Browsing by Subject "Surveillance"
Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Applying mathematical and statistical methods to the investigation of complex biological questions(2013-08) Scarpino, Samuel Vincent; Kirkpatrick, Mark, 1956-; Meyers, Lauren AncelThe research presented in this dissertation integrates data and theory to examine three important topics in biology. In the first chapter, I investigate genetic variation at two loci involved in a genetic incompatibility in the genus Xiphophorus. In this genus, hybrids develop a fatal melanoma due to the interaction of an oncogene and its repressor. Using the genetic variation data from each locus, I fit evolutionary models to test for coevolution between the oncogene and the repressor. The results of this study suggest that the evolutionary trajectory of a microsatellite element in the proximal promoter of the repressor locus is affected by the presence of the oncogene. This study significantly advances our understanding of how loci involved in both a genetic incompatibility and a genetically determined cancer evolve. Chapter two addresses the role polyploidy, or whole genome duplication, has played in generating flowering plant diversity. The question of whether polyploidy events facilitate diversification has received considerable attention among plant and evolutionary biologists. To address this question, I estimated the speciation and genome duplication rates for 60 genera of flowering plants. The results suggest that diploids, as opposed to polyploids, generate more species diversity. This study represents the broadest comparative analysis to date of the effect of polyploidy on flowering plant diversity. In the final chapter, I develop a computational method for designing disease surveillance networks. The method is a data-driven, geographic optimization of surveillance sites. Networks constructed using this method are predicted to significantly outperform existing networks, in terms of information quality, efficiency, and robustness. This work involved the coordinated efforts of researchers in biology, epidemiology, and operations research with public health decision makers. Together, the results of this dissertation demonstrate the utility of applying quantitative theory and statistical methods to data in order to address complex, biological processes.Item Assessment of United States national security policy under international human rights law and international humanitarian law(2014-05) Salvaggio, Natalie Cecile; Inboden, William, 1972-; Dulitzky, Ariel E.This paper assesses U.S. national security policies in surveillance, detention, interrogation and torture, and targeted killing to determine whether they comport with international human rights law and international humanitarian law. The U.S. is responsible for adhering to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Geneva Conventions. These human rights law documents can be understood through court decisions, congressional statutes, and widely accepted interpretations from organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the UN Human Rights Council. Further, this paper offers prescriptions on how international human rights law and international humanitarian law can be updated to better deal with the current war on terror.Item Items of interest and words of power(2014-05) Donovan, Kelly Michael; Perzyński, Bogdan, 1954-Kelly Michael Donovan is an M.F.A. Candidate in Transmedia in the Department of Art and Art History. Kelly Donovan creates artwork that examines our relationship to digital culture and technology, particularly the Internet. Following the global security disclosures in June 2013, Kelly Donovan created a series of work utilizing webcams, Internet search engines and a list of keywords used for monitoring social media to curate information and images relating to surveillance, privacy and national security.Item Narrative privacy : keeping secrets in contemporary Native American, Mexican American, and Asian American metafictions(2015-05) Eils, Colleen Gleeson; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Perez, Domino R.; Minich, Julie A.; Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole M.; Barrish, Phillip J.This dissertation considers twenty-first century metafictional novels and short stories by Native American, Mexican American, and Asian American authors who use literary form to theorize the politics of ethnic privacy. These authors use metafictional strategies to situate the well-meaning desires of academic and popular readers for ethnic literary representation within historical contexts in which increased visibility for ethnic people often compromised rather than improved their status. Using a formal maneuver I term “narrative privacy,” the writers in this project explicitly withhold stories from readers to maintain control over the most intimate parts of their lives and as an assertion of the social and political dangers that often accompany the mass dissemination of ethnic representations in the post-9/11 age. The dissertation’s three chapters each focus on a specific context of compulsory visibility—ethnographic, capitalistic, and archival—that authors use narrative privacy to resist. The dissertation opens with a reading of David Treuer’s The Translation of Dr. Apelles (2006), Sherman Alexie’s “Dear John Wayne” (2000), Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines (2003), and Nam Le’s “The Boat” (2008) as rejecting ethnographic imperatives in ethnic literature. By constructing private spaces for their characters within the narrative, Treuer, Alexie, González and Le destabilize persistent understandings of ethnic peoples as available subjects of study for the curious. Chapter two considers how Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2005) and Le’s “Love and Honor” (2008) position writers’ and readers’ literary gazes as privileged acts of dominance and surveillance that mimic oppressive U.S. political and economic processes that target people of color. Monique Truong understands literary and historical inclusion of marginalized subjectivities as potentially confining rather than validating in The Book of Salt (2003), the focus of the third chapter. Truong argues that well-meaning academic practices of historical and literary recovery reinscribe the authority of written records that have long diminished and excluded marginalized subjectivities. In conclusion, I argue that these narrative strategies indicates a vibrant formal and political shift in contemporary ethnic U.S. fiction that attends to some of the most urgent questions of privacy and surveillance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century U.S.Item Police culture & anomie: An evaluation of police typologies using strain theory & the theory of the disciplinary society(2012-08) Childers, Brian M.; Ramirez, Ignacio L.Much research has been done about the culture of the police, especially in regards to the varying personality/policing styles of members within law enforcement. While there are varying views on whether police culture is monolithic in nature, and whether it has changed or not with our recently changing society, most researchers agree that there appear to be certain static recurring groups of police personas among the police officers in every police department, regardless of size, time period, and geographic location. Different researchers have distinguished varying professional personas into a variety of different categories over the years. While these various categories used by previous researchers may have served their purpose in being quite informative of the behaviors that the officers demonstrate in a professional capacity, they lack in being cohesive with one another. More importantly, these previous categories of different types of police officers do not merge with any explanations of the motives behind the behavior of these groups of police officers. So researchers appear to have separately investigated different types of police officers and the underlying motives behind their actions in entirely different ways. In other words, there is much research concerning the different kinds of police officers patrolling the streets with widely varying outlooks and attitudes and there is much research about the social factors effecting different police officers in different fashions, as well as social factors effecting police departments as a whole. But there is a need to bring these two different lines of inquiry together into a cohesive understandable whole. So using content analysis, I have intensely applied the sociological theories of Emile Durkheim, Robert K. Merton, Max Weber, and Michel Foucault in an attempt to bridge the gap between the research and gain more knowledge of the varying subgroups of the police culture and what the underlying motivations for their behavior are. Ultimately, I demonstrate that it is the anomic nature of policing as a profession, including the anomic institutional character of police departments themselves, caused by excessive amounts of strain that is responsible for the attitudes and actions of the varying types of police officers on the streets.