1983 research outputs found
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The Art of Overcoming the Wall: Cinematic Reflections on the Berlin Border
No full textThis dissertation examines the iconography of the Berlin Wall—the West-facing façade of the intra-German border—that materialized in the 1980s through a series of filmic encounters that sought to question, challenge, reframe, and, in some instances, reinforce the visual rhetoric of the geopolitical divide and the Wall as its most prominent and potent symbol. As a study in visual literacy and cinematic (re)mediation of borderscapes, my project explores the Wall’s significance as a concrete barrier, a multimedia image, and a reflective screen for collective projections. Further, I contend that, counter to common postwall era narratives, the demise of the Berlin Wall ushered in a new era marked by a global proliferation of borders and bordering practices on an unprecedented scale.
In approaching the Wall as one of the most notorious border fortification systems of the twentieth century, my study focuses on films and other artworks that emerged at critical junctures in Berlin’s history: 1961 as the first provisional barrier was being erected; mid-1980s when the West Berlin Wall was gradually transformed into an open-air gallery and a contested public platform while the divided city prepared to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its erection; the sudden collapse of the border in 1989 and the media frenzy that ensued in its aftermath; finally, the 20th and 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, an event that attracted global attention to the (re)unified capital and the Wall’s lingering, ghostly presence. I argue that films produced prior to the destruction of the border like Cynthia Beatt’s Cycling the Frame, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, and Ross McElwee’s and Marilyn Levine’s Something to Do with the Wall attempt to counteract the affective aporias and anxieties triggered by the Wall’s unyielding presence by underscoring the agency of the subject and reframing the Wall through cinematic means while alerting their audience to the trappings of mediation and the gaze of the camera. In turn, films released after the Wende like Cynthia Beatt’s follow-up project The Invisible Frame, Jürgen Böttcher’s The Wall, Bartek Konopka’s Rabbit à la Berlin, and Courtney Stephens’ and Pacho Velez’ The American Sector deal with apparitions and after-images of the Wall as part of a memoryscape threatened by collective amnesia, institutional processes of musealization, and more borderscapes. Their documentaries function as expeditions in search of new meanings and new frames that have in the meantime (re)materialized across the city in the form of smaller borders and less conspicuous artificial dividers.
The films and artworks discussed in my project confront border politics with border poetics. They question the authority of borders and the limits they impose on civic society by probing and actively contesting their short-lived, transient power on the space of the screen
The Statistical Order of Knowledge: A Social and Intellectual History of Search Engines
No full textThis dissertation tells the story of how the index, originally a library technology, became the hidden infrastructure of information societies. Using archival material, I trace the historical process through which indexes and indexers came to be automated. To be sure, an index is always a technology of automation. Without indexes, each time we searched for an item in a collection, we would have to read the collection in its entirety. Since the late nineteenth century, however, there have been many attempts to speed up and, eventually, fully automate the creation of indexes and the practice of information retrieval. Rather than literary indexing, my focus is scientific indexing because it is in the field of scientific communication that fears of information overload became entangled with commercial interests and the ambition to objectively establish a new unity of science. The main characters in this story are indexers, ranging from librarians and documentalists to information scientists and engineers. Although this story focuses on them, many of its consequences affect us— the indexees—directly.
Each chapter of this dissertation focuses on a different process in the automation of indexing, tracing both the intellectual controversies that underlie their development and reflecting on the social consequences that each of these transformations has wrought. Beginning with the world of scientific abstracting services at the turn of the twentieth century, I examine the politics of scholarly information in the years immediately before and after World War II in the United Kingdom; the emergence of keyword search and attempts to fully compute natural language in the 1950s in the United States; the use of academic citations to organize large collections of data and the origins of automated ranked indexes at the Institute for Scientific Information in the 1960s and 1970s. The final chapter examines the development of an indexing infrastructure that pervades our present moment and the roots of algorithmic bias in information sciences.
The dissertation uncovers an important epistemic shift I have termed the 'statistical order of knowledge'. Attempts to classify and order the sciences have long adopted a deductive approach that subdivided knowledge from larger categories into individual documents. In contrast to this approach, the period I am studying will foster the emergence of inductive methodologies that rely on the analysis of bibliographic data to produce new organizations of knowledge from which the subjectivity of the indexer can be bracketed. As I will show, however, the bracketing of the indexer's subjectivity was nothing but an illusion, as the tasks of indexing were delegated to algorithms designed to automate decision making and establish their own ranking criteria. To that end, the dissertation focuses on libraries, universities, laboratories, and research centers, which represent the institutional landscape in which the statistical order of knowledge emerged, but these spaces do not exhaust its influence. Soon, the ranked index will break out of its perimeter and come to organize every aspect of our digitally mediated experience
Hunger sensitivity: How high interoceptive awareness of hunger impacts eating behaviors and body mass index in those over 40
No full textThe present study examined the concept of hunger sensitivity as theorized in a
study conducted by Walker et al. (2015a), who determined that hunger sensitivity could
be assessed using their newly developed Hunger Sensitivity Scale. This present study
continued their work and used the Hunger Sensitivity Scale to determine what effects
high hunger sensitivity had on individual BMI and maladaptive eating patterns in a
sample of participants between the ages of 40-65. Participants completed a Qualtrics
survey that included demographic data, the Hunger Sensitivity Scale and the ThreeFactor Eating Questionnaire R18V2. For the first research question, a two-tailed Pearson
correlation and an independent samples t-test were used to determine whether or not high
hunger sensitivity was related to higher BMI in adults within the sample age group.
Results showed no relationship between the two variables. For the second research
question, a two-tailed Pearson correlation was used to determine whether or not high
hunger sensitivity was related to higher scores on the Three-Factor Eating Questionnaire
R18V2. This measure is used to quantitatively score maladaptive eating patterns that are divided up into three different domains (uncontrolled eating, cognitive restraint,
emotional eating) as well as a total score. The results of this analysis showed that high
hunger sensitivity had a small correlation with the TFEQ-R18V2 total score and the
uncontrolled eating and emotional eating domains. There was no correlation found for the
cognitive restraint domain. Test scores were calculated using Microsoft Excel and all
statistical analysis was completed using IBM SPSS Statistics. Discussion of the study results include comparison to the results of the Walker et al. (2015a) study, as well as
discussion of ANOVA and multiple linear regression results for demographic data. Study
limitations and directions for future research are also discussed
Learning from Deregulation: The Asymmetric Impact of Lockdown and Reopening on Risky Behavior During COVID‐19
No full textDuring the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic, states issued and then rescinded stay‐at‐home orders that restricted mobility. We develop a model of learning by deregulation, which predicts that lifting stay‐at‐home orders can signal that going out has become safer. Using restaurant activity data, we find that the implementation of stay‐at‐home orders initially had a limited impact, but that activity rose quickly after states' reopenings. The results suggest that consumers inferred from reopening that it was safer to eat out. The rational, but mistaken inference that occurs in our model may explain why a sharp rise of COVID‐19 cases followed reopening in some states.Author's Origina
Clause of Death: The Social Lives of U.S. Obituaries, 1918-2023
No full textUnited States newspapers have published obituaries for more than two hundred years. Obituaries provide written notice of individual deaths and summaries of the lives of the deceased. However, they do more than document the past; obituaries also perform social action in the present. They are authored, reflecting the grief and motivations of survivors. They circulate in ways that make visible certain lives while obscuring others, constrained by the media and technology through which they are distributed, just as they imprint upon these forms. Finally, they are consumed by survivors and strangers alike, upon whom they make demands. While they are intimately individual and local, they can also build coalitions across difference just as they continue to be a primary means of the gatekeeping and segregation of grief by race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography. They can make visible and challenge the stigma of death and dying just as they can obscure many of the dead. This holds particularly true for moments of epidemic and outbreak, which can reveal more about structural forces and social fault lines, just as they often generate an uptick in obituaries themselves. This dissertation uses obituaries as a sampling device to examine grief, bereavement, and death reporting across four causes of death between the early twentieth to twenty-first centuries: 1918 influenza, HIV/AIDS, drug overdose, and COVID-19. In doing so, I examine what it means to mourn, remember, and forget in moments of profound individual and collective loss
Convergence of coronary artery disease genes onto endothelial cell programs
No full textLinking variants from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to underlying mechanisms of disease remains a challenge1,4,6. For some diseases, a successful strategy has been to look for cases where multiple GWAS loci contain genes that act in the same biological pathway1–6. However, our knowledge of which genes act in which pathways is incomplete, particularly for cell-type specific pathways or understudied genes. Here we introduce a new method to connect GWAS variants to functions, which links variants to genes using epigenomic data, links genes to pathways de novo using Perturb-seq, and integrates these data to identify convergence of GWAS loci onto pathways. We apply this approach to study the role of endothelial cells in genetic risk for coronary artery disease (CAD), and discover that 43 CAD GWAS signals converge on the cerebral cavernous malformations (CCM) signaling pathway. Two regulators of this pathway, CCM2 and TLNRD1, are each linked to a CAD risk variant, regulate other CAD risk genes, and affect atheroprotective processes in endothelial cells. These results suggest a model where CAD risk is driven in part by the convergence of causal genes onto a particular transcriptional pathway in endothelial cells, highlight shared genes between common and rare vascular diseases (CAD and CCM), and identify TLNRD1 as a new, previously uncharacterized member of the CCM signaling pathway. This approach will be widely useful for linking variants to functions for other common polygenic diseases.Accepted Manuscrip
Essays on Entrepreneurship and Labor Markets
No full textThe first two chapters of this dissertation are based on a novel survey-experiment I conducted with
540 founders and executives of growth-capable U.S. startups. Study participants described hiring and
compensation-setting at their own firms (which are on average 4 years old with 17 employees and 11,000 higher, on average. This
effect shrinks, but is not totally eroded by the provision of a wage benchmark. Chapter Three (joint
work with Margaret G. Dalton, Sari Pekkala Kerr, and William R. Kerr) deals with a different set of
entrepreneurs: those who self-identify as self-employed. We document that, over the past half-century,
while self-employment has consistently accounted for around one in ten of the United States workforce,
its composition has changed. Since 1970, industries with high startup capital requirements have declined
from 53% of self-employment to 23%. This same time period also witnessed declines in ”hometown”
local entrepreneurship and the probability of the self-employed being among top earners. Using 2016
data, we show that high startup capital requirements are linked with lower profitability at small scales.
The transition away from high startup capital industries appears most closely linked to changes in small
business production functions and less due to advantageous reallocation to other opportunities, growth
in returns-to-scale among large businesses, or a worsening of financing conditions and debt levels
Dissecting tumor-immune microenvironment in response and resistance to immune checkpoint blockade in metastatic melanoma
No full textAlthough checkpoint inhibitor therapies have shown promise in improving progression-free and overall survival in metastatic melanoma patients, individual responses vary significantly, and the mechanisms underlying these differences remain unclear. To identify new factors driving response, as well as intrinsic and acquired resistance to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB), we employed single-nucleus RNA-sequencing (snRNA-seq) on biopsies from 51 metastatic melanoma patients undergoing ICB. Our dataset includes 30 pre-treatment samples (19 from patients with durable clinical benefit and 11 from those without) and 21 post-treatment samples (15 from patients with durable clinical benefit and 6 from those without). These samples were acquired either prospectively or retrospectively. Given the important role of the tumor immune microenvironment in modulating immunotherapy response, we aim to comprehensively characterize the immune landscape in these melanoma patients to identify key tumor-infiltrating immune cells, their distinct states, and cellular interactions that correlate with clinical outcomes.
We characterized the single-nucleus transcriptomes of immune cells from metastatic melanoma patients before or after ICB treatment. In pre-treatment samples, T follicular helper (Tfh) like cells, naïve CD4 T cells, memory B cells, plasmablast-like B cells, and CLEC9A+ type 1 conventional dendritic cells (cDC1) were more enriched in responders to ICB. Analysis of tumor-infiltrating myeloid cells revealed diverse phenotypes of tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) with distinct functions. Among the TAM subsets, we identified one TAM subset associated with angiogenesis and hypoxia phenotypes that was significantly more abundant in non-responders prior to therapy. Finally, our correlation analyses between tumor transcriptional profiles and immune cell frequencies suggested two distinct tumor microenvironments (TMEs) potentially associated with ICB response. We observed that the frequencies of different lymphocyte and dendritic cell populations were highly correlated. In addition, we observed that the frequencies of most TAM subsets were tightly and inversely correlated with lymphocyte infiltration in non-lymph node metastasis samples, suggesting different tumor immune microenvironments in lymph node and non-lymph node metastases. Overall, this study provides a systematic view of the highly heterogeneous immune landscapes of metastatic melanoma in response to ICB treatment. Our results highlight key immune cell types and interactions related to clinical outcomes, laying the foundation for the development of novel diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic strategies for melanoma
Outsourcing Tasks Online: Matching Supply and Demand on Peer-to-Peer Internet Platforms
No full textWe study the growth of online peer-to-peer markets. Using data from TaskRabbit, an expanding marketplace for domestic tasks at the time of our study, we show that growth varies considerably across cities. To disentangle the potential drivers of growth, we look separately at demand and supply imbalances, network effects, and geographic heterogeneity. First, we find that supply is highly elastic: in periods when demand doubles, sellers perform almost twice as many tasks, prices hardly increase, and the probability of requested tasks being matched falls only slightly. The first result implies that in markets where supply can accommodate demand fluctuations, growth relies on attracting buyers at a faster rate than sellers. Second and perhaps most surprisingly, we find no evidence of network effects in matching: doubling the number of buyers and sellers only doubles the number of matches. Third, we show that the cities where market fundamentals promote efficient matching of buyers and sellers are also those that are the fastest growing. This heterogeneity in matching efficiency is related to two measures of market thickness: geographic density (buyers and sellers living close together) and level of task standardization (buyers requesting homogeneous tasks). Our results have two main implications for peer-to-peer markets in which network effects are limited by the local and time-sensitive nature of the services exchanged. First, marketplace growth largely depends on strategic geographic expansion. Second, a competitive rather than winner-take-all equilibrium may arise in the long run.Author's Origina
Main Street Monetary Policy: The Implications of Business and Consumer Sentiment for the Federal Reserve
No full textThe utility of sentiment measures in monetary policymaking has only been sparsely studied and increasing in importance as sentiment diverges from economic fundamentals. This paper seeks to answer two questions. First, has the Federal Reserve historically incorporated business and consumer sentiment into their policymaking? In addition to existing sentiment indicators, this paper constructs a first-of-its-kind index of business sentiment derived from AI-enabled textual sentiment analysis of Beige Book reports. This approach enables us to capture business sentiment flowing directly to the Federal Reserve, its geographic variations, and offers flexible insights into specific sentiment attributes. Resulting evidence shows that the Federal Reserve has been historically responsive to business but not consumer sentiment in its rate-setting. This paper also finds these sentiment measures to be more reflective of labor market than price level conditions. Notably, this paper finds discernible heterogeneity in this relationship across different Federal Reserve chairs. Second, should the Federal Reserve incorporate business and consumer sentiment into their policymaking? Combined with evidence that sentiment measures predict real economy outcomes, I present a mathematical model demonstrating how sentiment flows through the real economy and necessitates changes in the monetary reaction function. Lastly, I simulate the estimated monetary regimes in a general equilibrium model and find that sentiment-augmented monetary regimes produce significantly superior real economic outcomes compared regimes ignoring sentiment. Broadly, this paper provides evidence that a greater sensitivity to the sentiments of real economic actors can produce better monetary policy