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The Origins of Cyber Warfare: How the Internet Became Weaponized
No full textThis thesis introduces “cyberfarming,” a new framework for understanding how states weaponize cyberspace through the strategic deployment of technologies within critical infrastructure sectors. While the majority of research on cyberspace addresses resilience, cyber power indices, and incidents of espionage and sabotage, it often overlooks the systematic processes behind cyber weaponization. This study addresses this gap by presenting cyberfarming as a deliberate, state-led strategy to embed technologies for long-term control and leverage in conflicts. The thesis posits that cyber weaponization results from a network of interconnected practices: cyberfarming, legal frameworks supporting offensive actions, reliance on vulnerable infrastructures, and unresolved diplomatic conflicts. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, it examines eight case studies—featuring U.S. adversaries and allies such as China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Nigeria, Japan, France, and the United Kingdom—to highlight how these factors collectively drive cyber weaponization. The research also introduces a Diplomatic Hostility Index, illustrating the impact of diplomatic strains on cyber activity escalation and the shift toward technological self-sufficiency in critical sectors like energy and defense. Each chapter analyzes a specific factor affecting cyber weaponization: the role of evolving cyber laws, the vulnerabilities inherent in infrastructure dependencies, and the connection between diplomatic hostility and cyber strategies. This work contributes to the fields of cybersecurity and international security by offering an integrated perspective on cyber weaponization that links technological, legal, and diplomatic dimensions. The findings encourage a holistic approach to cyber policy, equipping policymakers and security professionals to better understand and counter cyber threats in an increasingly interconnected global environment
Growth Through Inclusion in South Africa
No full textIt is painfully clear that South Africa is performing poorly, exacerbating problems such as inequality and exclusion. The economy’s ability to create jobs is slowing, worsening South Africa’s extreme levels of unemployment and inequality. South Africans are deeply disappointed with social progress and dislike the direction where the country seems to be heading. Despite its enviable productive capabilities, the national economy is losing international competitiveness. As the economy staggers, South Africa faces deteriorating social indicators and declining levels of public satisfaction with the status quo. After 15 years, attempts to stimulate the economy through fiscal policy and to address exclusion through social grants have failed to achieve their goals. Instead, they have sacrificed the country's investment grade, increasing the cost of capital to the whole economy, with little social progress to show for it. The underlying capabilities to achieve sustained growth by leveraging the full capability of its people, companies, assets, and knowhow remain underutilized. Three decades after the end of apartheid, the economy is defined by stagnation and exclusion, and current strategies are not achieving inclusion and empowerment in practice.
This report asks the question of why. Why is the economy growing far slower than any reasonable comparator countries? Why is exclusion so extraordinarily high, even after decades of various policies that have aimed to support socio-economic transformation? What would it take for South Africa to include more of its people, capabilities, assets, and ideas in the functioning of the economy, and why aren’t such actions being undertaken already? The Growth Lab has completed a deep diagnostic of potential causes of South Africa’s prolonged underperformance over a two-year research project. Building on the findings of nine papers and widespread collaboration with government, academics, business and NGOs, this report documents the project’s central findings. Bluntly speaking, the report finds that South Africa is not accomplishing its goals of inclusion, empowerment and transformation, and new strategies and instruments will be needed to do so. We found two broad classes of problems that undermine inclusive growth in the Rainbow Nation: collapsing state capacity and spatial exclusion.Version of Recor
Education and the challenges for democracy
No full textThis introductory essay for the special issue, “Education and the Challenges for Democracy,” proposes challenges to democracy call for a reexamination of the relationship of democracy to democratic education. The essay describes the challenges to democracy, how those challenges impact democratic education and how education can address those challenges, followed by a summary of six peer reviewed papers that examine the relationship of education to democracy in Japan, Singapore, South Africa and the United States. The essay concludes with a discussion of the significance of these papers to understand the dialectical relationship between education and democracy, and their implications for research, policy and practice
Transferrin Receptor Targeting Chimeras (TransTACs) for Membrane Protein Degradation
No full textAbstractCancer cells require high levels of iron for rapid proliferation, leading to a significant upregulation of the iron carrier protein Transferrin Receptor (TfR) on their cell surface. Leveraging this phenomenon and the exceptionally fast endocytosis rate of TfR, we introduce Transferrin Receptor TArgeting Chimeras (TransTAC), a novel molecular archetype for membrane protein degradation in cancers and other cell types. TransTACs repurpose the naturally recycling receptor TfR1 for protein degradation. To accomplish this, we utilized a combination of protein engineering strategies to redirect the target protein from recycling-endosome trafficking to lysosomal degradation. We show that TransTACs can highly efficiently degrade a diverse range of single-pass, multi-pass, native, or synthetic membrane proteins, establishing new possibilities for targeted cancer therapy.Accepted Manuscrip
Trauma Toxins: The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study and Trauma's 'Toxic Turn'
No full textAuthor's Origina
Reshaping Remnants: Architecture Amid Inheritance and Uncertainty
No full textThe way we design architecture today is teleological in its approach. Architects face a crisis of relevance in an era of uncertainty and climate change, where rigid design processes fail to engage with ecological crises and material realities.
This thesis critiques the discipline’s short-sightedness and reliance on predetermined standardization, proposing an alternative design methodology that embraces inherited, irregular conditions and designs for geologic timescales—working with surplus materials, composing rather than dictating form, and allowing longevity to drive architectural response.
Using the post-strip-mining Appalachian landscape and discarded stone as fodder, Reshaping Remnants explores how hyper-local, material-driven sequencing and land-based timescales can redefine architectural practice. The project stitches waste rock and debris strewn in the aftermath of strip mining into a field of structures that restore the watershed while addressing immediate human and non-human needs. At the same time, it challenges architecture’s conventional temporality by designing for earthly timespans, suggesting that true sustainability emerges when architecture outlives its short-term purpose and transgresses the limited purview of teleological thinking.
Architecture, like all terrestrial life, is not static. How can it transcend the hubris of immediate authorship and instead transform through time, accommodating emergent futures and contextual abundance? By designing for longevity and leaving space for contingency, this approach resists the notion of fixed form, arguing that architecture becomes truly sustainable when it shifts from imposition to orchestration—choreographing the conditions it inherits rather than forcing material to obey a predetermined vision.Department of Architectur
Associations between indoor air exposures and cognitive test scores among university students in classrooms with increased ventilation rates for COVID-19 risk management
No full textBackground
Past work demonstrating an association between indoor air quality and cognitive performance brought attention to the benefits of increasing outdoor air ventilation rates beyond code minimums. These code minimums were scrutinized during the COVID-19 pandemic for insufficient ventilation and filtration specifications. As higher outdoor air ventilation was recommended in response, questions arose about potential benefits of enhanced ventilation beyond infection risk reduction.
Objective
This was investigated by examining associations between indoor carbon dioxide concentrations, reflective of ventilation and building occupancy, and cognitive test scores among graduate students attending lectures in university classrooms with infection risk management strategies, namely increased ventilation.
Methods
Post-class cognitive performance tests (Stroop, assessing inhibitory control and selective attention; Arithmetic, assessing cognitive speed and working memory) were administered through a smartphone application to participating students (54 included in analysis) over the 2022–2023 academic year in classrooms equipped with continuous indoor environmental quality monitors that provided real-time measurements of classroom carbon dioxide concentrations. Temporally and spatially paired exposure and outcome data was used to construct mixed effects statistical models that examined different carbon dioxide exposure metrics and cognitive test scores.
Results
Model estimates show directionally consistent evidence that higher central and peak classroom carbon dioxide concentrations, indicative of ventilation and occupancy, are associated with lower cognitive test scores over the measured range included in analysis ( ~ 440–1630 ppm). The effect estimates are strongest for 95th percentile class carbon dioxide concentrations, representing peak class carbon dioxide exposures.
Impact statement
As the COVID-19 pandemic eased, questions emerged on the benefits of increased outdoor air ventilation beyond infection reduction. This work assesses associations between carbon dioxide concentrations, indicative of ventilation and occupancy, and cognitive test scores among students in university classrooms with increased outdoor air ventilation. Although not causal, models show statistically significant evidence of associations between lower carbon dioxide concentrations and higher cognitive test scores over the low range of carbon dioxide exposures in these classrooms. While the underlying mechanisms remain unknown, higher outdoor air ventilation appears to provide additional benefits by reducing indoor air exposure and supporting student performance.Accepted Manuscrip
Raspberry-colloid-templated catalysts as a versatile and stable thermocatalytic platform
No full textNanoparticle (NP)-supported catalysts are critical to the production of over 90% of chemicals and raw materials used today. Their catalytic performance is predicated on a combination of geometric and electronic descriptors associated with the properties of the NPs, support, and the interactions between them. However, existing catalyst preparative methods of nucleating or immobilizing NPs on support surfaces do not permit independent variation of either NP or support properties as NP nucleation and growth characteristics are dependent on the support chemistry and vice versa. Consequently, such interconnected material properties cannot enable systematic investigations whereby individual NP or support properties are independently tuned to elucidate the catalytic role(s) of each structural descriptor or their combination, especially if their contributions exert orthogonal effects on catalytic performance.
To address this gap, we devised a raspberry-colloid-templating (RCT) strategy. In this Account, we outline the RCT synthetic methodology and highlight two key design features: partial NP embedding into the support which enhances catalytic stability against NP sintering while maintaining high reactant accessibility, and synthetic modularity for independent combinatorial variations of the catalyst’s building blocks and in their spatial organization. These two features yield thermomechanically stable RCT catalysts with multiple degrees of freedom at different length scales to isolate and independently tune potential catalytic descriptors, thereby deriving unambiguous structure–property relationships to guide future catalyst designs.
We describe how we leveraged these two key design features to employ the RCT strategy as a well-defined and synthetically robust model thermocatalytic platform to deconvolute the individual effects of traditionally coupled structural descriptors and elucidate important insights into catalyst design that cannot be easily achieved using conventional catalyst preparative methods. We highlight our recent investigations into three structural features found in all NP-supported catalysts: individual NP properties, properties of NP ensembles as a collective entity, and NP–support interfaces. First, we show how using pre-formed colloidal NPs in the RCT method decouples the NP and support formation steps to facilitate systematic evaluations of individual NPs properties. We exemplify this point through separate studies into the nanoscale effects of Pd ensemble sizes on the surfaces of PdAu alloyed NPs on reactant adsorption energetics, and the sintering behavior of Pt and Pd NP diesel oxidation catalysts. Second, we demonstrate how the colloidal templating steps in the RCT strategy controls the NP spatial localization to tune NP proximity, a collective NP ensemble property, at a fixed NP size, to induce local enrichment of reaction intermediates within the pore structure to direct catalytic selectivity. Third, we illustrate how partial embedding of NPs in RCT catalysts not only accentuates catalytic contributions arising from NP–support interfacial sites, but also reveals nanoscale wetting effects at the interface that we exploited to direct bimetallic catalyst synthesis. Interspersed throughout this Account, we also describe the advanced characterization and modelling tools adapted to probe the RCT catalyst structure and establish structural insights underpinning some of our main results. Finally, we provide an outlook on the RCT catalyst platform and speculate on its future opportunities, challenges, and practical applications.Chemistry and Chemical BiologyMaterials Science and Mechanical EngineeringAccepted Manuscrip
Reinforcing Manuscript Pages Weakened By Iron Gall Ink With Precoated Tissue: quick, subtle, and reversible (?) techniques
No full textThis poster presents a practical method for reinforcing fragile manuscript leaves damaged by iron gall ink corrosion. The technique is particularly suitable for treating bound manuscripts, where entire leaves—rather than isolated areas—may require stabilization. In such cases, overall reinforcement or lining is often more effective than localized mending.
Building on research by Rouchon et al. (2009) on the harmful effects of moisture, Pataki (2009) on precoated tissues, and Jacobi et al. (2011) on low-moisture mending, this method employs dry application of precoated tissue, which is reactivated in situ using a dilute solution of Klucel G (hydroxypropylcellulose) in isopropanol. This approach offers precise placement of the reinforcing tissue and controlled adhesive activation. Additionally, it eliminates the need for added drying weights, making it gentler on brittle and distorted leaves. The technique is demonstrated using images from a bound manuscript dating to circa 1800.
Finally, the poster shows how the treatment can be reversed: exposure to ethanol vapor softens the Klucel G adhesive, allowing it to be gently and selectively removed from the manuscript.Version of Recor
Closing Gaps or Holding Steady? The Affordable Care Act, Medicaid Expansion, and Racial Disparities in Coverage, 2010-2021
No full textContext: The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) Medicaid expansion produced major gains in coverage. However, findings on racial and ethnic disparities are mixed and may depend on how disparities are measured. This study examines both absolute and relative changes in uninsurance from 2010-2021 by race and ethnicity, stratified by Medicaid expansion status.
Methods: The sample contained all respondents under age 65 (N=30,339,104) from the American Community Survey, 2010-2021. Absolute and relative differences in uninsurance, compared to White Non-Hispanic individuals, were calculated for Hispanic; Black; Asian-American, Pacific Islander and Native Hawaiian (AANHPI); American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN); and multiracial individuals. States were stratified into ever-expanded vs. non-expansion status.
Findings: After the ACA, three patterns of coverage disparities emerge. For Hispanic and Black individuals, relative to White individuals, absolute disparities in uninsurance declined but relative disparities were largely unchanged, in both expansion and non-expansion states. For AANHPI individuals, disparities were eliminated entirely in both expansion and non-expansion states. For AIAN individuals, disparities declined in absolute terms but grew in relative terms, particularly in expansion states.
Conclusions: All groups experienced coverage gains post-ACA, but with heterogeneity in changes in disparities. Focused interventions are needed to improve coverage rates for Black, Hispanic, and AIAN individualsAccepted Manuscrip