Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 35-07, Section: A, page: 4718. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1974.

acase@tulane.edu / This dissertation research brings together disparate bodies of literature on environmental inequality, sociology of space, and feminist theories of intersectionality to bear on the location and distribution of environmental hazards in the form of landfills. Landfills pose a threat to both ecological sustainability as well as present risks to human health through contamination and pollution. While environmental inequality literatures have executed exceptional work into the dynamics of race and class with respect to the distribution of hazardous waste facilities, the literature is noticeably lacking with respect to identifying relationships between gender and environmental inequalities. Furthermore, many quantitative studies have exclusively focused on hazardous waste facilities as a singular measure of environmental inequality. This study advances the field in three major ways. First, through the inclusion of theorizations based on feminist intersectionality theories, this research empirically analyzes hypotheses derived from intersectionality theories to understand dynamics of gender-environment interactions. Second, this study extends analysis to all forms of waste containment—municipal, industrial, construction and demolition, and hazardous—to identify trends across the social fabric of the contiguous United States at the county level of analysis with respect to multiple forms of environmental hazards. Third, utilizing innovative analytic techniques, this research provides three unique and related strategies, geographic information systems, logistic binary regression, and structural equation modeling, to examine socio-environmental disparities. Findings from each analytic strategy inform the subsequent strategy. Findings suggest the importance of including gender indicators to account for the unique effect of gender and environmental inequality. Furthermore, results indicate the importance in applying intersectionality theories to environmental outcomes as well as empirically testing hypotheses derived from the largely theoretical and qualitatively backed field. Future research should focus on specific regional dynamics of identified socio-environmental interactions by including historical and qualitative data to triangulate quantitative findings. / 1 / Clare Cannon

This thesis explains to statisticians what graphical models are and how to use them for statistical inference; in particular, how to use decomposable graphical models for efficient inference in covariance selection and multivariate regression problems. The first aim of the thesis is to show that decomposable graphical models are worth using within a Bayesian framework. The second aim is to make the techniques of graphical models fully accessible to statisticians. To achieve these aims the thesis makes a number of statistical contributions. First, it proposes a new prior for decomposable graphs and a simulation methodology for estimating this prior. Second, it proposes a number of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling schemes based on graphical techniques. The thesis also presents some new graphical results, and some existing results are reproved to make them more readily understood. Appendix 8.1 contains all the programs written to carry out the inference discussed in the thesis, together with both a summary of the theory on which they are based and a line by line description of how each routine works.

This project was the result of three years of ethnographic fieldwork in a tongue speaking Pentecostal church in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The focus was on the individual process of becoming Pentecostal. The goal was to bring the reader into the church and provide an intimate portrait into the lives of its members to unfold their story as they proceed in their Pentecostal careers. The research questions that informed this dissertation included asking how individuals become Pentecostal and why they do so at each stage in their careers, as well as some of the consequence to this process. As opposed to past work that focuses on the Pentecostal movement in a macro context, this work focuses on the individual. The research objectives were to write a theoretical model on becoming Pentecostal, that includes a religious conversion, engaging in ongoing debates on the process of conversion. Ethnographic data was collected that included participant observation and formal and informal interviews. Analytic inductive procedures were used during data collection and analysis to form a preliminary theory and test it case by case, attempting to arrive at a general explanation of how and why individuals proceed in becoming Pentecostal. The dissertation also developed a "process analysis" to explain how individuals experience a process, not a single crisis, that includes one of numerous incipient moments that occur at each step in a long chain of events that explain an individual's path to become a religious seeker. This work demonstrates how ethnographic data and analytic inductive procedures create theories linked to empirical data. The conversion theory developed challenges both old and new religious conversion paradigms, updating past conversion research and advancing new ideas on how to approach the problem.

Policing is a profession linked to ideals of integrity and honor. In spite of this, the profession has not been immune to corruption within its ranks. Most research in policing has concentrated on police corruption rather than police integrity. Research studies have examined the issue of corruption but they have encountered a multitude of measurement issues, making the direct study of corruption difficult. / The goal of this research study was to replicate the seminal Klockars, Ivkovich, Harver & Haberfeld (2000) study examining police integrity within the United States. There has been a lack of research dedicated to the study of police integrity within the United States since the Klockars, et al. (2000) data was collected. This study aims to further understand the dynamics of integrity issues within the United States with the intension of offering policy recommendations to help reduce and eliminate their prevalence in American police departments.

Listening to the voices of the American Catholic sister

Exploring Interagency Collaboration in a Secondary Transition Community of Practice

This study is an attempt to combine Nietzschean thought with postmodernism (already greatly influenced by Nietzsche) to take what I am calling a "pastiche approach." I do not mean pastiche in the strictest sense of the word as simply a hodgepodge of various things with little connection to one another but as a combination of modernist schools of thought, such as the structuralists, with various postmodern and poststructural "schools," such as those strains of thought coming from figures such as Jean Baudrillard, Jean Francois Lyotard and Jacque Derrida. I am also referring to various methodological approaches, such as ethnography, historical comparative, textual and content analysis and positivistic approaches. These approaches are used in concert in order to paint a "portrait" from a stance of Nietzschean perspectivism of barworkers as people operating in cultural patterns both local and global.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Wu, C. F. Jeff; Committee Co-Chair: Yuan, Ming; Committee Member: Huo, Xiaoming; Committee Member: Vengazhiyil, Roshan Joseph; Committee Member: Wang, Zhonglin. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

<p>When making decisions about what to do in a disaster, people consider the welfare of their animals. Most people consider their pets to be "part of the family." There are more than 144 million pet dogs and cats in homes around the US, and Colorado is home to a $3 billion livestock industry. In emergency response, supporting the human-animal bond is one important way we can assist people in making good decisions about evacuation, and improve their ability to recover after the emergency period is over. There is an opportunity to leverage social computing tools to support the information needs of people concerned with animals in disasters. This research uses three major studies to examine the information management and cooperative work done around animals in this domain: First, an online study of the response of animal advocates in the 2012 Hurricane Sandy event; second, a study bridging the online and offline response of equine experts following the 2013 Colorado floods; and third, an extended 22-month ethnographic study of the work done at animal evacuation sites, beginning with on-the-ground participant observation at two fairground evacuation sites during the Black Forest Fire in Southern Colorado in 2013, and including the design of two information support tools. The research provides lessons about how information online, information offline, and the bridging of information in those arenas both supports and limits the potential for innovation in addressing the unusual and emergent ill-structured problems that are hallmarks of disaster response. The role of expertise as a vital resource in emergency response, and recommendations for policy improvements that appreciate the conscious inclusion of spontaneous volunteers are two contributions from this work.