No description available.

This paper takes a cultural materialist approach in analyzing the hegemonic purpose of using Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in American education. Ideas from critical race theory and Lee’s second novel, Go Set a Watchman, are used to reveal obfuscated aspects of Mockingbird’s narrative. These aspects have been repurposed to fit a Eurocentric palate, and have let the book achieve success under the guise of being a progressive and multiculturalist work. Mockingbird’s narration, marked by childlike innocence, has been used to obfuscate Eurocentric ignorance of racial and economic inequality. The text has also been used to divert blame from those in power onto those oppressed by a hegemonic system. Racism is in Mockingbird inaccurately described as an individual moral issue, rather than a system of discrimination which is deeply ingrained in every aspect of U.S. society. The liberal moderate ideology which informs Atticus character has historically been ignored due to his unquestionable, near-mythical position as a moral role model. The paper finds that Mockingbird has been used as part of a greater Eurocentric narrative which positions the Civil Rights Movement as a white movement of moral improvement.

<p>Legislative changes in the U.S. and more recently Germany, require universities and research institutes to act as entrepreneurs, something that is not necessarily in their nature. Therefore, a number of Technology Transfer Organizations or Evaluation Agencies have been established to handle the evaluation, patenting and commercialization of inventions. The process of evaluating inventions, in this thesis termed DEAR, poses two major challenges for evaluation agencies: (1) the process must be aimed at keeping the inventions that will generate revenues and filtering out those that will not; and (2) the time spent on evaluation should be kept to a minimum, but must never be reduced below the point where potential commercial successes will be lost. The purpose of this thesis is to benchmark the practices of evaluation agencies in order to establish whether time can be reduced in any part of the DEAR process and if so where. We find that there are aspects in almost every stage of the DEAR process that could be made more effective. For instance, it may be worthwhile for the German agencies to reflect on the fact that their U.S. counterparts generally seem to rely on the scientific information given in the disclosure. Also, even though valuation of inventions often becomes a case of"Garbage In - Garbage Out", such valuation may be worthwhile for younger agencies since it may signal that the DEAR process is conducted in a thorough and accurate manner.</p>

This thesis consists of three essays, which all concern the dynamics of pension reform. The first essay evaluates the financial balance and the demographic adjustability of the reformed Swedish pay-as-you-go pension system. The main findings are that the demographic adjustability of the system is poor. Furthermore, the financial balance and pension levels are, to a large degree, dependent on the pension fund and its returns. Making some alterations to the system's benefit formula may improve the adjustability of the system, as well as decreasing its pension fund dependency. It is also shown that the new public system imposes an age-dependent implicit tax on labor earnings that is falling with age. Within the pay-as-you-go system, this tax is large for younger workers for whom almost the whole contribution is regarded as a tax. By introducing a public defined contribution system, the total implicit tax may be reduced since the defined contribution system implies a negative implicit tax because savings are subsidized within the defined contribution system. In the second essay a three-generation OLG model for analyzing a privatization of PAYG old-age social security is developed. Furthermore, it proposes an explicit reform for how the privatization transition may be undertaken. The set of government policy instruments is limited to debt issuing and proportional labor income taxation. The possibilities of a Pareto-improving privatization, given the proposed reform, are then analyzed. Contrary to models where a two-generation OLG framework is used, the three-generation framework creates possibilities for a Pareto-improving privatization of old-age social security, since the PAYG system induces a non-optimal implicit tax over the life cycle. By shifting to an optimal tax policy cannot only the pension claims accrued under the PAYG system be financed, but the shift will also be Pareto-improving. In the third essay the performance of the reformed Latvian pay-as-you-go pension system is evaluated against the background of an exceptional projected decrease in the Latvian labor force. The pension system is designed to handle the upcoming difficulties, and special attention has been given in the design to keep the expenditures low relative to the revenues, by introducing rules dampening the increase in the pension expenditures. In the light of the pessimistic projection of the Latvian demography, the newly reformed PAYG system performs remarkably well. The expenditure reducing rules introduced have significant effects on the system's financial balance. The pension reform also includes the launch of a publicly run defined contributions pension system. It is shown that the resulting implicit tax imposed by the public pension system imposes on labor earnings is negative and increasing with age. That is, savings are subsidized in the public pension system. It is also shown that private savings are fully crowded out as individuals try to offset their savings in the pension system. Since individuals are capital constrained, they will have no private assets at all. From a welfare perspective, this suggests the overall contribution rate to the public pension system to be too high. / <p>Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2002</p>

Legislative changes in the U.S. and more recently Germany, require universities and research institutes to act as entrepreneurs, something that is not necessarily in their nature. Therefore, a number of Technology Transfer Organizations or Evaluation Agencies have been established to handle the evaluation, patenting and commercialization of inventions. The process of evaluating inventions, in this thesis termed DEAR, poses two major challenges for evaluation agencies: (1) the process must be aimed at keeping the inventions that will generate revenues and filtering out those that will not; and (2) the time spent on evaluation should be kept to a minimum, but must never be reduced below the point where potential commercial successes will be lost. The purpose of this thesis is to benchmark the practices of evaluation agencies in order to establish whether time can be reduced in any part of the DEAR process and if so where. We find that there are aspects in almost every stage of the DEAR process that could be made more effective. For instance, it may be worthwhile for the German agencies to reflect on the fact that their U.S. counterparts generally seem to rely on the scientific information given in the disclosure. Also, even though valuation of inventions often becomes a case of"Garbage In - Garbage Out", such valuation may be worthwhile for younger agencies since it may signal that the DEAR process is conducted in a thorough and accurate manner.

This essay argues that Sara Ahmed’s methodology for reading the emotionality of texts, through its focus on the relationships between emotions, language and bodies, can be applied to the emotional responses of Australians to refugees and asylum seekers. This essay specifically focuses on the emotions of disgust and pain in the participants of Go Back To Where You Came From, a three-part Australian documentary/realia TV series, because these two emotions’ preoccupation with surface and proximity provide a useful metaphor for what can be observed in the participants’ emotionality. Sensuous proximity in the form of sight, taste, smell, touch and hearing underlies the disgust experienced by the Go Back participants, while shared surfaces enable the participants to feel the pain of others. The essay concludes that Ahmed’s methodology is indeed an effective tool for analysing the emotions of people “affected” by the transnational movements of others.

In this study, an algorithm named ClustOrth is proposed for determining and matching functionally orthologous protein clusters in different species. The algorithm requires protein interaction networks of the organisms to be compared and GO terms of the proteins in these interaction networks as prior information. After determining the functionally related protein groups using the Repeated Random Walks algorithm, the method maps the identified protein groups according to the similarity metric defined. In order to evaluate the similarities of protein groups, graph theoretical information is used together with the context information about the proteins. The clusters are aligned using GO-Term-based protein similarity measures defined in previous studies. These alignments are used to evaluate cluster similarities by defining a cluster similarity metric from protein similarities. The top scoring cluster alignments are considered as orthologous. Several data sources providing orthology information have shown that the defined cluster similarity metric can be used to make inferences about the orthological relevance of protein groups. Comparison with a protein orthology prediction algorithm named ISORANK also showed that the ClustOrth algorithm is successful in determining orthologies between proteins. However, the cluster similarity metric is too strict and many cluster matches are not able to produce high scores for this metric. For this reason, the number of predictions performed is low. This problem can be overcomed with the introduction of different sources of information related to proteins in the clusters for the evaluation of the clusters. The ClustOrth algorithm also outperformed the NetworkBLAST algorithm which aims to find orthologous protein clusters using protein sequence information directly for determining orthologies. It can be concluded that this study is one of the leading studies addressing the protein cluster matching problem for identifying orthologous functional modules of protein interaction networks computationally.

As genes with similar expression pattern are very likely having the same biological function, cluster analysis becomes an important tool to understand and predict gene functions from gene expression profi les. In many situations, each gene expression profi le only contains a few data points. Directly applying traditional clustering algorithms to such short gene expression profi les does not yield satisfactory results. Developing clustering algorithms for short gene expression profi les is necessary. In this thesis, two novel methods are developed for clustering short gene expression pro files. The fi rst method, called the network-based clustering method, deals with the defect of short gene expression profi les by generating a gene co-expression network using conditional mutual information (CMI), which measures the non-linear relationship between two genes, as well as considering indirect gene relationships in the presence of other genes. The network-based clustering method consists of two steps. A gene co-expression network is firstly constructed from short gene expression profi les using a path consistency algorithm (PCA) based on the CMI between genes. Then, a gene functional module is identi ed in terms of cluster cohesiveness. The network-based clustering method is evaluated on 10 large scale Arabidopsis thaliana short time-course gene expression profi le datasets in terms of gene ontology (GO) enrichment analysis, and compared with an existing method called Clustering with Over-lapping Neighbourhood Expansion (ClusterONE). Gene functional modules identi ed by the network-based clustering method for 10 datasets returns target GO p-values as low as 10-24, whereas the original ClusterONE yields insigni cant results. In order to more speci cally cluster gene expression profi les, a second clustering method, namely the protein-protein interaction (PPI) integrated clustering method, is developed. It is designed for clustering short gene expression profi les by integrating gene expression profi le patterns and curated PPI data. The method consists of the three following steps: (1) generate a number of prede ned profi le patterns according to the number of data points in the profi les and assign each gene to the prede fined profi le to which its expression profi le is the most similar; (2) integrate curated PPI data to refi ne the initial clustering result from (1); (3) combine the similar clusters from (2) to gradually reduce cluster numbers by a hierarchical clustering method. The PPI-integrated clustering method is evaluated on 10 large scale A. thaliana datasets using GO enrichment analysis, and by comparison with an existing method called Short Time-series Expression Miner (STEM). Target gene functional clusters identi ed by the PPI-integrated clustering method for 10 datasets returns GO p-values as low as 10-62, whereas STEM returns GO p-values as low as 10-38. In addition to the method development, obtained clusters by two proposed methods are further analyzed to identify cross-talk genes under fi ve stress conditions in root and shoot tissues. A list of potential abiotic stress tolerant genes are found.

Traffic oscillations, or simply stop-and-go waves, are a common phenomenon arising in congested traffic but still not well understood. This phenomenon causes broad adverse impacts to safety risk, fuel efficiency and greenhouse emission. To eliminate or reduce those impacts, understanding the cause and propagation mechanism is essential. This dissertation studied driving behavior in traffic oscillations with the objective to uncover the formation and propagation mechanism of traffic oscillations. This study establishes a behavioral car-following model, the Asymmetric Behavioral model, based on empirical trajectory data that is able to reproduce the spontaneous formation and ensuing propagation of traffic oscillations in congested traffic. By analyzing individual drivers' car-following behavior throughout oscillation cycles it is found that this behavior is consistent across drivers and can be captured by a simple model. The statistical analysis of the model's parameters reveals that driver' behavior during oscillation (i.e., reaction to oscillation) is strongly correlated with driver behavior before oscillations and it varies with the development stage of the oscillation. Simulation of the model shows that it is able to produce characteristics of traffic oscillations consistently with empirical observations. This study also unveils the generation mechanism of the traffic hysteresis phenomenon arising in traffic oscillations using the Asymmetric Behavioral model. It is found that the occurrence of traffic hysteresis is closely correlated with driver behavior when experiencing traffic oscillations. In the growth and fully-developed stage of traffic oscillations, drivers behave differently, which results in different distribution of hysteresis patterns. This research makes it possible to unveil new management and control strategies of traffic oscillations to improve traffic operation and to quantify the environmental and safety impacts of traffic oscillations. For example, it can be used to estimate the increase of greenhouse emission and decrease of fuel efficiency imposed by traffic oscillations. It can also be used to study the increase of accident rate.

This study of Faulkner's Go Down, Moses uses the reader-response theories of Wolfgang Iser to examine the affective impact of strategically-arranged folk conventions and mythopoeic devices upon a textually-based, white "civilized" reader. Using the devices of Southwestern humor, the trickster, and the tragic Black folk tale, "Was" through "Pantaloon in Black" repeatedly sidetrack the reader into unconscious participation in the white-code attitudes he was invited to criticize. When this hypocritical participation is discovered at certain "points of significance" in "The Fire and the Hearth" and "Pantaloon in Black," the reader's rationally-humanistic norms are rendered ineffectual, setting the stage for the undermining of a second idealism based on primitive myth. In "The Old People" and "The Bear" the reader is induced by mythopoeic devices to adopt Isaac McCaslin's unifying mythical norms and, thereby, to criticize his own failures in "Was" through "Pantaloon in Black" along with Southern civilization's socially-fragmenting rational-empiric concept of progress. "Delta Autumn," however, will undermine the reader's attempts to create moral unity using Isaac's natural hierarchy. With mythopoeic devices withdrawn, the wilderness destroyed by civilization, and Isaac McCaslin's reversion to white-code attitudes regarding Roth's Black/white offspring, the reader can see Isaac's experience in "The Bear" for what it really is, not an introduction into Sam Fathers's immutable cyclic unity but an initiation into fragmenting Cavalier forms and values. Once again the reader faces the hypocritical ineffectuality of his own idealism. For by emotionally and intellectually identifying with Isaac's misperception of the wilderness experience, he has aligned himself with socially-alienating rather than socially-unifying values. Now confronting the fragmentation dramatized in Isaac's terror-motivated racism and experienced in his own textual failures, the reader is ready for "the existential norm of "Go Down, Moses," where he is encouraged to construct meaning out of non-meaning by negating the "bad faith" of Gavin Stevens, who in fear chooses stable but racially-fragmenting Cavalier values, and by affirming the "good faith" of Molly Beauchamp and Miss Worsham, who choose the temporal unity of shared suffering in the face of chaos. / Department of English