This dissertation proposes to build upon a critical tradition that explores the formation of racial subjectivity in narratives of passing in African-American and American literature. It adds to recent scholarship on passing narratives which seeks a more comprehensive understanding of the connections between the performance of racial norms and contemporary conceptions of "race" and racial categorization. But rather than focusing entirely on the conventional mulatta/o performs whiteness plot device at work in passing literature, a device that reinforces the desirability of heteronormative whiteness, I am interested in assessing how performances of a variety of racial norms challenges this desirability. Selected literary fiction from Herman Melville, Mary White Ovington, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and ZZ Packer provides a rich opportunity for analyzing these unconventional performances. Formulating a theory of "black-passing" that decenters whiteness as the passer's object of desire, this project assesses how the works of these authors broadens the framework of the discourse on racial performance in revelatory ways. Racial passing will get measured in relation to the political consequences engendered by the transgression of racial boundaries, emphasizing how the nature of acts of passing varies according to the way hegemonic society dictates racial enfranchisement. Passing will be situated in the context of various modes of literary representation - realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism - that register subjectivity. The project will also explore in greater detail the changing nature of acts of passing across gendered, spatial, and temporal boundaries.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle identifies three conditions that are necessary in order for a virtuous act to have been done as a virtuous agent: the act must be done (1) knowingly, (2) for itself, and (3) from a steady disposition. I examine previous interpretations of the second item, and then offer my own: a virtuous act is chosen for itself if it is chosen for its virtue-making features that are also reasons to do the act, and these features motivate the agent to such an extent that the agent would do the act even if there were no other reason to do it. / text

The literature on the ethics of presenting as queer has been largely confined to a commonly acknowledged phenomenon called "passing," or fully concealing one's membership to a marginalized group. Often employed as a survival strategy, many are sympathetic to the idea that one should be able to pass if need be. With that said, many philosophers argue that it is inextricably tied to oppression in the sense that acts of passing are acts complicit with one's own oppression. Because of the usually drastic alteration to one's appearance or behavior passing encompasses, along with its connection to oppression, a larger problem has gone unnoticed: covering. Covering differs from passing as one's membership to a marginalized community is now background knowledge in any social interaction where one may cover. Covering, then, depicts the intentional editing of one's behavior to modify the way in which their marginalized status is communicated to an audience. It is because one has announced their status as a community member that this concept often surfaces without controversy. This, at first, is intuitive. Why should someone be able to permissibly hide the entirety of their identity if partial concealment is impermissible? In the end, the very reason that covering is often excluded from the ethical discourse – that one has already announced their status as a marginalized community member – is actually a reason for my claim, that covering is wrong but passing is not, rather than one against it. I begin my argument with a negative claim: there is no duty not to cover. After explaining why this is the case, I argue for my second, positive claim: there is a duty to refrain from covering. If successful, my argument should show that a duty not to pass, or to be out, is too demanding. This will offer a better starting point for a relocation of some duty, which I argue should be on covering. If it is placed on covering, then demandingness concerns are circumvented and the goal of a duty to be out is more tangible. / Master of Arts / The acts of passing and covering are socially constructed. To research them further, I spent a significant amount of time understanding others' experiences of passing and covering. This involved finding articles where one intentionally engaged in either act, as well as their commentary on how they believe others perceived these actions. Upon gaining more understanding on these aspects of passing and covering, I also spent time researching the social constructs that make these acts as important as they are. Specifically, it seems that queer people are often thought to represent the queer community, whether they want to or not, just because of how others view us. In light of this, it seemed especially important to understand why this is the case. This is where my research on standpoint epistemology entered the argument. Lastly, the goal of this project was not simply to understand these acts but to use that understanding in an attempt to alter the way the queer community is viewed. Because of this, I also researched how societal perceptions may change, specifically in reference to queer people. Here, I was able to find that those who do not accept the queer community are often unaccepting due to their lack of familiarity with the community, rather than because there was a logical issue that. In other words, it does not seem that rational persuasion is especially helpful in changing opinions on the queer community. This seems to provide good reason to begin to analyze the way the queer community is perceived by others.

The topic of this dissertation was the use of distributed computing to improve the modeling of the interaction between passenger cars and trucks. The two main focus areas were the development of a methodology to combine microscopic traffic simulation programs with driving simulator programs, and the application of a prototype distributed traffic simulation to study the impact of the length of an impeding vehicle on passing behavior. The methodology was motivated by the need to provide an easier way to create calibrated traffic flows in driving simulations and to capture vehicle behavior within microscopic traffic simulations. The original design for the prototype was to establish a two-way, real time exchange of vehicle data, however problems were encountered that imposed limitations on its development and use. The passing study was motivated by the possible changes in federal truck size and weight regulations and the current inconsistency between the passing sight distance criteria for the design of two lane highways and the marking of no-passing zones. Test drivers made passing maneuvers around impeding vehicles that differed in length and speed. The main effects of the impeding vehicle length were found to be significant for the time and distance in the left lane, and the start and end gap distances. Passing equations were formulated based on the mechanics of the passing maneuver and included behavior variables for calibration. Through a sensitivity analysis, it was shown that increases in vehicle speeds, vehicle length, and gap distance increased the distance traveled in the left lane, while increases in the speed difference and speed gain decreased the distance traveled in the left lane. The passing equations were calibrated using the current AASHTO values and used to predict the impact of increased vehicle lengths on the time and distance in the left lane. The passing equations are valuable for evaluating passing sight distance criteria and observed passing behavior.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1964. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: l. 70-71.

The majority of the road infrastructure in developing countries consists oftwo-lane highways with one lane in each travel direction. Operational efficiency of these highways is derived fromintermittent passing zones where fast vehicles are permitted by design to pass slow vehicles using the opposite traffic lane. Passing zonescontributeto reduction oftravel delay and queuing of fast vehiclesbehind slow vehicles. Thishoweverincreases crash risks between passing and opposite vehiclesespecially at high traffic volumesdue to reduction of passing opportunities.Reduction of passing-related crash risks is therefore a primary concern ofpolicy makers, planners, and highway design engineers. Despite the wide application of passing zones on two-lane highways, there is limited knowledge on the underlying causal mechanisms that exacerbate crash risks, and the essential tools to assess safety of the passing zones. This thesis presentsa methodology to appraisesafety of two-lane rural highways based on observed operation of passing zones.Theproposed methodology takes into accountthe impact of traffic and geometric factors onthe rate passing maneuvers end insidepassing zonesand in the no-passing zones, adequacy ofthe designpassing sight distance,and time-to-collision at the end of passing maneuvers.Thethesis is comprised offive papers addressing capacity and safety aspectsof passing zoneson two-lane rural highways. Paper Ipresents a review of the literature on capacity and safety of passing zones. Paper IIdiscusses adequacy of the design passing sight distance based on the sight distance required to complete a passing maneuverusing observed data. Paper IIIdiscusses formulation, estimation, and application of a model to predict the passing rate using geometric and traffic factors, and applications. Paper IVdiscusses risk appraisal of the passing process based on the probability to complete passing maneuvers with time-to-collision less than 3.0 seconds taking into account the accepted gap in the opposite direction and the passing duration. Paper Vdiscusses formulation and estimation of models to predict the probability and the rate at which passing maneuvers end in a no-passing zone, and applications. Resultsshow that passing zones of lengths between 1.30and 2.50km aregood for both operational efficiency and safety.Passing zones of lengths between 0.50and 1.30km exhibitincreasing crash risks resulting from delayed passing maneuvers thatend in the no-passing zone where the sight distance is limited to evadepotential collisions. Safety of these passing zones could be enhanced with additional signage to indicate the farthestpoint along a passing zone that maneuvers can be initiated so as not to end in a no-passing zone. Passing zones less than 0.50km compel drivers to commence passing maneuvers close to the beginning of the passing zone,and should be avoided during design for safety reasons. The results further show that the passing rate depends on the length of the passing zone, absolute vertical grade, traffic volume in two travel directions, directional split, 85thpercentile speed of free flow vehicles,and percent of heavy vehicles in the subject direction. The peak-passing rate also known as the passing capacity occurs at 200, 220, and 240vph in the subject direction for 50/50, 55/45, and 60/40directional splits, respectively. The rate at which passing maneuvers end in a no-passing zone increaseswith traffic volume and unequal distribution of traffic in two directions, absolute vertical grade, and percent of heavy vehiclesin the subject direction. The thesis furtherdiscusses practical applications of the study findings in highway planning and design to enhancesafety and improve operational efficiency of two-lane rural highways. / <p>QC 20151106</p>

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 1984 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Digital Voice Network project is a 1984 IR&D program within the Microelectronic Systems Division of the Hughes Aircraft Company. The project is intended to advance the state-of-the-art in digital voice technology and demonstrate digital voice transmission using advanced microprocessor technology and token passing bus network architecture. This paper discusses the Digital Voice Network design architecture, voice terminal design and implementation, and finally future plans to satisfy digital voice requirements in a military environment.

Recently developed next-generation sequencing systems are capable of rapid and cost-effective DNA sequencing, thus enabling routine sequencing tasks and taking us one step closer to personalized medicine. To provide a blueprint of a target genome, next-generation sequencing systems typically employ the so called shotgun sequencing strategy and oversample the genome with a library of relatively short overlapping reads. The order of nucleotides in the short reads is determined by processing acquired noisy signals generated by the sequencing platforms, and the overlaps between the reads are exploited to assemble the target long genome. Next-generation sequencing utilizes massively parallel array-based technology to speed up the sequencing and reduce the cost. However, accuracy and lengths of the short reads are yet to surpass those provided by the conventional slower and costlier Sanger sequencing method. In this thesis, we first focus on Illumina's sequencing-by-synthesis platform which relies on reversible terminator chemistry and describe the acquired signal by a Hidden Markov Model. Relying on this model and sequential Monte Carlo methods, we develop a parameter estimation and base calling scheme called ParticleCall. ParticleCall is tested on an experimental data set obtained by sequencing phiX174 bacteriophage using Illumina's Genome Analyzer II. The results show that ParticleCall scheme is significantly more computationally efficient than the best performing unsupervised base calling method currently available, while achieving the same accuracy. Having addressed the problem of base calling of short reads, we turn our attention to genome assembly. Assembly of a genome from acquired short reads is a computationally daunting task even in the scenario where a reference genome exists. Errors and gaps in the reference, and perfect repeat regions in the target, further render the assembly challenging and cause inaccuracies. We formulate reference-guided assembly as the inference problem on a bipartite graph and solve it using a message-passing algorithm. The proposed algorithm can be interpreted as the classical belief propagation scheme under a certain prior. Unlike existing state-of-the-art methods, the proposed algorithm combines the information provided by the reads without needing to know reliability of the short reads (so-called quality scores). Relation of the message-passing algorithm to a provably convergent power iteration scheme is discussed. Results on both simulated and experimental data demonstrate that the proposed message-passing algorithm outperforms commonly used state-of-the-art tools, and it nearly achieves the performance of a genie-aided maximum a posteriori (MAP) scheme. We then consider the reference-free genome assembly problem, i.e., the de novo assembly. Various methods for de novo assembly have been proposed in literature, all of whom are very sensitive to errors in short reads. We develop a novel error-correction method that enables performance improvements of de novo assembly. The new method relies on a suffix array structure built on the short reads data. It incorporates a hypothesis testing procedure utilizing the sum of quality information as the test statistic to improve the accuracy of overlap detection. Finally, we consider an inference problem in gene regulatory networks. Gene regulatory networks are highly complex dynamical systems comprising biomolecular components which interact with each other and through those interactions determine gene expression levels, i.e., determine the rate of gene transcription. In this thesis, a particle filter with Markov Chain Monte Carlo move step is employed for the estimation of reaction rate constants in gene regulatory networks modeled by chemical Langevin equations. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed technique outperforms previously considered methods while being computationally more efficient. Dynamic behavior of gene regulatory networks averaged over a large number of cells can be modeled by ordinary differential equations. For this scenario, we compute an approximation to the Cramer-Rao lower bound on the mean-square error of estimating reaction rates and demonstrate that, when the number of unknown parameters is small, the proposed particle filter can be nearly optimal. In summary, this thesis presents a set of Bayesian inference methods for base-calling and sequence assembly in next-generation DNA sequencing. Experimental studies shows the advantage of proposed algorithms over traditional methods. / text

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En France, le traitement public des personnes exilées soulève un enjeu autour des frontières d’âges et de statuts : mineure, il s’agit d’un corps vulnérable à protéger, relevant de la compétence de l’aide sociale à l’enfance (ASE) et de celle du juge des enfants – majeure, il s’agit à l’inverse d’un corps à régulariser ou à éloigner du territoire. L’ossature, la chair, la pilosité, la dentition, la voix, la taille et les traits comportementaux sont considérés comme des marqueurs du grandir, de maturité ou d’immaturité, devant faire basculer l’identification d’un côté ou de l’autre du seuil des dix-huit ans. En suivant les pratiques de jugement policières, sociales, judiciaires, documentaires, médicales et d’attribution de la catégorie publique de « mineurs isolés étrangers » (MIE), nous avons observé comment les logiques institutionnelles en viennent à dimensionner les statuts autorisé ou contesté de présence sur le sol français, à travers les figures de « mineur en danger » versus celle de « faux mineur ». La recherche a investigué les épreuves corporelles, cognitives et matérielles que traversent les mijeurs exilés, tout au long de la chaîne d’actions sanctionnant, ou non, leur entrée à l’ASE et leur reconnaissance en tant que « MIE ». Engagés dans une série d’activités de démonstration de l’âge, les mijeurs (ou les « MIE » consacrés) mettent en forme des postures, des récits, des compétences, objets de (re)négociations avec les protagonistes chargés d’apprécier et/ou de leur renvoyer le « bon » âge. / In France, the public treatment of exiles raises an issue around the age and status boundaries: minor, it is a vulnerable body to protect, falling under the jurisdiction of child welfare ( ASE) and that of the children's judge - major, it is the opposite of a body to regularize or to move away from the territory. Framing, flesh, hair, teeth, voice, height, and behavioral traits are considered markers of growth, maturity, or immaturity, which must be tipped to one side or the other. the other of the eighteen year threshold.By following the police, social, judicial, documentary, medical and public category attribution practices of "unaccompanied foreign minors" (MIE), we observed how the institutional logics come to size the authorized or contested statutes of presence on French soil, through the figures of "miner in danger" versus that of "false miner". The research investigated the bodily, cognitive and material ordeals experienced by exiled mijeurs, all along the chain of actions sanctioning, or not, their entry into the ASE and their recognition as "MIE". Engaged in a series of activities to demonstrate the age, the mijeurs (or the "MIE" consecrated) form postures, stories, skills, objects of (re) negotiations with the protagonists responsible for assessing and / or return them the "good" age.