camera, camera angle, and use of screensharing). Twelve “thin slices” were systematically sampled from moments throughout each baseline session, for a total of five minutes and 45 seconds sampled from each session. Behaviors were coded for each thin slice sample. Multiple linear regression models assessed relationships between the students’ nonverbal behaviors, students’ verbal behaviors, and standardized patients’ satisfaction with session communication.
Results: Increased screensharing was associated with decreased use of facilitating statements (p<0.05), decreased patient-centeredness (p<0.01), and increased verbal dominance (p<0.05). Nodding was negatively correlated with verbal dominance (p<0.05). Forward lean was positively correlated with standardized patient satisfaction with communication (p<0.05).
Conclusion: Screensharing, nodding, and forward lean may affect patient-provider communication via telehealth in ways that are analogous to in-person clinical interactions.
Practice implications: The possible negative consequences of screensharing suggest a need for additional research to inform best practices for providing patient-centered care in the telehealth setting
Structured Analysis and Translation of Thousands of Languages
No full textThis dissertation introduces minimally supervised and massively multilingual methods for identifying convergent panlingual signal from correspondences in thousands of languages, then bootstrapping phrase tables and morphosemantic annotations for low-resource languages. Lexical correspondences between languages form the scaffolding of computer programs that translate text or speech. Speakers of different languages must make different choices to express the same intent, due to their languages' unique morphosyntax, lexicon, and semantic categories. Consequently, cross-lingual statistical correspondences may reflect essential or accidental relationships between these choices. A statistical model of language must discern between the essential and the accidental, often without being told which is which.
We illustrate how to identify meaningful lexical correspondences with only minimal supervision, bootstrapping from limited multilingual sources—bilingual dictionaries and small, parallel text—in the light of differential information expressed per-language. Across these lexical correspondences, we project probabilistic structures and labels such as person, number, case, and clusivity. High-quality cross-lingual signal can be distilled from model combination amongst several weak learners that are cheap and easy to fit. In the end, we can characterize and ground the lexicon of a new language without depending on large bilingual corpora or new annotated data.
We project annotations across word type and word token correspondences to address three problems in language. (1) In lexical semantics, whether there is an empirical basis for the Berlin and Kay color term hypotheses. We address this by designing 14 empirically-grounded computational linguistic metrics applied to color terms in thousands of languages which—along with their aggregation—strongly with both the Berlin and Kay basic/secondary color term partition and the corresponding hypothesized universal acquisition sequence. (2) In linguistic phylogeny, how to measure similarity of grammatical gender systems. We craft novel information theoretic metrics, finding that the similarity measure effectively induces a phylogenetic tree over Indo-European languages. (3) In unsupervised morphology induction, how one can automatically translate basic words (such as pronouns) whose obligatorily marked information differs across languages. Here we induce rich feature-specified tables of pronouns, determiners, ordinal and cardinal numbers, and verbs from multi-parallel text that can be used as anchor points to scaffold syntactic and semantic parsers, alignment models, and phrase tables for machine translation---the first such tables recorded in a cross-lingually consistent format with comparable featural or linguistic breadth
On Blaming the Healthcare System: A Preliminary Study of Moral Injury in the Clinical Context, Based on Pellegrino's Medical Ethics
Get PDFRecently the concept of moral injury is getting more attention from researchers and practitioners in medicine. It has been argued that the concept of moral injury is a more proper portrayal of the unique kind of human anguish - clinician burnout. Putting more emphasis on clinician burnout as a form of suffering associated with deeply held moral beliefs, rather than focusing on individuals experiencing emotional distress, is taken to be essential to prevent internalization of the cause and harms of clinician burnout that so far have only yielded ineffective countermeasures. Researchers of clinician burnout and moral distress in medicine have long argued for more fundamental, institutional change, and now the critics are asking for a definitional shift into moral injury.
Yet, the notion of moral injury has not been widely recognized by either medical society or academia in general, due to the lack of definitional specificity required for reliable communication within and among related disciplines. This preliminary research paper aims to present a clear description of moral injury that occurs in medical practice. First, it will provide the most recent theory of moral injury. Second, it will describe a comprehensive analysis of Pellegrino's medical ethics regarding morality. Lastly, it will revise the definition of moral injury and its factors specific to clinical settings, and propose terminologies for developing assessment tools