Society, Patients, and Nazi Psychiatry: A History of Reappraisal

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Combatting Collusion Between Reinforcement Learning Agents in Electricity Markets

When markets are well behaved, we expect firms to produce at the point where marginal revenue matches marginal cost. Collusive behavior, on the other hand, arises when firms produce less than this, leading to elevated prices, lower social welfare and higher industry profits. It is interesting, then, that collusive behavior has been observed between reinforcement learning (RL) agents that act to set prices for goods across repeated interactions in simple, simulated markets. This behavior is the convergence toward a market equilibrium that has lower social welfare or higher industry profits than what is considered a Nash equilibrium for the reinforcement learning agents. In this project, I create a simplified model of an electricity market to confirm the collusive behavior of RL agents, comparing theoretical baselines of profit and welfare to the result of using Q-Learning agents. I then study the effect of various market interventions, in both this simplified model and Abada and Lambin’s model \cite{Abada-Lambin}. The interventions I consider include a) the introduction of a welfare-maximizing agent, b) setting limits on battery and output capacity, c) the use of taxation, and d) a reward-punishment scheme. In order to assess the suitability of each intervention, a game-theoretic equilibrium is calculated for each intervention and compared to theoretical baselines. This is computed using quadratic program solvers and Scipy optimization packages. The intervention is then implemented in an OpenAI Gym environment to confirm or reject the game-theoretic improvements that were demonstrated. For the welfare-maximizing agent intervention, it was also implemented on the Abada and Lambin model to explore how agents react to the intervention in a more complex environment. A first result, in both the simplified model as well as Abada and Lambin’s model, is that the introduction of a welfare-maximizing agent fails to provide a desired improvement in social welfare. Likewise, creating restrictions on battery and output capacity fails to provide a desired improvement in social welfare. Rather, I show that a promising direction is to make use of a suitable taxation or reward-punishment scheme, with this able to improve social welfare in both models.Applied Mathematic

Computerizing Diagnosis: Minds, Medicine and Machines in Twentieth Century America

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Quimbanda in North America

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Sublime Frequencies: Metaphysics of Resonance in Arvo Pärt, Cecilia Vicuña, and M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

Through an inter-disciplinary and comparative study of the acoustic phenomenon of resonance—i.e., the synchronous vibration between two or more sounds—this dissertation thinks through a socially-engaged “sonic metaphysics” and phenomenology of sound in the field of religious studies, in three case studies of contemporary aesthetic and mystical works: Eastern Orthodox Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s (1935-present) selected works from his early tintinnabuli period of composition; Mestizo Indigenous Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s (1948-present) selected Précario and Quipu works; and transnational Sri Lankan Sufi Shaikh M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen’s (?-1986) The Resonance of Allah: Resplendent Explanations Arising from the Nūr, Allāh’s Wisdom of Grace. Critically, the study discovers how these three contemporary forms and dimensions of sonic religiosity act formally (through their content, form, and reception) to open up within and beyond established discourses of mysticism, animism, and aesthetics, to speak in new and socially-engaged ways about actual human and environmental relations and transformations. Each case study traces clear, detailed connections between metaphysical ideas about resonance and the impact of resonance on concerns such as self-realization and healing, social and environmental justice, humanitarian aid, medical care, and inter-religious tolerance, while examining the capacity of resonance to express continuities between metaphysics and the phenomenology of lived religious experience; to convey meaning across religious, political, and aesthetic categories of belonging; and to expand our capacity for listening and ethical action. Each case study likewise contributes both theoretical and ethnographic insights into how resonance, and sound more generally, convey roles as prayer, as presence, and as mode(s) of attunement that enact the creation of the cosmos and dialogue with the divine. The dissertation also uncovers the psychoacoustics of the listener’s embodied relationship with sound and presence and the capacity of resonance to elucidate commonalities in intersubjective experience (relational ontologies). The study contributes methodologically to the study of religion by situating resonance as a vital concept of contemporary interdisciplinary and comparative inquiry and positioning the listening subject and their experience at the center of the unfurling of sound within complex multi-religious and secular global spaces. More broadly, the study addresses how developing an account of the metaphysics of resonance in religion helps us to hear differently, with and for each other

Mosaic nucleic acids that bind purine nucleotides

Models for the origin of life have maintained that the first cells relied upon a single biopolymer for both genotype and phenotype. RNA may have provided these activities through its ability to transfer information via base-pairing and its ability to fold into functional structures. It follows that a comprehensive account of abiogenesis would include an understanding of prebiotic ribonucleotide synthesis. However, studies along these lines have shown that, depending on conditions, prebiotic chemistry may yield diverse nucleotides; some of which are based on sugars other than ribose. This monomer pool would likely support the polymerization of nucleic acid molecules characterized by a heterogeneous sugar-phosphate backbone. Copies of such mosaic nucleic acid (MNA) would conserve sequence information, but not the order and content of sugars in the sugar-phosphate backbone. Might MNA represent a possible source of early biological activity? The answer to this question largely depends on whether the structural heterogeneity of the sugar-phosphate backbone would allow for the emergence of selectable function. To test this possibility, we used in vitro selection to isolate purine nucleotide-binding MNA aptamers from a large library of random MNA sequences (containing an ∼1:1 mixed assignment of deoxy- and ribonucleotides). We report two MNA aptamers that bind either ATP or GTP with weak affinity (apparent KDs = ∼350 µM each) and moderate to high specificity. We conclude that variations in nucleic acid backbone content, perhaps introduced by imprecise synthesis, may not have posed an insurmountable barrier for the emergence of simple biological function.Medical SciencesMedical Science

'The Fourth Estate in Medicine' — The History of the Medical Journal and the Medical Profession in the United States, 1797–Present

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Warping the Weft: Ecological Interstices Through Material Compositions

“Warping the Weft” examines the potential of public art to create unique ecologies as a distinctive public artwork. Often positioned as two separate disciplines, this project explores the emerging possibilities of integrating landscape architecture and public art. Utilizing the Percent for Art program, a public artwork is integrated into the redevelopment plan of the Kingsboro Psychiatric Hospital in East Flatbush, New York. Using the format of a weave, mosaic configurations of material and plants create portals revealing historical realities of the site: the oak-hickory forests of Lenapehoking, colonial farmlands, and remnants of the former psychiatric hospital built for the rapidly urbanizing city. Glass imagery is integrated into the mosaic, as speculation on possible past and future landscapes within the site. Water acts as a connective material: swales empty and fill to complete the weave, speaking to ever-present yet unaddressed perspectives and emotional realities omitted from historical records.Department of Landscape Architectur

In the Blink of an Eye: A Unified Theory for Feature Emergence in Generative Models

Generative models, which produce samples of data such as text or images, are transforming the way we interact with technology. However, they often fail quickly in problematic and unintuitive ways. For example, a language model given a software engineering problem suddenly switched from coding to searching for pictures of Yellowstone National Park, and these rapid shifts in behavior have been observed in reasoning traces and hacks. This phenomenon is not unique to language models: in image generation models, key features of the final output, like objects in the background or the color, are also decided in narrow “critical windows” of the generation process. While critical windows for a particular type of image generation model called diffusion have been studied at length by statistical physicists, existing theory relies on the specifics of diffusion and strong assumptions on the distribution of model generations. In this thesis, we develop a unifying framework for critical windows that shows that they emerge generically when the sampler specializes to a sub-population of the distribution it models. Drawing on tools from information theory, machine learning, high-dimensional probability theory, and statistical physics, our theory improves upon previous work by using rigorous mathematical tools and is agnostic to the underlying model type or distribution, applying to both language models and diffusion. The key insight of our approach is to exploit the powerful formalism for generative models of stochastic localization, which has roots as a proof technique in probability theory. Leveraging our consolidated theory for critical windows, we apply it to different examples of critical windows in theoretical and empirical contexts. We provide a novel interpretation of the all-or-nothing phase transition in statistical inference as a critical window and use our framework to explain different failure modes of language models. We finally validate our predictions empirically for real-world models, and demonstrate that critical windows have applications towards improving the safety, privacy, and fairness of generative models.Computer Scienc