Eco-Traffic: Globalization, Materiality, and Subalternity in Asia-Pacific Literature

This project implicates globalization – the spreading of capital, neoliberalism, and Western totalitarianism – as a primary contributor to the continuing subalternity of colonized cultures and environments in the Global South. Under the guise of shrinking the world or spreading freedom, globalization has resulted in profound material consequences to biomes attempting political decolonization. Where postcolonial theory demands that attention be paid to anthropological difference, be it social, political, economic, or gendered, some ecocritical scholars of the Anthropocene wish to decenter the human from an era in which they – as a species – have emerged as a hazardous geologic force. This project offers “traffic” as a literal and metaphorical framework for the meshing of human subalternity within the material biomes of the Asia-Pacific region, as captured in literature. Examining texts from India, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States reveals multiple traffics within globalization that intertwine the subaltern subject within their environs: the mapping and zoning of cities, the congestion of foreign-made automobiles and persons within cities, and the historical and current trade of illegal narcotics and humans. The dissertation actively contributes to a developing subset of ecocriticism that recognizes the subaltern in the intra-action of environmental entities, showing that each animal, plant, object and person has its own vibrancy, its own directionality, which leads to congestion and accidents, but often to new pathways

Unsupervised entity linking using graph-based semantic similarity

Nowadays, the human textual data constitutes a great proportion of the shared information resources such as World Wide Web (WWW). Social networks, news and learning resources as well as Knowledge Bases (KBs) are just the small examples that widely contain the textual data which is used by both human and machine readers. The nature of human languages is highly ambiguous, means that a short portion of a textual context (such as words or phrases) can semantically be interpreted in different ways. A language processor should detect the best interpretation depending on the context in which each word or phrase appears. In case of human readers, the brain is quite proficient in interfering textual data. Human language developed in a way that reflects the innate ability provided by the brain’s neural networks. However, there still exist the moments that the text disambiguation task would remain a hard challenge for the human readers. In case of machine readers, it has been a long-term challenge to develop the ability to do natural language processing and machine learning. Different interpretation can change the broad range of topics and targets. The different in interpretation can cause serious impacts when it is used in critical domains that need high precision. Thus, the correctly inferring the ambiguous words would be highly crucial. To tackle it, two tasks have been developed: Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) to infer the sense (i.e. meaning) of ambiguous words, when the word has multiple meanings, and Entity Linking (EL) (also called, Named Entity Disambiguation–NED, Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation–NERD, or Named Entity Normalization–NEN) which is used to explore the correct reference of Named Entity (NE) mentions occurring in documents. The solution to these problems impacts other computer-related writing, such as discourse, improving relevance of search engines, anaphora resolution, coherence, and inference. This document summarizes the works towards developing an unsupervised Entity Linking (EL) system using graph-based semantic similarity aiming to disambiguate Named Entity (NE) mentions occurring in a target document. The EL task is highly challenging since each entity can usually be referred to by several NE mentions (synonymy). In addition, a NE mention may be used to indicate distinct entities (polysemy). Thus, much effort is necessary to tackle these challenges. Our EL system disambiguates the NE mentions in several steps. For each step, we have proposed, implemented, and evaluated several approaches. We evaluated our EL system in TAC-KBP4 English EL evaluation framework in which the system input consists of a set of queries, each containing a query name (target NE mention) along with start and end offsets of that mention in the target document. The output is either a NE entry id in a reference Knowledge Base (KB) or a Not-in-KB (NIL) id in the case that system could not find any appropriate entry for that query. At the end, we have analyzed our result in different aspects. To disambiguate query name we apply a graph-based semantic similarity approach to extract the network of the semantic knowledge existing in the content of target document.Este documento es un resumen del trabajo realizado para la construccion de un sistema de Entity Linking (EL) destinado a desambiguar menciones de Entidades Nombradas (Named Entities, NE) que aparecen en un documento de referencia. La tarea de EL presenta una gran dificultad ya que cada entidad puede ser mencionada de varias maneras (sinonimia). Ademas cada mencion puede referirse a mas de una entidad (polisemia). Asi pues, se debe realizar un gran esfuerzo para hacer frente a estos retos. Nuestro sistema de EL lleva a cabo la desambiguacion de las menciones de NE en varias etapas. Para cada etapa hemos propuesto, implementado y evaluado varias aproximaciones. Hemos evaluado nuestro sistema de EL en el marco del TAC-KBP English EL evaluation framework. En este marco la evaluacion se realiza a partir de una entrada que consiste en un conjunto de consultas cada una de las cuales consta de un nombre (query name) que corresponde a una mencion objetivo cuya posicion en un documento de referencia se indica. La salida debe indicar a que entidad en una base de conocimiento (Knowledge Base, KB) corresponde la mencion. En caso de no existir un referente apropiado la respuesta sera Not-in-KB (NIL). La tesis concluye con un analisis pormenorizado de los resultados obtenidos en la evaluacion.Postprint (published version

O\u27kei: An American Novel (Annotated)

On January 4, 1931, Boris Pilnyak (1894-1938) wrote a letter to Joseph Stalin, pleading with the Soviet leader to grant him permission to travel to the United States in order to conduct research for an ambitious book project he was undertaking that would compare communist Russia favorably to capitalist America. Pilnyak’s request received official approval, and a few months later the writer set off for the U.S., arriving in New York by steamer on March 12, 1931, and remaining in the country until August 3, 1931. During his nearly five-month stay in America, Pilnyak became acquainted with a number of prominent native writers, journalists, and critics (among others, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Floyd Bell, Max Eastman, and Michael Gold), attended a number of theatrical performances on Broadway, and visited a number of popular tourist sites, such as Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, and the Ford automotive plant in Detroit. Hired by MGM Studios to co-author the screenplay for a film about a Five-Year Plan construction project in the Soviet Union (and to serve as a consultant on this film project), Pilnyak in early spring travelled with his host and personal interpreter, Joseph Freeman, to Hollywood, where they spent a month working on a pro-Soviet film, tentatively titled Soviet, which was plagued by creative differences and was never released. Pilnyak and Freeman decided to return to New York by car rather than by train, enabling them to see more of the country as they visited various locales in the desert Southwest, the deep South, and the industrial Midwest as part of their journey back to the East Coast. Upon his return to Moscow in early August 1931, Pilnyak began recording his impressions of the United States – and especially his serious misgivings about that country’s failing capitalist economy and its purportedly poisonous social and moral values (individualism, philistinism, materialism, consumerism, and so on) – in a travelogue that was completed in February 1932. It was subsequently serialized under the title, O’kei: An American Novel, in the March, April, May, and June 1932 issues of the journal Novy mir, before being published in a separate book edition in 1933. What is being presented here for the first time is a complete English-language translation of O’kei. Amerikanskii roman, available to readers in both an annotated version and a version without annotation, accompanied by an essay from the translator that seeks to acquaint readers generally with the reception that Pilnyak’s American travelogue received in the Soviet press at the time of its publication and its subsequent scholarly treatment by academics in both the former Soviet Union and the United States. This is the annotated version

Phil Stone and William Faulkner: The Lawyer and The Poet

Symposium - The Law and Southern Literatur

Reinterpret 4As framework of energy security from the perspective of human security – an analysis of China’s electric vehicle (EV) development

This research addresses two issues: expanding the understanding of human security with the case of China’s electric vehicle (EV) development and examining the human security implications of China’s EV development. This research adopts an online ethnographic method to record very personal driving forces and barriers to China’s EV uptake through the experiences shared by ordinary Chinese people. From a theoretical perspective, this research provides more evidence for the applicability of the broad human security approach in energy security analysis through the case of China’s EV development. By reinterpreting the 4As framework (availability, affordability, accessibility, and acceptability), which is one of the most frequently adopted frameworks in the analysis of energy security on the state level, (Cherp & Jewell, 2014, p. 416), this research challenges the current understanding of human security by demonstrating that threats to human security exist at all levels of development and touch not only the most vulnerable but also people living in well-developed regions in the face of the lasted technological transformation. The analysis of China’s EV development as a strategic energy security consideration sheds some light on the complicated relationship between state and individual security within China’s security discussion. It enriches the understanding of human security by exploring how it has been adapted to the Chinese social and political context. Meanwhile, drawing on the insights from ontological security through the lens of some key indicators (protection, autonomy, and social acceptance), this research emphasises the necessity of incorporating the subjective dimension in human security analysis to capture subjective feelings and psychological factors in everyday security. This research contributes empirically to identifying human security implications of EV development based on the real-life experiences shared by the Chinese people, which may constitute barriers to China’s EV uptake. Informed by the flexible interpretation of security agency offered by the broad human security approach, this research demonstrates that apart from the state’s dominant position as the main security provider, other players, such as carmakers, also play an important role in shaping people’s perceptions of how secure EVs are. Recognising that the misoperation of an automobile can cause serious physical harm to both those on board and other road users, this research argues that ordinary people should not be only considered as the object of protection but also as the agent with the power to exert influence on the security implications of the new technology

ICT USE AND IDENTITY FORMATION AMONG BEIJING'S RURAL-TO-URBAN GRADUATE WORKERS

Master'sMASTER OF ART

The New Road: A History of Vietnamese Society and French Colonialism in the Early 20th Century.

My dissertation investigates how three interconnected phenomena: Western education propagated in colonial schools, infrastructure and transportation systems, and the quốc ngữ periodical transformed Vietnamese society during the late colonial period. In the span of roughly 30 years (c. 1910-1940) the Western, scientific knowledge and worldview propagated in classrooms throughout Việt Nam evolved from something that the Vietnamese regarded as holistically foreign and with reluctance, if not hostility, to something they had consciously made their own. Classrooms were primary centers of propagation for new knowledge and manners of being that formed the foundation of late colonial and postcolonial Vietnamese society. Because colonial schools were predominately located in provincial and regional centers, young people often had to relocate in order to study. Student movement diffused novel and increasingly homogenous manners of thinking, acting, and being. Their journeys became common due to infrastructural improvements and the profusion of motorized transportation following the Great War. The proliferation of elementary-level schools spread quốc ngữ literacy throughout the colony. By teaching their relatives and friends the rudiments of quốc ngữ, students also added to literacy rates. The increasingly literate population was a ready audience for an expanding number of periodicals. Vietnamese educated in the primary and secondary schools of the colony used periodicals as platforms for commenting on contemporary society and creating modern Vietnamese culture. As infrastructure altered the possibilities of physical interaction with the environment, the periodical transformed perception of space by transporting readers (and listeners) to any area of the colony and beyond. Infrastructure and the periodical also helped homogenize perception of spaces like the city, the countryside, and Việt Nam, throughout the colony. Interwoven into this study is an investigation behind colonial systems of control. Power relations in the colony were more complex and nuanced than previously articulated. Late colonial Vietnamese society was a place in which both the French and the Vietnamese sought to further their variegated imperatives in cooperation with and opposition to one another. As my study makes clear, Vietnamese used and shaped colonial systems in manners sanctioned and not sanctioned by the French to transform their society.PhDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108927/1/merchand_1.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108927/2/merchand_2.pd

Mass differentiated reading skills instruction in high school

Thesis (M.Ed.)--Boston University N.B.: Page 3 Misnumbered