The Black Worker and the Knowledge Economy in Philadelphia: University-Led Displacement vs. Homeowner Democracy

Chandra, Meghna ProQuest Dissertations & Theses University of Penn 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation investigates the consequences of university-driven development in Philadelphia, especially for the African American communities that surround the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and Drexel University. It uses the theoretical contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois and David Harvey to conceptualize Philadelphia’s high rate of low-income homeownership as a product of the struggle of black workers and communities for democracy and the Right to the City. Thirty-three qualitative interviews with long-time residents, political activists, university administrators, and community institutions were conducted. Quantitative analysis including logistic regression analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data comparing outcomes in gentrifying and non-gentrifying neighborhoods and spatial K-cluster analysis were also conducted. Results show that university-driven development is leading to the conversion of single-family homes into apartment buildings and multifamily rentals, and a vision of the city in which developers, city officials, and university administrators wish to (in the words of one interviewee) “bring Manhattan to Philadelphia”. For homeowners, density is a shorthand for social, economic, and political displacement of the black working class and the disappearance of affordable homeownership opportunities. Density and affordable housing—and an ideology of urbanism—as conceptualized by city planners, university officials, developers, and new residents, clash with communities’ definitions of what the urban fabric of Philadelphia should be, as well as what truly affordable housing looks like. Furthermore, the influx of a student and professional population and its definition of progressivism has led to the political displacement of constituencies that have been shaped by black liberation movements. Resistance to university-driven development, whether it is the movement against the building of Temple’s Stadium, or the drive to “save-zone” neighborhoods by rezoning them from mixed residential to single family, are led by black homeowners to preserve homeownership and black electorates. They are rooted in the historic struggles of the black worker in Philadelphia. I conclude with a discussion of the context of decreasing rates of homeownership in the country as a threat to a truly democratic society.

Vestures of the Past: The Other Historicisms of Victorian Aesthetics

Chandler, Timothy ProQuest Dissertations & Theses University of Penn 2019 해외박사(DDOD)

The importance of history to Victorian culture, and to nineteenth-century Europe more generally, is readily apprehended not only from its historiography, but also from its philosophy, art, literature, science, politics, and public institutions. This dissertation argues that the discourse of aesthetics in Victorian Britain constitutes a major area of historical thinking that, in contrast to the scientific and philosophical historicisms that dominated nineteenth-century European intellectual culture, focuses on individual experience. Its starting point is Walter Pater's claim that we are born "clothed in a vesture of the past"-that is, that our relation to ourselves is historical and that our relation to history is aesthetic. Through readings of aesthetic theory and art criticism, along with works of historiography, fiction, poetry, and visual art, this dissertation explores some of the ways in which Victorian aesthetics addresses the problem of the relationship between the sensuous representation and experience of the historical, on the one hand, and the subjects of such representation and experience, on the other. Through these readings, aesthetic modes of historical relation such as memory, revival, contrast, haunting, collection, and displacement are addressed as modes of subjectivation. The dissertation considers a wide range of more and less canonical texts by John Ruskin, George Eliot, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and Marcus Clarke. While the dissertation focuses on texts written in England, it takes a transnational approach, situating these texts in the broader contexts of the European intellectual discourses with which they engage and of British imperialism, which is addressed in the dissertation's coda through texts created in colonial Australia. By highlighting the role of the aesthetic in the formation of subjectivity as historical, this dissertation revises the image of nineteenth-century aesthetics as either ahistorical, formulating the pleasures of a timeless subject, or, conversely, deterministic, finding in art merely a reflection of larger historical processes. Instead, aesthetics emerges here as a discourse for the problematization of the historicity of subjectivity.

Theoretical studies of cosmic acceleration

Stokes, James ProQuest Dissertations & Theses University of Penn 2016 해외박사(DDOD)

In this thesis we describe theoretical approaches to the problem of cosmic acceleration in the early and late universe. The first approach we consider relies upon the modification of Einstein gravity by the inclusion of mass terms as well as couplings to higher-derivative scalar fields possessing generalized internal shift symmetries - the Galileons. The second half of the thesis is concerned with the quantum-mechanical consistency of a theory of the early universe known as the pseudo-conformal mechanism which, in contrast to inflation, relies not on the effects of gravity but on conformal field theory (CFT) dynamics. It is possible to couple Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) scalars possessing generalized Galilean internal shift symmetries (Galileons) to nonlinear massive gravity in four dimensions, in such a manner that the interactions maintain the Galilean symmetry. Such a construction is of interest because it is not possible to couple such fields to massless General Relativity in the same way. Using tetrad techniques we show that this massive gravity-Galileon theory possesses a primary constraint necessary to ensure propagation with the correct number of degrees of freedom. We study the background cosmology of this theory around cosmologically relevant spacetimes and find that, as in pure massive gravity, spatially flat solutions do not exist. Spatially open solutions do exist - consisting of a branch of self-accelerating solutions that are identical to those of pure massive gravity, and a new second branch of solutions which do not appear without the inclusion of Galileons. We study the propagating degrees of freedom of the massive gravity-Galileon theory around the self-accelerating solutions and identify the conditions necessary for the theory to remain free of ghost-like instabilities. We show that on the self-accelerating branch the kinetic terms for the vector and scalar modes of the massive graviton vanish, as in the case of pure massive gravity. We conclude our exploration of massive gravity by considering the possibility of variable-mass massive gravity, where the fixed graviton mass is replaced by the expectation value of a rolling scalar field. We ask whether self-inflation can be driven by the self-accelerated branch of this theory, and we find that, while such solutions can exist for a short period, they cannot be sustained for a cosmologically useful time. Furthermore, we demonstrate that there generally exist future curvature singularities of the "big brake" form in cosmological solutions to these theories. In the second half of the thesis we construct the gravitational dual of the pseudo-conformal universe, a proposed alternative to inflation in which a CFT in nearly flat space develops a time dependent vacuum expectation value. Constructing this dual amounts to finding five-dimensional domain-wall spacetimes with anti-de Sitter asymptotics, for which the wall has the symmetries of four-dimensional de Sitter space. This holographically realizes the characteristic symmetry breaking pattern O(2,4) to O(1,4) of the pseudo-conformal universe. We present an explicit example with a massless scalar field, using holographic renormalization to obtain general expressions for the renormalized scalar and stress-tensor one-point functions. We discuss the relationship between these solutions and those of four-dimensional holographic CFTs with boundaries, which break O(2,4) to O(2,3). Finally, we undertake a systematic study of one and two point functions of CFTs on spaces of maximal symmetry with and without boundaries and investigate their spectral representations. Integral transforms are found, relating the spectral decomposition to renormalized position space correlators. Several applications are presented, including the holographic boundary CFTs as well as spacelike boundary CFTs, which provide realizations of the pseudo-conformal universe.

Strategic Response in Regional Comprehensive Universities: The Influence of the Environment in Higher Education

Eremenko, Irina ProQuest Dissertations & Theses University of Penn 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

U.S. higher education (HE) faces a multitude of challenges brought on by shifts in demography, the economy, technology, and global competition. The disconnect between these realities and HEIs' perception of and response to their organizational environment may have negative implications for national educational attainment and the knowledge economy. While environmental analysis contributes to successful strategic response, many postsecondary leaders struggle to clearly understand their respective organizational environments. This multiple-case study examined how regional comprehensive universities leaders’ understanding of the external environment influenced the strategic response of their institutions. Research findings revealed that environmental scanning and analysis tools influenced leaders’ sensemaking during the strategic planning and, in turn, modulated their institutions’ strategic response. Macro- contextual and prospective sensemaking conditioned a future-focused strategy, relevant to the external organizational environment. In contrast, micro-contextual and retrospective ways of thinking produced an internally-oriented strategic response. This study provides evidence that universities’ leaders routinely make sense of their internal organizational environment, but only occasionally engage in sensemaking of the external surroundings. While the study confirms that university presidents played a crucial role in the strategy creation process, it also reveals that their average tenure might not be long enough to produce a successful strategic response. Findings illustrates how internal organizational challenges might lead to a deviated use of the strategic planning process, as compared to the processes suggested by extant literature. This research enhances extant theory via evidence that a developed definition of “strategy” separate from “planning” is crucial for producing an externally relevant organizational strategy. These findings could help HE practitioners to better understand their organizational environments and to enact strategic decision-making which allows for effective strategic response by their entire institutions. Understanding the relationships between the type of sensemaking and organizational environment as well as using macro-contextual, prospective, and routine scanning and analysis tools could produce an externally relevant strategic response.

Learning from Positive Evidence: The Acquisition of Verb Argument Structure

Irani, Ava ProQuest Dissertations & Theses University of Penn 2019 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation investigates how children acquire verb argument structure using positive evidence from the linguistic input. I discuss three case studies: the acquisition of raising and control verbs, the acquisition of causatives, and the acquisition of passives. When discussing these case studies, I address previous theories of verb argument structure learning that attempt to account for verb argument structure learning through indirect negative evidence (e.g., Pinker 1989), and I show that these approaches are inadequate in accounting for the developmental trajectory of the learner. Instead, I defend two learning models throughout the dissertation: the Sufficiency Principle (Yang 2016) and the Active Mapping Model. The Active Mapping Model of Language Acquisition illustrates how the learner uses conceptual and structural information in their language to form verb classes. In this model, there is no innate mapping between the conceptual and structural cues.Chapter 2 discusses the acquisition of raising and control verbs. Given three kinds of verbs, verbs that are purely raising, purely control, or verbs that can be both, the literature has foregrounded a learnability problem (Becker 2006). If some verbs can be both raising and control, then what prevents the learner from assuming that all verbs can take either structure? This learnability problem, known as the problem of overgeneralization (Baker 1979), then puts forth the question of how the learner retreats from this hypothesis to arrive at the adult grammar that also has pure raising and control verbs. Using the Sufficiency Principle, I show that the problem of overgeneralization does not arise, as the number of verbs that can be both raising and control do not meet the threshold of generalization determined by the Sufficiency Principle. I also argue against theories that propose indirect negative evidence to retreat from overgeneralization, and instead, I argue that raising and control verbs are learned from positive evidence in the input, which in this case is in the form of non-referential subjects. In Chapter 3, I discuss the acquisition of the causative alternation rule, which is a true case of overgeneralization, as seen by the errors made by children in their production data. In the acquisition of causatives, I demonstrate that the overgeneralization errors are predicted under the Active Mapping Model where the learner categorizes verbs into classes based on conceptual and structural cues. Given the learner's vocabulary size and verb classes, the causative alternation rule is found to be productive when the input the learner receives is examined. Thus, under this learning model, the child errors are predicted. Moreover, using the Sufficiency Principle to determine the threshold of generalization, I show that the learner retreats from overgeneralization when their vocabulary size increases, as the rule is then no longer productive when the input is examined. In this chapter, I also test the Sufficiency Principle experimentally, and find support for it in the results obtained from child participants. In Chapter 4, I use the Sufficiency Principle and the Active Mapping Model to examine the developmental trajectory of children's acquisition of passives. This chapter answers two questions: whether the passive construction is productive for the learner early on, and whether the asymmetry in the acquisition of actional and non-actional passives (e.g., Pinker et al. 1987) can be accounted for under the models of language learning assumed in this dissertation. Using the child production data and the input data, I show that the passive construction is productive in the input, and productive for the English-learning child. By examining Adam's vocabulary and verb classes, the passive rule is found to be productive for Adam given the number of passives present in the input. Moreover, under the Active Mapping Model, I show that the asymmetry in the acquisition of passives is predicted. This dissertation investigates whether the learner's developmental trajectory can be accounted for solely from the input data. In each of the cases discussed in the chapters of the dissertation, I demonstrate the role of the input in language acquisition. Furthermore, using the Active Mapping Model, I show that the innate linking between the verbs semantics and the syntactic structure is not only unnecessary, but also does not account for the full range of facts found in the child data.

Factive and Assertive Attitude Reports

Djarv, Kajsa ProQuest Dissertations & Theses University of Penn 2019 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation investigates the semantics, pragmatics, and syntax of propositional attitude reports; in particular, how assertion and presupposition are reflected in these different parts of the grammar. At the core of the dissertation are factive attitude reports, involving predicates like know, discover, realize, resent, appreciate, and like. Since Stalnaker (1974), factivity is taken to encompass both the discourse status of the embedded proposition p as Common Ground and the projection of the inference that the speaker is committed to p from the scope of operators—in both cases, unlike asserted content. Syntactically, factivity and assertion are argued to provide the semantic-pragmatic underpinnings for a range of complementation patterns (Kiparsky and Kiparsky 1970, Hooper and Thompson 1973, Rizzi 1997, a.o.).The central contributions of the dissertation are: (i) demonstrating what precise dimensions of assertion and presupposition are reflected in the syntax and semantics of clausal embedding, and (ii) decomposing the classically multifaceted notion of factivity into a set of more specific theoretical notions; importantly, dissociating the discourse status of p and the projection-prone speaker commitment inference.We attribute the speaker commitment inference to a lexical presupposition of an evidential modal base that entails p. We argue that this evidential base is always anchored to a Judge, which, depending on the type of factive predicate, is bound by different individuals. In the case of doxastic factives like discover, the judge is bound by the speaker, whereas in the case of emotive factives like appreciate, it is bound by the attitude holder, and for fact that nominals, it is realized as an index on the noun. The discourse status of p, we attribute to a separate dimension of discourse new vs. Given content (in the sense of Schwarzschild 1999), which cross-cuts both factive and non-factive verbs. Among the predicates which treat their complements as Given, we differentiate between the requirement (of response predicates like accept and not say) that p has an antecedent in the discourse, and the requirement (of emotive factives like resent and appreciate) that the situation or individual providing the attitude holder’s evidential basis for p is contextually accessible. We further argue for a fundamental semantic distinction between primarily acquaintance-based predicates —which include both factives (evidentials) like discover and non-factives like fear— and fundamentally doxastic or epistemic predicates, like believe and trust. Making these distinctions allows us to account for a wide range of apparently connected, yet clearly disparate empirical phenomena, some of which represent open problems in the literature and some of which are new observations made in the dissertation. Importantly, we are able to capture: (i) the dissociation of the discourse status of p and the commitment-to-p inference in doxastic factives (Chapters 3 and 5); (ii) a number of asymmetries between doxastic and emotive factives regarding their apparent entailment properties, interactions with operators, and sensitivities to contextual effects (Chapter 5); (iii) variations in entailment and argument-structural patterns across verbs like know and believe (Chapter 4); and (iv) the distribution of a set of proposed syntactic correlates of assertion and presupposition; in particular, V-to-C movement, wh-extraction, and selection for DP vs. CP-complements (Chapters 2 and 3).

Learning Transferable Knowledge Through Embedding Spaces

Rostami, Mohammad ProQuest Dissertations & Theses University of Penn 2019 해외박사(DDOD)

The unprecedented processing demand, posed by the explosion of big data, challenges researchers to design efficient and adaptive machine learning algorithms that do not require persistent retraining and avoid learning redundant information. Inspired from learning techniques of intelligent biological agents, identifying transferable knowledge across learning problems has been a significant research focus to improve machine learning algorithms. In this thesis, we address the challenges of knowledge transfer through embedding spaces that capture and store hierarchical knowledge.In the first part of the thesis, we focus on the problem of cross-domain knowledge transfer. We first address zero-shot image classification, where the goal is to identify images from unseen classes using semantic descriptions of these classes. We train two coupled dictionaries which align visual and semantic domains via an intermediate embedding space. We then extend this idea by training deep networks that match data distributions of two visual domains in a shared cross-domain embedding space. Our approach addresses both semi-supervised and unsupervised domain adaptation settings.In the second part of the thesis, we investigate the problem of cross-task knowledge transfer. Here, the goal is to identify relations and similarities of multiple machine learning tasks to improve performance across the tasks. We first address the problem of zero-shot learning in a lifelong machine learning setting, where the goal is to learn tasks with no data using high-level task descriptions. Our idea is to relate high-level task descriptors to the optimal task parameters through an embedding space. We then develop a method to overcome the problem of catastrophic forgetting within continual learning setting of deep neural networks by enforcing the tasks to share the same distribution in the embedding space. We further demonstrate that our model can address the challenges of domain adaptation in the continual learning setting.Finally, we consider the problem of cross-agent knowledge transfer in the third part of the thesis. We demonstrate that multiple lifelong machine learning agents can collaborate to increase individual performance by sharing learned knowledge in an embedding space without sharing private data through a shared embedding space.We demonstrate that despite major differences, problems within the above learning scenarios can be tackled through learning an intermediate embedding space that allows transferring knowledge effectively.

Language Profiles of Thai Children with Autism: Lexical, Grammatical, and Pragmatic Factors

Chanchaochai, Nattanun ProQuest Dissertations & Theses University of Penn 2019 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation is a linguistically-motivated investigation into different areas of language in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), compared to typically developing (TD) children. Fine distinctions between linguistic units were used in designing tasks on language production and comprehension in seven experiments. The focus of each chapter of this dissertation was on three main hypotheses respectively, namely (1) the Abstract Representation Difficulty Hypothesis that children with ASD (perhaps limited to the subgroup with co-morbid language impairments) have difficulties activating abstract lexical representations as effectively as TD children, due to their hyperattention to phonetic details of speech, (2) the Pragmatic over Grammatical Deficit Hypothesis that pragmatics is particularly difficult for all the ASD children, while morphological and semantic aspects of language are relatively intact, and (3) the Cognitive Factor Hypothesis that cognitive factors such as nonverbal intelligence quotient (NVIQ) and nonverbal working memory play a greater role in the ASD than the TD performance on linguistic tasks.Chapter 2 investigates the morpho-phonological and semantic aspects of the lexical processing of Thai compound and simplex words. Results suggest that morphological facilitation effects can be obtained independently of phonological and semantic relatedness in the processing of Thai compounds. While children with ASD with lower task performance display hyper-attention to the acoustic differences between primes and targets, children with ASD in the higher performance group have enhanced morphological effects, compared to their TD peers, and the effects appear to be independent of the presence of phonological effects and enhanced semantic effects. The lack of phonological effects in the first set of experiments was explored further in the later experiments. Children with ASD were found to be slower in processing natural-sounding surface phonological forms, suggesting that a deeper processing of neutralized forms than full forms. The similar performance on the next task with the integration of visual information suggests that the slower processing may result from their slower lexical semantic processing. The Abstract Representation Difficulty Hypothesis, thus, holds for a subgroup of children with ASD, while other children with ASD display intact phonological representation, enhanced morphological processing compared to TD controls, and intact but slower lexical processing.Chapter 3 explores the Pragmatic over Grammatical Deficits Hypothesis. Using fine distinctions within the personal reference terms, consistently replicated results suggest that while grammatical person 過-features are intact in children with ASD's representation of pronouns, these children are less sensitive to deictic information in their interpretation of pronouns and tend to avoid using the first-person pronoun, with high deictic level, when they have freedom to choose personal names to refer to themselves. Children with ASD also performed more poorly on the comprehension of unmarked pronouns which requires implicated presupposition, suggesting that even with minimal comparisons among the pronouns, lexically-encoded core grammatical features and pragmatic ones are distinguished in children's language processing. Chapter 3 also adds to the literature on lexical presuppositions, scalar implicature, and implicated presuppositions that not only adolescents, but also children with ASD are age-appropriate in deriving scalar implicatures and that not all kinds of pragmatic inferences are equally challenging for children with ASD. The most indicative difference between the children with ASD and the TD group lies in the children with ASD's heavier reliance on literal, logical meaning when other semantically- and pragmatically-inferred meanings are violated.Chapter 4 partly contributes to the Cognitive Factor Hypothesis, suggesting a possibility that cognitive factors, as opposed to developmental factors, correlates more with children with ASD's performance on linguistic tasks. Additionally, children in both groups displayed correlations in their performance across all of the experiment in the dissertation. Individual language profiles were compiled with the results from the previous chapters. Two subgroups of children with ASD were identified through k-means cluster analysis. The children with ASD in Cluster 1 have globally better performance across experiments than children with ASD in Cluster 2, supporting that ASD children may be able to be classified into subgroups based on their performance on linguistic tasks alone. Even with globally better linguistic task performance, the children with ASD in Cluster 1 still appear to be less sensitive to social-deictic information, confirming that certain types of pragmatics are indeed more challenging than the others.In sum, this dissertation advances our understanding on morphological, semantic, and pragmatic abilities of children with autism through carefully-designed linguistically-motivated experiments.

Replication in Massive Open Online Course Research Using the MOOC Replication Framework

Andres-Bray, Juan Miguel L ProQuest Dissertations & Theses University of Penn 2021 해외박사(DDOD)

The purpose of this dissertation was to develop and use a platform that facilitates Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) replication research. Replication and the verification of previously published findings is an essential step in the scientific process. Unfortunately, a replication crisis has long plagued scientific research, affecting even the field of education. As a result, the validity of more and more published findings is coming into question. Research on MOOCs have not been exempt from this. Due to a number of limiting technical barriers, MOOC literature suffers from such issues as contradictory findings between published works and the unconscious skewing of results caused by overfitting to single datasets. The MOOC Replication Framework (MORF) was developed to allow researchers to bypass these technical barriers. Researchers are able to design their own MOOC analyses and have MORF conduct it for them across its massive store of MOOC data. The first study in this dissertation, which describes the work that went into building the platform that would eventually turn into MORF, conducted a feasibility study that aimed to investigate whether the platform was able to perform the tasks it was built for. This was done through the replication of previously published findings within a single dataset. The second study describes the initial architecture of MORF and sought to demonstrate the platform’s scaled feasibility to conduct large-scale replication research. This was done through the execution of a large-scale replication study against data from an entire University’s roster of MOOCs. Finally, the third study highlighted how MORF’s architecture allows for the execution of more than just replication studies. This was done through the execution of a novel research study that sought to analyze the generalizability of predictive models of completion between the countries present in MORF’s expansive dataset—an important issue to address given the massive enrollment numbers of MOOCs from all around the world.

Essays in the Economics of Human Capital

Azuero Melo, Rodrigo ProQuest Dissertations & Theses University of Penn 2017 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation deals with two different aspects of human capital accumulation: early childhood development and tertiary education. Specifically, it analyzes the role that public policies or changes in regulations affect incentives of agents in a way that ends up affecting the aggregate endowment of human capital in an economy. The first chapter is related to early childhood development. Recent literature has shown that skills shaped during childhood have long lasting consequences later in life. This fact has promoted a large number of programs aimed at stimulating the skill formation process for children in disadvantage. However, little is known about how cost-effective are these policies. In this chapter I evaluate the cost-effectiveness of three alternative policies aimed at improving the living standards of families in disadvantage: cash transfers, childcare subsidies, and subsidies for child investments. I find that subsidies promoting child investments are much more productive than the other two alternatives. In the second chapter, co-authored with David Zarruk, we analyze the consequences that subsidized loans for higher education have on the quality of education offered by colleges in the context of a developing country. We find that subsidized student loan policies lead to a widening gap in the quality of services provided by higher education institutions. This happens because the demand for elite institutions unambiguously increases when individuals can borrow. This does not happen in non-elite institutions, since relaxing borrowing constraints makes some individuals move from non-elite to elite institutions. The higher increase in demand for elite institutions allows them to increase prices and investment per student. If investment and average student ability are complementary inputs in the quality production function, elite universities also increase their acceptance cut-offs. In this new equilibrium, the differentiation of the product offered by colleges increases, where elite universities provide higher quality education to high-ability students and non-elite universities offer lower quality to less-able students. We calibrate the model to Colombia, which implemented massive student loan policies during the last decade and experienced an increase in the gap of quality of education provided by elite and non-elite universities. We show that the increase in the quality gap can be a by-product of the subsidized loan policies. Such results show that, when analyzed in a general equilibrium setting, subsidized loan policies can have negative effects in equilibrium.