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Around the Gate
Get PDF“Around the Gate” is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems written by a New Orleans native. Beyond local color and Creole culture, the collection treats archetypal figures in mythology and the literary tradition as contemporary personae, frequently in a dramatic monologue. The poems span across several times and time zones, and readers are just as likely to find themselves cruising down St. Claude Street in New Orleans in the 1980s as they are to find themselves on an ancient beach of Naxos, in the Aegean Sea. The collection’s poems are often, thusly, dialogic, including a smattering of ekphrastic poems. The manuscript may easily be interpreted through a feminist or ecopoetic lens, moving between familial, or domestic scenes and tales of travel and transformation
Slow Burn
Get PDFWhen three estranged sisters receive news of their father’s death, they must go on a road trip to an eccentric arts festival in order to receive their inheritances and decide if reconnecting after years of family trauma is worth the trip
Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow
Get PDF“Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow” closely reads one novel and one play written in the early twenty-first century and set in the Jim Crow period. Analyzing how Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2005) and Lynn Nottage’s drama By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) take up Jim Crow era Black history together, I find that both works intentionally offer incomplete, subjective and fictive narrations of black life during Jim Crow to deny readers a sense of realism. In doing so, these authors represent a group of African American novelists and playwrights that contend with the decades following Black Arts Movement being so temporally removed from Jim Crow in two steps. Firstly, they acknowledge in their partial and obscure narratives that this historical Black experience cannot be fully recovered by treating Jim Crow Black history like a historical site to be discovered with a literary return. Secondly, they demonstrate in their direct appeal to their audiences to co-create the fictions’ narratives with the characters that black history can instead be a praxis of inter-generational, collaborative fiction writing that imagines past Black individuals, making them more transparent in the contemporary moment. These features of narrative and structural address signify that this group of post-Black Arts Movement authors consider Black individuals’ freedom during Jim Crow more accessible by conjecturing how it manifested with their audiences
Review of William Faulkner and Mortality; A Fine Dead Sound, by Ahmed Honeini, Routledge, 2021, pp. xi+ 194, $ 96,00 (hardback), ISBN: 9780367501327.
Get PDFBook review of William Faulkner and Mortality; A Fine Dead Sound, by Ahmed Honeini, Routledge, 2021, pp. xi+ 194, $ 96,00 (hardback), ISBN: 9780367501327
Parallel Algorithms for Scalable Graph Mining: Applications on Big Data and Machine Learning
Get PDFParallel computing plays a crucial role in processing large-scale graph data. Complex network analysis is an exciting area of research for many applications in different scientific domains e.g., sociology, biology, online media, recommendation systems and many more. Graph mining is an area of interest with diverse problems from different domains of our daily life. Due to the advancement of data and computing technologies, graph data is growing at an enormous rate, for example, the number of links in social networks is growing every millisecond. Machine/Deep learning plays a significant role for technological accomplishments to work with big data in modern era. We work on a well-known graph problem, community detection (CD). We design parallelalgorithms for Louvain method for static networks and show around 12-fold speedup. The implementations use both shared-memory and distributed memory parallel algorithms. We also show the change of communities in dynamic networks in different time phases computing several graph metrics based on their temporal definition. We detect temporal communities in dynamicnetworks representing social/brain/communication/citation networks in a more concrete way. We present both shared-memory and distributed-memory parallel algorithms for CD in dynamic graphs using permanence, a vertex-based metric. The parallel CD algorithm implemented using Message Passing Interface (MPI) for temporal graphs is the first MPI-based algorithm to the best of our knowledge. Our algorithm achieves 30× speedup for the largest network with billions of edges. We present a scalable method for CD based on Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) via semi-supervised node classification using PyTorch with CUDA on GPU environment (4× performance gain). Our model achieves up to 86.9% accuracy and 0.85 F1 Score on different real-world datasets from diverse domains. We provide a scalable solution to the Sparse Deep Neural Network (DNN) Challenge by designing data parallel Sparse DNN using TensorFlow on GPU (4.7× speedup). We include the applications of webspam detection from webgraphs (billions of edges), sentiment analysis on social network, Twitter (1.2 million tweets) to reveal insights about COVID-19 vaccination awareness among the public and timeseries forecasting of the vaccinated population in the USA to portray the importance of graph mining in our daily activities
Investigation of Innovative Means to Enhance Mist Cooling in Gas Turbines
Get PDFOne of the most common techniques to increase the thermal efficiency and output power of gas turbines is to increase the turbine inlet temperature with increased pressure ratio. The current turbine cooling schemes have almost reached a plateau with most of cooling advancements being incremental. Since the main challenge is to cool the turbine airfoils without using more cooling air, application of mist cooling is a very promising scheme that can provide significant cooling enhancement. In this study, mist (tiny water droplets 10-20 µm) is added to the conventional cooling air technique to improve the cooling performance.
Computational studies have been performed to investigate employment of mist cooling a) in a complete, current gas turbine airfoils design under real gas turbine operating conditions including conjugate gas-solid heat transfer with internal passage cooling, impinging jet cooling, trailing edge cooling, and external film cooling and tip cooling in a rotating blade. b) in the first stator-rotor stage under complicated interactions of passing wakes and shock waves in a transonic gas turbine. c) through a row of novel sweeping jet design via fluidic oscillators without moving parts in the applications of impinging jet cooling and film cooling.
Furthermore, an experimental study has been performed to investigate mist film cooling through the sweeping jet film cooling design in a wind tunnel. A Phase Doppler Particle Analyzer (PDPA) system was used to investigate the water droplet behavior with such a sweeping jet in conjunction with the temperature field using thermocouples and Infrared Thermography.
The results show that using mist can achieve an average cooling enhancement of 20% to 80% with the local maximum enhancement up to 350%. For sweeping flow studies, due to the sweeping and feed-back flow behavior inside the fluidic oscillator, tiny droplets coalesce into bigger droplets, resulting in a phase lag between the air and mist flow, which makes cooling more uniform. The non-steady flow simulation has identified the fundamental vortex dynamics that explains the reason why the sweeping jet film cooling flow produces a time-averaged inward counter-rotating vortex pair (CRVP) against the outward CRVP presents in traditional steady jet film cooling flow
Ocean Wave Prediction and Characterization for Intelligent Maritime Transportation
Get PDFThe national Earth System Prediction (ESPC) initiative aims to develop the predictionsfor the next generation predictions of atmosphere, ocean, and sea-ice interactions in the scale of days to decades. This dissertation seeks to demonstrate the methods we can use to improve the ESPC models, especially the ocean prediction model. In the application side of the weather forecasts, this dissertation explores imitation learning with constraints to solve combinatorial optimization problems, focusing on the weather routing of surface vessels. Prediction of ocean waves is essential for various purposes, including vessel routing, ocean energy harvesting, agriculture, etc. Since the machine learning approaches cannot forecast ocean waves with sufficient accuracy for longer forecast horizons and the numerical methods are not flexible due to being expert-designed, there is a need to study both methods to improve forecasts. One popular way to improve forecasts is to perform data assimilation, which fails to improve the numerical model in the model space. In this dissertation, we explore different ways to improve wave forecasts. We combine data assimilation and machine learning methods to improve predictions from the numerical model WaveWatch III. We have also explored rogue ocean waves, which are not predicted using traditional numerical methods. Moreover, using imitation learning to guide combinatorial optimization problems should allow fast training of reinforcement learning algorithms while satisfying the constraints
Balzac et la Construction de l’Iidentité Individuelle: Jeux d’Entente et de Concurrence entre l’État Civil et la Comédie Humaine (book review)
No full textPhotoproducts and Transformations of Organic Pollutants in Aquatic Environments
Get PDFThe degradation of petroleum-derived organic pollutants in aquatic systems occurs through lengthened exposure to UV and visible light. In this thesis, organic pollutants include crude oil, refined fuels, and plastic particles or films. The photo-oxidation of these pollutants are monitored over natural waters. To characterize the molecular signatures of photo-oxidized petroleum, bench-scale spills of refined fuels and crude oil were irradiated over Alaskan waters. A 4-component fluorescence PARAFAC model revealed a unique feature associated with photo-oxidized refined fuel unlike traditional “microbial”- or “terrestrial-like” components. In contrast, crude oil photolytically decomposed into humic-like components and oxidized aliphatics. FT-ICR MS data corroborated the optical data. Overall, refined fuels produce a significantly higher mass of photoproducts than crude oil and carry a unique chemical signature.
To characterize degradation pathways of plastic particles mediated by reactive oxygen species (ROS), chemical probes were added to solutions of plastic in water to react with reactive transients produced from plastic irradiation. ROS examined were hydroxyl radical and singlet oxygen. A higher ROS production rate was observed in nanosized particles versus microsized particles, and higher in plastics with backbones containing ester bonds than that of backbones made of carbon-carbon bonds. Cloud point extraction was successfully used to separate plastic particles from water, and surface chemistry changes on shopping bags show early signs of degradation from UV light. Results in this thesis give encouraging precedent to future methods of studying photodegradation of environmentally relevant organic pollutants
Advocacy Experiences of Licensed Professional Counselors Who Serve Minor Survivors of Abuse and Neglect
Get PDFLPCs in Louisiana operate in multiple professional roles and maintain various responsibilities, including advocacy for clients. Although numerous advocacy opportunities occur when counselors are working with children, a minimal amount of research exists regarding advocacy training, as well as the associated intricacies and responsibilities of advocacy. Lack of awareness of advocacy issues is a prominent barrier to advocacy involvement and it is suggested that counselor education programs are infusing advocacy education into courses but are not necessarily teaching specific constructs of advocacy. Thus, relevant and existing advocacy literature is sparse.
The purpose of my qualitative phenomenological research is to understand advocacy experiences of LPCs who work with minors who are survivors of child abuse and neglect. I will explore LPCs’ experiences regarding advocacy in the following areas: (a) education, training, and competence; (b) collaboration with various professionals; and (c) difficulties and benefits of advocating for minors who are survivors of child abuse and neglect. The outcome of this research is important as it may uncover advocacy areas in need of further research, gaps in education and training, and a reflection of clinical competency related to advocacy experiences of Louisiana counselors who serve minor survivors of abuse and neglect. Improved actions of advocacy for this population may result in prevention of further traumatic experiences, access to needed resources, lack of gaps in services and improved self-advocacy. Knowledge produced by the research could also lead to more competent practices for clinicians, improved education and training, and improved collaboration with professionals