39456 research outputs found
Sort by
A Queer Genealogy of "Havruta": Study Partnership as Intimate Relationship Between Men in Jewish Literature
No full textThis dissertation traces a literary lineage in Jewish cultural imaginations that associates havruta—an educational method of long-term study partnership that has evolved in a male homosocial context of traditional Judaism as a central pedagogical method and an important religious practice—with forms of same-sex erotic and affective connections, often analogous to marriage. This dissertation argues that the trope of queer havruta, which refers to literary images of traditional Jewish study pairs that can be read as queer through a modern lens, has established its place in the canon of queer romance and contributed to the shaping of Jewish queer culture.
Traditional Jewish sources, from the rabbinic period onward, often depict male study partnerships as sites of intimacy, personal attachment, and commitment, sometimes including erotic desire or sexual practices. The homoerotic potential of these representations is rooted in cultural assumptions distinct from modern sexual categories. The images of havruta intimacy in the Mishnah, Talmudim, and Midrash, along with their interpretive traditions, draw on biblical heroic couples and construct homoerotic intellectualism as a form of masculinity within ancient homosocial and patriarchal contexts.
Jewish writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—including S. An-sky, S.Y. Agnon, I.B. Singer, Tony Kushner, Jyl Lynn Felman, Michael Lowenthal, Evan Fallenberg, and others—re-articulate this literary tradition of homoerotic scholarship and havruta intimacy in ways that both align with and challenge modern gender and sexual categories. These modern and contemporary narratives seek and resist the signification of havruta intimacy, offering new pleasures, relational models, and ways to conceptualize male-male desire through affective and eroticized readings of Jewish history and intellectual life.
Reimagining havruta through a queer literary genealogy enables the reclamation and transformation of traditional Jewish symbols, often by challenging their heteronormative, sexist, and misogynistic assumptions, while reshaping religious, gender, and sexual identities, relationships, and intimacies. It disrupts binary and totalizing definitions of normativity and queerness by representing havruta intimacy as an intersection of multiple viewpoints and sensibilities, when some forms of traditional Jewish normativity produce enabling dynamics for new queer intimacies. It allows the creation of a distinctly Jewish queer space
Transportation Costs And Economic Development
No full textThis dissertation contributes to a growing literature using microeconomic data to explore questions in macroeconomic development, with particular focus on the importance of transportation costs. Specifically, I study the importance of idiosyncratic transportation costs and economic development via three different angles.
In Chapter 1, I study how idiosyncratic transportation frictions as labor mobility barriers affect the sectoral sorting of workers between agriculture and non-agriculture and quantify their impact on aggregate and sectoral productivity, the pattern of occupational choices and selection. I add idiosyncratic transport costs by sector to an otherwise canonical two sector Roy model. I combine panel data on household level transport costs and income from Honduras with a structural model to quantitatively estimate the impact observed transport costs on the reallocation of labor and aggregate development through this selection channel. When removing transport costs, share of agricultural employment drops by 8 percent, agricultural productivity increases 1.32-fold and real GDP per worker rises 1.19-fold.
In Chapter 2, I examine whether the geographic location of farmers, and their distance from markets can account for measured misallocation in the data. I quantitatively examine this question by leveraging a transport infrastructure development program in El Salvador. I use panel micro-level data on transport costs and agricultural production at the farm level along with a structural model in which farmers produce subject to transportation costs. The key insight of my model is that in the presence of transport costs the implied efficient allocation is different than that in the canonical model of misallocation.
In Chapter 3, I explore the role idiosyncratic transportation costs from farm to market play in contributing to a pronounced subsistence agricultural sector. Particularly, I study how idiosyncratic transportation costs to market affect crop commercialization among farmers in Tanzania in the long rainy season. Methodologically, I combine panel data from the Tanzania National Panel Survey with a structural model to quantitatively examine the role transport costs play in facilitating the transformation from subsistence to commercial farming. I find that reductions in transport costs for food crop farmers, sees switching to cash crop farming
Indigenous Peoples And Environmental Justice: Recognition, Rights, And Representation Of Indigenous Peoples In Bangladesh's Environmental Regulatory Framework
No full textUsing an Environmental Justice theoretical lens, this thesis explores the extent to which the environmental legislative landscape of Bangladesh has ensured environmental justice for Indigenous peoples. In doing so, the thesis concentrates on three main areas: recognition, rights of Indigenous people under the environmental legal framework as well as their representation in the environmental decision making bodies. The research evaluates Bangladesh environmental laws against standards elaborated in the environmental justice literature on each of these three areas. The research employs a combination of legal and policy analysis, as well as a critical analytical approach as part of its methodology. This thesis contends that the environmental laws of Bangladesh fall short of realizing the rights, recognition and representation of Indigenous people in the environmental legal framework. These shortcomings appear to stem from a combination of factors including the design, scope, limitations and implementation of environmental laws and Constitutional provisions by both the state and the courts
Mathematical Modelling of Complete and Truncated Dentrification and Dissimilatory Nitrate Reduction to Ammonium (DNRA) in Agricultural Soils
No full textCurrent agricultural fertilizers add nitrogen in the form of ammonium and nitrate to the soils where different bacteria enabled processes lead to formation of multiple nitrogen containing compounds included in the global nitrogen cycle. A better understanding of those processes can help control the anthropogenic contribution to greenhouse gases released and the nitrogen containing compounds accumulating in the soils and water sources. We analyze mathematical models of denitrifying and dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium (DNRA) bacteria utilizing nitrogen oxides and organic carbon as substrates, first with minimum principle, then with two Monod terms in the bacterial growth formulation. We compare the two models and show how the changes in the model’s structure affect the steady states feasibility and stability boundaries. We show how the system outcomes depend on the initial conditions as well as the bacterial species’ characteristics. Lastly, we explore truncated reactions with the addition of a third species
A Phenomenological Study Exploring the Lived Mental Health Experiences of Afro-Caribbean Canadian Youth Utilizing Mental Health Services
No full textLittle is known about the mental health experiences of Black youth, especially those from the Afro-Caribbean community, due to a paucity of studies within the Canadian context and a lack of Black youth mental health perspectives. To respond to this gap, this study explored the lived mental health experiences of Afro-Caribbean Canadian youth (ACCY) aged 16–18 who use mental health services. This helped gain their perspectives on their mental health experiences in Southern Ontario urban areas. This study was informed by post-colonial theory and critical race theory (CRT) and the concept of anti-Black racism (ABR). An interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) rooted in Heideggerian hermeneutic was utilized to respond to the main research question and three sub-questions. Data were collected from 13 participants comprising four groups: six ACCY; three faith-based leaders; two mental health workers; and two parents. Overall, 10 females and three males participated in the study; the three males were all ACCY.
One of the significant findings from this study revealed that ACCY understand their mental health experiences as an invalidation of their knowledge, feelings, and emotions and who they are as Black youth. ACCY reported that they were invalidated within key institutions and in their home environment, which negatively impacted their mental health and well-being. However, the adult participants understood the mental health experiences of ACCY differently from the youth. They understood that ACCY’s mental health experiences were misunderstood as deviant behaviours and ACCY’s behaviours were criminalized rather than recognized as mental health issues to be addressed. This study found that the invalidation and misunderstanding of the mental health experience of ACCY within dominant institutions were race-based and resulted from experiences of systemic and pervasive ABR. I argue that systemic ABR is the root cause of the mental health experiences of ACCY being invalidated. In terms of ACCY’s access to and use of mental health services, the study identified a dual pipeline: a school-to-mental health pipeline and a prison-to-mental health pipeline. ACCY prefer to access mental health services from Black mental health workers who understand them and can validate their lived experiences with systemic ABR and identity as Black youth.
This dissertation concludes with recommendations for social work and restructuring the key institutions by addressing pervasive ABR within them to centre Black youth’s mental health, give them the opportunity to voice, help them affirm racial pride, and include them in full participation in Canadian life by nurturing a sense of belonging
Brain Responses To Symmetries In Naturalistic Novel Three-Dimensional Objects
No full textHuman brains are sensitive to symmetry, especially vertical reflection, which is present in human faces and many other biological forms. However, symmetries in most visual scenes are rotated relative to the observer’s viewing location, failing to produce symmetry in the retinal image. We investigated the differences between perspective-distorted symmetry, and images that produce symmetry on the retina, and measured the association between responses to symmetry and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We found that perspective-distorted symmetry with cues to 3D shape elicited responses, and both image-level and perspective distorted 3D symmetry elicited stronger responses than 2D symmetry. 3D image-level symmetry created stronger responses than 3D perspective-distorted symmetry. Lastly, there was no association between responses to symmetry and ASD. We conclude that symmetry processing occurs in the absence of a symmetry-related task, even for perspective-distorted symmetry. Additionally, there may not be any association between conditions that affect global processing and symmetry processing
On PCF Polynomials
No full textThe author of [27] proves that the set of post-critically finite (PCF) polynomials of given degree is a set of bounded height, up to PGL_2-conjugacy. This result is extended to show that the set of monic polynomials g(z) with rational coefficients of given degree such that there exists a d ≥ 2 such that g(z^d) is PCF, is also a set of bounded height. Note that by fixing the degree of a polynomial and algebraic degree of its coefficients, the set of such PCF polynomials is in fact finite, and computable. Bounds on the coefficients for quartic PCF polynomials with rational coefficients are computed, and a search of the resulting space yields 16 distinct conjugacy classes. Infinite families of PCF polynomials containing each of these distinct conjugacy classes are found, giving a lower bound on the number of such conjugacy classes in terms of degree d
The Mathematics Of Deep Neural Networks With Application In Predicting The Spread Of Infectious Diseases Through Disease Informed Neural Networks (DINNs)
No full textDeep learning has emerged in many fields in recent times where neural networks are used to learn and understand data. This thesis combines deep learning frameworks with epidemiological models and is aimed specifically at the creation and testing of DINNs with a view to modeling the infection dynamics of epidemics. This research thus trains the DINN on synthetic data derived from an SI-SIR model designed for Avian influenza and shows the model’s accuracy in predicting extinction and persistence conditions. In the method, a twelve hidden layer model was constructed with sixty-four neurons per layer and ReLU activation function was used. The network is trained to predict the time evolution of five state variables for birds and humans over 50,000 epochs. The overall loss minimized to 0.000006, was characterized of the loss of data and physics, which made the DINN follow the differential equations that fundamentally described the disease progression
Biologically Inspired Oral Inflammatory Load For Periodontal Applications
No full textPeriodontal disease is a prevalent inflammatory condition affecting the supporting structures of teeth, including the gums, periodontal ligament, and alveolar bone. It is one of the leading causes of tooth loss in adults and has been linked to various systemic health issues, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and respiratory conditions. Early detection and accurate diagnosis are critical for preventing disease progression and mitigating its broader health impacts. However, current diagnostic methods are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and require specialized clinical expertise. This dissertation presents an innovative approach that integrates bio-inspired cell isolation techniques with artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the detection and quantification of oral inflammatory markers, specifically oral polymorphonuclear neutrophils (oPMNs), for periodontal diagnostics.
Our method involves saliva sampling using a standardized 10 ml oral rinse collected from both healthy and periodontal subjects. We optimized and characterized a novel technique for isolating oPMNs from other cellular components in saliva, leveraging their unique adhesion properties. Hydrophilic materials were coated on surfaces to selectively capture and isolate oPMNs. The isolated cells were then analyzed using an AI server developed and trained specifically to detect and quantify oPMNs in both healthy and clinical samples. The AI model categorized the results into five distinct levels of periodontal disease, providing a detailed assessment of disease severity.
The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method in isolating and quantifying oPMNs with high accuracy. Clinical validation on samples from a diverse cohort, ranging from healthy individuals to those with severe periodontitis, confirmed the method's functionality. The oral inflammatory load (OIL) assessment showed an error rate of less than 5% compared to standard laboratory-based methods, underscoring its precision and reliability.
The integration of AI in this context significantly reduces the diagnostic workload for healthcare professionals while enhancing the accuracy and speed of assessments. The method offers a practical, scalable solution for periodontal disease diagnostics, enabling earlier and more precise identification of disease states. Beyond its clinical applications, the system has the potential to be developed into a point-of-care diagnostic tool, providing immediate results without the need for specialized laboratory equipment. This innovation could be particularly impactful in resource-limited settings, where access to advanced medical facilities is restricted.
In conclusion, the combination of bio-inspired isolation techniques and AI-assisted analysis represents a significant advancement in periodontal diagnostics. This approach not only improves current diagnostic practices but also opens new possibilities for the future of periodontal healthcare, where rapid, accurate, and accessible diagnostics become the standard. Through this work, we aim to contribute to the development of innovative, patient-centered solutions for periodontal disease management, ultimately promoting better oral and systemic health outcomes
Measurement Of Inclusive Anti Neutrino Cross Section And Ration To Neutrino Cross Section As A Function Of Muon Kinematics
No full textMeasurement of inclusive anti neutrino cross section and ratio to neutrino cross section as a function of muon kinematics
The MINERvA experiment delves deep into the world of neutrino nucleus interactions to piece together a guidebook of measurements essential to advancing cross section models. The next generation of long baseline neutrino experiments require a high precision understanding of neutrino nucleus interactions to measure oscillation parameters. The MINERvA experiment uses an on-axis flux peaking at 6 GeV from the NuMI beamline at Fermilab.
This talk will present a measurement of the inclusive anti neutrino cross section, in terms of muon kinematics, on the hydrocarbon tracker region of the MINERvA detector. An inclusive measurement in terms of muon kinematics will make for a comparatively easier comparison to model predictions, as such a measurement reduces the need for an accurate prediction of hadronic activity, which is harder to model.
Furthermore, muon kinematics are easier to reconstruct in the detector and a two-dimensional measurement yields a more detailed view of the phase space being explored. Moreover, the measured cross section can be compared to the baseline model broken down by the predicted interaction channel. Some channels dominate in certain parts of phase space and will motivate which aspects of the model require more improvement.
This measurement is extracted in anti-neutrino mode as long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments rely on a high precision understanding of both neutrino and anti-neutrino nucleus interactions. The neutrino counterpart of this measurement has already been published [1]. Model comparisons are presented for the extracted cross section measurement and its ratio to the neutrino cross section.
[1] D. Ruterbories et al. (MINERvA), Measurement of inclusive charged-current νμ cross sections as a function of muon kinematics at ∼ 6 GeV on hydrocarbon, Phys. Rev. D 104, 092007 (2021), arXiv:2106.16210 [hep-ex]