Digital Commons Network^™

Final Master's Portfolio, Marisa Mount

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

The following portfolio project contains four separate pieces of writing produced during the author's MA coursework.

The Livingston Survey 2022, S. Anderson, B. Bovino, M. Brown, Thomas Lam, Et Al

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

The 16 participants in the December Livingston Survey weakened their forecasts for real GDP growth, compared with their projections in the June 2022 survey. The forecasters, who are surveyed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia twice a year, expect 2.0 percent annualized growth in real GDP during the second half of 2022. They project 0.4 percent annualized growth over the first half of 2023. The forecasters predict that real GDP will continue to decline and reach -1.0 percent annualized growth in the second half of 2023.

Singapore Management University Report To Stakeholders 2021/2022, Singapore Management University

Report to Stakeholders

The title of the annual report, “Our Evolving Garden”, points to how the University continues to develop and progress as “One SMU”. With the world now learning to live with COVID-19 as endemic, the last year has been one in which SMU students have been able to resume many of the activities that contribute towards providing a transformative education. For example, they were able to attend many more events on campus and to travel overseas for internships, exchanges, and community service projects. Faculty too were able to attend academic conferences and meet with educational partners, business connections and research associates …

Mars 2100: A Microcosm Of Ecocentric Design, Andrea Hoe

Architecture Thesis Prep

In the dystopian future of 2100, Earth becomes a dying planet and humanity is forced to continue colonizing the solar system for survival. Mars develops as a colonized planet, exploited for its natural resources and potential. The hierarchical system of power seen constantly throughout Earth’s history was inescapable, and poor conditions turned to extremes. As billionaires take control of the space race, the capitalist system reflected in past company towns was implemented, making the moral questions and lines blurred.

When the system is eventually ruptured, ecosystemic living is proposed. Living is now centered around health and mindfulness, creating a system …

Immersive Inoculation: Testing If Architecture Can Become A Form Of Emotional Supplementation, Julia Kazubowsi, Chloe De Marco

Architecture Thesis Prep

The environments, objects, and spaces we encounter rub off on us, even if we don't notice. Like a human interaction, every inanimate encounter we have have with surrounding objects and architecture has a positive or negative affect on us.

We recognize that ordinary things have a surprising power to create extraordinary feelings and reactions. This thesis propose a visual medium that bridges the gap between us and the inanimate. Where we meet in the middle is an architectural experience that is emotionally charged, introducing specific emotions to the body. Just as movies, books, and happy pills elicit a response from …

Paradigm Of The Post Natural: Critiquing Capitalist Ideals Through Environmental Degradation, Andrea De Haro, Charlotte Bascombe

Architecture Thesis Prep

There is an unspoken value in the destructiveness caused by design that is exposed through the exploitation of natural resources. This thesis seeks to exemplify the aesthetic value inherent within these newly defined environments. Nature is a source for human consumption, and as such it has developed into a commodity. By now it should be made evident that humanity’s presence is everywhere. There is no ecosystem left unturned by human manipulation Iin this respect, nature is dead. Deforested sites of oil fracking leave mile long toxic ponds highlighting the destructive pursuits that capitalism creates. Chernobyl showcases how human errors in …

Eternal Imprint: Two Libraries Linked In Time, Jaifer Sultan

Architecture Thesis Prep

The thesis is an exploration of the symbolic relationship between Earth and the Moon through the conceptualization of two libraries, one on Earth and one on the Moon, are to be formally expressed through a mitosis-like interdependency, where both libraries are in constant architectural dialogue with each other despite their separation which occurred some time ago.

The thesis positions itself in the architectural discourse through the rigorous stud and analysis of the library typology throughout history, to both symbolize meaning and ritualize one's experience of acquiring knowledge. This understanding of the library typology will be tackled through the cataloging of …

Tectonic Thresholds: Reclaiming Space Through Geomorphological Design, Amreeta Verma

Architecture Thesis Prep

This research posits that a revitalization of indigenous earth architecture practices in a contemporary context can mitigate the immense waste and embodied carbon in the construction industry. Earth materials are the focus of this research because they are locally sourced, abundantly available, and can be reused or returned to the natural environment, when utilized in a circular consumption cycle. Designing for reuse reduces the impact of construction waste on the burgeoning issue of environmental degradation and resource depletion.

The structural viability and environmental enclosure capabilities of soil throughout its lifecycle will be tested in different forms derived geomorphically from the …

The Ark: Sanctuary For Isfs, Zejun Sun, Wei Wei Li

Architecture Thesis Prep

The thesis is aiming to decrease the potential flooding damages to the ISFs, and a balance between the limited resources and high population density to relieve the flooding issues through the renovation and reconstruction of local churches in the Baseco Compound.

Flooding has become one of the most common and devastated issues in developing countries, and it is worsen by the housing crisis that lead to a formation of informal settlements with shoddy constructions and destabilized communities. What is an applicable approach to decrease the potential flooding damage to the ISFs? How to find a balance between the limited resources …

Tri-Ag News Academics Research Extension College Of Agriculture Sciences - Spring/Summer 2022, Prairie View A&M University

Prairie View Magazine Collection

No abstract provided.

Religious Education: Necessary For Perfection, Daniel Skinner

Aristos

No abstract provided.

“The Inner Form Of The Church:” The Mariology And Ecclesiology Of Erich Przywara, Danijel Uremovic

Aristos

In this paper, we will explore the link between the Mariology and ecclesiology of Polish-German theologian Erich Przywara, paying special attention to his designation of Mary as the “inner form of the Church.” Following a brief introduction to his doctrine of analogy, we will examine Przywara’s understanding of Mary’s formal-causal role in shaping the Church. To this end, we will consider three specific sites of his Mary-Church link, namely, Christ’s passion, Mary’s motherhood, and her nuptiality. We will then explore the implications of this three-fold link, and what it means for Przywara’s understanding of the Church. Finally, we will conclude …

Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi: Eschatological Teachings In The Prayers Of A Funeral Mass, Carolyn Lewis

Aristos

In light of twenty-first century secularization, and with the liturgical revisions following the Second Vatican Council, some lament that the true eschatological doctrines of the Catholic faith are no longer evident in the Funeral Mass. This would then miscarry the axiom Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, exposing significant shortcomings within these liturgical revisions. This paper analyses the propers of the Funeral Mass, in order to assess which eschatological teachings are evident in those prayers. Examined first are the Christocentric salvific teachings, considering the hopeful Paschal focus of the Funeral Mass. Representations of the nature of the afterlife are then analysed, …

What Roles Do Reason And Revelation Play In The Knowledge Of The Trinity, According To St Thomas Aquinas?, Matthew Anslow

Aristos

The Holy Trinity is viewed, within the Catholic tradition, as “the central mystery of the Christian faith and life.” Given the importance of the doctrine, this paper explores to what extent, and by what means, humans are capable of knowledge of the Trinity. It summarises Thomas Aquinas’ account of the knowledge of the Trinity, beginning with an outline of Aquinas’ understanding of the place of revelation and reason in the knowledge of God in general. From there, the paper notes Aquinas’ denial of the ability of human reason to discern the Trinity before turning to his primary reason for this …

Immunogenetic Role Of Il17a Polymorphism In The Pathogenesis Of Recurrent Miscarriage, Shafat Ali, Sabhiya Majid, Md Niamat Ali, Mujeeb Zafar Banday

Faculty and Student Publications

Interleukin-17A (IL17A) is a proinflammatory cytokine and is assumed to play an important role in fetal rejection. In order to evaluate the potential role of IL17A polymorphism in the pathogenesis of recurrent miscarriage (RM), serum IL17A levels were estimated by ELISA. Single-nucleotide polymorphism was assessed by polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment-length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) using gene-specific primers and the EcoNI restriction enzyme. Serum IL17A levels were nonsignificantly (p > 0.5) low in RM patients compared with the control group. IL17A gene amplification by PCR yielded the undigested product of 815 bp, and its digestion with EcoNI enzyme produced 815, 529, 286, and 270 …

Psychometric Properties Of The 26-Item Eating Attitudes Test (Eat-26): An Application Of Rasch Analysis, Natalie M. Papini, Myungjin Jung, Amanda Cook, Nanette V. Lopez, Lauren T. Ptomey, Stephen D. Herrmann, Minsoo Kang

Faculty and Student Publications

Background: The 26-item Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26) is a commonly used tool to assess eating disorder risk. The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the EAT-26 with a combined sample: (1) of adults with overweight and obesity enrolled in a behavioral weight loss program and (2) general adult sample (n = 469; age = 36.17 ± 17.83 years; female = 72.5%; white = 66.3%; obese BMI category = 58%). Methods: Rasch modeling was used to assess model-data fit, create an item-person map to evaluate relative distribution items and persons, item difficulty, and person’s eating disorder …

Supervised Acoustic Embeddings And Their Transferability Across Languages, Sreepratha Ram, Hanan Aldarmaki

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

In speech recognition, it is essential to model the phonetic content of the input signal while discarding irrelevant factors such as speaker variations and noise, which is challenging in low-resource settings. Self-supervised pretraining has been proposed as a way to improve both supervised and unsupervised speech recognition, including frame-level feature representations and Acoustic Word Embeddings (AWE) for variable-length segments. However, self-supervised models alone cannot learn perfect separation of the linguistic content as they are trained to optimize indirect objectives. In this work, we experiment with different pre-trained self-supervised features as input to AWE models and show that they work best …

Msw Capstone, Angela Marple

Social Work Masters Capstone Projects

abstract not available

Interview With Maria Andrade, Daniel Lane

Immigrant Leaders

An interview with Maria Andrade, an immigrant leader from Latino Action Network. The interview covers life before immigrating, arrival and integration, and political participation.

Asdot: Any-Shot Data-To-Text Generation With Pretrained Language Models, Jiannan Xiang, Zhengzhong Liu, Yucheng Zhou, Eric P. Xing, Zhiting Hu

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

Data-to-text generation is challenging due to the great variety of the input data in terms of domains (e.g., finance vs sports) or schemata (e.g., diverse predicates). Recent end-to-end neural methods thus require substantial training examples to learn to disambiguate and describe the data. Yet, real-world data-to-text problems often suffer from various data-scarce issues: one may have access to only a handful of or no training examples, and/or have to rely on examples in a different domain or schema. To fill this gap, we propose Any-Shot Data-to-Text (ASDOT), a new approach flexibly applicable to diverse settings by making efficient use of …

Abundance And Territory Location Data Of Forest Songbirds To Determine Effects Of Pipeline Collocation As A Mitigation Strategy, Lillie Langlois

All Data Sets

These data were collected for the purpose of determining potential ecological costs associated with a mitigation strategy used in shale gas development in the Appalachian basin. Collocation is the practice of siting new shale gas pipelines adjacent to existing surface disturbance such as forest roads to reduce habitat fragmentation and loss of core forest. These data result from spot mapping for species of songbird at paired forest road and shale gas corridors (expanded access roads collocated with pipelines) between May and July 2013 in north-central Pennsylvania, USA. The data file contains nine sheets that report data from different pieces of …

Resel: N-Ary Relation Extraction From Scientific Text And Tables By Learning To Retrieve And Select, Yuchen Zhuang, Yinghao Li, Jerry Junyang Cheung, Yue Yu, Yingjun Mou, Xiang Chen, Le Song, Chao Zhang

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

We study the problem of extracting N-ary relation tuples from scientific articles. This task is challenging because the target knowledge tuples can reside in multiple parts and modalities of the document. Our proposed method RESEL decomposes this task into a two-stage procedure that first retrieves the most relevant paragraph/table and then selects the target entity from the retrieved component. For the high-level retrieval stage, RESEL designs a simple and effective feature set, which captures multilevel lexical and semantic similarities between the query and components. For the low-level selection stage, RESEL designs a cross-modal entity correlation graph along with a multi-view …

Efficient (Soft) Q-Learning For Text Generation With Limited Good Data, Han Guo, Bowen Tan, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric P. Xing, Zhiting Hu

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant algorithm for training text generation models. This paradigm relies on direct supervision examples, which is not applicable to many emerging applications, such as generating adversarial attacks or generating prompts to control language models. Reinforcement learning (RL) on the other hand offers a more flexible solution by allowing users to plug in arbitrary task metrics as reward. Yet previous RL algorithms for text generation, such as policy gradient (on-policy RL) and Q-learning (off-policy RL), are often notoriously inefficient or unstable to train due to the large sequence space and the sparse reward received only …

Interview With Mike Legaspi, Andrea Generalao

Immigrant Leaders

An interview with Mike Legaspi, an immigrant leader from Migrante. The interview covers life before immigrating, arrival and integration, and political participation.

Teacher Perceptions Of Tier 2 Reading Interventions, Marlena Robinson

Dissertations (2016-Present)

Many students in schools in the United States today are considered at-risk in their reading ability. The disproportionate number of students making inadequate progress places the fate of students at stake. Response to Intervention (RTI) was created to support student growth in reading while reducing the number of students requiring testing for disabilities. This study aims to examine teacher perceptions of RTI reading interventions. Specifically, this study will be concerned with the effects of Tier 2 reading interventions by examining their perceptions of professional development, data and progress monitoring, resources, and support surrounding reading interventions. While an extensive body of …

Conceiving Consistency: Giving Birth To A Uniform "Best Interests Of The Child" Standard, Victoria L. Pepe

Hofstra Law Review

The article address the lack of consistency surrounding the best interests of the child (BIOTC) standard as it has been used in child legal custody adversarial proceedings. It mentions lack of consistency surrounding the BIOTC standard as it has been used in child legal custody adversarial proceedings. It also mentions need to incorporate child welfare data from across the U.S., legal scholarship, and case law to determine which state factors or tests.

Development Of The Spur Tool: A Profiling Instrument For Patient Treatment Behavior, Béatrice Tugaut, Selam Shah, Kevin Dolgin, Hanna Rebibo Seror, Benoit Arnould, Marie Eve Laporte, Aaron Lee, Lydiane Nabec, Reem Kayyali, Joshua Wells, John D. Piette, Guillaume Hubert

Faculty and Student Publications

Background: Long-term treatment adherence is a worldwide concern, with nonadherence resulting from a complex interplay of behaviors and health beliefs. Determining an individual’s risk of nonadherence and identifying the drivers of that risk are crucial for the development of successful interventions for improving adherence. Here, we describe the development of a new tool assessing a comprehensive set of characteristics predictive of patients’ treatment adherence based on the Social, Psychological, Usage and Rational (SPUR) adherence framework. Concepts from existing self-reporting tools of adherence-related behaviors were identified following a targeted MEDLINE literature review and a subset of these concepts were then selected …

Walter Marian Drzewieniecki Curriculum Vitae, Joanna Drzewieniecki

Drzewieniecki Family Curriculum Vitae

Curriculum vitae with publications and manuscript archive holdings.

Staff Council Financial Statement December 2022, Staff Council

Staff Advisory Council Treasurer Reports

No abstract provided.

The Financials Of Water: The Case Of Maynilad And Manila Water, Junette A. Perez, Janrick Razon

Center for Business Research and Development

What is water? It is defined in the English Oxford Living Dictionaries as a colorless, transparent, odorless liquid that forms the seas, lakes, rivers, and rain and is the basis of the fluids of living organisms. The paper uses financial ratio analysis to examine the financial performance of the two dominant water and wastewater companies in Metro Manila. It attempts to appreciate how water and wastewater companies perform financially as they confront the complexities of operating an essential utility, water, and wastewater.