Counterfeiting in American Literature
Year of Dissertation:
2010
This dissertation provides an analysis of representations of counterfeiting in American literature across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the oldest crimes in America and until the Civil War one of the most prevalent, counterfeiting appealed to the literary imagination not merely because it was so common, but because, as a fundamentally ambiguous activity, it seemed to expose significant fault lines in American life. The ambiguity of counterfeiting arose from the fact that its performance, and especially its successful performance, explicitly challenged the stability of the concepts, such as monetary value and sovereign authority, that were necessary to define it as a crime. Counterfeiting thus probed the shifting and often permeable boundaries between what was considered legitimate and illegitimate, legal and illegal, moral and immoral, natural and artificial, valuable and valueless, real and imaginary.
The Effects of Ethnic Matching on Abusive/Neglectful Minority Clients' Counseling Satisfaction, Engagement, Pre-mature Termination, and Outcome
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Educational Psychology
Advisor:
Georgiana Shick Tryon
This dissertation explored the relationship of ethnic matching between abusive and/or neglectful ethnic minority parents and minority counselors. Specifically, it examined these clients' satisfaction with and engagement in counseling as well as type of termination (unilateral or continuing) and outcome (client adjustment, meeting of agency goals, and re-abuse). This study also looked at the relationships of ethnic identity and acculturation discrepancies of clients who abused their children and their counselors, who were either ethnically matched or not matched, to client satisfaction, client engagement, client termination type, and client outcome.
Components of Emotional Experience and Reaction Time: A study of Normal Aging and Parkinson's Disease
Year of Dissertation:
2013
We examined whether valence or arousal levels affect decision and movement times in Parkinson's disease (PD) and in healthy aging. For both decision and movement time, we were interested in differences in the speed and variability in responding. We also studied whether emotional experience is altered as a result of the aging process and PD pathology.
PRICING COLLATERALIZED DEBT OBLIGATIONS WITH PURE JUMP LÉVY PROCESSES: A DYNAMIC BOTTOM-UP APPROACH
Year of Dissertation:
2011
The Gaussian copula model is the industry standard in pricing CDO tranches because of its easy implementation and speedy calibration. However, it has several well-known shortcomings: It leads to the so-called correlation smile", generates symmetric and light-tailed asset return distributions and it is static. This dissertation proposes a dynamic bottom-up model based on a pure jump Lévy process, a path rarely taken in the credit pricing literature, and makes a comprehensive empirical analysis of bottom-up CDO pricing models. Owing to its ability to capture asymmetric heavy-tailed return distributions and to accommodate different degrees of dampening for positive and negative jumps, empirical evidence shows that the proposed model significantly outperforms the models commonly employed in the industry and frequently referenced in the literature in fitting CDX and iTraxx tranche spreads. As such, it constitutes an important addition to the credit pricing literature.
The Powerful Voice of Women Dramatists in the Arab American Theatre Movement
Year of Dissertation:
2009
The Powerful Voice of Women Dramatists in the Arab American Theatre Movement
Some Non-Classical Methods in Epistemic Logic and Games
Year of Dissertation:
2012
In this dissertation, we consider some non-classical methods in epistemic logic and games. We first consider, dynamic epistemic logics in topological and geometric semantics, and then extend such ideas to the cases where inconsistencies are allowed. Then, as a case example, we discuss a well known paradox in game theory which is essentially a two-person Russell's paradox. Finally, we conclude with considering an alternative approach to games where strategies are considered as the primitives of the theory, and advancing some results.
Neverending Stories: Unauthorized Continuations, Fictional Realities, and the Long-Form Narrative from 1590 - 2011
Year of Dissertation:
2013
In reader-response theory, the open text demands that its readers collaborate in its construction. Such participation requires that these readers invest in the text's narrative universe, an investment made more possible when a fiction exhibits the properties of selvage: a firm, detailed, and consistent framework shot through with unfinished edges (termed fractures) that invite and support the reader's response in the form of continuation. These unauthorized extensions literally transform active reading into writing, while their presence recursively solidifies the fictional universe's imaginary space, further buttressing its autonomous existence. Such narrative reinforcement troubles many critics because an independent fictional reality not owned solely by a primary creator has disruptive implications for textual properties and copyrights. Nevertheless, these unauthorized continuations are the tangible artifacts of invested, pleasurable, and embodied reading, a type of reading and pleasure that is itself a revelatory form of literary criticism. Classifying texts in terms of their readers' desire to enter into and extend the narrative world encourages an understanding of these texts as evolving objects that must be categorized and described not just statically, but also dynamically, in terms of their capacity to generate. Three distinct (though occasionally intersecting) kinds of source-texts are identified here; the first locates the source's imaginary space as a narrative of place, the second as a narrative of society, character, and people, and the third as a narrative of interstices. Narratives of place such as Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia evoke fantasies of exploration and colonization; narratives of society like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice call forth fantasies of unveiling; and narratives of interstices such as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, as well as various long-running television programs, endorse fantasies of dimensionality and dialogue. An examination of these fantasies of continuation from 1590 to 2011 reveals a cyclical pattern in the reception of derivations and continuations. After the Romantic privileging of originality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the postmodern conception of creativity once more begins to resemble the more collaborative vision of the early modern period, a perspective which produces a queer, non-normative, multiplicitous, and post-canonical understanding of literature and fiction.
Word Association and Semantic Priming in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Program:
Speech & Hearing Sciences
Lexical organization in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is not fully understood. This study investigated the nature of word association in individuals with ASD using two experimental paradigms: a word association task (Experiment 1), followed by an individualized semantic priming task (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, participants were asked to name as many semantically related words as possible when auditorily presented with a target (e.g., participants heard the word cat and were asked to name semantically related words, within 60 seconds). In Experiment 2, participants were asked to name a target picture, preceded in time by 50 ms. Four types of auditory primes were used: Associated (e.g., bird-nest), Individual Semantic (e.g., bird-(tree)), Identity (e.g., bird-bird), and Unrelated (e.g., bird-car). The primes in the Individual Semantic condition were semantic associates obtained from responses in Experiment 1. Participants were 15 individuals with ASD (aged 14;0 to 19;2), 16 with typical language development matched for chronological age (CAM) (aged 15;0 to 19;7), and 14 with typical language development matched for raw score (VM) on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test 4th ed (aged 8;1 to 13;4) (Dunn & Dunn, 2007). In Experiment 1, while individuals with ASD produced many appropriate word associations, they also produced more unrelated word associations than both control groups. In Experiment 2, participants' reaction times revealed that individuals with ASD performed similarly to both control groups in all conditions: they exhibited priming in the Identity condition, but not in the Associated and Individual Semantic conditions. Absence of group x condition interaction in the Associated condition calls method into question. Results from Experiment 1 suggest that individuals with ASD have a similarly organized lexicon (i.e., more associated than unrelated responses to a given target), but the breadth and depth of their lexicons may be immature (i.e., higher proportion of unrelated responses, relative to both control groups). Findings have clinical and educational implications for vocabulary instruction in individuals with ASD. Word associations may first appear to be typical. However, in-depth analyses (i.e., monitoring associated, perseveration, proper noun, phrase, or unrelated responses), provides robust information regarding lexical organization.
THE IMPACT OF ATTACHMENT ON SEXUAL RISK TAKING, ATTITUDES AND TRAUMA IN ADOLESCENCE: A STUDY OF NEW YORK INNER CITY YOUTH
Year of Dissertation:
2012
The present study examines how attachment impacts sexual behavior, attitudes and sexual risk taking among Latino American and African American adolescents on the Lower East Side of New York City. This population was chosen because inner city teens are at particular risk of HIV/STD infection and because past research suggests a high prevalence of sexual risk among inner city youth.
Sensor Strip Cover: Maximizing Network Lifetime on an Interval
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Suppose that n sensors are deployed on a one-dimensional region (a strip, or interval) that we wish to cover with a wireless sensor network. Each sensor is equipped with a finite battery, and has an adjustable sensing range, which we control. If each sensor's battery drains in inverse linear proportion to its sensing radius, which schedule will maximize the lifetime of the resulting network? We study this Sensor Strip Cover problem and several related variants. For the general Sensor Strip Cover problem, we analyze performance in both the worst-case and average-case for several algorithms, and show that the simplest algorithm, in which the sensors take turns covering the entire line, has a tight 3/2-approximation ratio. Moreover, we demonstrate a more sophisticated algorithm that achieves an expected lifetime of within 12% of the theoretical maximum against uniform random deployment of the sensors. We show that if the sensing radii can be set only once, then the resulting Set Once Strip Cover problem is NP-hard. However, if all sensors must be activated immediately, then we provide a polynomial time algorithm for the resulting Set Radius Strip Cover problem. Finally, we consider the imposition of a duty cycling restriction, which forces disjoint subsets of the sensors (called shifts) to act in concert to cover the entire interval. We provide a polynomial-time solution for the case in which each shift contains at most two sensors. For shifts of size k, we provide worst-case and average-case analysis for the performance of several algorithms.