<p> Sanitation is an ideal non-monetary measure of broadly distributed development. Compared to other global development indicators, it reduces volatility, resolves equivalency, achieves closer concept fidelity, and features greater data availability. </p><p> Factors affecting rates of sanitation in cross-national comparisons include democracy (with less influence in the developing world), fewer restrictions to political freedoms or civil liberties, better governance, communism, greater wealth, less poverty, urbanization, population density, and slower population growth. Factors affecting change in sanitation rates include microfinance activity.</p><p> Subnational factors which influence rates of sanitation in India are wealth and communism. The factors affecting the change in sanitation in India include wealth, economic growth, higher taxes, and less corruption.</p><p> The benefits of higher rates of sanitation include longer life and reduced mortality rates for infants and children.</p>

<p> The purpose of this research is to explore the shifts in the rhetoric utilized by the European Far-Right political parties in response to terror attacks. The subjects of study are the National Front and Alternative for Germany within France and Germany respectively with both states having experienced attacks by Muslim terrorists within recent years. This study was conducted through the employment of Image Theory through a content analysis, specifically through the lens of the Barbarian and Enemy Images and if they can be observed in either party&rsquo;s rhetoric. This shift in rhetoric can be seen expressed by both parties as they acted and reacted through their policy platforms over the years of observation.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation examines body politics in the People&rsquo;s Republic of China. It first closely looks at Zhuangzi&rsquo;s idea of <i>xu</i> by analyzing the major aspects of the term&mdash;blandness, lack of substance, spontaneity, dispossession, incompleteness, and absurdity. It then argues that the concept of xu generates profound implication for politics by bringing up a particular mode of politics&mdash;politics of indeterminacy. In this mode of politics, power relation and power structure are never settled. Instead, they morph without being actualized. Examined in this context, the body for Zhuangzi is understood as an indeterminate entity whose political agency is attributed to its capacity in re-articulating power relation by constantly receiving and transforming a manifold of forces. That the body can be alternatively construed this way is crucial for our re-examination of the shaping of reshaping of identity in the contemporary Chinese society. In this light, the work investigates two cases&mdash;the Cultural Revolution and the state capitalism to find out in what specific ways the body, identity and politics are intertwined in manifesting the story of changing political relations in the everyday life of the ordinary Chinese people. The work contends that the making of the subjectivity is an indeterminate process in which one&rsquo;s identity is impossible to be fixed. It can never be composed with certainty. The construction of identity is a process of detachment by which one experiences the unexperienced without being settled around a center. The making of the political, to Zhuangzi, is thus founded on this indeterminacy to create new self and dissident political subject. </p>

<p> Modern Internet services are multi-tiered and are typically hosted in virtualized shared platforms. While facilitating flexible service deployment, multi-tier architecture introduces significant challenges for Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning in hosted Internet services. Complex inter-tier dependencies and dynamic bottleneck tier shift are challenges inherent to tiered architectures. Hard-to-predict and bursty session-based Internet workloads further magnify this complexity. Virtualization of shared platforms adds yet another layer of complication in managing the hosted multi-tier Internet services. </p><p> We consider three critical aspects of Internet service management for improved performance and quality of service provisioning : admission control, dynamic resource provisioning and service differentiation. This thesis concentrates on statistical learning based approaches for multi-tier Internet service management to achieve efficient, balanced and scalable services. Statistical learning techniques are capable of solving complex dynamic problems through learning and adaptation with no <i>priori</i> domain-specific knowledge. We explore the effectiveness of supervised and unsupervised learning in managing multi-tier Internet services. </p><p> First, we develop a session based admission control strategy to improve session throughput of multi- tier Internet services. Using a supervised bayesian network, it achieves coordination among multiple tiers resulting in a balanced service. Second, we promote session-slowdown, a novel session-oriented metric for user perceived performance. We develop a regression based dynamic resource provisioning strategy, which utilizes a combination of offline training and online monitoring, for session slowdown guarantees in multi-tier systems. Third, we develop a reinforcement learning based coordinated combination of admission control and adaptive resource management for multi-tier Internet service differentiation and performance improvement in a shared virtualized platform. It addresses limitations of supervised learning by integrating model-independence of reinforcement learning and self-learning of neural networks for system scalability and agility. Finally, we develop an user interface based Monitoring and Management Console, intended for an administrator to monitor and fine tune the performance of hosted multi-tier Internet services. </p><p> We evaluate the developed management approaches using an e-commerce simulator and an implementation testbed on a virtualized blade server system hosting multi-tier RUBiS benchmark applications. Results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of statistical learning approaches for QoS provisioning and performance improvement in virtualized multi-tier Internet services.</p>

<p> Communication now is easier than ever before. One consequence of this is the emergence of virtual communities, unconstrained by physical proximity. We perform two investigations into changing social trends. We study a corpus of 100 years of newspaper articles to see if we can find evidence to support the popular intuition that as news cycles have sped up, the public's attention span has gotten shorter. We find no such evidence: to the contrary, we find that the typical length of time that a person's name stays in the news has not changed over time, and celebrities now stay in the news for longer than ever before. We also investigate a new kind of community on Twitter called a group chat, where members have regular meetings to discuss a broad range of topics, from medical conditions to hobbies. We find that the phenomenon is growing over time, and paint a broad picture of the topics which one could find a group chat to discuss. With a view to helping connect new participants to group chats they may not have been able to find or might not have been aware of, we design an algorithm to rank group chats in the context of a topic given as a query.</p>

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2006 / "Publication number AAT 3251805."

<p> Women are underrepresented in public office throughout the United States. Candidate recruitment and training are understood to be crucial interventions for increasing women&rsquo;s representation in elected leadership (Rozzell, 2000; Carroll &amp; Sanbonmatsu, 2009; Carroll &amp; Sanbonmatsu, 2010). In response to this need, campaign programs for women have become increasingly prevalent across the country. However, the implications of what happens within campaign training programs and the impact particular training content has on participants, women&rsquo;s political participation, and the political arena are still poorly understood. Using discourse analysis, this study seeks to understand the construction of womanhood in a campaign training program for women. The program for the purposes of this study is called Women in Politics (WiP). The WiP program is a multi-faceted, non-partisan, issue-neutral program geared towards encouraging and training women to run for public office and is located in a small city in the Southeast United States. Data was gathered using participant observation during three of six workshops in the series that were free and open to the public. Discourse about the intersections of candidacy, gender, race, age and class; family; and, appearance, perception and public judgement are examined to reveal how womanhood is constructed in ways that both reify and challenge or complicate hegemonic standards. The findings of this study indicate that for women to become elected to public office, a field in which women have been historically underrepresented, they must contend with and in many ways maintain hegemonic womanhood.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study is to analyze existing United States Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) cyber capabilities, identify gaps, and explore the possible need for US Army special operations warfighters to build a robust cyber skill set. This research reviews the current status of cyber-capacity and capability for ARSOF to conduct cyberspace operations, the vulnerabilities that inhibit Army Special Operations Forces from conducting Cyberspace Operations at the Tactical Level, and provides recommendations as to what steps to take to improve the warfighting posture of ARSOF in the cyber domain. </p><p> This research found that it is critical to train and equip Army Special Operators in cyberspace operations at the tactical echelon, in order to compete with adversaries with sophisticated cyber capabilities in combat operations within multi-domain operations. The Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership Education, Personnel, Facilities, and Policy (DOTMLPF-P) analysis is used to study problems to help solve the warfighters cyber capability gaps. In addition, this research reviewed historical cyber attacks to ascertain if the success cyberspace operations proved efficacious when integrated during conflicts. </p><p> This research provided recommendations to support ARSOF in the ways-ahead to contest in today's digital warfare. The Army Special Operations should be able to employ organic cyber capabilities at the tactical echelon with dedicated personnel to compete in modern-day warfare. ARSOF leaders must be prepared to operate with proper authorities and permissions it might gain in the future to employ robust cyberspace operations capabilities. </p><p>

<p> This dissertation provides an explanation for the workings of clientelism and some preliminary insights on the conditions under which it can recede. </p><p> First, I provide evidence from Nigeria on the &ldquo;loyal-voter anomaly&rdquo; (Stokes et al. 2013, 66): I show that political parties tend to target clientelistic transfers to partisans, whose votes should already be secure, rather than to swing voters, whose votes are up for grabs. Second, I develop a theory of <i>strategic safe-betting</i> to explain the disproportionate targeting of partisans. This theory puts the emphasis on risk mitigation, an aspect of clientelistic relations that existing explanations tend to overlook. I argue that clientelistic transfers are risky and expensive endeavors, and that loyal voters represent a safer bet for political parties: their voting behavior is indeed easier to influence, predict or, in a best-case scenario, monitor. This is due to their close ties to the operatives of the party machine, as well as their deeper embeddedness in <i>networks of control</i> through which parties exert influence and gather information on voters before and during elections. Third, I provide preliminary insights on the demise of clientelism. I show that macro developments&mdash;in particular urbanization and economic development&mdash;that increase the weight of swing voters make clientelistic transfers riskier and provide incentives for parties to develop programmatic promises during elections. </p><p> The dissertation builds on original quantitative and qualitative empirical evidence from the most populous sub-Saharan African country, Nigeria. It draws on observational and experimental survey data to provide a quantitative analysis of the determinants and workings of clientelism at the individual level. It also builds on selected archival documents and in-depth key informant interviews to develop a qualitative narrative of the historical roots of clientelistic partisan pacts in Nigeria and the mechanisms that sustain and break them in contemporary politics.</p><p>

<p> Digital media have made it possible for people with disabilities to have better access to information and mainstream publications. New and improved guidelines by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have helped millions of users with various types of disabilities to utilize the web to its full potential. The Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) 2.0 has pushed for several reforms to ensure that web pages are equally accessible for people with disabilities. How- ever, there are some limitations with the WCAG 2.0 when it comes to accommodating people with Low Vision. The W3C agrees and is currently working to draft a new set of guidelines that will address this specific problem. In the push to accommodate people with low vision, a team at California State University Long Beach, led by Dr. Wayne E Dick, proposed a software so- lution called Typometric Prescriptions or TRx which generates a user based custom stylesheet. The purpose of this thesis was to build on top of the working framework of TRx and shape it to be a completely functional stylesheet generator for people with low vision. The research and technical work put into this study have led to the development of a keyboard accessible color picker that makes it possible to pick a color from the possible 16 million choices, with less than 48 keystrokes.</p><p>