Investigation into the mechanism of catalysis for the kinetic resolution of a,a-Disubstituted y-Hydroxy Esters

The synthesis of enantioenriched, biologically active compounds is a vital area of interest for synthetic chemists. The lactone motif is found in several biologically important molecules, and the development of kinetic resolutions capable of producing enantioenriched lactones is important for the total synthesis of these types of compounds. The chiral Brønsted-acid catalyst, R-TRIP, has proven to be effective in producing enantioenriched a,a-disubstituted lactones with up to 94% ee. A study of the effects of varying electronic substituents on the kinetic resolution of a,a-disubstituted-?-hydroxy esters to produce enantioenriched ?-lactones is the focus of this study. The introduction of varying electron-withdrawing and electron-donating substituents in the para position of an a-Ph group is hypothesized to cause a change in the selectivity and rate of reaction through resonance, induction, hydrogen bonding and pi-stacking. This project seeks to broaden the scope and understanding of the catalyst-substrate interaction to improve upon this synthetic methodology. [This abstract has been edited to remove characters that will not display in this system. Please see the PDF for the full abstract.]]]> 2018 Esterification Esters $x Synthesis Esters$x Synthesis English http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/Wilson_uncg_0154M_12503.pdf oai:libres.uncg.edu/23278 2018-07-10T14:19:31Z UNCG Grabbing him by the tweets: presidential parody as political activism NC DOCKS at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro Wood, Olivia <![CDATA[It has never been easier for presidents to communicate directly with voters. Social media allows world leaders to post messages to their followers anytime, anywhere, without going through the traditional channels of speechwriters or public relations staff. Donald Trump in particular has become famous--and heavily criticized--for his unorthodox use of Twitter. This criticism has taken many forms, including a crop of Trump-themed parody accounts, tweeting in character as some version of the president. Political satire is nothing new, but social media platforms offer a new genre in which to do it. In this paper, I examine the parodic methods of five different Donald Trump parody accounts on Twitter and compare them to the rhetorical style of @realDonaldTrump. Methods of analysis included code frequency comparisons across accounts, code intersection patterns, word and phrase frequency comparisons, interviews with account owners, and comparative ethnography. Donald Trump parody accounts on Twitter sit at the intersections of new forms of presidential communication, new uses of digital media, and new strategies for activism. Analyzing their role at this crossroads necessitates considerations of genre, rhetorical situation, and the affordances of the platform. My research thus contributes to discussions of genre and digital rhetorical theory by examining our current political situation and how rhetors are employing digital strategies in this controversial real world setting. I approach this project with four research questions: 1) In what ways are different accounts parodying the president, and what rhetorical effects do each of these methods have? 2) What elements of the actual president’s real account do the parodies focus on? How do they differ linguistically from each other and from @realDonaldTrump? 3) How do parody accounts fit into the broader set of anti-Trump activism? 4) What political issues do the different accounts highlight, and what can readers gain from them (other than entertainment)? How do parody accounts communicate a message differently than other types of activism? My results provide a rhetorical picture of @realDonaldTrump’s Twitter activity in late May/early June of 2017 alongside the activities of his parodists, showing how the parodists view the president and which political issues the parodists find most important to discuss

Analyzing political parody in social media

Parody is a figurative device used to imitate an entity for comedic or critical purposes and represents a widespread phenomenon in social media through many popular parody accounts. In this paper, we present the first computational study of parody. We introduce a new publicly available data set of tweets from real politicians and their corresponding parody accounts. We run a battery of supervised machine learning models for automatically detecting parody tweets with an emphasis on robustness by testing on tweets from accounts unseen in training, across different genders and across countries. Our results show that political parody tweets can be predicted with an accuracy up to 90%. Finally, we identify the markers of parody through a linguistic analysis. Beyond research in linguistics and political communication, accurately and automatically detecting parody is important to improving fact checking for journalists and analytics such as sentiment analysis through filtering out parodical utterances

Mental health discourse and social media: Which mechanisms of cultural power drive discourse on Twitter

The global burden of mental health disorders has increased steadily during the past decade. Today, mental illness is the leading cause of total years lived with disability. At the same time, global mental health policies and budgets fall short of addressing the societal burden as mental health discourse languishes in the shadows due to stigma. As social media have become an increasingly popular source of i

A Sociolinguistic Study of Code Choice among Saudis on Twitter

The present study is an attempt to explore a new dimension of language use: how Arabic is utilized in the social media, Twitter in particular. It attempts to examine codeswitching (CS) in its written form between standard Arabic (SA) and Saudi dialect (SD). It aims to answer three research questions, namely: 1. What are the functions of using CS on Saudi Twitter? Are these functions different from the functions of CS in face-to-face interactions? 2. Do patterns of CS differ by gender and education? 3. Do patterns of CS differ by topic? The current study adopts the sociolinguistic approach and provides a qualitative descriptive and quantitative analysis of 7350 tweets which were collected between December 2016 and July 2017, from 210 Saudi Twitter accounts diversified in terms of gender and education. The goal was to compare the motivations for CS in the written form with those motivations that have been identified in face-to-face interactions and to explore whether CS patterns would differ by gender and education. An additional 500 tweets were collected to investigate whether or not CS patterns would change by topic. The findings revealed that the Saudi Twitter community utilized SA more than the SD. The study revealed that CS to SA is correlated with prestige, importance, sophistication, and seriousness. It revealed that the Saudi Twitter community switched to SA for the following social motivations: 1. to introduce formulaic expressions 2. to emphasize a point 3. to quote 4. to shift from comic to serious tone 5. to take a pedantic stand. In contrast, the SD or the Low variety is associated with sarcasm, informality, low-prestige, and everyday topics. It revealed that the Saudi Twitter community switched to the SD for the following social motivations: 1. for a specific intended meaning 2. for sarcasm and criticism 3. for quotations 4. for exemplifying and simplification 5. for introducing daily-life sayings 6. for scolding and personal attack or insult 7. for common usage. Regarding the role of topic in CS patterns, the present study provided evidence against Ferguson’s prediction (1959) in which he associated code choice with the topic and situation. It revealed that CS occurred in different contexts that varied in their formality and informality. Therefore, the study provided evidence that CS occurs to perform intended functions. As for gender, the study found that men utilized SA more than women, and this confirms previous findings of Ibrahim (1986), and Abd-El-Jawad (1987), Badawi (1973), and Haeri (1996a), Schmidt (1974), and Walters (1996) that women with the same level of education as men use SA less than men. Regarding education, the present study found that the Saudi Twitter users with high and college education used SA more than their counterparts with less than college education. However, the current study should have considered age in addition to gender and education, because education by itself might be “a proxy variable” that could act on behalf of other less obvious independent variables (Al-Wer 2009). The findings of the present study suggest studying each community independently as each community differs in terms of its social variables, language attitudes, perceptions, and language policies. Finally, the study emphasizes the importance of teaching SA to Arabic learners, placing less focus on dialects to learners due to the stability of SA, and designing as well as developing curriculums accordingly.PHDNear Eastern StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144071/1/saeedaa_1.pd