Digital Commons Network^™

The Matching Function And Nonlinear Business Cycles, Joshua Bernstein, Alexander W. Richter, Nathaniel A. Throckmorton

Arts & Sciences Articles

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The Cobb-Douglas matching function is ubiquitous in labor search and matching models, even though it imposes a constant matching elasticity that is unlikely to hold empirically. To examine the implications of this discrepancy, this paper uses a general constant returns to scale matching function to derive conditions that show how the cyclicality of the matching elasticity affects the shape of the job finding rate as a function of productivity and amplifies or dampens nonlinear labor market dynamics. It then shows that modest variation in the matching elasticity, consistent with recent estimates, significantly affects higher order moments and optimal policy. This …

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China's Hidden Role In Malaria Control And Elimination In Africa, Julius Nyerere Odhiambo, Carrie B. Dolan, Ammar A. Malik, Aaron Tavel

Arts & Sciences Articles

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Background

Insufficient funding is hindering the achievement of malaria elimination targets in Africa, despite the pressing need for increased investment in malaria control. While Western donors attribute their inaction to financial constraints, the global health community has limited knowledge of China’s expanding role in malaria prevention. This knowledge gap arises from the fact that China does not consistently report its foreign development assistance activities to established aid transparency initiatives. Our work focuses on identifying Chinese-funded malaria control projects throughout Africa and linking them to official data on malaria prevalence. By doing so, we aim to shed light on China’s contributions …

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Seasonal Trends In Lysogeny In An Appalachian Oak-Hickory Forest Soil, Melaina L. Jacoby, Graham D. Hogg, Madelein R. Assaad, Kurt E. Williamson

Arts & Sciences Articles

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Since 1989, investigations into viral ecology have revealed how bacteriophages can influence microbial dynamics within ecosystems at global scales. Most of the information we know about temperate phages, which can integrate themselves into the host genome and remain dormant via a process called lysogeny, has come from research in aquatic ecosystems. Soil environments remain under-studied, and more research is necessary to fully understand the range of impacts phage infections have on the soil bacteria they infect. The aims of this study were to compare the efficacy of different prophage-inducing agents and to elucidate potential temporal trends in lysogeny within a …

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The Uninvited Host: Goa And The Parties Not Meant For Its People, R. Benedito Ferrão, Angela Ferrão, Maria Vanessa De Sa

Arts & Sciences Articles

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Despite its history as a favored destination for hippies from the West in the 1960s and 1970s, present-day party tourism in Goa largely attracts Indian travelers. This is a product of the post-1990s liberalization of the Indian economy, coupled with the exoticization of Goa, which has rendered it a pleasure periphery to the subcontinent. Such difference, and attraction, occurs because, unlike most of the rest of the India that annexed Goa, the region was a Portuguese colony until 1961. Goa’s Lusitanization suggests a more liberal milieu, social gatherings with music and dancing being commonplace culturally, for example. While tourism has …

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Creating New Knowledge With Undergraduate Students: Institutional Incentives And Faculty Agency, Kelebogile Zvobgo, Paula M. Pickering, Jamie E. Settle, Michael J. Tierney

Arts & Sciences Articles

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Undergraduate students today face a more demanding and competitive labor market than their parents’ generation. In response, some pursue double majors to signal breadth to potential employers and to improve their job prospects. Some students also realize that a strong signal of workplace readiness is acquiring in-demand skills through independent and collaborative research. In this article, four professors at an undergraduate-focused public university in the United States share their experiences working with undergraduate students on research, focusing on the “supply side” of student research training and mentoring. We discuss how institutions can support differently situated faculty members, who face different …

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Host Defense Peptide Piscidin And Yeast-Derived Glycolipid Exhibit Synergistic Antimicrobial Action Through Concerted Interactions With Membranes, Fei Liu, Alexander I. Greenwood, Yawei Xiong, Et Al., Myriam L. Cotten

Arts & Sciences Articles

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Developing new antimicrobials as alternatives to conventional antibiotics has become an urgent race to eradicate drug-resistant bacteria and to save human lives. Conventionally, antimicrobial molecules are studied independently even though they can be cosecreted in vivo. In this research, we investigate two classes of naturally derived antimicrobials: sophorolipid (SL) esters as modified yeast-derived glycolipid biosurfactants that feature high biocompatibility and low production cost; piscidins, which are host defense peptides (HDPs) from fish. While HDPs such as piscidins target the membrane of pathogens, and thus result in low incidence of resistance, SLs are not well understood on a mechanistic level. Here, …

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Crystal Structure And Hirshfeld Surface Analysis Of Cyclo-Tetrabromido-1k2br,3k2br-Tetrakis(Pi2-2-{[(Pyridin-2-Yl)Methyl]Amino}Ethane-1-Thiolato-Krystal Structure And Hirshfeld Surface Analysis Ofcyclo-Tetrabromido-1j2br,3j2br-Tetrakis(L2-2-{[(Pyridin-2-Yl)Methyl]Amino}Ethane-1-Thiolato-K3n,S:S)Tetramercury(Ii), I. D. Thomas, K. R. Kocher, J. A. Viehweg, Robert Pike, Deborah Bebout

Arts & Sciences Articles

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The macrometallacyclic title compound, [Hg4Br4(C8H11N2S)4] or [((HgL2)(HgBr2))2] (1) where HL = 2-{[(pyridin-2-yl)meth­yl]amino}­ethane-1-thiol, was prepared and structurally characterized. The Hg2+ complex crystallizes in the P21/c space group. The centrosymmetric Hg4S4 metallacycle is constructed from metal ions with alternating distorted tetra­hedral Br2S2 and distorted seesaw N2S2 primary coordination environments with pendant pyridyl groups. The backfolded extended chair metallacycle conformation suggests inter­actions between each of the bis-chelated mercury atoms and Br atoms lying above and below the central Hg2S4 plane. Supra­molecular inter­actions in 1 include a fourfold aryl embrace and potential hydrogen bonds with bromine as the acceptor. Hirshfeld surface analysis indicates that …

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A Language Framework For Modeling Social Media Account Behavior, Alexander C. Nwala, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer

Arts & Sciences Articles

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Malicious actors exploit social media to inflate stock prices, sway elections, spread misinformation, and sow discord. To these ends, they employ tactics that include the use of inauthentic accounts and campaigns. Methods to detect these abuses currently rely on features specifically designed to target suspicious behaviors. However, the effectiveness of these methods decays as malicious behaviors evolve. To address this challenge, we propose a language framework for modeling social media account behaviors. Words in this framework, called BLOC, consist of symbols drawn from distinct alphabets representing user actions and content. Languages from the framework are highly flexible and can be …

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Civic Virtue In Non-Ideal Republics, M. Victoria Costa

Arts & Sciences Articles

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This paper defends a neorepublican account of civic virtue as consisting of stable traits of character, understood in broadly Aristotelian terms, that exhibit excellences associated with the role of citizen, and that contribute to the secure protection of freedom as non-domination. Such an account is important for the neorepublican project because neither laws nor social norms can yield reliable support for republican freedom without a parallel input from civic virtue. The paper emphasizes the need to distinguish civic virtue from desirable norms, which can operate in tandem. Against other neorepublican accounts of civic virtue, it argues that the primary function …

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Decoloniality And Tropicality: Part Two, Anita Lundberg, Hannah Regis, (...), R. Benedito Ferrão, Et Al.

Arts & Sciences Articles

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The papers collected together in this special issue on the theme ‘decoloniality and tropicality’ discuss and demonstrate how we can move towards disentangling ourselves from persistent colonial epistemologies and ontologies. Engaging theories of decoloniality and postcolonialism with tropicality, the articles explore the material poetics of philosophical reverie; the 'tropical natureculture' imaginaries of sex tourism, ecotourism, and militourism; deep readings of an anthropophagic movement, ecocritical literature, and the ecoGothic; the spaces of a tropical flâneuseand diasporic vernacular architecture; and in the decoloniality of education, a historical analysis of colonial female education and a film analysis for contemporary educational praxis.

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Identification Of Transient Radio Frequency Occlusion Events In Urban Environments, Margaret M. Rooney, Mark Hinders

Arts & Sciences Articles

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We model the propagation of SHF OFDM signals around vehicles and buildings since these are the most common elements present in urban environments that could lead to complex radio frequency signal scattering. Scenarios involving temporary hidden node situations, which we term transient occlusion events, are simulated and compared to scenarios where a line of sight transmission event occurs. Sets of fingerprints generated from signals recorded in full-wave 3D finite difference time domain simulations of these two different types of situations are compared, and features in the fingerprints corresponding to the occlusion of a transmitted signal by a vehicle or a …

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Decolonizing The Tropics: Part One, Anita Lundberg, Sophie Chao, R. Benedito Ferrão, Ashton Sinamai, Et Al.

Arts & Sciences Articles

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This special issue is a collection of papers that addresses and enacts the theme of decolonizing the tropics. Each article provides a sense of how we can untangle ourselves from entrenched colonial epistemologies and ontologies through detailed articulations of research practice. Drawing together humanities and social sciences, the papers collectively address questions of whose voices are heard or silenced, what positions we write from, how we are allowed to articulate our ideas, and through which mediums we present our research. In doing so, the contributions foreground the critical importance of these and other questions in any move towards decolonizing the …

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Race And Racial Exclusion In Security Studies: A Survey Of Scholars, Kelebogile Zvobgo, Arturo C. Sotomayor, Maria Rost Rublee, Meredith Loken, Et Al.

Arts & Sciences Articles

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Increased attention to racialized knowledge and methodological whiteness has swept the political science discipline, especially international relations. Yet an important dimension of race and racism continues to be ignored: the presence and status of scholars of color in the discipline. In contrast to other fields, there is little research on (under)representation of scholars of color in security studies, and no systematic studies of race and racial exclusion that center their voices and experiences. Building on scholarship that contends with the fundamental whiteness of academia and knowledge creation, we present results from a 2019 survey of members of the International Security …

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Chinese Health Funding In Africa: The Untold Story, Carrie B. Dolan, Ammar A. Malik, Sheng Zhang, Wenhui Mao, Et Al.

Arts & Sciences Articles

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The motivations behind China’s allocation of health aid to Africa remain complex due to limited information on the details of health aid project activities. Insufficient knowledge about the purpose of China’s health aid hinders our understanding of China’s comprehensive role in supporting Africa’s healthcare system. To address this gap, our study aimed to gain better insights into China’s health aid priorities and the factors driving these priorities across Africa. To achieve this, we utilized AidData’s Chinese Official Finance Dataset and adhered to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) guidelines. We reclassified all 1,026 health projects in Africa, originally …

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Chinese Health Funding In Africa: The Untold Story, Carrie B. Dolan, Ammar A. Malik, Sheng Zhang, (...), Eli Svoboda, Julius Nyerere Odhiambo

Arts & Sciences Articles

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The motivations behind China’s allocation of health aid to Africa remain complex due to limited information on the details of health aid project activities. Insufficient knowledge about the purpose of China’s health aid hinders our understanding of China’s comprehensive role in supporting Africa’s healthcare system. To address this gap, our study aimed to gain better insights into China’s health aid priorities and the factors driving these priorities across Africa. To achieve this, we utilized AidData’s Chinese Official Finance Dataset and adhered to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) guidelines. We reclassified all 1,026 health projects in Africa, originally …

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Documenting Multilingualism And Contact, Lenore A. Grenoble, Jack B. Martin

Arts & Sciences Articles

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In order to understand why languages become endangered, linguists must shift from documenting the last fluent speakers to documenting the larger ecology of language use in an area. The papers in this special issue all address different aspects of documenting language multilingualism. They address three related topics: (1) consideration of the state of multilingualism in endangered language ecologies; (2) tools and methods for transcribing, annotating, analyzing and presenting multilingual corpora; and (3) methods in documenting and studying language contact in process.

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Infrastructures Of Race? Colonial Indigenous Segregation And Contemporaneous Urban Sorting, Luis Baldomero-Quintana, Guillermo Woo-Mora, Enrique De La Rosa-Ramos

Arts & Sciences Articles

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We study the impacts of a colonial segregation policy on modern-day spatial population patterns and residential sorting by human capital in Mexican cities. After the Conquest, the Spanish aimed to segregate Indigenous individuals into settlements called pueblos de indios. While the segregation policy lasted until the end of the colonial era, we use present-day census data at the block level on population, schooling and access to medical services to understand the persistent effects of pueblos on within-city structure. First, we document a spatial non-monotonic correlation between the location of the pueblos and population deagglomerations. Second, we study the causal impact …

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Translator’S Introduction To ‘Notebook From The Trip To Visit The Hopi Indians’ By André Breton*, Katharine Conley

Arts & Sciences Articles

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This Translator’s Introduction provides additional context for Breton’s “Notebook from the Trip to Visit the Hopi Indians,” based on scholarship published since the 1999 publication of the “Notebook” in the edition of Breton’s Complete Works edited by Etienne-Alain Hubert. In the twenty-five years since that initial publication, new studies on Hopi history and culture have been published by Native scholars such as Lomayumtewa C. Ishii and by non-Native scholars such as Thomas Sheridan and Wesley Bernardini, who have worked closely with the Hopi. This additional scholarship extends the background already provided by Hubert in his Introduction from 1999.

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Predicting Micronutrient Deficiency With Publicly Available Satellite Data, Elizabeth Bondi-Kelly, Haipeng Chen, Christopher D. Golden, Nikhil Behari, Milind Tambe

Arts & Sciences Articles

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Micronutrient deficiency (MND), which is a form of malnutrition that can have serious health consequences, is difficult to diagnose in early stages without blood draws, which are expensive and time-consuming to collect and process. It is even more difficult at a public health scale seeking to identify regions at higher risk of MND. To provide data more widely and frequently, we propose an accurate, scalable, low-cost, and interpretable regional-level MND prediction system. Specifically, our work is the first to use satellite data, such as forest cover, weather, and presence of water, to predict deficiency of micronutrients such as iron, Vitamin …

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(Un)Seeing Goa’S Bom Jesus In Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar’S This Is Not The Basilica!, R. Benedito Ferrão

Arts & Sciences Articles

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This article examines the interrogation of visual history associated with Goan church architectural legacies offered by Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar’s installation series, This is Not the Basilica! (2021). The artist’s subject is the 16th-century Basilica of Bom Jesus, which was built in locally domesticated Baroque style during Goa’s Portuguese colonial era and which houses the remains of the Spanish saint, Francis Xavier. Kandolkar’s work makes viewers intimate with the Basilica’s history, I contend, so as to posit the need for conservation efforts that will save the deteriorating church while also revealing its unseen aesthetic past as a symbol of still-unfolding Goan …

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From The Studio To The Field: André Breton’S ‘Hopi Notebook’, Katharine Conley

Arts & Sciences Articles

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André Breton’s visit to the Hopi villages of Arizona in 1945 had an impact on his view of the world and of the objects he collected. His response to what he witnessed in the month when the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was reflected in the notebook he kept on his trip, known as the “Hopi Notebook,” and in the poem he began writing that summer, “Ode to Charles Fourier.” His belief in the liveliness of repurposed things, haunted by their former lives, was particularly pertinent to the Hopi katsina figures he collected on his trip …

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Spatial And Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Approaches To Inform Covid-19 Surveillance And Control: A Systematic Review Of Statistical And Modelling Methods In Africa, Julius Nyerere Odhiambo, Carrie B. Dolan, Lydia Troup, Nathaly Perez Rojas

Arts & Sciences Articles

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Objective Various studies have been published to better understand the underlying spatial and temporal dynamics of COVID-19. This review sought to identify different spatial and spatio-temporal modelling methods that have been applied to COVID-19 and examine influential covariates that have been reportedly associated with its risk in Africa.

Design Systematic review using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines.

Data sources Thematically mined keywords were used to identify refereed studies conducted between January 2020 and February 2022 from the following databases: PubMed, Scopus, MEDLINE via Proquest, CINHAL via EBSCOhost and Coronavirus Research Database via ProQuest. A manual …

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Understanding The Public Health Role, Motivations, And Perceptions Of Community Health Workers Deployed To Low-Income Housing In Richmond, Virginia, Iyabo Obasanjo, Alison Scott, Monica Griffin, Amma Agyemang-Duah, Charlie Westhoff, Stephanie Toney, Patrice Shelton

Arts & Sciences Articles

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Background

For the US health indicators to improve to the level of other developed countries, the use of Community Health Workers (CHWs) in vulnerable populations has been indicated as a possible long-term intervention. There are few models of long-term deployment of CHWs as part of the district level public health system in the US.

Method

In this study we interviewed CHWs who served as neighborhood-integrated health district staff assigned to low-income housing in Richmond, Virginia for 10 years. Qualitative analyses of their taped and transcribed interviews resulted in 5 themes from the interviews. The themes were Activities, Satisfaction, Strengths, Facilitation/Resources …

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The Jew Who Fed An Army: Jacob Benjamin And The French Revolution, Ronald Schechter

Arts & Sciences Articles

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This article tells the story of a Jewish army supplier in the French Revolution. Jacob Benjamin literally fed an army: the Army of the South (l’Armée du Midi), a vast force that spread from the Pyrenees to the Alps. He provided meat for every one of the army’s 30,000 soldiers for the second half of 1792. He sold goods to three of France’s four other armies (of the North, the Centre, and the Rhine). His shoes were probably on the feet of the soldiers who won the battle of Valmy, a battle that prevented France’s enemies from suppressing the Revolution. …

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