Keyboarding Skilis and Their Effect on Computer Production Rate

Higgins, Jacquelyn Rae Central Michigan University 1983 국내석사

Atmospheric and land surface response to reduced Arctic sea ice extent

Higgins, Matthew E University of Colorado at Boulder 2010 해외박사(DDOD)

With the Arctic climate system changing at unprecedented rates and sea ice extent at near-record lows, an improved understanding of the relationship between sea ice and climate system components is warranted. In a series of model downscaling experiments using present day and projected end of 21 st century sea ice extent, the direct impact of sea ice on the Arctic atmosphere and land surface is examined. Using the Community Atmospheric Model (CAM), future projections of reduced sea ice are found to result in a decrease in sea level pressure (SLP) across northern North American and the central Arctic and an increase in SLP across much of Siberia in winter. The self-organizing map (SOM) technique is used to understand these mean changes from a synoptic climatology perspective. The decreases seen in SLP are found to be the result of an increased frequency of strong Arctic cyclones and an increased intensity of Aleutian lows, while the strengthened Siberian high is due to an increased frequency of a several synoptic scale patterns with strong high-pressure ridges. With a reduction in sea ice, precipitation increases significantly throughout the Arctic due almost entirely to higher levels of atmospheric moisture rather than increased cyclone frequency. In addition, very large increases in winter near-surface atmospheric temperature are simulated, and approximately half of the temperature change can be attributed to advection and half to diabatic heating. The Weather and Research Forecasting Model (WRF) is then forced with lateral boundary conditions from the CAM experiments to examine the land surface response to future sea ice projections across the North Slope of Alaska. Despite warmer near-surface atmospheric temperatures, it is found that spring melt is delayed throughout much of the North Slope due to increased snow pack, and the growing season length is shortened. Increased snow pack in the future sea ice scenario results in warmer soil temperatures for most seasons. However, in the summer soil temperatures are reduced due to increased albedo. These changes imply that sea ice extent acts as a negative feedback on Arctic vegetation growth and have implications for the terrestrial carbon budget.

Applications of Integer Programming Methods to Solve Statistical Problems

Higgins, Michael James University of California, Berkeley 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

Many problems in statistics are inherently discrete. When one of these problems also contains an optimization component, integer programming may be used to facilitate a solution to the statistical problem. We use integer programming techniques to help solve problems in the following areas: optimal blocking of a randomized controlled experiment with several treatment categories and statistical auditing using stratified random samples. We develop a new method for blocking in randomized experiments that works for an arbitrary number of treatments. We analyze the following problem: given a threshold for the minimum number of units to be contained in a block, and given a distance measure between any two units in the finite population, block the units so that the maximum distance between any two units within a block is minimized. This blocking criterion can minimize covariate imbalance, which is a common goal in experimental design. Finding an optimal blocking is an NP-hard problem. However, using ideas from graph theory, we provide the first polynomial time approximately optimal blocking algorithm for when there are more than two treatment categories. In the case of just two such categories, our approach is more efficient than existing methods. We derive the variances of estimators for sample average treatment effects under the Neyman-Rubin potential outcomes model for arbitrary blocking assignments and an arbitrary number of treatments. In addition, statistical election audits can be used to collect evidence that the set of winners (the outcome) of an election according to the machine count is correct—that it agrees with the outcome that a full hand count of the audit trail would show. The strength of evidence is measured by the p-value of the hypothesis that the machine outcome is wrong. Smaller p-values are stronger evidence that the outcome is correct. Most states that have election audits of any kind require audit samples stratified by county for contests that cross county lines. Previous work on p-values for stratified samples based on the largest weighted overstatement of the margin used upper bounds that can be quite weak. Sharper p-values than those found by previous work can be found by solving a 0-1 knapsack problem. We also give algorithms for choosing how many batches to draw from each stratum to reduce the counting burden.

Home schooling in New Mexico: A case study of one family's experience

Higgins, James Brian The University of New Mexico 2002 해외박사(DDOD)

The purpose of this study is to investigate and interpret the home schooling experience of one family in the state of New Mexico. In addition to capturing the lived experiences of these four family members, a brief history of the home schooling movement in New Mexico is offered in an attempt to frame the context in which current home schooling practices are situated. Themes which emerged from this qualitative study of home schooling include: issues of identity, learning through relationship, the independence in learning that comes as a result of home schooling, a review of teacher practices, a critique of the public school experience from a home schooling perspective, the identification of the aporias in public schools, and a discussion of the benefits that educating at home can offer. This case study which progressed over a period of more than thirteen months, compliments existing information on home schooling by focusing on the child's voice in home schooling practice. Previous studies have interpreted child experiences through an adult lens, which may distort or compromise their thoughts and emotions. This study attempts to capture this child voice in a desire to represent home schooling practice from the major stakeholder's point of view. This study also addresses the transition process of moving from the public school to the home school setting. As this family made its transition, they identified issues of identity, self-concept, and relationship, as areas of concern. Finally, this study contributes to existing knowledge by pointing out the importance of relationship in learning in the home school environment. Previous studies have mentioned home schooling's effect in the building of positive relationships within the family. Though this study supports the findings of the positive bonding which home schooling can offer, it provides a deeper interpretation of the learning process itself and documents the richness of the relational dynamic of teaching and learning in both home school and public school environments. This paper calls for continued qualitative research in the area of home schooling in order to capture the complex dynamics of the thoughts and emotions that are inherently linked to all human interaction. With this new knowledge, government educational agencies, school districts, and local schools may be more informed about the nature of this viable educational alternative.

Confusion in the Karnatic Capital: Fusion in Chennai, India

Higgins, Niko Columbia University 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation examines how a contested musical practice makes the problems of modernity in India audible. In particular, I look at the relationship between South Indian “fusion” musicians and India’s recent economic and cultural growth attributed to the economic reforms of 1991. Fusion is the local name for a musical practice that combines South Indian classical music with elements from rock, jazz, and world music. During thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the South Indian city of Chennai between 2006–8, I attended countless concerts, interviewed dozens of people involved with musical production, and performed with musicians. I observed how musicians and audiences perpetuated the idea that fusion was contested and I documented the local debates that often expressed a deep uncertainty and ambiguity about the legitimacy of fusion. What can a contested musical practice reveal about the recent economic and cultural changes in contemporary urban India? Fusion is contested because its multiple and contradicting histories, definitions, and opinions make it a unique musical problem in Chennai. This problem is further complicated when the explicit intension of fusion as musical mixing is also understood as an example of persistent debates of cultural mixing that are so crucial to India’s colonial history and postcolonial present. In this dissertation, I show how fusion triggers debates that provide a unique constellation of irresolvable tensions that help situate contemporary, urban, South Indian musicians within the changing relations between India and the West. The contestation about fusion has led to a lacuna of critical scholarship that this dissertation remedies. I argue that rather than being a reason to overlook fusion, fusion’s contestation loads it with meaning and makes it a rich, unexamined site of expressive culture. It provides a unique domain to understand how musicians in Chennai represent the always-changing relations of India and the West through their discourse about music and musical sound.

The PACT of Patient Engagement: Unraveling the Meaning of Engagement with Hybrid Concept Analysis

Higgins, Tracy Columbia University 2016 해외박사(DDOD)

Patient engagement has become a widely used term, but remains a poorly understood concept in healthcare. Citations for the term during the past two decades have increased markedly throughout the healthcare-related disciplines without a common definition. Patient engagement has been credited for contributing to improved outcomes and experiences of care. Means of identifying and evaluating practices that facilitate patient engagement in care have become an ethical imperative for patient-centered care. This process begins with a definition of the concept. Concept analysis is a means of establishing a common definition of a concept through identification of its attributes, antecedents and consequences within the context of its use. Concept analysis is a methodology that has been used in social science and nursing as a means to resolve conceptual barriers to theory development in an evolving field. The methodological theory was based in the analytic philosophical tradition and sustained during the 20th century by the strength of philosophical positivism in the health sciences. This concept analysis is guided procedurally by Rogers' evolutionary approach that incorporates postmodern philosophical principles and well-defined techniques. This dissertation is informed by the expanded and updated perspective of the neomodern era in nursing research, which advances the concept analysis methodology further. An analysis of the concept underlying the term patient engagement in the scientific literature revealed four defining attributes: personalization, access, commitment and therapeutic alliance. These defining attributes were derived through thematic analysis of over 100 individual attributes shared among six categories and three domains. The resultant definition revealed that patient engagement is both process and behavior shaped by the relationship between patient and provider and the environment where healthcare delivery takes place. Patient engagement is defined as the desire and capability to actively choose to participate in care in a way uniquely appropriate to the individual, in cooperation with a healthcare provider or institution, for the purposes of maximizing outcomes or improving experiences of care. In addition to the attributes of the concept identified in the literature, themes relevant to patient engagement were identified through inputs from six focus groups of persons living with HIV in New York City. The focus group participants were convened to inform the development of a mobile application designed to support their healthcare needs. Their experiences, insights and expectations were valuable in ascertaining those actions or behaviors that may serve to assist the patient in obtaining and adhering to care. The focus group transcripts were coded twice. The first round occurred prior to the concept analysis of the literature and used emergent coding methodology to capture meanings independent of the findings of the concept analysis. The second round occurred after the concept analysis of the literature and used the resultant attributes to perform a directed concept analysis of the transcripts. The content analyses of the transcripts from the patient perspective supported and reinforced the attributes from the concept analysis. The focus groups also highlighted another important aspect of patient engagement, that of privacy/confidentiality, which had not been specifically addressed in the concept analysis of the literature. The definition and the identified attributes serve as a heuristic in designing patient engagement strategies and as a basis for future development of the engagement concept in healthcare. The supporting concepts for engagement, especially the role of empathy in the therapeutic alliance, require further clarification and debate. While patient engagement may be promoted through face-to-face interactions or through health information technology, the defining attributes are invariable and should guide the design of engagement processes and tools. Finally, the value of understanding and exploring the defining attributes of patient engagement in medical and nursing education becomes clear, as is the need for continuing clinical training to support and encourage patient engagement skills.

The inward urge: 1960s science fiction and imperialism

Higgins, David M Indiana University 2010 해외박사(DDOD)

Science fiction's "inward" turn in the 1960s coincides with an introspective shift in British and American imperial imaginings. In a moment when the ideal of the "frontier" is transforming in America, and at a time when decolonization is reversing the European colonial project, science fiction turns its attention to "inner" rather than "outer" spaces, and this introspective turn indexes the changing contours of imperial discourse and practice in the 1960s. The science fiction of this period rejects the ontological imperialism of modernist meta-narratives by exploring valid plural subjectivities; at the same time, it indexes the ways in which imperial power can utilize postmodern tactics to retain asymmetrical privilege. This dissertation indexes Cold War transformations in imperial imaginings in the fiction of Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, Thomas Disch, Philip K. Dick, Philip Jose Farmer, Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, and Ursula K. Le Guin. These texts offer revealing insights into the continuing power of modern imperial strategies and into emergent formations of postmodern neo-imperialism.

The persistence of vision: Modern and postmodern collage

Higgins, Scarlett Brehm The University of Chicago 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation undertakes, broadly, to theorize the persistence and success of collage in artworks past the initial avant-garde moment of its inception, and, specifically, to study individual instances of collage in the literary and visual arts in their formal, thematic, historical, and cultural contexts. I argue that collage, defined as any art form that utilizes disjunctive cuts in material, has represented not only an avenue of formal innovation, but also a pathway to utopian political and social thought. Beginning with a theoretical consideration of the writings of Ezra Pound and Walter Benjamin, and continuing with a series of case studies on figures including Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Duncan, Jess, Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner, Langston Hughes, Nathaniel Mackey, Susan Howe, and Paul D. Miller (D. J. Spooky), this dissertation show how collage allows for the reader/viewer to "see differently," leading to a revolution of the senses. On the basis of these case studies, I contend that a broad range of textual and visual artists used collage in works that were politically or socially motivated, and have continued to do so into the contemporary era. Though the European avant-garde groups under whose auspices collage first flourished did have explicit political connections (on both the right and the left), the larger literary and artistic movements now known as "modernism" have often been characterized as elitist and apolitical. And yet, since the 1920s, a diverse spectrum of American artists have included collage as an essential part of their practice of making politically or socially motivated art. For these artists, collage's form (cutting and pasting, or its equivalent) is essential to the political content that they wish to express, in varieties both utopian and apocalyptic. Thus, collage has persisted well past its original avant-garde moment to become a staple not only of art but also of the mass media. Recovering the shock of recognition that collage initially provoked, as well as its visibility (in the face of near ubiquity in advertising and film), is the purpose of this project.

Ecosystem responses and feedbacks to abrupt climate change

Higgins, Paul Stanford University 2004 해외박사(DDOD)

Interactions between subunits of the climate system (ocean, atmosphere, biosphere, and cryosphere) often lead to emergent properties---behaviors not evident when subunits are viewed in isolation. Abrupt climate change, such as could occur under thermohaline circulation (THC) weakening, constitutes one example that is increasingly evident in the paleoclimate record and model experiments. Ecosystem responses to abrupt climate change would likely feedback to the climate system and alter the flow of ecosystem services upon which humans depend. Temperature sensitivity to THC is highest in the North Atlantic region, but this dissertation demonstrates that terrestrial ecosystem responses to THC weakening occur throughout the world. For example, precipitation changes in northern South America threaten local species richness. Currently, northern Amazonia has high levels of precipitation and relatively light land-use. For species richness this constitutes a good-good combination of climate and land use, respectively. In contrast, eastern Brazil has low levels of precipitation and heavy land-use (i.e., a bad-bad combination for species richness). THC weakening causes the precipitation patterns for these two locations to switch, but the loss of species richness associated with the good-good to bad-good transition in northern Amazonia far exceeds the gain in species richness associated with the bad-bad to good-bad transition in eastern Brazil. Thus, large losses in species richness occur. Similarly, plausible temperature changes in England threaten the remnant broadleaf deciduous habitat fragments upon which much remaining local biodiversity depends. The broadly distributed ecosystem responses that occur, particularly due to changes in leaf area, also constitute significant feedbacks to local and regional climate. For example, large changes in the distribution of leaf area lead to local and regional changes in absorbed solar radiation. When globally aggregated, however, the changes in absorbed solar radiation and total terrestrial carbon storage change less than 1 percent. Therefore, accurate assessment of ecosystem responses and feedbacks requires spatially disaggregated analysis and careful consideration of scale. Finally, biological responses to climate change depend not only on the final state of the climate system but also on the pathway of change. Thus, accurate projection of ecosystem responses to change requires consideration of transient climate responses.

Feeling like a clerk: The emotional economy of the lower middle class in Dickens, Gissing, and Wells

Higgins, Richard S Indiana University 2009 해외박사(DDOD)

Feeling Like a Clerk explores the emotional life of class status, what class identity feels like and how it is constituted through the emotions. It focuses specifically on the lower middle class, the clerk class, in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century and illustrates how a particular set of social emotions give the identity of the clerk its shape and definition within a larger set of prescriptions, prohibitions, and influences during the Victorian period. The study suggests that the "rise of the clerk" in nineteenth-century Britain can be used as a model for understanding the modern complexities of class as lived experience. This is particularly true in the case of the great fiction writers of bourgeois life, whose texts represent various forms of upward and downward mobility as they themselves climbed out of the cramped parsons' cottages, dingy rented rooms, and stuffy offices of the lower middle class. The male clerk, in particular, was subject to a bewildering unpredictability when it came the uneven distribution of emotions in the popular imagination. Provisional forms of masculinity and puzzling subordinate responses to social imperatives are the result of these emotional inequities. When given the opportunity to develop refined sensibilities that mark him as bourgeois, the lower middle-class man confronts the fact that his new companions only make him feel class more acutely, and he often yearns for a home to which he cannot return. By paying attention to these contradictions, Feeling Like a Clerk uncovers a moment when class becomes more deeply psychological and internalized, when new, more diminutive emotions take the place of the classic passions of class struggle.