Showing 3431 - 3440 of 5708 Items
Gendered Subjectivity in Refugee Resettlement Processes: From Somalia to Lewiston, ME
Date: 2018-01-01
Creator: Elena Gleed
Access: Open access
- Refugee Resettlement to the United States is a globalized and transnational process of making home. After Somali state collapse in 1991, more than a million displaced people fled to refugee camps across the Kenyan border. Today, over 12,000 Somali people now live in Lewiston, ME, an old mill town located along the Androscoggin River. As refugees are resettled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees they enter a system created over fifty years ago in response to World War II. Using post-colonial and feminist scholarship, this project analyses the “female refugee” subject as she appears in the official discourse of resettlement processes. I trace the historical emergence of this subjectivity from an individual and work-based neoliberal American ethos to non-governmental organizations run by Somali women in Lewiston. Drawing from document analysis and ethnographic interviews, this paper explores the how Somali women are made to be “new American workers” in a process that combines western liberal feminism with ideas of integration and cultural orientation to the United States.
Using 'big data' to explain visits to lakes in 17 US states
Date: 2020-07-01
Creator: Erik Nelson, Maggie Rogers, Spencer Wood, Jesse Chung, Bonnie, Keeler
Access: Open access
- We use large dataset on US lakes from 17 states to estimate the relationship between summertime visits to lakes as proxied by social media use and the lakes' water quality, amenities, and surrounding landscape features and socioeconomic conditions. Prior to estimating these relationships we worked on 1) selecting a parsimonious set of explanatory variables from a roster of more than 100 lake attributes and 2) accounting for the non-random pattern of missing water quality data. These steps 1) improved the interpretability of the estimated visit models and 2) widened our estimated models' scope of statistical inference. We used Machine Learning techniques to select parsimonious sets of explanatory variables and multiple imputation to estimate water quality at lakes missing this data. We found the following relationships between summertime visits to lake and their attributes across the 17-state region. First, we estimated that every additional meter of average summer-time Secchi depth between 1995 and 2014 was associated with at least 7.0% more summer-time visits to a lake between 2005 to 2014, all else equal. Second, we consistently found that lake amenities, such as beaches, boat launches, and public toilets, were more powerful predictors of visits than water quality. Third, we also found that visits to a lake were strongly influenced by the lake's accessibility and its distance to nearby lakes and the amenities the nearby lakes offered. Finally, our results highlight the biased results that "big data"-based research on recreation can generate if non-random missing observation patterns in the data are not corrected.
Contingent planning under uncertainty via stochastic satisfiability
Date: 2003-07-01
Creator: Stephen M. Majercik, Michael L. Littman
Access: Open access
- We describe a new planning technique that efficiently solves probabilistic propositional contingent planning problems by converting them into instances of stochastic satisfiability (SSAT) and solving these problems instead. We make fundamental contributions in two areas: the solution of SSAT problems and the solution of stochastic planning problems. This is the first work extending the planning-as-satisfiability paradigm to stochastic domains. Our planner, ZANDER, can solve arbitrary, goal-oriented, finite-horizon partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). An empirical study comparing ZANDER to seven other leading planners shows that its performance is competitive on a range of problems. © 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Measuring Creative Performance of Teams Through Dynamic Semantic Social Network Analysis
Date: 2013-04-12
Creator: Peter Gloor
Access: Open access
- In this project we compare communication structure and content exchanged by members of creative, interdisciplinary teams of medical researchers, physicians, patients and caretakers with their creative output. We find that longitudinal social networking patterns and word usage predict creative performance. We collected the e-mail archives of 60 members of a community of researchers working on 12 projects improving various aspects of the daily lives of patients of Crohn’s disease. Our results indicate that more creative projects show a decrease in group density, while more actors are involved, and more emails are exchanged, suggesting that a more successful project attracts more attention from many different people. We also found that members of more creative projects use more emotional language, which gets more focused over time.
Subversive, mother, killjoy: Sexism against dilma rousseff and the social imaginary of Brazil’s rightward turn
Date: 2019-03-01
Creator: Joseph Jay Sosa
Access: Open access
- From resistance fighter against Brazil’s military dictatorship to its first female president, Dilma Rousseff’s biography follows the historic arc of democratization in Brazil. Her 2016 impeachment was also the culminating event of numerous crises that polarized Brazilian society. To supporters, Rousseff’s removal without evidence constitutes an abrogation of democracy. To critics, Rousseff had to answer for an economic recession and widespread corruption (though she was not implicated in any investigation). This article examines the social imaginaries of the rightward turn that made Rousseff’s removal possible. Moving across diverse sets of public culture-street protests, journalistic accounts, political observations, and Rousseff’s speeches-the article uses sexism against Rousseff as an analytic to deconstruct the cultural narratives of Brazil’s rightward turn. A first section considers conservative efforts to paint Rousseff as a political subversive. These accusations drew on long-standing, right-wing Brazilian tropes around people who don’t “act right” in the moral, sexual, and ideological fields. A second section reads the maternal metaphors of Rousseff’s governance strategies against conflicting political renderings of the family-pitting left-wing versions of family rooted in economic development against Evangelical Christian accounts of the family as a gender-normative unit. A third section argues that Rousseff’s response to the charges against her turned her (and those who argued her case) into what Sara Ahmed calls “feminist killjoys.” Ultimately, the question of sexism in Rousseff’s impeachment shows how deep-seated cultural conservatisms can be activated in a new era of democratic uncertainty.
A critical, analytical framework for the digital machine
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Crystal Hall, Eric Chown, Fernando Nascimento
Access: Open access
- The Faculty of Digital and Computational Studies (DCS) at Bowdoin College proposes a critical, analytical framework, referred to as the ‘4As,’ as an interdisciplinary means to interpret, evaluate, and create the data, operations, and devices of computing across all domains of knowledge production. Following other disciplines that have developed in symbiotic relationships to one another, DCS puts computation in conversation with fields from across the arts, humanities, physical, and social sciences. Our foundational premise is the bidirectional influence between these disciplines and digital artifacts and computation. The 4As (artifact, architecture, abstraction, and agency) benefit from both the scepticism of the liberal arts in the face of ubiquitous digital processes and the analytical opening for examining questions pertaining to creative and imaginative alternatives to the digital and computational status quo. We provide an ultra-contemporary case study to demonstrate the framework in use.
Locating noctiluca miliaris in the arabian sea: An optical proxy approach
Date: 2014-01-01
Creator: Patricia S. Thibodeau, Collin S. Roesler, Susan L. Drapeau, S. G. Prabhu Matondkar, Joaquim I., Goes, P. Jeremy Werdell
Access: Open access
- Coincident with shifting monsoon weather patterns over India, the phytoplankter Noctiluca miliaris has recently been observed to be dominating phytoplankton blooms in the northeastern Arabian Sea during the winter monsoons. Identifying the exact environmental and/or ecological conditions that favor this species has been hampered by the lack of concurrent environmental and biological observations on time and space scales relevant to ecologic and physiologic processes. We present a bio-optical proxy for N. miliaris measured on highly resolved depth scales coincident with hydrographic observations with the goal to identify conducive hydrographic conditions for the bloom. The proxy is derived from multichannel excitation chlorophyll a fluorescence and is validated with microscopy, pigment composition, and spectral absorption. Phytoplankton populations dominated by either diatoms or other dinoflagellates were additionally discerned. N. miliaris populations in full bloom were identified offshore in low-nutrient and low–N:P ratio surface waters within a narrow temperature and salinity range. These populations transitioned to high-biomass diatom-dominated coastal upwelling populations. A week later, the N. miliaris blooms were observed in declining phase, transitioning to very-low-biomass populations of non–N. miliaris dinoflagellates. There were no clear hydrographic conditions uniquely associated with the N. miliaris populations, although N. miliaris was not found in the upwelling or extremely oligotrophic waters. Taxonomic transitions were not discernible in the spatial structure of the bloom as identified by the ocean color Chl imagery, indicating that in situ observations may be necessary to resolve community structure, particularly for populations below the surface.
Xanthophyll cycle activity in two prominent arctic shrub species
Date: 2017-01-01
Creator: T.S. Magney, B.A. Logan, J.S. Reblin, N.T. Boelman, J.U.H., Eitel, H.E. Greaves, K.L. Griffin, C.M. Prager, L.A. Vierling
Access: Open access
The “New” Prosumer: Collaboration on the Digital and Material “New Means of Prosumption”
Date: 2013-04-13
Creator: George Ritzer
Access: Open access
- Many of “cyber-utopians” have lauded the Internet, especially social networking sites, for a variety of reasons, including making possible a dramatic and revolutionary increase in social collaboration (Benkler, 2007; Tapscott and Williams, 2006). The goal of this essay is to examine- and, at least in part, debunk- this claim from a new and unique sociological perspective- the relationship between collaboration and the “new means of prosumption”. Such an examination is suggested by the fact that collaboration is, by definition, a form of prosumption. That is, it involves one or more parties “producing” and other(s) “consuming” something of mutual interest and importance. However, the collaborative process, like prosumption more generally, is not as separable as all that. In fact, collaboration is a dialectical process in which those involved are continually changing their positions on the prosumption continuum (see below), sometimes they are more